27550 Thursday, 2 January 2020 The Sound of Meeoosic

87 comments on “27550 Thursday, 2 January 2020 The Sound of Meeoosic”

1. I biffed a couple: BUSHBABY, REEVE, GERMAN MEASLES, and almost biffed 16ac, but just saw the ??? just as I was typing in the letters. Are BARONETS nobles? They’re not peers, but I don’t know the difference. ‘Cow’ seemed rather wide of the mark as a definition of CHASTEN. A DIPHTHONG is two vowels producing one sound; that’s two vowel sounds not two vowel letters: so the vowels in ‘out’, ‘boy’, and ‘eye’ (or ‘I’) are diphthongs, but so is the A in ‘Kate’. What counts as ‘one sound’ is the key: in Japanese, say, ‘hai’ (ashes) contrasts with ‘hae’ (fly), so there are two separate vowel sounds in each word, no diphthongs.
   1. Wikipedia says this is a title among the “lesser nobility,” which must be what the “-et” signifies.
   2. A subplot in The Woman in White involves the distinction between baronets and knights, both of whom are prefixed ‘Sir’.

      Edited at 2020-01-02 10:18 am (UTC)

2. By a tad, which makes it slower than average. Does that cheer you up? Sped through all but three – then a significant alphabet trawl to get squashed, the previously opaque question marks became obvious, and I could guess a uni might have a rector.
   Slight MER at Kate which I pronounce (to my ear) as a short, diphthongless vowel, but otherwise I really enjoyed this. Thanks blogger and setter.
3. I wondered about Kay-eet too!
   I fell out of step with the blog but have done all the puzzles this week. I got to this one early enough in the night to have worked it with a clear head!

   Edited at 2020-01-02 04:06 am (UTC)

   1. If you grew up in West Virginia, I’d be surprised if you didn’t have a diphthong; I’m guessing that isla3 is Scottish, and things may well be different in his dialect. Vowels are shorter, too, before voiceless sounds, so the vowel in e.g. Cade would be more salient than Kate.
      1. When I was back in the hills, I assiduously avoided sounding like the people around me… who could easily have squeezed three vowels into “Kate.”

         Edited at 2020-01-02 05:34 am (UTC)

         1. Whereas I, though growing up in San Francisco, always pronounced my name to rhyme with ‘Craig’; it was only after some time in Japan that I de-diphthongized the pronunciation.
            1. In the UK, it’s becoming depressingly common to shorten it to Kat. That settles any DIPHTHONG dispute, but it certainly occurs in North East England, where it’s usually “Kayit”.
            2. A lot of people pronounce ‘Craig’ without a diphthong, to rhyme with ‘Gregg’ as I would say it.
4. ….highest rank of commoner, and they are eligible to sit in the House of Commons, unlike a baron. This is not the only misconception – I once had a good laugh at a silly female mystery writer who wrote about an Elizabethan baronet!

   This puzzle fell in 21 minutes, which is a good speed for me, although it felt slower. I really liked the question marks clue, and wasn’t bothered by all the flies.

   1. Have a heart Vinyl. Silly female mystery writers and a lot of other people might not know that the rank of baronet was created by James I because the Stuart kings were chronically in need of ready cash and this was a way to raise it without Parliament getting in on the act. Nowadays I really don’t know how much money a knighthood or a peerage costs in donations to party coffers (in the absence of getting one via good works) but they seem to have done away with creating anything hereditary, including baronets.
5. Nice puzzle. Here’s a piece of trivia. Many people think that EDELWEISS is a traditional Austrian folk song that Sound of Music borrowed. Nope, Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote it. No Austrian were harmed in the writing.
   1. Not only that but the Austrians have been wondering ever since what the fuss over edelweiss is all about .. a bit like writing a song about nettles, or bindweed (which of course being English, we actually have)
   2. Years ago when I was in Salzburd with a choir I bought a little German-language pamphlet the filming of The Sound of Music. My favourite story from it is that the producers of the film had gathered a crowd of Austrian extras to be the “audience” in the scene where the Von Trapps sing Edelweiss in a folk-music competition. The film-makers themselves thought that the song was a genuine Austrian folk song. During the filming the audience were supposed to join in with the singing as a kind of defiant anti-German gesture. When none of the audience joined in it became apparent that nobody knew the song. Filming was halted, the extras were dismissed and local choirs, who could read music, were the extras who finally appeared in the film. The locals were highly amused…
6. and I whizzed home in 11.45 mins. which is my best for many a moon. Totally on wavelength – I turned seventy at Christmas, so is good to know that I still have most of my marbles. Only twice ever been under 10 minutes.

   FOI 6dn BARONET

   LOI 5ac ABSENT

   COD 9ac DIPHTHONG

   WOD 7dn EDELWEISS cue ear-worm and inch-worm! Paul, I think it was written in Jamaica.

   Love the new gds avatar

   Edited at 2020-01-02 06:13 am (UTC)

   1. Edelweiss, the reggae version. Now that would make for an interesting recital in the amptheatre near the end of the movie.
      1. If Lin-Manuel Miranda can manage a hip-hop ‘Hamilton’ I’m sure he can run to a reggae ‘Sound of Music’!
   2. Thanks, Horryd!
   3. Only 70 ? Whippersnapper !
   4. Great time horryd 😊 That’s a nice (belated) birthday present.
      1. Thank-you pb – every dog has his day!
7. 40 minutes. I’ve never been confused as to what a diphthong is, and like Isla above I’m struggling to make one out of ‘Kate’.
   1. /e/ is diphthongal in RP, less distinctly so in General American, monophthongal in Scots English. As I said above, English vowels are shorter before voiceless sounds like [t] (‘mate’ vs. ‘made’ or ‘may’, say), which would, I imagine, make the tongue rise less salient.

      Edited at 2020-01-02 08:14 am (UTC)

      1. As a Scot, married to a Kate, I couldn’t agree more. There also seems to be a tendency in some of the comments to confuse phonemes with lexemes.

         Having been told for 45 years in Crossword Land that X sounds like Y – though it doesn’t for 5.5 million Scots – to be told that ‘Kate’ is a definitive example of a diphthong is going a bit too far.

         Scottish universities have a Rector, though these days it’s an honorary post, given to a weel-kent face. If I’m expected to know about scouts and proctors and bedders, then is it too much to expect solvers south of Watford to know that?

8. That’s a bit like how this felt to me anyway. Nothing too much to cause trouble, except for DIPHTHONG going in with a shrug – thanks to those who have explained the subtleties. As if the (sort of) triple def weren’t enough, a variation on the 16a theme appearing elsewhere today helped make this almost a write-in. Finished in 18 minutes.

   I’m more of a ‘Doe, a deer’ person myself. Great to see it here on telly the other night.

9. …would have been a lot better if I hadn’t made a mess of MAKE DO.
10. 8:23 … with an awful lot of biffin’ goin’ on. Loved ASPIRIN’
11. After an appalling start with nothing in after three mins, I spotted ESPRESSO and simply raced through from that point on. I believe this is my fastest time.

    LOI: CHASTEN

12. I wasn’t surprised to look at the SNITCH today and see people’s times in a sea of green. Wondering when we last had a puzzle with an easier SNITCH rating I checked and found it was October 2018!
13. 19 minutes, with the only one not understood DIPTHONG. The learned discussion above hasn’t helped me that much. We have even more ways of saying ‘a’ than we have towns that went Tory in Lancashire, but I use a straight, short noise. QUESTION MARKS was neat, but his answers would be long-winded, so COD to ASPIRIN. I’d feel safer walking past the REACTOR than the generator transformer. Nice puzzle though. Thank you Z and setter.
    1. Basically, Kate in Standard British English is pronounced Keh-it, where the ei is a diphthong. English has a stack of these vowel sounds, while Italian, for example, has pure vowel sounds, ah, air, i, o, oo (a, e, i, o, u). (Ke-it, if you prefer)

       ulaca

14. Yes, easy .. Did very much like 6dn though. Very neat clueing.
    I flatly refuse even to attempt to understand diphthongs, once you get beyond basic merging of two letters into one.
    1. That’s digraphs, isn’t it? Diphthongs–what a pain to type–aren’t letters, they’re sounds.
       1. Well there you go Kevin, I rest my case .. just a minefield.
          But my dictionary says for diphthong: “a compound vowel character; a ligature (such as æ )”
          1. Chambers, I bet.
             1. The OED says: “esp. In popular use, applied to the ligatures æ, œ of the Roman alphabet.As pronounced in later Latin, and in modern use, these are no longer diphthongs, but monophthongs; the Old English ligatures æ and œ always represented monophthongs.”
                Collins says: “a digraph or ligature representing a composite vowel such as this, as ou in mouth or æ in Cæsar”
             2. Chambers : “two vowel sounds pronounced as one syllable (as in “out” or “loin”); (loosely) a digraph. The ligature definition follows but my phone keypad won’t handle that !
15. Very easy puzzle

    I think if the setter is going to use that construction for DIPHTHONG he has to find a better example than “Kate”. As can be seen from above comments he’s on dangerous ground anyway partly because dialects mangle diphthongs and partly because the “movement of the tongue” explanation is far too esoteric. Poor cluing in my opinion.

    1. I agree. Gail/Moira/Dai/Klaus/Roy/… has one, for instance.
       1. The first two would probably be ok in a thong, but Dai, Klaus and Roy less so.
16. This is only a diphthong in some dialects of English. If ye’re fae Aiberdeen it’s nae ( and neither is “nae).
    1. As I said, above.
17. My other earworm for today is Norwegian Wood. COD to 24ac, isn’t it good?

    < 12′, keeping up my 100% record for the year.

    Thanks vinyl and setter.

    1. You’re very welcome (wearing my Vinyl mask)
       1. Many apologies z!
       2. So glad you clarified that comment by capitalising the V in Vinyl!
18. First sub 10 minute of the year – and the first in a while.

    COD: German Measles.

19. In IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) the ‘a’ sound in Kate is rendered as /ei/ and is quite clearly a diphthong, as is the letter A by itself as pronounced by an adult reading of the alphabet. This is true for RP and the vast majority of dialects.
    1. In IPA, the vowel of ‘Kate’ would be written as /e/ and would be realized, depending on the dialect, as [ei] or [e]; as I said above, [ei] for RP, [e] for Scots English. I don’t know how many dialects there are of English, so I don’t know how many counts as the vast majority.
20. 12 mins, which is as fast as I could read the clues and immediately write in the answers on my copy of the Times. A rare case of the physical barrier of my tremor causing most of the delay as opposed to the difficulty of the clues. If you are Scottish it’s unlikely that you’re gonna get a diphthong out of ‘Kate’. Thanks z.
21. 14.11, which is a record for me. With Kate (my wife) next to me, she is sure that it isn’t, and she should know!
22. …suitably CHASTENed, I responded in the correct manner by recording my best time since I came to this blog. I have to confess to parsing both BATHTUB (I was looking at the wrong “tiger’s head”) and SOLITAIRE after completion.

    FOI REEVE
    LOI and COD SOLITAIRE
    COD before parsing the above ESPRESSO
    TIME 5:08

    1. Clearly, you weren’t cowed by yesterday’s experience.
       1. Nor did it leave me cowering….
23. As Chico would say, Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
24. 4:18. After failing to record a sub-5 time throughout 2019 I’ve got off to a good start in 2020. Lots of biffing, inevitably.
    We generally accept a definition if it’s supported by one of the main dictionaries, and Collins even gives ‘late’ as an example in the entry for DIPHTHONG.
    1. As a dictionary originating in Scotland, it should hang its head in shame. (But then again, my wife worked for Collins Dictionaries for quite a few years, and I can testify that these days most of the lexicographers are English RP speakers.
       1. It’s also a dictionary for the whole of English, wherever it originated, and in most dialects of English the a in late/Kate is a diphthong. Mind you it wouldn’t have been that hard to find an unambiguous example!
          1. I do (grudginly) acknowledge that.
25. Well, after the tortuous progress of yesterday this was much more fluently solved. Finished in 13 minutes but only just managed to avoid a schoolboy error at 1 down. Became fixated on bedeck until I realized it was a bodice ripper.
26. The Russian site “useful English” in its section on “Practice Materials for Diphthongs” lists Kate as an example of “he sound [ei] as in RAY”. I only mention this to underline how far my Googling took me to get the info correct.
    At best, Chambers (another diphthong A, I suspect) is misleading in its examples.
27. A gentle puzzle which I romped through in 15:41, starting with SEPIA and finishing with SQUASHED.I have to subtract BROWNIE POINTS though, as I failed to consciously notice the QUESTION MARKS at the end of the clue for 16a. Liked BATHTUB. Thanks setter and Z.
28. By the time I get to Phoenix I’ll have had enough of DIPHTHONGs. There was some sort of sonic boom as Magoo clocked in at 2.42. In case you were wondering Georgette Heyer didn’t write BODICE-rippers. I just about remember my grandparents having two doorstop sized volumes – Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage and Burke’s Landed Gentry. The plot of Wilkie Collins’s Woman In White was so convoluted that Collins himself lost track of it. The secret at the heart of it was that Sir Percival Glyde was not in fact a baronet because he was illegitimate and he forged the parish register to cover this up. 9.04
29. As a Scot, married to a Kate, the vowel is certainly a monophthong. (There also seems to be a tendency in some of the comments to confuse phonemes with lexemes.)

    Having been told for 45 years in Crossword Land that X sounds like Y – though it doesn’t for 5.5 million Scots – to be told that ‘Kate’ is a definitive example of a diphthong is going a bit too far.

    Scottish universities have a Rector, though these days it’s an honorary post, given to a weel-kent face. If I’m expected to know about scouts and proctors and bedders, then is it too much to expect solvers south of Watford to know that?

30. 10:42. I liked QUESTION MARKS… when I eventually saw it and gave me the Q for SQUASHED, my LOI, that I had been puzzling over for a while. As for ALABAMA, I should have an M.A. in Natural Sciences, but I never bothered to go and collect it. Thanks Z and setter.
31. 8:01. I turned on the TV to watch West Brom v Leeds yesterday just as Christopher Plumber was picking up his guitar to strum along to Edelweiss. Luckily I was able to change channels before he started singing.

    1. He would be pleased!

32. Fairly gentle.
33. 15’55. The sky filled with sabre-rattlings over Kate the diphthong – did the setter have a certain mischievous intent in mind? What’s wrong with all you people who don’t know your phonemes from your lexemes? You can’t all be south of Watford. An enjoyable work-out though Magoo’s time scares me. Can’t that mighty mind be harnessed to something worth doing? Like becoming a one-man Civil Service or something? And what’s with the bats? They may not be birds, but flying animals? Maybe they’re in-betweens and all called Kate. Something wrong shurely. joekobi
34. 36 mins for me, which by my standards is a good result.
35. I flew through this one. Great joy after the hard graft of today’s quickie!

    There was a lot to enjoy, even if some of the clues were very easy – brownie points, hiked, amiss – but with some lovely surfaces.

    I have no desire to get involved in the diphthong debate, as a southerner, married to a Geordie and living in the East Midlands! Moor = more to me, moo-er to him!

    But, here’s a bit of controversy, I always understood that the Watford Gap was the supposed divide betwen north and south. Over the years, people have dropped the second part of its name, so now the north apparently starts near a town in Herts, rather than a gap between hills in Northants, not far from the Leics border. That does make rather more sense, although I would say that the north really starts quite a bit further up the M1 still!

    FOI Reeve
    LOI Reactor
    COD Question marks, although I liked sabre rattling, baronet, aspirin and theology too
    Time 24 minutes

    Happy new year to you all, cheers to the setter for a nice puzzle, and thanks Z8 for a fab blog 😊

36. That was me – got logged out!
37. 17.39 which seems positively sluggish compared to everyone else, even though sub-20 always feels like a decent result for me. I was through most of this in about 13 or 14 minutes but got held up at the end on make do – where I had to trawl through the alphabet to get the first word. Glad to see that brave hero of the French resistance, Rene Artois, get a mention in the blog at 13ac. Nice puzzle. I liked sabre-rattling, question marks and the controversial diphthong.
38. My New Year’s resolution is to not bring variant US English pronunciations into discussions of diphthongs and dodgy homophones. I liked the nice anagram at Sabre Rattling, and I learnt that just as with antelopes and plants there are quite a few primates that I have to think twice about before entering into a grid.

    Thanks, Z, and thanks to the setter (whom, in agreement with joekobi, I suspect of trolling us at 9ac).(And, if it wasn’t him or her, it was definitely the ed).

39. This must be how it feels for clever people! Thank you setter for the experience
40. Having crashed and burned in my usual QC haunt, I decided to have a stab at today’s 15×15, which I found was just the right level for those of us trying to step up. If I had bothered to make a note of my start time, I’m sure it would have been a PB (not that it means much), with only the parsing of 24ac beyond me. Invariant

    PS The discussion on diphthongs reminds me that I once asked a local in a small French town to recommend a restaurant, and was told ‘Cat’ was the place to go. Not being sure I had quite mastered the local patois, I asked him how it was spelt. He looked at me as if I was an idiot (the French can be so perceptive…) and said Kah-ah-teh-euh.

41. …that occasionally I can complete a 15×15!
    Very happy to do so today – I’m another QC regular who sometimes struggles to get started on the main crossword. Thanks to the bloggers who help us improve.
    This was fun – I guessed CHASTEN without understanding the cow reference and enjoyed when 16ac fell into place.
    But I’m a Scot so I also don’t pronounce the Kate sound as a diphthong and spent too long over this clue.
    I thought 7d was neat. I also watched the Sound of Music yesterday for the umpteenth time and know all the lyrics by heart.
    By the way Christopher Plummer was dubbed (and I doubt he played the guitar either)!
    1. Really? I have always excused the bad singing on the grounds that it was probably the best that Plummer could manage. Surely if you’re dubbing you’d employ somebody who could actually sing!
42. My story much the same as Invariant’s. I’m a regular but slightly ponderous solver of the QC and found myself stumped by last three clues of Pedro’s offering today. So later on I had a stab at the 15×15 and finished it all with no real alarms. No time but my cup of tea didn’t get cold while I did it. Certainly seemed at the easier end of the spectrum (a glance at yesterday’s 15×15 yielded just one solved clue).
43. Phew. For me, anything under 20 min is a blistering pace, and I got through this one in ten minutes and change. Not quite a PB, but if I’d stopped to see how I was doing, I might have typed a bit faster. Not surprisingly (but disappointingly) the SNITCH has this one rated as “very easy”. Ah well.

    Everything seemed very straightforward, although I am another one who’s puzzled as to why the setter chose “Kate” as an example of diphthongery. I’d pronounce it with a flat “a”.

44. Hi all and sorry to have been absent of late. I flew through this in less than 10 minutes, straight from top to bottom. That’s quite a rare time for me. Happily I don’t have a strong memory of what a DIPHTHONG is supposed to be anyway, or it might have made me stop and think. As it was, the wordplay led immediately to the answer and I didn’t give it another thought. Regards.
45. Question marks I just don’t think the straight clue parses and think it was a very poor clue not becoming of the times which is usually scrupulously fair
46. My PB by a distance ruined by a sloppy MADE DO instead of the correct MAKE DO. Rats.
47. For the (very late) record, I was directed to this by a comment on Friday’s QC blog. Very thankful to have been so directed as a) this was entirely entertaining and b) at exactly 17 minutes this broke my previous and long held 15×15 PB record by about 3 minutes. To return to daily 15x15s – that is the question – but the follow up one is do I have the time? Thanks for the discussion on thongs of all sorts and the useful quiz question GK to remember re diseases.
48. Saved for today when there is no Quick Cryptic! I completed a lot of this which was gratifying – perhaps I am gradually improving. Thanks to those who gave the heads up and to setter and blogger (resorted to in the end for a couple of answers and some clarifications) Frankyanne.
49. Another person led here from the QC and looking to spend a weekend on it. Had to use some aids but did manage to finish it. Quite a milestone, even if it was rated very easy! Wondered for ages whether to ‘make do’ or ‘made do’ at 19d. I can see a case for either…

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