Mephisto 3079 – Don Manley

12 comments on “Mephisto 3079 – Don Manley”

1. I parse that as the HE of ‘The’ being deleted, leaving T + ROVER; this was a procedure not a person, so the underline should start at ‘legal’.
2. This is the first one I’ve completed in quite a while. For some reason I felt sure that the Basque word had an EU in it, which left no choice given the checkers; EUSKARA is also in ODE. I was a bit worried about SEEL, which I couldn’t find in Chambers but which seemed like the only possibility.
   1. SEEL is in Chambers 11th edition, as the second definition (happiness, good fortune, etc), coming after the first meaning, a rather unpleasant verb: to sew up the eyelids of eg a hawk.
      1. It’s also in the latest (13th) edition of Chambers. I’m wondering whether there’s confusion with the one offered for free at https://chambers.co.uk/ which is the shorter Chambers 21st Century Dict. rather than The Chambers Dictionary.
         1. That would explain things. I don’t have a Chambers; I only go, occasionally and usually in vain, to the link.
3. ….apart from the number of variations in acceptable spelling for “sphere”. I entered “sphear” and that made life difficult for a while, especially since I couldn’t see PLAGAL, and when I did I was unsure about “not authentic”.

   Only other one I eventually biffed was ASTILBE.

4. I had a racing start to this with 20 answers going in with the first pass through the clues, but then I slowed down. Like Phil, I too had SPHEAR at first for 24D. which had me stuck with 32A and 34A. But 34A had to be an anagram so I eventually went looking for that other spelling. I also had problems working out why ASTILBE was the answer to 20D until I reverse engineered to look for STILB as the unit of brightness. I note that it appears to be obsolescent… “It was in common use in Europe up to World War I. In North America self-explanatory terms such as candle per square inch and candle per square meter were more common. The unit has since largely been replaced by the SI unit: candela per square meter. The current national standard for SI in the United States discourages the use of the stilb.”.

   Edited at 2019-09-08 06:36 am (UTC)

5. Same issue with EUSKARA with my Chambers, which meant stumbling over the simple SIMMON for a long time until I resorted to other sources. I find I missed out the wrong letter in the US spelling of EGIS, and couldn’t work out what word ?AGIS? meant a law man: MAGIST(rate) perhaps? One pink square.
6. I agree with Kevin about 10A

   Like everyone else had to untangle the Basque clue but knew SIMMON had to be correct. I’ve been caught by the variations of “sphere” before so waited for checkers before deciding on correct version

7. Comments about their “Basque” entry passed on to Chambers. I’m pretty sure that I just knew it when test-solving, and either didn’t think it needed a look-up when editing, or saw it in the “Euskarian” def.
8. I have got out of the Mephisto habit of late, and this was a very gentle puzzle to ease myself back in.
   The Chambers entry for ‘Basque’ gives ‘Euscara, Eskuara’, which already looks odd, and the entry for ‘Euskarian’ says that its origin is ‘the Basque Euskara the Basque language’. So it seems pretty clear that ‘Eskuara’ was just a mistake. Still, I was glad I already had the S from SIMMON.
   I parsed 10a like Kevin too.

   Edited at 2019-09-08 09:08 am (UTC)

9. ….but it took me a while to remember how to spell ‘Euskara’.

   All my across answers were correct, but I had four wrong in the downs. Each one was a single unchecked letter. Two I should have got, and two were due to ignorance of the necessary knowledge.

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