Mephisto 3247 – Don Manley

11 comments on “Mephisto 3247 – Don Manley”

1. My first Mephisto! I’d never tried to finish one before, but Vinyl suggested I give this week’s a whirl.
   I don’t have Chambers, but I was able to find dictionary support for the words I hadn’t known before—except for the precise meaning given here for DERAYED, and for a while I was thinking I’d seen somewhere the whole word ASSAI as “sloth” (LOI)—AI is in all dictionaries, of course. AHRIMAN I knew, but I looked him up anyway and learned that in the 9th to the 12th century the name was frequently written upside down “as a sign of contempt and disgust.” “Homes for felines” didn’t look like the straight definition for CATHOUSES, which I thought should be something else! I’m sure M for “money” and ET for “Egypt” are two abbreviations we will only ever see in Mephisto.

   1. Hopefully you are hooked – though a copy of Chambers is a big help.

      You are correct – M for Money is in Chambers but not in Collins, so you won’t see it in the daily.

      IVR codes for countries are pretty common wordplay elements in Mephisto, which is where ET for Egypt comes in. IVR codes are in Collins, but I don’t recall them as regulars in the daily.

      DERAY is in Collins, but I don’t expect it to pop up in a daily

      1. Yes, I found DERAY in Collins, but with only these definitions:
         NOUN
         1. disorder; chaos; disarray
         VERB (intransitive)
         2. to act madly or in a disorderly fashion

         “Put out”? I take it that “as before” means “archaic.”

         1. Yes, “as before” means archaic and I believe any word denoted as such in Chambers needs an indication in the clue.
            The Chambers defs of deray are derange, go wild, tumult, disorder, and for put out there is disclocate.
            This was one I didn’t bother looking up before writing the blog, since the wordplay left no option. Mephisto is more a puzzle of wordplay than definition.

   2. Chambers is really essential for Mephisto. If you have a smartphone the app (which gives you the full dictionary) is only £8.

      1. US price is $9.99.

         1. I was tempted to make a remark about the fall of the pound sterling, but refrained.

2. As you probably guessed from Sandy’s comments, I didn’t find this too difficult. Don Manley has very clear cryptics, and I knew most of the answer words anyway. After doing Mephisto for a while, you pick up words like Ahriman, stannary, and diarchy. It was actually jiaos that gave the most trouble, since that was one I didn’t know.

3. I was shocked by how easy this was, given my experience of Mephistos, where I tend to give up. I don’t have a Chambers, and am not about to buy one, but Collins usually comes through when I have something to verify, like EYALET. Like Guy, I don’t think of feline homes when I see CATHOUSES. Are there cat houses?

   1. The Chambers entry for cathouse is great.
      1. A brothel (especially N Am slang)
      2. A place where cats are cared for.

      Make of that what you will

4. I found this really easy: I finished it more quickly than Dean’s puzzle.

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