Mephisto 3374 – A versatile marsupial!

18 comments on “Mephisto 3374 – A versatile marsupial!”

1. My LOI was TWEED, and my one indecisive struggle with this puzzle was in trying to get a grip on how “WEED” can be “bearing, Scots” and finally reluctantly settling on the hypothesis that the former as “Armour (archaic)” and the latter as “heraldic device or coat of arms” may be what is intended…

   (Noticed a funny thing about Chambers, the app. Some words don’t turn up in a Search but are there to be found if you type them into Look up.)

   1. 35a is TWEEL not TWEED. (kil)T WEEL ( bearing)
      36a does’t appear to be in Chambers, surprisingly. Am I not looking in the right place?
      4d of course it’s (chi)ANTI – thank you! I was playing with ANTI(gone), a Greek character where left had left. Doesn’t quite work.
      25d I think the definition is “Layers of Society”; as (to whatever extent) etc..
      13d I still can’t see how that works. How does ASAR = banks?

      All in all I rather enjoyed this puzzle. Thanks for the blog.

      1. According to Chambers, the plural of ås is åsar, and ås is defined as a kame or esker. So it’s the banks of a retreating glacier.

         1. Oh ok thanks.

      2. AMBER Alert (sic) is in my Chambers (on my phone).
         I don’t think I ever knew that it’s an acronym (besides being named after a little girl), America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response.

         1. Thank you. I was looking under amber as in the colour. Warning colours in the UK are often referred to as amber, hence amber alert. I got there, wrong path.

2. 35A is TWEEL, Scots form of twill

   1. Blog now updated. Maybe I should have skipped the DSL?

   2. It looks so obvious now!

3. I liked this one: pretty tough but not impossible, as John Grimshaw’s puzzles can be.
   In 5ac ‘English’ is part of the wordplay, the definition is just ‘serviettes?’ Similarly in 10dn ‘up’ is a reversal indicator and the definition is just ‘to the vessel’s bottom’ (‘up to the bottom’ doesn’t make much sense!)
   When I search for GRUTTEN on the Chambers app the entry for ‘greet’ comes up but the word GRUTTEN does not appear in it at all. Odd.
   Thanks to Richard for explaining STRATA. I couldn’t account for ‘to whatever extent’.

4. I thought there were a couple of dodgy definitions. 1ac: not in my (old) Chambers, but defined online as “language nests” typically run by family groups, so “before master” doesn’t seem to fit (as well as being very vague). 12ac: why “relating to” – it simply means Telugu, which is a language?

   1. 1ac is in the latest edition of Chambers defined as an ‘infant class’.
      GENTOO is defined in Chambers as an adjective meaning ‘of or relating to the Gentoos or the Telugu language’.

      1. Thanks, keriothe – but I’d still say an infant class doesn’t usualy have a “master”. The online description I read of a kohanga reo suggested parents, teachers and elders get together with a group of children; you could call that an infant class, but it wouldn’t involve a master in the normal sense. My (old) Chambers just defines Gentoo as a noun, but does say it could be an adjective, so fair enough.
         Re GRUTTEN, it’s an obsolete Scottish past participle of greet (in the Scottish sense of to weep).

         1. Fair enough. Presumably the setter didn’t look beyond the definition in Chambers and assumed that a class must have a teacher.
            Yes I saw that meaning of GRUTTEN. I was just curious that a search for that word showed the the more conventional meaning of ‘greet’ as a result when the old past participle doesn’t actually feature in it.

            1. It is there, further down the apps page under meaning 2 – obs Scot apparently.

            2. I’ve never heard anyone say GRUTTEN, but “gret” is commonly used (here in Scotland, anyway) as the past tense.

               1. Chambers Scots Dictionary lists it without examples or qualifications. The English Dialect Dictionary is more illuminating and quotes an example from East Fife from Tam Bodkin by Latto (1860s). The EDD also shows Grutten to be a form of the more conventional meaning of greet but they example quoted is in the weeping sense. The Scottish National Dictionary has an example from Ramsay Poems 18thC. All past participles and by all accounts obsolete or confined to dialectal use. I would like to have found a Burns reference but I was unable to.

5. Thanks John Grimshaw and Vinyl1. I think John’s puzzles for last few occasions have been just the right level of difficulty after his earlier ones were a bit too difficult for me. I hadn’t parsed ETERNE, RESUME and STEAMER- blog very helpful as always.

Comments are closed.