QC 3035 by Izetti

I was sure “little room” was going to be LOO.

For CANCELLED, the American rule is to double the ‘l’ if the last syllable is accented when you add the suffix -ing or -ed, but not if the first syllable is accented. The British rule is to always double the ‘l’. This explains most of the differences: traveled, canceled, fueled and so on. (Both sides of the pond double the ‘l’ in words like propelled where the stress is on the second syllable.)

Originally, all cans were ‘tin can’ because cans were lined with tin. The Brits took tin, the Americans took can for the short name.

ANTIGENS are substances that trigger an immune response, while antibodies are proteins produced by the body to neutralize or eliminate antigens. Essentially, antigens are the “invaders” and antibodies are the “defenders”. Not sure Izetti has this right, biochemists of the blog please elaborate.

“first to” to indicate the initial letter seems a bit unnatural to me.

This was my LOI, and only unpacked post-submission.

As soon as I saw “Harry” I thought must be “Hal”, and forgot to go back and check if it might be the definition.

How long before we see Harry=Spare?

Not a fan of those tiresome poetic abbreviations (called syncope) such as “o’er” or “e’er”. Come on, poets, it doesn’t fit, so chose a different word.

Also “people” used twice here, is this a bug or a feature?

I always find this word tough to spell. A1 actually comes from the Lloyds classification of ships, where A1 was the best.

I can now share this excellent cartoon about Julius Caesar playing Battleships:

The ever reliable Fowler distinguished between triple which suggests three different things (triple jump, triple crown) and treble which suggests three of the same thing (treble 20, winning the treble, a “huge drink”). US English doesn’t seem to make this distinction.

“Trebles all round” as they used to say in Private Eye.

I always get confused between LEA (meadow), LEE (shelter) and LEIGH (pretentious suffix on house names in the Home Counties)

Collins has GRAND-AUNT as a possible alternative. Kind of word that probably crops up in Mephisto.

In Music if a note is neither sharp nor flat it is NATURAL, and has the sign ♮. (It’s a bit more complex than that, but close enough)

The ERG is a unit of energy equal to 10⁻⁷ Joules, and is mainly used in astrophysics.

An ERG is about the amount of work done by a fly performing a “press-up”, the leg-bending dip that brings its mouth to the surface on which it stands and back up.

The association of madness with the moon goes back to at least at least Pliny. But Pliny believed all sorts of weird stuff. It appears in the Bible (Matt 4:24), σεληνιάζομαι (seléniazomai) which is translated in the King James Version as “lunatick.”

…they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatick, and those that had the palsy; and he healed them

The English 1871 and 1881 censuses included columns to identify “lunatics” alongside “imbeciles” and “idiots”. By 1901, the term “idiot” was replaced with “feeble-minded”.

I’d say used to mean reduced by 10 per cent, and now actually means “devasted”, and is a word that launches a myriad of pedants, and yes myriad originally meant 10,000 but no-one has a pet peeve about that.

“School” the verb, here.

NEMESIS was the spirit of divine retribution against those who succumb to hubris, the meaning is now extended to something like arch-enemy.

mise-en-scène in cinematography refers to everything that appears before the camera—the sets, props, costumes, actors, and even the lighting.

Most of my NHOs in crosswords are botanicals, composers, birds etc. Not often they are straight English verbs like this, and I can’t recall ever coming across it. I kept banging my head against “describing” and “decrying”.

I’ve not read Janes Austen’s Emma, but there it is in Chapter 28:

Miss Bates, passing near the window, descried Mr Knightley on horseback not far off. 

To us English, St Michael is most famous not for being an archangel but for being in our pants, as a brand of Marks & Spencer. It was introduced by Simon Marks himself, but  was retired in 2000.

I always find this “not half” business a bit odd. It just means half.

This type of clue uses the single word “insect” in both the wordplay and the definition.