Maybe it was just me, but I found this one quite an odd experience. For me, it was one where the answers flowed in easily enough (no obscure GK or unusual words) but where the detailed parsing of several of the clues was quite challenging. Net result is I am frankly unsure whether I have successfully got fully to the bottom of three of the clues – 8a, 5d and 16d. I might have, but then again…
I started (as a virgin blogger) blogging the QC with puzzle number 3 over two years ago, and have blogged every fortnight since then: I can honestly say this is the first time I have ever posted a QC blog where I have been plagued by doubts about any of the parsing – and when three come along in the same puzzle, it is a bit discombobulating! Lest I be misunderstood, that is in no way a complaint – on the contrary, it was a stimulating and enjoyable puzzle – but is intended as an indicator of the trickiness of some of the clues as far as I was concerned.
Anyway, I’ll be very interested to hear what others thought. Thanks to Pedro for an exhausting experience!
On edit: thanks to all for the explanations re. the ones that eluded me. I should have picked up the pun in 8a and the deployment of the “standard” Crosswordland idiom in 16d (whether that idiom is so old hat as to be of questionable merit is a different debate…): a chastening experience for your humble blogger!
Definitions underlined: DD = double definition: Anagrams indicated by *(–)
| Across | |
| 1 | Desire is seen in women’s hearts (4) |
| WISH – IS appears between (‘seen in’) W (abbrev. women’s) and H (abbrev. hearts in bridge notation) | |
| 3 | Former schoolfellows no longer ill? That’s not made clear (8) |
| OBSCURED – OBS (abbrev. old boys – former schoolfellows) + CURED (no longer ill) | |
| 8 | One’s work on plot includes a clash of blades (4-5) |
|
LAWN MOWER – This one, my friends, drove me nuts. Had I just been a solver, I’d have cheerfully slapped the answer in from cross checkers and enough in the clue (plot, blades) to point to Lawn Mower, and moved on. However, as your humble blogger, I do not have the luxury of “biffing”. I therefore went on a hunt for some kind of definition and wordplay. Of course, hunts can rapidly turn into nightmarish experiences if you start to doubt whether there is actually a quarry at all! After an unfeasible amount of time spent looking for bits of anagrams, hiddens, lifts and separates and every other ploy known to our daily tormentors, I gave up. And then I had what I think might be a penny drop moment – maybe this is one of those relative rarities (at least in Quickie country), a “Semi & lit” with “one’s” (i.e. the lawn mower’s) work etc. etc. I’ll refrain from dwelling too long on the fact that if there is a “clash of blades” your mower has a serious problem and, in a normal scenario, the mower’s blades will not clash. Or maybe I’ve finally lost the plot altogether. On edit: see explanations below; the key to the clue is the “pun” based around two meanings of blade – mower blade and blade of grass. Kicking myself for not spotting that… |
|
| 10 | Amount of money curtailed enjoyment (3) |
|
FUN – FUN |
|
| 11 | No rag, badly edited, may be considered a newspaper (5) |
| ORGAN – *(NO RAG) with “badly edited” as the anagrind | |
| 12 | Line in magazine included in a morning mix (7) |
| AMALGAM – MA{L}G (line in magazine) inside (included in) A AM (a morning) | |
| 13 | Necessitate angry speech after conflict (7) |
| WARRANT – RANT (angry speech) follows (after) WAR (conflict) | |
| 18 | Difficult bottling oxygen for store (5) |
| HOARD – HARD (difficult) with O (symbol for Oxygen) included (bottling) | |
| 19 | Marine activity not quite sound in part of aircraft (7) |
|
WHALING – HAL |
|
| 20 | I simpered awkwardly, showing skin (9) |
| EPIDERMIS – *(I SIMPERED) with “awkwardly” as the anagrind | |
| 22 | Manage failure, letting one go (3) |
| RUN – RU[I]N (failure minus the I – ‘letting one go’) | |
| 23 | Plaything most of you duplicated (2-2) |
| YO YO – YO[U] (most of you – i.e. last letter removed) repeated (duplicated) | |
| 24 | Request core part of French agreement (8) |
| ENTREATY – EN (core part of FrENch) + TREATY (agreement) | |
| Down | |
| 1 | Surprised exclamation about blight in wood (6) |
| WILLOW – ILL (blight) ‘in’ WOW (surprised exclamation) | |
| 2 | Work with needle, taking a long time, and waste material (6) |
| SEWAGE – SEW (work with needle) + AGE (a long time) | |
| 4 | Greeting first parts of body of work (3) |
| BOW – First letters (first parts) of Body Of Work | |
| 5 | Machine in the wings is the first thing seen in theatre (7-6) |
| CURTAIN RAISER – DD – I think – with the first being (I guess) a reference to a contraption used to raise the theatrical curtain (which said contraption would, one assumes, be located in the wings) and the second being the more frequent usage of the first act on stage. Must admit I’d never really thought about the process behind the curtain going up, but I assume it must be mechanised (as opposed to a couple of burly blokes on each side of the stage tugging at ropes as if erecting sails on a yacht). Or maybe I’ve gone completely haywire here! | |
| 6 | Shelter sports official, very large for a Cockney (6) |
| REFUGE – REF (sports official) + [H]UGE (very large with the aitch dropped in Cockney style) | |
| 7 | Busy person ruined Monday (6) |
| DYNAMO – *(MONDAY) with “ruined” as the anagrind | |
| 9 | Maltreat new worker interrupting bloke (9) |
| MANHANDLE – N HAND (new worker) inside (interrupting) MALE (bloke) | |
| 12 | Weapon taking top off simple cart (5) |
| ARROW – [B]ARROW – the ‘simple cart’ loses its first letter (top off) | |
| 14 | Friendly call receiving reduced attention (6) |
| CHEERY – CRY (call) ‘receiving’ HEE[D] (attention – heed – ‘reduced’) | |
| 15 | Speak about idiot making sense (6) |
| SANITY – SAY (speak) around (about) NIT (idiot) | |
| 16 | Mountainous country – I make a mistake entering it (6) |
|
SIERRA – Whilst the answer became clear with the arrival of a couple of cross checkers and the word ‘mountainous’ at the beginning of the clue, I was a tad unsure about the full parsing here. We clearly have I ERR (I make a mistake) entering something; I originally thought that something was SA (being an abbreviation of South Africa = ‘country’): however, for this to work our definition would be ‘Mountainous’, whereas I would have thought ‘mountainous country’ would be the more likely definition for SIERRA. On second thoughts, I think maybe I’m being too rigid in my analysis of clue construction here, and we are simply being given a steer towards a word meaning mountainous country that includes I ERR and with no specific clueing of the SA bit… All views gratefully received! On edit: again, your blogger fell over – much egg on face. Thanks to those who put me straight: the IT in the clue is the old crossword device equating to “sex appeal” – in turn abbreviated to SA. |
|
| 17 | Information collected by a heartless county organisation (6) |
|
AGENCY – GEN ‘collected’ by A C |
|
| 21 | Fellow one’s pulled from the sea (3) |
| MAN – MAIN (sea) losing I (one’s pulled) | |
I’m just as clueless about LAWN MOWER as you are. CURTAIN RAISER seems like a simple double definition, so no problems there for me. The SA in SIERRA refers to “sex appeal”, which is signalled by “it” in crosswordese. (One of the more obscure codes that you just have to learn; I was pretty miffed the first time I came across a clue with this in the clue.)
The blades of the LAWN MOVER clash with the BLADES OF GRASS!
I agree on CURTAIN RAISER yes but, no but…
SIERRA it is partially clueless!
PEDRO should be reprimanded
horryd Shanghai
5dn: seems clearly to be a double definition; but though the second def. is clearly supported by the dictionaries, for the first one I think we are just expected to accept that such a machine is possible, if not likely these days. Of course even a man stationed with a rope can technically be classed as a machine, if one wanted to be picky, certainly an electric motor can.
16dn: “It” girls and SA = sex appeal are tired crossword cliches that nevertheless is apparently too useful for setters to dispense with.
That last apart, a good crossword!
Edited at 2016-04-06 06:40 am (UTC)
In a traditional cylinder mower (probably used these days only by green keepers) a number of blades in a cylindrical form rotate and touch a fixed bottom blade thus cutting the grass by a scissor action. That is not exactly a clash of blades, but the blades certainly have to come together with sufficient pressure to cut effectively.
Dereklam
Horryd Shanghai has posted the correct interpretation 8ac pointing out there are two types of blade involved. This sort of clue is effectively a riddle and I’m often unsure whether that categorises it as &lit or cryptic, but that’s a side issue.
On CURTAIN RAISER I have my doubts about the first definition because I don’t know what mechanisms are in use these days if Nick’s burly blokes have been replaced. I assume some sort of electronic or mechanical device involving counterweights is tucked away somewhere and this is as likely to be in the wings as anywhere else
SA/IT is a fact of cryptic crossword life that needs to be learnt if one is going to progress.
Edited at 2016-04-06 06:12 am (UTC)
Edited at 2016-04-06 09:01 am (UTC)
Similarly organ = newspaper actually. Here’s the relevant SOED entry: ORGAN: A means or medium of communication; spec. a newspaper or journal which serves as the mouthpiece of a particular party, movement, etc.
Edited at 2016-04-06 09:34 am (UTC)
One talks of “sailing the Spanish Main”.
Chambers has “mainland” and “high sea” as separate definitions for main – it looked to me as though the Spanish Main (when used to describe the sea in those parts) was simply an association with the original meaning of Spanish Main (i.e. the mainland) rather than a derivation from the sea meaning of main, so I’d been hoping to find a common example of the sea usage of main that had arisen purely from the sea definition. Sure, it doesn’t matter for the purposes of answering the clue but I thought it was a nuance worth mentioning – others may disagree 🙂
Any fewl nose MAIN is a large sea – SPANISH MAIN (Shak. and Milton)
horryd Shanghai
Sierra I took to be I ERR in the country South Africa with Sierra being a mountainous region as in Sierra Nevada
Curtain Raiser I had no problem with having had a daughter who worked backstage in school productions. And yes the answer is that it is a pulley mechanism situated in the wings cranked by hand (or it was in my daughter’s school theatre anyway)
Lawn Mower I never parsed, but yes I suppose the blades of the machine clashing with the blades of the grass is a possible explanation.
All good fun
Playuppompey
Philip
PS I went to a girl’s comprehenisve, but I got found out . . .
This QC took me 16 minutes and presented no real problems except I too could not parse 8a and 16d; but I was sure both answers were right.So thanks Nick for great job. My LOI was 19a. No really difficult words or phrases today.
I have already managed most of the bottom half of today’s main puzzle so it must be easier than most. David
I am not sure this tough is going to tempt me to try the 15×15 – a confidence reducer.
Thanks for the blog which made most things clear.
And on Clashes, of course the clue is good. But for amusement, the excellent James May ‘REASSEMBLE’ new series on BBC TV has him rebuilding a 1950s Suffolk Colt lawnmower. He uses choice words and might have responded to the idea of any clashes, mower on grass or blade on blade – the mower cuts and the blades ‘whisper’!