Quick Cryptic No 304 by Teazel – nice work

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Quick Cryptic
Some clever and witty clues here, on the more difficult end of the Quickie spectrum I think, but nothing obscure or unfair. Only one dodgy definition, in my view; see 5a.

Across
1 LOGGIA – LOG = record, GI = soldier, A; def. gallery. Nice for a change not to be playing around with EP for record and TATE for gallery.
5 POMADE – Hidden reversed in DRESS(ED A MOP)PET; def. scented powder. I always thought pomade was greasy, waxy kind of stuff, and Wiki agrees, but maybe it was a powder in olden days.
8 THOUGHT POLICE – THOUGHT = believed, POLICE = lawmen; def. an invention of Orwell’s, thinkpol in Newspeak, as in the novel 1984, IMO one of the great books of the 20th century.
9 PROM – PRO = for, M = miles, def. walk for pleasure, short for promenade.
10 RED-FACED – (FEARED CD)*; def. looking embarrassed.
11 SHUT UP – Double definition; be quiet!, and perhaps in prison.
13 EGRESS – (R)EGRESS = go back, missing the beginning R; def. exit.
15 GLOW-WORM – Cryptic definition.
17 SITE – SIT = take a pew, E = back to nave, def. position.
19 GENERAL STRIKE – (LIKE STRANGER)*, then E = English; def. all idle here.
21 MEDDLE – Sounds like MEDAL = award; def. interfere. A crossword chestnut.
22 GRETNA – ANT = worker, ERG = quantity of work; all reversed; def. Scottish town, famous for its proximity to the border so a top location for elopement marriages; allegedly as many as one in six Scottish weddings still take place there.

Down
2 OTHER – OT = Old Testament = religious selection; HER = of woman; def. different.
3 GOURMET – (MORE GUT)* def. &lit.
4 ASH – As hard = no less hard (H); def. remains.
5 PIPE DREAM – Cryptic definition. A churchwarden is a kind of pipe for smokers. A pipe dream is an unrealistic ambition.
6 MALTA – MA = graduate, holds ALT = key on keyboard, def. island.
7 DUCHESS – D U = drug, odd letters of; CHESS = a game; def. lady of rank.
10 REPROBATE – ROB = steal from, inserted in (REPEAT)* = awful repeat; def. villain.
12 HELLENE – HELL = dreadful situation, E, N, E are directions; def. Greek, anglicised word for Greek. (Greek: Έλληνες [ˈelines], i.e. “Hellenes”)
14 RESERVE – To re-serve is to join the army again; reserve is not the main part, e.g. of fuel tank.
16 WIELD – WILD = savage, holding E = centre of spear, def. brandish. One of those words that looks wrong, whether you spell it WIELD or WEILD.
18 TOKEN – TEN = a number, insert OK = acceptable; def. voucher.
20 SAG – SAGA is a long story, cut short by lopping the A; def. droop.

7 comments on “Quick Cryptic No 304 by Teazel – nice work”

  1. Still distracted by news coverage I took 13 minutes and biffed a couple of silly errors which I’m too embarrassed to reveal.
  2. Quite tough for a Friday and also compared to the rest of the week, or maybe it is just the other news distractions that made it so. It helped me to have done a lot of these of these quickies before and to have read the blogs as the ‘rules of the game’ are now clearer. So when there is a seemingly an incomprehensible collection of words (‘dressed a moppet’ in 5ac) and the word ‘back’ it is likely the answer is hidden in the clue backwards. I knew the quantity of work (erg) from A Level Physics years ago but still struggled to get 22ac. Somehow I remembered from another crossword that a churchwarden was a type of pipe but it seems a bit obscure to me. In 4dn I still don’t see how ‘no less’ can be translated as ‘as’. Similarly I knew 19ac was General Strike but took a long time to work out that ‘to work’ was the anagrind. By the way is 15ac really a cryptic clue? It seems like a straightforward definition to me unless I am missing something.
    1. I think it’s cryptic, in the sense that ‘shiny’ at face value means the beetle is shiny looking, like a polished car bonnet or something; but here shiny really means ‘shining’.
    2. I think you have to take the words together, not separate them. So “no less hard” is another way of saying “as hard” where, for crossword purposes, H stands for “hard” in the second one.
  3. I’ve only managed to finish one puzzle this week and today’s stumbling block was 22a. I was pretty sure it had ant in it somewhere but I’ve never heard of an erg before. Overall though I was quite pleased with my efforts today as there were some tough clues and words I wasn’t familiar with e.g. 1a. Couldn’t parse 5d and didn’t know that a glow worm was a beetle.
    Like Jackkt I thought a pomade was oily rather than a powder.
    1. That was Pip, not me, but I looked it up too and couldn’t find a reference to powder. ‘Ointment’ was in one dictionary, and another had ‘preparation for dressing hair’ neither of which sounds like powder to me.
      1. Someone has bothered to write a Wiki entry, which begins:

        Pomade (/pɒˈmeɪd/; French pommade) is a greasy or waxy substance that is used to style hair. Pomade makes hair look slick and shiny, and does not dry it out. It lasts longer than most hair care products, taking up to several washes to remove. The original pomade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries consisted mainly of bear fat or lard. Lanolin, beeswax, and petroleum jelly have been used extensively in the manufacture of modern pomades. Stiffening properties of pomades make sculptured hairstyles such as the pompadour or quiff possible; while long lasting moisturizing properties make it popular with individuals with Afro-textured hair.

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