ST 4319 (Sun 8 Mar) – Lost for words

24 comments on “ST 4319 (Sun 8 Mar) – Lost for words”

1. While talbinho has trouble connecting every day, he’s e-mailing posts which I’m putting up for him. The only reason for saying so: if other bloggers see that the ST post is missing, start by asking me whether I’ve forgotten my part of the process.

   I tried this after seeing someone call it “riddled with errors” or similar elsewhere. I can forgive confusion about exactly how seam is used as a verb (though lack of a clear indication in the dictionaries raises the ‘too obscure to use?’ issue), but also found a factual mistake: At 20, Taliban is the movement, not a “fundamentalist” member. They’re apparently Talibs. At 11D, my interpretation of the wordplay was (E=earth + MER=sea) rev. in (cement he’d)*, but I can’t see proper indication of both the containment and the reversal.

   1. At 11D, ER is the chemical symbol of Erbium, a rare earth element, so it could be RE (i.e. earth round) + MED out on which CEMENT HE had been simply poured (rather than been rearranged). It’s a long bow.
   2. I had all the same quibbles over this one and at least three about today’s. I wonder if there is any hope of comments from this forum doing something to improve the standard of the ST puzzle? If not, I think I may give up worrying about it, just bung in answers that are obviously right despite poor cluing and enjoy the rest of my Sunday mornings.
2. I was happy with 11 Dn, with Er(bium) the rare earth reversed as suggested by Kororareka (Russell?), but I did study chemistry.

   8 Dn – quite possibly a typo: Should be “Finds Mary a …”.

   26 Ac? Oh dear, it must be Sunday.

   1. I see you’ve tumbled to my true identity, thinly hidden as it was. You may also recognise the view from Pompallier House window.

   2. Thanks for the ‘Er(bium)’ explanation, but I’m not at all convinced; firstly ‘earth’ = ER is too indirect and secondly the construction doesn’t work: ‘X out on Y’ can’t sensibly mean ‘X around Y’.

      You may well be correct about 8dn, though I wonder if there was an error in the original grid such that 8dn was a letter short and contained only ‘Man Friday’, with the clue not being amended when the answer was extended.

3. And shouldn’t it be Men Friday, not Man Fridays?
   1. My ancient Collins is silent on this issue, although the American Heritage Disctionary online gives the plural as Men Friday or (covering all eventualities) Men Fridays.
4. This one got three hms and a huh? against the clues while solving, which is something of a record.

   STYE is quite a doozy. Maybe ‘nasty emissions’, or even ‘nasty excretions’ intended? Please God they’re not letting spellcheck loose on the crossword.

   Searching for a scrap of silk for a purse, I liked the pairing of short and long stories at 20d and 22d. And the clue for STANCHION is very good with that play on ‘order’.

5. I do enjoy something different, where there is a little flexibility.

   Several of the objections have already been answered:

   11. The rare earth ER
   26. Must be a typo

   Let me answer two more:

   8. It’s an anagram plus ‘group’ as plural indicator
   20. ‘Funamentalist’ as adjective

   I suspect there is some yet-undiscovered trick in 27, but it may be just a cryptic definition.

   As I understand it, there is one constant Sunday setter, and this is the official Sunday style.

   1. My understanding is different – that there are four setters, but one of them – who’s also the ST xed editor – has a different style to the Times puzzles.
      Based on my knowledge of the three setters other than the editor, I’d expect their puzzles to be fine. But that doesn’t seem to happen with three out of four ST puzzles. I don’t know whether the editor contributes more puzzles than the others, or imposes their style on some clues in other people’s puzzles.

      Either way, I doubt that what we say here is going to make much difference for the moment.

   2. You may be very well be right about 20 (I confess that Peter’s objection hadn’t occurred to me, and the dictionaries I have to hand don’t clear it up), but:

      11ac: This explanation doesn’t hold water (see my reply to rosselliot above).

      8dn: I don’t see how ‘group’ on its own can mean “add an S”, even in the Sunday Times, plus this would render the definition meaningless (unless ‘group’ was doing double duty).

      But I’m glad someone liked it!

6. Re: STYE. Since Chambers (New Ninth Edition, p. 1503) seems to consider STYE as a variant of STY (for all of its meanings), I don’t have any real problem with the given answer. Or should I?

   ‘Everyone’ Revisited:
   Since ‘everyone’ with the meaning ‘e’ has appeared at least 5 times in ST cryptics, there must be some logical explanation, at least in the mind of the clue designer. I was never happy with the thought that ‘e’ may be an abbreviation (in some obscure source)for ‘everyone’.
   Even though ‘bridgehead’ = ‘bridge’ with the operator ‘head’ acting on it, indicating the first letter ‘b’, I was so uncomfortable with my interpretation that ‘everyone’ = ‘every’ with the operator ‘one’ indicating the first letter ‘e’, that, once long ago, I briefly considered ‘everyone’ = ‘ever yon e’ with the meaning “always that ‘e’”. This shows how desperate an irritated mind can become.
   Comments to ST 4318 indicate that others also do not have a satisfactory explanation of ‘everyone’ = ‘e’. My investigation into the problem yielded the following: One = first (Chambers – New Ninth Edition, p. 1043 under ‘one’) and Day one = the first day (op cit, p.382). This strongly suggests that ‘one’ may be replaced by ‘first’ or ‘the first’ and may be considered an operator acting on something else. Does this mean that ‘tone’ = ‘t’? ‘None’ = ‘n’? ‘No one’ = ‘n’?
   The word ‘first’ itself can be tricky. Consider ‘first’ = ‘1ST’ = ‘IST’, which can lead to an answer [ILLUSIONIST] as in 12 Magician? Sick and broke one on first (11) (ST 4175, 04 June 2006). Does this work in reverse? That is, since ‘IST’ = ‘1ST’ = ‘first’, then, if required, ‘ILLUSIONIST’ may be considered ‘ILLUSION IST’ = ‘ILLUSION first’ = ‘I’?

   Re: LAWN TENNIS. My comment doesn’t really make anything clearer, but perhaps it is of some interest. A ‘sennit’ or ‘sinnet’ (op cit, p. 1380) = a braid made of strands of rope, straw or GRASS. Other dictionaries stress the straw/GRASS aspect. If either ‘sennit’ or ‘sinnet’ ‘receives a pounding’, we obtain ‘tennis’.

   1. The problem with stye is not one of definition. It’s the hidden word ‘Some naSTY SEcretions..’ clue, which gives us STYSE, not STYE.
   2. STYE: Yes you should! – the clue is a hidden word and the answer is supposed to be STYE. Even in the most liberal puzzles, wordplay for an unindicated variant spelling of the answer is not OK.

      One=first: Only makes any odds if you accept that the “first day” is the same as “the first part of day”. Many setters seem to use this, but it does not make logical sense. “illusionist”=I is surely taking the technique of tricks like “indeed” = “in deed” (already beyond the pale for some) further than most setters would dare.

      Sennit: may receive a pounding in ‘tennis’ but the clue is for LAWN TENNIS, and sennit is ultimately braid, not grass. You’ve just found a bizarre coincidence, I’m sure.

7. I thank Anonymous for the info about STYE. I have never studied the rules for and jargon of cryptic puzzles, and I have developed my own ideas and jargon from solving and trying to solve many ST cryptics. Your response helped further my education.

   Re ‘first’: Unfortunately, my experience has been almost entirely with ST cryptics, where in almost every puzzle one encounters ‘first’ in something like ‘first “WORD”‘ = ‘W’ or ‘”WORD” first’ = ‘W’. I really don’t see anything wrong with this, since ‘first’ may be used as an operator acting on some word(s) in a way similar to that of an anagram operator such as ‘shuffle’ performing an operation on another word or group of words. I think that our philosophies differ with regard to cryptics. You mentioned ‘indeed’ = ‘in deed’. I feel that this is a great device opening the possibilities of ‘in’ as an operator indicating that something should be put into ‘deed’ or that ‘deed’ should be placed into something. Such tricks, indeed, greatly increase the need for flexibilty in thinking, especially in lateral thinking (a la Edward de Bono). Perhaps this should apply only to ST cryptics which are fairly easy to solve. I understand that other cryptic puzzles are more difficult, and thus would not require such tricks. Since I really don’t have time to get involved with other cryptics, I appreciate the introduction of new interesting wrinkles in these easier puzzles.

   Re: sennit/sinnet: My comment was not in any way meant to suggest an explanation for the answer ‘LAWN TENNIS’. The whole thing is, as you suggest, a coincidence. I recently encountered the ‘sennit/sinnet’ words, and ‘grass’ and ‘court’ in the clue brought ‘sennit’ to mind along with its similarity to the word ‘tennis’. This coincidence along with the ‘gass’ = ‘lawn’ connection did allow me to obtain the answer very quickly.

8. Until recently I would have called devices such as “first person” for P a mark of amateurish setting, but it’s one of those things that suddenly becomes more acceptable with a bit of lateral thought.

   Whereas in the UK we describe a date as e.g. “first of March”, the US/Canadian equivalent is “first March”, meaning precisely the same thing.

   With such a precedent set, are we then happy to “import” US English to UK English? I don’t see why not. The cryptic crossword is a British invention but our newspapers are sold internationally and, thanks to the internet, our crosswords are solved by people all over the world.

   It’s right, I think, that we acknowledge differences in syntax.

   1. @anaxcrosswords –

      I cannot speak for Canada, but here in the US of A, we would describe the date as either “March first” or “the first of March.” I have never heard the usage, “first March.”

9. I was going to let the matter slide, but since Anonymous from The States has commented, I feel obligated to give a Canadian perspective. In general, anyone more or less fluent in Canadian English would say ‘the first of March’ or ‘March (the) first’. I can think of two exceptions. Someone in the world of business, trying to economize in every aspect of life, could conceivably say ‘first March’. Another possibility is someone learning English could translate directly word for word from their native language. The German, ‘der erste März’translates properly to ‘the first of March’, but someone translating word for word would come up with ‘the’ ‘first’ ‘March’ as the English equivalent.
10. R comes from “MER” for sea. CEMENT HE’D MER [E]arth
    1. As Peter says in the first comment above, this doesn’t work because MER would need to be reversed. The wordplay is “Cement he’d poured out on earth round sea”, so ’round’ could be a containment indicator but the closest this could give is C(MER)E DE MENTHE.
11. G’day
    Sorry but we get the puzzle late (Toronto Star April 11) Clue 11dn hence the alte comment.

    “Cement he’d poured out on Earth round sea is green sticky stuff” – we thought that “round sea” meant REM (mer backwards) – so CEMENT HE’D + E + REM = Creme de Menthe.

    1. But if “round sea” = MER then we have

       “Cement he’d poured out on E[arth] + REM”

       which gives CE DE MENTHE REM, not CREME DE MENTHE. If “round” is a reversal indicator it can’t also be a containment indicator, so there’s nothing to tell the solver to put REM inside anything.

12. I think the problem is that too much 1a and 11d had been consumed by the setter and/or editor during the publication of this one?

    I quite liked it. I must admit to not having noticed the missing letters in the anagram fodder at 8d and 11d.

    The hidden answer that was not quite correct at 26a was my LOI.

    24a CARPE DIEM – and on to the next one.

Comments are closed.