ST 4324 (Sun 12 Apr) – Take a deep breath

9 comments on “ST 4324 (Sun 12 Apr) – Take a deep breath”

1. Once again I’ve lost my printout in the intervening week, but I recall it taking less than twenty minutes, which I was reasonably happy about. (Today’s grid took me nine minutes to get down to only four empty cells, and six hours later I still can’t fill them.)

   I’m not sure about “in” serving double duty for OUTFIT. It might be if the reference is to physical fitness, but equally, “suitable shape” on its own would serve for FIT – something is a suitable shape to fill a hole, say.

   8dn; headmaster isn’t any better or worse than “maidenhead” and others similar – in fact pretty much the first thing it would make me think of is the letter M. I’m unfamiliar with Ximenean rules, but I gather they do not allow for tricks like this, stringing words together and using misleading punctuation. For myself, as long as the solver is aware that such tricks might be played, I see no problems with them – is it just personal preference, or is there a sound logical reason they should be rejected?

   1. The SE?
   2. The reason normally given for rejecting these is (using a common example): “Gateshead” cannot or does not mean “the head of a gate”. But then “flower” doesn’t mean “something that flows” in real life. Many people, including me, object to “Gateshead” and “indeed” but not “flower”. As far as I can tell, this cannot be explained on purely logical grounds (and when the same issue was discussed over at Derek Harrison’s message board (read by plenty of setters and Azed competitors), no logical reasons were suggested as far as I recall). FWIW, the prefixes/suffixes -er, -head, in-, are all in the Concise Oxford with the required meanings.
      1. Heyesey, you’re absolutely right about ‘fit’ as a noun in 28ac – thanks for the correction.

         My objection to (e.g.) “Gateshead” is not so much that it can’t mean “the head of a gate” but that it’s not the same as “Gate’s head”. “Masthead” does mean “the head of a mast”, but this is not the same as “the head of the word MAST” so I would still object to this indicating “M”. Similarly. “headmaster” is not the same as “head of master” or “master’s head”. If you like this sort of thing, and the stringing together of words like “indeed”, the Guardian is probably the crossword for you!

         1. Thanks – maybe it’s just word-spacing that settles this and makes “flower” OK when the others aren’t. This seems to be such a common view that there should be a logical explanation for it, and this one is more convincing than any I can remember.
2. Solved in 7:33. Not often I get anywhere near Neil’s times, so I’m pleased with that!

   I think I can guess which four cells heyesey is on about, as I probably had the same four left in a similar time. I’m sure of one of the answers, but guessed the other one.

3. Much harder than usual ST fare, I thought. 45 minutes with 22d and 30a missing and another 15 minutes to polish it off. My difficulty with 30 was having E for L as the final letter in 17d.

   Today’s ST took me even longer. After a flying start I became completely bogged down with 12/13/14d and the remainder of SW corner.

4. I agree with heyesey that if ‘fit’ is considered a noun, ‘a suitable shape’ could be equated to ‘a fit’.

   Until recently, the only cryptics that I attempted to solve were the ST cryptics, thus I readily accept ‘start xyz’ or ‘xyx start’= the first letter ‘x’, since it has occurred fairly frequently over the years:

   14 Start building haystack on land where construction material is manufactured? (10) [BRICKFIELD]

   4 Start modelling a ripe peach using this substance (6-5) [PAPIER MACHE]

   17 Leaflets our herbs consistently start producing (9) [BROCHURES]

   3 Grandee with commandant, if in Georgia may start heading north (9) [MAGNIFICO]

   28 Kick-start the human race into longer life (6) [THRILL]
   Note the liberties taken with ‘start’ in this last example.

   Re: Head
   ‘Head’ has been used in the ST cryptics for indicating a first letter very often: ‘skinhead’ = ‘s’, ‘bridgehead’ = ‘b’, ‘egghead’ = ‘e’, etc., but in all the examples that I could find, ‘head’ never(?) preceded as it does in ‘headmaster'(i.e., not in a compound word). This causes me wonder whether the thinking could have been a headmaster is a master, and the abbreviation for master = ‘M’. I have learned to be fairly flexible with the ST cryptics; thus, I am willing to accept that ‘xyzhead’ = ‘headxyz’ = ‘x’, just as ‘xyz start’ = ‘start xyz’ = ‘x’. Does this lead to possibilities such as ‘headstart’ = ‘h’ or ‘s’, ‘head first’ = ‘f’ or ‘h’? Does this open the floodgates too much?

   As heyesey states, ‘as long as the solver is aware that such tricks might be played, I see no problems with them’. It is the presence of these tricks that makes cryptics interesting, such as in:

   12 Businessman and continental headdress (7) [CORONET]
   At the time that I was trying to solve this clue, I was unaware that ‘business’ and ‘man’ could be considered separately.

   1. Thanks for the analysis. You’re certainly correct that this sort of thing is standard for the Sunday Times crossword, though “Headmaster” to indicate “M” feels worse to me than (e.g.) “start modelling” or “masthead”. In this crossword, if such licence gives an otherwise very good clue then I’m prepared to accept it, but in many cases it just strikes me as lazy cluing, e.g. 17 (BROCHURES) in your examples which has a terrible surface reading.

      Whether “businessman” = “business man” = “CO RON” is fair is a moot point; some setters go further, e.g. “Chives” = “C hives” = “C APIARY”, which Araucaria used last week in the Guardian. See also my reply to Heyesey and Peter above.

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