I think I passed! A few definitions—as parts of clues and for an entire answer—really had me stretching. Much else was equally opaque at first, in other ways. That there are two DISHes, symmetrically placed on the lower left and right sides, is probably just a coincidence.
I indicate (anargasm)* like this, and words flagging such rearrangements are italicized in the clues.
| ACROSS | |
| 1 | Snug wearing little tunic (6) |
| TABARD TA(BAR)D “Snug” in the sense of a cozy private room in a pub …That part rang a faint, faraway bell, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across the word TABARD in English literature—rather than French. |
|
| 4 | Like Wagner’s Ring, a chaotic Act I (8) |
| OPERATIC O, “Ring” + PER, “a” + (Act I)* |
|
| 10 | Can refugees stay in north, perhaps? (9,6) |
| DETENTION CENTRE DETENTION …My COD! |
|
| 11 | House doctor supplied with right lozenge (5) |
| RHOMB R, “right” + HO, “house” + MB, Bachelor of Medicine, “doctor” |
|
| 12 | Stripped naked in shelter, causing arousal (9) Scabrous scenario… |
| AWAKENING AW( |
|
| 13 | Ball formed out of bent square (10) |
| MASQUERADE MADE (“formed”) with (square)* inside, hence “out of” it |
|
| 14 | Keep sending plans over (4) |
| SPAM MAPS<=“over” |
|
| 17 | Open wide space, originally empty (4) |
| GAPE GAP, “space” + E |
|
| 18 | Seizure occurs when an old flame’s in a state (10) |
| ANNEXATION AN + N(EX)ATION |
|
| 20 | Head of school retired? Define “sacked” (4-5) |
| DOPE-FIEND POD<=“retired” + (define)* |
|
| 22 | Old king, also regal (5) |
| GRAND GR, “Old king” Georgius Rex + AND, “also” |
|
| 24 | Shop workers paid for shopping (5,10) |
| STORE DETECTIVES CD, playing on “shopping,” slang for informing on someone, especially to the police |
|
| 25 | A French restroom full of posh lotions (8) |
| UNGUENTS UN (A in French) + U, “posh” + GENTS, “restroom” |
|
| 26 | Recover after nil by mouth (6) |
| ORALLY O, “nil” + RALLY, “recover” …Hard to make sense of the surface |
|
| DOWN | |
| 1 | Staff do up house (5) |
| TUDOR ROD (“Staff”) + UT (“do” as the note in a musical scale) <=“up” |
|
| 2 | The worst drink for your health (7,2) |
| BOTTOMS UP BOTTOM, “The worst” + SUP, “drink” « Votre santé ! » |
|
| 3 | Ladder on a car (8) |
| RUNABOUT RUN, “Ladder” (in stockings) + ABOUT, “on” |
|
| 5 | Sewer needs sign when circulation is impeded (4,3,7) |
| PINS AND NEEDLES DD, both a bit cryptic! |
|
| 6 | I’m afraid boring leftie was humming (6) |
| REEKED R(EEK)ED |
|
| 7 | Rwandan boy king one’s raised (5) |
| TUTSI TUT, “boy king” + I[’]S<=“raised” |
|
| 8 | Religious type just about runs gym (9) |
| CLERGYMAN CLE(R)(GYM)AN CLEAN is not found on the page for “just”at Thesaurus.com nor “just” on the page for CLEAN. But CLEAN can mean “pure; morally sound” (Collins) and “Honest, uncorrupted” (Chambers) and a CLEAN fight is a fair one. |
|
| 9 | Chaos in naming arrested suspect (14) |
| DISARRANGEMENT (naming arrested)* |
|
| 13 | City cat given bowl coated in gold (9) |
| MOGADISHU MOG, “cat” + A(DISH)U |
|
| 15 | Ancient chief wrong to be quoted (9) |
| PRIMAEVAL “prime evil” |
|
| 16 | The best medicine that may be canned (8) |
| LAUGHTER CD |
|
| 19 | Weak y{et effe}ctive, somewhat upset (6) |
| EFFETE Reverse hidden |
|
| 21 | Tip for new head of government (5) |
| PRONG PRO, “for” + N(ew) + G |
|
| 23 | Fit detective shot (5) |
| DISHY D(etective) I(nspector) + SHY, “shot” Any of the three definitions in Collins for SHY as a noun work: “a quick throw,” “informal a gibe,” or “informal an attempt; experiment.” …I wasn’t aware that SHY could be a noun! It’s likely that a DISHY person is also “Fit”—and vice versa—but the former seems a more subjective evaluation. This was my LOI. |
|
33 minutes, so very easy for one of Dean’s puzzles.
Aside from being a tunic, The TABARD was the name of the inn in Southwark where Chaucer’s pilgrims gathered before setting off to Canterbury. It was destroyed in a fire in 1676. The site is very close to The George where our fellow-bloggers meet regularly.
Ut as the first note of the scale was news to me, so TUDOR was entered last as nothing else seemed to fit. Thanks Guy. Cognate with “utmost” perhaps?
24:51
Merriam-Webster’s Etymology note for UT: “Middle English, first note in the diatonic scale, from Medieval Latin, from the syllable sung to this note in a medieval hymn to St. John the Baptist.”
The “ut” in that hymn, “Ut queant laxis” (I checked), and the “ut”in “utmost” are not the same word.
“Utmost comes from Old English ūtmest, a superlative adjective formed from the adverb ūt, meaning ‘out.’ The earlier sense of utmost carries the same meaning as outermost.”
Ut is Latin for as. The hymn that you mentioned was used by Guido of Arezzo, about a thousand years ago, to name the notes of the “hexachord” (the first 6 in a major scale), in the style of an acrostic, as each syllable on the right note starts one of its lines. (Very much like Rodgers and Hammerstein in The Sound of Music.) Ut was replaced by Do for solfege usage centuries later, as it’s an open syllable like the other 5, and Si (usually Ti in English) was also added to complete the scale. In French, where the syllables are used to name notes of the scale of C, “Ut majeur” = C major, and can be seen on the cover of the score for many classical music pieces. Is Do Re Mi in C major? I haven’t checked, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Do Re Mi… is the diatonic major scale, which is in C in “fixed do” solfège but in “movable do” can be transposed, with of course do always as the tonic.
Oh, but you mean the Richard Rodgers song “Do Re Mi.” And of course it is.
https://musescore.com/user/2810131/scores/1286471
Fixed/moveable Do understood, he says while getting packed up for some trombone trio playing. Sample score (from the same city as SoM) – https://f.media-amazon.com/images/I/91b6MQajOzL._SY425_.jpg
Finished over lunch, so no time. In retrospect it looks pretty easy for one of Dean’s, although parsing OPERATIC (finally remembered per=a), MASQUERADE, & DOPE-FIEND (Can one be just a HEAD tout court?) took ages, and I never figured out DETENTION CENTRE. I liked OPERATIC, MASQUERADE,& TUDOR.
I took some convincing over HEAD but eventually found this way down in Collins under 25a:
25. slang
a. a person who regularly takes drugs, esp LSD or cannabis
25b is the more familiar:
b. (in combination)
an acidhead, a pothead
I’m still not sure that ‘Like Wagner’ is sufficient definition for OPERATIC. I bet most of us thought ‘Like Wagner’s Ring‘ and then had to row back on it to avoid double duty.
ANTISEMITIC is too long.
Hah!
I thought JUST=CLEAN was a bit a of stretch, but it was then only way I could explain 8dn which is exactly how Guy explained it. One again a most enjoyable puzzle.
Well the Ut was news to me. I had a “doubting circle” written round 7d Tudor, and am gobsmacked. I thought there might have been an error. I thought it was too specialised, but that is because I didn’t know it. Oh well.
COD 25a Unguents.
Thank you for your research in the different dictionaries about JUST=CLEAN in 8d.
For the surface in 26ac: “nil by mouth” is a medical instruction in British hospitals – apparently the US equivalent is “nothing by mouth” (or npo). So you might see someone in a hospital bed with a sign “NIL BY MOUTH” hung up behind them, to warn the staff not to give them any food or drink because they are shortly due to have a general anaesthetic prior to surgery.
23d. There is also a “coconut shy” – “a fairground stall in which balls are thrown to knock coconuts off stands”.
For FIT = DISHY, from Collins definitions of “fit”:
” 14. mainly British informal
(of a person) sexually attractive”
—
Chorus from 2004 song “Fit but You Know It” by English rapper Mike Skinner -aka “The Streets”:
I’m not trying to pull you
Even though I would like to
I think you are really fit
You’re fit, but my gosh, don’t you know it?
I didn’t look up “nil by mouth,” but guessed the phrase might be an idiom meaning something like that; even making that assumption, I found the surface somewhat elliptical.
Never heard that song. My point about “Fit” and DISHY was that a person not particularly “fit” by the more objective (i.e., measurable) standards of, say, your doctor or gym trainer, might be found (sexually or otherwise) attractive by another person, chacun(e) à son goût.
I didn’t check the anagram fodder carefully and put MISARRANGEMENT (I didn’t know either word although both are plausible). So one wrong.
DNF – nowhere near finishing in fact, defeated by TABARD (didn’t know that meaning of ‘snug’), TUDOR (thought of it as a house, but didn’t know ‘ut’ as ‘do’), DETENTION CENTRE (far too clever for me), AWAKENING, CLERGYMAN, PINS AND NEEDLES and RUNABOUT.
Thanks Guy and setter.
COD Detention centre (now I’ve seen the explanation!)
28.33
Very late entry.
Excellent blog as always thanks and a classy puzzle
Thanks Dean and guy
Struggled with this one, but started in a noisy cafe and finished with distractions in two longish sittings. Got there in the end and managed to find all of the parsing bits, so quite satisfying. A lot of neat clues with favourites being the popular DETENTION CENTRE (especially because I found the trick), UNGUENTS (nice surface and another one happy to have seen) and RUNABOUT (for its concise and effective clueing) were my favourites – but there were others.
Started with TUTSI and finished in the SW corner with PRONG, EFFETE and DOPE FIEND (had to go searching for the ‘head’ reference).
Doing much better on Dean’s puzzles at last! ( only 2 look-ups). Started with BOTTOMS UP, then TABARD ( from Chaucer I suspect), then worked my way around the grid determined to manage most of it myself, but strung out over the day when I had “a window”. Very satisfying to complete nearly all of it myself! COD to BOTTOMS UP, then DETENTION CENTRE.