Independent on Sunday 1045 by Quixote – 21st February 2010
Posted by Handel on February 25th, 2010
Two unknown words and one unknown spelling made this a tougher challenge for your faithful correspondents. One clue we haven’t successfully parsed.
ACROSS
4. POUND triple definition.
6. HE I NOUS
8. CONNIVER ‘inn’ backwards inside cover
9. H(UM)OUR
10. LA TEST
11. BO(LONE)Y spent a long time on this convinced that ‘baloney’ was the only way to spell it, turns out that’s a load of boloney
12. C LASS WILL TELL as in William Tell, El loves clues like this
16. CUBICLE cub, then (lice)*
18. ALBAN Y St Alban of St Albans fame
20. GRILLE e.g. backwards around rill. This one got all up in ours and took a while to solve
21. ECHIDNAS (chased in)*. A new word for us, ‘an Australian toothless, spiny, egg-laying, burrowing monotreme’, apparently
22. BA(SKIN)G
23. R(ACE)D
DOWN
1. NU(is)ANCE
2. WIT HAL
3. COMMENCE ‘commerce’ with an ‘n’ rather than an ‘r’
4. PROSAIC ‘o’ in (Paris)*
5. DE(VOTE)S
6. HARD-BOILED EGG Cryptic definition
7. STUD Y and why not?
13. A R B(A)LEST another unfamiliar one, it means ‘a crossbow’
14. L(E)ATHER
15. LANYARD unsure of the parsing of this: ‘One going over a river secured by light line’
16. CA< ROB
17. C RED IT
19. BOD ICE
February 25th, 2010 at 7:17 pm
I think it may be the alternative spelling LANIARD with I A R in ‘land’ = light.
February 25th, 2010 at 10:13 pm
I think the clue is referring to the River Yar which flows into The Solent at Yarmouth, Isle of Wight. So I would go with LAN(YAR)D and agree that ‘land’ is defined by light (alight).
February 25th, 2010 at 11:02 pm
I’d LANYARD pencilled in without full understanding, then, going back to the clue, the LANIARD alternative occurred. We’ll not know till Sun, but “One going over a river” seems to be just a little bit more than Yar.
February 26th, 2010 at 12:02 am
Alternative spellings are always problematic and must be precisely clued. Duncan’s parsing doesn’t seem to account for the “One”.
February 26th, 2010 at 6:21 am
I’m surprised LANIARD caused so much of a problem. NMS got it right of course. ECHIDNA will become familiar over time, usuallly in the singular form as an anagram of CHAINED.
February 26th, 2010 at 11:59 am
Thanks for the explanations everybody! I guess, for office dwellers like me, ‘lanyard’ seems so humdrum and is something we write almost every day, so ‘laniard’ feels even more alien than it should, like a glamorous alter ego.
February 28th, 2010 at 2:03 am
Thanks, Handel.
By the way, you missed the C (about) at the end of 4dn.