Guardian 24,991 / Araucaria
Posted by mhl on April 22nd, 2010
A good puzzle from Araucaria, much of it quite easy (a relief to me) with perhaps 3 more difficult clues. I don’t get the subsidiary of 14 across, so any explanations would be much appreciated
| Across | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1. | CONSTELLATION | CONS = “Prisoners” + TELL = “narrate” + A + (INTO)* |
| 10. | LITTLE DOG | Double definition: the constellation is better known as Canis Minor, and the other reference is to the rhyme “The Cow Jumped Over The Moon” |
| 11. | TWILL | [sui]T + WILL = |
| 12. | UNFIT | F = “Female” in UNIT = “group” |
| 13. | LABYRINTH | (RLY IN BATH)* |
| 14. | HAY WAIN | Not sure about this: the definition must be “Picture”, referring to The Hay Wain by Constable, but I don’t understand “confusion when made by 25″. Update: there are some suggestions below, I think alluding to the Plough / Big Dipper / Ursa Major also being known as Charles’s Wain or Wain – possibly “to hay” meaning “to confuse” has some bearing on it. I’m still looking for a really clear explanation, but perhaps I misunderstand what’s obvious to others… :) |
| 16. | ETHERIC | ERIC = “Boy” around THE = “article” |
| 18. | DECRIES | EC = “the City” in DRIES = “hard-line Tories” (a reference to the Thatcherite terminology “wets and dries”) |
| 20. | CAPTAIN | CAIN = “Killer” around APT = “suitable” |
| 21. | INVENTION | IN VENT = “in hole” + I = “one” + ON = “attached” |
| 23. | CHINA | Double definition: “Mate” as in Cockney rhyming slang, and “great power” as in China, the superpower |
| 24. | LARNE | L = “left” + ARNE = “composer” |
| 25. | GREAT BEAR | GREBE = “suitable [?] bird” around A T = “a time” followed by A R = “a river” |
| 26. | SOUTHERN CROSS | SOU = “minimal money” + RN “the sailors” + CROSS = “angry” |
| Down | ||
| 2. | OUT OF SYNC | (FOCUS TONY)* |
| 3. | SPLIT | SLIT = “cut” around P = “page” |
| 4. | EIDOLON | Difficult, I thought: EID = “festival” (in Arabic – one of many, but paritcularly the end of Ramadan) + O = “round” + LON[don] = “half the capital” |
| 5. | LEGIBLE | LE GIB LE = “The French for the Rock [of Gibraltar?] and the” |
| 6. | TUTORSHIP | (PURIST HOT)* |
| 7. | ORION | OR = “or” + ION = “charged one”; the constellation of Orion has a very clear belt |
| 8. | PLOUGHED FIELD | PLOUGH = 25 (another name for Ursa Major) + E = “English” + (FIDDLE)* |
| 9. | ALPHA CENTAURI | Sounds (vaguely!) like “‘alf a century” |
| 15. | ALIGNMENT | G = “good” + N = “new” in ALIMENT = “food”; the definition is “Dressing”, as in “to dress / align a row of soldiers” |
| 17. | READINESS | DINE = “eat”, with RE = “in the case of” + ASS = “a fool” around the outside |
| 19. | SHINGLE | Double definition |
| 20. | CANTEEN | Double definition (something of an old chestnut) |
| 22. | VIRGO | VIR = “man” in Latin, so “VIR GO” might be “[Constellation] that’s bidden man to depart?” – I think the Latin is a bit unfair here, but the image of Virgo bidding a man to depart is nice |
| 23. | CATER | CAT = “authorised spectator” + ER = “sovereign” – I puzzled for a while about the former part, but finally remembered “a cat may look at a king” from |
April 22nd, 2010 at 7:57 am
Many thanks, mhl, I enjoyed this as far as I got – mainly the top half. At first, I thought ‘this is easy’ and, like you, I opted for HAY WAIN without fully knowing why.
Would some very clever person please explain?
And to think that only yesterday I pleaded for more Englishness in our puzzles and today Araucaria reacts by taking us out of this world!
April 22nd, 2010 at 8:19 am
Hi, mhl and Bryan. I think 14a is a reference to the various names by which The Great Bear is known. In the North of England we always called it ‘Charlie’s Wagon’, and ‘Wain’ is also used. 8d has another name for it : ‘The Plough’
April 22nd, 2010 at 8:32 am
Good morning mhl and everybody.
Pleasant enough from Araucaria today. The theme well handled, relatively simple when the 1ac is clued to make the solve very straightforward.
Among the highlights for me was the wordplay for solving ‘Decries’, the construction for ‘Southern Cross’ & ‘Great Bear’ and the wonderful dd for ‘China’
48′
April 22nd, 2010 at 8:33 am
Thanks mhl. I agree this was easy. Re 14 and 25a I assumed the Constable link and the wain=plough but note from the Net that there is apparently a history of confusion on the Plough constellation re Charles (of Wain fame) and nearby Arcturus, an Arthur/Charlemagne muddle of a sort. Not fully satisfactory, I agree. The 9d was outrageous even for the philohomophonic Araucaria.
April 22nd, 2010 at 8:41 am
I should add that different cultures have seen a Plough and a Great Bear – the hay wain/ploughed field could only be linked to a Great Bear in a confused way.
April 22nd, 2010 at 8:44 am
This was very straightforward but satisfying. Its nice when a theme is getable quickly and maintains itself throughout!
April 22nd, 2010 at 9:38 am
‘Straightforward and satisfying’, says rrc, and that about sums it up. DECRIES and CATER terrific, but what a shame about CANTEEN.
mhl, I guess the grebe in 25 is ‘suitable’ because you would see it on the river which appears later in the clue.
April 22nd, 2010 at 9:55 am
Many thanks, Octofem @2
Bryan
April 22nd, 2010 at 10:03 am
Like most people I guessed 14A but I wasn’t sure why. In Chambers “make hay (of)” is defined as “to throw things into confusion”, so I think hay is being taken to mean confusion . I’ve never come across this definition before.
April 22nd, 2010 at 10:39 am
I didn’t find it that easy, the last half dozen clues took a while. But those were among the most satisfying, including the laugh-out-loud ‘alf a century (I don ‘t think you can complain when the homophone material is given so directly) and the wonderful CATER.
April 22nd, 2010 at 11:12 am
Thanks, mhl. This was enjoyable and straightforward. The first clue I got was 1ac, which helped! And although EIDOLON and ETHERIC were new to me, I didn’t find them too hard to solve — I know of Eid.
I went for HAY-WAIN at 14ac without the slightest idea why, so thanks for the explanations. My favourite was also CATER.
April 22nd, 2010 at 11:55 am
I should have guessed that, because I actually finished it for once, you would all be saying how easy it was! But I had to guess quite a few because I didn’t know the keywords (Eid, Vir, Cat, Hay wain, EC).
My favorite was 26ac because I got it in reverse: the ‘cross’ bit first, then the ‘rn’, then the ‘the’, and finally the ‘sou’.
Also, is it fair to use ‘by’ in 1dn? I thought The Plough was inside Ursa Major, not by it.
April 22nd, 2010 at 11:55 am
Sorry, that should have been 8dn, not 1dn.
April 22nd, 2010 at 12:14 pm
I suspect 9d might have been Araucaria thumbing his nose at some of us!
April 22nd, 2010 at 12:26 pm
The Plough and the Southern Cross are asterisms, rather than constellations.
…Well, someone had to point it out.
April 22nd, 2010 at 12:39 pm
C’mon Eileen…
Eileen, if you see this message could you please email me – anaxcrosswords at yahoo dot co dot uk.
April 22nd, 2010 at 1:02 pm
Thanks for the blog, mhl
I really enjoyed this on my train journey this morning – got all but three in the 50 mins available.
Didn’t get EIDOLON (never heard of it), CAT=spectator was naughtily obscure, and I kicked myself for not getting CHINA as I love cockney rhyming slang.
April 22nd, 2010 at 1:34 pm
Thanks to Araucaria and mhl, esp. for explaining HAY WAIN, which was the only thing we didn’t understand.
April 22nd, 2010 at 1:37 pm
Now I look at it, was there a little mini-theme of “hey diddle diddle”?
CAT as an “authorised observer”
LITTLE DOG “laughing”
FIDDLE as anagram fodder
and I guess you might have a SPOON in your CANTEEN. (Probably not running away with your dish, though)
April 22nd, 2010 at 1:43 pm
I enjoyed this, being an ex-astronomer, so Wain was no problem for me. Thanks for the explanation of 4d, mhl.
I do take exception to 9d’s pronunciation, however, Mick H at #10. I have always pronounced it sen-TOR-eye; I can’t remember the province for this, but I have good authority at Sky and Telescope, where you can hear it pronounced.
I believe the constellation was a Roman name (the Greeks called it Thyrsus ), so how would it have been pronounced there, Eileen?
(Incidentally, why does the spellin checker on these posts somtime work and dometimes not?)
April 22nd, 2010 at 1:58 pm
Thanks mhl. I read 11a. ’twill’ differently. I assumed the going to was the placement of ‘t’ on ‘will’ and that ‘will’ was ‘demand’ in phrases such as ‘I will have you know’ or even ‘I will my pet unicorn to my nephew’. Otherwise ‘demand’ = produce or generate this fabric seems a little odd. Does this make sense?
April 22nd, 2010 at 2:01 pm
Hi Dave
“(Incidentally, why does the spellin checker on these posts somtime work and dometimes not?)”
Assuming you are referring to comments added to posts then this problem is down to your browser. There is no comment spell-check facility in the site software. I believe Firefox has a spell-checker built in and I use an add-on for IE8 which has picked up the three errors in your query. I don’t know about what is provided with other browsers.
April 22nd, 2010 at 2:13 pm
Re ‘will my pet…’ I am getting at the idea that ‘I will’ (in a will and also a will itself) is an authoritative demand on executors and others. Perhaps I am in a hole here and should stop digging!
April 22nd, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Hi Dave #20
The Latin pronunciation would be Ken tow [as in how] ree – but Sen-TOR-eye follows the usual pattern of Anglicising of Latin words.
I agree with Mick H and Bill Taylor: I don’t think you can take this one too seriously!
April 22nd, 2010 at 2:39 pm
Hi tupu
No, you are not digging a hole for yourself. Chambers thesaurus gives ‘demand’ as a synonym for ‘command’ and one of the definitions in Chambers for ‘a will’ is ‘a command’ and for ‘to will’ it gives ‘to issue a command’.
If your parsing is not correct then ‘demand’ in the clue is superfluous.
April 22nd, 2010 at 2:41 pm
Thanks, Gaufrid, I have just tried Firefox, and that picks up the errors.
April 22nd, 2010 at 2:49 pm
Thanks Gaufrid (25).
April 22nd, 2010 at 5:05 pm
Dave Ellison, in Firefox right click the box and select Languages, you may have to add English/United Kingdom.
April 22nd, 2010 at 5:07 pm
I think 25A still requires explanation – grebe/suitable bird – Martin H has made a valiant effort but grebes are open water birds not river birds
April 22nd, 2010 at 5:15 pm
Thanks for a tricky blog mhl.
Just a point or two:
Re 8. PLOUGHED FIELD PLOUGH = 25 (another name for Canis Major) + E = “English” + (FIDDLE)*
Isn’t there some confusion here between Canis and Ursa?
The Great Bear/Plough thing is typically tenuous but just about discernible.
For 8 dn I had it that “Land (has been made ready for) use by (Great Bear = Plough)”, followed by the E fiddle weak-enough-to-be-non-existent anagrind.
I didn’t think much of “being prepared” equating to READINESS either; different parts of speech IMO.
April 22nd, 2010 at 5:15 pm
What’s this – an Araucaria that can be done in 30 mins – by me and my (non-crosswordy) family? What’s the world coming to!?
Actually it was fun – apart from 4 down which I just don’t recognise – so thanks for the help!
April 22nd, 2010 at 5:24 pm
John: oops! Thanks, I hope I’ve fixed the Canis / Ursa mistakes now. (That exact mistake has cost us points in a pub quiz in the past…) With regard to READINESS, I think you could say both “in a state of readiness” and “in a state of being prepared”.
Thanks to everyone for their comments – I’ve tried to apply corrections to the post above.
Eileen: although (as is ever clear!) I’m no Latinist, I thought there were a number of traditions of modern pronunciation of Latin, in particular an Oxford / Cambridge division? Or is that one
April 22nd, 2010 at 5:54 pm
Re being. This seems OK to me as used since
-ing words are both verbal adjectives e.g. ‘he and his wife are parting’ and verbal nouns e.g. ‘parting is such sweet sorrow’.
April 22nd, 2010 at 6:00 pm
25A again – grebe/suitable bird – could it be that grebe is contained in agreeable? – tenuous i know…
April 22nd, 2010 at 6:48 pm
25a I thought I would have a further hunt via google on this one. First it seems that some grebes do live on rivers. Second there are a lot of references to grebes on the Bear River in Utah. Also there is a Great Bear river in Canada but it is not clear that there are grebes there! If all this does not seem obscure enough, there is also a Thomas Hardy short story ‘Barbara of the House of Grebe’ who is the object of Lord Uplandtower’s earnest suit. Nuff’s nuff!?
April 22nd, 2010 at 6:54 pm
p.s. After all that I should perhaps echo others and say that this was generally a very enjoyable puzzle.
April 22nd, 2010 at 7:08 pm
A very enjoyable puzzle, by the way Ixion, I must tell the grebes on our local stretch of the Thames that they must leave at once and head for open water.
April 22nd, 2010 at 7:44 pm
Scarecrow – it would be better to ask them politely!
Well great bear is anag of grebe at a r – so I guess my ornitholigical outrage is misplaced!
April 22nd, 2010 at 8:28 pm
Perhaps it is as simple as that after all – grebe is the only bird suitable for making the anagram?
April 22nd, 2010 at 10:25 pm
Enough about birds and stars [and birds that want to be stars] for me.
Everything’s already been said about this [IMHO, very average] Araucaria.
Except something about 5d (LEGIBLE).
In the clue there’s three times ‘the’ and in the solution only twice ‘le’.
‘The French’ = ‘le’ , I guess.
Gibraltar seems to be called ‘the Rock’ or ‘Gib’.
But why should the third ‘the’ then be ‘le’ [because 'French' is linked to the first 'The']?
And if Araucaria means ‘French for the Rock and the’ [= LE GIB + LE), what is the first ‘The’ doing there?
I think this is not right, but maybe I’m missing something.
April 22nd, 2010 at 10:38 pm
Fellow pedant – I think the initial “The” is superfluous – French applies to what follows ie “the rock and the”.
April 22nd, 2010 at 10:55 pm
Sil, and other fellow pedants – It’s common to ask, “What is the French for…….?”; rather than “What is French for?”, so here we have ‘the French’ for ‘the’, ‘Gib’, and ‘the’, as you suggest, and the first ‘the’ is OK. But is the French for Gibraltar ‘Gib’? And if not, does the clue still work?
April 22nd, 2010 at 11:27 pm
Martin H, I don’t think I’m a pedant, rather someone who does not always know what is common in the Streets of London.
But I am completely happy with your explanation.
And indeed, the only thing that’s uncertain is whether the French say ‘le Gib’ or not. The French Wikipedia doesn’t.
April 22nd, 2010 at 11:43 pm
Apologies Sil – I didn’t mean pedant to sound insulting – I applaud your attention to detail in pursuit of the truth!
April 23rd, 2010 at 12:32 am
Please explain “hay wain” ??
April 23rd, 2010 at 12:50 am
Sil @43
It’s masculine:
Le rocher de Gibraltar
De rots van Gibraltar
I’m sure that Ary would have checked this very carefully.
April 23rd, 2010 at 1:02 am
Sil – to echo ixion @44, in my book pedant is anything but an insult.
April 23rd, 2010 at 2:23 am
Alpha Centauri – relatively straightforward to get from the clue but perhaps an anagram might have been vaguely possible!
April 23rd, 2010 at 5:20 am
I parsed 25A as G = “good/suitable” + REA (rhea misspelling) + T + BEAR (river flowing into Great Salt Lake)
April 23rd, 2010 at 8:12 am
Yeah, Bryan (#43), if you’re still there, I know that it is Le Rocher de Gibraltar, so perhaps: le Gib.
But do the French say ‘le Gib’, just like the English?
If so, then it’s fine, if not, then Araucaria is zigzagging through Le French & The English: LE (Fr) GIB (Eng) LE (Fr).
That was in the end my point and, I think, Martin H’s.
Indeed, Araucaria normally knows what he does, knows a lot more than me anyway – so I am not at all bothered.
]
[nor am I insulted by the word 'pedant'