Comments on: Quiptic N° 613 by Arachne

By: Arachne

Arachne — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 08:58:09 +0000

PeterO,
As a keen etymologist myself I was thrlled and fascinated to read your comments at 5 above, and pallet Arachne

By: Arachne

Arachne — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 08:58:09 +0000

PeterO,
As a keen etymologist myself I was thrlled and fascinated to read your comments at 5 above, and pallet Arachne

By: PeterO

PeterO — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 00:50:14 +0000

Ah well, the Greek characters made it into the preview, but not the final version. Anyhow, the transliteration is katharos.

By: PeterO

PeterO — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 00:06:52 +0000

Thank you, Arachne, for gracing our blog – and for another splendid crossword. I doubt if you would have been struck by lightning for 13D; as far as I can tell, catharsis and Cathars (Albigensians, for those who have not looked it up) are connected only etymologically, deriving independently from the Greek ???????, pure or clean. Incidentally, PALLET as in forklift comes by a winding road from Latin pala, a spade, while PALLET, mattress, is a different animal, coming from the French paille, straw, which might give you a marginally less uncomfortable night than a wooden plank.

By: Arachne

Arachne — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 21:40:43 +0000

Thank you so much to PeterO for the blog, and to Kathryn’s Dad, Bryan and Robi for your kind comments. I do hope you were all at least briefly detained and entertained. If this had been a cryptic I fear that the poor old Albigensians would have had an outing at 13dn, so I’ve probably been protected from myself. As for PALLET, my dear old dad tells me he slept on a few in a bygone age, and I fear they were little more comfortable than those wooden things that people today seem to want to buy for some unknown reason.
Love, hugs, and toodlepip,
Arachne x

By: Robi

Robi — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 11:25:28 +0000

Thanks, Arachne; horses for courses but I thought this was easier than the Cryptic with lots of anagrams.

Good blog, PeterO; I like seeing the clues for reference. A PALLET for me is a wooden thingy for lifting stuff, so I wouldn’t fancy sleeping on that. SCAREDY-CAT was allegedly coined by Dorothy Parker in 1933 – ‘Cats are intelligent enough to retreat when threatened by a larger or better armed enemy and other potentially harmful situations; this gives us the British “scaredy cat” and the American “fraidy cat”.’

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 08:06:58 +0000

Many thanks PeterO – you are a busy bee this morning. Do you ever get any sleep?

25a left me feeling very sheepish as I’d never heard the story.

Also, many thanks to the Spider Lady. Yes – it was tougher than today’s Cryptic.

By: Kathryn's Dad

Kathryn's Dad — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 05:57:27 +0000

Thanks, Peter.

Good Quiptic, I thought. Plenty of anagrams to get you going (THIRD DEGREE was clever), and then some inventive clueing elsewhere: I liked CATHARSIS and SCAREDY CAT in particular. I couldn’t see how AIRLINE worked, so thanks for that, and also for the Jacob story. I remembered the ladder and the coat of many colours but had forgotten about the sheep bit.

I too had a ‘hmmm’ moment with ‘slips’ and ‘drops’ but I think on reflection it’s okay: ‘The soap slipped out of her hand’, ‘The soap dropped out of her hand’.

Thank you to Arachne.