Comments on: Independent 8108/Anax

By: shuchi

shuchi — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 10:57:13 +0000

I got a print of this puzzle the day it was published and it took me about 4 sittings to finish it. Being Indian I should have probably fared well with this puzzle – didn’t happen! I cottoned on to INDIAN IMPORT early on but struggled with the answers. It was a very satisfying workout ultimately, not least because I learned new things about my native language.

I didn’t know MUSK came from Sanskrit. The bigger surprise was CUSHY from ‘khushi’ – the Hindi word is very common. Incidentally the opposite of ‘khushi’ = ‘gum’ (sorrow), people pun about eating gum to dispel gum.

CHEETAH and THUG were familiar, they are used identically in Hindi. SHAMPOO has changed meaning – the origin ‘champi/champna’ (massage) is not used in the same sense. In fact there is no equivalent for SHAMPOO in Hindi, we treat the word as if it is an import from English!

Thank you Anax, this was a delight to solve.

By: Donk

Donk — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 23:43:17 +0000

Many thanks to Anax and John for the puzzle and explanations. I enjoyed the puzzle on completion but found it incredibly difficult with so many essentially undefined answers.

I had to take a moment before putting in 26a just to make sure my filthy mind hadn’t conjured up something that wasn’t meant to be!

By: Bertandjoyce

Bertandjoyce — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 22:11:56 +0000

Thanks Anax for a good workout!

We also took a while to get 21d and were then amazed at the origin of some of the thematic answers especially 26ac, 6d and 3d.

Great stuff as always and amazingly we finished it this evening after our usual late start. We only used the dictionary to check the origin of a number of answers out of interest.

Thanks John for the blog. This must have taken a bit of sorting out!

By: anax

anax — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 21:54:06 +0000

Evening everyone. Thanks John for a typically ace blog and to all for your kind comments.

Looks like any major quibbles have been addressed, but I must ackowledge Jan’s point about whether or not the thematic entries deserved more definition than they were given. It was concern when the puzzle was submitted, and I was secretly glad when the clues were allowed to stand as they were, as adding extra definitional pointers would have made them unwieldy. As it was, the ‘definition’ idea (that each answer had a linguistic something in common) felt attractive enough to be left unmolested.

Best wishes all!

By: JollySwagman

JollySwagman — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 20:48:05 +0000

@K #6

“I may be way off the mark of course.”

No -I think you hit the nail `on the head. Why else the QM?

By: JollySwagman

JollySwagman — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 20:47:36 +0000

@K #6

“I may be way off the mark of course.”

No -I think you hit the mail on the head. Why else the QM?

By: flashling

flashling — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 17:28:26 +0000

Now that was tough, like NMS took a while to see IMPORT despite getting Indian quite quickly, cheers to John for some explanations that I knew the answer had to be right, but was too lazy to fully parse and Anax, for a bit of a mental pounding.

By: nmsindy

nmsindy — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:38:37 +0000

I thought this was a magnificent puzzle – and, indeed, educational. It took me quite a while to find the IMPORT part of 16 21. What was especially pleasing was that I was able (eventually) to work out all the answers without consulting anything and, despite the absence of definitions, had no real doubt about any of them before coming here to verify as the wordplay clueing was so precise with some excellent misdirection. There were some very clever and amusing clues – in particular I liked SHAMPOO, THUG and TEA BREAKS. Many thanks, Anax, and John for the blog.

By: Klingsor

Klingsor — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:07:43 +0000

I don’t think flat/atonal in 14 across are meant to be synonyms (they’re not). If you speak in a flat voice you speak in a toneless voice and this is a whimsical suggestion that atonal could be taken to mean “without tone” – hence the ? next to flat at the end of the clue. I may be way off the mark of course.

Great stuff as always from Anax. SHAMPOO and JUGGERNAUT were my two favourite clues and it was a very interesting little theme. And no, I’m not just saying this because Anax mentioned certain Wagnerian characters in his last puzzle…honest.

By: Jan

Jan — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 14:41:38 +0000

I forgot to say that I loved the clue at 6a.