Cheers
Rowly.

Fine puzzle which I solved while invigilating at work (invigilating? ) so no dictionaries at hand apart from Vietnamese-English, Korean-English and Chinese-English (which is true).

While you think surfaces are “non-existing”, I thought yours were generally pretty good. You always care for them IMO.

In 23d, “New filling for cheese” I played with the idea of replacing the ‘content’ of “cheese” with whatever: C ….. E
I’ve put it in my Notebook of Crossword Ideas.

Many thanks to U2, scchua!

Personally, I’m not a fan of pushing the boundaries too far just for the sake of a good surface. 6dn was a very good surface but at the expense of clueing ‘OON’ as ’round leg’, and whilst I wouldn’t claim that it was unfairly clued, I’d have preferred something like ‘Unusually large Cat came in breaking Clooney’s heart!’, but I’m happy to accept that I’m probably in the minority.

By the way, I really did enjoy solving the rest if this crossword, and was really quite surprised by the fact that 6dn seemed so out of character with the style of all the other clues.

Thanks again to both Neo & scchua.

Skinning cats is what I do, and as you know, with this activity different opportunities present themselves along the way. I too am a fan of strings of letters, of groups of words either treated as a single entity or as a multitude, or just about anything as long as it all agrees at the cryptic level. The surface is very important to me, but I always try to keep in mind that it really is an arbitrary construct – a means to an end only.

As to cats, I think you are telling me that I should not have clued an obscure word using a partial anagram, and I can accept that: there’s no reason why a MAICE NOON shouldn’t be the solution, especially as I might have made the same crit myself of someone else’s work.

Cheers from one PB to another.

12ac: I can accept that “two word phrase” is not quite right. If you take the subject of “hold” as “some letters” then the plural verb is indeed justified. I was thinking of it as a sequence of letters, in which case the verb needs to be singular. The advantage of putting “will hold” (or similar) is that it is acceptable as either singular or plural. In this case, there is a distinct disadvantage as the extra word would take the clue on to a second line.

24dn: I am happy to stand corrected on this one. The phrase spear carrier indeed appears in Chambers 2011 with the definition “an actor in a minor non-speaking role”, so no indication of definition by example is required. It just did not occur to me that this was worth checking before I wrote my comment – it should have done. I am sure the phrase can be found hyphenated in some other dictionary, but to me that really does not matter.

Finally (for now anyway) a bit more about 6dn. To me this was an obscure answer, and I appreciated the very precise clue. The real answer was much more plausible than the only sensible alternative MAICE NOON given the checking letters. This was a case where a partial anagram was appropriate for precision, which is not always the case. It was also valuable to me that none of these checking letters was necessary to solve any of the relevant across clues. Sometimes two obscure answers cross. It is then desirable that at least one can be solved without the mutually checking letter.

Thanks to scchua, and thanks indeed for the comments, some of which centred around the issue of cryptic grammar. If you’ll allow me, I’ll say what I had in mind from that perspective when I wrote the clues you’ve scrutinized.

5ac: this cryptic construction wasn’t designed to advertise any particular sequence of events, but to describe an entity NARMENIA that ‘wants’ (does not have) a first letter.

12ac: to me surfaces are not real. There are no lesbians in this crossword clue, nor a two-word phrase. OTOH some letters, b, r, i, s, b, a, n, e, l, e, s, b, i, a, n, s, with an arbitrarily assigned gap somewhere between them, hold (because they attract a plural usage) back (seen in a backward direction) the required word. AFAIA all cryptic tenses agree.

15ac: TA=appreciated was my intention.

18ac: ‘supposedly’ in Collins, but not in Chambers. I went the simplest available way.

6dn: you can’t please all the people etc, but I quite liked this one! As to poorly-clued (which probably does need a hyphen), I’d like to know why Lynette thinks this is the case (impossible to respond without more information). I can’t see any grammatical boo-boos.

18dn: as someone mentioned, PHEASANT is singular or plural. If you do what the clue asks, ‘cut H from PHEASANT’ you get the required word – no last letters to remove!

24dn: ‘spear-carrier’ was according to Chambers a synonym when I set the puzzle. They may have had second thoughts.

Happy hunting,
Neo.

On with The G!

Rowly.