Guardian 26,348 / Brummie

52 comments on “Guardian 26,348 / Brummie”

1. Thanks Brummie and Eileen
   I took an embarrassingly long time to solve the best clue (LLOYDS – is it pronounced “thloyds” in Wales?); otherwise very straightforward.

2. I also found this a bit easy. Note sure it counts as a theme but there’s a lot of doubling up going on – quite a few answers with double letters (do-or-die, nutty, nuff-said etc) or doubled groups of letters (two-twos, tsetse).

3. Yes, I though the theme was double letters as hinted at by 1ac

4. I didn’t fully understand TWO TWOS, but on re-reading Wayne’s comment I think he is surely right: there are two types of twos, double letters and doubled groups of letters.

5. 19 is a hidden word clue. (stricT SET SEquence)

6. Thanks Eileen. No worries here, except for OB in 2D which you have explained. Got 1A and1D straight off, and sailed on from there, slowing down a little in the bottom right. This is the third month running we’ve had TSETSE, all very differently clued.

7. Thanks, Steve B – doh!

8. Thanks Eileen,the fly in 19d is in stricT SET SEquence, rather than an anagram.

9. @dave 4 tha needs ta cum from Yorkshire to understand 1a where owt is ought and can mean zero or nought in counting as well as anything. Ought, one, two, three etc. or owt for nowt .

10. Thanks, Eileen.

    I found this fairly straightforward for Brummie – the anagrams and a sprinkling of simple clues helped to open up the grid. I took the theme to be double letters and reduplications.

    Some nice constructions, but some bizarre surfaces! Good ‘hidden’ clue for TSETSE – a word that crops up a lot in these puzzles. I share the misgivings about ‘owt’ = ‘nought’ in 1a and ‘lain’ in 13d, for precisely the reasons that Eileen has adduced.

    I liked the misleading ‘fairy transport’ in 5a and the constructions and surfaces of RUBBER STAMP and LLOYDS.

11. I’m with almw3 @9 re OWT and I’m from the soft south. Been exposed to too much Yorkshire speak over the years.

    Yup, I thought this was going to be tricky until I got going with BARE FISTS, quite early on. Everything moved pretty smoothly thereafter. A few clunky surfaces yes – the likes of 14a and 3d feel contrived rather than effortless – but I enjoyed others eg TASMAN and LLOYDS. I share your doubts Eileen about LAIN = “located” in CHAPLAINCY. Didn’t know BRASSARD but fairly clued.

12. Hi almw3 and Trailman

    I only know ‘owt for nowt’ as in the expression [pardon my Yorkshire – I don’t come from there but it’s my spiritual home], ‘ if thee ever does owt for nowt, do it for thissen’.

    Owt = nothing doesn’t appear here:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/northyorkshire/voices2005/glossary/glossary.shtml

13. Hi Eileen, I might have to defer to you on this one. owt = aught or anything in Wiktionary and Collins etc. Maybe I’m misconstruing ‘owt for nowt’.

14. Thanks Brummie and Eileen. Strictly speaking, isn’t the “CID” in 24/12 “GOLD DISC” reversed rather than “upstanding”?

15. Thanks Brummie; as Eileen said it wasn’t as tricky as it first seemed.

    Thanks Eileen for your Queen Mab which of course I didn’t know. Surely in 24,12 upstanding should be a reversal in a down clue, but here it is in an across one??

    Yorkshire dialect is a bit beyond me but the ‘owt for nowt’ in almw3@9 surely translates as ‘anything for nothing’ as Eileen points out above.

    I liked Dolly’s bust. 😉

16. Hi Shirl, we crossed; great minds think alike. 🙂 My suggestion is that this was a down clue that was later changed.

17. @eileen. You need to come from South Yorkshire – they’re a bit posh in the North! : )

18. @robi did you read the rest of my post? It can mean zero or nought, as well as the more usual anything!

19. Hi Shirl and Robi

    I did note that when solving but forgot to mention it when writing the blog – by then I was thinking of it as a down clue, as it began at 24dn.

    Robi – Mercutio in ‘Romeo and Juliet’:

    “O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
    She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
    In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
    On the fore-finger of an alderman,
    Drawn with a team of little atomies
    Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
    Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders’ legs,
    The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
    The traces of the smallest spider’s web,
    The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,
    Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,
    Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
    Not so big as a round little worm
    Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;
    Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
    Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
    Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.”

    An empty hazel-nut is a bit more picturesque than a MINICAB as fairy transport. 😉

    Hi again almw3

    I wasn’t arguing – only saying I hadn’t come across that use of ‘owt for nowt’. [But I am much more familiar with the Dales – although my daughter lives in Hebden Bridge.]

20. @eileen I didn’t for one minute take it that you were arguing, and really hope you didn’t think I did! But dialect is a very strange beast isn’t it? That’s what makes it so interesting. Language and it’s origins and evolution is one of my interests. Not that I’m an expert or anything, but I just find it fascinating. For instance the fact that we have cows, sheep and pigs, but we call their meat beef (boeuf), mutton (mouton) and pork (porc) because it was mainly the Norman overlords that got to eat it.

21. @robi. I must apologise. I have just reread my post and realise that I didn’t express it very well. What I was saying is that owt can mean zero in counting or anything as in owt for nowt.

22. I’m with you all the way, almw3. There was nothing my husband and I liked more than sitting in a pub listening to the [North] Yorkshire chat.

    As I said in the blog, ‘ought’ seems to be one of those words [like cleave] that can have opposite meanings. I just didn’t know that the same applied to ‘owt’.

23. The dictionaries all suggest that the usage of the word ‘ought/aught’ for ‘naught/naught’ only applies to the noun meaning ‘digit zero’ rather than the pronoun ‘nothing’. The SOED posits that ‘a nought’ became reinterpreted as ‘an ought’, in the same way that ‘a napron’ became ‘an apron’ (‘adder’ from ‘nadder’ cf Latin ‘natrix’ and ‘orange’ via French from the Spanish ‘naranja’ are other examples of this).

    Is the digit zero ever referred to in Yorks dialect as ‘a nowt’ (or ‘an owt’)? I’ve certainly never come across this usage.

24. I thought this puzzle was great, although I couldn’t get AYATOLLAH. I like Brummie’s surfaces. Thanks to him and Eileen.

25. I agree that this was not the most difficult Brummie, but I found it fairly challenging in places, especially my last in ANTIRRHINUM – not being familiar with the answer made the anagram very difficult even after getting the last crosser from TESSELLAE. OBLIGATO with a single B was new to me, but had to be right.

    Thanks to Eileen and Brummie

26. Thanks Eileen and Brummie

    A good puzzle from Brummie who can sometimes be pretty daunting. I was a bit more worried (for a time) about ‘two twos’ taking a singular verb, but I suppose it is acceptable as a noun phrase like ‘two times two’. ‘Two twos equals four’ sounds oddly better than ‘two twos is four’.

    In the end I ticked this clue along with 3d, 7d and 20d.

27. Thanks Eileen and Brummie. I found this a bit like the curate’s egg but got there in the end. I liked dolly’s bust too muffin but the ll sound in Welsh is not a soft sound put your tongue
    on roof of your mouth and blow. Robi and Muffin did you mean the delightful Miss Parton’s bust or the clue? Sorry couldn’t resist.

28. I found this rather unsatisfying despite it being rather easier than most BRUMMIE puzzles.TESSELLAE was new to me but had to be right given the most transparent clue that BRUMMIE has contrived-and I didn’t like the spelling of OBBLIGATO. Still not a bad puzzle.

29. As blogger says, clunky and somewhat wordy surfaces in places, but also some nuggets, ‘ Lloyds, for example’ . Makes me realise how lucky we are to have such a variety of setters, however, with such a range of styles and mannerisms. Peace and love to all.

30. 1ac is a shambles.

    Ten doubled letters, “twos”, while not quite Puck’s recent 15, is clearly thematic, but TSETSE, together with 1ac itself, hardly justifies the suggestion that there are two such themes.

    An extract from the times tables we used to chant is an odd phrase for a crossword. It is not defined/described in any dictionary. I don’t like BARE FISTS for the same reason.

    Gervase @23 is right. ‘nought’ for OWT is just wrong. My mother was from Yorkshire, so I have long and close acquaintance with many speakers of the dialect.

    The surface, like some others, is not great either.

31. almw3@9 I did understand the clue and its solution. I agree with Eileen’s (and others’) doubts. I am from the right side of the Pennines, and there “owt” was “anything” in my youth, and never 0. What I was trying to say was I hadn’t quite grasped the meaning of the theme as expressed by TWO TWOS.

    “Ought, one, two, three etc. or owt for nowt”. Shouldn’t this be “ought, yain, tain, tethera…”?

32. You shouldn’t have said that, Dave Ellison! – you sent me scurrying back to this blog of mine http://www.fifteensquared.net/2013/03/08/guardian-prize-25885-puck/ [1 across]

    Unfortunately, the link is no longer available – but there are lots more!

33. rhotician@30 is it really the case that no crossword solution can contain a word combination that does not appear in a dictionary? Bare-handed and bare-knuckle both appear in my Oxford dictionary. Would bare boards, bare poles (or masts)or even bare necessities be forbidden in your system?

34. I thought this puzzle was a good challenge. I never take much notice of surface readings so any clunkiness passed me by. I either didn’t know or had forgotten BRASSARD, and it took a while before I remembered “wrasse”. I was helped with ANTIRRHINUM by the fact that Pyrrhic came up in another puzzle so the “rrh” in the middle of the answer didn’t look strange. I was grateful for the clear wordplay for SIBYL because it is one of those words that I have a habit of misspelling no matter how many times I see it. LLOYDS was my LOI.

35. harhop@33, no doubt Brummie was referring to the John Ford film 😉

36. Just beat me to it there Robi. I was about to direct Harhop to the useful Onelook dictionary search facility.

37. LLOYDS – wonderful ( like DP’ s bust)!!

38. ought2 /öt/
    noun a variant of aught; also a non-standard corruption of naught. Chambers on line

    Owt – a mid 19th century variant of aught

    Naught – a variant spelling of nought

39. Hi again almw3

    In my original blog I said:
    “OWT is dialect for ‘aught’, which has the variant ‘ought’, which, confusingly, is ‘also a non-standard corruption of naught’ [Chambers].”

    Are we going around in circles here? Can we agree that this discussion is, as they say, something or nothing? 😉

40. Up to a point, Lord Copper.

    nought means nothing (though not in the sense of being meaningless). ought can mean nothing or anything.
    owt only ever means anything. nowt means nothing. In the clue ‘nought’ for OWT is wrong.

    As my grandfather told me “There’s nowt as queer as folk. Except me and thee. And thee’s a bit odd.”

41. Hi rhotician

    “As my grandfather told me “There’s nowt as queer as folk. Except me and thee. And thee’s a bit odd.””

    That’s one of my favourites – thank you!

    This is one of those occasions when it would be great if the setter would drop in – but he’s a Brummie! 😉

42. Pleasant enough puzzle but very easy for Brummie. (Almost a write in in fact!)

    1A was obviously TWO TWOS but I did pause briefly to wonder at the use of OWT. I am from Lancashire but lived in Yorkshire for several years and still can’t see this use of OWT?

    I think the easy grid meant that once a few clues were written in the crossers gave too much away.

    Thanks to Eileen and Brummie

43. Nowt more to be said really apart from the fact we missed the double letters and the definition for 26ac pops up in Another Place today at 24ac!

    Thanks Eileen and Brummie – both of you with double letters!

44. Dear Brummie, brevity – in crossword clues at least – is the soul of wit. And “clunky” isn’t the word. I’d say prolix.

45. Thanks all
    It was rather easy except that a remarkably long delay in solving the anagram for Tasman meant that the NW took as long as all other points combined!

46. Brendan @42 – I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone complaining that a grid made things too easy before. I think how easy it was depends on whether you were familiar with ANTIRRHINUM and TESSELLAE, neither of which I’ve ever heard in everyday speech, though tessellation is a familiar concept.

    On the ‘owt’ debate – I wrote the answer in without questioning in at the time but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use either owt or aught to mean nothing, but I’m from a Midland county adjacent to Yorkshire so I wouldn’t know.

47. 9a SPLIT in southern Europe. I think not! Unless London is also…

    1a OWT = nothing? Very disappointing.

48. Les @47 – that is an interesting viewpoint. I’ve just looked up a few latitudes on Wikipedia: Murmansk 68, Helsinki 60, London 51, Split 43, Athens 37. So I can see that you could argue that London may be south of a notional halfway line (in the same sense as Haltwhistle being the centre of the UK, i.e. not using the more difficult centre of mass calculations), but I don’t think many would argue with putting Split in the South.

49. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_midpoint_of_Europe – counting the Arctic islands strengthens the case for London being in the South, but weakens the case for Split being anywhere else!

50. Gosh! I’ve been enjoying fifteensquared for nearly a year now (doing the G crossword for over forty!) and this is the first time I haven’t agreed with Eileen wholeheartedly! OK – one or two clues’ surfaces weren’t perfect. But some were very good (18a,22a,1d,7d,8d) and 17d particularly nice.
    I had 1ac as my FOI; as I had no concerns over its parsing, I thought it a super clue.
    Had I been as perspicacious as Eileen, and spotted the “quibble” at 1ac, and had then not noticed that TSETSE was a cleverly hidden run (which I thoroughly enjoyed at the time), I may well have viewed the puzzle less agreeably. As it was, I thought it rather good. My only complaint was that it lasted but a few minutes – entirely the fault of my own competence and experience. And it is a Tuesday, so pitched about right I thought.
    All in all, a lovely puzzle. Many thanks, Brummie.
    And thanks to Eileen (who, I trust, will understand that my genuine respect for her is undimmed!

51. I found this quite difficult, and failed to solve 15d, 1d and 20d. New words for me were ANTIRRHINUM, OWT, BRASSARD and wrasse (fish). I solved but could not parse 3d.

    My favourites were 25a and 26a.

    Thanks Brummie and Eileen.

52. Thanks Brummie and Eileen

    Agree that started off with normal trepidation … but it yielded readily enough.

    Completely missed the doubles theme …

    It’s interesting the amount of discussion a puzzle can bring on … it’s good !!!

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