Guardian 23912/Araucaria

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Solving time: 1h+

Ah, Araucaria. The most Ximenean of the crowd in terms of wordplay but absolutely a horror when it comes to meaningful surfaces.

Today’s theme is putting out fires. As per usual, there are new words and phrases to learn and lookup (not in that order!): 9A, 24A (spelling), 21D, 22A…

Across

1 CUS+TOM+ER – charade with three familiar cryptic idioms: abbrev for copper (the metal not the policeman or money), tomcat and the current queen. The definition is a bit indirect since there are lots of other things in the market.
9 AN(ALEC)TS – Alec is a boy’s name inside our hard-working crossword workers. A classic case of wordplay being solvable given the crossing letters leading to learning a new word meaning a collection of phrases.
10 GOS+SIP – apparently a charade of GOS (from goshawk: “hawk a little” thanks to r.pc.) + SIP (drink). And it’s what many of us do to get through the day. GOS isn’t in any dictionary that I consulted (don’t have Chambers): interestingly GOSS means “to spit” which is a synonym of a meaning of “hawk”, but this would create overlap in the wordplay.
12 P(RE+EMIN)ENCE – Tracy Emin has cropped up elsewhere in a recent puzzle – a sign of the times when Tracy refers to her and not Spencer nor Dick. Again not my favorite surface reading.
19 K+R+ON+A – charade starting with the classic crossword abbrevs for kings. Not so sure what “standard” adds to the clue: other than KRONA is a standard coin in Sweden.
27 DRY RISER – anag(“derry is r”): need to solve 4D and 8D beforehand (related to putting out fires). Another case of the wordplay being tractable and resulting in a new phrase (for me). A DRY RISER is a kind of fire extinguishing installation in tall buildings.

Down

4 EX+TIN+GU(I)SHER – Good example of clean wordplay and contrived surface reading. But helped establish the theme. Note that the definition anthropomorphizes the extinguisher: “I put out”.
7, 8 HO(SE PI)PE – theme related: wordplay is clean and refers to the “fire alarm” in 16D. HOPE contains anag(“pies”).
11 ENGINE DRIVER – theme-related cryptic definition.
14 BREAKS+PEAR – Now this was esoteric – turns out that Nicholas Breakspear was the only English pope as Adrian IV in the 12th century. Not sure about the Hadrian spelling – but then again being pedantic about spelling wasn’t a mediaeval forte: perhaps the setter felt he needed to mislead in the direction of the emperor to make it even harder.
16 FI(RE AL+A)RM – The key to the theme (I needed to solve this first to get going). Yet another instance of clean wordplay with a rough surface.
21, 18 CIDER WITH ROSIE – Never read nor heard of it. Oh well. Wordplay is OK and I struggled to the answer through inspired guesswork and finally checking here. . Definition is “Lee’s volume”, “drink” is cider and the tea is “rosie”: cockney rhyming slang derived from “Gypsy Rosie Lee” (thanks to PeterB for edifying me).

4 comments on “Guardian 23912/Araucaria”

  1. I suspect some would dispute the bit about Ximenean wordplay – A is regarded as the arch-non-Ximenean setter by many, though this is rather a caricature.

    BTW, new format and link-list organisation looks nice to me, though I quite liked the pic of the biro as a thing associated with xwd-solving.

  2. I suppose it’s a bit like the curate’s egg — you’re either Xean or you’re not.

    My thought is that A is very precise about the wordplay part of his clues (a la X) but completely unfair when it comes to the surface.

  3. Unfairness in puzzles usually results when setters try to force a ‘nicer’ surface reading without consideration for the grammatical structure at the cryptic level.

    In Araucaria and other so-called Araucarians such as Enigmatist (RIP) or Shed, you’re far more likely to see a strained or difficult – as opposed to unfair – surface reading accommodating the clue workings.

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