Guardian 26,062 by Brummie

29 comments on “Guardian 26,062 by Brummie”

1. Thanks manehi. I liked most of this. Oddly, I got the quote at 11,8 long before the artist – and even then decided that ‘lynx’ was what got taken for a stroll. Spent the longest time on 1a, thinking it might be ‘peplum’ – even when the right answer hit, I couldn’t see why the need for US. Failed on TINSEL, opting for ‘tender.’ Otherwise fine, fun, no worries.

2. Thanks for the helpful blog.

   23d I thought referred to internet “poke” facility (can have a sexual connotation)
   Still don’t understand 26a – sell = bought? Obviously me being dim.

   Entertaining puzzle I thought, although some of the surfaces were a bit too clunky for my taste.

3. I thought that this one was going to defeat me, but I eventually prevailed without aids.
   Like Andy @2 I am not convinced by 26a, but, no doubt, someone will cite a dictionary definition to justify it.
   On the whole a very enjoyable puzzle.

4. 26a I think this is “sell”=”be bought” as in, the hot cakes are selling/are being bought.

5. Thanks Brummie and manehi; I enjoyed this one. Googling, I was taken aback to find how easy it is to take a lion for a walk!

6. re 26a: the idea is that if things sell at some price then they can be bought at that price.
   Close enough? I don’t much like it.

7. manehi I’ll buy that. (I was interrupted mid-post so we crossed.)

8. Thanks manehi and Brummie

   A clever and enjoyable puzzle. My first thought was Oh Dear as a first scan seemed to yiled nothing much, but it steadily yielded up its answers in a satisfying way.

   I particularly liked 1a, 11,8, 15a, 21a and 7d.

   I agree with manehi’s interpretation of ‘tinsel’. This common use of ‘sell’ and ‘selling’ seems to be a rare example of the so-called ‘passival’ which was much more widespread in the past, e.g. Jane Austin writes of the ‘parcels bringing down’ rather than ‘being brought down’. It seems to have been retained in some regional forms of English – e.g. it was common to be asked in a Manchester shop ‘do you want it wrapping up?’ as opposed to the more standard ‘wrapped up’.

9. Thanks, manehi

   Fun puzzle, which I sailed through for once. I liked the KLEE linkages but my favourite clue was 10a.

   Like others, I got held up by 26a, finally settling, rather dubiously, for TINSEL. I agree with manehi about the parsing. However, I disagree with tupu about the grammatical classification of the usage. The ‘passival’ is the archaic (dialectal?) usage of ‘middle voice’: like Jane Austen’s ‘parcels bringing down’, rendered in modern usage as ‘parcels being brought down’. Instead, it is an example of ergative usage: the direct object of a transitive verb becomes its subject when the verb is used intransitively. This happens a lot in English: ‘he is cooking lunch’ v ‘lunch is cooking’ (in French, on the other hand, ‘cuire’ is always intransitive and a causative construction: ‘faire cuire’ (‘make to cook’) has to be used to make the verb transitive). Expressions like ‘Celebrity magazines are known to sell in great numbers’ (= ‘…to be bought in great numbers’) are perfectly current.

10. Thanks to manehi for the blog. You explained several where I had the right answer without understanding why.

    I also had trouble over SEL[L] = buy but eventually decided that “be bought” is almost near enough.

    I had heard of PAUL KLEE but had never heard his description of drawing.

11. Hi Gervase

    Thanks. I am a bit puzzled by your comment as it stands since it not immediately clear to me what each part of it refers to and how they relate to each other. As far as I can see we are in fact not all that far apart.

    I was careful to us the word ‘seems’ because the whole issue of the ‘passival’ in English (and also Italian where I came across it recently) seems both obscure and a bit controversial). Its exact relation to idea of a ‘middle’ voice is also not wholly clear (at least to me)and I am not sure that the term ‘ergative’ adds to the discussion rather than muddies the waters.

    I suspect that the contrast you seem to draw between your ‘happens a lot in English’ and my ‘rare example’ is not as great as you suggest. The usages you quote are standard but they seem only to happen with a limited number of verbs as compared with the past. As I note they seem more widespread in some regional variations of the language.

12. Rather frustrating – too much general knowledge required for my liking. 🙁

    Thanks manehi; I think it is very difficult to arrive at the long answer from the clue and without knowledge of the saying. Parsing, of course, makes it look fairly obvious. Regarding SELL=BE BOUGHT, I note the two are given as synonyms in Collins.

    I liked CASH FLOW – it seems that in across clues ‘on’ can be read as first or second words.

13. Thanks all
    Very enjoyable and enough to exercise my brain especially the NW (like manehi)
    Although familiar with Paul Klee I did not now the ‘clay’ pronounciation and hence struggled to find the homophone.
    I did waste a lot of time thinking that17ac would be ???biopic!

14. tupu @11: You’re right that only certain types of verbs can be used ‘ergatively’ in English (though ‘sell’ is one of them). But ‘passival’ is generally used to refer to a particular construction, formerly general but now obsolete in standard usage, which doesn’t relate to the syntax of 26a.

15. Thanks Brummie and manehi
    Late to this one today. I too found almost nothing on first pass (INSPECT only), but gradually made progress. I had TENDER instead of TINSEL, and guessed (incorrectly) DIPPED instead of LIMPID.

16. Hi Gervase

    Thanks once more. 🙂 I am not sure if I am in a hole and should stop digging, and the discussion may in any case not interest others. However it looks from the OED that Sweet 1892 is the main source of a more precise definition of passival than an earlier one simply referring to the ‘passive’ voice.

    1892 H. Sweet New Eng. Gram. I. 90 The book sells well, meat will not keep in hot weather… We call sells and keep in such constructions passival verbs.

    This seems broader than your own and Wiki’s restriction to ‘progressive’ forms involving ‘is/are …ing’ and more in keeping with my own tentative use. There seems to be some room for argument thoughI begin to wonder how many ways one could define the term on the top of a postage stamp!

17. A long time starting, SW corner then came quite quickly, and had a stab at PAUL KLEE but couldn’t remember all of the quote.

    But the fun bit was that this meant I could finish off the puzzle, quite quickly, on the tubr into town. I was hoping the guy sitting next to me was watching in awe but alas it seems he wasn’t.

    Thanks manehi, and to Brummie for a good puzzle. Couldn’t parse POSSUM but now I know.

18. With Paul Klee one can’t have it both ways. Klee is indeed pronounced “clay”, but Paul is pronounced “Powl” rather than the Anglicized “Paul”.

19. Thanks Manehi, thanks Brummie and thanks tupu and gervase for the grammar discussion. I think you are talking about very similar things but are using different terminology. For me, “This book sells well” is close enough to “This book is bought by many” to make the clue valid. However, the homophone for Paul Klee does not really work from my (German) perspective. gwep @ 18 is right about “Powl”, but wrong about “Clay”. The vowel is what the phonetic alphabet would transcribe as “e:” not the “ei” (sorry, the “I” shouldn’t have a dot) of “clay”. That said, I’m perfectly happy with you Brits pronouncing his name as you see fit – after some hard listening I’ll find out who you mean 🙂 actually, he was my first one in!

20. I must be misreading the clue, but it does rather look like 24a is saying that people with poor health are bad people. Really? I know several here are not in the best of health, are those people bad?

21. Derek@20 – one of the definitions of “bad” is “ill”, e.g. “he was taken bad”, so I don’t have a problem with the clue.

    I thoroughly enjoyed this puzzle and I had enough of the right sort of GK required in some of the clues for it not to have been an issue, PIZZICATO being the prime example.

    I knew of Paul Klee but only worked out the required pronunciation from the wordplay. I didn’t know the quote but it was gettable from the clue once all the checkers were in place.

    TINSEL was my LOI after I had flirted with “tender” but decided against it.

22. Thanks for telling me what I already know Andy, but the phraseology is ambiguous. Most people I know would say someone was a bit badly, not that they were bad. Prime meanings rule unless otherwise indicated.

23. An enjoyable crossword which though at first look like it was going to be a stinker soon capitulated.

    Once I got the Paul Klee I soon got the TAKING FOR A WALK although I wasn’t aware I knew the quote. (A close friend at university was a massive fan of Klee so I assume he must have mentioned it. He was a tremendously talented artist himself but was studying the scarier areas of Modern Physics.)

    Plain sailing after this. TINSEL went straight in as I had all 3 crossers but I still think it’s not right!

    All this discussion of passival and ergative seems to miss the point in my opinion. “Be bought” can never be the same as “sell” ergatively or “passivally!!!”. This is not a question of an archaic tense or special type of verb. Using buy or sell introduces a totally different entity as subject. (Buyer or seller). So swapping the subject and object is meaningless as the the seller doesn”t sell the buyer. Neither does the buyer buy the seller.

    Hope that explains things! 😉

    Anyway thanks to manehi and Brunnie

24. Re 26a – “Do you think this will sell?” means “Do you think this will be bought?” Nice lateral touch from Brummie, I thought.

25. Andreas61@19. Surely Klee is pronounced as in the German Schnee (snow) – pronounced “schnay.

26. Well, it’s ‘can’ = TIN plus ‘be bought’ = SELL, is it not, bar the final letter, and where’s the problem with those directly synonymous elements. A more valid argument could consider the positioning of the subtraction indicator, since TISELL is as fairly got as TINSEL, or the sense of the surface.

27. Just why is “sell” “directly synonymous” with “be bought”?

    Just as “give” is directly synonymous with “be taken”?

    And “charge” is directly synonymous with “be paid”?

    They are obviously not synonymous. They describe the same interaction but from a very different perspective.

28. Brendan (NTO) @27

    “Sell” in the relevant sense is synonymous with “be bought”. By that I mean that it is logically inescapable that something “sells” (intransitively) if and only if it is bought. (Sell has other meanings and usages too, which may be distracting people). “My house sold within a month of putting it on the market” always means that it was bought within a month of putting it on the market. Conversely the fact that it “was bought” always means it “sold”. There is nothing eccentric about this usage; surely no native (British) English speaker could misunderstand it.

    Your other pairs of examples are not, as far as I can see, synonyms. They are not equivalent to the example in the clue. Hence sell=be bought is confirmed by the dictionary (see 12 above), but as far as I know your other examples are not.

29. Derek @22: I actually share your view about 24a. Brummie could have gone with “had by people in bad shape” or some such variation. As for describing someone as “a bit badly,” it seems that adjectival usage might be a regional thing:

    postpositive (Northern England, dialect) ill; poorly [Collins]

    (Not a judgment, just an observation, as I’d only ever encountered badly as an adverb.)

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