A very gentle stroll on a pleasant, sunny morning. I would have preferred more of a challenge but others will no doubt have enjoyed it, particularly due to the absence of anything contentious.
Across
1 Only one Labour leader for us — Mr Miliband’s ditched (6)
JILTED – I (one) L[abour] (Labour leader) replacing ‘us’ in JusT (only) ED (Mr Miliband)
5 Cast from violent western short of energy (6)
STREWN – anagram (violent) of WEST[e]RN (western short of energy)
8 Drop off small logs (7)
SLUMBER – S (small) LUMBER (logs)
9 Anticipating endless warbling, son retires for a breather (7)
NOSTRIL – SON reversed (retires) TRIL[l] (endless warbling)
11 Clandestine subject to Basie about backing (5,3,7)
UNDER THE COUNTER – UNDER THE (subject to) COUNT (Basie) RE (about) reversed (backing)
12 Posh hotel in eastern half of French resort (4)
RITZ – [biar]RITZ (eastern half of French resort)
13 Coarse flour is presumably not called for (10)
GROUNDLESS – cryptic indicator & def.
17 Island is in her itinerary, not entirely cut off (10)
DISINHERIT – hidden in (not entirely) ‘islanD IS IN HER ITinerary’
18 Step up or down without a movement (4)
STIR – ST[a]IR (step up or down without a)
20 Austen’s ultimate representation of rare bygone Bath? (10,5)
NORTHANGER ABBEY – [auste]N (Austen’s ultimate) anagram of (representation of) RARE BYGONE BATH &lit
23 Sample last of lager in bar (7)
EXCERPT – [lage]R (last of lager) in EXCEPT (bar)
24 OAP guarded by senior army man (7)
SOLDIER – OLDIE (OAP) in (guarded by) SR (senior)
25 Skirmish grips papers for 24 hours (6)
FRIDAY – FRAY (skirmish) around (grips) ID (papers)
26 See “hate” in another form (6)
LOATHE – LO (see) anagram (in another form) of HATE &lit
Down
2 Sister and boyfriend trapped in island swamps (9)
INUNDATES – NUN (sister) DATE (boyfriend) in (trapped in) IS (island)
3 Sleeveless jacket and dull ’eadgear used up (6)
TABARD – DRAB (dull) [h]AT (‘eadgear) reversed (used up)
4 Possibly winning outsider ineligible for the Scots Greys? (4,5)
DARK HORSE – def. & cryptic indicator
5 Boy in charge of sound … (5)
SONIC – SON (boy) IC (in charge)
6 … rings those limiting EastEnders in series (8)
RESOUNDS – E[astender]S (those limiting EastEnders) in ROUNDS (series)
7 Least good material editor’s disposed of (5)
WORST – WORST[ed] (material editor’s disposed of)
8 A new church first raised in power in formal measure (6,5)
SQUARE DANCE – SQUARED (raised in power) A N (new) CE (church)
10 Biblical petition (Parry’s older translation) (5,6)
LORD’S PRAYER – anagram of (translation) PARRY’S OLDER
14 Catholic film studios (9)
UNIVERSAL – double def.
15 Found limited joy in running heats (9)
ESTABLISH – BLIS[s] (limited joy) in anagram (running) of HEATS
16 Job that’s boring, boring and fixed at sea (8)
ANCHORED – CHORE (job that’s boring) in (boring) AND
19 Eg the Guardian reported a bloomer (6)
DAHLIA – homophone of (reported) ‘daily’ (eg the Guardian) A
21 Runner‘s livelier without one (5)
RACER – RAC[i]ER (livelier without one)
22 Mad mongrel decapitated in New York (5)
NUTTY – [m]UTT (mongrel decapitated) in NY (New York)
Thanks, Gaufrid.
Very gentle, as you say. Some good clues, nevertheless: I enjoyed the &littish 20a, although the solution did leap out; 17a is a well hidden answer. 1a is ingenious, and probably my favourite; it was one of my last entries as I couldn’t see the parsing for quite a while.
Thanks, Gaufrid. A very neat little puzzle from Nutmeg.
LOI was RITZ, with the pangram giving me a nudge.
Thanks Nutmeg & Gaufrid.
I didn’t notice the pangram. I particularly liked JILTED, GROUNDLESS, ESTABLISH and the mistressful NORTHANGER ABBEY.
Agreed, not too difficult, but once again an elegant puzzle from Nutmeg (in my view) with some very nice surfaces, as already mentioned. 1a and 17a were my favourites too.
Thanks Gaufrid and Nutmeg
Agree very much with Gervase @1. I also liked 23a and 16d.
A check revealed that the reference is to the Scots Greys’ grey horses, rather than to ‘light cavalry’.
In what sense is a square dance a “formal measure”? (8d)
A “measure” can be a dance, especially a slow or stately one, according to Chambers.
Thanks Nutmeg and Gaufrid
Agree that this was a neatly clued puzzle – picked up the pangram too late to be of use. Finished off with JILTED and TABARD with the former taking quite a while to understand why!
I got my geography wrong and used ST MORITZ as the resort – although I ended up in the right hotel.
This setter has set some tricky ninjas previously and it looked suspiciously like the heart of George down the centre, but could find no more.
Ninas of course – hate that autocorrect
Thanks Gaufrid. I enjoyed this and for once spotted the pangram which helped me get 1ac, although I failed to see the ingenious wordplay.
I also enjoyed the very well hidden 17ac. Put a tick beside 5 and 6dn for the use of the ellipses — ‘sonic’ could be playfully clued ‘re sounds’ 🙂
Thank you Nutmeg.
Well spotted, liz, @10! I’d thought the ellipsis worked reasonably well, anyway, but that’s very neat.
I agree with your other ticks – 1ac is a brilliant surface and the wordplay took a minute or two – and I’d add 20ac.
Thanks, Gaufrid, for the blog, and Nutmeg for an enjoyable puzzle.
Quiptic yesterday; cryptic today. Nutmeg will be off to the shops this weekend …
Fine puzzle, and for once I did spot the pangram (although only on completion). I liked GROUNDLESS and DARK HORSE in particular today.
Thanks to S&B.
Pangram spotters please explain.
Thanks to Gaufrid for the blog. You explained a couple of cases where I had the right answer but missed the parsing.
I missed the pangram so was doubly scratching my head on 1a 🙁
Thanks Nutmeg and Gaufrid
Pangrams invariably pass me by, so I failed on 1ac.
I agree with others on liking NORTHANGER ABBEY particularly.
I didn’t like RITZ (“eastern half of French resort” is clumsy, I thought) and TABARD (“dull ‘eadgear” is inelegant as well). Apart from these, very enjoyable – I got to it late, but didn’t find it all that easy.
MartinD @13
Solutions contain all the letters of the alphabet – neat trick to achieve.
One of the few times I’ve looked for a panoramic and found one … or rather used the absence of an x to help with 23.
How is it that Biarritz sprang to mind today while Pembroke did not yesterday?
Is Ed Milliband the only person setters can think of anymore whose name is Ed? That one has officially gotten old.
Martin@16 . . . eh?
Sorry, that should have read ‘muffin@16’, but still ‘eh?’ A pangram in this grid?
AdamH @ 20
I think that they are all there. What are you missing?
Thanks all
Very nice although ‘jilted’ parsing defeated me. I liked the hidden at 17ac.
Hi mrpenney @18
I don’t know for how many years ED was always ‘editor’ – and still often is.
We quite often these days get [either way] Ed = Balls [the Shadow Chancellor, if you’re outside the UK, as your use of ‘gotten’ implies. 😉 ].
But today it just had to be Miliband [the present Labour leader] to provide such a hilariously good surface.
Eileen @11 re the ellipses. I thought of you — remembered you always approve when there’s a reason for them to be there!
muffin@21
I’m not sure what I’m missing. Not being a regular on here, maybe you all have different terminology, but I understood a pangram to be a sentence using all letters of the alphabet. Don’t see one here . . .
AdamH
You are correct, of course, but in the sense that people having been using it here, it has been extended to mean “a crossword that uses all the letters of the alphabet in its solutions” (as this one does).
Hope that explains it. Did you pick up on the “nina” expression as well?
Thanks muffin. I have no idea whether I picked up on the nina, since I have no idea what you are talking(typing) about!
I finished the grid though, so perhaps I did inadvertently . . .
A
AdamH @27
This is from this site’s FAQ section:
What is a Nina?
A Nina is a message (or theme words etc) hidden in the grid, sometimes round the perimeter, sometimes along a diagonal or sometimes in the unchecked squares in a particular row or column (or more than one of each). Its name is derived from the American cartoonist Al Herschfeld’s habit of hiding his daughter’s name, Nina, in his cartoons.
Someone was looking for one is this crossword as well as the pangram, but there doesn’t seem to be one. Again, very clever if you are the fist to spot one (I never am!)
Amazing, isn’t it muffin? You spend years (30 or so in my case) trying to get better at these little b***ers, and then you discover all these extras that you’re supposed to be looking out for.
Thanks for your help; I think I’ll just retreat and cook dinner now and wait for tomorrow’s challenge.
A
Muffin @ #28:
It’s Hirschfeld, with an I. (Can the owners of the site fix that in the FAQ? Okay, normally I’m not that persnickety about spelling, but in a crossword context you kind of have to be.)
And Eileen, yup, I’m an American (who has learned, through years of doing British crosswords, a thing or two about British politicians).
Over here, Ed (when not an editor) is always Asner, come to think of it, so I really shouldn’t complain.
Muffin@26
Ah. So that is a little less exciting, then, really.
Thanks all the same!
Hi mrpenney @30
Thanks for pointing out the error, now corrected. I copied/pasted the Nina definition from another source and didn’t notice it.
After the last time we had a Nutmeg Cryptic I promised myself I would look out for future ninas or themes from her, so that’s what I did today. There aren’t any as far as I can tell, but looking for them made me miss the pangram.
As others have already noted this puzzle was on the easy side, but it was a pleasant solve nonetheless. I finished off in the SW with the ANCHORED/EXCERPT crossers, the latter of which almost always gives me more trouble than it should.
A pleasant enough solve but rather easy.
I made it a little harder for myself by entering RAAER for 21d which delayed the completion of the SW corner until I spotted it. (That typo thing is always a possibility when doing the crossword online!)
Although 20A is a neat &lit the definition makes it a write-in. Surely a waste of an &lit?
My final comment is on this pangram nonsense! As I have said before, if a setter fills in a grid to set a crossword there is a reasonable chance that they will use all the letters of the alphabet anyway. Whether they have decided to do this on purpose is basically irrelevant as we are never informed of this beforehand.
So checking for a pangram is insane in my opinion. It’s the equivalent of trying every letter of the alphabet in the few remaining squares. (In fact I suspect this method is more efficient as it works for non-pangrams as well.) Both show signs of desperation in my opinion anyway. End of rant
Thanks to Nutmeg and Gaufrid
Apparently 7+5 isn’t 12 anymore according to the last captcha
muffin @28 I always thought nina stood for not in normal answers!
AdamH@27
There’s a topical nina in today’s FT, if you’re not puzzled out!
Well said Brendan NTO !
A few quite nice clues in there.
Forehead slapping moment when I was caught out again by ‘Found’ = Establish, which has come up a few times recently…but I will spot it one of these days!
Like everyone else, I thought JILTED was a joy.
B(nto) @34
Given the known frequency of occurrence of J,Q,X and Z in English, I reckon the chance of an
‘accidental’ pangram in a crossword is about 1 in 3 million.
r@39
I would love to see your calculation for this 1 in 3 million figure.
I personally haven’t bothered to work this out in just the same way I don’t bother to look for them.
However perhaps I should as your figure seems way out! I did study Probs and Stats at university and the problem seems very similar to the probability of 2 peolpe in a room sharing the same birthday. It is surprisingly low and counter intuitive. (As I’m sure you know at 25 people it’s already above 50% chance and by 50 people it’s 97%.)
I’m no authority on this, but I think you’ll find that while a lot of puzzles contain all letters except JQXZ, very few would contain those 4 as well unless the setter has striven to include them. One or two of the 4 maybe, especially X or Z, but not all 4. On my part, I might make a puzzle a pangram as a mini challenge to myself, as well as a mini help to any solver who might spot it and be struggling over the last few answers.
Thank you to all who have taken the trouble to comment on the current puzzle.
Brendan@40 Rhotician@39
I’ll have a go at guessing the probability of an accidental pangram:
According to this site about 0.2% of words in the concise oxford dictionary contain Q or J and about 0.3% contain Z or X.
So if you were to pick 30 words at random you’d have a 6% probability that they’d contain at least one Q, and 9% that they’d contain at least one Z.
Assuming these are approximately independent then the probability of the 30 random words containing at least one Q, J, Z and X would be about 1 in 40,000.
Obviously getting all 26 letters would be less likely but I’m not sure it would reach one in a million.
Well I’ve just done a quick calc and I get the following using English letter frequencies form Wiki.
I assumed that on average there are 160 empty spaces in a crossword.
It’s a bit lower than I expected but the chance of an “accidental” pangram is about 3 in 10,000. ( 0.000300021186131477 in fact)
So the chance of no accidental pangram goes below 50% after about 2310 consecutive puzzles.
Todays puzzle is 26,175 so I bet we’ve had a good few “accidents” to date 😉
In fact bizarrely the chance of not having the accident to date is now also 3 in 10,000 ( 0.000388105703385 to be precise)
Of course I could be talking a load of ****
I’ve been enjoying this statistical sideshow – I think we need a data set based on the words actually used in a large sample of crosswords, since the mechanics of filling a grid tend to mean that some words are often the only ones that fit, so they are chosen more often than they would be in literature. Then we’d have to exclude words deliberately chosen to complete pangrams, which distort the model.
The number of pangram crosswords is observably higher than 3 in 10000 so as Nutmeg @41 suggests [thanks for that], it is much more likely to be deliberate than accidental, even without allowing for Araubeticals.
I’d love to see a crossword that takes its inspiration from Georges
Perec’s “La disparation” (“A void”) and contains no letter E – would anybody notice that if it happened? Whereas a tribute to Schoenberg and his twelve tone system (i.e. using all letters with the same frequency) is probably impossible.
BH@45 – Araucaria made a “univocalic” crossword where the only vowel used was A.
B(nto)
Neglecting insignificant factors I did my approximation by multiplying the Wiki frequencies for J,Q,X and Z and dividing by the number of ways of choosing 4 words from 30.
A while ago Mitz thought that ICHOR had appeared in a Brummie puzzle as a thematic nina. But he had grossly overestimated the chances of it being a random occurrence. Brummie confirmed that, as others thought, it was an accident.
In the light of Nutmeg’s response @41 I hope you can revise your opinion that “checking for a pangram is insane”. I’m glad she took the trouble to construct a pangram for me to look for. To call it icing on the cake would be to put the cart before the horse but the finished product was very pleasant.
Brendan’s 23948 has only the vowel I. His 23788 has STAINER, RETSINA, NASTIER and RETAINS forming a central cross.
The rest of the puzzle uses only these seven letters. These appeared in 2006. Which gives me pause for thought.
Alan R @45, rhotician @47 – thanks – I didn’t remember any of those but it’s nice to know it’s been done.
Thanks belatedly to the boss, just couldn’t see anchored. Grr. Re the pangram, well certainly a few years ago they were everywhere but these days with the crossword compiler software allowing anyone to create one they appear less often. Mind you i blogged a Tees triple pangram which was one hell of a feat with no really obscure words.
Rhotician. No I have not revised my opinion that looking for a pangram is “insane”. Whether the pangram is accidental or “secretly on purpose” it still doesn’t help looking for it. It’s more efficient to use normal methods rather than the desperate tactic of seeing if “J, Q, Z or X” might fit somewhere!!!
What does appear to be insane is your calculation for the probability of an accidental pangram! 😉
Beery Hiker. If in fact the chance of a pangram is 3 in 10,000 then unfortunately observable values on a sample off approx 30,000 are totally meaningless!
Andy R. Your conclusions about words with Q and with Z are very creative but bizarre 🙂
Brendan, I can’t comment on your calculation because you don’t properly describe it. In particular I don’t see the significance of the number of empty spaces let alone what part 160 played. It’s interesting that Alan R @42 comes up with a probability an order of magnitude less than yours, based on the frequency of (Q or J)&(Z or X) when he should be using Q&J&Z&X.
But I’m less concerned with your lack of logic than the intemperance of your language. To describe looking for a pangram as “insane” is insulting to those of us who do. What it implies about constructing a pangram is very insulting to the setter.
Brendan @50
I can’t let that pass without comment. I am not accepting the 3 in 10000 figure, but I quoted your figure as the lowest one suggested so far. I can accept the 160 is close to the typical number of letters in a 15×15 crossword.
Now in a typical year we get 312 Guardian crosswords, of which at least 5 (probably more but I’m not a spotter) are pangrams, which is about 1.6%, and this seems to happen every year. This difference is too high to explain by sampling noise, and I stand by my assertion that most (not necessarily all) pangrams are deliberate.
I was curious enough to write a little program yesterday to break a text file (ignoring non-alphabetic characters) into 160 character chunks, counting the incidence of each letter in each chunk, and I used the text on this page to test it. It did find two “pangrams” out of 87 chunks, but since both of these included sentences discussing J Q X and Z they can’t be regarded as accidental!
A more valid test was the next I tried, “the longest article on Wikipedia” on South African Labour law – this had 1698 chunks of which none were pangrams, and only one used 25 different letters. A typical chunk uses between 20 and 22 different letters.
Your efforts serve to emphasise how far out Brendan’s figure is and how flawed is his reasoning. Had you found a pangram of 160 characters you would not have been able to fit it into a crossword. Just as Nutmeg’s pangram cannot be written out as a meaningful piece
…of text.
Rhotician – bizarrely I used the laws of probability to calculate my figure!
The 160 is an estimate of the average number of empty squares to be filled in in a crossword. Based on the definition of the occurrence of letters in the Wikipedia figures I can assume that the acts of filling these in these are mutually exclusive events.
Calculate the probability at least one of each letter occuring during these 160 events and use this to calculate the chance of a pangram.
Easy if you understand probability.
And actually Beery Hiker does nothing to “disprove” my figure.
And I repeat that I think anyone who looks for a pangram is insane. I don’t consider that intemperate.
The setter is not just filling 160 empty spaces with letters she’s filling a crossword grid with words.
I don’t know what you mean by events, let alone mutually exclusive ones.
And I repeat that your use of the word “insane” is insulting.
And I did not use the word “disprove”.
I think this debate is getting a bit silly. We aren’t really dealing with a pure mathematical calculation and the actual usage of letters with very low incidence is largely a matter of authorial style (for example I would expect Americans (and crossword setters) to use more Zs than typical British literature). My reason for trying my test is that counting occurrences in a large random text file gives us a better feel for the baseline probabilities than the analysis of words in the OED (which will not reflect the preponderance of short simple words in normal communication). Setters also like to use proper nouns when faced with a tricky set of crossers.
For anyone still reading this, the percentage for each letter in the last document I analysed is E 13.261,T 9.752,O 8.339,I 7.833,A 7.332,N 7.050,S 6.614,R 6.574,H 4.121,L 4.007,C 3.552,D 3.252,M 3.087,P 2.633,U 2.546,F 2.334,Y 1.924,G 1.471,B 1.355,W 1.206,V 0.875,K 0.432,X 0.165,Q 0.135,J 0.128,Z 0.008 (and yes I know that’s too many significant figures but I needed Z to show more than a 0). I remember Hofstaedter quoting ETAOIN SHRDLU as the most common letters and this isn’t too far out.
Anyway thanks to Nutmeg for starting all of this, and for pointing out that this pangram was deliberate.
In the context of the frequencies we are using i.e. of letters in WORDS the setter IS filling in 160 blamk spaces.
And if you don’t know what a mutually exclusive event is why, for heavens sake, are you arguing about probability? !!!!!!!!