Guardian 26,385 / Tramp

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[If you’re attending York S&B please see comments 32&33] - here

Seeing Tramp’s name under the puzzle is guaranteed to brighten up a dull morning!

I think the gloomy weather had dulled my brain somewhat: I was aware from the beginning that there were a number of phrases in inverted commas and a number of references to business / offices but it was a while before the penny-dropping moment when I recognised the clichés and then realised that there were a few more hidden in the clues. [I had been sidetracked by the possibility of Tarantino films and perhaps ‘The Office – a programme I’m not familiar with.] So, an amusing theme, carried through with the usual wit and dexterity and lovely surfaces. Favourite clues: 27ac, 2dn, 17,19 and 22,11. Many thanks to Tramp for the fun!

Across

1 Place for meeting? Get on with opportunity (9)
BOARDROOM
Simple charade to start us off: BOARD [get on] + ROOM [opportunity]

6 Member worried partner (4)
MATE
M [member] + ATE [worried]

8 This paper’s ignoring another? Front of Times showing full face (8)
GUARDANT
GUARD[i]AN [this paper, minus ‘i’ – ignoring another paper, the ‘I’] + T[imes] for the heraldic term, which I think I have only seen spelt ‘gardant’

9 Stopped spouting rubbish, primarily, with year in retirement (3,3)
RAN DRY
R[ubbish] + AND [with] + reversal [in retirement] of YR [year]

10 IT system in hospital dividing opinion (3,3)
THE NET
H [hospital] in TENET [opinion]

12 Got up to speed: final letter about low returns (6)
ZOOMED
ZED [final letter] round reversal [returns] of MOO [low]

15 Throw in “on close of play” as filling — it’s bedlam (5,3)
LOONY BIN
LOB IN [throw in] round ON [pla]Y
Bedlam, meaning a madhouse, is derived from the Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem in London

16 It’s reflected within uses for pay (8)
STIPENDS
Reversal [reflected] of IT in SPENDS [uses]

21 Doctor inhales lit piece (heroin and crack) (8)
DECIPHER
DR [doctor] round an anagram [lit = ‘drunk’] of PIECE + H [heroin]

22 Hit in the morning — money coming into question? (6)
WHAMMY
AM [in the morning] + M [money] in WHY [question]

24 State “going forward”, on the contrary, poster having a short opening (6)
NEVADA
Reversal [not going forward] of AD [poster] + A VEN[t] [a short opening]

25 “Steer” to enter these businesses? One points to ambition (5-3)
DRIVE-INS
DRIVE [ambition] + I [one] + N S [points]

26 One cuts confusion, having switched first half (4)
ADZE
DAZE [confusion] with the first two letters switched

27 Rolling Stones out, individually sustained in music (9)
SOSTENUTO
Anagram [rolling] of STONES OUT
Literally ‘sustained’ – Chambers: ‘with full time allowed for each note’, hence ‘individually’ [But see Tramp’s comment @16]

Down

1 Touch base at start (career meeting) (5)
BRUSH
B[ase] + RUSH [career]

2 Account right? Gross “on my radar”, say (7)
ACRONYM
AC [account] + R [right] + an anagram [gross] of ON MY – RADAR being an acronym for RAdio Detection And Ranging:  I’d always thought of RADAR as the archetypal acronym but both Collins and Chambers have it as a word in its own right now. For RADAR, Chambers has Royal Association for Disabilityy and Rehabilitation

3 Plan which might be taken on board, we hear (5)
DRAFT
Homophone [we hear] of draught – might be taken on board

4 Contract beginning — beginners perform better in business (7)
OUTSELL
OUTSE[t] [beginning contracted] + LL [beginners]

5 Lethal drink knocked back roused drunk (9)
MURDEROUS
Reversal [knocked back] of RUM [drink] + an anagram [drunk] of ROUSED

6 Regularly in day they replace English with bull, ultimately (7)
MONTHLY
MON[day] + [bul]L replacing ‘e’ [English] in TH[e]Y

7 Director managed to cut rubbish (“in loop”) (9)
TARANTINO
RAN [managed] in [to cut] TAT [rubbish] + IN O [in loop]

13 Working with those people? Stop improving (2,3,4)
ON THE MEND
ON [working] + THEM [those people] + END [stop]

14 No good stopping awful “heads up” for business gatherings (4,5)
DUNG HEAPS
NG [no good] in [stopping] an anagram [awful] of HEADS UP  – a different kind of business this time!

17,19 Place for business? Proactive to work with rest (7,6)
PRIVATE SECTOR
An anagram [to work] of PROACTIVE and REST

18 Hears director invested after section walks (7)
STRIDES
D [director] in TRIES [hears] after S [section]

20 Possible place for grapevine gossip? Nice water (7)
CHATEAU
CHAT [gossip] + EAU [water in Nice]
A reference to the water cooler effect, ‘a phenomenon occurring when employees at a workplace gather around the office water cooler and chat’.

22,11 “Reinventing the wheel” inapt: it’s not needed (5,8)
WHITE ELEPHANT
An anagram [reinventing] THE WHEEL INAPT

23 Staff love to take last of low-hanging fruit (5)
MANGO
MAN [staff, as a verb] + O [love] round [low-hangin]G

48 comments on “Guardian 26,385 / Tramp”

  1. Thanks Tramp and Eileen – I second your opening comment, and really enjoyed this one.

    Tramp trailed that the puzzle was ‘full of bull’ on Twitter this morning.

    In 22A, is the second M for money a standard usage? I don’t recall seeing it before.

  2. Hi Simon

    I don’t do Twitter, so I missed that.

    Re 22ac: what a beautifully tactful way of saying that I’d omitted to parse the second M . 😉 I’ll do it now. [It is a standard abbreviation.]

  3. Thank you Tramp and Eileen

    Really enjoyed this, great fun.
    Amongst others, loved 20d. I got all tied up with it, stupidly not realising Nice referred to the town…a chateau d’eau in France being a water tower.

  4. Only managed about half of this; obviously not on Tramp’s wavelength today. Some great clues nonetheless, 14d especially (business gatherings, hehe). Perhaps not the best crossword for those of us who use them to escape the banalities of the office, and especially the mangling of the English language by our “superiors” exemplified with the clues, but I’ll forgive Tramp for that.

  5. Good morning everyone and thank you for the blog, Eileen.

    I enjoyed this a lot.

    I think I’ve seen the NICE WATER gag before but it made for a smooth clue, nonetheless.

    ACRONYM was nicely obfuscated, too.

    I’m intrigued by GUARDANT. As you say, it’s a heraldry term meaning ‘facing the observer’ but presumably the root is from the Latin “keep” and I can’t quite make the link to ‘facing’.

    Was particularly dim with BOARDROOM this morning but it finally clicked.

    Lovely, rounded puzzle, thank you Tramp.

  6. Hi William

    Guardant [gardant] is, like other heraldic terms, from French [garder]. [Latin ‘keep’ is ‘tenere’.]

    See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_%28heraldry%29

    I’d always thought of ‘gardant’ as meaning ‘looking [straight] at’ [from French regarder]: I find that ‘regardant’ in heraldry means ‘looking back’ – see link above].

  7. Thanks to Tramp and Eileen

    I started at the SE corner and things started to fall into place less slowly than I anticipated.

    Was anyone else wondering where the ED came from in 12a? I had Z and OOM and suspected it ended in d but could not complete the parsing. I did not think of zed as the pronunciation of the last letter of the alphabet. North American solvers could also be left wondering.

  8. Another nicety (no pun intended) to the clue in 20d is that many vineyards/wineries are called Chateau something.

  9. Thanks, Eileen.

    Fun puzzle; less pervasively thematic than many of Tramp’s crosswords, despite the fair sprinkling of business (of various sorts – I did enjoy DUNGHEAP), but certainly none the worse for that. Some nice misdirection in the definitions.

    William @5: G(U)ARDANT (of an animal’s head, ‘looking forward’) is, like all heraldic terms, medieval French. However, it isn’t from Latin, but an early borrowing into Romance from Germanic – the Old French ‘garder’ is cognate with the English ‘ward’ and originally meant ‘watch over’ but came to mean just ‘look at’ (cf ‘guardare’ in modern Italian). In modern French the word for ‘look at’ is ‘regarder’ but curiously the heraldic term ‘regardant’ means ‘looking backwards’. (There are several other old Germanic borrowings into Romance where ‘w’ becomes ‘gu’: ‘guerre’ is from ‘war’, ‘guide’ is related to ‘wit’ and ‘Guillaume’ is ‘William’).

  12. This was a real birthday treat for me: not too difficult, but full of the usual Tramp wit and ingenuity, and with the business clichés all nicely worked into the clues, including the loathsome “going forward” (though not the more recent but equally horrible “reach out to”, meaning to contact). Thanks to Tramp for the entertainment and to Eileen for the blog.

  13. Andrew@12. Happy birthday. A pity Tramp couldn’t have worked “reach out to” into 23d. Of interest, in Tamal man = mango tree (kay = fruit, thus mankay = mango)

  14. Thanks to Diamond Geezer on Tuesday I listened to the Janice Long interview with Paul.
    Two statements struck me: one, it is highly competitive to get exposure in The Guardian ; and: two Paul gets more than all the rest.
    Conclusion: make your own.

  15. Cookie @10

    I like your rhyming in Kevin@7 but it does bring back memories of the 2007 political campaign in Australia when Kevin Rudd was running for Prime Minister and his slogan was Kevin 07. I won’t say whether they are good or bad memories.

  16. Many thanks Eileen for the kind words and superb blog (as always). So, thanks to all you guys* for reaching out.

    In April, a discussion broke out on a blog of one of my puzzles regarding the use of business jargon. I posted the following:

    “Thanks for the heads up regarding the office speak. Going forward I might have to leverage the synergies of your posts and proactively produce a ‘business bullshit’ puzzle going forward. Just to manage expectations, it might be some time before I ideate the puzzle but I will certainly take on board your key learnings when I can find a landing slot in my diary.”

    I wrote this puzzle in early September. It was a steep learning curve against some strong headwinds but I managed some blue-sky thinking and eventually came up with this puzzle. My original clue for 2d was different; I wanted to use something like:

    For management, cut crap “on my radar”? (7),

    which I thought was a showstopper/game-changer. However, “crap” was deemed offensive and I had to come up with a rewrite. I’m not sure many Guardian readers would be offended by it though given that Paul had “bullshitter” the other week.

    If I were being picky I’d say that the “returns” in 12a is the wrong tense in the cryptic reading of the clue. Apart from that, I’m pleased with it.

    ps The “individually” in 27a is denoting that it’s an anagram of “Stones” followed by an anagram of “out”. I know it’s not strictly necessary but I thought it made a better clue.

    * my particular pet hate

    Neil

  17. Kevin @15. Well, John Key has just entered term 3 after the election in September (I,m a New Zealander). Does one see much of politics in these crosswords, or is the theme mainly avoided, the Scottish independence referendum excepted.

  18. Hi Tramp @16

    Many thanks, as ever, for dropping in and adding more insight. At least it gives you the opportunity to give us gems like the original clue for 2dn. I totally agree with you: Paul does seem to be able to get away with rather more than some other setters. 😉

    Re ‘individually’ in 27ac: I did wonder about that.

  19. Thanks Tramp and Eileen

    Was a ‘chip away’ work for me – mainly constrained by time – still enjoyable, especially when I finally got some time to focus in the end.

    THE NET was my last in after initially trying to justify ‘why not?’ for a while.

    Saw the jargon in the background, but didn’t put it together as the theme ! A lot of different clue types and liked both LOONY BIN and OUTSELL the best.

  20. My worst encounter with business language-mangling (aka managementspeak jargonbollocks) came a few years ago when I was trying to tell a director that there was a problem with an IT project he was running. Verbatim: “It’s not a problem, it’s a situation requring a solution.” My next thought began with a W.

    Needless to say he was promoted and went on to become MD of a couple of other companies, while I slowly sank without trace…

  22. Tramp @16. Crap is in the O.C.E.D. first as nonsense, rubbish [earlier senses ‘chaff, refuse from fat-boiling’: Middle English from Dutch krappe], not offensive at all. Second as faeces.
    I cannot believe that anyone was offended by “bullshit” recently, or would be by “poppycock”. I was upset by “lunch box”, but that was my fault as I looked up the hidden meaning.

  23. Thank you Eileen, and Tramp @16, for explaining what was going on here.

    I usually find themed puzzles very hard. Either I don’t know the references: for example yesterday’s pop music DJs. Or, as today, I don’t notice that there is a theme, and so find a fuzziness between clue and answer. Still, I suppose that’s what makes Guardian puzzles more interesting than those in the Times!

  24. Thanks Tramp & Eileen.

    A bit slow this morning but got there in the end. Strange what is deemed as offensive. My ODE has ‘crap’ as vulgar slang, but LOONY BIN as offensive – I doubt that that phrase would ever be used in a broadsheet, but this is just a crossword so no real need to get ‘hot-under-the-collar.’

    I liked the ‘crap’ business gatherings.

  26. Robi @ 25

    Oh yes, I agree – that particular addition to the MS JB lexicon came after the events I described.

    A colleague and I used to pass each other a note during particularly laden meetings:

    AJJOUB aka A Jolly Jamboree Of Utter B******s

  27. I remember the discussion Tramp alludes to – the puzzle number was 26223 for anyone who wants to look it up, and it’s nice to see the deliverable (and for those of us who remember that discussion reading a few clues made the theme pretty obvious). All good fun, with enough going on to make it a bit tricky in places, but no showstoppers – last in was NEVADA, favourites LOONY BIN and DUNG HEAPS. I think GUARDANT was the only unfamiliar word, but that was clearly clued so once the crossers were in place it was obvious.

    Thanks to Tramp (for the crossword and for dropping in) and to Eileen for the usual exemplary blog.

  28. Thanks Tramp and Eileen
    I took ages to see THE NET and had never heard of GUARDANT, so had to get it from the parsing.

    I bet LOONY BIN isn’t an acceptable term in the Guardian’s style guide – I wonder if there will be letters to “Corrections and clarifications”?

  29. I’ve just noticed that I had WHAMMO rather than WHAMMY. It works just as well (who? rather than why?), and fits the definition in Chambers better:
    whammo – (interj) descriptive of violent impact………..
    whammy – (n) a malevolent spell or influence cast by someone’s evil eye; such a spell cast by both eyes being a double whammy………
    (though it does go on to add “now, generally, a stunning blow, the winning punch”

  30. muffin @29 – thanks for the dictionary definition of “WHAMMY” – I don’t think I’d ever looked it up, but that is interesting (for some reason I still associate it with Chris Patten, who had a soundbite involving DOUBLE WHAMMY some time in the early 90s).

    Robi @25 – I thought the phrase was “… there are only solutions” but that may be a variant.

  31. Muffin@28 – we wondered about loony bin as a Guardian issue but why crap being deleted? Seems odd to us!
    Thanks Eileen for a great blog – we really struggled with this and guardant stumped us completely

  32. Well you guys make sure you keep all the balls up in the air and Don t forget if you re not part of the solution , you re part of the problem.

    I do like setters joining the discussion Thank you Tramp today and Boatman recently.

  33. Just four clues in over lunch, took a long break, then the answers came steadily in session two. A considerable mental workout for me, this. DECIPHER was last; totally missed lit as anagrind, so had no idea what was going on.

    Makes a change for the dear old Guardian to run a business-themed crossword. Shortly before retirement, I had to go on a three-day training course to learn all the new jargon, a crap (can I use that word?) investment if ever there was one. How nice of Tramp to bring the memories flooding back.

  34. I can’t match all this business stuff but one Teacher Day, referring to our ‘challenges’ re recruitment, our jargon-loving Vice Principal got rather confused and told us that it was now ‘a case of sink or drown’. Some challenge!

  35. Brilliant puzzle – loved the theme. Jargon is generally the last refuge of unoriginal minds.

    So many great clues – liked WHITE ELEPHANT and DUNG HEAPS particularly.

  36. I had trouble with this and didn’t,as usual,spot the theme(I don’t do Twitter either). While I didn’t really enjoy the puzzle,I think that is more down to me than it. DUNGHEAP was lovely as others have said.
    I first came across WHAMMY on old RnB records- a favourite being She put a double eyed whammy on me-which I think was by Freddie King.

  37. Glorious, thanks Tramp, 14d had me getting funny looks in the pub. 🙂
    Thanks too to Eileen for writing what I suspected for some of the parsing…

  38. Eileen @ 34

    In a different occupation, I had a boss who, when supplier problems were causing us grief, contacted said supplier & said, with some exasperation, “The customers are walking with their feet”

    I had to resort to breath=control…

  40. I found this hard going but thoroughly enjoyed it. I found the RHS easier than the LHS, and it took me much too long to decipher the clue for DECIPHER. I had the most trouble in the NW and finished with GUARDANT after BRUSH. My biggest smile came when I cracked DUNG HEAPS.

    Business jargon is a blight on the language, IMHO, and the more people who make fun of it the better as far as I’m concerned.

  41. Gervase/Eileen @9/6 Brilliant, thank you both. Sorry not to reply sooner work got in the way.

    Nice day.

  42. ta Eileen, see you in York soon I hope, must admit I entered Guardant in hope from the obvious wordplay. but this was a bit of a laugh, tramp you’re a star setter.

  43. Eileen @34. All this has been such fun. There must be a term for the “faux pas” your Vice Principal made, many politicians must have done the same thing, it is similar to a Spoonerism.
    Thanks again for the blog.

  44. Looking at all this from the thirty thousand foot level, I think we’ve made a pretty good job of collectioning up the gobbledegook which emanates from the lowest facial orifices of jungleworzel screeps in business orientated enclosed spaces and sending it firmly into the electronically operated thingwhasit which masticates it and expectorates it into the underground removal system to the sepulchratic concealment containerment for doublegoonspeak.

  45. Late to the party.

    I interpreted (obviously wrongly) that the “individually” in the SOSTENUTO clue was a reference to the fact that the sostenuto (centre) pedal on a piano holds up the damper on only the note or notes held when the pedal is depressed. (As opposed to the damper pedal, which holds up all the dampers.) So if piano sheet music calls for use of the sostenuto pedal, it wishes for an individual note or chord to be sustained. Thus, “individually sustained, in music.” See discussion in Wikipedia at Sostenuto.

  46. Re Eileen’s ‘faux pas’ story. Anything genuine in my family is now referred to as ‘bony fido’ after my daughter used the phrase as a ten year old describing an event in which she met someone she didn’t know. ‘He was a ‘bony fido’ policeman’ she said.

  47. Enjoyed this but the time of my blog gives away how long I took. Still at least it meant reading through a very interesting 46 comments. Now four years away from the work interface, I am losing touch with current jargon, for which I am very thankful.

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