Inquisitor 1355: Holy Inappropriate by Lato

17 comments on “Inquisitor 1355: Holy Inappropriate by Lato”

1. 21a pronounced NEEVE – I wouldn’t have known that before living in Ireland.

   38d [D]OSSI(E)[R]

2. Wonderful puzzle. The pairing of the some of the females and their partners was a brilliant touch. Once I had an idea what was going on, I was looking for entries similar to stag/doe, so couldn’t see some of the parings for a while. And the ‘exercise in futility’ was a clever distraction. As were the title and the phrase with ed’s comments.
   Loved it all. Some clues were very testing but the answers rang true with the clues – which I don’t think is always the case.
   The only one I couldn’t parse was ‘Bologna’. I have never come across ‘bona’ as goods. So thank you very much Duncan for your blog.

3. I agree, a fine puzzle where the admiration for it grows as the thematic elements fall into place. I’m also kicking myself in retrospect for not seeing how the pairs of unclued answers are arranged. I didn’t get the 13th one, PRAYING, until right at the end, which had me scratching my head for where the third word came from. I was vaguely thinking it was MAN, ‘TIS MATING! I’d read the preamble as saying the 13th word and the misprint phrase referred separately to the thematic entries.

   I’d parsed 38A as dOSSIEr, which I think gives better fitting briefs.

   For quite a while I was confused by a couple of the thematic definitions, but I realised in the end where I was going wrong – I had TAG as game so couldn’t work out how Dog gave BRIDGE. The only clue I hadn’t parsed in the end was 5D – BOLOGNA, but looking in my shiny new Chambers I see the definition of fine for log. It does make things easier!

   Thanks for the blog Duncan, and to Lato for a quality puzzle.

4. I wasn’t expecting to have to refresh at this time of night!

5. OPatrick,

   Yes, I think your parsing of 38A fits rather more closely than Duncan’s. (Which is the one I had.)
   Blushing slightly, can’t help feeling this is the wrong site to be discussing intimate items of apparel.

6. Loved the puzzle!

   We couldn’t parse 16d – we were very confused as we were looking for ‘Native Americans’ surrounding I! DOH! Thanks Duncan.

   Thanks Lato – it took us a while but was worth the effort.

7. A brilliant puzzle with a superb PDM. As Duncan said, afterwards I couldn’t believe I hadn’t spotted that there were six pairs of unclued entries in the grid with another one at the bottom. Thanks to Duncan and Lato. Thanks also to John and the team, as all the IQ puzzles that I have tackled have been first class.

8. Agree with everyone else’s comments. A real ‘slow burner’ whose theme, inter-connections, grid set-up and PDM became clear only after a while, prolonging the pleasure (oooerrr, Missus !).
   Even though I kept staring at the BRIDGE ROOM pairing near the bottom ofthe grid for ages, the penny still didn’t drop for a while and when it did, it merited a hard slap on the forehead !

   Thanks to Lato and to Duncan.

9. Thanks to all who pointed out that DOSSIER is a far better source of OSSIE/OSSI at 38 down. I should have seen that myself, but sometimes fixation on one particular answer makes you blind to something more obvious.

10. Wonderful puzzle indeed … Having got the theme, and all the 12 thematic answers, I wasted a lot of time looking for synonyms of “head” to remove from them … simply because I had spotted that you could do exactly that with the first two , i.e BRIDGE(HEAD) and (HEAD)ROOM. It wasn’t until I twigged PARIS and HELEN that I realised we were dealing with couples. Incidentally, I was once a work colleague of Denis Compton’s, and he told us that the then Middlesex captain, J.J.Warr, was known as Aris, because of his somewhat steatopygous physique. When I asked why Aris, he explained the Aristotle derivation, as now given in Chambers. Does anyone know of similar double-rhyming-slang examples ?

11. Whistle=suit: http://www.cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk/slang/whistle_and_flute

    Kettle=watch: http://www.cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk/slang/kettle

12. Thanks,Kenmac … whistle/flute rhymes with suit, and kettle/hob rhymes with fob, with just a single step, as in most rhyming slang.

    But with Aris there is a DOUBLE step involved :

    Aris/totle rhymes with bottle, and then bottle/glass rhymes with arse.

    in the single step method Aris would just = bottle, as in “Give us an aris of beer, mate.”

    As a made-up example of the double-step method, “Paddy” could be “beggar”, as follows

    Paddy/whack = mac mac/gregor = beggar

    I was hoping there might be other examples … aris is the only one I already knew.

13. An impressive grid indeed – with the male/female partners being contiguous AND aligned so that each male’s ‘head’ moved exactly one cell down or across into the female.

    However, I can’t say that I enjoyed filling it in. There seemed to be quite a lot of short words, but the thing that got to me more was the sheer volume of proper nouns: Niamh, Egan (who he?), Dubai, Nepal, Isar, Bologna, Sonia, Bari, Dench, Langer, Edberg, Judea, Reba (who she?), and two or three others.

    And, I’m with Duncan in that the phrase (“This sort of thing …”) is not at all helpful.

    So, for me, this was a “curate’s egg” – but as defined in Chambers, not with its original meaning.

14. HolyGhost @13,

    I think we have to live with the reality that one man’s meat is another man’s poisson. (acknowledgement to Anthony Buckeridge).

    For me, my heart sinks when it’s a carte blanche or involves a word search. Or, far worse, requires a grasp of any of the sciences. Or chess, or cricket or . . . well, anything that doesn’t appeal to me. For instance not long ago there was a puzzle that involved E for Euler. This reference was totally beyond me. I stopped going to school when I was 13.

    Yet I have learned quite a lot from these sort of puzzles – if only because they have pushed me into googling. So much so that I have left the puzzle and pursued the subject. Amazed at my ignorance.

    But coming back to your comments, perhaps there were too many proper nouns. And Reba was a bit obscure.
    But, er, I like her and her songs.

    I realise that having said that, I have committed suicide on this blog.

15. This was a very satisfying solve when the penny finally dropped and I have to admit that I didn’t even notice the large number of proper nouns until it was pointed out. Like others I didn’t find the ‘This sort of thing …’ helpful at all and I can’t escape the feeling that I’m missing something …

16. Many thanks to Duncan for the detailed blog and to others for their comments. Yes, indeed – inappropriate behaviour in a loving and nurturing relationship.

    Must admit I can’t see what’s wrong with proper nouns. DUBAI and NEPAL, for example, must be more familiar than LALDY and ELDING.

    ‘This sort of thing’ was intended merely as a light-hearted comment. PRAYING, RELIGION and the title were meant to be helpful.

17. Thanks Duncan and Lato, a super puzzle that yet again I failed to complete. I started off pretty well on the Inquisitor getting nearly everything for a couple of weeks, but lately I have been going backsliding at an alarming rate. Hats off to everyone who figured out what to do, especially Duncan.

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