Guardian 26,618 by Philistine

72 comments on “Guardian 26,618 by Philistine”

1. Doesn’t “berated” work just as well as a solution for 28a? (Start with “beLAted”, and switch hands.)

2. Thanks PeterO. 26, 17, 9 was the FOI, and soon figured out the “Not 9” device, with gazelle. From then on, it was simple enough and raced through to be stuck at 11a and 6d crossers for a while before completing them. Liked all Not 9s! Good fun! Thanks Philistine!

3. Thanks Philistine. Most enjoyable.

4. Took me a while to getting with this puzzle. First thing I had to do was some research on Stockton Bridge as I had no idea what that might signify or where it might be, although I presumed it was in the UK!

   Having solved the long clue, it then took me a while to understand what was going on with the “Not 9” clues even though I had solved LENDERS, COLLAGE & ABEL without being able to parse them. Like ilippu @ 2, the penny dropped with GAZELLE and I started to enjoy the puzzle more. I was pleased to be able to complete this one.

   New words for me were SYSTOLE & NARROWBOAT and I needed help to parse 20d, 6d & 2d.

   My favourites were WITH REGRET, CHANNEL & BELATED.

   Thanks Philistine and PeterO.

5. Sorry, first sentence above should read: “Took me a while to get going with this puzzle.”

6. Thanks Peter. Had a good inkling via its rhythm of 26,17,9 but the penny only dropped with COLLAGE well after half way. Not crossing Ts is hardly a valid way to get Ls. You are right to mention loosenesses, which include Ed Kane’s at #1, arrow=points plural in 11A and lifts off=reverses in 20D. Stockton was lost on me and I didn’t look it up, but fair enough, as indeed the whole thing really.

7. Thank you very much for explaining the device, PeterO. Had all the answers quite quickly without knowing why! Agree with you that “NT” as “Bible” in 11a could be seen as loose, but otherwise no complaints.

   Very enjoyable, thank you Philistine.

8. Thanks, Peter.

   Not my favourite ever Philistine, although it’s undoubtedly ‘clever’. Which version of ‘clever’ that means will depend on the solver, I think. I did get the long answer reasonably early from the enumeration (I could never have parsed it, so well done). Then I twigged the T to L trick, but still struggled to find all the themed answers.

   SHILLING was funny, so not an entirely wasted hour or so. Thank you to the setter.

9. Thanks Philistine and PeterO
   Overall I was disappointed with this. I had more than half the “theme” answers before seeing what was going on, mainly because the trick simply doesn’t work if you write in capitals, as I always do in crosswords (I bet most others do as well).
   I agree about BERATED/BELATED – in fact I entered the former, then “checked” to find that I needed the latter.
   I know that some people here don’t regard surfaces as being all that important, but surely we could hope for something better than the completely nonsensical 25d!
   Favourite was WITH REGRET.

10. I meant to mention BELATED/BERATED as well, because it’s one of my pet hates. The clue is completely ambiguous; then people say ‘get some crossing letters’. But of course the L or R choice is not in a crossing clue, so you’re knackered.

11. Thanks, PeterO.

    I thought this was a lot of fun, particularly as I had half the ‘not 9s’ before I realised what was going on – a real pdm. I got the long answer fairly easily from the enumeration and enjoyed unravelling the parsing – thought ‘doing the rounds sober’ was lovely!

    I always enjoy plays on More / Utopia and this one was pretty outrageous!

    I agree with the reservations about NT as Bible and BERATED / BELATED, which I actually got right but see now that it could be ambiguous.

    Hi molonglo @6 – I think you’ve misread the blog: ARROW is indicated by ‘this points’.

    Many thanks, as ever, to Philistine – a very enjoyable puzzle.

12. Thanks Philistine and PeterO

    I loved this, then again I invariably enjoy Philistine puzzles, however tricky I sometimes find them. To me he has a humour and sparkle that some other setters don’t.

    molonglo @ 6: in 11A it’s not arrow = points (noun/noun), but arrow = ‘this points’ (noun/definition), so it’s fine.

13. Eileen @ 11: sorry, you posted while I was typing!

14. Great puzzle

15. Thanks Philistine and Peter. The T/L device was a very nice idea but it simply doesn’t work – as Muffin says, most people will complete the puzzle in CAPS if they are using the paper; the on-line version completes in CAPS and the printed and on-line clues use a font where uncrossed ts don’t resemble ls. And I agree with those who had BERATED instead of BELATED.

16. Like others I was part way through before I got the t-l exchange and then proceeded quickly to the end. I got ARIZONA from the crossers without knowing it was the genus of snakes and got UTOPIA without getting the East End clue, so thanks to PeterO for the parsing and Philistine for an enjoyable exercise.

17. Philistine indeed. Where are all the cricket clues on this great day? One brief mention of third man is all I can spot.

18. Thanks Philistine and PeterO.

    This was great fun, especially BULLOCK / BUTTOCK, which was the first ‘Not 9’ clue I got, then the others followed.

    “Dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s” relates to cursive writing, these operations being done after the pen has left the paper. The font used for the clues is irrelevant as is the fact that capitals are usually entered into the grid.

19. Very naughty, the T/L thing as we all seem to work in caps. It was COTTAGE -> COLLAGE that got it for me, like so many others about half way through the ‘not 9s’. But I did enjoy TOUCHÉ -> LOUCHE all the more as a result.

    I know two things about Stockton; it was one end of the first successful steam-hauled railway; and it’s at the mouth of the Tees. So I Googled ‘Stockton Bridge’ and found out about its very nice Infinity Bridge and immediately started going off on an infinite tangent.

20. I’m with you there Cookie. Not9 is a witty device and all credit to Philistine for a lovely puzzle which took me at least twice as long as usual.

21. I got the gateway clue almost immediately but it was only after I got COLLAGE that I saw how the themed answers were supposed to be solved. If I’ve got a quibble regarding the themed answers it is that “not 9” refers to Ts rather than T so doesn’t quite work for LOUCHE and LENDER as there is only one replacement needed, but I managed to get them so I can’t really complain. I agree that the clue for BELATED was ambiguous, and although I guessed the right one it wouldn’t have surprised me if it had been “berated”. Overall I thought this was a good challenge, and my LOI was the cleverly constructed WITH REGRET.

22. Surprised that Philistine could get away with SHILLING, but it made me smile, so no complaints here. Overall a very nice puzzle.

    Luckily for me, the Other Half’s from Stockton, so 9d went in easily, but I was a bit surprised by the clue. Surely the famous Tees bridge is the Transporter in Middlesbrough.

    Although I do share the reservation that most people (including the Guardian website) write crossword answers in all-caps, the full phrase “dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s” makes clear that it’s talking about lower case (since upper-case ‘I’s don’t have dots).

23. Just noted a strange coincidence, the original title of Moore’s book at 7d, UTOPIA, began Libellus vere aureus, ‘A truly golden little book’, and the answer to 7d, LIBELLOUS, is derived from libellus .

24. Much enjoyment… Though this has not been a week for those lacking in the literature department with More vision today and Stoke thoughts yesterday 🙂
    Loved the device… I think in lowercase and write in caps!

25. I enjoyed this very much with the possible exception of BERATED/BELATED. The long clue was a right in for me so I was half way there from the start. LOUCHE/ TOUCHE confirmed it.
    I was amused by SHILLING and LOLLY especially as the usual suspects are bound to be offended by them.
    Thanks Philistine.

26. Er, I meant” a write in”

27. Although I fill the grid in in capitals, I do all my thinking in lower case, so the theme works fine for me. Apart from jumbling anagrams (which weren’t relevant here) do others think in capitals?

28. Thanks Philistine and PeterO

    What a great puzzle !! I got ABEL very early on but couldn’t see how it related to the unknown 9 at that stage – wasn’t all that much later when COLLAGE presented that led directly into seeing what the long 16, 17, 9 was all about. Agree with Cookie, it has nothing to do with how we write in the letters to the grid – but the fact that a lower case t without the crossing, basically turns into an l – very clever concept. Laughed out loud at the audacity of SHILLING !!!

    Was going to complain about the BELATED (instead of BERATED) – but in light of the theme, I think the setter can claim this one – that we are converting to an L not away from it! Have marked it as an error for me !!

    Didn’t see the reverse hidden TORPEDO – had parsed it as ROT (lifts off – probably more like rotten though), PE (the covers of ‘protective’) and the DO ( … from somewhere!) 🙂

    Ended up in the NE corner with LOLLY (had heard of it as slang for money before, but had not heard of the TOTTY term though) and the clever homophone in UTOPIA (which took some hearing out).

29. Massive compileritis. 🙁

30. Well I thought this was fun – I spotted the theme almost immediately from the definition and enumeration of 26 17 5, and guessed what was required very early. Why do so many of you think the clues should be solved in capitals – for me capitalisation is the last thing you do before entering the solution in the grid, and none of the answers are proper nouns starting in L. Last in was LOLLY. Liked that, the cheeky SHILLING and BULLOCK and UTOPIA. I had BERATED too and think the clue would work better that way round…

    Thanks to PeterO and Philistine

31. I started writing my comment before seeing hh@29, so I was not responding to that predictably churlish response 🙁

32. I refer the honourable gentlemen to the following fonts, all of which have ts which become ls (more or less!)

    Aharoni
    Bradley Hand ITC
    Century Gothic
    Comic Sans MS
    Edwardian Script ITC
    Euphemia
    Gabriola
    Gisha
    Levenim MT
    Palace Script MT
    Tw Cen MT (and variations)

    And let me guess, you don’t use them either. So maybe the device is not fair because these are obscure? Or maybe it’s totally fair just because these fonts do actually exist? I have no idea, you decide!

    Does anybody have as part of their job the need to inspect all the dozens of available fonts in order to select one? Or in other words, what is the point of having so many?

33. Really thoughtful comment, hedgehoggy. I do love your contributions to this site. Always insightful. At least we didn’t have a full clue-by-clue list of your whinges today. Stick with the two-word comments. I’ll keep my two-word opinion of your comment to myself.

34. You can be my guest KD.

    I have not had time to post my usual list of remarks today, regrettably.

35. I would quickly say that as crosswords are filled in in capitals, the ‘not crossing the Ts’ does not lead to L it leads to I. And that’s just for starters, I wish I could say more about this offering!

36. It’s SO bad!

37. As I see it, you solve the clue, take the solution, convert it to upper case and write it in the grid. Simples. Crossing the Ts implies lower case.

38. Is there a ‘Stockton Bridge? There’s the ‘Infinity Bridge’ which is in Stockton on Tees . . .or is that picky?

39. This is not one of my favourite Philistine crosswords – clever but in a too-contrived way. I don’t, on the whole, like puzzles in which so many answers rely on solving a single key clue, even though this one was not particularly difficult to get. Even then, solving the ‘themed’ clues was not possible until the solver recognised the substitution, but once that was done the themed answers then became too easy.

    Even when I twigged the “not 9”, I was slow to get the right substitution as in my handwriting an uncrossed capital T looks more like a capital I, and an uncrossed lower case t doesn’t look much like any other letter. In type faces, I don’t think an uncrossed t looks like an l in any serif font, and not in many sans ones. However, it seems we all got there in the end – in my case, ABEL/ABET was the breakthrough.

    I couldn’t parse ARIZONA, and searching online for Arizona reptiles just gave me lists of reptiles found in Arizona, not the genus. Although I saw the parsing for UTOPIA, I wasn’t convinced by it as I can’t imagine any East Ender pub-goer using “tope” in that context. I was so eager to make use of the new crossing letters that I completely forgot to parse 26,17,9!

    I think the wording of 28a does suggest BELATED rather than BERATED, but I agree that there is some ambiguity, which is undesirable when it can’t be resolved by a crossing answer.

    My favourites are WITH REGRET NNEL.

    Thanks to Philistine and PeterO.

40. Oops! That should have read “My favourites are WITH REGRET and CHANNEL.”

41. Brilliant puzzle!

    I didn’t solve the long clue until I only had NE left, happily having realised we need the T to L conversion but not yet why. So the game turned into understanding why, and when I got the long clue I was worried the rest would be an anticlimax – but was overjoyed that NE still contained three absolute belters that made me laugh, with 16a a favourite.

    VERY ENJOYABLE! I’ve no time for for the case/font arguments – there was clearly a gimmick, and it was gettable.

    28a I had berate, if “for” is the link, I didn’t see how belate can work.

    Many thanks Philistine

42. Loved it, with some of the same (very small) quibbles mentioned above.

    I don’t understand why people would want to dear apart the Guardian puzzle for small crimes against Ximenean perfection, when it’s often so full of imagination and fun.

43. Late to the party, as I didn’t get to this until late morning U.S. time.

    I cheated on LOLLY, as neither LOLLY nor TOTTY is part of American English. And I was among those who had the wrong BERATED / BELATED answer. Otherwise, this was great fun. SHILLING and BULLOCK were both, um, cheeky…but I’m one of those who likes that feature of things.

44. Re 42, what about misdemeanours against straightforward English grammar?

    Perhaps you have to be a Ximenean to know it, but at risk of expulsion from the Lodge I should tell you the Great Secret, which is that the grammar most of us use in our everyday sentences is the same grammar the more enlightened crossword compilers use in their cryptic grammar.

    It’s really not that difficult!

45. Good lord found this hard to break into, the t to l translation doesn’t work in capitals, thanks Peter but what a run around this was

46. Thanks Philistine and PeterO

    I always enjoy Philistine’s puzzles, even when I find them difficult. Today’s I thought was tremendous, and must really have been on-wavelength, got and parsed the long ‘un early doors, and the rest was steady progress at a decent lick, though I did try for a fair while to crack an impossible anagram for 10, 24.

    I have no problem with the Ts device, it’s this rule-warping that, for me, turns a good setter into a very good one.

47. Man this was hard for me, still learning of course but I barely got any, had to keep looking on here to see how it was parsed.

    On the off, I don’t really understand the concept of ‘theme’ in crosswords, as well as ideae of “this doesn’t correlate with a down clue” sort of post, can anyone explain this to me?

48. Isn’t that a strange expression, ‘Dotting the is and crossing the ts’?
    Why should one want to cross the t when it already has a little horizontal line (otherwise it’s not a t)?

    The least we can say of today’s puzzle is that it was fun, original and different.
    Is that ‘compileritis’?

    There was, as you say PeterO [thanks for the blog], some looseness.
    I could make a list but why should I?

    Many thanks to Philistine.

49. Adam H,

    No, I don’t think there’s a Stockton Bridge, nor a Manchester Lass. However, as the clue says, there’s a Stockton bridge, probably several, and countless Manchester lasses, surely?

    I think that’s all that was meant.

    Thanks all.

50. I liked this a lot – an original idea, cleverly executed. I’ m surprised at so many grumpy comments above – of course the clues don’t work in upper case, but I can’t believe that that held solvers up for more than a second or two.

    But I do have a gripe about 28, where I still think BERATED is the more natural reading.

    Thanks to setter and blogger.

51. I had BERATED which I think parses better than BELATED given the “for” in the clue. Figured out the Not 9 thing pretty much straight away and thought it was fun. The phrase clearly refers to cursive lower case script so I think it’s fine as way of indicating T>L.

52. Of course in Polish it’s dotting the Zs and crossing the Ls ……
    In English, all this talk of fonts is irrelevant. It’s about that thing called handwriting that some of us still do.

53. I like Philistine. He has that vibe which makes you despair at first but then when you look further you start to make inroads. I always feel that I can complete it.

    However, not this time.

    Give him the credit for trying to change up the usual clues (often berated here) for new, ingenious ones (also berated here).

54. A bit late but I was engrossed in the tennis, which delayed my meal.

    Paul B @44

    I’ve searched the comments and can’t find any quibbles regarding grammar, of either the everyday or cryptic kind, and you didn’t offer any examples of your own. I, pedant that I am, didn’t spot any for myself.

    I’m mystified by the continuing discussion re dotting ss and crossing ts: it has nothing to do with how any of us fill in the grid – it’s about writing in lower case, in which the clue was written, which is how we all learned to read and write, and still mostly read. If you’re interested, because ‘i’ and ‘j’ were originally interchangeable, “the dot on the small ‘i’ was introduced about the 11th century as a diacritic in cases where two [i’s came together [eg filii] to distinguish between these and ‘u'”. [Brewer].

    On a lighter note – my students who adorned their ‘i’s with a circle – or, worse, a heart, did not endear themselves to me!

55. A lot of moaning about not a lot. I enjoyed this.

    The “device” was obvious once one got the long answer. Why be so pedantic about something which was clearly a bit of fun. It’s a crossword and it’s meant to be entertaining. This was a pleasant change.

    Also 28A is obviously BELATED. Read the clue!

    Thanks to PeterO and Picaroon

56. I thought the Ts to Ls clues were fun, but the rest of the crossword didn’t quite sparkle for me as brightly as other Phitislines usually do.

    Still very good though.

57. I would also like to thank Philistine (who apparently had a lot of help from his mate Picaroon 😉 )

58. Sil @48, see my post @18, people did once write by hand you know. Teachers often say to the children “check that you have dotted your i’s and crossed your t’s.”

    Thanks again Philistine for a super puzzle.

59. [Eileen @54, children in France have to put a small circle above their i’s when learning to write, a very hard habit to break – perhaps the custom has spread to primary schools in England.]

60. [Eileen, another point of interest, children in France first learn the alphabet in capital letters, then go straight on into cursive writing, they never ‘learn’ to print in lower case. Books for young children are puplished in cursive writing. Perhaps for this reason it has become the ‘in thing’ with older children to drop cursive writing and to print, a shame because it slows down their ability to take notes later on at university etc.]

61. Perhaps writing by hand has been dropped in the UK? In France when you apply for a job you have to write a letter of motivation by hand, and your writing is analysed by a handwriting ‘expert’ – it all ties in with the custom shown by certain Presidents of consulting their astrologist first thing each morning.

    Apologies, Philistine, I have the feeling you are conversant with all this.

62. My problem with the “it’s the cursive not the printed version” argument is that the way I, like most of my generation in England, was taught to do cursive writing, an uncrossed lower-case T did not look like an L. It should be shorter and never looped, whereas the lower-case L would be full height and have a loop. If anything it would look more like an undotted or carelessly dotted I.

    Sil @48
    That’s the whole point of the expression. The cursive styles which were taught in school required you to write the whole word and then go back to dot the Is (and Js) and cross the Ts as otherwise they wouldn’t be recognisable as Is and Ts. When writing a hurried scrawl, even if you remember to go back, there’s a tendency for the dots and crosses to end up misplaced, and potentially to be misleading.

63. Eileen!

    44 is a response to 42. 42 acknowledges ‘small crimes against Ximenean perfection’ in Guardian puzzles generally, and so your remarks at 54, which seem to single out today’s puzzle, don’t make much sense.

    Re Guardian 26,618, I’m not sure how one might speak for or against the compiler given the complexity and apparent controversy of the rubric. I can only say that such an idea seems to me rather familiar, and so perhaps something in a similar vein has appeared before somewhere. As to the clues, and if it helps, I can only say that Tees, Neo and friends have their own (Neo-Ximenean?) way of doing things, and they’ve done okay on it.

64. RedSoules @47: looks like no one answered your question about down clues.

    A “charade” type clue–one where the answer is chopped up into bits that are then clued separately–often indicates that one part is “on” another. This only is really technically true in a down clue, where the first part is on top of the second. In an across, they’ll be next to, not on.

    Sometimes, though, you’ll see “on” (or similar directions that depend on vertical orientation) in across clues. This bothers some people, who thereupon post a comment to that effect here. Similarly, people get worked up when a direction implying adjacency, such as “beside,” appears in a down clue.

    Neither one really bothers me much; you have to be a bit flexible, I think.

65. Fun solve. Having twigged the biggie early I latched onto the idea quite easily.

    At first glance it was reminiscent of Araucaria.

    1a: Not 9 …
    so you look at 9
    9a: See 26

    Had 26 been: A 3,4 with a 1a

    or similar we would have been home.

    Oh – I see the Millwall crowd are in. They’ll never understand Rugby – they think it’s soccer gone wrong.

    Best ignore them.

    Many thanks to S&B.

66. mrpenney @ 64

    RS was recently comprehensively outed as a troll on this and other sites. Please don’t feed it.

67. An enjoyable compilation, thanks to Philistine and thanks to PeterO. I am berating myself for getting to this so belatedly, but there was a lot of high quality tennis on TV, and it wasn’t going to watch itself.

    I thought the big clue was brilliantly composed, and the Not 9 device was fair enough (with plenty of clever examples to find). All this talk of fonts is irrelevant in my view: “crossing the ts” clearly refers to handwriting in lower case, and whatever method one was taught, one must be aware that for many people failing to cross a t would leave a character resembling a possibly shorter l. And this is Crosswordworld: normal rules do not apply.

    I felt that SHILLING nearly crossed a line, though the offensive word was implied quite coyly. I am not a prude – having brought up three children, I of course swear constantly – but I am a little shocked to find, shall we say, the language of Frankie Boyle in my Guardian crossword, even if only by implication. Bugger it, I must stop being so precious.

    I am in the BERATED camp, just from the way the clue reads. I loved the disguise of ‘More vision’ for UTOPIA, and have learned a new word SYSTOLE and a new reptile, ARIZONA.

68. Jenny @62 – that is fascinating – when I was at primary school in the early 70s, we weren’t taught all that – we just had to be vaguely legible and after that poor writing was acceptable. In my scrawl l and uncrossed t look very similar! Maybe that is why I just accepted the device and got on with it. Clearly a Marmite puzzle (except that I liked this but can’t stand Marmite).

69. PS the l in “in my scrawl…” is a lower case L – in the display font here it looks very like an I!

70. beery hiker @68/69
    That is why I wasted a little time trying to substitute Is rather than Ls. I was in primary school in the mid 50s, by the way, and all that practice writing out letter forms didn’t make my writing any beter than “vaguely legible”. I was about 12 when for some reason I suddenly started writing in a completely different style and both my writing speed and the legibility improved enormously. ‘One style fits all’ doesn’t really work.

    I considered making the Marmite comparison earlier :-). I love Marmite (in small quantities) and I liked this puzzle too, even with my quibble over the substitution. I’ve liked other Philistine puzzles more, though.

71. @54
    Quite right in every respect, Eileen.

72. @64 Hey Thanks for the reply, was useful and informative.

    @66 This is making me angry now. Why are people labelling me as a troll, grow up.

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