Guardian Quiptic 830/Anto

64 comments on “Guardian Quiptic 830/Anto”

1. Underwhelming, agreed, but:
   (1 down) If you knock someone up, you get her pregnant. Seems OK to me?
   (22 across) Records were mono before they were stereo, so I suppose it’s just a (weak) sort of CD…

2. Thanks Anto and Pierre
   Anto strikes again! There were several clues I liked, but Quiptic it wasn’t – does the editor actually check them, do you think? EARSHOT and TRIUMPH (yes – Kipling’s If) were my favourites. Sorry I can’t help on the ones that have you baffled, Pierre – me too. I particularly would like to know how KYRIE is supposed to work.

   P.S. For anyone in serarch of an actual “Quiptic”, Rufus’s Cryptic today fits the bill very nicely.

3. P.S. I agree with blaise that “knock up” can be either passive or active!

4. Thanks, both. It is my mistake in 1dn. The answer is KNOCK UP and not, as I have indicated, KNOCKED UP. So the clue is fine.

5. BTW the relevant lines from If are

   If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
   And treat those two impostors just the same;

6. @Pierre- I cannot tell you that you are wrong as I think you are 100% correct.Glad I didnt waste any ink on it.Thanks for blog!

7. No problem with ‘knock up’ for me either. I parsed 4A as ears-hot – which they would be if you’d been on your mobile for too long.

   I was hoping for a parsing of kyrie, haymaking and monomania. It’s some comfort to know that I’m not alone in struggling.

   Perhaps Anto lives in a Peabody Trust house, and perhaps the trust is well known in London, but (s)he might want to bear in mind that not everyone lives in London. In fact the vast majority of the intended readership of the Guardian don’t live in London.

8. My first reaction to this puzzle was ‘poor Pierre!’

   I took too long choosing the words for my comment, so muffin’s said most of it. I’m also particularly intrigued by the clue for KYRIE. [I had a wonderful afternoon on Saturday, at a ‘Come and Sing Faure’s Requiem’, where we did sing ‘Kyrie’ several times! – but I can’t make much sense of the clue.]

   I thought 9ac and 16dn were quite good for a Quiptic.

9. 20d The relevant lines from If are:
   If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
   And treat those two impostors just the same;

10. Thanks Pierre – I quite liked 1 across, but it was mostly all downhill from there. How Anto’s puzzles can be considered suitable as Quiptics is totally beyond me.

    I was hoping MONOMANIA might have been a song (or “song”) by the Sex Pistols or some such, but I can’t find anything. Maybe the definition is supposed to be “Obsession with single”?

    20d is definitely about Kipling’s “If”: “If you can meet with triumph and disaster/And treat those two impostors both the same”.

    In 4ac I think the idea is that your EARS would be HOT. Assuming you move your phone from one side to the other…

    A KYRIE can “go on a bit” in a choral setting of the mass – e.g. the opening Kyrie Eleison of Bach’s B Minor Mass takes several (albeit glorious) minutes to cover those two words, but it’s a bit vague, to put it mildly.

11. We crossed, blaise!

12. Like Alastair and Andrew, I read 4ac as EARS HOT – but didn’t like it much.

    [My apologies to Fauré for messing up his accent.]

13. Haymaking is straightforward, isn’t it? You make hay in the summer so the cattle have something to eat in the winter when the grass is growing poorly. Hardly cryptic, though.

14. blaise @13 – cryptic enough to bamboozle everyone else who has joined in the discussion to date except you (and me now).

15. ‘… French free 10 across’ is BAY. Admit = LET IN, ‘backing’ could give IN LET, an INLET is a BAY…

16. more accurately, a BAY is a broad INLET.

17. Thanks Pierre and Anto.
    Agree with muffin@2 that Quiptic it ain’t.
    I could only link MONOMANIA to the album by the indie rock band, Deerhunter, but it’s such an unsatisfactory reference I think.

18. 6a. Could it be “Making hay while the sun shines”

    11a. The Oxford Dictionary of Music helps define Kyrie. The “prayer” is the Roman Catholic Mass, which is divided into 5 parts (a) Kyrie (b) Gloria (c) Credo (d) Benedictus (e) Agnus Dei.

    13a. Peabody was an American who settled in London in the Victoria ans used his fortune to establish “affordable” housing.

19. Yuk. The last Anto quiptic showed some improvement, but we are back on the downhill slide again.

    In addition to all the clues mentioned above, 14d is poor. Is anyone called Antonella? (Apologies to any Antonellas in crosswordland)

20. Re MONOMANIA, on second thoughts, I think it merely refers to the old records which were monoaural before stereophonic became the standard.

21. Shirl @19, Anto might be, it is not rare!

22. If an inlet is a bay, where does “backing French free” come in?

    How is “monomania” supposed to work? If “obsession” is the definition, then “single old record” is the cryptic part. I should think that would come out “monomono”, since there’s nothing in the second half to indicate mania.

23. Vaentine @22, ‘Admit backing’, could be LET IN (backing) giving IN LET, ‘…French free 10 across’ leaves BAY, a BAY is an INLET.

24. I blame the crossword editor – surely Rufus should appear in the Quiptic slot!

    This one was très difficile – especially the French connections.

25. Thanks Anto and Pierre.

    I think as blaise @1 & scchua @20 say MONOMANIA is just a cd relating to monaural records. Does Cookie @15 mean that because ‘ou’ is a French word, ‘… French free 10 across’ is BAY? If so, it’s pretty loose; otherwise I need further explanation. I guess as Andrew @10 says Kyrie Eleisons can go on a bit. The Peabody Trust is probably not well known by most but once STUBBY was used there was not much chance of another word.

    As others have said, definitely not a Quiptic in nature.

26. Surely monomania is straightforward. Whether it is a good crossword clue I leave others to decide.
    Google defines monomania as “obsessive enthusiasm for one thing” and mania as “obsession”, a mono is
    an old record. Doesn’t “obsession” do double duty?

27. Hi Robi @25

    I interpreted cookie’s comment @23 as you did [I didn’t understand it the first time round @15] – and share your opinion! And LET IN [backing] leads to NITEL, not INLET.

    For me, it isn’t a question of whether this is too ‘difficult’ for a Quiptic: I’d be questioning several of the clues if it were in the Cryptic slot. I agree with Pierre’s comment in his preamble.

28. If it walks like a duck etc and we have seen enough from this compiler to know for sure now I think. How can one become a compiler with such limited ability? There is no awareness of technique, no wit in the often clunky definitions, and etc etc. Please make it stop.

29. Btw as a quiptic it is pretty much impossible due to all the mistakes in the clues to solve.

30. blaise #13 – It crossed my mind, of course, that haymaking was just a straightforward definition but I was hoping there might be something cryptic I was missing.

31. It’s nice to get lots of comments on the Quiptic thread, but today they are all for the wrong reasons. In a reverse Schadenfreude kind of way, I’m pleased others found tricky (or impossible) the ones that I couldn’t explain for you.

    I agree with others that the editor’s got to sort this out. The score or so of people who regularly comment on this thread are clearly not judge and jury, but I would have thought that the opinions expressed over four puzzles from this setter should be enough to prompt him to pull the plug. There’s been little pleasure in solving them and no pleasure in blogging them, I’m sorry to say.

32. ‘Backing’ need not be the same as ‘reversal’. Imagine an advertisement board were being got out of a van, the right way up and the right side first coming into view, you would read the words in a backward order.

33. As many others have said this definitely doesn’t fit the brief for a Quiptic – though it seems to me that all new Guardian setters appear in the Quiptic slot initially, so maybe the editorial team should take at least some of the flak for that.

    Some of the clues were decent enough, IMO, but as evidenced by the comments above these were overshadowed by a number of problematic clues. I thought MONOMANIA was a pretty good CD – even though CDs in general are my least favourite, often making me think ‘yuk’, which was indeed my reaction to the HAYMAKING CD.

    KYRIE defeated me – having never come across the word before it is impossible to solve given that there is only a CD-ish allusion – breaking the convention of ‘clear wordplay for obscure words’.

    I agree with the comments on INLET – it isn’t LET IN ‘backing’, rather ‘switching parts’ – for me this is the one clue that doesn’t work at all.

    Overall I thought the compiler was trying to be ‘Boatman-esque’ in pushing the boundaries – & whilst some of the ideas were quite inventive, eg for TRIUMPH, the execution came across as very clunky, especially the surfaces – illustrating how difficult it is to be truly innovative in writing cryptic clues without appearing to be ‘trying too hard’.

34. ref 20d

    In a clue that is based on famous lines from a famous poem, I would expect the setter to use the same spelling as in the original. It is ‘impostor’, not ‘imposter’.

35. Sorry blaise, I hadn’t read your @1 before writing my@20.

36. Shirl @19
    The only Antonella I’ve come across is an important character in Mark Mills’s “Tha savage garden”. I recommend reading it – I thought it was very good.

37. @Van Winkle #14

    I had no trouble at all parsing “haymaking”, so less of the “everyone else”, please. 🙂 And, as someone who lives in New Jersey rather than London, I had no difficulty with “Peabody”.

    “Monomania” concerns the fact that old records were in mono. Again no problem.

    The only ones I had difficulty in parsing were “triumph” and “kyrie”; the former’s now explained (shame on me for not getting it, since I’ve actually edited [anon] a collection of Kipling’s stories!), and trenodia @18 has I think offered the correct explanation of the latter.

    I thought it was a great little crossword — far more fun than today’s Cryptic. A few of the clues (e.g., “retail”, “earshot”, “stubby”) had me chuckling aloud.

38. realthog #37 – I’m glad you enjoyed the puzzle. Could you explain just how you parsed ‘haymaking’ and ‘stubby’ please? Thanks.

39. Too many unsatisfactory clues, too many clues not suitable in a Quiptic, and too few enjoyable ones, at least for me. It was a slog, which I don’t expect from a Quiptic.

    Thanks, Pierre.

40. I’m slightly surprised about how many people haven’t come across “Kyrie” as a word. It’s very familiar to “musos” (horrid word!) as a Kyrie kicks off most choral masses (all, if you count requiems as separate).

41. The Oxford Dictionary of Music notwithstanding, the actual Kyrie prayer has only 6 words, so hardly that long.

    Kyrie eleison
    Christe eleison
    Kyrie eleison

42. STUBBS is just the plural of STUBB, George Stubbs family name was originally Stybb, a stybb being an area of ground covered by tree stumps. STUBBY would be as valid an adjective as STUBBSY. http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Stubbs

43. Cookie @42
    I’m not sure that it’s relevant what the Stubbs family used to be called – the painter was called Stubbs, so the “adjective” would have to be STUBBSY.

44. ………..or Stubbsian!

45. This was far too hard – I thought quiptics were meant for beginners like me? For the editors’ benefit, here are just a few of the clues I failed on:
    KYRIE – I know the word but the clueing is far too loose
    PEABODY – never heard of it, an obscure word and a charade clue – tricky combo for a quiptic
    RETAIL – I don’t understand the “docked” part?
    FREIGHT – how does ‘re’ = ‘on’?
    INLET – I have no idea how this works
    THEREFORE – I got the ‘drug’ = ‘e’ having seen this before but the synonyms for THERE and FOR were too much of a stretch for me
    FLANGE – Scots dialect in a quiptic – really? Especially hard for international solvers (I’m from NZ)

    I was feeling a bit downhearted after this – glad to see even the experienced solvers here also struggled.

46. matrixmania @45
    Two of those are OK. “Docking” is a (barbarous) process in which some breeds of dogs have their tails cut off or shortened. RE = ON as in “concerning”.

    I agree with the others (though “Auld Lang Syne” is fairly well known).

47. Just a thought on ANTONELLA – a name I’ve not come across and only got from the wordplay – could this be a self referential clue? Is Anto short for Antonella?

48. Does the Crossword Editor ever read these comments?

49. Matrixmania, #45, this wasn’t a great example of a quiptic. Go back through the archive if you want to practise – there are 829 others.

    ‘re’ = ‘on’? ‘Re’ = regarding so you might have a book ‘re accountancy’, which could also be a book ‘on accountancy’. It’s a bit weak, but there you are.

    As for ‘inlet’, you get ‘let in’ from the ‘admit’ part of the clue. ‘Backing’ tells you to swap the two parts around to give ‘inlet’. Well, it doesn’t (as has been pointed out above), but that’s how you’ve got to read it to make the clue work. Then you go to 10 across, whose answer is ‘bayou’ – you take the French bit of that out (the ‘ou’, meaning ‘where’) which leaves ‘bay’. And an ‘inlet’ is a ‘bay’.

50. Like others, I am not an Anto fan.
    But I was happy to give the setter another chance after his previous puzzles (of which the debut was the worst, IMO).
    Pierre’s preamble was of course not uplifting but I did give it a go tonight.

    Actually, I started off with some decent clues, a couple in each corner.
    But just as I thought, this time it isn’t that bad, things went downhill.
    Finding solutions took too long anyway, completely unsuitable for a Quiptic.
    Parsing a handful of solutions wasn’t easy either but after reading all the comments some may, at least, be justified.

    I will not repeat things here.
    But a setter who uses ‘over’ in 12ac wrongly (indeed, Pierre), who cherishes ‘his loss of heart’ for HS and ‘for final’ for R, will probably never enter my Top 10.
    In 19ac I cannot see why ‘as’ is there other than to make the ellipsis work.

    If I’m right, nobody mentioned 24ac (SUSHI).
    “Shuns chain not regularly ….” for choosing the odd letters in ‘Shuns chain’?
    I know, a bottle can be half empty and at the same time half full.
    Not choosing the regular letters leaves you with another set of regular letters – a paradox?
    But why on earth should you say ‘not regularly’ if ‘regularly’ would have done the trick?

    Eileen mentioned some good Quiptic clues.
    Yes, there really were two handfuls but (once more) not enough to call this a proper Quiptic.
    I’ll leave it up to others to decide whether this was even a proper crossword anyway.
    I have my thoughts.
    Like the editorial team has theirs, apparently.

    Thanks Pierre.

51. muffin 43, consider the name Flowers, as a nickname or adjective Flowery comes to mind, not flowersy.

52. Mmmm – not sure if I’ve ever heard of an adjective from someone called “Flowers”; I think it would be “Flowersy”. Think of the appalling tendency of football coaches to use nicknames to “seem less formal” by just adding a Y to the surname. I can’t bring to mind any recent ones, but “Greavesy” rather than “Greavey”, I think! I see your point, though.

53. Thank you Anto and Pierre.

    Agreed, this was not suitable for the Quiptic spot, but I did like the inventiveness. I especially appreciated the concept of ‘backing’. Perhaps this was not clued to satisfy most solvers, but there must be way to do it; why should we be stuck with only the concepts of ‘reversal’ or ‘switching parts’?

54. Because ‘backing’ doesn’t mean ‘cut the word in two and swap the parts’.

55. Of course it doesn’t, why should it mean cut the phrase (LET IN) in two and swap the parts? Too tired now to continue, tried to explain the concept @32. I’ll try again…

    Think of a van backing out of a crowded parking lot with an advertisement on its side, say ‘Persil washes whiter’, first you are going to read ‘whiter’, then ‘washes’, then ‘Persil’.

56. I know, the concept is quite nice – but I still think your imagery is a bit of a stretch (as it here would lead to ‘in let’ and not to ‘inlet’).
    The main problem is that Anto is apparently not capable of finding the right word to make his device work.
    Why should a solver try to find a justification while the setter didn’t do his homework?

    [It’s a bit like last week in the Philistine puzzle. There was a mistake in it (a missing L), annoying (not in the least for Philistine himself) but it can happen, and yet some solvers made an effort to come up with an explanation – why would one want to do that?]

57. Sure it would, but we know it must must correspond to ‘French free 10 across’ which is BAY.

58. Sil van den Hoek @50
    “Regularly” can mean “evenly”, so “Shuns chain […] regularly” could mean only the even letters and then “not regularly” would be only the odd letters. That is more specific than using “regularly” just to mean alternate letters, which could mean to take odd letters or even letters. I think that is clumsy, though.

59. First time I’ve done a Quiptic – sorry to go against the flow but I really enjoyed it! Liked the challenge and the playfulness and could parse almost all, even though I could see that perhaps some of the clueing was a little, shall we say, unconventional.

    Yes, the Kyrie does go on – it goes Kyrie EleisON, Christe EleisON over and over …

    And if even I, who know nothing about football have heard of Antonella Roccuzzo, surely some of you Messi fans would have heard of his wife?

60. No, frankly.

61. The answer to 26 across is NITEL, btw, and not INLET bejaysus as some commentators have attempted to impose. I can only suggest by all the saints that the grid was printed up wrongly or something, or backwards. Shame, but The Urndigaa* (an episode in Ulesssy* shurely) does it all the time begorrah. And it’s the French free that’s ‘backing’ begob! That’s a superb Free French joke if I ever did see such a one.

62. [Sil @56, is it certain that Philistine ‘missed’ an L? I thought he might have made the L in INFLICT do ‘double duty’,
    INFL AGRANTEDE LICT O, committing a misdeed on purpose as a joke, saying mea culpa.]

63. Once again not really well-suited for the Quiptic slot but as a puzzle I enjoyed it very much. Plenty of real crypticness, which many dislike, preferring, as they do,simple word substitution puzzles. I suppose that’s why it’s probably wrong for the Quiptic slot, where one expects beginners to get a workout in the simpler cluing techniques using reasonably obvious fodder etc.

    My favourite was 20d – these sort of literary references used to be one (one of many) of Araucaria’s little tricks. I admit that I was hammering away at it as if it was a conventional clue up until I had all the crossers in – surely that’s the idea – then when you twig “If” the penny drops.

    INLET I read as per Cookie. Backing you clearly have to do at the word level – not the letter level – literally it means what it says. “But usually …” doesn’t matter. Also the reference to 10a has a slight twist – you don’t just take the answer the way you usually might – you have to go *into* the clue itself and get rid of the French bit. Unusual – but once again literally and logically justified.

    As I recall, I wasn’t keen on the previous Antos but I can see Anto developing quite a following with this sort of thing – not in the Quiptic slot though.

    I would say that most main Guardian cryptic solvers enjoy originality – being taken by surprise – having your preconceptions challenged – but in the end recognising that the clue told a truth which you failed to see at first sight. I’m guessing what genuine beginner Quiptic solvers want but what they probably *need* is a more predictable workout so they they can develop the skills etc to attack the former.

64. Just to add a belated voice to the chorus: I felt that many of the clues in this puzzle did not measure up as a cryptic (at least not in any way I could parse), and regardless, it was poorly suited to any sensible definition of “quiptic”.

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