Guardian 26,740 – Shed

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An interesting puzzle from Shed – mostly quite straightforward (with a large number of reversals) , but with a couple of unfamiliar words, and I took longer than I should have in the SE corner. Thanks to Shed.

 
 
 
 
 
 
Across
8. ENTANGLE Symbol not beginning to draw into web (8)
[P]ENTANGLE
9. HIATUS Break South American state holding one back (6)
S + I in UTAH, all reversed
10. TILL Cultivate cash carrier (4)
Double definition
11. AUSTRINGER Bird keeper‘s cartel breaking wind (10)
RING in AUSTER (the South wind) – an austringer is a keeper of goshawks. Perhaps a bit unfair to use one rather obscure word (auster) in the wordplay for another
12. PARCEL Jump back, receiving Catholic item in post (6)
RC in reverse of LEAP
14. STARFISH Supposing Romeo’s turned in hidden treasure to sea dweller (8)
(IF R) reversed in STASH
15. MALAISE Tom, perhaps, keeping sloths in discomfort (7)
AIS in MALE. The AI is the three-toed sloth, well known to Scrabble players
17. MERCURY Slightly drunk, admitting copper’s an element (7)
CU in MERRY
20. SPAGYRIC Involving transmutation of racy pigs? (8)
(RACY PIGS)* – relating to alchemy
22. POTATO Root around books on summit (6)
Reverse of OT ATOP
23. PULLED PORK Trendy grub was first to be garnished with mash (or kale, initially) (6,4)
LED (was first) in PULP OR K[ale]
24. CUBA New recruit to a country (4)
CUB + A
25. TANNIN Something in wine bar turning brown outside (6)
INN reversed in TAN
26. GANGRENE Endless vigour on horseback causing decay (8)
Reverse of ENERG[y] + NAG
Down
1. INTIFADA Woman prepared to rise, supporting popular uprising (8)
IN (popular) + reverse of ADA FIT
2. PAIL Pothead to be sick in bucket (4)
P[ot] + AIL
3. AGNAIL Climbing plant, climbing, snags good strip of skin (6)
G in reverse of LIANA
4. PERSIST Name-dropping spinster resolved to keep going (7)
SPINSTER* less N
5. SHORTAGE Want coast to receive label (8)
TAG in SHORE
6. MAGNIFICAT Hymn to periodical pong curtailed by one sort of scanner (10)
MAG (periodical) + NIF[F] + I + CAT (scanner)
7. DURESS Pressure garment protecting centre of wound (6)
[wo]U[nd] in DRESS
13. CHANGELING Swapped baby cherub in divinatory system — one’s gone missing (10)
ANGEL in [I] CHING (Chinese divination)
16. STRIDENT Second deterrent, allegedly loud (8)
S + TRIDENT (missile system)
18. RATSBANE Ten Arabs affected by pesticide (8)
(TEN ARABS)*
19. SCROOGE Tightwad‘s self-esteem Tolkienian baddies lifted (7)
Reverse of EGO + ORCS
21. PLURAL More than one friend securing draw, mostly (6)
LUR[E] in PAL
22. PUKING Dog keeps family from throwing up (6)
KIN in PUG
24. CURL Bit of hair left to hound (4)
CUR + L

47 comments on “Guardian 26,740 – Shed”

  1. Thanks Shed and Andrew

    Three unfamiliar words – AGNAIL ironically as I now know what to call what I’ve got at the moment (and perhaps gain more sympathy?) Mostly fairly clued, though. Favourites were CHANGELING and HIATUS.

    I don’t think “from” works in 22d.

    One major howler; although it could be argued that all plants have roots, the bit of the potato plant that we eat is a tuber – a swollen stem rather than root.

  2. Oh I meant to add: does the “allegedly” go with the “deterrent” in 16d? Political comment if it does (though I would agree with the sentiment!)

  6. Thanks Andrew.

    Four unfamiliar words today: AUSTRINGER, SPAGYRIC, AGNAIL and RATSBANE. AGNAIL also had a word I didn’t know in the clue LIANA.

    I did this on-line and managed to hit the REVEAL THIS button twice instead of the CHECK THIS one; could they not place them further apart?

  8. Thanks Shed and Andrew for an enjoyable puzzle and a helpful blog..

    I only knew an AGNAIL as a ‘hangnail’ (apparently an alteration of ‘agnail’ influenced by ‘hang’), AUSTRINGER rang a very faint bell, but SPAGYRIC was new or long forgotten.

  12. [Dave Ellison, no, there were trees with plenty of lianas on the other side, but there was a hippos’ pool I would have been washed into if I had let go.]

  13. Thanks both.

    Took forever over AUSTRINGER & POTATO. The latter I felt to be a bit clumsy.

    Cookie @9 Really?!? What an astonishing past you must have had. Were you a jungle foundling raised by a troop of baboons, perchance?

    Muffin @3 Like your wording better. Wonder why he added the “from”.

    Nice weekend, all.

  14. Thanks Andrew and Shed
    An entertaining puzzle. Lots of obscure words but generally extremely well clued.
    Cookie @9. I remember a pool. I used to pass through Bukoba in the late 50s and visited one not far away. When were you there?

  15. Good puzzle! I agree that the clue for AUSTRINGER was a bit iffy; and I had to look up SPAGYRIC and RATSBANE. Favourites were SCROOGE, HIATUS, MERCURY and GANGRENE (re 26a: I spent a long time trying to come up with a word that ended in RIDING, for ‘on horseback’). Many thanks to Shed and Andrew.

  16. I thought SPAGYRIC was another slightly dubious clue – either “transmutation” is doing double duty, or there’s no proper anagrind (read straightforwardly, the clue suggests a synonym of “involving”). Not really fair for such an obscure word in the daily. Other than that, some lovely clues. Thanks Shed and Andrew.

  17. Very enjoyable, my enjoyment probably helped by the fact that I did know all the potential ‘unknowns’ apart from the alchemy in 20a.

    Thanks to Shed and Andrew

  18. [tupu, we were in Ankole for three years from 1965 until Major Juma came down to Mbarara with the Simba Battalion and things started to get difficult for the local people. The hippo pool was a small one at the downstream end of the island, about 10 hippos.]

  19. Enjoyable but tough, with the NE staying empty for a long time and AUSTRINGER my LOI. That and SPAGYRIC were new words for me. I did dig out “auster” from the back of my mind, though, once I had the crossers. Favourites were MERCURY, PULLED PORK and CHANGELING.

    Thanks to Shed and Andrew.

  20. Muffin @1
    Although a potato is a tuber to a botanist or gardener, cooks tend to categorise vegetables based on different characteristics, and I think many would class potatoes as a root vegetable for culinary purposes.

  21. jennyk @20
    I sorry, that doesn’t make any sense. How can someone “class potatoes as a root vegetable for culinary purposes” when they aren’t roots?
    Though I remember now that the EU classifies carrots as fruit, because the Spanish make jam from them!

  22. ………….and the clue says “root”, not “vegetable classed as a root for culinary purposes” 🙂

    I agree that “root” does give an excellent surface to the clue.

  23. Shed goes well into Pasquale territory here. Still, the rule is held to – unfamiliar words have gettable clues (I didn’t have a problem with either the RING or the AUSTER, though I’m not at all sure how an entire cartel can break wind).

    But I always find some way to create difficulty, and this time it was misremembering the sloth as an AY not an AI, which did 15a no good at all, that and missing the INTIFADA.

  24. muffin @21
    Because they are treated like a root vegetable for cooking most of the time? It’s the physical properties and the taste which count for cooks, not the botany.

    That’s not the only anomaly, of course. Rhubarb is treated as a fruit. Tomatoes, courgettes, aubergines, peppers, cucumber, beans, avocado and all the squashes are fruits, so how about combining some of those for a fruit salad or a nice fruit crumble with custard?

  25. 3dn AGNAIL is clearly clued but a hangnail is never a strip of skin but a strip of semi-detached nail (keratin?) surely?

  26. As the late lamented Miles Kington said, “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”

    Thanks for the blog, Andrew and Shed for a very enjoyable puzzle come back soon!

  27. What a lovely coincidence! Just back from a morning hunting ais with my spagyric austringer, Mr Ratsbane. Didn’t catch anything, so relaxing with a packet of Butterkist’s new pulled pork popcorn. Trendy grub!

  29. Enjoyed this one a lot – found it pretty difficult but in a lot of cases it is difficult to say why in retrospect, which for me is one of the marks of a fine crossword. Last in was MALAISE, and I had the NE half almost complete while the SW was almost blank. SPAGYRIC was new to me.

    Thanks to Shed and Andrew

  30. Thanks to Shed and Andrew. I did know RATSBANE and AUSTER but new to me were AGNAIL and SPAGYRIC. As to AUSTRINGER, in Shakespeare’s First Folio the first appearance of an otherwise unnamed courtier in All’s Well That Ends Well, 5.1 is “Enter a gentle astringer.” Subsequent editors often emend that signal to “Enter a gentleman, a stranger,” but at least one RSC production in Stratford included two attendants carrying birds from a local falconry. I don’t know if the goshawks or whatever made the journey when the show transferred to London. I much enjoyed this puzzle.

  31. AUSTRINGER was my LOI. I didn’t know AUSTER but RING was fairly obvious for CARTEL. SPAGYRIC was new to me too. Overall I thought this rather good even if it did take longer than it probably should have.
    Thanks Shed.
    P.S. I have never swung across anything on a liana – or indeed anything else! Ah me.

  32. Has the success of Helen Macdonald’s H IS FOR HAWK been so quickly forgotten that Austringer is now an unfamiliar word? Not that I got it; it was Auster that held me back. Though I did know that once also.

  33. Thanks all. The first definition of ‘root’ in my now admittedly slightly dated edition of Chambers is ‘(ordinarily and popularly) the underground part of a plant, esp when edible’, which I’d say includes potatoes pretty unequivocally, even if the hoi polloi are wrong from a scientific perspective. In 20a, ‘transmutation’ was indeed intended to do double duty as both part of the answer and part of the crypting. I agree that muffin @3 suggests a genuine improvement to 22d.

  34. Thanks for dropping in Shed (and for acknowledging me @3!)

    Someone said in “the other place” that it was careless of Chambers to define root as “the underground part of a plant, esp when edible” without saying “except potatoes, which are stems”.

  35. Surely the “underground part of a plant” usage long pre-dates the more specific botanical usage. It is therefore the more ‘authentic’ one and the problematic usage is the botanical one. It was the botanists who chose to divide up the underground parts into different categories but then perversely chose to use the accepted general term for just one of those categories.

  36. No problem with POTATO or the other ones intersecting 18d.
    18d, the last one in, had to be RATSBANE (never heard of it).
    Initially, I thought of RATBEANS …. 🙂

    We found this puzzle slightly harder than the usual offerings from Shed.
    A bit unfortunate that two ‘obscure’ solutions (3d/11ac) crossed each other.
    Purely from the construction, I went for the right words (while Beth, my PinC, wasn’t sure at all).

    For a while I considered ‘dustringer’ at 11ac as a ‘duster’ can also be a kind of wind.
    A lot of reversal clues today, of which 22ac wasn’t the best (I agree with William @13).

    An enjoyable end of the week.
    Many thanks to Andrew & Shed.

  37. For me it was a bit of a stinker through & through. Though it didn’t help when playing around with “racy pigs” @20A I came up with SPYRAGIC. I looked it up and found it was an alchemical process involving herbalism. Job done!…I thought.Two anagrams from the same source on the same subject!!!!

  38. Oh good grief. I’d never heard of SPYRAGIC either, and it isn’t in Chambers, but it clearly does exist and makes for an equally valid answer to the clue. And there was me thinking I could justify the use of a rather obscure word by clueing it with a nice simple anagram.

    And it’s probably too late now, but I did mean to say to muffin @2: wouldn’t 16d be a more politically loaded clue if I *hadn’t* said ‘alleged’?

  39. Hi again Shed
    I took your “deterrent, allegedly” as expressing doubts about its effectiveness. More politically controversial than just “deterrent” I thought.

  40. muffin @39
    There is doubt about its effectiveness. Omitting the “alleged” appears to accept that it does act as a deterrent. Including it is appropriate, leaving open both both possibilities – that it is and that it isn’t. Surely that is less controversial then coming down on either side.

  42. Thanks Andrew and Shed.

    Tough? – Yes.

    Doable? – Yes.

    Quite a lot of new words to take in one go – both in the make-up and the answers. But all fairly clued and I just hope I don’t forget AUSTRINGER, AUSTER, SPAGYRIC, AGNAIL or ICHING – how to work them into daily conversation will be a challenge – but I enjoy fair challenges.

    Whether Trudent is or isn’t a deterrent is part of the point isn’t it? Those of us old enough might remember the conversation between Hacker and Humphrey Appleby when Jim was given ‘the button’ – something along the lines of ‘the Russians are probably certain that Jim wouldn’t use it but they’re not certain about the probability…..’

    Liked PULLED PORK – but who doesn’t?

  43. Hi Hamish

    If the inestimable Sir Humphrey is going to be quoted on this site, let’s get his words exact: 😉

    “Yes … they probably know that you probably wouldn’t. But they can’t certainly know.”

    followed by:

    “Yes, but even though they probably certainly know that you probably wouldn’t, they don’t certainly know that although you probably wouldn’t, there is no probability that you certainly would.”

    My favourite TV series of all time. I’ve seen every episode at least thrice and read the books based on the original scripts a similar number of times. Thanks for the reminder of it.

  45. I managed to see some episodes on various other people’s televisions. I liked it less when Jim became Prime Minister, I think because he had to deal in some way with actual world problems, and part of the original charm was the staggering triviality of the issues Jim had to address.

  46. Shed says:
    November 28th, 2015 at 7:25 pm
    Oh good grief. I’d never heard of SPYRAGIC either, and it isn’t in Chambers, but it clearly does exist and makes for an equally valid answer to the clue. And there was me thinking I could justify the use of a rather obscure word by clueing it with a nice simple anagram.

    I suspect that SPYRAGIC is a misspelling of SPAGYRIC that has propagated through the web.
    After a few minutes of googling, I was only able to find uses of SPYRAGIC from a few recent sources in reviews or discussions of SPAGYRIC things.

  47. Thanks Shed and Andrew

    I thought that I would be a long last … and here we have a post from only a day ago !! Did do this one a while ago, but only now got around to the final parse and check.

    Found it a typically enjoyable puzzle as I have found this particular blog an interesting diversion with the history of the African lifestyles of a couple of the posters along with “Yes, Minister!”

    Think that SPAGYRIC and MAGNIFICAT were the only new words, but there were a lot of clues where electronic help was needed to prise out / verify the answer. A lot of creative clueing (maybe the reversals a little overdone) that generated a lot of pleasure when finally getting the right word.

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