Guardian 27,110 / Pasquale

57 comments on “Guardian 27,110 / Pasquale”

1. Thanks Pasquale and Eileen

   I found this both a lot easier and a lot more enjoyable than a typical Pasquale (possibly these two are linked!). I got off to a good start with RAIL CARD (to give some starters) and DISARRAY being write-ins. Favourites were CENTAUR, MANUALLY and AESTIVAL.

   11 was an example of the sort of clue I don’t like – very much “guess the answer, then parse”.

   I have past history on this, so it may not be a surprise that I didn’t like “in general” in 23a.

   Unusual grid.

2. I always find Pasquale’s puzzles hard work, and this was no exception. My favourites were similar to muffin’s: CENTAUR, MANUALLY, BUSHEL and PIESPORTER. Thanks to P and E.

3. I like to think I have a fair vocabulary, but learnt some new words today, AESTIVAL, CLODPOLL and APERIENT. Did Pasquale chew a dictionary for breakfast?

   Thanks to setter and Eileen, you enjoyed it more than I.

4. Hard going today and failed to solve AESTIVAL, FRANCO and CAUSAL. The first of these was new to me, as were CLODPOLL, TRYSAIL and APERIENT – all of which needed a bit of help. And I learned today that VA is the Old Dominion so, no, I didn’t get VAGRANTS either. So not a terribly good showing, I’m afraid.

   Some very clever cluing for some here: I ape drufle @2: in nominating CENTAUR, BUSHEL, PIESPORTER and MANUALLY. I enjoyed solving YOGI BEAR and BROMANCE step by logical step. LESSOR was cunning in its misdirection so I only spotted the lurker third of fourth time of looking.

   I don’t particularly like the mechanism used to get CASUAL and I thought cloth=sheeting was a bit stretched.

   Thanks to Pasquale and Eileen for the hints which I needed today.

5. Doofs @ 3: Pasquale’s main diet is dictionaries – he always includes a few unusual words.

6. I enjoyed a lot of this although it had a bit of an “exam paper” feel about it. The clues for CENTAUR, PIESPORTER and MANUALLY were my favourites. I hadn’t heard of CLODPOLL, nor was I familiar with one of Scotland’s 8-million-odd islands called COLL, so this was hard yakka.
   Non- British party =ANC and dynasty= MING eh?
   Hmmm.
   Thanks to Pasquale and Eileen

7. Thanks to Don and Eileen.

   Fairly liberal use of word searches to get the last few – I didn’t know 6 or 7 words, so quite tough.

   Thanks for the parsing of BROMANCE, which escaped me.

   I did like Maradona’s hand of God, and, yes, I did fall for the non-anagram of ‘man a nag,’ and enjoyed the craftily hidden LESSOR.

8. Re Clodpoll – for those of us old enough to remember the Jennings and Darbyshire books from the 1950’s, Mr Wilkins was always calling Jennings “you stupid clodpoll”. Anthony Buckeridge the author said he got it from Shakespeare though I can’t find any reference to it there off hand though it is originally 16th century. Perhaps the Don can enlighten us?
   Thanks for the puzzle and the blog Eileen – thought you might remember Jennings – or is that too cheeky!

9. Thank you Pasquale and Eileen.

   Hard going but with many bright moments, DISARRAY, CENTAUR, CASUAL, LESSOR, MANUALLY and AESTIVAL making me smile. Luckily I remebered COLL from a Scottish Island puzzle a little while ago, but CLODPOLL was forgotten, chiz, and BROMANCE, PIESPORTER and The Old Dominion were new to me.

10. Wait a minute, wot fule, I am confusing Jennings and Molesworth, so CLODPOLL is new to me.

11. The OED shows CLODPOLL as Shakespearian:
    Shakespeare Twelfth Night (1623) iii. iv. 186 This Letter being so excellently ignorant..he will finde it comes from a Clodde-pole .

12. The earliest refernce I can find is from Wordwizard:
    “1605 “Not bred ‘mongst CLODS and CLODPOLES”—Ben Jonson”

13. On second thoughts, I think “clodpoles” might be referring to “clodhoppers”, so the Shakespearean reference @11 is most probably the first.

14. Perhaps this from Wordwizard clears the muddle:

    “It all started with the word CLOD which originally meant the coagulation of anything liquid such as a ‘clot of blood.’ In the early 15th century it came to mean a coherent mass or lump of any solid matter, e.g. a clod of earth, clay, loam, etc. Soon after the word began to be used figuratively as a person (1595) and also as a dull person (1579) or more specifically a thickhead, blockhead, clodpoll/clodpole (1601), clodpate (1636).”

15. The quote @12 comes from the Ben Jonson play Valpone (first performed 1605-06) iii. i. 9. The play was first published in 1607, before the first publication of Twelfth Night in 1623 (however Twelfth Night was first produced in 1601).

16. CENTAURS was my favourite, even though I didn’t manage to solve it – a clever and fun clue.

    Why does ‘Football food’ = Pies?

17. Crumplehorn @16

    Apparently having a hot pie during or after the game is traditional.

    A common football chant – particularly if one of the opposition is on the chubby side – is “Who ate all the pies?”

18. Found this a bit tough in places, with a few unfamiliar words, but quite an enjoyable challenge. VAGRANTS was last in. Liked CENTAUR.

    Thanks to Pasquale and Eileen

19. Thanks to Pasquale and Eileen. Like others I was slowed down by words new to me (TRYSAIL, APERIENT, PIESPORTER) and by the AE spelling of AESTIVAL though I did know BROMANCE and CLODPOLL. A challenge for me but enjoyable.

20. VAGRANTS was last in for me because of not thinking of VirginiA, but it was perfectly fair. In an
    Australian puzzle, PIES could be ‘Cricket food’, since they sell masses of them there to the Test and other crowds (or at least used to – perhaps Julie will know if this is still true).

21. We got buoyancy for 4d as a divers buddy does offer such a service. But it didn’t quite parse so we are grateful to you Eileen for the explanation. We found this tough going today. Thanks to everyone

22. This looked impossible initially, but slowly yielded, despite some unusual words. I thought “people to walk around” was a clumsy definition of vagrants. Thank you Pasquale and Eileen.

23. Thanks to setter and blogger.

    Can someone explain why lessor = letter?

24. A person letting property – i.e. renting out – can be called a “lessor”.

25. Hammer@23: lessor is the technical term for someone who leases a property; the person who takes the lease is the lessee. (I think)

26. Talking of guess the answer then parse, did anyone get ANC purely from non-British party?

27. Clodpoll and aperient seemed vaguely familiar rather than new to me, though I guarantee you that I’ve never used either.

    Piesporter and Mir as a commune, on the other hand, were quite new — I thought Mir was the Russian spacecraft, as well as being the Russian word for peace.

    Trysail also was new, I think, though generally nautical words are among my strong suits — I sailed with a friend thirty years ago from Boston to Paris, spending six weeks in Poole while waiting for the cross-channel wind to change. While we were living in Paris we went to a “Festival Estival” (early music, as I recall), so I thought of the word with its French spelling, which must be the American spelling too.

28. Quite a treasure chest! I knew CLODPOLL from the Jennings books and from Children’s Hour which dramatized them, although it wasn’t Mr Wilkins who used the term but the boys to one another! I came across MIR in the works of Karl Marx who thought that a Russian socialism would be based on these peasant communes. Unfortunately, by the time this was translated into Russian,the revolution was about twenty years old!
    I had quite a tussle with this as usual. I find Pasquale rather difficult although my vocabulary improves with each of his puzzles that I do. Liked AESTIVAL.
    Thanks Pasquale

29. Hi Shirley @8 [I’ve been out.]

    Not too cheeky at all: I do remember Jennings [but from listening to Children’s Hour, rather than from reading the books] – and I should have remembered ‘Twelfth Night’, too!

    Valentine @27 – I had to look up MIR and found this: https://www.britannica.com/topic/mir-Russian-community

30. Peter Aspinwall @28 – I hadn’t seen your comment when I wrote mine.

31. Okay, so I’m probably the only person here who saw Old Dominion and immediately thought “Virginia?” Indeed, I spent a second or two trying to make that be the answer.

    Otherwise, I shared others’ difficulties. Wound up having to cheat on several at the end, but mostly from having run out of time. Would not have gotten AESTIVAL or CLODPOLL in any case…

32. Clodpoll also in King Lear and Cymbeline, apparently (with slightly variant spellings)

    I thought some of these clues were very clever, if only retrospectively, but I thought that “people to wander about” was a bit weird as a definition.

    Mrs southofnonorth worked out aperient and trysail without having heard of either, so, fair enough!

    Thanks to setter and blogger

33. southofnonorth @32, also in Troilus and Cressida as ‘clodpoles’.

34. Thanks both,

    It does seem the majority of citations are to ‘clodpole’ rather than ‘clodpoll’, which is more logical, with ‘poll’ standing for ‘head’. I needed a wild card search to get ‘bromance’ and still didn’t get the parsing and ‘going by’ meaning ‘after’ held me up in 4ac.

    Nevertheless, by no means a walk in the park but a pleasant challenge for all that. I hadn’t seen ‘disarray’ clued as in 6ac before, so it had the biggest tick of the day for me.

35. @Tyngewick
    the parsing for BROMANCE is:
    “buddies have this” =def
    non-British party = ANC (African national Congress)
    in British (B) city (Rome)
    There are probably a few million combinations for global political party acronyms of 2 or 3 letters to go inside a city with 4 or 5 letters and I didn’t get it, either

36. Thanks muffin @17 – I never heard of these pie and footy traditions despite being surrounded much of my life by ardent supporters, could be cos I tend to block my ears perhaps…
    cheers

37. baerchen @35 and Tynegewick @34 – and Bodycheetah @26

    BROMANCE was my last one in, I think, from the crossers and the [guessed, as I intimated] definition. B ROME seemed obvious for the British city, which left only ANC to account for. It certainly wasn’t an answer built up from scratch from the wordplay.

    13dn has been bugging me all day. In my haste to get the blog posted, I thought I could justify ‘people who’ [[which would make a viable definition] as ‘people to’ [essential to the surface]. I’ve been playing around with this and can only come up with examples where ‘to’ indicates purpose/intention/function, e.g. waiters are people ‘to wait’, or, in the passive sense, consultants are people ‘to consult’. I hoped Pasquale might drop in, as he sometimes does, to clarify / justify this but perhaps the queries about this have been overshadowed by the intriguing discussion re CLODPOLL and its variant spellings. 😉

38. For 13d, would “people who wander around” have worked better? It still makes grammatical sense.

    I knew that I had come across CLODPOLL before, but I am grateful to be reminded of Jennings and Darbyshire (who I always preferred to that troublemaker William).

39. Thanks to Pasquale and Eileen.

    Whatever about Jennings and co (who passed me by) anyone who was a kid enjoying Yogi Bear would, like me, now be pushing on a bit and the clue maybe misses a generation and a bit. Nonetheless enjoyable for all that – particularly liked CENTAUR and DISARRAY.

40. I found this crossword hard but fair.

    4DN: I thought of bromance but opted for buoy(anc)y, as bromance fitted the parsing but seemed a bit far fetched to be a legitimate solution.

41. muffin 38@
    “For 13d, would “people who wander around” have worked better? It still makes grammatical sense.”

    As I said @37, ‘people who’ makes sense in the definition but none, really, in the surface.
    I’m going to bed now. 😉

42. I reluctantly disagree, Eileen – I think “who” is just as good (or bad) in the surface.

43. 3d was a treat

44. Tricky stuff from Pasquale.

    As others found, the new terms/words caused me a few stumbles … arras, trysail, mir, aperient, piesporter, old dominion, clodpoll and aestival all slowed me down and I spent as much time on Wikipedia as I did on the puzzle itself!

    I didn’t like CAUSAL as it’s virtually an indirect anagram. But I did enjoy BROMANCE and CENTAUR immensely.

    PS – there’s not a lot of football (soccer) here in NZ but when we go to watch rugby we usually eat chips and hotdogs!

45. I started this unaided and had a most enjoyable but challenging time cracking the many excellent clues. I decided to try and finish unaided too, but I had to give up on 14d, which is a clue I could never solve anyway: I got as far as –LODPO–L, but both COLL and CLODPOLL are unfamiliar to me. (I have claimed before on this site that I like learning new things, which is a normal occurrence with a Pasquale puzzle, but what I like less is getting two in one go!)

    I had the same misgivings as Mark @4 about CAUSAL and SHEETING, but these were not enough to spoil the positive experience. The puzzle took longer than a Guardian crossword usually does, but I stuck at it because I found it so rewarding. I have many favourites, all of which have been highlighted already.

    Many thanks to Pasquale and Eileen.

46. I thought I was going to manage a pre-midnight posting but enjoyed reading the comments so much that the clock has struck its maximum again.
    A real struggle for me today with much guessing and checking and Mrs W providing LOI – causal. Centaur was favourite, along with aestival both for the clueing and learning. Thank you Eileen for the usual high class blog and Pasquale for the challenge – I haven’t read many “it’s getting too easy” comments in the last few days!

47. Thanks for the link to “mir”, Eileen. I’d looked it up but didn’t find that site. The passage surprised me first because the peasants apparently had a way to manage land collectively while they were serfs, and second because they “reverted” to collectivism after the revolution — surely they had no choice in the matter!

    mrpenney — your fellow Yank here also thought of Virginia. I assumed the word would begin with VA, but didn’t get any further for much too long.

    I’m still enjoying this puzzle and this blog after all thee hours.

48. Another difficult one for me, so that is two in a row that I failed to complete. I gave up on the NE corner – failed to solve 6a, 8/21, 2d, 3d (still do not understand this one).

    I solved but could not parse or fully parse 13d, 25a, 2d, 4d.

    Of the ones that I solved, new words were TRYSAIL, APERIENT, CLODPOLL. Also never heard of PIESPORTER or COLL island.

    Thanks Pasquale and Eileen

49. Hi michelle @48 – for 3dn, you need to know this story:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina_v_England_(1986_FIFA_World_Cup)#.22Hand_of_God.22_goal

    You can see the goal here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ccNkksrfls

50. “Mir” is a wonderful word: can mean “peace”, “world”, or “commune”. Giving the elegant “Mir miru” – “Peace to the world”.

51. Bear @50 — you sound pretty brainy to me!

    Eileen @49 or anybody — I thought using your hand in football was forbidden. How can Maradona’s goal count if he broke the rules? (I should have thought to ask this earlier.)

    I’d never heard of the hand of God goal, but I assembled the word was MAN + U + ALLY anyway.

52. Valentine @51

    “I thought using your hand in football was forbidden. How can Maradona’s goal count if he broke the rules? (I should have thought to ask this earlier.)”

    It is! I found more background and discussion here: http://worldsoccer.about.com/od/internationals/a/Diego-Maradonas-Hand-Of-God-Goal.htm

53. I knew clodpole so entered it as I didn’t know cole or coll as an island. This made causal unparsable. I should have got AESTIVAL but was sidetracked by too many other possibilities. I suspect that Virginia stopped being called the Old Dominion before it was abbreviated as VA. Anyway, as none what I remembered as former dominions fitted, that was a miss for me.
    Thanks to Pasquale and Eileen.

54. Sheeting is the cloth that you buy to make sheets!

55. Did no one else come unstuck at 16D, which leads equally well to the answer BESTIVAL? B (bar opening) + ESTIVAL (in summer). Definition = “a gala”. No? Oh well ….

56. Therefore this letter, being so excellently ignorant, will breed no terror in the youth; he will find it comes from a clodpole. Twelfth Night 3:4. Sir Toby Belch speaking

57. mrpenney @31 – I immediately thought of Virginia as well, but since it never occurred to me to abbreviate it, I dismissed it out of hand. I hate it when I do that! I also put SARRA in 6 ac about 5 times before I realized (realised) that I was on the right track.

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