Too many clues made me smile to mention them all – particular favourites were 25ac, 27ac, and 10dn. Thanks Picaroon
| Across | ||
| 1 | COMMA BUTTERFLY | Colourful creature, clever to follow goat (5,9) |
| a COMMA immediately follows the definition; plus FLY=”clever” after BUTTER=”goat” | ||
| 8 | WORST | Paradoxically, it could be best! (5) |
| to WORST=to “best”=’to defeat’/’to get the better of’ – “Paradoxically”, as best and worst are usually opposites | ||
| 9 | IMPUDENT | I heartlessly intended to eat sweet, liking sauce (8) |
| definition uses “sauce” as in impertinent behaviour I; plus ME[a]NT=”intended” with the heart a removed, around PUD=”sweet” |
||
| 11 | RUN INTO | Hit erotic author interrupting tour abroad (3,4) |
| Anaïs NIN [wiki] is the “erotic author”, inside (tour)* | ||
| 12 | OREGANO | Love old sandwiches middle daughter leaves for cook (7) |
| O=”love” and O[ld]; around REGAN=”middle daughter” of King Lear | ||
| 13 | LAMIA | She-devil, one punching priest (5) |
| I=”one” inside LAMA=Buddhist “priest” | ||
| 15 | MANGANESE | Element in language of oriental comics? (9) |
| =a chemical element MANGA are “oriental comics” plus -[N]ESE as a suffix associated with languages or nationalities |
||
| 17 | LIGHTEN UP | Unwind fuse in the plug (7,2) |
| (in the plug)* | ||
| 20 | MOTIF | Spun suit jacket of optimum design (5) |
| Reversal/”Spun” of: FIT=”suit” plus O[ptimu]M | ||
| 21 | OPIATES | Drugs ring criminals run is gone (7) |
| O=”ring”; plus PI[r]ATES=”criminals” minus r[un] | ||
| 23 | PORTEND | Left back to warn of trouble (7) |
| PORT=”Left” plus END=”back” | ||
| 25 | SIDEREAL | Where Galácticos played, following team of stars (8) |
| the Galácticos were star footballers for REAL Madrid in the early 2000s, after SIDE=”team” | ||
| 26 | CHOIR | Collection of voices paper’s reported (5) |
| sounds like ‘quire’=”paper” | ||
| 27 | ROCKET LAUNCHER | What shoots and leaves diner eats first (6,8) |
| ROCKET=salad “leaves”; plus LUNCHER=”diner” around A=”first” letter surface alludes to the joke about a panda that ‘eats, shoots and leaves’ |
||
| Down | ||
| 1 | COWARDLY LION | He wanted bottle of cordial, only laced with whiskey (8,4) |
| =from The Wizard of Oz; definition uses “bottle” as in courage (cordial only)* around W[hiskey] |
||
| 2 | MORON | One’s thick slice of ham or onion (5) |
| Hidden in [ha]M OR ON[ion] | ||
| 3 | ATTENDANT | Waiter quite slowly cut drinks off the booze tab (9) |
| ANDANT[e]=”quite slowly” cut short; around/”drinks” TT=teetotal=”off the booze”; plus E[cstasy]=tab[let] | ||
| 4 | UNIFORM | The same two places to find students (7) |
| students can be found at UNI or in a school FORM | ||
| 5 | TOP-DOWN | Tense and unhappy about work led by the bosses (3-4) |
| T[ense] and DOWN=”unhappy” around OP[us]=”work” | ||
| 6 | RIDGE | Bar‘s free for one turning up (5) |
| RID=”free”; plus E.G.=”for one [example]”, reversed/”turning up” | ||
| 7 | LAND AGENT | What lady seeking partner hopes to do for estate manager (4,5) |
| LAND A GENT=”What lady seeking partner hopes to do” | ||
| 10 | ROGER FEDERER | Court favourite, it’s understood, dined with queens (5,7) |
| ROGER=”it’s understood” over radio communications; FED ER ER=”dined with queens” | ||
| 14 | MAGNIFICO | Big cheese spread coming and a round provided (9) |
| =an Italian noble (coming a)*, around IF=”provided” |
||
| 16 | ARMORICAN | Old Breton, a Republican, one Macron irritated (9) |
| A plus R[epublican] plus (I Macron)* where I=”one” | ||
| 18 | NASCENT | Budding head of narcissus on a bouquet (7) |
| N[arcissus] plus A SCENT=”a bouquet” | ||
| 19 | PAPILLA | Old man dressing badly shows fleshy bulge (7) |
| =a nipple-like protuberance PAPA=”Old man”, around ILL=”badly” |
||
| 22 | TWERK | Two short English kings behave provocatively (5) |
| =see [wiki] TW[o]; plus E[nglish]; plus R[ex] and K[ing]=”kings” |
||
| 24 | ENOCH | I turned on taps for patriarch (5) |
| =one of the patriarchs from the book of Genesis ONE=”I”, reversed/”turned”; plus C[old] and H[ot] taps |
||
Thanks for your parsing of 3 down, Manehi. Nice puzzle.
Picaroon always a pleasure.And thanks manehi.
Wonderful. OREGANO my favourite, but it was a damn close run thing.
Thanks to Picaroon and manehi
Wonderful indeed. The second appearance of the ‘middle daughter’ today
Thanks to Picaroon for a great, less tricky than I expected, crossword – I always love a ‘hidden in plain sight’ comma clue.. Thanks too to manehi
Thanks, manehi. Yet again, I share your favourites but must add 1 and 12ac and 3 and 16dn. [I could go on…]
Many thanks, as ever, to Picaroon for a fun start to a wet morning.
Thanks Picaroon and manehi
I always like a Picaroon puzzle, but I thought that he was a bit loose in places here – “bar” for RIDGE, “middle daughter” for REGAN (I tried G first!). 1d is meaningless unless you know The Wizard of Oz.
I didn’t know LAMIA, but worked it out from the clue. Conversely I got ATTENDANT from definition and crossers, but didn’t see the parsing.
Favourite was LAND AGENT.
btw Bretons claim that “a l’americaine” recipes should really be “a l’amoricaine” – i.e. Breton-style. Unfortunately it seems that they are wrong! See here.
I’d always thought that Whiskey in the 1d context was spelt without the E. But it isn’t. Whoever invented the NATO phonetic alphabet must have been Irish.
Seeing ‘goat’ in the clue for 1a, I immediately thought of ROGER FEDERER (often called the Greatest Of All Time)! And then he appears as 10d. Synchronicity, or what? Lovely puzzle, as others have said. My favourites were ENOCH, MOTIF, IMPUDENT and MANGANESE. Many thanks to Picaroon and manehi.
…or American, Gladys!
Re my comment @ 9 above: on second thoughts, I bet Picaroon put the goat in 1ac after thinking of Roger Federer: “Roger F > greatest of all time > goat > butter > comma butterfly.” Picaroon, please confirm or deny!
Cheered me right up. Thanks Picaroon and Manehi. I put in unisons at 4d. Of course it didn’t quite work. It led me to sinhalese at 15ac, and then here to fifteensquared to be put right on both counts.
Thank you Picaroon and manehi (especially for the full parsing of ATTENDANT).
Lots of fun clues, that for LAND AGENT was my favourite, closely followed by those for COMMA BUTTERFLY, OREGANO, ROGER FEDERER and ROCKET LAUNCHER.
Another top class puzzle – Picaroon is always worth looking forward to. Particularly liked LAND AGENT, COWARDLY LION and MANGANESE. RIDGE was last in. LAMIA was familiar from the song on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, which must have been inspired by Keats. PAPILLA and ARMORICAN were less familiar…
Thanks to Picaroon and manehi
That was fun! I particularly enjoyed the four long answers around the periphery (especially 1a and 1d), but there were plenty of good ones in the interior of the puzzle as well. LAND AGENT brought a chuckle when the penny dropped, and I liked the anagram for LIGHTEN UP. My LOI was MANGANESE, only because it took me awhile to figure out the parsing (which I enjoyed, once I got it). Thanks to Picaroon and Manehi.
Thanks Picaroon and manehi
Most enjoyable. As one of my daughters is passionate about Japanese I got 15ac quickly (Hokusai was one of the first artists to draw manga: only later did manga become associated with comic books). I liked the self reference in 21ac too.
Well.
After 20 mins I nearly gave up. But so pleased I finished it even if I would never have parsed attendant in a million years.
Thanks to Picaroon and manehi. Very enjoyable. I too needed help parsing ATTENDANT and did not know AMORICAN or PAPILLA so had to check via Google.
Had to guess RIDGE because I couldn’t parse it,but most of this went in fairly quickly. ROGER FEDERER took a while as did OREGANO. I did like LAND AGENT and COMMA BUTTERFLY.
Nice puzzle.
Thanks Picaroon.
I suppose ‘two short’ is not bad for this one. I missed RIDGE and OREGANO: I suppose a sand-BAR is a sort of ridge – and it’s a long time since I read King Lear.
Where does FLY mean clever? Not in my vocabulary, must be dialect. And a clue which depends on where a particular punctuation mark is – well I don’t know what Ximenes would have had to say about that!
My ‘never heard of that’ list is substantial. Includes NIN, MANGA, LAMIA, GALACTICOS, TWERK. Plenty of Wiki work!
As to ATTENDANT …. bad enough having to endure ‘E’ for ecstasy=drug in so many recent crosswords. But to then doubly-encrypt the E into “Tab” – isn’t that a step too far?
To sum up. Not my favourite – I’d have said that even if I’d finished it.
I’m still not convinced by “bar” – RIDGE – I did think of a sandbar, but that;s a very obscure use of “bar” (generally at an estuary mouth). Any clarifications?
Re Muffin’s comment – all clues are meaningless if you don’t know the reference!
Not entirely so, Bill – many clues just need knowledge of words, rather than GK references.
As ever a nice crossword from Picaroon.
27ac has a great idea but to make the surface work there should really be a comma after ‘leaves’.
Which, of course, was the point of the ‘joke’.
muffin and baerchen, have another look at comments 17 and 18 in Anto’s Quiptic blog.
25ac is OK?
[For me, it is]
Thanks, manehi.
Sil @24
Not seeing your point. I don’t see any problem with SIDEREAL (except possibly the GK “Real”).
muffin, it’s nothing against you and I tried to formulate it in a ‘friendly’ way.
Anto clued THE BORDER by ‘Where customs are’.
This was criticised (not by you but you were part of the short discussion) because, apparently, it should have been AT THE BORDER.
Now, Picaroon’s doing the same thing: ‘Where Galacticos played’ for REAL and everything’s fine.
That’s what I meant.
People [including me] don’t like Anto and do like Picaroon.
Even so.
Got it, Sil – I think O agree.
I not O of course!
One of the Pirate’s better puzzles. Excellent.
I don’t agree with any of the criticisms on here.
For instance Muffin seems to have gone crazy again.
Firstly for “bar” OED has
…
15.
a. A bank of sand, silt, etc., across the mouth of a river or harbour, which obstructs navigation.
…
Have you never seen one of these? I have navigated many of them. They are definite ridges of sand.
(Ridge is also mentioned in two of the other defs for bar but one is plenty for me.)
Doesn’t “middle daughter” suggest the strong possibility of 3 daughters to you? Who are the most famous 3 daughters in literature? Possible King Lear’s tribe! As soon as I saw the even number of letters in daughter I was on to this.
1dn certainly isn’t meaningless if one doesn’t know the Wizard of Oz. It’s a straightforward, clearly indicated anagram with a clear definition which can only lead to one answer. (Knowing the Wizard of Oz merely gives the answer context)
It’s bizarre that you champion obscure clues to do with American biologists but then decry very good clues which refer to general knowledge which an averagely educated English speaker REALLY SHOULD have. 😉
Sil @24
27a really doesn’t need a comma after leaves to make the surface work. It works just perfectly without one. (As does the title of the book. That’s the whole point)
muffin @28:
If you change the punctuation at the end, to “I not O of course -“, then the answer is DASH
Time for my medicine, I think.
Agree with BNTO @29, no comma is needed in 27a.
On second thoughts, OK, boy & girl.
Re 27ac.
Brendan @ 29
Why don’t you restrict your comments to the puzzles, instead of (yet again) gratuitously insulting muffin?
On the plus side, I suppose, you didn’t mention the editor in today.
Impressed that “Australian” = A was decried yesterday (PAN) but “first” = A passes muster today (Picaroon). Not quite to my taste today what with LAMIA, ARMORICAN, PAPILLA, MANGA…
FOI was CHOIR which to my left ear (and I’m definite) is not quoit a homophone for quire.
Ah me. Ah well. Lots to enjoy nonetheless.
Thanks to setter and blogger.
Thanks to Picaroon for an enjoyable puzzle and to manehi for an instructive blog.
It’s a very long time indeed since the Comma butterfly last surfaced but from memory it is not so much colourful as rather drab. According to UK Butterflies from the wiki link it is camouflaged to look like a withered leaf.
Alphalpha @34
I got a laugh out of your use of “quoit” — was that intended to illustrate that, depending on regional dialect, “choir” and “quire” may be pronounced differently? (If so, I found that illustration educational and impressive.)
Or was it a mere typo or autocorrect error, and “quite” was what you actually meant to type? (In which case I will have a bigger laugh, at myself, for reading too much into “quoit”!)
Also: I would contend that whether clueing the letter A with “Australian” (as in Australian Football League = AFL) or with “first” (as in, “We were seated in Row A”), either way passes muster. There are probably dozens more ways to clue this or any single letter of the alphabet – ranging from those that we may have seen many times in the past to those that will be test-driven sometime in the future, and, on the theory that “all’s fair in crosswords” (at least that’s my theory), I say to the setters Bring It On! If I can’t figure it out I hope (and invariably find) that someone on fifteensquared will have done so, and then my horizons for creative thinking, or my general knowledge, or both, will have been expanded.
BNTO @ 29
I read your description of 1dn as “a straightforward, clearly indicated anagram with a clear definition which can only lead to one answer. (Knowing the Wizard of Oz merely gives the answer context)”, and I think that’s a bit of a stretch.
(Actually my first thought, same as when I first read muffin’s comments @6, was, Who doesn’t know The Wizard of Oz??) But assuming for the sake of discussion that a solver really had absolutely zero familiarity with The Wizard of Oz, and that he or she had solved all of the crossers for 1dn, giving “C _ W _ R _ L _ L _ O _”, I’m not sure that it would be perfectly obvious to that hypothetical solver that (1) “laced” was an anagrind, (2) “whiskey” was a clue for the letter W, (3) “cordial, only” was the rest of the anagram fodder, (4) “He wanted bottle” was the definition, or (5) “bottle” is a term sometimes used to mean “courage”. Assuming further that our hero or heroine eventually caught on to #s 1, 2, and 3 above (perhaps after noticing that all of the crossers could be found in an anagram of CORDIALONLYW, meaning that the uncrossed letters were “DIAONY” in some order, he or she might by process of elimination have come up with the correct answer, if for no other reason than that “COWARDLY” and “LION” are probably the only two words of the stated lengths that can both be spelled using those six available letters in the uncrossed spaces. (But even with the right answer, I imagine it still would be difficult for our hypothetical solver to fathom why a cowardly lion is one that would want a bottle.)
I’m not looking to get into whatever arguments you apparently have going on with muffin or others, but I think Picaroon’s clue in 1dn was pretty clever, and no more or less obvious (and no more or less solveable) to someone who had never heard of The Wizard of Oz or the Cowardly Lion, than Qaos’s recent clue “Biologist who reversed hot car by railway, getting caught by crime (6,6)” was to someone who had never heard of Rachel Carson before but who had “R _ C _ E _ C _ R _ O _” completed in the grid and had the benefit of Qaos’s clever (but equally fair and clear) wordplay to work with.
Sorry for my long post everyone.
Imho this was a great puzzle with some outstanding clues. Despite it not being very colourful I loved 1a because it broke my first rule of clue solving – ignore the punctuation – and it’s the first time I’ve come across comma clues like this. 1d came from having several crossers and then seeing the anagram fodder – so for me it was clearly clued, but with hindsight, and I have a vague recollection of from the film. I didn’t see the goat connection with 10d but that just makes it an even better clue. I also ticked 11 and 12a. All the unfamiliar words could be deduced from the clue and crossers and then checked. I couldn’t parse 3d or 20a and 6d was LOI as I didn’t see “for one” as eg – another device to log.
Many thanks to Picaroon for a fine puzzle and to manehi for filling in the parsing gaps.
A most enjoyable puzzle. For some reason I made ridiculously heavy weather of 1ac (had difficulty seeing the word BUTTERFLY!), but apart from that I was very much on Picaroon’s wavelength.
I failed to solve RIDGE and needed help to parse 17a, 19d.
New words for me were PAPILLA + LAMIA.
My favourites were MAGNIFICO, MANGANESE, ROGER FEDERER.
Thanks blogger and setter
I have just remembered that I solved COWARDLY LION without knowing it was an anagram. When I had all of the crossers, I used google to find out if there was such a character a “cowardly lion”. I had a vague idea it had something to do with the Wiz of Oz but was not sure.
I now realise that the clue was very clever!
BNTO @29
Charlotte Bronte? (another “middle daughter”).
If you recall, I said “loose”, not “wrong”.
Muffin @41
Rather disingenuous this clutching at straws don’t you think.
What comes to mind?
Goneril, Regan and Cordelia
The three daughters of King Lear. (Quite a famous chap!)
Charlotte, Emily and Ann Bronte
Three novelists who were sisters. Daughters of a clergyman. What was his name? Oh the Reverend Bronte. His only claim to fame being that he was their father. So famously sisters.
Your comments were off the mark. Admit it. 😉
After the first two puzzles of the week this shone out as a beacon and only deserved praise.
BNTO
There are lots of examples of “middle daughters”, and not necessarily of 3 either – Charlotte was the middle of five, in fact.
I do take your point that they are best remembered as sisters, but that doesn’t alter the fact that they are daughters too. There is nothing in the clue to suggest that the father (or mother) has to be well-known; hence my complaint about “looseness” rather than incorrectness.
DaveMc@36 (since we’ve spilled over)
My “quoit” was intended to amuse and glad you enjoyed. Now picture my being caught saying “choir, quire, choir, quire…” and trying to hear a difference in pronunciation – which I know is there – and yet failing.
BNTO and muffin – I imagine for many of us the argument was moot, as the clue was solved through consideration of the small range of cooking leaves that begin and end in “O”, so that the “middle daughter” part of the clue was relevant only to confirming the solution, or for misdirecting that “gh” had to be fitted in somewhere. I doubt otherwise that “middle daughter” would have been sufficient to take me anywhere near “Regan”. Perhaps I am to much of a fillistein to be aloud near the Guardian crossword.
Sil @26
you make a very fair point (as always in a very fair way).
In case this arrives too late, I’ve emailed you a mea culpa.
Didn’t finish and had to wait for the solution – couldn’t get the butterfly (though we should have done better as we saw the comma, just didn’t think of it as part of the clue) and ridge defeated us.
However, we did discover two godesses/ deities for 13a – lamia is an Icelandic goddess. Though she’s a goodie so it wasn’t her. It started us wondering how many other deity names are anagrams of each other…..
Thanks for parsing ATTENDANT (3d). Enjoyable puzzle. As a chemist I liked MANGANESE (15a).
ARMORICA(N) (16d) is on the map at the front of every(?) Asterix The Gaul book. Clearly Breton.
Guessed COWARDLY LION (1d) from only the C and the W then wrestled the rest out of the clue.
Never seen punctuation play such an important rôle before as in COMMA BUTTERFLY (1a).
LAND AGENT (7d) and ROGER FEDERER (10d) also good fun.