Guardian 27,320 / Paul

56 comments on “Guardian 27,320 / Paul”

1. Thanks Paul and Eileen

   My fault, but too many went in partly or wholly unparsed for this to be one of my favourites (14, 26, 3, 17 and 19). Some nice ones, though, with WRONGDOING and INNER CITY my favourites.

   EARLY DOORS is very clever, and I did parse it retrospectively, but it’s an example of a clue that effectively isn’t solvable “bottom up”.

   [btw Eileen, your comment on amount/million on the Picaroon thread gave rise to quite a lot of discussion; perhaps you could pop over and clarify your point?]

2. Enjoyed this very much and a couple of Paul classics.

   I thought exactly the same as you Eileen re 17d

3. No-one has praised 23 d which I thought was splendid.

4. muffin @1 – I have now posted a comment on the Picaroon thread. I am surprised at the protracted discussion, since I thought you yourself had answered the initial query.

5. [BNTO usually finds a way to disagree with what I say :)]

6. Very enjoyable.

   EUPHONIUM always makes me think of Jimmy Edwards.
   https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FAviGOqtAqM
   Of its time, of course.

   Thanks to Paul and Eileen.

7. Just the thing for a long train journey! I must find out about the KECKS in 1d when I arrive in northern England.

   I did like the ‘corrupt TV company’ of 11a but the surface does show up an occasional problem with Paul’s clueing. A TV company in a toilet? Would it fit? Maybe I should be more accepting of the surreal.

   Last in WRONGDOING, very annoying as I’m usually OK with this sort of clue.

8. Thanks Paul and Eileen. I hadn’t heard of COCKAPOO but EUPHONIUM made it inevitable, as it were. Best was WRONGDOING, I thought.
   Re 16: Cockney’s not the only h-dropping variant of English. How about the “posh” pronunciation of hotel, for one?

9. Lots of solve then parse for us today – but that’s often the case with Paul. As a Lancastrian I knew “kecks” and had “op” but didn’t make the capital money connection and it was my second to last in after KNOTTY came to me and then PATHOS as LOI. I hadn’t fully parsed WRONGDOING before coming here and it is now my cotd, along with NIMBI as copmus highlighted.
   Thanks Paul and Eileen.

10. Thanks Paul and Eileen

    ‘Immorality in God’ for WRONGDOING was the second first class clue in a few days, following on from ‘Gin or Meths’ for MOTHERS RUIN.

    KECKS was very familiar to me – a word for boys/mens trousers in common use in my childhood in Liverpool.

11. A good challenge, my favourites – like Muffin @ 1 – being WRONGDOING and INNER CITY. Although I managed to complete the puzzle I needed Eileen’s help to parse STEAM ROOM. Thanks to setter and blogger

12. Thank you Paul for the challenging puzzle and Eileen for a very helpful blog, I managed to fill in the answers, but parsing was another matter.

13. It’s puzzles like this that make me glad I’m not a blogger. I got hardly any of it last night. One of the few I did work out from the wordplay was EARLY DOORS, and I thought, “What the blazes is that? It must be something else.” Now I find it’s actually a thing.

    Never heard of kecks, but apparently Eileen hadn’t either, so I can’t complain. And I missed the old “capital” trick. In my defense, I wouldn’t think of kopecks as capital any more than I would pennies. Capital is serious money.

    Thank you to both Paul and Eileen.

14. Thank you, Eileen, needed your parse of CROSSWINDS.

    Enjoyable, with lots of smiles along the way but with rather too many I had to work backwards to the parse.

    Can someone tell me what a RIDING SADDLE is, please? When would one say this as opposed to simply saddle?

    Thank you Paul, nice week, all.

15. William @14
    Wikipedia does have a reference to an “endurance riding saddle”, but that seems to be a saddle for “endurance riding”, so doesn’t male sense without the “endurance” part.

16. An unusually tricky Paul with several educational phrases so an entertaining challenge.

    Thanks to Paul and Eileen

17. Yes, rather KNOTTY, this one, but still a quality puzzle from Paul. I parsed almost everything and just needed a bit of help from the blog.

    muffin (@1) was half right about EARLY DOORS not being effectively solvable ‘bottom up’: I got EARLY and S from the wordplay, then the answer, and then the rest.

    I didn’t know either COCKAPOO or GIRDLE OF VENUS (not the first time my weak GK has let me down), but the answers were gettable, and I still like to learn.

    I thought it interesting that Paul used the ‘reverse clue’ type of cryptic device in two answers crossing each other: WRONGDOING and INNER CITY. As noted already, a recent crossword had MOTHER’S RUIN clued in a similar way. It’s not my favourite type of clue, but it is a legitimate weapon in the armoury of a setter, and I’m certainly not complaining: I like to see a variety of types of clue in a single puzzle.

    Thanks to Paul and Eileen.

18. William @14. I think that, since saddle can refer to several things – basically anything roughly shaped like a horse’s saddle, e.g., geological formations – adding the word RIDING for clarification is ok. Would probably say horse’s saddle if it was for a horse rather than some other riding animal though.

19. I tried to cram SAUNA instead of STEAM into 10, purely because this is Paul and Othello’s backside just had to be the a-word somehow. Paul is my favourite setter but I thought 16d to be rather poor.

    Being stateside, I do not contribute often because by the time I’m active most of the of what needs to be said is already here. Thanks to all S & Bs and keep up the good work.

20. Thanks to Paul and Eileen. I did not know GIRDLE OF VENUS or EARLY DOORS and needed help parsing NOONTIDE and KNOTTY. With regard to NIMBI-Nimby there have been articles recently about YIMBY – Yes In My Back Yard, a pro-development movement in contrast and opposition to the NIMBY phenomenon” (Wikipedia).

21. Muffin@1 I did get EARLY DOORS from the bottom up — “rood” spelt backwards — and then didn’t know what to do with it. The phrase made no sense to me so I decided it must be something else I couldn’t think of, till the blog told me there really was such an expression.

22. Well done, Valentine. It was very much the other way round for me; quite a common expression in Britain in the last twenty years, often in a sports context. Not one I’d ever consider using myself, though!

23. Valentine and muffin, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins the expression EARLY DOORS dates from 1883, it referred to admission to a music hall some time before the start of the performance, you paid more but got a wider choice of seating. The practice died out in the 1950s but the phrase was resurrected in the 1970s in footballing circles in its current sense.

24. I’ve been out from late morning until now, so have only just seen the queries re RIDING SADDLE. I was curious about that this morning [surely a saddle is for riding, as William said @14?] and when I couldn’t find it in Collins or Chambers, I typed it into Google and lots of entries came up, so I decided against mentioning it, because I thought it must be generally familiar.
    I’ve just had a longer look and found this interesting article: http://www.limebrook.com/saddlehistory.html

25. I am standing (which I would do anyway, as I stand at work) and “ovating” for this excellent puzzle by Paul!! A great workout with clever wordplay and many fun PDMs. I managed to solve all and *mostly* parse all, although like some of the other U.S. commenters who posted above, I was unfamiliar with, and could only guess at, EARLY DOORS as a term for opening stages and KECKS as a term for trousers.
    I knew there had to be more to CROSSWINDS — I did not understand the “Those challenging you” portion. Thanks to Eileen for explaining the parsing. Now that I see the wordplay (with the critical involvement of “in shifting or”), I think this clue is brilliant, bumping up there among the top clues of the day for me.
    Like others, I was surprised that Paul would pass up the opportunity to be more naughty (as opposed to KNOTTY) when clueing COCKAPOO, but then again, I think that the instances of Paul’s ribaldry that I have found funniest and most enjoyable have occurred where the answer in the grid has been a word for which the use of earthy humor in the clueing was unexpected. Incidentally, I parsed COCKAPOO in an iffy (and, as I now see, incorrect) manner, so thanks again to Eileen for setting me straight on this one as well. As with CROSSWINDS, now that I see the correct parsing, this clue is also elevated in my estimation to be one of the top ones on my list.
    I echo others above in considering WRONGDOING to be my COTD, by a hair’s breadth. (Or perhaps by a slightly wider margin, say, the breadth of the GIRDLE OF VENUS!)
    Many thanks to Paul for a(nother) great puzzle and to Eileen for a(nother) great blog!

26. Back in the days of strict licensing hours, we used to use the phrase ‘early doors’ to refer to arriving at the pub at, or just before they opened. Typically that would be 11.00 am except on Sundays when it was noon. Otherwise, many thanks to Paul and Eileen

27. Dafydd @26
    If your name confirms your origins, you were lucky to get a drink on Sundays at all – in the words of the song
    If you go down to Wales
    Where they sell the best of ales
    And you want a drink on Sunday
    You will have to wait ’til Monday

28. I was going to suggest that saying RIDING saddle was a legitimate way to distinguish it from a pack saddle but then I realized the clue was actually more descriptive of the latter than the former so never mind.

    I found this puzzle too tough for me overall – never heard of kecks or early doors and my brain seems set to ‘energysaver’ today – but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Surfaces may not always be Paul’s strongest suit but he more than makes up for it in cleverness and that touch of bawdiness we all love.

29. Thanks to Paul for the entertainment and Eileen for the illumination.

    Nothing to add other than to say that I for one liked RIGHT EAR and the associated witticism which Eileen has mentioned. I rather liked INSTEAD as well, great Pauline surface; minor problem getting one of RATHER/INSTEAD to replace the other in a sentence. Obvious I’m sure, but help appreciated.

30. Hi Alphalpha @29

    I’m with you in struggling to swap ‘rather’ and ‘instead’ in a sentence: the usage is ‘rather than’ or ‘instead of’, so they’re not directly interchangeable but, pedant as you know I am, I think the idea is the same and so I decided that it worked for me and I wouldn’t open that can of worms. And it was such a good surface. 😉

31. I enjoyed this puzzle from Paul. Quite a challenge from Paul but all very fairly clued.

    I’m sorry Muffin but I have to disagree with you again. 13D was one of the few clues I solved on the first pass. This was without any crossers from the the wordplay which I thought was pretty straightforward. So much so that I don’t understand your effectively isn’t solvable “bottom up”.

    BTW Eileen if you thought Muffin’s original explanation of your bugbear with “amount” was the “end of the story” then it appears you disagree with the OED, at least 200 years of usage and myself. The OED defines “Amount” both in respect to “quantity” and “number” which I quoted at some length in the blog.

32. BNTO
    Yes, Valentine did it that way too. Different thought processes. I don’t think I would ever have worked up from “Noblemen carrying base of heavy” to EARLY….S

33. For comparison, my first pass was HAKE, EUPHONIUM, KNOTTY (I am a birdwatcher, as I mentioned last week), SASSY and the decried but easy RIGHT EAR.

34. BNTO @31 – my latest comment on the relevant blog is my last word.

35. Alphalpha @29, Eileen @30
    I think you can interchange RATHER and INSTEAD as follows:
    It’s not white; rather, it is black.
    It’s not white; instead, it is black.
    As you see, I was keen to make a good clue a good clue!

36. Terrific stuff. Thanks, Paul.

    Crossbar@6
    I seem to remember that Jimmy Edwards derived the word EUPHONIUM from the Latin (or possibly Greek): eu – what a | phoni – shocking | um – noise.

37. With thanks to Paul & Eileen

    Alan B @ 35, I think we’re on the same lines in that it’s a bit of a circumlocutory “synonym”

    I’d do this rather than that
    I’d do this instead of that

    As I’m definitely non-ximenean I’m perfectly happy with that.

38. Thanks, Alan B @35 – I think that’ll do me. [So was I. 😉 ]

39. Argh fell at the last hurdle on PATHOS – just couldn’t see it and had to wordsearch.
    An excellent puzzle. Thanks Eileen for the parsing of INNER-CITY, I was thinking homophonically of ‘in a city’ and thought it a bit weak.
    ‘Do not use lard to smooth down your hair. Rather, use Brilliantine!’

40. Eillen @34

    So avoiding the issue then. Just as I expected. Bye.

41. A fine bit of tortuousness from Paul!

    Many wrong paths followed yesterday – and I had to go to bed leaving the SE corner unfinished, wrestling with that wretched “God”….. Then, just as I was dropping off to sleep, musing over every long-named deity from BEELZEBUB to QUETZALCOATL to ZOROASTER (none of which fit, of course), it suddenly *ping*d! Reverse anagram, if you please!

    This then helped to close off the EARLY DOORS – I’d got EARLY early, but was stumped for the second word. And I then realised that 26 was OLDIE, not INDIE (I was thinking of the Indianapolis 500, a ‘classic’ motor race).

    Meanwhile, I’d spent a long time with CROSSROADS rather than CROSSWINDS at 3. And as for 19,5, I spotted the “OF VENUS” quickly enough, but had never heard of the GIRDLE bit. Palmistry isn’t my thing!

    Favourite? I’ll nominate 7d. Nice misdirection, sending us all in search of stars (and I speak as an amateur astronomer….)

    Thanks Paul and Eileen.

42. P.S. I also had EXPLOSIVE at 25. I’m glad it turned out to be EUPHONIUM – far more melodious!

43. I don’t usually find so many words I haven’t heard of in a puzzle, but KECKS, EARLY DOORS, COCKAPOO and GIRDLE OF VENUS were all new to me. So quite a 1d challenge as Eileen says.

    23d doesn’t work for me, or for Collins or Chambers or OED for that matter. We all think NIMBY is pronounced ‘nim bee’, but NIMBI is ‘nim buy’.

44. Hi Mr A Writinghawk @43 – you’re right, of course: that is the Anglicised pronunciation but I didn’t think of that when blogging because I’m so used to the Latin – as it happens, it had cropped up in Ovid at my Latin reading group on Wednesday. 😉

45. Could have happened to anyone!

46. Memories of school Latin: Let’s just run over that old second declension…..
    Dominus, domine, dominum, domini, domino, domino; domini, domini, dominos, dominorum, dominis, dominis etc.

    Yep. I definitely remember, when called upon to recite that lot in class, I’d have said “domin-eee”, not “domin-eye”. So it’s “nim-bee” and the clue is correct.

47. And, while we’re at it, conversely, in the first declension, you’d have said puellae [puell-eye] – but larvae [in the Anglicised version] is usually pronounced larv-ee.

48. Dirac @46: Yes, but the crossword is in English not Latin, isn’t it? I’m sure you wouldn’t accept a homonym of ‘tarball’ with ‘table’ just because table happens to sound a bit like that in French. (Ok, maybe this example is a stretch …)

49. You must do the cases in a different order in the UK. I’d have said dominus, domini, domino, dominum, domino, domine, and domini, dominorum, dominis, dominos, dominis and I forget the vocative plural.

    Anybody remember the declension of motor bus?

    What is this that roareth thus?
    Can it be a Motor Bus?
    Yes, the smell and hideous hum
    Indicat Motorem Bum!
    Implet in the Corn and High
    Terror me Motoris Bi:
    Bo Motori clamitabo
    Ne Motore caedar a Bo—
    Dative be or Ablative
    So thou only let us live:—
    Whither shall thy victims flee?
    Spare us, spare us, Motor Be!
    Thus I sang; and still anigh
    Came in hordes Motores Bi,
    Et complebat omne forum
    Copia Motorum Borum.
    How shall wretches live like us
    Cincti Bis Motoribus?
    Domine, defende nos
    Contra hos Motores Bos!

50. Dafydd@26, Muffin@27
    It depends on which part of Wales. I remember being told by a policeman in Carmarthen in the days of strict licensing laws that on market days the pubs in Carmarthen were open all day and it was said that you only had to drive a pig down the street for it to be a market day in Carmarthen.
    BNTO @ 40 and earlier posts. This raises a point I made in the General Discussion forum, previous edition 95, about the use of dictionaries. When I, and Alan B who made the only comment,started solving Guardian crosswords I could rely on an answer being in Chambers unless it was a proper name or there was a note to warn me. This seems fair. I don’t think that solvers should be expected to have more than one dictionary, particularly that we should be expected to use the OED. In this instance Chambers gives “quantity” but not “number” under “amount”. By the way there was a convincing (to me) article in the Pedant’s column in my wife’s Times a few weeks ago that “less” is acceptable for numbers as well as quantity whereas I and others including Eileen had been told that we could only use “fewer”.

51. Is anybody else annoyed by the “fewest number” instead of the “smallest number”?

52. Valentine @51

    Since this is my blog, I have to answer but I’ve absolutely shot my bolt on the Picaroon thread a couple of days ago and I thought I’d heard the last of it. After all my years of struggling to teach teenagers the distinction between number/amount and less/fewer, I’m in despair.

    ‘Annoyed’ is to put it mildly!

53. Sorry, Valentine @49, I was so exasperated that I skipped your earlier post!

    That’s interesting: we do [or did, when state schools were fortunate enough, as in my case, to be able to learn / teach Latin] Nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative.

    And thanks for the reminder of the rhyme. 😉

54. Eileen@52
    The last thing that I would want to do would be to annoy you. I agree about number/amount and as The Pedant wrote that fewer/less was invented as long ago as 1770 it can possibly be said to have passed the test of time.

55. I get the giggles just saying “motorum borum” to myself.

56. Finished after under a week! No one shouted out for 20D AGREED, but I thought it was a fun solve and gave me a smile. Also: I drew an angry face by 24,12 after realising that it wasn’t some big monarch I was after.

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