Guardian Cryptic 27,342 by Pasquale

31 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 27,342 by Pasquale”

1. Thanks Pasquale and manehi

   I really enjoyed this. I find the most satisfying experience in doing crosswords is making up a word from the wordplay and then finding out what it means, and that it’s the correct answer – LANTANA, TALLITH and PARESIS in this puzzle.

   [Slightly unfortunate that Pasquale chose a Breton for FILES, as there is a chance that he wouldn’t have said “fils”. My Welsh grandmother thought that she could speak French, as she could chat with the “French onion sellers”. However they were Bretons, and understood her Welsh!]

2. Parisian, Brittany, Provence, three French-language indicators, unusually, at 1A, 14A, 19; it’s always interesting to see setters working through the range of regions and cities, though this trio is relatively conventional. 7D was marked as two words, in the print version anyway, which was a distraction at first. Good puzzle anyway: thanks to both.

3. Yes 7d was given as 3,4 in the paper. The website had a correction, but the printout was still 3,4!

4. Thanks both,

   This looked hard at first and I thought there might be a theme lurking, but it gave way steadily and I learned the same new words as muffin.

5. I found this quite a lot easier than most Pasquale puzzles. Like others I needed to the dictionary to confirm several words. THOMAS TRAHERNE was a write-in, which helped. Favourites were DIEGO, BRITISH DISEASE and PORTENDED. Many thanks to P and m.

6. Muffin @1 What a lovely story about your Grandmother!

   Had to Google a couple but loved the crossword and the new (to me) words.

   Not sure quite how the wordplay in DIEGO works. The answer was clear enough from the crossers but I don’t see what’s thrown game. I thought ‘to throw’ a game was to deliberately cause it to be lost. The incident in question was quite the opposite.

   Great puzzle, many thanks to The Don.

   Nice week, all.

7. Hi William
   “Die” as singular “dice”, I think, is “thrown”, then Go is the game

8. Like drofle@5 I found this an easier offering from Pasquale but still with the usual smattering of words new to me – six if I include the poet who was last one and not a write in.
   It was a solver friendly grid as well with 1d going straight in which led to Mrs W coming up with 1a and we were off. Favourite was AESTIVATE because it’s an interesting new word as well. Why are new verbs more interesting than nouns?
   DIEGO brought on a smile, especially as it was one of the last to go in after having thought of DONNA early on.
   Thank you for the blog manehi and to Pasquale for the education.

9. Being a fan of interesting words, I do like it when Mr M gives us a few new ones to add to our memory banks, although saying that I did know AESTIVATE out of today’s interesting collection

   Thanks to him for the crossword and Manehi for the blog

10. I think of the Prom concert some years’ ago, when the conductor, Andrew Davies, in his speech to the audience, gave a parody of the Major General’s patter song from ‘Pirates of Penzance’, in which he rhymed ‘Aestival’ with ‘Festival’. Very much in character with the original.

11. Muffin @7 Of course, many thanks.

12. Muffin@1 – some years ago Mrs Goujeers and I were in a pub in Cardiff and heard some splendid singing in another bar. A roomful of people (all men, I think) were singing a Welsh translation of Frank Hennesey’s “Farewell to the Rhondda”, which was written in English. The only person who would talk to us (we being non-Welsh speakers)was a Breton who had come to Cardiff to to improve his English, and been taken up by the Welsh Language Society.

13. Most enjoyable – as well as a learning experience!!! (Thanks to Pasquale for the puzzle which taught me new words AMPULLA and AESTIVATE – both gettable from word play, so a very fair exercise in puzzling.)

    It helped me enormously to get 1a and 1d quite early. Fortunately I loved Gerry and the Pacemakers from way over here in the southern hemisphere, and we are somewhat familiar with “gerrymandered” elections, so that got me started.

    Did not quite get 8d NATIONAL DISEASE but worked it out.

    I really liked 15a AITCH and 16d TALLITH.

    Thanks to manehi and contributors.

14. Sorry; meant to type BRITISH DISEASE at 8d, which I did not fully understand – sorry to be so ignorant of UK history. I do get some of it because of the films “Brassed Off”, “Billy Elliot” and “The Full Monty”.

15. Thanks to Pasquale and manehi. For once my general knowledge was an asset rather than a liability. I knew TRAHERNE, DIEGO Maradona, and AMPULLA, had come across BRITISH DISEASE in a previous puzzle, and remembered LANTANA not from my limited knowledge of plants but from the 2001 movie. PARESIS was my LOI. FREE LUNCH brings back memories of Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where the standard greeting is TINSTAAFL – “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”

16. Thank you Pasquale and manehi.

    An enjoyable puzzle, PARESIS and TALLITH were also new to me, or forgotten, but gettable from their clues.

    The same problem with the Brittany reference occurred to me as it did to muffin (loved the story about his grandmother), and on checking I found that ‘mab’ is the word for ‘son’ in both Breton, Cornish and Welsh (the teaching of Breton was ‘banned’ in France for a while in the past, but is now back in the curriculum of several schools).

17. Thanks Pasquale; smooth cluing.

    Thanks also to manehi; I liked the complete dinner and Theresa’s problem. I must have come across AESTIVATE before – nice word as the opposite of hibernation.

    Apparently Traherne’s works were not published until the twentieth century, having been misattributed to Vaughan, according to the gospel of Wiki.

18. Nice puzzle -thanks manehi and Don

19. A tough and enjoyable puzzle made even more whimsical by today’s online correction which reads like a Grauniad self-parody: ‘Special instructions: 31 November 2017: the letter count for 7 down has been corrected’.

20. Several obscure words that I actually knew – for a change! GALLIARD I’d heard of (God Save The Queen is actually an example of a Galliard!).

    Also TALLITH – although, speaking as an (extremely lapsed) Jew, I’d never have spelt the word like that: it would end in -S (Ashkenazi) or -T (Sephardi/Ivrit) but never -TH. However the -TH ending is common in theological writing and literature, so let it stand.

    But AMPULLA (rang a bell), LANTANA, THOMAS TRAHERNE (also rang a bell), and PARESIS all needed a look-up after the write-in. Pity about that.

    Also a pity that I was held up for a while by the original enumeration (3,4) of 7d – since corrected to (7) as I see on the web page. Now, if the Grauniad could devise a means of fixing up the printed copy….. 🙂

    As always, thanks a lot to Pasquale for an enjoyable challenge, and manehi for the work through.

21. As always with Pasquale this was educational, but all of the more obscure stuff was fairly clued so no complaints. Interesting that another writer of Meditations (Marcus Aurelius) fits the enumeration for 25, but fortunately he was unparseable…

    Thanks to Pasquale and manehi

22. Paresis and Tallith were new to me, but could be worked out. I agree that it would have been more sensetive to users of brezhoneg (Breton) to have used a region where French was not an imposed language. “Paris’s son collects English records” would have been better. Breton for son is mab, the same as in Cymraeg. Diolch i Pasquale.

23. A bit late to the fray, however, a great puzzle by Pasquale and a tip of the hat to Manehi for the informative blog. In response to Muffin at comment 1, my mother also bought onions (shibwns) from the “French” onion sellers that came to the door and they were referred to as Sioni Onions or Johnny Onions and definitely from Brittany.

24. Never heard of TRAHERNE so had to look him up. Amazed that I got DIEGO given it’s football. Virtually everything I know about the sport comes from crosswords! The usual crop of relatively obscure words which were mostly gettable from the wordplay. Took some time to see GERRYMANDERED despite having known the lads from the Pacemakers back in the day.
    Thanks Pasquale.

25. 7 new meanings for me here and another 7 in the telegraph toughie today ( where Don is Giovanni). A good day for education.

    I liked PORTENDED AESTIVATE, YELLOWISH

    many thanks Pasquale and manehi

26. A fun puzzle today. I found this a little bit easier, at least in the early going, that I have typically experienced with this setter. I was pleased to learn a few new words from the puzzle (the same ones mentioned by several others above), as is often the case with Pasquale, plus a few other new things from the blog. I enjoyed DEBACLE (which, in addition to its fine surface and wordplay, featured another appearance of one of The Most Important Rivers in Crosswordland) and BRITISH DISEASE, and my favorite (and also LOI) was DIEGO. Many thanks to Pasquale and manehi and other commenters.

27. I found this quite straightforward; surely P is getting easier, as I keep saying.

    The ones I had never heard of were LANTANA, THOMAS thingy and TALLITH. I am surprised no one else included LISTS in their list of unknowns; I discovered it only recently because I have just read Ivanhoe (and that Scott created the name Cedric).

    Thanks Manehi and Pasquale.

28. Dave Ellison @27
    Wow, fun fact about Cedric!

29. Thomas Traherne rang a bell, but it might have been the film El Dorado, in which James Caan (in an early role) plays Alan Bourdillion Traherne, nicknamed “Mississippi”. Google told me about the “Centuries of meditation”.

30. Like beery hiker @21 I saw the word “meditations” and the enumeration (6,8) in 25ac and assumed the answer was going to be MARCUS AURELIUS. Fortunately the obvious anagram ruled him out quite quickly, though I needed some crossing letters before I thought of Traherne (whom I’ve heard of but never read).

    Another interesting and enjoyable puzzle. Thanks Don. (See you on Saturday?)

31. Funny, isn’t it?
    A puzzle with a lot of ‘obscure’ words thrown in, perhaps even more than usual, and see what happens: most people liked it.
    All fairly clued but then, in my opinion, Pasquale’s clues are always fair.

    LISTS (22ac) was our last one in – reluctantly so.
    Never heard of that meaning of the word.
    Looked like a plural with a singular definition.

    Good crossword at the easier end of what Pasquale can offer us despite the lantanas and talliths.

    Thanks manehi.

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