Guardian Cryptic 27,386 by Shed

by

Very enjoyable, and fairly tough – I got a bit stuck in the top left with an unfamiliar word. Really liked 10ac, 11ac, 2dn and 20dn. Many thanks to Shed.

Across
4 MUCOID Senior officer I covered with dirt-like slimy stuff (6)
C[ommanding] O[fficer], plus I; inside MUD=”dirt”
6 MINOTAUR Hybrid child receiving letter from Athens (8)
MINOR=”child” taking in TAU=”letter from Athens”/from the Greek alphabet
9 NEEDLE Want the French to be annoying (6)
NEED=”Want”; plus LE=”the [in] French”
10 FISHCAKE Is like “running water”, infiltrating bogus food item (4,4)
IS, plus H[ot] and C[old]=”like running water”; all inside FAKE=”bogus”
11 RAVI SHANKAR Musician to make off with most of capital (4,7)
=the sitar player – see [wiki]
RAVISH=”to make off with”; plus ANKAR[a]=”most of [the Turkish] capital”
15 ANGUISH Not beginning to flag pain (7)
[L]ANGUISH=”flag” without its beginning letter
17 ROOT OUT Get rid of bouncer and hawker (4,3)
ROO=kangaroo=”bouncer”; plus TOUT=”hawker”
18 TROUSER ROLE Time to wake up, accepting Flynn’s cross-dressing persona (7,4)
=a role where an actress appears in male clothing
T[ime] plus ROUSE=”wake up”; around ERROL Flynn
22 IMPERIAL Put at risk, adopting a system of measurement (8)
IMPERIL=”Put at risk”, around A
23 BALHAM Half of hair lotion put around part of London (6)
Half of HA[ir]; with BALM=”lotion” around it
24 HASSIDIC Very devout, hot and reportedly sour (8)
H[ot]; plus a homophone of ‘acidic’=”sour”
25 DINNER Socialist revolutionary eating pub lunch (6)
RED=”Socialist”, reversed/”revolutionary”; around INN=”pub”
Down
1 VILLUS Rising operettist excising an intestinal growth (6)
=a hairlike growth in the lining of the small intestine
Arthur SULLIV[an]=”operettist”, reversed/”Rising”, and with an removed
2 MINISKIRTS They expose limbs, given sweets – is drink included? (10)
MINTS=”sweets’, around IS and KIR=”drink”
3 LOTHARIO Womaniser reluctant to go to a South American city… (8)
LOTH=variant spelling of loath=”reluctant”; plus A; plus RIO=”South American city”
4 MONTREAL …or mental (crazy) North American one (8)
=a North American city
(or mental)*
5 CLEAVAGE Gap between outstanding features of holiday mostly in prison (8)
most of LEAV[e]=”holiday”; inside CAGE=”prison”
7 AJAX A vote for German 10, or Greek hero (4)
A; plus JA=yes or “vote” in German; plus X=”10″ in Roman numerals
8 REEL Dance to cast a lustful eye over (4)
LEER=”cast a lustful eye”, reversed/”over”
12 ACHROMATIC Colourless church with scent outside (10)
CH[urch] with AROMATIC=a fragrant substance=”scent” outside it
13 COLOPHON Work hard to penetrate punctuation mark by which publisher may be recognised (8)
=a publisher’s emblem
OP[us]=”Work” plus H[ard]; inside COLON=”punctuation mark”
14 STREAMER Radish top getting into cooking vessel results in severe cold (8)
=cold as in an illness, with water streaming from the nose
R[adish] in STEAMER=”cooking vessel”
16 INTERMIT Pause for popular insect with no bottom (8)
IN=”popular”; plus TERMIT[e]=”insect” without its bottom letter
19 ROADIE I adore getting drunk with member of band’s crew (6)
(I adore)*
20 KITH Old friends bringing equipment to hospital (4)
KIT=”equipment” plus H[ospital]
21 OPUS Aquatic animal losing month’s work (4)
[oct]OPUS=”Aquatic animal”; losing oct[ober]=”month”

45 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 27,386 by Shed”

  3. Thanks Shed and manehi

    I didn’t find this too difficult, though I didn’t spot ERROL Flynn, and had trouble persuading Google to search for HASSIDIC (it kept politely saying “Did you mean “hasidic?”)

    DINNER and “lunch” are eaten at quite different times in this house!

    BALHAM reminded me of <a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RTWk9QIKS0>this</a>.

  4. It took me ages to get going, but it was an excellent puzzle. Favourites were MINOTAUR, RAVI SHANKAR, TROUSER ROLE and MINISKIRTS. Many thanks to Shed and manehi.

  7. I ruined the top left corner by entering “DESIRE” at 9A. So I got my French wrong as well as the answer. Cannot see “ire” as a verb either in the dictionary so I got both parts wrong. ?

  9. Nice to see full strength Shed again. I didnt know TROUSER ROLE but it was so neatly clued that it was easy to guess.

    MUCOID produced a couple of crossings-out-knew it had to do with MUCUS but MUCOUS didnt pass the check button- so this and VILLUS held me up at the end.Perfectly clued. I am used to the confusion between lunch and dinner being a fan of Victorian novels so that was no ,problem(it did raise a query).

    Class puzzle all round. Thanks Shed and manehi.

  11. Thanks for the blog, manehi.

    Once again, I share your favourites and I thought 22ac was rather neat, too.

    I was pleased to winkle out COLOPHON from the wordplay. It was lurking in the depths of my mind but I was surprised to find out what it meant.

    I expected lunch = dinner to raise some eyebrows. It’s partly a [rather old-fashioned] local thing but I don’t think  most people, wherever they’re from, think of  school dinners, served by dinner ladies, as food eaten by boarding school kids in the evening. 😉

    Thanks, Shed, for a most enjoyable puzzle – great fun.

  12. Thanks Shed and manehi.

    Largely entertaining but some really weird surfaces eg Half of hair lotion put around part of London. I didn’t know COLOPHON, and TROUSER ROLE seems to be unknown to most dictionaries.

    I quite liked CLEAVAGE, although why one would want to spend a holiday in prison is beyond me.

  13. I forgot to say that CLEAVAGE was my favourite, despite the slightly dodgy surface.

    The highlighted link I posted @5 will take you to Peter Sellers’s “Balham, gateway to the south”.

  14. It helps not to know too much sometimes: my knowledge of operettists is limited, and with Lehar no use, it seemed sensible to make something out of Sullivan. A good way to clue a word that was new to me.

    Greatly enjoyed this, as I usually do Shed, and didn’t find it too far out-there on the difficulty scale. Favourite clue was the ‘ROO TOUT’.

  15. One of those slow boilers for me today.  Very little on the first few passes then steady progress.

    Got stuck looking for a noun instead of an adjective at MUCOID.  Nicely concealed with the hyphen in ‘dirt-like’.

    Took ages to spot H&C for ‘running water’ in FISH CAKE.

    Shed on good form today, I thought, many thanks.

    Nearly Christmas…yahoo.

  16. muffin @3 – it was always dinner midday for me as a child in South Yorkshire. Didn’t become lunch until I moved south.

    Very enjoyable puzzle. I always like new to me words like COLOPHON which are clearly clued.

    Thanks to Shed and Manehi. I needed help parsing ANGUISH which for some reason eluded me.

  18. Thanks both. I enjoyed this.
    TROUSER ROLE is very common in opera (e.g. Marriage of Figaro, Der Rosenkavalier) and some female singers spend the majority of their careers in trousers

  19. [Shirl @18

    The performer playing the trouser role of Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier must get confused, as he (she) also has to pretend to be a girl in some scenes!]

  23. A few unfamiliar solutions, but all fairly clued, in VILLUS and COLOPHON. Liked RAVI SHANKAR and CLEAVAGE. MUCOID was last in. A fine puzzle, easier than it seemed at first glance.

    Thanks to Shed and manehi

  24. Thanks to Shed and manehi. Lots of fun. As a yearly visitor to London since 1980 I thought I was familiar with different localities but BALHAM  was new to me, as were MUCOID, VILLUS, and STREAMER as a cold, but all were well clued.

  25. Very few answers forthcoming from the across clues, steady progress once I got to the downs.  I didn’t know COLOPHON or what a TROUSER ROLE was, but both were readily constructed.  MINISKIRTS was my favourite.

    Quite a tough puzzle, but one where you’re not sure why after it’s done.

    Re: AJAX – I saw it as JA = “vote for” in German rather than just “vote”.

    Thanks, Shed and manehi.

  26. I found this quite tough but nearly got there, failed on 1 down, even though thinking as G and S, also failed in 6 across, which I really should have got.. That said enjoyed the rest of it and the challenge. Thanks to Shed and manehi for the help seeing the parsing.

  27. Never seen mucoid, villus or colophon before today and neither has my autospell judging by the difficulty in writing this post.

    Good fun though, Minotaur last in.

  28. I came across VILLUS in O level Biology. “Growth” is slightly misleading, as it implies something that shouldn’t be there, but quite the reverse is the case – they are the tiny finger-like projections in the small intestine that do most of the work in taking up the digested food, as they have a much increased surface area compared with a flat surface.

  30. Good puzzle.  I got only a few the first time through, and it is always satisfying to see a puzzle fill in from a tiny start.

    I got stuck in the slimy mess thinking it somehow involved “muck,” and never did get past that idea.

    I think “Aromatic” is “with scent,” an adjective and not a noun.

    Is that Bluebottle drilling holes in Balham toothbrushes?

     

  32. Excellent puzzle though I did have my moments with it especially on the S side- HASSIDIC,MUCOID and VILLUS were all new to me as was TROUSER ROLE,but were all well clued.
    Something very satisfying about Shed’s puzzles, and this was no exception.
    Thanks Shed.

  33. I really enjoyed this, though kept thinking 18A was trouser suit, and was completely flummoxed by Flynn. Doh!
    6A should have been ‘letter from Crete’ instead of Athens!
    Thanks to Shed and manehi.

  34. Well, several new words here – had to look up MUCOID (though it was a reasonable guess), VILLUS, INTERMIT and COLOPHON.   Well-clued though.  MUCOID was the LOI – or to be more accurate, the last one for which I figured out the parsing.

    Muffin@3: I’m familiar with HASSIDIC but in my experience it’s nearly always spelt with just one S.  That’s always the problem with words transliterated from a non-Roman language!  The original Hebrew word (which I probably can’t represent here but I’ll try:  ??????? ) makes it clear (to anyone who knows the Hebrew characters) that the ‘S’ is not to be doubled.  But it’s also apparent from Wiktionary that the doubled-S version is also in usage.

    CLEAVAGE was a bit risqué what with the superfluous ‘outstanding features’, eh?  There are other meanings of the word, as every geologist knows!  Reminded me, a bit, of the notorious phrase which appears in Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography: “upper regional domes”.  Anyway, I wasn’t sure whether CLEAVAGE, TROUSER ROLE, and (last but not least?) MINISKIRT constitute some sort of theme?

    Thanks Shed and Manehi.

  35. I’m sure I’m not the only cricket fan to have found ROOT OUT, in close proximity to a ‘bouncer’, somewhat painful, given the situation in the Ashes…

     

    Thanks to manehi and Shed.

  36. Nice crossword from Shed, slightly more challenging than his recent output (here and in the FT).

    As ever quite a few ‘new’ words, something that Shed has in common with Pasquale – not a problem to me, though. My British solving partner hadn’t heard of COLOPHON and this was – once more – an occasion on which my Dutch background came to the rescue. That word (spelled ‘colofon’) is quite familiar to me!

    Like others, we thought about ‘dinner’ = ‘lunch’ and decided that ‘lunch’ may be a DBE of ‘dinner’, meaning that just a simple question mark could have done the trick.

    First one in AJAX (another club sacking their manager, today), last one in MUCOID.

    Thanks manehi & Shed.

     

  37. I enjoyed this too. A pleasing number of clues where the parsing came first, leading to the only possible answer, rather than working out the answer from the crossers, then trying
    to parse it as is too often the case. Nice examples were 1d, 16d and 10a.
    Both “lunch” and “dinner” are sometimes used to mean the same thing but not by the same person – whether this makes the clue wrong I don’t know. In our house we have a snack lunch and call the main,evening meal “supper” though in my childhood, when the main meal was in the middle of the day, “supper” was an evening snack. All designed to confuse the foreigners.
    Thanks to Shed and manehi.

  38. Sil’s (@36) first in, AJAX, was my last in (!), and that was my favourite clue in a crossword full of good clues.

    Like FirmlyDirac and some others, I didn’t know MUCOID, VILLUS, INTERMIT or COLOPHON, nor the spelling of HASSIDIC with double-S.  However, the wordplay always allowed me to be sure of the answers I got, and  I’m with all those who said this is an excellent crossword.

    Thanks to Shed and manehi

     

  39. I have to echo the praise for Shed. If there is such a thing as a perfect puzzle, this was it for me. I was able to get every answer, almost always with happy mixture of definition and wordplay but rarely without a good deal of cogitation which in turn lead to those aha moments that make solving so fun.

    I didn’t even blink at the lunch/dinner equivalence. I grew up in the southern US where we often use breakfast, dinner and supper, much to the chagrin of other regions of the country.  I tend to think in terms of breakfast, lunch and dinner but to me lunch is small whereas a large or celebratory meal in the early afternoon would still be a dinner, e.g. Sunday dinner.

    I also liked Eileen @ 11’s examples although in the US we have school lunches served by lunch ladies.

  40. I’m with Pino@37 in using the parsing to get the answer rather than the usual vice versa. And as too often happens anothe bung in held me up as I had BATH rather than FISH CAKE which meant the excellent MINISKRTS was my loi. All the new words were fairly clued and I’m another northerner for whom dinner was in the middle of the day until moving south.
    Thanks to Shed and manehi for help with parsing a couple.

  41. Thanks everyone.

    BlueDot@39: you make me blush. Speaking as an English southerner who’s spent a fair bit of time in the north of England, I’ve sat through innumerable pub debates about what time of day ‘dinner’ is eaten at: in my experience, northerners tend to favour the middle of the day and southerners the evening. But we did have ‘dinner ladies’ who served us lunch when I was at primary school in Surrey, so I think it’s pretty much up for grabs.

    Having become alarmed by the discovery that TROUSER ROLE isn’t in Chambers, I googled it, and learned that it’s known as a ‘pants role’ in BlueDot’s part of the world. But either way it is a well-attested bit of theatrical jargon.

  42. Working in a shop several years ago I was flummoxed for the first week when my co-worker asked me every day what I was having for my tea. She was equally flummoxed thinking I lived on biscuits.
    I spent a large part of my life working in the theatre but have never heard of the term trouser role.

  43. FirmlyDirac @34 — it finally occurred to me to click on your row of blue question marks, which did indeed lead me to Chasid/Hasid/Hassid spelled in Hebrew letters.  Since the samekh has a dagesh under it, wouldn’t that be an argument for doubling the s in the transcription to the Latin alphabet?  (You may know a reason why it wouldn’t, and I defer to you.)

  44. My overall linguistic impression is that “dinner” refers to whatever is the principal or biggest meal of the day, which in some places is at midday and others is in the evening.  From the point of view of health, it’s much better for you not to eat a big meal just before you sleep.  “Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dine like a beggar.”  Breakfast, lunch and supper simplifies all.

  45. Thank you manehi and Shed – it was a very enjoyable puzzle to solve

    I was unable to parse the HC in FISHCAKE, and new words for me were BALHAM, VILLUS.

    My favourites were LOTHARIO, ROOT OUT, AJAX, MINOTAUR.

Comments are closed.