Guardian Quiptic 952/Matilda

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An entertaining Quiptic from Matilda this morning with a sting in the tail.

 

 

 

I solved this with the sense only of ‘this is a good, accessible, Quiptic, I’ll give it a thumbs up in the blog’. It was only when I was writing the blog that I realised what the setter had done: all the acrosses, apart from the middle 19ac, are anagrams of each other. So we have:

TANGERINE/ARGENTINE
CANOE/OCEAN
EXALT/LATEX
BRASSERIE/BRASSIERE
VARIOUS/SAVIOUR
ARMPITS/IMPARTS
REGAL/LAGER

We have occasionally in the past had a Nina in a Quiptic (if you don’t know what a Nina is, click on the FAQ button in the taskbar at the top of this page) but this is the first time we’ve had anything like this. Normally this sort of ‘cleverness’ leaves me a bit cold, but to have done it within the constraints of producing a puzzle for beginners is a feat, I think. Brava, Matilda.

 

Abbreviations
cd  cryptic definition
dd double definition
(xxxx)*  anagram
anagrind = anagram indicator
[x]  letter(s) removed

definitions are underlined

 

Across

9 Fly entering a fruit
TANGERINE
A fine surface and clever clue to get us going: it’s (ENTERING A)* with ‘fly’ as the anagrind.

10 Sporty Sebastian takes an Inuit boat
CANOE
An insertion of AN in [Sebastian] COE.

11 Worship at some sex altar
EXALT
Hidden in sEX ALTar.

12 Money, ie note, provides support
BRASSIERE
A charade of BRASS for a slang word for ‘money’, IE, and RE for the second ‘note’ of the tonic sol-fa.

13 You French inhaling polluted air of different kinds
VARIOUS
An insertion of (AIR)* in VOUS for one of the French words for ‘you’. The anagrind is ‘polluted’ and the insertion indicator is ‘inhaling’.

14 Weaponise collieries — they can be hairy!
ARMPITS
A charade of ARM and PITS gives you the posh word for oxters.

17 Majestic Elgar composition
REGAL
(ELGAR)*

19 Cut back endless test
AXE
EXA[M] reversed.

20 Mix large drink
LAGER
(LARGE)*

21 Passes on compiler’s bits
IMPARTS
A charade of I’M for ‘compiler is’ and PARTS.

22 Relish hugging one rescuer
SAVIOUR
An insertion of I in SAVOUR.

24 A place to eat for senior officers by a lake
BRASSERIE
A charade of [top] BRASS and one of the Great Lakes.

26 Extremely twee in soft rubber
LATEX
An insertion of TE for the outside letters of ‘twee’ in LAX.

28 Once a stormy body of water
OCEAN
(ONCE A)*

29 Barges into mines stripped of silver
ARGENTINE
Matilda is asking you to take away (‘strip’) the outside letters of the first three words of the clue, so it’s [B]ARGE[S] plus [I]NT[O] plus [M]INE[S]

 

Down

1 Last year’s eye problem
STYE
Hidden in laST YEar. You have to take ‘year’s’ to mean ‘year has’.

2 Not starting amusements is mean
UNFAIR
[F]UNFAIR. This one has been round the block a bit, but it’s a Quiptic, so fair play.

3 Painter’s tool touched fancy car
FELT ROLLER
A charade of FELT and ROLLER. Rolls-Royces could certainly be described as ‘fancy’.

4 Cloud visible initially in Northern Ireland may bring us snow
NIMBUS
The first letters of the last six words of the clue.

5 Repeats a stupid part
SEPARATE
(REPEATS A)*

6 Serves cards
ACES
A dd.

7 Not noticing jockey — genuine (and small)
UNSEEING
(GENUINE S)* with ‘jockey’ as the anagrind.

8 Only water
MERE
A dd, the first an adjective and the second a noun. MERE is one of only a few adjectives in English that can be attributive but not predicative. You can say ‘a black cat’ and ‘the cat was black’; you can say ‘a mere scratch’ but you can’t say ‘the scratch was mere’.

13 Did reviewer turn up to cover musician?
VERDI
Hidden reversed in dID REViewer.

15 Man admits love rejection not heartless but evil
MALEVOLENT
One best got from the definition with the parsing to confirm, I fancy. An insertion of LOVE reversed in MALE followed by N[O]T. The insertion indicator is ‘admits’; the reversal indicator is ‘rejection’; the removal indicator is ‘heartless’.

16 More painful therefore doctor gave painkiller at last
SORER
A charade of SO for ‘therefore’ and the last letters of doctoR, gavE and painkilleR.

18 Be successful and travel
GO PLACES
A dd.

19 Al abandoned girl down under for a European
AUSTRIAN
AUSTR[AL]IAN and another one we’ve seen before a few times.

22 Hammer vehicle
SLEDGE
A dd.

23 Where you may get beef to follow soup
OXTAIL
A charade of OX for ‘beef’ and TAIL for ‘follow’.

24 Bravo, you upset cardinal as an example
BUOY
A charade of B for ‘bravo’ in the phonetic alphabet and YOU reversed. A ‘cardinal’ is a type of buoy, I learned this morning, a fact which I will endeavour to store for future use.

25 They say perfume is in the post
SENT
A homophone (‘they say’) of SCENT.

27 Ten guys are superheroes
X-MEN
A simple charade gives you the American superheroes.

 

Thanks to Matilda for an entertaining Quiptic to begin the cruciverbal week.

20 comments on “Guardian Quiptic 952/Matilda”

  2. Very much enjoyed this one. I’m surely missing something obvious that will make me kick myself later, but I can’t see what the girl adds to the clue for 19 D.
    Thanks to Matilda and Pierre for today’s fine offerings ?

  3. Nice. I didn’t notice the pattern until the last of the pairs – BRASSERIE. Then the rest fairly jumped out of the grid.

  4. Thanks Matilda and Pierre

    I noticed the OCEAN/CANOE pair, so was on the lookout for the others (aren’t Inuit boats “kayaks”?). However I was baffled by the parsing of several. I tried to do something with the reversed GNAT in TANGERINE (though this did give me ARGENTINE, which I might otherwise have missed); I didn’t know the cardinal BUOY; I didn’t see the RE in SORER.

    In what context does “hammer” mean SLEDGE? Sledging in sport is purely verbal.

  5. AussieNovice @2

    You need a person to be an “Australian”. Matilda is perhaps following Arachne’s example of making any unspecified person female.

    P.S. It was unfortunate that the typeface left it ambiguous whether it was Al(an) or Artificial Intelligence!

  9. Nice quiptic, thanks for the blog, buoy as cardinal escaped me.

    I would have had 19a as a palindrome e.g. ada/aka etc with 5d then as e.g. metadata – then the conceit would be complete.

    Muffin@5, yes, quite – if the clue had said “man down under” nobody would have noticed.

  10. I have a vague memory of the clue “Regal as Elgar, or as large, perhaps (7).” Without remembering that, I probably wouldn’t have spotted the pattern until much later.

    I didn’t know about the buoy and failed to parse SORER, figuring that RE for “doctor” was some unfamiliar abbreviation. Otherwise, this went very quickly, mostly because I was lucky enough to spot the pattern early.

    I wouldn’t want this sort of thing to be used too often, but on rare occasions I think it’s good fun, especially when, as in this case, it’s implemented so well.

     

     

  13. An excellent Quiptic – more enjoyable we thought than today’s cryptic. We noticed the pairings which helped us guess a couple of answers without really checking the clues but this did not spoil the solve.

    We didn’t know that a cardinal was a type of buoy ……. but we do now.

    Thanks Matilda and Pierre.

  14. I was wondering if Matilda is an Australian (girl)? The pseudonym, from our national song.
    And the 4 X’s, on an axis, through AXE. An Aussie beer XXXX.
    Loved the trick in this, although it only appeared late,as I was distracted by the Xs. I still think there might have been a reference to axes.

  16. I visited the Quiptic page for Monday the 12th on Wednesday the 14th, but the puzzle being shown is in fact *next* Monday’s. It’s even labelled the 19th, which I didn’t notice till I’d nearly finished it. Once again the Grauniad manages to get it wrong.

  17. I’ve just noticed that too pac. I’d partially filled it in during my teabreak on Monday and I’ve only just got back to it this evening, so it took me a few confused minutes to figure out why my entries were all over the place and apparently unconnected to the clues.

    There is a workaround though: clicking on the ‘Print’ button shows the correct puzzle and if you want the interactive version it’s available via the WaybackMachine web archive, here – although it won’t save your progress in the proper place of course.

  19. Muffin @4 As a kayaker myself, it took me a long time to think of an Inuit boat as  being neither a kayak or an umiak. (Apparently the former means ‘men’s boat’ and the latter ‘women’s boat’. Nevertheless although British paddlesports enthusiasts, following American usage, tend to differentiate between ‘kayaks’ (usually decked and propelled by a double bladed paddle) and ‘canoes’ usually undecided and propelled by a single bladed paddle, more generally, in British English, a kayak can be considered a type of canoe.

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