Guardian 27,448 / Chifonie

52 comments on “Guardian 27,448 / Chifonie”

1. Thanks Chifonie and Eileen

   I enjoyed this, with particular favourites BECKON, FIREDAMP and COUPON. I didn’t parse ROUNDERS, and I think 8d would have been better as “Look up and down” in a down clue.

   DUNEDIN and RIFLEMAN reminded me of this charming bird (sorry, Pierre!).

2. Derrida was my LOI. My problem with philosopher clues is that the only ones I’ve heard of are in Monty Python’s philosopher song.  So I hum it through in my head and if no-one leaps out I’m down to trying to fathom out the wordplay.  Aficionados of MP will know that Jaques Derrida does not feature.  Presumably he was a sober sort.  I managed to derive him from the wordplay though with a quick check on Google afterwards.

3. Thank you for the (as always) excellent blog Eileen.  I completely agree with your general comments about the puzzle; so many thanks to Chifonie as well for a very enjoyable start to the week!

   I was interested to see what you made of 22a; I can’t come up with anything better but the “S” in isolation seems a little weak to me.

   As is often the case, I found the Quiptic today as challenging (indeed, possibly slightly more challenging) than the Cryptic (although I did the Quiptic first and so the brain might not have warmed up properly then).

    

4. I found this to be harder than the Quiptic today – which I guess is how it ought to be! I failed to solve 21d, 13d, 22a and my favourite was MIND-READER.
   Thanks Chifonie and Eileen

5. Hi michelle @4 – your comment made me realise I had omitted 21dn! My apologies: I’ll amend it now.

6. Good morning, Eileen.

   My parsing of ROUNDERS was the same as yours but I was hoping for something else.  I can’t help feeling there’s a bit of a typo as I can’t find a way to read the clue satisfactorily.

   I wondered if the M in ADAM was for Monsieur as I don’t see the abbreviation for ‘man’ in Chambers.

7. William @6

   Isle of Man = IOM perhaps?

8. Thanks Eileen – you read my mind! (Comment at 15a 🙂

9. Thanks Eileen and Chifonie.

   I’m with Frankie@2 in generally not knowing philosophers who don’t feature in the MP song, but got 17a from the crossers and wordplay.

   13d: I read RIFLE as meaning “sack” in the sense of “loot”, as in rifling a safe etc.

    

10. muffin @7:  Interesting thought.  Better than mine but still a bit dodgy don’t you think?

11. beaulieu @ 9 – me too on “rifle”

    William @10 – yes, a bit dodgy. Rather like accepting B for “broadcasting” as that’s what it stands for in BBC!

12. Me @6:  So sorry, I meant the M in IMAGES of course.

13. Hi William @6 – Perhaps there is a typo [or omission]: ‘dismissed with less than one player would make better sense – but then I would have a serious issue with ‘less’. 😉

    As you say, Chambers doesn’t have M as an abbreviation for man – hence my question mark. I wondered if the clue should have read ‘male’. muffin @7 – I don’t really think you would like that!

    Yes, Andrew @8 – it was you I was looking at! 😉

14. William@6, you don’t need M as an abbreviation for anything. It’s A, +MAD reversed, as Eileen noted.

15. beaulieu @9 – re 13dn: oops, that’s what I meant, of course: I’m so used to seeing sack = fire in crosswords that I carelessly wrote the wrong word. I’ll correct it now.

16. Eileen @13

    Yes, I might have complained 🙂

17. Frankie the cat @2

    And I thought I was the only one! It’s a useful bit of trivia, which works more often than not, and often leads me into searching YouTube for Python videos.

    I drink, therefore, I am. Classic.

    A nice puzzle, thanks muchly Chifonie and Eileen.

18. A good Monday puzzle – I particularly liked BECKON, MIND-READER and COUPON. Flummoxed by ROUNDERS. Many thanks to Chifonie and Eileen.

19. I don’t know whether I’m relieved or disappointed that no one  has come up with an alternative for ROUNDERS. I’m going out now until mid- afternoon – perhaps it will be resolved by then…

20. Thanks Chifonie and Eileen. I started very slowly on the acrosses but that might have been my brain warming up, and it then came together as a fast but pleasant solve (or almost). I enjoyed BESTRIDE and MIND-READER. I entered ROUNDERS but found I couldn’t parse it. Came here and kicked myself for not seeing RO for run out.

    As a lapsed bridge player (sic) I don’t have a problem with S for player. Not terribly witty or elegant but entirely adequate I think. It was the other end of the answer that tripped me up.

21. Hi Eileen, for what it’s worth my Chambers Crossword Dictionary has M = man and player = S. I parsed ROUNDERS as you did.

    Thanks Chifonie for a good Monday crossword. The ‘… in country’ is a bit sloppy but I guess we all knew what was intended.

22. @Robi

    I don’t have a copy of Chambers Crossword Dictionary so that abbr. is new to me.

    In my BRB, 12th. ed, “m” has numerous listings (including male and masculine) but not man. Although it suits me (as a setter) to have as wide a palette as possible, I must say that I think this idea of another crossword setters’ Bible extra supplement to the BRB is a step too far.

    I have long suspected that serious Scrabble players cajole to get frankly nonsense words into dictionaries to they can bung down an x, z or q on the triple-letter square and it would be a shame if crossword setters were to go down the same route

23. baerchen @22; I agree, I said ‘for what it’s worth’ – I can’t find M=man in most dictionaries. It can also be found in Bradford’s, so there must be some usage. It can be found here as a term in Business.

24. Thanks for your clear blog (as usual), Eileen.  I agree with your general comment about the crossword.  I see also that Andrew is the person you had in mind, but I’ll just say that I too had the same doubts about the two clues concerned (15a and 14d), in which a word like ‘somewhere’ is missing.

    I liked the two incidences of ‘sack’ in the clues, one meaning ‘fire’ and the other ‘rifle’.

    I’ve never heard of Derrida (17a), but the wordplay ensured it had to be that.

    Thanks also to Chifonie.

25. Thanks Chifonie and Eileen

    As a regular bridge player, I can confirm that it is normal to refer to individual players as North, South, West or East especially when playing Duplicate Bridge when we record who played the hand, or who was to lead.

26. Thanks, Eileen and Chifonie.

    This went really quickly for me (about 15 minutes). I am actually familiar with DERRIDA, who is commonly found on humanities grad-school reading lists, so no holdup there.

    As for M for man, it’s common enough in the personal ads, I guess. In other contexts it’s more likely to be “men” than “man” (restroom doors, for example).

27. Thanks to Chionie and Eileen. An enjoyable puzzle which fell into place quite readily, and ideal for a Monday. My only two hiccups were that I had to double check Derrida and could not parse the ros in rounders. Overall good fun and thanks again to Chifonie and Eileen.

28. Came after solving to look up the RO in rounders, which I assumed was another cricket thing. Thanks.

29. Solved while navigating Mrs T round Essex B roads. I’m glad it wasn’t Vlad, or we might have got lost.

    Mostly smooth surfaces, as is the case with Chifonie, but I’m still trying to get my head around ‘years’ being corrupt in 16d, rather than the group.

30. The band Scritti Politti included a song entitled “Jacques Derrida” on their debut album “Songs to Remember”

31. I missed the parsing of ROUNDERS – despite being both a bridge-player and following (some of) the cricket, the only bit I got was UNDER.  Oh well…

    Rest was fine.  I think we’re firmly back with the tradition of ‘gentle Mondays’ – although this was nothing like a Rufus!  Hadn’t heard of DERRIDA (there I go thinking I know the philosophers!) but easy once the wordplay’s sussed.

    9a reminds me of the old anecdote about the guy who ran a sandwich bar and experimented with alligator meat on the menu.  Customers kept on coming in and saying “Alligator sandwich please – and make it SNAPPY!”

    IGMC.  Thanks to Chif and Eileen.

32. Eileen, thanks for a beautiful blog.  Are you going to change the explanation of RIFLEMAN to give “rifle” = “loot” rather than “fire”?  I parsed as beaulieu did @9.

    And Chifonie, thanks too for a thoroughly pleasant Monday morning (and Sunday evening in my case).

     

     

     

33. Surely in 22ac, ‘in game’ is just doing double duty – no problem with South as a player in bridge

34. Thanks to Chifone and Eileen. I enjoyed this puzzle, though, like others, I needed help in parsing ROUNDERS. For those involved in language and literature studies, Jacques Derrida was a very big deal starting in the 1970s as the champion of deconstruction (but don’t ask me to explain it).

35. Nice puzzle. I got ROUNDERS from the crossers and couldn’t parse it. Otherwise, everything went in quite smoothly. I was at university in the seventies when DERRIDA et al were becoming fashionable so I had no problem with him- not as the answer to a crossword clue anyway.
    Thanks Chifonie.

36. Never heard of Derrida but otherwise straightforward Monday fare. Thanks to everyone.

37. Hi Valentine @32

    See me @15 – rushing to go out, I forgot!  Apologies. 😉

38. PS: I don’t know why the link for Robert Adam isn’t working: try this  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Adam

39. Eileen — I did see you @15, but I didn’t see the correction.  I see it now — thanks for the explanation.  Sack is underlined and asterisked — does that mean it’s a link? It doesn’t link.

40. Hi Valentine @ 39 – no, it isn’t a link: the asterisked bit in brackets was supposed to indicate that the asterisked word [‘sack’] was an edit. Sorry if it wasn’t clear – I don’t think this has been my day. 😉

41. Eileen @38

    http://known%20https//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Adam

    Your guess is probably no better than mine as to the source of the extraneous preamble.

    I would say that 6A FIREDAMP has a nicely cryptic definition.

    Thanks for the blog.

42. Thanks, PeterO – but it still doesn’t work!

43. Hi Eileen

    I think Peter was indicating that the link had some spurious content (the “known” bit). Let’s see if this works: Robert Adam.

44. In 21d I had ‘PU’ as the accepted abbreviation for ‘pulled up’ in jumps racing, or is that too specialised?

45. Pyriform @ 44

    I like the idea, but as far as I can see, the abbreviation for “pulled up” in horse-racing is just P; do you have a source for “PU”?

46. PU is given as an alternative here

    I worked in a bookies’ when I was a student, and I don’t think I came across PU – everything was given as abbreviated as possible!

47. …though that was in summer vacs, so there wasn’t much jumps racing, and “pulled-up” is rather rarer in flat races.

48. A pleasant pretty easy start to the week. I didn’t know the philosopher but the answer could be little else. Last in was 5d. Why? Because I messed up 9ac, that’s why. Oh well…

49. I agree with Eileen’s preamble. Thanks to Chifonie and her. At 17a I tried briefly to work out how to change the last letter of 3d to a D so the answer could be DIDEROT, another French philosopher and also containing DID = behaved. I was slow to get the correct answer thinking that DERRIDA was spelt DERUDA for some reason (possible confusion with NERUDA though he was a poet)

50. bodycheetah@ something – my phone doesn’t show the numbers of each comment. Of course, in the Scritti Politti song, in order to fit the scansion, Green had to mis-pronounce the name – Der-eeee-da instead of Derry-da!

51. I enjoyed this puzzle.  I had another super busy day at work, so this (after 1 a.m. now in the Eastern U.S. – Yikes!  I’d better get to bed!) is the first real chance I’ve had all day to come here to read the blog & comments.  I think BECKON and MINDREADER were my favorites today.  I did not know DERRIDA (my LOI), but it was gettable from the wordplay and the crossers.  I expect that SNAPPY meaning irritable can be found in dictionaries and (presumably) in usage by some English language speakers, but I have heard this term used almost always to mean “speedy” (“make it snappy” — and thanks Laccaria @31 for the joke, BTW), whereas when the intent is to mean “irritable”, I have mostly heard the term “snappish” used.

    Many thanks to Chifonie and Eileen and the other commenters.

52. I’ve now discovered that by switching to desktop view one can see the number attached to each contribution.

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