Guardian Cryptic 27,496 by Chifonie

45 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 27,496 by Chifonie”

1. Epic = Ambitious ?

2. Phil@1: indeed. I strongly disliked that. I also didn’t know REP=cloth but you live and learn.

3. phil@1 promo for The Holy Grail…. “Makes Ben Hur look like an epic”

4. Thanks Chifonie; the bottom half went in fairly smartly but one or two in the top half needed some extra thought.

   Thanks loonapick; the Oxford Thesaurus has an epic/ambitious journey.

5. Thanks for the blog, loonapick, and sorry to hear about your technical hitches.
   I enjoyed this except for the two aforementioned clues, 1a REPTILE and 2d EPICURE, with a question mark over both “cloth” and “ambitious”. Still can’t see the sense of it in the example sentence, copmus@3.
   My favourites were 11a GOODS TRAIN, 19a BEDFELLOW, 26a IMPRUDENCE, 28a ALGEBRA, 6d OBSESS, 7d CORPOREAL and 9d CONDESCENDING.
   Thanks to Chifonie.

6. Thanks Robi@4 for your post re EPIC; we crossed.

7. Cantered swiftly through the top half (which is a new experience for me) when reality bit and I lost my mojo in the bottom half. Got there eventually but quite a lot of relying on the crossers and guessing. Did manage to parse almost all of them, after the event. Didn’t like reptile (though I got it). Liked algebra and sunder! All in all, a good one for newbies like me. I suspect some of you pros won’t have had to break sweat.

8. Thanks Chifonie and loonapick

   I didn’t see “ambitious” for EPIC either, but apart from this it was fine. Favourites were CONDESCENDING and SUNDER.

9. Thanks to Chifonie and loonapick. This went in quite readily and steadily. That said, I think I spent more time on one clue (17a) than I did on all the rest. It w as an unfamiliar term to me (clearly never been a shareholder). Firstly convinced myself it could end with ia (plural) then tried scrib and finally had to look up scrip. However always nice when you learn a new word. I liked wedge and good strain and thanks again to Chifonie and loonapick.

10. I thought this was too easy to be much fun, without Rufus’s deftness.  RISING especially, but also GOODS TRAIN, CONDESCENDING and ROTATE were just putting the pieces one after the other and BEDFELLOW is what loonapick said.

11. It wasn’t so much the REP that bothered me as its always been used for ‘material’ in crosswords but I’ve never heard of REPTILE for a base person. So new one for me on that.

    I’m with Phil@1 despite Robi’s offering. Otherwise just right for a Monday, thanks Chifonie

12. As always with “easier” puzzles there were several clues that took longer than they should have done with hindsight including REPTILE and CONCEAL. Like others I had ticks against GOODS TRAIN, CONDESCENDING and SUNDER – the latter because it’s a lovely word rarely used except in ASUNDER so it was nice to be reminded it is a verb in its own right.
    Apart from the questionable (but understandable) EPIC I thought this was a cleanly clued and enjoyable puzzle so thanks to Chifonie and to loonapick.

13. My computer dictionary has REP/REPP as “a fabric with a ribbed surface, used in cutains & upholstery”.

14. I know each of REP = cloth, TILE = hat and REPTILE = something that has crawled out from underneath a stone that you’d rather not have any dealings with (very unfair to lizards, I’ve always thought), but putting them together was another matter. Probably because I thought I was looking for a pediment-style base or a cloth hat. Which, no doubt, Chifonie wanted me to do. No other problems though.

15. All pretty straightforward as we have come to expect from Chifonie, but there were a few here than took me longer than they should have done, with ALGEBRA last in.

    Thanks to Chifonie and loonapick

16. Thanks to Chifonie and loonapick. Back to normal Monday fare with no complaints from me. I took a while before spotting ARISING and missed the parsing for SUNDER but otherwise proceeded smoothly. Am I the only one who has come across the IMPUDENCE-IMPRUDENCE link many times?

17. Re 23a, how does PROFOUND = “to have great insight”? And in 2d, how does EPICURE= “great taste” or “has great taste”?

18. Thanks Chifonie and loonapick.  A nice Monday puzzle.

    I was OK with “ambitious” for EPIC, as in an epic novel / an ambitious novel.

    One crossword convention I’ve never understood is “banker” to mean river.  I know it’s an old favourite, but why?  A river flows, so it’s a flower, no problem.  But a river doesn’t bank, it has banks.  A house has a roof, but that doesn’t make it a roofer.  Am I missing something?

19. Like Offspinner @17, I thought the cryptic grammar had gone somewhat awry in both 2d EPICURE and 23a PROFOUND.

    Apart from those, I thought this was a crisply clued crossword with some nice touches, for example: ‘once’ instead of the usual ‘ex’ for ‘formerly’ in 5a CONCEAL, ‘hearts’ instead of the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘suit’ in 14a HEARTLESS (in which ‘les’ instead of the usual ‘le’ or ‘la’ for the French definite article is also used), and the neat phrase ‘in front of’ in 19a BEDFELLOW which could mislead one into thinking the anagram (EDFELL) comes first.

    A quirk of the puzzle is that DECAGON is as good as OCTAGON at 21d – except of course that two crossers would then not work!

    I liked BEDFELLOW and ALGEBRA best of all.

    Thanks toChifonie and loonapick.

20. I didn’t know REP=cloth but I did know TILE. I got really bogged down in the SE as a result of putting DECAGON-which parses just as well as the,admittedly, more obvious OCTAGON- in at 21dn. Otherwise this was fine.
    Thanks Chifonie.

21. I was happy with REPTILE.

    I confess to the same concerns as offspinner@17

    My last one in was SCRIP, which I had to look up. Annoyingly, it also means writing.

    Liked BEDFELLOW, OBSESS, and many more

    Many thanks Chifonie and loonapick

22. Dreadful grid re number of unchecked/checked letters.

23. I was held up for much longer than I should have been because I somehow convinced myself that 8d was an &lit, and I kept searching for an anagram of ‘a riot is’.

24. ‘Reptile’ is commonly used in the UK to describe unscrupulous hacks who make a living out of sensationalist journalism. Here’s the opening sentence of a 2011 Guardian opinion piece on phone-hacking by Simon Jenkins:

    ‘Shock disclosure – journalists sometimes behave unethically. The reptiles behave like reptiles. As they slither round the swamp, they even run out of prey, and are now consuming their own.’

25. Chris M @22

    I take your point about the ‘unfriendliness’ of the grid (as I would call it) in terms of the number of answers that have fewer than half of their letters checked by other answers.  A ratio of 9 out of 29 is one of the highest in the set of grids that the Guardian uses for its crosswords.  (Other grids can be ‘unfriendly’ in other ways, such as having very few connections between the four corners.)

    However, a good setter will be aware not only of the ‘pitch’ of a crossword as a whole but also other factors like the accessibility of clues in, say, a part of the grid where little help is given to solvers in the form of crossing letters – going back to the point you made.

    I thought the setter got this just right.  1a REPTILE was, to me, the only clue that was made more challenging by having so few crossers, but that clue wasn’t vague – nor did it call for having to eliminate dozens of possibilities for the answer as a whole or for the part-answers from the wordplay.

26. I struggled today but having looked at the answers here I think I must be having a slow Brain day. I normally find chifonie ok (I can’t agree he/she is easier than Rufus though!) and I’m sure today was a fair challenge on the whole.

    2 points – I have never heard of cloth = rep and that’s seems pretty obscure if Monday is meant to be “easy”?

    Can someone explain how ‘the Parisian’ is les? Surely it’s le or la, how do you get to a plural ?

    Thanks

27. P.s. tile seems a lot of a stretch for hat also, I struggle with barely synonymous synonyms!

28. Thanks Chifonie and loonapick

    SD @ 26/27:

    ‘rep’ for cloth/fabric is a crossword staple (Chambers definition 3)

    French for ‘the’ is le, la, or les – eg la femme/les femmes. Why should the reference be restricted to the singular?

    ‘tile’ for hat is also a crossword staple. From memory, it also appears in the well-known music-hall song:

    WHERE DID YOU GET THAT HAT

    Now how I came to get this hat is very strange and funny
    Grandfather died and left to me his property and money
    And when the Will it was read out they told me straight and flat
    If I would have his money I must always wear his hat.

    Chorus: ‘Where did you get that hat? Where did you get that tile?
    Isn’t it a nobby one and just the proper style.
    I should like to have one just the same as that.’
    Wherever I go they shout ‘Hello, where did you get that hat?’

    hth

29. Stuart @27&27

    “les” is the Parisian word for “the”. As in “les hommes” for example.

    Why is tile a“lot of a stretch” for hat. It is a word which means hat. As in

    “Where did you get that hat, where did you get that tile?”

30. Pipped to the post!

    Great minds think alike 😉

31. DNF.  Northwest stopped me.

    I too have never heard of REP = Cloth, and REPTILE = “base” is a rather loose simile.  To me that makes the clue too difficult.  Tile = hat is OK, however.  We see that lots of times!

    Likewise EPICURE.  Although the overall def is fine (although not clear that it is a noun – Ximmies might object), EPIC = “ambitious” just doesn’t work for me, sorry!  And whilst we all know “flower” for a river, “banker” is a new one to me (I suppose it’s been used before, but rarely).

    As for the rest, mostly fine although hardly a traditional Monday!  For 21d I originally wrote in DECAGON which of course fits the wordplay equally well.  Then I realised, it’s ambiguous and needs the crossers to determine, so I pencilled in OCT… alongside.

    Question: is a solution that can only be determined by crossers, entirely fair?  I believe Afrit would have said, no.

    Anyway, thanks to Chif and loonapick.

32. REP, TILE and “banker” are all frequent visitors to Guardian crosswords, so presented no difficulties (though, as I said earlier, I wasn’t keen on “ambitious” = EPIC).

    BH has already visited, so is unlikely to respond to a question of how many times IMPRUDENCE and REINFORCE have been clued similarly.

33. Ok I apologise, sorry Chifonie et al, I am rare in not having heard of hat = tile!

    Funny how people were saying they hadn’t heard of reptile = base person when that’s pretty common ‘down the pub’ modern language and rep and tile haven’t been used for many a year! ?

34. Laccaria @31
    In answer to your question about whether a solution that has to be determined by crossers is fair, I would say, as a fellow amateur setter, that I would not allow it myself (at least, intentionally).
    There was a discussion about this on this site some time ago, but I don’t recall any consensus.
    My view is that having unique solutions is what sets cryptics apart from non-cryptic crosswords, in which non-unique answers are normal and, from a setter’s point of view, to be positively encouraged. My rule happens to be what Ximenes wrote down, but I don’t take my rules from him!

35. I enjoyed this as much or more than any Chifonie puzzle I can remember (which, TBH, is a field of no more than the last three Chifonie puzzles).  I had no qualms with REPTILE or REP or TILE, or with EPICURE or EPIC or . . . Wait – What?? Why, it’s the honorary fourth member of the Three Most Important Rivers in Crosswordland!!  (Unless one is a midge.)  I feel like it has been some time since any of the Three appeared in one of the Guardian Cryptics.

    I thought there were many clues today that were commendable for their elegant surfaces and/or clever wordplay.  I ticked DESPOTIC, HEARTLESS, FERMENT, SUNDER, and my CotD, OCTAGON.  (I already had solved BEDFELLOW before I saw 21d, so the possibility that the same clueing (by itself) could have worked also for decagon never occurred to me.)

    I had this song going through my head as I solved the puzzle, but then just now, after reading the comment from Simon S @28, I had to go seek this out.

    Many thanks to Chifonie and loonapick and the other commenters.

     

36. [DaveMc@35 – thrilled to see The Church referenced in your post. A favourite Aussie band. Great live. “Under the Milky Way” and “Unguarded Moment” great songs. Glad they made their way to the US of A.]
    Thanks all for an interesting discussion on the Chifonie puzzle.

37. Urgh. Agree the cryptic grammar comments.

    Having said that, Chifonie isn’t noted for goofs as far as I know, and he is, I’d say, the most natural successor to Rufus.

    Anyway, thanks very much to both.

38. I understand 7d is corporeal but shouldn’t the clue read “soldier with energy…..”?

39. Evening all, and thanks to Chifonie and loonapick.

    Only dropped by to say that I couldn’t believe that REP=cloth was included; I haven’t seen it in long years and had given up using it as a referee when cloth appears in a clue.  I had never seen it, and have never seen it, outside a crossword so have been glad to let it RIP.  But here it is again in all it’s arcane glory. I think it needs to be ditched once and for all.  Also TILE=hat should be laid to rest: the reference is to a Victorian music-hall song and the equality comes only from that song’s strangulated rhyming.  I have less trouble with the unlikeable SCRIP which I haven’t seen before, so something new learnt.

     

40. Julie in Australia @36,

    Thanks for your post!  The two songs by The Church that you mentioned — to me, also (together with Reptile) great inclusions in the soundtrack of [my] life.  “Metropolis” is another one.  I’m listening to it as I type this!  Sorry that I never saw The Church perform live.

41. Michael@38: “without” is taken to be in the sense of “outside”, as in “the rent-collector is without”.  No doubt someone could give you a sentence about wisteria growing without the castle walls, but it’s not something I could easily do – it’s again (cf my comments @39) a rather arcane usage.  I’m gonna say Shakespearean even.

    JinA: good morning. Is it perchance raining without?

42. Alphalpha @39 and others –

    I don’t think that REP = cloth is as arcane,or as limited to Crosswordland, as you state.  I believe that if you search on Google right now, you will find many online menswear merchants whose wares include rep neckties, although sometimes I think the word appears with the alternative spelling of “repp”.  (I.e., I am agreeing with ChrisP @13, although I am mostly familiar with this word in relation to ties, not curtains or upholstery.)

43. DaveMc@42: perhaps so.  I Googled and found the following: “…..if you’re building a necktie wardrobe, it’s better to start with a good foundation of striped rep ties and solid colored grenadines before you branch out to raw silks, boucles, or unusual prints.”  Maybe more quaint than arcane?  A point well made for all that.  But I haven’t seen it in years even within a crossword, though now I’m just repeating myself.  Muffin@32 suggests it’s still a “regular visitor” and he would know better than I.

44. I’ve Wiki’d REP since my post, and all I can say is, if there’s any space left in the old diminishing grey cells, I’m just going to have to file that word away!  Very valuable for setters and solvers alike (almost as valuable as the three – or is it four? – most valuable rivers in Cruciverbaland)!

    I’m only perplexed that I haven’t come across it before.

    And both my father, and my grandfather before him, were in the cloth trade…

45. The best I could manage for 1 was “GENTILE”, which I was much relieved to discover to be wrong.

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