Guardian Genius 180 / Boatman

8 comments on “Guardian Genius 180 / Boatman”

1. I was disappointed in this as a Genius. The Genius usually lasts me several nights two or three clues at a time spread over a few bedtimes but this was finished in one sitting leaving me a whole month to wait for the next. Plantain was my first which gave me the ‘ant’ to add or remove. After that it was fairly simple to complete although I agree that some of the clues didn’t quite work.

2. I took FOND to be “foolishly tender and loving” (archaic; Chambers), ie naive, with sweet=fondant.  That said, I agree with you about some of the other definitions and connections.  I got ANT quickly enough but only managed to solve half the clues; this blog has been illuminating for a number of connections I didn’t make (some I should have made, and some I think I never would have).

    

   Thanks Bert & Joyce, and Boatman for something that kept me occupied!

3. Thanks for the comments so far. Following steve’s comments we looked back at our blog and we realise now that we both missed an error in our parsing of 27d.

   We said we were not totally happy with fond = sweet but it should have said fond = rather naive. However, checking in Chambers we found fond defined as “credulous or foolishly hopeful (archaic)”

4. I think the sense of “fond” as “naive” survives in the expression fond hope: “a desire that is held dear but unlikely to be realised” (Chambers).

   I thought the definition in 5,26 was meant to be a pair of bongos? with “antelope” used as a plural. (Apparently Eric Partridge coined the term “snob plural” for the phenomenon of using the singular form as the plural for animals hunted by the upper classes.)

   Like almw3 I found this pretty easy for a Genius (and a Boatman!) and agree with B&J about its non-boat-floating quality. I identified ANT as the “word in common” early on, and it somehow seemed a bit of a disappointment.

5. I read 5,26 the same way as Andrew@4, with the question mark justifying “a pair” as an example of a plural.

   I was half-expecting to come here and find I’d missed something clever in the grid to do with ants, but it doesn’t look like there’s anything else going on. Boatman’s last couple of cryptics have been (relatively) straightforward as well.

   Thanks to Boatman and Bertandjoyce

6. FOI was LATE NEWS, which gave me ANT (although for some reason, I had TEN written down as the extra word, which delayed me a little). Unfortunately, I didn’t solve 6d, PAGE (I don’t like the definition much, either) or 27d, FOND (perhaps the clue should have indicated an archaism?). 7d, ATHENA was a tentative second in, using the def and the final NA, later confirmed by crossers though I never parsed it fully.

   I also took “a pair of bongos?” as the definition (by example) in 10,26. I thought the definition for 21 was ok, rather clever in fact: “asking for it” is inviting trouble, isn’t it?

   This blog would be much easier to read if the answer was on the same line as the number, or failing that, if there was another blank line between entries.

   Thanks for the explanations, B&J.

7. I solved this one fairly quickly and then sat there for several weeks wondering if I had got 6d right as the definition for PAGE seemed so vague I never felt convinced about it.

8. Unlike your other contributors, we did not find this disappointingly easy !

   We stared at it for a couple of days without making any progress, discarded for a couple of weeks, then came back to it and got LATE NEWS like Tony, after which progress was steady, if not rapid.  As others, I found some of the definitions a bit weak, but I put that down to Boatman just being one of those setters for whom I have difficulty getting on the same wavelength.

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