Inquisitor 1561: Chip Chop by Vismut

22 comments on “Inquisitor 1561: Chip Chop by Vismut”

1. Another tough one I thought. Not quite the challenge of the previous week’s, but not far off. I hadn’t thought about the diagonal having to fit in with the letters of the perimeter, which nudges my admiration for the puzzle up another notch. Inevitably some obscure words in the grid, which made tying up the details quite tough and it took me a while to parse everything to my satisfaction. 25D, EVEN ON, was the last I worked out, taking several days of occasional squinting at it even after knowing there was an extra B in there somewhere, but TITRATE at 21D was also late to fall. I think the ‘race’ is the Isle of Man TT, around the ‘in’, minus the superfluous n.

   Thanks to Vismut for an engaging challenge and Duncan for the detailed blog, though I note you have the second letter of SATIATE down as an E, and hence your homophones askew.

2. In a recent puzzle by The Ace of Hearts “Bill’s camel” was used in a clue to indicate a Shakespearean word. Well, in this puzzle we have “Ed’s favoured” in 13a, referring to Burke. What next? “Geoff’s” to indicate a Chaucerism? (We shall see.) ‘Ed’ foxed me for a while, and I only understood it after solving the clue in spite of it = but I’m not objecting.

   While solving 23a I misread ‘gentlemen’ as ‘gentleman’ and got the extra letter P from STUMP + M, leaving STUMM. I saw my error (the correct wordplay being STUB + MM) only when B was needed instead of P for the quotation.

   My grid was half filled before I saw what was going on round the edges: most of SHOREDITCH was there. I suspected much earlier that it wasn’t going to be a musical group, and I was pleased with the choice of theme. I had all but the ‘L’ of PEAL, so that quickly followed. I have to admit that the grid was nearly complete before I saw the oranges and lemons.

   The rhyme was of course well known to me, but I never knew the last line with ‘Chip Chop …’ until now. That made sense of the title.

   I was stuck for a while on my last entry MANOAO. It was such an unlikely word that I started to question the presence of BOW in the perimeter. However, it yielded in the end.

   Like OPatrick, I had to admire the way the fruit meshed with the bells in the two corners.

   On scanning the diagram in order to find the fruit, I couldn’t help noticing that the grid would have been symmetrical if the centre square (‘S’) had been boxed in entirely instead of being part of the word LESSENS. This could have worked because the ‘S’ is part of ORANGES. Perhaps this idea was ditched because it would have drawn attention to where the fruit were hidden.

   Thanks to Vismut for an enjoyable puzzle (my 20th Inquisitor and my first by him/her) and to Duncan for an excellent blog.

3. I agree that the ‘race’ is supposed to be TT, even though it would be wrong, since TT strictly speaking denotes ‘races’

4. Duncan

   Sorry – I somehow skipped what you wrote about the near-symmetry of the grid, otherwise I would have referred to it.  Non-symmetry doesn’t bother me, but in this puzzle it was worth commenting on because it was so close to being ‘achieved’, as we both noticed.

5. Another great puzzle, many thanks to Vismut. Similar to others, I had filled a substantial proportion of the grid before having any sense of what the theme might be. It was only when starting to guess what might be in the perimeter that I wondered about ‘St Clements’. It was lucky that I started there – had I seen any of the other churches first then I’m sure that I would have headed off on a wild goose chase. Things began to fall into place reasonably quickly after that.

   Thanks to Duncan for the comprehensive blog. TITRATE had stumped me too. I had spent a while trying to make something of TEAR backwards (‘race around’) with a spare E but the message ruled that out.

6. An auspicious debut. Nice theme that takes me back more years than I care to think about, and a tidy endgame that left no room for doubt. As far as I remember the version I learned ended with “…chop off your head!” but it wasn’t hard to confirm the significance of the title. Great stuff.

   I parsed TITRATE as others have without too much of a hold-up; TT has been a staple for “races” and, incorrectly, “race” for as long as I’ve been doing crosswords.

   Alan  @2: Ed is a pretty common indicator for those pesky Spenserian words in advanced barred puzzles like this and the Listener. You’ll meet him pretty often if you do these crosswords regularly. I don’t recall ever seeing Geoff, but that’s probably because there are very few Chaucer words in Chambers.

   More from Vismut please!

7. An enjoyable debut that I didn’t find to be overly tricky, at least as far as Inquisitors go. The quote was fairly easy to come by, and with a little help from Google… In went the remainder of the perimeter letters, where MARTIN was always a pretty fair guess for the far bottom right. More please. 🙂

8. @6 – I don’t know what puzzles you’ve been doing but whilst I agree races =TT has been a staple for years, I have never seen ‘race’ used (as you say erroneously) as TT. Any decent crossword editor would remove it. I don’t, incidentally, mean to imply that John H isn’t a decent crossword editor – it’s very rare that I see errors in any of the IQ puzzles so I can only assume this was a rare occasion when an error slipped through. It happens.

    

   Of course, we could all be wrong about the parsing anyway…!

9. @2 – I’ve only just read your comment about Spenser

   I’ve been doing the IQ (and its predecessors), Listener and Azed for about 25 years and I would hazard a guess that I’ve seen probably every word Spenser ever uttered  – let alone his poetry – as entries, almost all of which are indicated by ‘Ed’s’ ‘Edmund’s’ or ‘poet’s’ or something similar. Get used to it!!

10. cruciverbophile @6

    This was indeed my first encounter with Ed.  And of course I meant to say Spenser and not Burke.  (These pesky literary figures both had the name Edmund!)

11. binybing @9

    I am now ‘used to it’.  Once learned, never forgotten.

12. I have to express admiration for how neatly the theme was incorporated into the puzzle. The quote had me thinking churches, but despite thinking “huh, BEL?? might be BELLS” whilst deducing it, it wasn’t until I’d got the bottom half of the grid mostly sorted that STC?E?E?N??, uh, rang a bell… squeezing all the churches in around the perimeter helped with some of the awkward words that are inevitable under such strict constraints, and then there was the beautiful back-to-back epiphanies that the superfluous words were all bits of a bell (though I did have to look up “sally”…) and that PEAL was to lead to the homophone PEEL (which Vismut may well be pleased to know elicited an audible groan), so that ORANGES & LEMONS could indeed go down the diagonal that I’d flagged as suspicious due to the asymmetry. Not to say that the asymmetry was a flaw; just like the interesting wording at the end of the preamble, it served as a tantalising hint of the endgame’s depth that gave nothing away beforehand and yet confirmed it all definitively afterwards. And just how long did that gridfill take?

    Kudos to you, Vismut, for a great construction and an enjoyable solve, and of course ta to Duncan for the blog!

13. Thanks Panthera@12 for pointing out the link between the words – brilliant! That had passed me by entirely and adds a further layer of satisfaction.

14. Bingybing @8: I can’t remember where I saw race singular = TT, but I’m guessing it was probably the Guardian. TT = race singular (but not plural) also appears in the list of abbreviations at the end of the Chambers Crossword Manual.

15. Stupidly mis-read the instruction re the superfluous words, using the clue word rather than the answer and hence failing to get ‘peal’, and thus also its homophone. Also made a few mistakes on the extra letters. Yet I still loved this puzzle – the slow-dawning realisation these weren’t merely East London locations, but out of a nursery rhyme.

    Many thanks to Vismut for a beautifully integrated puzzle, and duncanshiell for a helpful blog.

16. I didn’t find this puzzle as difficult as some others seem to have – I guess I got in tune with the setter’s thinking early on. Anyway, I thought that this was an exemplary debut by Vismut and most enjoyable – admirable.
    And I’m glad someone has mentioned that the 4 superfluous words were all to do with bell-ringing – I knew about WHEEL, CLAPPER, and ROPE but I too had to look up SALLY: “the woolly grip of a bell-rope”.
    Thanks to Duncan for the blog. I parsed TITRATE the same as many others, and wasn’t aware of the singular/plural issue regarding TT race(s).

17. I agree with the positive comments already expressed so I won’t repeat them except to say that I really enjoyed this one. I solved a few in the top right which gave me in the perimeter Y-TE—EY, the first Y most likely being the end of a previous word. I must be in my second childhood because STEPNEY jumped out at me almost immediately, suggesting “bells of” and I was hopeful that I had sussed the theme. A few more more perimeter letters seemed to confirm this and I was soon able to fill in the rest of the group unambiguously, together with a fair stab at the letters to be extracted from the clues. This allowed some “reverse engineering”, which was a great help with some of the clues which which had till then stumped me, mainly in the lower part of the grid.

    Thanks to DS for the blog and to Vismut for a puzzle with some nice touches – I look forward to your next one.

18. A towering (!) achievement in grid construction. Absolutely loved it. Bravo to Vismut and thanks to Duncan for the blog.

19. I’m late to the party again, but loved the sequence of revelations. Crabbe (oh dear what a boring poet) emerged from a lot of pleasant preliminary work. After further progress and being slow about the perimeter (fictional churches maybe? Barchester Cathedral? Fenchurch St Paul?) I started seeing something like ANGEL and DEMON in the long diagonal. Panic! Consternation! Is this going to be a Dan Brown novel? Then it came clear and I very happily wrote in all the churches from memory.

    The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes confirms my vague recollection that another related couplet is “Gay go up and gay go down / To ring the bells of London Town”. Which would presumably have led to “Yaggar” as an alternative crossword title.

20. @19 too late at night: “Yaggay” not “Yaggar”.

21. I enjoyed this very much, a well crafted IQ with a good theme that didn’t require Wikipedia to finish.

    Early on I made a guess there would be cathedrals & related items around the edge.  This was wrong but enabled me to catch on to the church theme very quickly when it started to appear in more detail.  It was very nice to be able to complete the puzzle from memory for a change without relying on Wikipedia.  I didn’t understand the title as I had not heard the last line of the rhyme before.

    A possible defence of a singular TT: in cycling (non-motorised) and other sports TT stands for “time trial” which is a singular race.  Not listed in Chambers but widely used nonetheless.

    Thanks Vismut and Duncan

22. Enjoyed greatly.  Well done Vismut and thanks DS.

    Listener 4052, Question by Aedites, was the previous puzzle based on the Crabbe quote.

    Re TT, 7d, in last Saturday’s Times cryptic, for MOTTO, the totally unsurprising clue …

    “Noise from the herd about race becomes slogan”.

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