Guardian 27,665 / Brummie

64 comments on “Guardian 27,665 / Brummie”

1. Enjoyed this, stuck for a while with Gunmetal…

2. Thank you, Eileen.

   Enjoyable puzzle with a couple of quibblets (to steal from grantinfreo).  Raised an eyebrow at the double def of FATHOM.  Seems the same root to me but it’s only a minor point.

   Also, not keen on works = watch parts, but it’s probably simply pique on my part as I took ages to see it.

   Last whinge, why does cove have to be an old fellow.  Chambers just has ‘fellow’. Is it perhaps a reference to the somewhat dated usage?  I still use it from time to time.

   Clever anagram of parachute in the GUTTA PERCHA clue.

   Thank you, Brummie, but where’s the theme?

   Nice week, all.

3. Thanks Brummie and Eileen

   I had CUT AWAY instead of OUT TAKE for a while – it works, but it’s not as good, I liked BURN WITH LOVE and WARMTH best.

   Didn’t we have BAGATELLE somewhere very recently?

4. Why the question mark at 4 down?

5. Pretty straightforward but couldn’t get GUTTA PERCHA – even with all the crossers for me a numbers of the anagram letters could have been interchangeable unless you knew the term. I reiterate a view that anagrams shouldn’t be used for technical or scientific clues. To make matters worse there was a fish, stomach and reservist in the answer surely Brummie could have made something of that little lot.

6. @gsolphotog @4 – the question mark is needed for the surface reading, which is a question.

7. Thanks Brummie and Eileen for the blog, but…

    

   sorry –  first time in a long time I didn’t need any explanations. Slow to get going (4 entered on first sortie), but after a break, all fell into place.

8. Re 14: I have vague memories of hearing something like “‘e were reight frit” for “he was really frightened (or sh.. scared)” in Sheffield in my very early youth. Many thanks Brummie and Eileen.

9. Thanks to Eileen and Brummie

   I took 20d as a cryptic def with “sound” being used in the sense of “a coastal water”, which is where most such measurements would be taken in order to avoid grounding.

10. I could also see in 20dn SOUND meaning a stretch of water as in Plymouth  Sound – so a fathom could be a measure used to gauge the depth of water in a sound, i.e a sound measure.

     

    Thanks E & B.

11. Re 14 down. Odd mistake by Hugh Stephenson : Derrick Macnutt was Ximenes not Torquemada

    (Edward Powys Mathers).

12. Hi Dansar @9 and cholecyst @10 – that thought crossed my mind, too.

13. Hi mij@11 – I didn’t spot that – he got it right here  😉

14. Why With (with a capital W) in 8a?

15. Not too difficult, and also enjoyable I thought.
    FATHOM can also be parsed as a definition from the whole clue, since ‘sound’ can mean a body of water, whose depth may be measured in fathoms.
    @BlueCanary, I suggest GUTTA PERCHA is no more a technical/scientific answer than ‘rubber’ – it is simply a term not much used today and therefore perhaps unfamiliar.
    Thanks Eileen and Brummie.

16. Sorry, slow typing meant I crossed with several others regarding FATHOM.

17. Oleg @14

    I wondered about that, but decided it was to make it look like a film title.

18. Thanks to Brummie and Eileen for a good crossword and accurate blog.

    I think there might be a theme here of fonts; apparently, as well as the well-known COURIER, there are GUTTA PERCHA, SKY, GUNMETAL and BOUFFANT, and there might be some others lurking there, or is this just coincidence?

19. … BROWN OWL’s another one …

20. … and SHIVA

21. Wow.  All hail Robi.  Wouldn’t have seen that in a month of Sundays.

22. A bit chewier today, about right for Tues. Took a while to wake up to Bruno’s passion tho it’s a not infrequent device, and ditto connive, even with the v in, which was a bit dense. Quite like gal toting unmet, and I knew frit from my very first visit to Lancs, when great aunt Leah asked me “Are ta frit lad?”, (i.e. frit of her, given her reputation as a bit of a dragon). So yes, pretty widespread in’t north it would seem. [Lots of Germanic (Saxon?) vocab and grammar in that dialect, e.g., “es’ta getten a pair o’ graidly new shoon?”].

    Wondered about naff being ‘outburst’ when it was simply reversed. A mere quibblet, lots to like, thanks Brummie and Eileen.

23. Robi @18 good spot – bagatelle is a font family, shiva is a font (is anything not a font? I see barn owl is, but not brown owl)

    A very fair crozzie – thanks Brummie, and Eileen. Lots of neat surfaces but actually they worked as expected, often using standard answers (such as “gat”). Warmth was my LOI – not really thinking of a month as a short time, especially in politics. 13 and 11 crossing with their guns was slightly unfortunate, but enjoyable clues. Lubyanka was also fun.

    Fathom I had as a measure for sounds (ie bodies of water) or taking soundings. As Ariel did not quite say “Full fathom five thy father lies, alas his aqualung was the wrong size”.

     

24. Also STATURE.

25. Also STROBE LIGHT.

26. Many thanks, Robi – and even more to thezed for elucidating [one of my areas of ignorance.]  😉

    thezed – re 19dn; I took ‘short period of  time’ as indicating an abbreviation of ‘month’ – I’ll amend the blog to clarify.

27. As for fonts, well done Robi et al, courier the only one I know, so no bells rang.

28. Thank you Brummie for an enjoyable puzzle and Eileen for an interesting blog – and Robi for spotting the theme!

29. Took me ages to gain a foothold. After that it unfolded reasonably well. I enjoyed the prison, the rubber and the trinket. SPOOR as a synonym for track was new to me but so clearly clued it wasn’t a problem.

    Re: FRIT, it was used a lot in my youth (70s, just North of London), as in “he frit me up”.

    Re: GUTTA PERCHA – anyone with any interest in the history of golf will have tripped over the term at some point.

    Good puzzle, good blog, good spotting of the fonts! Thanks Eileen, Brummie and Robi.

30. Brummie on best behaviour  with no complaints here. Some nice clues

    And thanks Eileen.

31. Thanks to Brummie and Eileen. A big doh from me. I had no trouble with most of this which was good fun. I then got stuck on 14 and eventually gave up? Now when I came here I noticed that I had put bear with love by mistake. Hey ho teach me to be more careful. I did like glossary, worksheet and cubbyhole. Thanks again to Brummie and Eileen.

32. I was nowhere with the theme myself, but of course we also have FOUNT at 20A and I suppose OUT-TAKE and WORKSHEET are distantly related. All good clean fun!
    Thanks, all.

33. I too was pulled by Bruno Bear at first, PetHay, but couldn’t make 14d work with a middle a, so held off ’til burn put me right, then remembered Auntie Leah (see above). At least I think that’s how it went, too long past shiraz o’clock to be certain!

34. A friend of mine – art teacher and part-time printer – could never bring himself to use the term “font”, and winced whenever anyone else did. He insisted that the only correct word was “fount”.

35. I will admit to using a word search to unscramble the unfamiliar GUTTA PERCHA. The rest were easier than they seemed at first glance.

    Thanks to Brummie and Eileen

36. Haven’t come across GUTTA PERCHA for a long time, but I think at school we used to define it as a street sparrow!

37. As most of us are saying, an enjoyable puzzle today.  I would never have spotted the theme of typefaces – I think only Courier was familiar to me.

    Of many good clues I liked SPOOR and GUTTA-PERCHA the most.  I wonder if Brummie was tempted to omit the definition ‘dot’ from the clue to FULL STOP and put an almost unnoticeable full stop at the end of the clue.  I’m glad he didn’t do that – the clue is a perfectly good one as it stands.

    Thanks to Brummie and Eileen.  The bit of ancient crossword history connected with Afrit was appreciated.

38. Me @34

    ….or “typeface” of course

39. Liked this. Gutta percha was new to me and last to go in. Fascinating notes on afrit Eileen. Worth doing the crossword for that alone. Would never have seen the font theme but highly plausible. The fathom surface lacked depth but was that part of the clue?! ?

40. Thanks Brummie

41. A very satisfying puzzle. I took far longer than I should to get SKYE BOAT SONG, and was slowed down a bit by originally having CUT AWAY instead of OUT TAKE (parsing Cut = Nick and Away = Abroad) till SKYE put paid to all that. I’d never heard of GUTTA PERCHA but fortunately my partner knows his golf – and I’m very taken with David’s sparrow-moniker! My favourite was CUBBYHOLE. Thanks to Brummie and Eileen.

42. Thanks to Brummie and Eileen (especially for WORKSHEET).

    It’s all been said and I enjoyed it with an amount of biffing. But in what sense is a COURIER a guide?

     

43. Hope Brummie is chuckling at the attempts to claim that a theme has been identified, although his declaration in the nina (third row up) that he is one tenth of a dong might perhaps be a confession that he is enough of an anorak to have this interest in fontology.

44. Alphalpha @42  A travel courier, for example, is a guide.

45. For FATHOM, sounding is the act of taking a depth measurement so the clue works perfectly.

    Thanks to setter and blogger … and theme finder!!

46. Thanks Brummie and Eileen

    Alphalpha @ 42: travel company reps on locations abroad have long been known as couriers, though they may not be these days.

    In any event, Brummie is on safe ground, as courier = guide is defined in both directions in Chambers eThesaurus, and their dictionary has

    3. An official guide and organizer who travels with tourists

47. BlueCanary @ 5, why the intolerance? As an engineer, you won’t find me griping over arty or current-affairs anagrams. Look on it as an opportunity to push out the envelope.

48. Fonts is it? I had no chance of seeing that. I don’t recognize any of them even now I know. Still, I quite enjoyed this despite some difficulties- GUTTA PERCHA and CONNIVE- I’ve never heard of the former and I couldn’t parse the latter. I liked CUBBY HOLE,BOUFFANT and several more.
    Thanks Brummie.

49. muffin @38

    Hardly anyone uses ‘fount’ in the sense of ‘font’ now.  There is a distinction between ‘font’ and ‘typeface’, though.  ‘Courier’ is the name of a typeface, whereas ‘Courier 12-pt bold’ is an example of a font.  Perhaps I should clarify that that is the distinction I learned a generation ago and have stuck with it.  ‘Font’ is often used for ‘typeface’, but that means of course that the distinction is lost.

50. Luce Gilmore @47

    I think that BlueCanary is making the point that it’s more feasible to make up a word (or words, here) that you haven’t heard of from a charade than from an anagram. However I would disagree that GUTTA PERCHA is a technical or scientific expression – as someone pointed out earlier, it’s just a rather obsolete one!

51. Alan B @49

    I didn’t say that I ever agreed with him!

    As I recall, he insisted that the fount was the horizontal raised surface that the moveable types sat on. (I may have misremembered that).

    I agree about the distinction between “font” and “typeface”. Was “typeface” what thezed meant by “font family”?

52. muffin @51

    Well, only thezed can say for sure!  But I would say yes.  To use the typeface I used for my example, ‘Courier’ could be the family name of all possible Courier fonts (varying by point size, roman/italic, weight, …).  But ‘typeface’ is the long-established name for what ‘Courier’ represents (by example).

53. Fair play Luce@47 I shouldn’t have singled out science but referred more generally to obscurities in whatever field. On the arts front we have had some musical terms that I didn’t understand even after googling them!

54. I’m another who enjoyed the puzzle and the blog with the unearthing of the theme. I’m also still working through last Friday’s ”wall of death” – but that’s probably not of interest to many!
    Thanks Brummie and Eileen.

55. Richard@44

    That’s true. I haven’t heard it used in that context in decades. Thanks.

56. muffin @51 yes I used font family in the way others are using typeface – as a design which encompasses a set of fonts.

57. Oops and Simon S@46 thanks also

58. LOI BURN WITH LOVE after fathoming ‘Bruno’. Must have filled GUTTA PERCHA in a certain Times puzzle. Had to go to the internet when l suspected the past tense of frighten could be ‘frit'(in certain parts of England). COD 2d.

59. A fount of type is also a physical set of pieces of type with letters in varying quantities – fewer z’s than e’s for example. It is made in a type foundry.

60. Regardless of whether we read the apostrophe ‘s’ in 4d as ‘is’ or ‘has’, the cryptic grammar is corrupt.

61. Muffin your I had CUT AWAY instead of OUT TAKE for a while – it works, but it’s not as good is bizarre.

    OUT TAKE in your opinion may work but in what sense. As it doesn’t fit with the crossers it is in crossword terms plain wrong. The clue is in the name. “CROSS WORD” 🙂

    I am aware that there are a number of people on here that believe that word play and definition should lead to a unique solution. In historical crossword terms this is of course nonsense as well as being almost impossible to achieve.

62. Muffin your I had CUT AWAY instead of OUT TAKE for a while – it works, but it’s not as good is bizarre.

    OUT TAKE in your opinion may work but in what sense. As it doesn’t fit with the crossers it is in crossword terms plain wrong. The clue is in the name. “CROSS WORD” 🙂

    I am aware that there are a number of people on here that believe that word play and definition should lead to a unique solution. In historical crossword terms this is of course nonsense as well as being almost impossible to achieve.

    Ruddy HTML 🙂

63. Alex

    I don’t think you have said what you meant. OUT TAKE is the correct answer!

    CUT AWAY did fit with STROBE, but I had to abandon it when I could get the song.

    I am in the camp that thinks that a clue that doesn’t have a unique answer isn’t as good as one that does.

64. M e @63

    I don’t suppose that anyone will see this now,but….

    I had thrown it away, so wasn’t able to check – it was in fact LUBYANKA that seemed to confirm CUT AWAY.

    More generally, it would be possible to conceive of a puzzle in which every clue had more than one valid answer. Where would one start?

    Further to that, it would be possible to conceive a puzzle in which every clue had two valid answers, leading to two completely differenet valid grid-fills, depending on which way you went on the first answer (quite a challenge to compile, though!)

    What I am working towards is that a clue with more than one solution by itself is not as good as a clue with one unique solution.

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