Hob has given us a very nice workout. It was not always easy to see the answers, but once you did everything was clear. And that’s just how it should be. I have a slight criticism of 18ac and 15dn, but it is slight and the more I think about it the more I feel that it is not really justified.
11ac is questionable, but maybe I’m just out-of-date. And the rather unusual anagram indicator ‘game’ appears twice, which is perhaps a blemish.
Definitions underlined, in maroon. Anagram indicators in italics.
There are words from the NATO alphabet (most of them in fact) all over the place: in the clues and in the answers. I leave it to you to find them.
| Across | ||
| 1 | OSCAR | Gas Mark 6 (5) |
| 6 being award, this is O [oxygen] scar, as in the Oscar ceremonies | ||
| 4 | TETRARCH | Chatter inanely about royal ruler (8) |
| r in (chatter)* | ||
| 8 | GRAND | Magnificent golf managed by daughter (5) |
| g ran d | ||
| 9 | ELEGANCE | Chic short poem, one about 16A (8) |
| eleg{y} a(N)ce, 16A being November [=N] — chic a noun | ||
| 11 | NULL SET | Former teachers include lecturer breaking into university? There’s nothing in that (4,3) |
| NU(L(l)SE)T — I don’t see why it’s ‘Former’ teachers: so far as I know the NUT is alive and kicking — the null set is a mathematical term for the set that contains nothing at all | ||
| 13 | ENDORSE | Echo around, or send back (7) |
| E *(or send) | ||
| 14 | ZULUS | Africans from Zambia and Zimbabwe originally? (5) |
| Both Zambia and Zimbabwe are Z initially and Z = zulu in the NATO alphabet | ||
| 16 | NOVEMBER | New 6 within past month (8) |
| n ove(MBE)r, 6 being award, an example of which is the MBE | ||
| 18 | TANGIEST | Extremely piquant 20, after Romeo leaves port (8) |
| Tangie{r}s T, 20 being tango [=T] — but see my comment on 15dn, below — perhaps someone can explain the difference between Tangiers and Tangier, something I can’t find out | ||
| 20 | TANGO | One of a couple appearing in Strictly (5) |
| There are two types of tango in Strictly Come Dancing, and there are two T [= tango]s in ‘strictly’, so this is an &lit. | ||
| 22 | OIL LAMP | Producer of light opera, perhaps primarily about Lima, playing around Lima (3,4) |
| o{pera} p{erhaps} around (Lima)* around L [= Lima] | ||
| 24 | Y-FRONTS | Those providing openings for going Dutch – rather small ones, we hear (1-6) |
| “wife runts” — Dutch = wife, but the exact reason for this is unknown to me: is it something to do with the term ‘Dutch wife’? | ||
| 26 | HELPMEET | Cry for assistance by Quebec joiner’s companion (8) |
| ‘help me!’ et — the Quebec joiner is the French for ‘and’, which is a joiner | ||
| 27 | DORGI | Maybe setter has run-in with newspaper, getting cross (5) |
| do(r)g i [the newspaper the i] — a cross between a dachshund and a corgi | ||
| 28 | ATLANTIC | Where American, for one, lost in doomed Titanic (8) |
| Titanic with its i replaced by A, then an anagram of it, round l [lost], &lit. | ||
| 29 | OCHRE | Brownish-yellow decor defaced wantonly around hotel (5) |
| ({d}ecor)* round h | ||
| Down | ||
| 1 | ORGANIZATION | Body of Goran Ivanisevic’s initial suffering unknown, heading into a game (12) |
| (Goran I{vanisevic})* z (into a)* | ||
| 2 | CRAWL | Stroke left Charlie up around green (5) |
| (L C)rev. round raw | ||
| 3 | ROD | Duck occupying river delta perch (3) |
| r(0)d — as I learnt when a small child something and ½ somethings = a rod, pole or perch. Google now tells me that it’s 5½ yards — when did the nonsense of making children learn such things stop? | ||
| 4 | TREATY | Agreement to pay for yuppie’s starter…. (6) |
| treat y{uppie} | ||
| 5 | THERETO | ….in addition to that which another Etonian’s eaten? (7) |
| Hidden in anoTHER ETOnian | ||
| 6 | AWARD | Prize fighting restricted by bill (5) |
| a(war)d | ||
| 7 | COCK ROBIN | Murder victim, 100 kilos, briefly hidden in my old rubbish container (4,5) |
| co(C K)r! o bin | ||
| 10 | BEDROOM SUITE | A Little Night Music? For the rest of us, it’s part of the furniture (7,5) |
| Two meanings, based on the fact that a suite can be a furniture set as well as a bit of music | ||
| 12 | SUSHI | Quarterdeck mostly filled with cast putting away Yankee dish (5) |
| Quarterdeck is really quarter deck, a quarter of a deck of cards so a suit; it’s su(sh{y})i{t} | ||
| 15 | LONELIEST | Extremely solitary if most enjoyable 16A for Victor (9) |
| most enjoyable is loveliest, and the V [Victor] is replaced by N [16A, November] — my criticism of this clue and also of 18ac, which uses the same terminology, is that extremely isn’t the same as most, and surely the clues would have been more accurate if ‘extremely’ had been replaced by ‘most’: Graham Gooch’s 333 was an extremely high test score but it wasn’t the most high test score — although I suppose that in a sense of ‘most’ it was most high | ||
| 16 | NIT | Wally books to go round India (3) |
| N(I)T | ||
| 17 | EATER | Something got by shaking a tree? (5) |
| You could get an eating apple by shaking an apple tree, and also it’s *(a tree) so it’s another &lit. | ||
| 19 | SAPIENT | A letter gets mailed out? That’s wise (7) |
| s(a pi)ent — it just says ‘letter’: who ever said it wasn’t a Greek letter? | ||
| 21 | MYSTIC | Like Meg to see City’s game with Mike initially (6) |
| M (city’s)* — (the second time in this crossword that ‘game’ is the anagram indicator) — Mystic Meg | ||
| 23 | ALPHA | Group presses record reaching No.1 in America (5) |
| A(LP)-ha — No. 1 in America is its first letter | ||
| 25 | NORTH | Card player from Aberdeen, or thereabouts (5) |
| Hidden in AberdeeN OR THereabouts | ||
| 27 | DUO | Two people wearing the same uniform (3) |
| Wearing ‘the same’ [ditto, or do] is u [uniform] | ||
*anagram
Very entertaining. Spotted the NATO alphabet ‘theme’. Think I spotted 19 in total. Agree with your comments on the use of ‘extremely’ in 18a & 15d. Liked the use of ‘for the rest of us’ with a play on meaning of “rest” in 10d.
Thanks to Hob and John.
Nice workout but completely lost on DORGI-most of these crosses end in OODLE so its a nice change but I’d never heard of it, not in my Chambers. or any word search-bit like new chemical elements-new one comes up each month.
Thanks all.
Thanks for the blog, John.
Regarding your quibbles:
See here for NUT.
As far as I can tell, Tangiers is the English usage [cf Marseilles / Marseille]
There’s nothing iffy about game as an anagram indicator, in its sense of ‘lame’ [when I was a child, adults used to duck out of playing active games with me by saying they had a ‘gammy leg’] – perhaps a pity Hob used it twice.
As for ‘extremely’, in all my dictionaries, extreme / extremely is given as a superlative.
With all that out of the way, I thought this was a super puzzle! Like hovis, I counted nineteen theme words in clues and answers, which I thought was no mean feat, since none of the surfaces suffered and some of them, like 1, 14, 20, 26ac and 16 and 27dn [small but perfectly formed] were excellent [another word which is, strictly, a superlative. 😉 ]
The only quibble I had was that I could never bring myself to spell 1dn with a Z – but that’s just me.
Many thanks to Hob, as ever – I loved it!
Thanks Hob, John
Fun puzzle, loved gas mark 6.
I read the blog intro before doing the puzzle, so knew ‘game’ indicated anagrams. Perhaps that reference could be removed?
I don’t see why extremely can’t refer to the thing at the end of a range. If at the top end of the range of loneliness, it’s loneliest, isn’t it?
Is it really L for lost in 28a? I’m not convinced that’s the intention, but then where does the L come from?
What Eileen said – including her quibble about 1d – it isn’t just her!!
Thanks to Hob for the fun – if we don’t know the you-know-what after this theme, there’s no hope
Thanks also to John
James @4
Thanks for the heads-up regarding the spoiler in the preamble, now removed from the home page.
Once we realised that there were rather more references to the NATO alphabet than might be expected we were well away. Not that it wasn’t challenging, and DORGI was our LOI after working it out from the wordplay and checking it by googling (not in Chambers 13th ed or Collins 8th ed). Our only quibble would be the repetition of ‘game’ as an anagrind as others have already noted.
Favourite was 1ac.
Thanks, Hob and John.
PS: James @4: L for ‘lost’ is found in league tables for football etc.
I’d never heard of a DORGI and didn’t think of a fruit tree for 17d which I therefore couldn’t parse. Sharing the theme being between the answers and the clues worked well for me.
I liked the ‘wife runts’ (by the way there’s quite a good discussion about ‘wife’ for ‘Dutch’ <a href=”https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/my-old-dutch.html”>here</a> though I’m afraid the ads are intrusive) and DUO which kept up the tradition of harder than they look three-letter clues. Favourite was ZULUS, even if it did depend on spelling 1d with a Z (‘Zee’ I suppose). I’m another for whom it goes against the grain to spell it this way, even though, as I think I may have read here, it’s apparently not incorrect, even for UK English.
Thanks to Hob and John
Enjoyable puzzle where spotting the theme helped out with my penultimate entry 20A, and then eventually 10D came to mind. Assumed that 1D has the Z spelling so that the words in the NATO acronym are all present. Thanks Hob and John.
DORGI is in Wiktionary.
@allan_c, thanks. It’s odd that league table letters don’t appear in Chambers since they’re so commonly used. I see that Collins has W & L as American abbreviations, but for win(s) and loss(es).
Odd indeed that crossworders don’t see L as ‘Lost’. Then again, you’re probably not all West Bromwich Albion fans. We’re used to it.
Thanks to John and Hob
I’m another not keen on EXTREMELY for MOST. I just can’t get it to read that way, so I looked in my recently acquired Chambers (not the latest edition but I shouldn’t think it’s changed), and it gives the superlative as EXTREMEST. My S.O.E.D doesn’t list EXTREMIST at all, and neither does my Collins. All very odd.
I mostly liked the puzzle though.
Chambers defines MOST and EXTREME as in the highest degree so in their adverbial forms I see no reason why they shouldn’t both indicate the superlative when prefacing adjectives. Granted, the former is more intuitive.
As a stand-alone word MOST = EXTREMELY (or VERY) although I think it’s rather old-fashioned now. It crops up a lot in Agatha Christie novels!
I found this quite tough going and had to cheat at the end to complete it. I guessed DORGI from the wordplay and then used the online check to verify it. A few I couldn’t parse so thanks for the explanations.
As for 1dn, I was taught at school in the sixties that both s and z spellings were acceptable and I always preferred the z as in the cursive script we’d been taught there was an extravagant loop for the z. Then I started work and the house style was using the s spellings.
I’ve seen my great-aunt’s baptism certificate. She was born near Abingdon in the second half of the nineteenth century. The printed certificate said “baptized”. I believe the z spellings are still standard with Oxford University Press and thus for the OED. Lynne Murphy in her book on British and American English The Prodigal Tongue reckons that z spellings became labelled as American in the nineties with the rise of word processors and spelling checkers, but I first came across this when I started work in the seventies.
It’s a bit late but for the record ‘dutch’ for ‘wife’ is Cockney rhyming slang – ‘Dutchess of Fife’ (dutchess being an accepted spelling in earlier times, as seen on some monuments etc).