A slow, tough, and enjoyable puzzle – favourites were 11ac, 26ac, 2dn, 19dn, and 20dn. Thanks to Picaroon.
I had to reveal 22dn in the end – not a familiar spelling of the word.
| Across | ||
| 1 | ACCUSER | Provider of charge account, cocaine addict (7) |
| ACC (account) + USER=”cocaine addict” | ||
| 5 | MISTERM | Wrongly label title with the French equivalent (7) |
| MISTER=”title” + M (Monsieur)=”French equivalent” | ||
| 9 | TENOR | Content, round figure with right clothes (5) |
| TENOR=”Content” of e.g. a written document O=”round”; clothed in TEN=”figure” + R (right) |
||
| 10 | PUNCHBOWL | Clownish entertainer to produce a ball in party kit (9) |
| PUNCH=”Clownish entertainer” from Punch and Judy shows + BOWL=”produce a ball” in cricket | ||
| 11 | BEEF STROGANOFF | Grouse stew a strong, rancid dish (4,10) |
| BEEF=grumble=”Grouse” + (a strong)* + OFF=”rancid” | ||
| 13 | MATE | Tea from China (4) |
| =a South American tea ‘China plate’ is rhyming slang for MATE |
||
| 14 | NEUTRINO | Tour 9 runs, one moving with the speed of light? (8) |
| (Tour nine)* | ||
| 17 | RONDINOS | Little pieces of iron dinosaur swallows (8) |
| =short musical pieces hidden in [i]RON DINOS[aur] |
||
| 18 | SMUT | Black stuff that could be blue (4) |
| =soot can also mean sexual or ‘blue’ content |
||
| 21 | BLANK CARTRIDGE | One unable to make a killing getting fired? (5,9) |
| cryptic def | ||
| 23 | BOULEVARD | Awfully bad lover hugs you the French way (9) |
| (bad lover)* around U=”you” | ||
| 24 | GRADE | Mark looked older, it’s said (5) |
| homophone of ‘grayed’=”looked older” | ||
| 25 | ECTYPES | Car models, including carbon copies (7) |
| Jaguar E TYPES=”Car models”, around C (Carbon) | ||
| 26 | OUTSTAY | What overzealous Remainers do to expose support (7) |
| OUT=”expose” + STAY=a prop or “support” | ||
| Down | ||
| 1 | ASTI | Aperitif taken out of case for wine (4) |
| [p]ASTI[s]=”Aperitif” taken out of its outer letters or ‘case’ | ||
| 2 | CONSENTING ADULT | Politician submitted good bill last month, one fit for Congress (10,5) |
| CON[servative]=”Politician” + SENT IN=”submitted” + G (good) + AD=”bill” + ULT=short for ‘ultimo’=[in the] “last month” | ||
| 3 | SHRIFT | King in female clothing, which may be short? (6) |
| as in ‘short shrift’ R (Rex)=”King” in SHIFT=”female clothing” |
||
| 4 | REPUTE | Standing up, tree collapsed (6) |
| (up tree)* | ||
| 5 | MANHOLES | Spooner’s Chinese spies showing means to go underground (8) |
| Spoonerism of ‘Han Moles’=”Chinese spies”, with ‘Han’ meaning a person of Chinese ethnicity | ||
| 6 | SCHMALTZ | Too much emotion in school dance has head spinning (8) |
| SCH (school) + [W]ALTZ=”dance” with the head ‘W’ rotated 180 degrees to make ‘M’ | ||
| 7 | ECONOMIC MIGRANT | A riot commencing somehow, an irritation for nationalists (8,7) |
| (A riot commencing)* | ||
| 8 | MILK FLOATS | Vans kind fellow left in ditches (4,6) |
| ILK=”kind” + F (fellow) + L (left); all inside MOATS=”ditches” | ||
| 12 | IMPROBABLE | Tall child misbehaving with Nick Sharp (10) |
| as in ‘tall tales’ IMP=”child misbehaving” with ROB=steal=”Nick” + ABLE=”Sharp” |
||
| 15 | PICK-ME-UP | I want to be seduced — it’s stimulating! (4-2-2) |
| could also be read as ‘I want to be seduced’ | ||
| 16 | NOWADAYS | Votes against saving old pile of cash for the present (8) |
| NAYS=”Votes against” around all of: O (old) + WAD=”pile of cash” | ||
| 19 | STUDIO | Bookish American must leave — that’s flat! (6) |
| STUDIO[us]=”Bookish” minus ‘US’=”American” | ||
| 20 | FIDGET | Right out of the cooler, thief’s beginning to show unease (6) |
| R(ight) taken out of F[R]IDGE=”cooler”, plus the beginning of T[hief] | ||
| 22 | EERY | Bachelor’s left with lots of ale and rum (4) |
| “rum” as in ‘odd’ B (Bachelor) leaving [b]EERY=”with lots of ale” |
||
Re 3: having no crossers at the time, my first idea was ‘pastry’, with the female clothing being one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasties
Tough but very enjoyable – lots to smile at along the way, including the clues mentioned by manehi.  Thank you to him and Picaroon
I think 1ac is AC (account) plus C (Cocaine) + USER addict. Â Â I found this quite tough today, even with the crossers in place. Â Â Despite guessing the wordplay in 6d it took me far to long to get it. Â Thanks to Picaroon and Manehi.
I parsed 1ac as Tomsdad@3 did, else “cocaine” has no place in the clue. A very tough solve with some odd words. I had a few quibbles and queries. A neutrino has mass and so does *not* travel at the speed of light, not even with a question mark to indicate something. A pity, but if the definition is wrong, it’s a bit unfair. Some of the longer clues were very much “write in and parse later” with the synonyms being a bit stretched at times. In quite a few cases I had part of the solution (“ult”, “punch”, “mis”) and struggled with the rest – probably a sign of good cryptic definitions which did not make solving trivial with the odd crosser.
Many thanks Manehi and also Picaroon for the whimsy and the clever long clues.
TheZed@4Â On Times for the Times, they use the term ‘neutrinos’ for people who report solving times faster than humanly possible
Tomsdad @3-thats how I parsed ACCUSER
22 brilliant -great clue and i wasnt aware of that spelling-the things you learn on these puzzles.
Great fun. Thanks all.
Like copmus@6, I thought this was great fun. My vote for the best clue goes to MILK FLOATS. Also loved EERY and SCHMALTZ. Many thanks to Picaroon and manehi.
Oh dear. I should have thought longer: I bunged in ‘graze’ at 24a, thinking that there might be a boo boo with the tense in the clue. Another very good puzzle from one of my favourite setters, though, perhaps, not the finest vintage.
I also parsed 1ac as Tomsdad@3 did.
Many favourites today – MANHOLES, MILK FLOATS, ECONOMIC MIGRANT, CONSENTING ADULT, IMPROBABLE.
New for me were ECTYPES and RONDINO = bird/swallow.
I was very pleased that I could complete this puzzle because at first, it looked as if I would have to give up on it unfinished.
Thank you Picaroon and manehi.
Once again, what crypticsue said @2.
Thanks, Picaroon and manehi.
@Flavia (comment #1):
Brilliant! But careful, you might get pulses here racing a little too fast for comfort…
Someone has commented on the Guardian website that MATE (13 across) isn’t actually tea. I suppose they are technically correct, but Chambers describes it as “1 a S American species of holly tree. 2 a type of tea made from its dried leaves.” I am awaiting comment from an Argentinian colleague…
Anybody remember that debunked news story about scientists measuring neutrinos travelling faster than light? Personally, I’m with Thezed@4 on this clue.
Hovis @12 to be fair to the scientists, they knew the result was impossible but could not work out what the error was, so opened it up more widely to others to find the source of the problem – some delay in a detector circuit if I recall correctly. At one point there was no way to measure neutrino mass, only the square of the mass, and scientists were getting a negative number for that, which was also a bit confusing. crypticsue @5 to my mind that makes them lightweights, not fast…not, perhaps, the image intended!
Mitz @11 I used to object to people calling rooibos “tea” on the grounds it was not a tea plant but I gave up that fight eventually. Even I struggle to be that pedantic sometimes. I was wondering about the legitimacy of making “mah-tay” and “mate” equivalent, but they are written the same if we ignore the accent.
@TheZed – I blinked at your comment re the rest mass of the neutrino – in my day it was thought to be zero … got to keep up….
Good puzzle although suffering from brain fade on the last 2 clues – couldn’t see tenor or asti (guessed correctly).
Thanks for the blog.
I have read that neutrinos travel at something like 99.999999999 percent of the speed of light, so that’s near enough to 100% for the purposes of a crossword, I think.
I got no answers on the first pass through, so I found this very difficult. Some of the definitions are a bit tenuous eg  ‘which may be short’ for SHRIFT.
I liked PUNCHBOWL and BLANK CARTRIDGE among others.
Robi @15 I may have given up my pedantry on tea, but physics remains a source of great precision for me. “at” the speed of light and “nearly at” are different in hugely important ways. It not like “rhymes” and “nearly rhymes” or “only a homophone in rhotic speech”. It’s different. Only objects with ero mass (such as photons) travel “at” the speed of light. If a clue described something as a bird, and the answer was “dragonfly” you’d probably not be very happy – I mean, they fly they are quite big, brightly coloured, it’s close. But it’s not right. It didn’t spoil the puzzle for me, I just comment because, as they say, “someone is wrong on the internet“…
@TheZed
Fields arranged by Purity
Thanks to Picaroon and Manehi.
I found this a strange grid, almost sandwich-like with two separate halves and no connecting middle – not really like a sandwich when I think of it. Anyhoo, an enjoyable experience with some laughs (PICK-ME-UP, SCHMALTZ) and some favs (NOWADAYS, MISTERM) and tilts (RONDINOS, ECTYPES). Pretty good.
I gave up today, but now I see there were some excellent clues in there. I didn’t help myself by putting in “turn me on” at 15d which I think is nearly as good based on the clue itself, but the word count would be “4,2,2” not “4-2-2”.
Neutrino I would agree neutrino is technically wrong for the reasons stated above, but that would not have stopped me getting the answer; the definition is rather loose.
It’s been a while since I’ve started a Picaroon, but I was reminded of his skill with this puzzle, which I nearly completed (leaving only the two unknown words ECTYPES and EERY, which I really should have tried harder to solve).
My favourites were MISTERM, BEEF STROGANOFF, BOULEVARD, CONSENTING ADULT, SCHMALTZ and MILK FLOATS.
Thanks to Picaroon and manehi.
Michelle @9.
RONDINOS aren’t birds, they’re short rondos, i.e. “little pieces”; “swallows” is a containment indicator.
Wasn’t familiar with ECTYPES or EERY, but should have worked them out. I also put GRAZE which I think works almost as well as GRADE.
Flirted with the idea of Schnapps for 6 down for a while (“has head spinning”), and one or two other sticking points, including Eery, so a DNF today. Tough going, but some very clever cluing as ever with Picaroon.
Thanks Picaroon and manehi
A DNF for me too – I also revealed EERY, and don’t think I’ve ever seen it spelt that way. I didn’t parse ASTI either, and ECTYPES was a new word for me.
LOI was EERY because I have never encountered that spelling.
Neutrinos travel very nearly at the speed of light and are very nearly massless. This is a hugely significant distinction: one of type rather than degree.
John Updike’s poem “Cosmic gall” may amuse some of you, but I digress.
Yes, tough but worth the effort. Thanks P & M.
Another brilliant puzzle. Not easy but very rewarding – SCHMALTZ was last in but occurred to me immediately once the last crosser was in place.
Thanks to Picaroon and manehi
Enjoyed this very much. I parsed 9ac TENOR as figure = ONE, clothed in right = RT, all backwards (round), but can see that was not the intention. Particularly as, I think I’m correct in saying, while right is often RT in the Times crossword, it’s hardly ever so in the Guardian…?
Thank you Picaroon for a challenging puzzle and manehi for a helpful blog.
Like Michelle @9, RONDINOS brought swallows to my mind, but I checked – the Italian for swallow is rondine m., rondina f., and a rondino is a soldier of low rank.
Thank you for identifying the aperitif, and sorting out EERY. I’m useless at these “think of a word and chop bits off it” clues.
New to RONDINOS and ECTYPES. I like CONSENTING ADULT and BLANK CARTRIDGE among many.
I saw 9ac as you did Conrad@27
Neutrinos do have masses but, being so tiny, nobody sees them when they turn up for the Eucharist.
Benington @31
🙂
Actually, it is still contentious whether they have mass or not. If they did, they could help explain “dark matter”, as there are so many of them, however light; but they wouldn’t be able to travel at light-speed.
Not that contentious muffin @32 – the 2015 Nobel Prize for physics was awarded for the discovery of neutrino mass, and the Nobel committee are usually pretty careful these days (they moved on a bit since giving prizes for things like frontal lobotomies). There’s no direct measurement of the mass but that is not unusual in physics. As Auriga @25 points out, massless vs massive is a category error, not one of degree.
Didn’t care for this and didn’t finish it..Some of those I did “do” came only after I sought online assistance. Never heard of MATE as tea. EERY was a guess that I was surprised to see was correct. Didn’t understand TENOR, and ECTYPES was new to me. I don’t often get on with this setter and so it proved today. Oh well!
I’m always late getting here, because I’m solving in the US, so I guess it’s not too surprising that others have covered the neutrino issue. As a physicist, I can confirm that the evidence is very strong that neutrinos have positive mass and hence travel at less than the speed of light — although typically only a tiny bit less. 20 years ago or so, the conventional view was that they were probably massless and traveled at the speed of light.
A slight correction to TheZed @13’s description of the faster-than-light neutrino business from a few years back: the claimed measurement would have implied that the square of the neutrino’s mass was negative, not the mass itself. This would have implied that the neutrino’s mass was imaginary. No such particles are thought to exist, but if they did, they would be “tachyons” that travel faster than the speed of light.
As TheZed’s says, everyone (including the experimenters themselves) presumed that there was a problem with the experiment and the result was incorrect. The experimenters quite correctly published the results they had, even though they initially didn’t have a full explanation for them. Eventually the problem was sorted out.
There are multiple varieties of neutrino, and I think it’s just possible that the evidence still allows for one of those species to be massless (and hence to travel at the speed of light), although that possibility is quite remote. Combine that with Robi @15’s argument that 99.99999% of the speed of light (a typical neutrino speed) is close enough, and with the question mark in the clue, and maybe we can justify the definition, although it would have been better to define it a different way.
Ted @35 thanks for the follow up. I did actually say “only the square of the mass, and scientists were getting a negative number for that” ie the square was negative, so I think I covered the point. I wasn’t aware of the possibility of massless neutrinos – I guess they would have to be another generation beyond the 3 known currently.
Sorry – getting well off topic now!
TheZed @36 — Sorry! I failed to read what you wrote. I seem to have skipped over a clause and misinterpreted you as a result. You’re quite right.
Yes, when I refer to the (remote) possibility of a massless neutrino, I was thinking of something beyond the ones we know about. There was a period of time when the data allowed for one of the three known neutrinos to be massless: the observations only constrained differences between the mass-squareds, so didn’t rule out the possibliity that the lightest one could be massless. I don’t think that possibility is consistent with the data anymore, although it’s been a while since I looked closely at this.
Benington@31: It tool a while for that penny to drop. While we’re riffing, we mustn’t forget the anti-neutrino who turns up unexpectedly from the past and criticises your curtains.
I think the report of the experiment went something like this: We don’t serve neutrinos says the barman. A neutrino walks into a bar. But the clue is WRONG. They have mass and don’t travel at c. A very hard puzzle for me — had to use t’internet quite a lot.
Very interested in all the clever stuff above regarding neutrinos having mass: all I knew before (and referencing the Incredible String Band comments a few days ago) was that neutrinos, like amoebas, ‘are very small’.
DNF as, like others, we had GRAZE for GRADE, but otherwise an enjoyable solve for us. We all have some setters that we find a bit daunting, and I see that Picaroon is in this category for some, but we find him fair and do-able. Thank you Picaroon and manehi.
I finished it eventually, despite wrongly interpreting 9 across as ONE clothed in RT, all reversed. Thanks to manehi for the correct version. A tough but satisfying challenge.
9a I’m still struggling to make TENOR = content. Perhaps tenor=purport=meaning=content but it seems a bit forced to me. Unless tenor is bein? used in the sense of “even tenor of his ways” but, if so, I think “even” needs to be indicaated.
Thanks to Picaroon and manehi.
I’m interested that amidst all the concern about the speed of neutrinos, nobody has queried the definition of 7 down, which seems more doubtful the more I think about it. Are migrants, economic or otherwise, necessarily irritating to nationalists (there isn’t a question mark in the clue)? I haven’t noticed Sinn Fein or the Scottish Nationalists making a thing of this, and I doubt if those who really do dislike migration are very bothered about why the migrant comes; they simply wish them all to stay away. But a fun crossword.
I often finish the daily puzzle the next morning so come here rather late. But I enjoyed this one, particularly the sequence of “what are those particles which travel at the speed of light? Ah yes, neutrinos. Oh good, that fits the grid. And the clue. What’s next?”
🙂
I note that whenever the speed of light is mentioned in a puzzle, it’s understood to mean the speed of light in a vacuum, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
I had the same parsing for TENOR as RJS @41. I agree that manehi’s is better, although I think they both work.
And RJS @45’s comment about the speed of light is correct. This usage is standard in physics: the speed of light in a vacuum is such an important quantity (far more important than the speed in some other medium) that we habitually leave off the qualifier.