Guardian Cryptic 28,133 by Vlad

101 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 28,133 by Vlad”

1. I don’t know why, but I found this a little easier than most Vlad puzzles, and as always a very entertaining solve. It helped that the long anagram and most of the NW corner fell early.

   Thanks to Tranp and manehi

2. Took a while to get going but then it steadily fell into place.  Not helped by my browser auto-correct adversely affecting the fodder in the Grauniad anagram helper.  LATITUDE made me smile.  Thanks both.

3. Thanks Manehi. I didn’t think small beers were weak necessarily, but it could be my dnk. The slimmer thing is actually a thing apparently (we have one here, The Biggest Loser; met the presenter at son’s wedding, but I wouldn’t watch it in a fit).

   Pottered through this happily, bit of head scratching but no tooth grinding. Liked the keen whale. Spent, as subtractor, is interesting–as though the summit has agency. Slow to see the reverse hidden for underwent, neat. And we’ve had effed recently, and ‘it’ for ‘it’ is of course a chestnut (my favourite for it is ‘How’s your father’..has that ever turned up?). Fly for smart is another regular, tho it’s never been part of my vocab. Slow to see through as non-stop, and ditto ‘ge’ as ‘for one promoted’, which is a bit thick given the frequent use of ‘eg’. So, nice steady workout, thanks Vlad.

4. Sorry Vlad – meant to thank you not a misspelt Tramp. Commenting on the phone is a bad idea, especially when you can’t see what you have written because it is covered by misplaced name and email boxes.

5. grant @ 3 – See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer. More popular before water was safe to drink…

6. Thanks Vlad and manehi

   I saw BRIO as it was printing off, but slow start after that. However a lot became easy when few letters were in, so a rapid middle game, but still a slow finish in the NE.

   PILOT WHALE was favourite, but a good standard throughout.

7. I did try an anagram scrambler on the long one but no luck-had to work it out with the help- of crossers

   This took me ages-twice as long as Serpent but it made it more enjoyable still as I could admire the sheer artistry of how all the components fitted together.Thanks JT and manehi

8. grantinfreo @3 I think small beer is/was beer that has been watered down.  An overt act rather than adulteration.  I believe schoolboys at private schools used to be served small beer.

   Vlad on good form today and, for me, a slightly more rigorous workout than it was for beery hiker @1.  MIDWESTERN resisted til the end although I guessed it had a US connection and I could see what I needed to do.  I loved the Pauline LATITUDE and the definition for the long anagram.  PILOT WHALE, EFFED, SPECIAL and IF ONLY were also ticks.  For some reason I spent a few minutes trying to work out why MEAT TICKLE might be the answer to 3d before sanity kicked in.

   I’d always thought it was conflab rather than confab and don’t think I’ve ever written the word.  But I see both are in the dictionary so a TILT for me.

   Thanks Vlad and manehi for helping me fully understand SET IN STONE.

9. beery hiker@5 Even on a phone you’re a faster typist than me on a laptop!  We crossed on the small beer.

10. Mark @9

    It’s short for “confabulation”. It’s often heard as “conflab”, but I’m afraid that’s another error that’s been allowed into dictionaries.

11. In my comment @1 I said easier, but for me some Vlad puzzles are at the extremely difficult end of the scale. So an easier Vlad is still challenging.

12. Mark @9 – it was only the first comment that was typed on the phone, and I only noticed my error after reading it on the computer. That had better be my last contribution for now otherwise the number of comments will attract attention.

13. Not on the wavelength today. I started with a bang – 1a straight in, but it was a struggle after that. Came back to it again and again throughout the day. Quite a few went in without having been parsed, using the check button. I was usually right, but couldn’t see why until I got here. Thanks for the explanations, manehi, and to Vlad (I think).

14. [In case Eileen – or another classical scholar – drops in, how did OMNIBUS (“for all”) become a collection of works? (I can see how the mass transport meaning evolved – a bit similar to the joke derivation of “tandem”!)]

15. I thought this very well constructed – enough to get you started, enough to make you scratch your head and think you’ll never finish. Not as tough as some Vlads (but I loved the “impale” reference – a touch of the Boatman there). Lots of clever devices and a few torturous constructions and possibly the best hidden reversal I’ve seen in a long while in “underwent”.

    Re the small beer discussion (especially Mark @8) – indeed, Eton College even has a boarding house called “Hopgarden” which was the site of the hops grown for the college’s small beer production for the boys. I believe the fermenting and the addition of hops helped to reduce the pathogen content of the water, though if it was anything like Kvass (which I’ve had) it would’ve been horribly sour. In the Patrick O’Brian books the young midshipmen are sometimes served small beer at meals with the officers, as appropriate to children/teens, rather than the bottles and bottles of wine, port, brandy the adults consume!

    Many thanks Vlad, and manehi

16. Thanks beery and Mark, yes I was forgetting about ale instead of water in the time of cholera etc.

17. Classy stuff. Ticks against almost everything except maybe the definition for MIDWESTERN? Loved INTRO for the start/finish misdirection. Cheers all

18. Thanks, manehi for a great blog and Vlad for another fun puzzle. I loved LATITUDE!

    grantinfreo @3 – I had a rummage in my little book of classic clues and found ‘How’s your father’s place in ruins of old Algiers? (8) [from Rorschach in the Indy, five years ago.

    muffin @14 – my SOED gives omnibus as ‘a volume containing several stories … published at a low price to be within the reach of all’ – the same usage as the mass transport.

19. Thanks Eileen. I couldn’t find any “for all” reference online – perhaps I should get out of my chair and look at the dead tree edition!

20. No, not in my Chambers. A bonus, though – getting it off the shelf revealed a small book hidden behind it that I thought I had lost!

21. [Mrs ginf hated omnibus editions, great fat things that won’t open flat, and spent lots of travel time haunting second-hand bookshops; she found the thirteenth Poldark in Dingle while sis, bro-in-law and I swam with Fungi the dolphin]

22. Ta so much for digging that out Eileen, I shall ponder it…

23. Ah yes, Mozart! Lovely clue.

24. A well constructed challenge as always from Vlad which I enjoyed – thank you. I’m another who learnt it was CONFAB not conflab – as did MrsW. LATITUDE and HAMMER THROW got my double ticks today and it was a dnf as I didn’t know and wasn’t able to work out GEODES although the clue is clear enough – with hindsight! Thanks to manehi for the blog and other contributors for further illumination.
    What book did you rediscover muffin?

25. Very enjoyable although a DNF as I did not know GEODES and could not get the wordplay.  I had no idea why LATITUDE was the answer to 8d so many thanks to manehi for that and for confirming a few others I was not sure about!!  Either I was on form today or this was on the mild side for Vlad.  I suspect the latter.  Favourites were, like others PILOT WHALE, LATITUDE once manehi had pointed it out to me, and the brilliant but succinct SUIT.  Many thanks Vlad!

    muffin@10, surely it is one of the delights of English that mistakes can be incorporated, thus making the language so rich.

26. [I’m embarrassed – “Tips to improve your golf”!]

27. [SPanza – if only that were the case. Many mistakes make the language less rich, like using “epicentre” for “centre” or “aggravate” for “irritate”!

    Big argument about this in the blog of a recent Quiptic, where the compiler had used “flack” instead of “flak”, and we had the “it’s in the dictionary” justification. I said at the time that if dictionaries are “just being descriptive”, they ought to indicate the erroneous usages.]

28. [Muffin @27 Epicentre itself is erroneously used – in geology the epicentre is the point on the surface centred above the source of the earthquake. The actual centre of the quake is usually some km down inside the earth and is called the focus. So to use “epicentre” as the source or point from which things spread out is incorrect – it is where the superficial waves might appear to spread from, a false centre!!]

29. Yes, TheZed. All these “epicentres of infection” have been really aggravating! It is often used by classicists, who ought to know what the prefix “epi” means.

    But we digress….

30. muffin @ 27 I take your point that dictionaries should point out erroneous usages, but I would celebrate the rich nature of the English language.  I live part time in Spain and try to solve the El Pais crossword.  It is a shadow of British crosswords and only rarely has cryptic clues.  I am sure this is because Castilliano Spanish does not have the treasure house of words and meanings that English does.  We all make jokes here but I have never heard a pun for instance.  I am largely ignorant of other languages.  Does one get cryptic clues in French, Germany or Italian journals?  There must be a PhD thesis on this subject surely!!

31. Another corker. Thought this was plain sailing until I realised only half the grid was filled.

    Best of a great bunch were LATITUDE (all round brilliance) and SMOULDER (for the clever – if slightly disturbing – surface). The start/finish misdirection in 23d had me floundering for ages. INIQUITY for vice also threw me so just followed the instructions and bingo.

    Thanks as ever to P&M

32. Ashamed to say I’ve always said conflab not CONFAB.  Thanks, muffin, for the note.

    I thought The Impaler was on good form today – a genuine slow burner for me that revealed pleasant secrets slowly.

    Still cross with myself for remaining stoically fixated on some human seafarer for the traveller in the main.  Never learn.

    Many thanks for the fine blog, manehi.

     

33. Lots of fun, similar favourites to others with lots of ticks. Thanks to Vlad for the fun and Manehi for the blog.

34. Geodes. Grrr.

35. Given that I managed to get this before midday, it probably means a gentler Vlad than usual. I am still basking in the glow of having completed the Genius #203, and anything compared to that must necessarily be gentler.

     

    Thanks to Vlad and manehi – I was almost there but not quite for several parsings, but this makes it clear, and I realise everything was quite fair.

36. Re dictionaries and erroneous usage. If something starts as an error but becomes a widely used norm it is no longer erroneous. Language follows people, not vice versa.

    This may be regrettable and one may not like it, but it’s a fact of life.

    cf also hopefully, refute, etc

37. Spanza @30 I asked the question about Continental European crosswords a couple of weeks ago.  Specifically about Italian (following on from the debate about the word ‘trat’).  One of our Italian community here – il principe dell oscurita – replied thus: “The family of the man credited with the invention of the Italian crossword live in a palazzo a stone’s throw from me here in Sassari. The preponderance of vowels do make them very challenging and an encyclopaedic knowledge of obscure Tuscan castles seems to be a sine qua non.”

38. I don’t think I’ve ever heard conflab, and hope it never shows up in a crossword.

    SPanza@30: I would agree about Spanish-language crosswords, but the same could perhaps be said of most US ones. Castillian Spanish does have a very rich vocabulary and there is plenty of scope for word-play, just no tradition of using for this purpose. If your Spanish is up to it, I highly recommend the Argentinian group Les Luthiers (widely available on Youtube) whose interpretations of the works of the apocryphal composer Johann Sebastian Mastropiero are gloriously funny.

39. muffin and Spanza yes, English is the most marvellous bricolage of eveything from Proto-Indo, Sanscrit, Greek, Latin and every other Euro tongue, plus ‘UK’ indigenous (Scot, Pict) and then colonial additives from kedgeree to tomahawk. It’s unique. As for puns, Mrs ginf used to chide me: don’t try to pun in Italian because 1) they don’t do them and 2) even if they did, your Italian is woefully inadequate, so you’ll just embarass everyone, esp yourself.

40. muffin @10 Thanks for that.  What a glorious word is ‘confabulation’.  It results in an ugly abbreviation but I can see why one arose.

    TheZed @15 Eton was the name in my head when I posted earlier but I wasn’t sure.  The Wikipedia article mentioned by BH specifically refers to the Eton brewery.  Tbh, I had forgotten the original reason for small beer’s existence – the poor quality of potable water – and only recalled the provision of a weaker than usual alcoholic beverage for younger drinkers, as per your Patrick O’Brien reference.  Rather like watered wine being available for younger consumers in restaurants in France. (Talking of France, students and alcohol, I think I recall correctly that entitlement to a half bottle of wine with lunch used to be in the contract of employment of a French schoolmaster.  What a splendid idea!  No wonder the French grow up with an appreciation of the finer things in life.)

41. A chore rather than a pleasure: some of the clues are either vague to the point of obscurantism or simply don’t make sense.

    Fill first, parse later.

    ‘Whale’ does not sound like ‘wail’.

42. Quite fun, but with two of my pet hates.

    [1] An apostrophe S that is there for the sake of the surface but that has to be ignored for the word play.  I’ve never seen a crossword with more examples – and please don’t take that as a challenge.

    [2] SUM as a synonym for PROBLEM.  Is that a regional usage?  In an arithmetic class, surely doing SUMS differs from doing PROBLEMS?  A SUM is a specified calculation – an addition, to be pedantic – whereas doing a PROBLEM involves reading some text and deciding for yourself what calculation is needed.

43. Highlander @41 What does ‘whale’ sound like?  And/or what does ‘wail’ sound like?

44. 13d – MIDWESTERN – also has “in(Indiana) is such a state”

45. SimonS – yes my understanding is that dictionaries reflect usage and do not arbitrate whether that is “right or wrong”. My guess is many (most?) words have moved on from their original meaning.
    It also means words get taken out of shorter dictionaries – as happened with many words associated with nature in children’s versions – words like kingfisher, bluebell, ivy and otter for example. Robert Macfarland wrote and Jackie Morris illustrated a superb book – The Lost Words – to keep them alive. I’ve bought several copies for grandchildren and would highly recommend it.

46. John McNeill @42, you beat me to it. I agree entirely, both points of criticism leapt out at me.

47. Difficult for me.

    I failed to solve SUIT, and could not parse SET IN STONE + INTRO.

    Thanks B+S

48. I’m another who always thought the word was CONFLAB, but apparently both versions are still acceptable. After a while with this, seeing the parsing of the answers when I had already written them in, and realising how typically tricky and Vladlike they were, rather bunged them in hopefully and managed to succeed that way. Though didn’t ultimately solve SUIT and therefore INIQUITY. Not really my cup of tea today, I’m afraid, but that’s just me and my predelictions….

49. Highlander (@41), I’m no fan of this crossword either. Funnily enough, for me personally, “whale” sounds exactly the same as “wail” (in my dialect, words starting with “wh” are pronounced as if the “h” had never been there). That’s not to excuse the clue. It’s to illustrate the danger of clues that entail supposed homophones. Setters can’t know whether a clue is a genuine homophone for all readers unless they have perfect knowledge of all English dialects (which they don’t). It would be bad enough if the Guardian were merely a british or English paper (where I’m from), as there are so many dialects here that confusion over supposed homophones regularly arises. But given the Guardian is now effectively billing itself as a global publication, with Australia and US versions of the website, and many (most?) solvers of the crosswords doing it online from outside the UK, it’s really a trick that ought to be abandoned in my view.

50. Spanza@30. I just dug up a PowerPoint for an academic talk I gave on cryptics several years ago, where I looked into this a bit. Unfortunately, the relevant slide just showed some variant empty grids, where the actual country names were not included because they were part of my patter. Apart from the English-speaking world, I do remember mentioning Germany, Sweden and Japan, but it might be just that they had something along the lines of what we’re familiar with, not identical. Sorry.

    Can someone fill me in on a context where rout=retreat (21a). In a decisive battle, doesn’t one side do the routing, the other the retreating? Thanks.

51. Mark @43

    I pronounce the ‘H’ in ‘whale’ (effectively ‘hwael’), and ‘wail’ pretty much as it’s written (effectively ‘wael’). According to Collins A-Z, however, ‘whale’ is pronounced as ‘way-yow’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHaSTjqC77k

    Alternatively, the sound of a whale is generally subsonic to the human hearing range, whereas the sound of a wail often tends towards the uncomfortable upper register.

    And in Jazz music, the drummer may well be whaling, while the singer is wailing, and both could either be wailing (performing well) or not.

52. poc @38:  thanks for the recommendation muy divertido!  It reminds me of a joke an Argentinian friend told me once.  Que es el ego? Es el argentinito que todos llevamos dentro!  What is an ego?  It is the little Argentine we all have inside! Sorry way off theme, I’ll get my coat!

53. I forgot to mention what I think is possibly the most egregious misuse of a word, which has now gained much wider traction: what on earth is a “humanitarian catastrophe”? Oxymoron if ever there were.

54. David @49; I don’t think the existence of different regional accents should prevent the use of homophones. I don’t know whether we still have RP, but if you go to the Collins dictionary site and listen to the pronunciation of whale and wail, they are identical, so that’s good enough for me.

    Slowly impaled by this one, and it hurt! I BIFD quite a few and then sorted out the parsing. Maybe it was the wine last night or maybe just corona-brain.

    I thought UNDERWENT was masterfully hidden and liked making love below the lecturer’s room.

    Thanks Vlad for the good workout and manehi for the comprehensive blog.

55. John MacNeill @42

    I totally agree with point [2].

    Where I went to school, Arithmetic was examined separately from Mathematics, and a ‘sum’ and a ‘problem’ were indeed different entities.

56. Well not quite yet!!  Dr. WhatsOn @ 50 thanks for that.  I was only partly joking when I mentioned a PhD, If I were 25 years younger I might have given it a go.  Can you imagine an Araucaria crossword set in Latin?

57. Highlander @51 I earned some strange glances walking the dogs 10 minutes ago whilst reciting “whale, wail.  Whale, wail…”  I managed to pronounce the first with the whisper of an ‘h’ but that’s the closest I got.  Interestingly, I see ‘hwael’ is the Middle English version of ‘whale’.

    I liked your following two points!

58. David @49

    I would also question the use of obscure regional/dialectal words, e.g. ‘near’ as a definition of ‘mean/stingy’, especially when there is no indication given that the usage is regionally idiomatic.

59. Regarding homophones, the occasional setter has used “for some” to indicate that it only works for some accents – I think this is especially important when dealing with the rhotic vs non-rhotic divide. For me, Whale does not equal wail as I do pronounce the “h” as a soft aspirant, but I know this is uncommon so I had no problem with the homophone. I think banning homophones completely would be ejecting the neonate with the lavation fluid. Given the puzzle is set in the mainland UK, is is not fair that the homophone works for commonplace recognisable UK accents? I’m not saying you can justify something because the singsong accent of the people of Elgin on Skye makes it work, but if you are likely to have heard it on TV or radio, it’s probably fair game? Then there’s the difficulty of the clue to consider – like the difficulty of a synonym, jumping from “you” to “yow” (as a Brummie might say it) is more of a stretch than from “you” to “u”.

    On words and errors, I think it is great that language evolves, but as well as adding to the richness, such evolution reduces it too. Words such as “magnificent”, “wonderful”, “awesome”, “fantastic” all just mean “very good” now but they used to have meanings associated with their ability to instill awe, to appear as if in a fantasy etc. Sadly they no longer summon those meanings first to the modern reader and we are left with more words meaning the same thing than we know what to do with, and fewer words meaning something different.

60. TheZed @59 I agree with both your points.  Specifically regarding the latter – and I want to stress before anyone takes any kind of offence that this is emphatically NOT homophobic – I mourn two words that have almost completely lost their earlier meanings, ‘queer’ and ‘gay’.  ‘Odd’ just about works for the first but I haven’t really found a word that conjures up quite the same sense as the second.

61. Mark @57

    That almost made me wail with laughter!

    I suppose that my pronunciation of ‘whale’ is closer to the Middle English, and at school, the ‘correct’ pronunciation of ‘WH’ (as ‘HW’) was a requirement; although most people tell me either that I have no particular accent, or, that I speak good Standard English. Certainly, people whose first language is not English rarely have a problem understanding me, whilst I fairly regularly have a problem understanding native (English) English speakers, who seem to evolving a whingey-whiney way of speaking. I’m starting to think that Americans speak better English than (native) English people do.

    I will concede that the aspirated ‘WH’ may be considered archaic, although I shall continue to use it.

62. Thank you for sorting out the parsing of a few of these, manehi (especially SUIT), and thanks Vlad for a tough challenge (I was getting desperate at one point but lunch somehow sent my brain cells spinning a different way and got me going again).

    I’m another “Latitude” fan but my favourite has to be “Underwent” simply because i spent ages trying to construct anagrams from the first or last pair of words, the crossers I had allowed for both potentially, and finally getting the “U” at the start eventually brought about the Eureka moment even though it did not falsify either pair as anagram fodder. So well done Vlad for bamboozling me comprehensively for quite a while.

    Thank you also WhiteKing @45 for reminding me of that book whose existence I noted a while back without actually purchasing, something I should remedy soon. Main gripe for me is ANATOMIST which I did not think necessarily synonymous with Doctor but I’m neither myself and am sure given the abuse of epicentre and other terms it is justified in a dictionary somewhere.

63. TheZed @59

    ‘Ejecting the neonate with the lavation fluid’: ‘legendary’!

    On words and errors, I agree with you. And I would add that mass media, especially mainstream media and journalism, and even more especially political leaders, are contributing to the degradation of the English language.

64. SPanza@56 I have actually seen a crossword where in each case either the clue or the answer was in Latin. It might be somewhere in my many books of crossword collections, come to think of it.

    There are two issues when it comes to setting a crossword in another language – grid fitting and clue setting. As covered in a course on the mathematical theory of communication that I took in college centuries ago, grid filling depends on the entropy of the language, so the internal structure of English words allows for 2-dimensional grids, but not 3-dimensional! Other languages allow/require different degrees of crosser density.

65. Dr. WhatsOn @64 I’d love to have a reference for that crossword!!

66. Unlike some others, I found this even tougher than most of Vlad’s offerings. It seemed to take forever and after sorting out all of the tougher clues, my brain gave out and I had to reveal ROUT (head-slappingly easy once I saw it). There were some rewards for the struggle along the way – PILOT WHALE, INIQUITY and LATITUDE come to mind, and unlike gazzh @62 I liked ANATOMIST.

    On the subject of errors evolving into accepted usage, I agree with John MacNeill @42 that sums and problems are different animals, but equating the two has become accepted usage, fortunately not in general, but at least in crosswordland.

    Thanks to Vlad and to manehi for the parsing of SUIT, GEODES and INTRO.

67. Surely a word sounding like another word doesn’t mean they have to sound identical? Especially in every conceivable pronunciation. If WHALE/WAIL stopped anyone getting the clue then they have my sympathies but this is a cryptic crossword after all and a degree of cruciverbal licence would seem reasonable.  Thanks to Steve @44 for Indiana – another itch scratched 🙂

68. calendarpuzzles.co.uk has a 3-d puzzle each month, and The Times has a weekly Latin one.

69. SPanza @65

    I assume you are referring to Dr. WhatsOn’s mention of a crossword using Latin. If so, each Saturday there is a puzzle in The Times (I assume in the paper as well as online) which has this preamble: “Clues, which may be straight or mildly cryptic, always lead to answers in Latin”. From the quick look I have had, the clues are in a mixture of Latin and English.

70. DrW @50 I had the same thought but Chambers offers 14 different meanings for ROUT including a “disorderly retreat”

71. “The defeat became a rout when the defenders turned and ran”?

72. Bodycheetah @70 and Dr WhatsOn &50 I took them both as nouns, with one being a subset – or indeed a development – of the other. If one side were routing the other Dr W, I think the losers would be doing more than retreating. Yet you are right in that they would be retreating too. Just a heckuva lot faster.

73. Always daunted by a Vlad! Rose to the challenge today however for a change. Favourites LATITUDE of course and ANATOMIST for its bamboozlingly simple surface. Thanks both.

74. Thanks muffin@71 but I’m only half convinced. Isn’t that like saying for a sporting encounter “that match was a big win” versus “that match was a big loss”; both could be said of the same match (wrt the respective sides) but it doesn’t mean win=loss.

75. I see what you mean, DR. WhatsOn, but “it turned into a rout” makes sense to me. The rout is what happened, without the win/loss dichotomy. The equivalent would be “it produced a result” (though in football parlance a draw is now a “result”!).

76. I’m a big Vlad fan and I enjoyed this very much.  Too many highlights to easily mention.

    Thanks, Vlad and manehi.

    Re:  some of the talking points today.

    Sum for problem is fine I think, because a sum is an example of a mathematical problem (just as a division/multiplication/subtraction is).  So Vlad is defining sum by using the category it falls into.  Omnibus in Latin is not only Dative case plural but also Ablative case plural.  It’s tempting to think that the “collection” meaning of omnibus may derive from the latter, which could be translated as “with all”, i.e. including everything.  I’ve no evidence at all that that is how the usage evolved.

    One other thing that struck me today:  “recollection” as a reversal indicator seems to require a double mental leap, i.e. recollection = bringing back as of memory = bringing back as in reversal.  I’m not sure that’s a reasonable justification for its use here.

77. Thanks for the “with all” offer, phitonelly. That makes sense – pity there’s no evidence!

78. The estimable Eric Whose-surname-I-forget produces a collection of 12 3D crosswords every year for charitable purposes. Off the top of my head I can only remember Arachne, Puck and Rufus having been setters, but other equally well-known names were involved too.

79. Muffin@75 gotcha, that works, with one caveat. One side can rout the other without the second side having a chance to retreat, and likewise a side can retreat to prevent a rout, so equating the two is still a little dubious, imo.

    Also, thanks to peterM@68 for that reference. The puzzles I saw there actually seem to prove my point, or rather, the lecturer’s point. The grids are nowhere near 15x15x15 (not to mention 23x23x23) in size, and some of the solutions need to go backwards or around corners to overcome the entropy problem. I’m sure that adds to the charm for solvers, though.

80. Dr. WhatsOn @79 We had this discussion, on entropy, once before when you pointed out (thank you and it was fascinating btw) that Brummie has more helpful crossers on the basis that they are less common. At that point I mentioned Claude Shannon, who was first (to my knowledge) to discuss entropy of language and suitability for crosswords. I’ll report for convenience (for those who did not study this at uni!):

    In his seminal paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (free link) on page 15 he even briefly detours into the necessary redundancy in a language in order to be able to make crosswords possible. English is well-suited it turns out. He goes into more detail on language, but not on crosswords, in his “Prediction and Entropy of Printed English” (here).

81. phitonelly @76 – re OMNIBUS, I’m holding out for the dative:  ‘within the reach of all’ [me @18] = available to / for all.

82. Unlike some who found this easy, or at least easier than a normal Vlad, I found this the hardest crossword since lockdown began. I started off quite well, but then suffered a brain fade with only half the lights filled. Got my second wind when I finally saw THOROUGH and suddenly all but two were then written in very quickly. Failed on SUIT and GEODES. I find Vlad’s surfaces so well constructed at times that it is almost impossible to ignore the literal to get at the cryptic; 16d was one such for me, likewise 12a, 14a and 20d. And even when getting to grips with the wordplay, some of it is so convoluted and/or devious that even when the penny drops it is hard to acknowledge that the clue was “fair”, as commenters on here sometimes say. That’s not to say I think them unfair, just hard to unravel.

    I thought the reference to Emirates in 26a was a bit more universal than just to games being refereed at Arsenal home games (which would have made the clue at bit weak, I think). Emirates sponsors the FA Cup, so all of those games would have an “Emirates official”, and the airline also sponsored (perhaps still does) rugby union, whose referees wore/wear Emirates logos.

    Small beer was, as I understand it, a term for beer made from a second sparging of the grain, rather than beer with water added. It would normally be for domestic use rather than being sold in your local public house, so “local issue” is a bit misleading.

    UNDERWENT, as others have commented, was excruciatingly well hidden, and was my clue of the day. Well done, Vlad.

83. While I know the usage “set in stone” is in daily use, I still feel that the correct forms are

    ”carved in stone”

    and

    “set in cement”

84. Jim @83

    “set in stone” is more often heard as “it’s not set in stone”.

85. Eileen@ 81, yes I can see it that way too.  It intrigues me that either case of the Latin word could be involved.

86. Definitely not one of my favorite puzzles – I gave up with about 4 clues remaining and I couldn’t fully parse too many that I did get. “Reffed” for what an Emirates official does? Come on…

87. Thanks to both but I was in the same camp as Jay_in_Pittsburgh. For no particular reason I couldn’t warm to this – found it heavy going with little to lighten the mood. I don’t think it’s just my mood – HAMMER=”FASHION” rather exemplifies the looseness that I found impenetrable. I’ll be on Vlad’s wavelength another time again. And thanks to manehi for parsing it all.

88. Really tricky. Finally finished on around the fourth sitting and didn’t have all the parsing!
    Thanks-I think- Vlad.

89. 12a was the last to fall for me . If the setter had used “top” as the first word in the clue it would have been parsed much sooner. Can’t complain though.I enjoyed this excellent offering from Vlad.

90. Thanks to manehi for the blog and to those who commented.

    ‘(R)effed’ and ‘hammer’ (fashion into shape) seem fine to me. And the apostrophes mentioned @42 and @46 represent ‘has’ or ‘is’ to indicate a link between two elements of wordplay or between wordplay and definition. That usage is a crossword staple.

91. I agree, Vlad, though with (r)effed I would be interested to know if you were thinking of Arsenal, or more generally?

92. Thanks to manehi and Vlad

    All the ‘s’s are perfectly valid but I can’t find a home for the “to” in 14a,

    and still not sure of the def in 13d,

    other than that – top notch.

93. Vlad@90. I agree. Thanks for a great and fair puzzle.

94. A DNF for me but that didn’t prevent my enjoyment of gems such as GEODES, IF ONLY, INIQUITY, LATITUDE, THOROUGH, and BRIO. Nice work. Thanks Vlad and Manehi.

95. On the OMNIBUS ablative/dative issue: am I correct in having a childhood memory (from a far distant time and place) of the ‘omnibus edition of “The Archers”‘ on a Sunday or Saturday morning – meaning, I assume, a collection OF all the weekday episodes, rather than FOR all?
    As for the rest of the puzzle, I enjoyed it and thought it was perfectly fair – meaning that I (eventually) cracked it. Mind you, I “solved” REFFED, by carelessly assuming it was somehow connected to the Ottoman (?) honorific EFFENDI.

96. This may perhaps have been an easier than average Vlad crossword but it was once more very very good.

    My first one in was SUIT (12ac) which is really a phenomenal clue, in my opinion.
    Deceptively simple, and a totally natural, believable surface.
    I see that only one commenter (SPanza @25) singled this one out but, really, I’d wish I had written this clue!

    Just a pity that we had H = ‘hotel’ twice today, in 9ac [our LOI] and 27ac.
    But, all in all, as I said earlier: very very good.
    Many thanks to manehi for the blog & Vlad for a well-spent 90 minutes or so.

97. Gert Bycee @95

    I’m hesitant to tread on Latinists’ toes, but I think if you were going to make out a case for ‘of all’, it would be genitive not ablative, which would make it omnium.

    Following Eileen’s explanation @18, the idea of an omnibus edition has been ‘stretched’ from the original “volume containing several stories… published at a low price to be within the reach of all” – so we’re definitely in dative territory, in the sense of ‘available for all/to all’, just like the bus.

    The trouble with the ablative theory is that the abl. ‘with’ is the with of instrumentality (I hit him with a hammer) rather than the with of accompaniment (she arrived with her friends).  In the second example I believe Latin would use cum + abl. rather than an abl. by itself.

    But I’m happy to be corrected!

98. muffin@91 – it was intended to reference Emirates Stadium. Broader meaning might work but don’t think it would be as clear.

    dansar@92 – think the infinitive is suggesting the implementation of an action. To temper/tempering the wordplay gives the definition.

    Thanks also to later commenters.

     

99. I struggled with nearly half of this. I wrote in all answers (except SUIT) which must mean there was sufficient info in the clue or crossers to get me there but I didn’t have the satisfaction of working out every single aspect of the parsing. Thanks to manehi for explanations and to Vlad for the all important mental exercise.

100. I posted late yesterday, but my comment didn’t get through, and my browser cleared it!  I only wanted to say I thought this was a very good puzzle, with much to enjoy – including being fooled here and there by smooth misdirections.

     Like Julia (@99) I left SUIT unsolved.  I just couldn’t think of a word from which I could remove two Ms!  I needed to come here also for the parsing of PILOT WHALE.

     Thanks to Vlad and manehi.

101. Spanza@30: here is a Spanish pun for you:

     Que hace el pez perezoso ?

     Nada !

      

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