Guardian 28,169 – Nutmeg

72 comments on “Guardian 28,169 – Nutmeg”

1. 13dn: read this as ALL (everybody) + THE BEST (first); so not a DD as such.

2. Top quality from Nutmeg, as usual.

3. Damn! Too dense to twig music staff..an aeon zince I read music, but no excuse. Great puzzle, thanks both.

4. Isn’t the crocodile a caiman not a cayman (20a)?

   Small quibble in great puzzle

5. ..since not zince..

6. Tricky but very fair

7. Don Quixote is on of the myriad classics that one should have read, but I haven’t, so didn’t know Lothario’s origin.

8. Nice puzzle.

   Did the NE corner last.

   Could not parse: 21d SCORED, 17/19 TATTOO = personalised picture *groan*

   New for me: ARSENATE, SIMON PETER (only ever heard of him as St Peter), author O HENRY.

   Neill97 – spelling can be caiman or cayman. Like you, I more often see caiman than cayman.

    

   Thanks B+S

9. A lovely puzzle – I particularly enjoyed CAVALRYMAN and SPRINGTIME. Had OLEARY instead of OHENRY (Lea is a woman’s name); and couldn’t parse SCORED – thanks to Andrew, and to Nutmeg for fun as ever.

10. Yes the original Lothario was a tale within a tale and he seemed a pretty decent sort but the “parable” stuck so I suppose ROMANTIC is OK

    The Edith Grossman translation is great,

    NEVER heard of O Henry I thought it  would be some Irish writer with a name like O’Kerry but in that case would it be  a (6)  rather than (1,5)

    Another great puzzle this Thursday so thanks Nutmeg and Andrew

     

    Anyway I needed check button in the NE I was thinking something in the Aston Martin range so DRY MARTINI was a nice stepover

    Another great puzzle on the Thursday. Thanks Nutmeg and Andrew

     

11. Great fun, as ever.  I found 8d’s DRY MARTINI tricky – I hadn’t equated ART with ‘facility’ & I was too busy thinking ‘Nutmeg wants us to think of (James) Bond and therefore it isn’t!”  So I’ve fallen for a double bluff (and perhaps of my own invention!).  Thanks both Andrew & Nutmeg 🙂

12. The NW and SE went in reasonably well, then after much leaving and coming back, the SW. But I stared at the NE with not a glimmer of success, until I suddenly saw why O HENRY (which I had considered and dismissed) worked. Quite obvious, really – in retrospect. Then the rest came in a rush, just as I was thinking this would be an ignominious failure. And the clues which had seemed so opaque were suddenly clear. I did like ARSENATE and ADIOS. Thanks for the parsing of a few that I really just bunged in, Andrew, and to Nutmeg for the workout.

13. michelle @8 and drofle @9 – O. Henry’s short stories are well worth reading. A master of the genre.

14. This was difficult in places.  I guessed both the answers for 17, 19 TATTOO and 21d SCORED and then scratched my head for a while before I eventually figured out how they worked.  I thought 7d SPRINGTIME was really good.

    Was SIMON PETER a sinner (14d)?  Is it because of his denial of Jesus before the cock crowed?

    Thanks Nutmeg and Andrew.

15. Delightful but a technical DNF as I had O’LEARY and as is customary in these cases felt my answer was just as good. Beth O’Leary is an award winning female author. Lea us a woman’s name etc. But alas, I was wrong so I’ll just have to suckbit up and get on with sunbathing. Ciao all

16. Unfortunately stuck in O’LEARY and forgot to go back and properly parse before checking all.

    Got the rest and particularly enjoyed CAVALRYMAN and ROMANTIC.

    Thanks Andrew and Nutmeg!

17. TassieTim @13: you beat me to it.  I’m another who would certainly recommend O Henry’s work.

    Another splendid test from Nutmeg.  Some tricky parsing (btw I parsed ALL THE BEST as Trovatore @1): struggled with SCORED, tried to make Adieu fit 23d and spent a while inserting E rather than ENG for English into STEN GUN.

    I thought REASON was clever with its reference to Nick Hornby and also ticked DISAGREE, CAVALRYMAN, ARSENATE and SPRINGTIME.  COTD was DRY MARTINI.

    I didn’t wake up grumpy this morning but will note that I didn’t like TATTOO being split in the answers but that’s a personal grouse.

    Thanks to Nutmeg and Andrew for the pointers I needed.

18. [TassieTim @13 – Thank you. I will look out for O. Henry’s short stories]

19. Thanks Nutmeg and Andrew

    Mostly enjoyable. I didn’t parse SCORED either. In contrast to Mark @17, I dislike clues like DRY MARTINI. The solution is unlikely to be built up from its parts, so it is “guess the answer (requiring GK in this case – might “shaken, not stirred” have been fitted in somehow?) and then parse”. No particular favourites.

    I too am very fond of O.Henry’s short stories.

20. Thanks for the blog, Andrew.

    George Clements @2 sums it up – but, to elaborate: my favourites were 9ac ROMANTIC, 15ac  LAY TO REST, 20ac CAVALRYMAN [I’ve only ever seen CAYMAN] 7dn SPRINGTIME and the brilliant [&littish] 14dn SIMON PETER [yes, Lord Jim @14: Peter denied Jesus three times, then, after the Resurrection [time to reform], Jesus asked him three times if he loved Him, to cancel out his denials].

    And as for 6dn – I was initially shocked at the idea that Nutmeg might have clued female writer as female writer, then quickly realised the cleverness of it: for some reason I have a fairly clear memory of a late ’50s TV series, ‘The O.Henry Playhouse’ – adaptations of the stories].

    Many thanks to Nutmeg for another lovely puzzle.

21. Hi TassieTim, he’s the bloke that wrote the one about the girl selling her hair to buy him the something for his… and he’d pawned or sold the …to buy her something for her hair, yeah?

22. Rather tiptoed round this to begin with, as I didn’t see the clever DIRK for a while. Thought O’HENRY a bit obscure and fiddly to solve. Another of those could-be-anything compounds ARSENATE, but clearly enough clued. Took a while to puzzle out CAVALRYMAN as I was convinced the South American reptile was spelled Caiman. Nevertheless, lots and lots of ticks as always with Nutmeg, including the economically simple SOME.

23. GinF @21

    Yes – that story is called “The gift of the magi”, I think.

24. Glad to see an American author for a change, so the shoe is on the other foot, so to speak. I expect moat American schoolkids have had to read “The Gift of the Magi” at some point, and I admit that that’s the O.Henry story I’m most familiar with. He was famous for his use of ironic twists.

    As to the puzzle itself, I failed to parse STEN GUN, simply because I’m so used to “English” being the letter E that I didn’t even consider ENG. (Funny–“American” doesn’t have this problem for me, since you see it signify A or US with nearly equal regularity, so my brain tries both, and also AM and AMER for good measure.)

25. Enjoyed this as an unashamed Nutmeg fanboy. CAVALRYMAN and SPRINGTIME were my favourites, and DRY MARTINI my LOI. As most have observed, there was definitely a difficulty gradient from the SW up to the NE. Didn’t parse STEN GUN properly as I’m too used to English=E

     

    Like Mark @17, I think splitting an answer over two lines is a bit messy. Surely there are plenty of good clues for TAT and TOO on their own?

26. muffin @19: I was lucky in that crossers gave me D-Y which had to be Day or Dry and Martini leapt out at me.  GK to be sure but I think Nutmeg can reasonably assume many readers will have seen or read a James Bond at some point.  And his Martini preference has transcended the genre.  (Though that does make me wonder: does he drink said cocktail in every book/movie?  I suspect he does in the latter case but I don’t know whether Fleming included it as a gimmick.  The same probably applies to the “Bond.  James Bond.” line.)

27. Good precise cluing from Nutmeg as ever.

    I didn’t know old Henry. CAYMAN is the first spelling in Chambers and Collins, although not in Oxford dictionaries. I liked DRY MARTINI where I was thinking of a relish as the answer (it’s even got the Aston MARTIN in there.)

    Thanks Nutmeg and Andrew.

28. mrpenney @24 & Boffo @25: that’s three of us already confounded by the simple E/Eng alternative.  And I run through the same American alternatives as you mrp.  Pretty much every time.

29. Initially dismissed this one as ‘too hard’, as a novice solver, then saw DIRK and decided to chance my arm – glad I did with only O HENRY stumping me in the end – a failure of general knowledge rather than the clue. Feeling rather pleased for a Thursday.

    Didn’t always parse them though – it felt like Nutmeg was being pretty straight with the definitions, fortunately – so thank you Andrew.

30. By no means an unpleasant way to spend time (appropriately shaded) in the warm outdoors with a cool glass of beer beside me. Most vexed by the double definitions, my second least favourite clue type, with LOI an uncertain MEAN.

    And no utterly improbable spellings of unknown cooking ingredients to spoil the flow.

31. Fun stuff, especially “buried treasure”, “deep malaise”, “female author”.

    Anybody notice the “double definition” you get if you pluralise 18d?

32. I got worried when I read the first ten clues and couldn’t begin to unpack a single one, but persistence paid off as it usually does with Nutmeg. I ultimately completed it and parsed everything except the second part of SCORED (thanks, Andrew) for a satisfying experience.

    Yes, MrPenney @24, I read “The Gift of the Magi” in school along with “The Cop and the Anthem,” another O. Henry story with a twist at the end. Both stayed with me, unlike much of my required school reading.

33. Lovely crossword great blog so thank you both!! Favourites were ROMANTIC, well with my username I would know Lothario,  SIMON PETER and maybe TATTOO, so simple but great fun.

34. I’m surprised O Henry is considered obscure. Ashamed as a one time chemist that LOI was ARSENATE. I rather like split answers such as TAT TOO.

    Thanks to Andrew for the parsing and to Nutmeg for the fun.

35. I have to own up and admit that my first knowledge of O Henry came from the introduction to the 1950s television series The Cisco Kid in which, if I remember correctly, the hero was described as O Henry’s famous Robin Hood of the Old West.

36. i thought “Hey, wait a minute.  A cayman is a New World animal, it must be an alligator, not a crocodile.”  So I looked it up.  A cayman/caiman, I found, is an “alligatorid crocodilian.”  Talk about having it both ways!  I now know that alligators live only in the Southeastern US — and China!  how did they get there?  And the southern tip of Florida, where there is also a species of crocodile (who knew?) is the only place in the world where crocodiles and alligators live side by side.  Caymans, meanwhile, live in Central and South America and aren’t alligators but their close relatives.

37. Oh, and I forgot — thank you, Nutmeg, for as usual a fine puzzle — I especially  liked SPRINGTIME.  And thank you Andrew for a blog that resolved some puzzlements.

     

38. Very enjoyable. Fav was SIMON PETER. Parsed ALL THE BEST as Trovatore@1 did. Despite being familiar with reading music, failed to see the DD of SCORED; spent some time thinking of ‘…rod’ before had all the crossers.

    Am more familiar with caiman, but have seen both spellings. Thanks Valentine @36 for the info re crocs and alligators, interesting.

    Thanks to Nutmeg for the fun and Andrew for the blog.

39. Valentine @36

    We saw crocodiles in Costa Rica. See here.

40. Failed to complete all the parsing, as “comitted to staff” was beyond me (though it had to be SCORED). How is plain=dry in 8d? I filled in DRY MARTINI ok, but Andrew’s bnlog is no help to me, so it must be very obvious.

    DNF because NAUSEA just would not come.

    Thanks to Nutmeg for the challenge and Andrew for the blog (if you could just elucidate dry?).

41. Thanks to Nutmeg and Andrew.
    The usual treat from Nutmeg and as fair as Snow White, but I did think that plucking the Franc from the air as “foreign currency” was a bit of a stretch and – a recurring theme for me – O Henry passed on in 1910 so again a bit of an ask from just “author” for those (few?) among us who didn’t experience The Beatles the first time round.
    I failed to parse SCORED; pass the tea tray please.

42. I’m with you sheffield hatter @ 40 if someone would point out how dry = plain I’d be most grateful!!

43. sheffield hatter@
    “Dry bread”? “Dry language”? In sound engineering a “dry” signal is unadorned with e.g. reverb and might be “plain”.
    No doubt someone else can do better.

44. And SPanza@ – we crossed.

45. From Collins under dry: “Without adornment; plain: dry facts“.

46. A classy crossword, and for me quite tough – a bit more so than yesterday’s.  I had a bit of trouble with SCORED and, surprisingly, MEAN.

    Like michelle @8, (1) I completed the NE corner last and (2) I see caiman more often than cayman, although that didn’t hold me up.

    Thanks Nutmeg and Andrew.

47. Thanks Gaufrid. Not a usage I have knowingly come across.

48. Thanks all for the elucidation of dry=plain. Like sheffield hatter I do not think I have ever encountered this meaning.  However, it did not hold me up as I figured ‘what else could it be’?  Indeed DRY MARTINI was my 3rd in so no foul!!

49. Gee, I thought this crowd would have loved ARSE-NATES.  Must have misjudged.

50. Thanks, Andrew.

    Are Lotharios romantic?

    I liked the construction of CAVALRYMAN, but the clue only works if you read “croc” as an abbreviation for crocodilian, which is a bit of a stretch.

    Dr. WhatsOn @49: I didn’t even spot that. Haha!

51. very good as usual. I wasn’t sure about the sinner and I’d made the mistake of entering SPRINGTERM (which isn’t a word), which was soon corrected along with my guess of OVERSE as an obscure female author by the checking clues.

    An engaging solve, thank you Nutmeg, and thanks Andrew

    yes, i thought it was funny Dr WhatsOn@49

    Mark@17 did anyone reply? my understanding is that it’s acceptable practise to split an answer over two grid entries as long as each entry is a word in its own right. You can’t have nonsense words in the grid. But maybe this is simply a practise you don’t care for, which is fine of course, a chacun son gout

52. As always and in a good way I found this a challenge as i do with most Guardian puzzles, but when I read the parsing it all makes sense and great fun.

53. I found this a challenge as i do with most Guardian puzzles, but when I read the parsing it all makes sense and great fun.

54. Thanks both,

    Some witty and fresh clues.

    I’m not entirely convinced that ‘mean’=’dishonourable. A mean trick I would take to be within the rules but ungenerous, possibly even low, but not actually dishonourable. Neither OED nor Chambers seem to go so far as to give dishonourable as a meaning.

55. Thanks Nutmeg for a wonderfully clued crossword and for transporting me back to high school English class with O HENRY. I loved his stories especially The Ransom of Red Chief. Favorite clues were DRY MARTINI, NEARBY, and TATTOO; failed on DIRK, however, and could not parse CAVALRYMAN in the least — thanks Andrew for the help.

56. Probably too far fetched, but is the theme something to do with guns? Sten, Spring(field), Cavalryman, Arsena(l)

57. Thanks both. I’m not great at recognising individual setters’ styles, but am coming to look forward to Nutmeg’s outings. Lots of inventiveness, and plenty to challenge without resorting to over-obscurity, but not so much difficulty that one despairs at any stage.

58. dutch @51: thanks, yes, Boffo did @25.  I’ve raised it before – quite recently – and won’t make a practise of doing it every time.  (Though it doesn’t seem to occur that often).  ‘Tis indeed a personal view and I know many others aren’t bothered by it.  My cross to bear.

    Dr WhatsOn @31 & 49: apologies for not rising to your witticism.  Didn’t know ‘nates’ so have now extended my vocabulary of rump synonyms.  I’ve been mildly disappointed myself in the past when a witticism hasn’t solicited response.  But then, with mine, it’s probably because it wasn’t funny to anybody else so best not to draw attention to it!

59. Miche @ 50, I too wondered whether a Lothario is romantic so didn’t enter it till nothing else would fit. “A man who behaves selfishly and irresponsibly in his sexual relationships with women” according to google, which doesn’t sound too romantic to me. Am I missing some literary reference or something?

60. I approached this with some trepidation having failed to complete yesterday’s Puck. As I got virtually nothing on the first pass, I thought I was in for another humiliation but things began to look up as O HENRY and ALL THE BEST opened the puzzle up and,while a slow solve, it was a successful one. I liked LINGUA FRANCA and LAID TO REST and,of course ARSENATE. (LOI)
    I first came across O HENRY as the creator of the Cisco Kid,which owing to his comedy Mexican sidekick Pancho, would be seen as irredeemably racist today- and quite right too!
    Thanks Nutmeg.

61. Re: LINGUA FRANCA.  I believe I heard, from Steohen Fry no less, that the lingua franca of ancient Rome was Greek, believe it or not.

62. Dr. WhatsOn, the common language of the eastern part of the Roman empire was Greek, and had been in that area since the conquests of Alexander the Great.  The common language in the western half of the empire was Latin, which later evolved into the Romance languages of Italian, Spanish, French and so on.

63. Like others , I didn’t twig staff = musical stave, so I parsed SCORED as ‘kept score by means of notches on a wooden staff’.

    Dr WhatsOn @61 and Lord Jim:  Indeed – St Paul’s epistle to the Romans was written in Greek!

    Mark @26: nobody has yet responded to your Bond query, so here goes.

    A dry martini makes its debut in Fleming’s first novel Casino Royale (1953).  ‘Shaken not stirred’ first appears in Diamonds are Forever (1956).  Vodka martinis and gin martinis then make regular appearances throughout the books.

    In the films, Dr No (1962) presents Bond with a medium dry martini, shaken not stirred.  Sean Connery doesn’t order one till Goldfinger (1964).  In You Only Live Twice (1967) 007’s contact in Japan, Henderson [Charles Gray, later to play Blofeld in Diamonds are Forever and the Criminologist in the Rocky Horror Picture Show] gets it wrong, ‘stirred, not shaken’.  He dies shortly afterwards.

    Roger Moore never orders a single martini himself, but others make sure that his needs are attended to.

    Daniel Craig’s first outing as Bond – the first ‘canonical’ film version of Casino Royale (2006) – makes a point of subverting the Bond clichés.  Having just lost millions in a poker game to Le Chiffre, he orders another martini.  Barman: ‘Shaken or stirred?’  Bond: ‘Do I look like I give a damn?’

    “Bond.  James Bond” is the second line uttered by 007 on the big screen (Dr No, 1962).  It was a regular phrase in Fleming’s novels, but we probably have scriptwriter Berkely Mather to thank for elevating it to iconic status.

    Craig kept fans waiting to the very end of Casino Royale before delivering the phrase.  There were reports of cinemas erupting in cheers when it finally came.

    Nutmeg and Andrew, it was a pleasure, as always.

64. Lord Jim@62 yes, I believe Fry’s point was that Rome itself behaved as the eastern part, a little counter-intuitively, maybe.

65. [Dr. WhatsOn @64. This was also the impression I got from reading Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin, which is based on the later books of Virgil’s Aeneid and tells the story of the arrival of the refugees from Troy via Carthage, who eventually went on to play a big part in the founding of Rome.]

66. essexboy @63. I like your explanation of 21d, which I’ll copy here in case anyone has missed it in your lengthy post above.

    “Like others , I didn’t twig staff = musical stave, so I parsed SCORED as ‘kept score by means of notches on a wooden staff’.”

    That makes better sense to me, though Andrew’s version also works.

67. essexboy @63: a bit late so you may not see my reply but thanks so much for a forensic analysis of the Bond cliches.  How do you have this much knowledge???  Either you’re a true fan or you’ve found a remarkable Bond trivia website.  Either way, many thanks for the fulsome response.

68. Dr. WhatsOn @64 and sheffieldhatter @65: hmm, interesting.  I haven’t read that Ursula Le Guin book, but if it is based on the Aeneid it’s dealing in myth rather than history – Rome wasn’t really founded by refugees from Troy.  I think that in the period of the later republic and the empire, Roman intellectuals and writers looked up to the culture of Greece, and so a knowledge of Greek was thought a good thing.  I’m not sure this made Greek a “lingua franca” in Rome: I suppose it depends on what you mean by that phrase.

69. Mark @67: I’m slightly embarrassed to admit ‘true fandom’ in this august forum, so let’s just say it’s a little bit of both  😉

70. [Lord Jim @68. I think the point that Le Guin was putting across was that there were numerous small groups in city states all speaking different languages and dialects – Lavinia was the daughter of the king of the Latians, and other people in the local area didn’t speak Latin. They were able to communicate with each other (and with the Trojan refugees) by using Greek. I know she was basing her fiction on the myths written down by Virgil, but it makes sense that Greek would be available as a lingua franca. Italy didn’t manage to suppress the local languages that still survived there until the latter half of the 20th century, I believe, and Italian itself is still a sort of lingua franca for older Italians to this day.]

71. [sheffield hatter @ 65. Ah – Ursula Le Guin, one of the vastly underrated writers of our time, mainly, I suspect, because she got labelled as SciFi, and literary purists look down on genres. I have read Lavinia, as I have read everything she ever wrote (that I could get my hand on, at least). Vale Ursula.]

72. Just couldn’t get started until late last night and then the answers flowed in. Being a regular reader of music, I’m ashamed not to have parsed SCORED. I don’t know why people don’t like split word clues, provided both parts are words in their own right. We accept multi word phrases scattered all over the grid, which need to be taken as a whole to fit the clue definition. Many thanks JNutmeg and Andrew.

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