Guardian Quiptic 1,082/Hectence

44 comments on “Guardian Quiptic 1,082/Hectence”

1. We always enjoy quiptics on Mondays after a week’s worth of varying success at cryptics! Solved this easily enough, but could not parse IMPRISON so thanks to Pierre for the explanation, and to Hectence for the puzzle!

2. Given that quiptics are ostensibly aimed at beginners, I think that Pierre deserves special kudos for the way he explicitly spells out the exact construction of the wordplay.

3. (From wikipedia) Terrapin (amphibious vehicle), a transport vehicle used for amphibious assault by the Allies during the Second World War.

   (From Chambers) amphibian […] a vehicle for use on land or water

4. Thanks both. I agree wholeheartedly with Blaise @2. However I can’t believe that Hectence was thinking of a vehicle for TERRAPIN!

5. Hmm … I’m not convinced, blaise.  Maybe.  Just maybe.

6. I think 17 may refer to a Terrapin – amphibious vehicle from WWII? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrapin_(amphibious_vehicle)

7. Not a ‘perfect Quiptic’ but it was a very good workout. I found this slightly more difficult than today’s Cryptic. There were a few that I solved and then parsed later, and I needed to do some research on Cockney slang to solve COBBLERS = balls = ROT = nonsense.

   Liked KEEPS TABS ON, SPRUCE (loi).

   Failed PHASED OUT. [I had entered PLAYED OUT but could not parse it.]

   Was pleased that I could parse the Hilary Benn clue.

8. I finished this, with a couple I couldn’t parse (the non-homophonic nature of ROAST, and MS for ‘woman’ passed me by entirely!)

    

   I got TERRAPIN, but then I thought they were amphibians… if Hectence *did* mean the WWII vehicle, that seems a little tough for a Quiptic!

    

   Thanks to Hectence for the clues, and Pierre for the admirably clear explanations.

9. Thanks Hectence and Pierre

   Very good, apart from IMPRISONS, which had tortuous parsing, including PRISON itself.

10. I’m kind of okay with TERRAPIN – that the answer vexes taxonomists can be viewed as a bit of cheeky misdirection given that – as Pierre notes – they are amphibious in lifestyle. It’s certainly more acceptable than defining axolotl in a clue as “walking fish”, which might be an old name for them but which still occasionally leaves me waking in the middle of the night feeling unaccountably angry…

    Felt okay for a Quiptic though – I mean, I finished it at least!

     

    Ta Pierre & Hectence for this morning’s workout and parsing for those that I didn’t at the time – rent/tore took an unholy amount of time for the penny to drop even with the explanation.

11. Agreed that this was tougher than the Cryptic, especially the TERRAPIN/IMPRISONED crossers. Like you, Pierre, I was looking at frogs and their cousins before the reptile popped into my brain. I did find the vehicle on a post-solve search, but I can’t think it was GK – particularly at Quiptic level. And like Michelle @7, I am a DNF, as I had PLAYED OUT at 15d – everything parsed (OK, except a rogue E, I now realise). Mr Benn had me looking to fit Tony in – must be my age (and is the cartoon Mr Benn, or Mr Bean, Pierre? If the former, I don’t know it.) Thanks, Hectence, for the challenge, and Pierre for help with those mentioned above.

12. Jimmy @8 – same idea, typing at the same time!

13. Whoops – sorry all, I thought terrapins were amphibians!

14. Thanks Hectence for dropping in – we forgive you! (I thought that terrapins were amphibians too)

15. Thanks for dropping in, Hectence. No need to apologize for a small error in such an excellent Quiptic. It doesn’t appear to have prevented anyone from figuring out the clue, and like several others, I’m not enough of a biologist to have hesitated over it. Thanks also to Pierre for his usual thorough blog.

16. Well, never mind the taxonomy – in the vernacular, amphibian means something equally at home on land or in the water, as an adjective, You could describe a crocodile as amphibian.

    Thanks for the neat puzzle, Hectence – and ta for the blog. Another one here who abesnt mindedly biffed in played out.

17. If you’d kept quiet about it I’m sure you’d have got away with it, Hectence! Enough wriggle room to ensure it still parses fine.

    Ta for popping by – and for the Quiptic.

18. As a beginner, I thought this was hard for a Quiptic.  Even after solving, I didn’t understand some of the clues.

    For example in 16d (skirmish) I have no idea where the MI and SH come from in the clue.

    1d (Spruce) was pretty convoluted too with reversal, insertion and having to work out ‘curs’ for dogs – quite challenging for a beginner IMHO

     

19. OnionWoman @18 – M1 (MI) is a motorway = road, SH = quiet

20. OnionWoman @18 Risk travelling quiet road before battle: You understand the anagram of ‘risk’. Then you get MI from ‘road’ – the M1 is a major road in England (and the 1 turns to I) and SH is what you say to get quiet. ‘Quiet road before’ tells you to put the road before the Sh (MISH). A bit convoluted, agreed.

21. A lovely Hectence puzzle, as ever. Perhaps more charade clues that were really warranted, but I thought CHAIN STORE was a little gem.

22. OFF TOPIC, but I don’t know where else to ask. Does anyone know how sites like DanWord work? If you Google a clue, more often than not they come up with an answer (correct, but without the lovely parsing you get here), and much more quickly than one or two people could do solving them normally. I don’t like it and seldom use it, but it fascinates me.

23. Good Quiptic; perhaps a little tricky in places.

    I agree with muffin @9 that the clue for IMPRISONS wasn’t the best because jug means prison. The rest was entertaining, notwithstanding the slight inaccuracy about amphibians.

    Thanks Hectence for the puzzle and for dropping in with a mea culpa. Thanks also to Pierre for a nicely explained blog.

24. Roger @22; one of the contributors to crosswordsolver.org has posted these couple of speculations about Dan Word:

    I had always presumed it was some sort of machine learning based AI that has parsed millions of crossword clues, and matches most likely answers to grids, fitting them all together. I cannot imagine the papers would publish answers. If anyone knows any more would be fascinated to hear. It is certainly not a team, given the speed with which crosswords are solved.

    There is a business registered at companies house (UK) called the danworld ltd whose sole director is a translator at a company specialising in automated translation from Nordic languages.

25. Thanks to Hectence for dropping in and confessing to the (extremely minor!) error on TERRAPIN. I had decided that the definition must refer to the military vehicle. The vehicle’s Wikipedia page begins “The Terrapin (officially 4-ton amphibian) …”, which seemed to me to justify it. I had never heard of the vehicle, but I assumed that it was probably well-known in England, and the problem was simply my own American ignorance.

    Anyway, if a tiny taxonomic inaccuracy is the worst thing I did on a given day, I’d call that a very good day!

    Thanks to Hectence for a delightful puzzle.

    (Off-topic: I was just watching an old episode of the excellent Foyle’s War, in which Foyle uncovers a deception by noting a character’s implausible prowess at solving the Times crossword.)

     

26. Onionwoman @18, thank you for your comment.  Others have answered your queries, but just to add that I should have explained M1/MI and SH! more explicitly.  I write the Quiptic blogs with solvers like you in mind, so shouldn’t have assumed that you – or others – would be au fait with these conventions.  They’re new when you come across them for the first time.

    Glad the amphibian mystery is solved.

27. Without ever having seen or read A winter’s tale, I still know two things about it:

    Autolycus (spelling?) a picker-up of unconsidered trifles (close?)

    Stage direction: exit, pursued by a bear….

28. Perhaps my brain is just not engaged yet this morning but I had a much different interpretation of this puzzle, namely that Hectence has grown resentful of the Quiptic spot and wanted to show just how devious her puzzles can be. I had to reveal several of the answers and had to come here to parse IMPRISONS, ISSUE and especially HILARIOUS.  I better put off trying the Cryptic till after lunch.

29. Sorry, posted 27 on the wrong thread

30. I liked the criminal not wearing headgear, and the clergyman brewing – and when I saw Mr Benn, I’m afraid my first thoughts were of the children’s cartoon character, with Hilary very much in second place. (I still find myself humming the theme tune when in a cheerful mood…)
    I’ve never added a link to a comment here, so fingers crossed:
    https://youtu.be/KJuj_ZT8pjU
    Thanks to Pierre for the blog: I’m always the wiser for reading it! Thanks to Hectence for an entertaining crossword

31. Muffin@27 and 29…

    Oh dear. ‘The Winters Tale’ is a Shakespeare Play. ‘A Winters Tale’ is a song by David Essex…

32. ….and the solution was “The”, too!

33. Thank you, Robi @24. Machine learning makes some sense, except that many of the best clues are quite sophisticated. Indeed, I would have thought that the essence of cryptic crosswords was to separate people from machines. It rather reduces my pride in my modest but real solving abilities if a machine can beat or match me every time.

34. Roger @22, we think the Dan Word site gets the answers from the websites which host the puzzles, as the solution data is kept at the same places. I have a monthly 25×25 cryptic where Dan Word has all the answers available immediately to fresh and thematic clues, as soon as the puzzle is available, as just one instance.

35. Terrapins are amphibian, but they are not amphibians. Amphibian can be used as an adjective with the same meaning as amphibious, at least according to Chambers.

36. With Blaise@2 on Pierre’s consummate laying out of routes to solutions. Just one question, though – I take it ‘s’ is an abbrevn for ‘square’ (re. 24D). I know it as ‘sq’ or ‘sqr’. Well, maybe two questions – in 16D (skirmish), ‘before’ (quiet road before) tells us to put ‘mi’ before  ‘sh’. But what in 21A (rare) tells us to put ‘ra’ before ‘re’? In fact, I had previously come to the conclusion that a charade doesn’t have to be in order.

    Thanks to Hectence and Pierre.

37. Wellbeck@30 Thank you for the link. What beautiful drawings and magical story-telling! With a lovely, gentle humour. And the accompanying music. A joy from start to finish 😉

38. Morning Anne.  S for ‘square’ is in Chambers, and no doubt other dictionaries as well.  It’s quite common.

    A setter should make clear the order of the particles in a charade.  As you say, with SKIRMISH, it’s evident that the MI has to go ‘before’ the SH.  I suppose you could argue that ‘by’ in the clue for RARE is ambiguous – you could equally read it as leading to RERA if you consider ‘by’ to be equivalent to ‘next to’.  But the vast majority of solvers, I would argue, would see this as a perfectly fair clue for RARE.  After all, RERA is not a word.

    Thank you for your comments – always good to hear from newer solvers like yourself.  I liked Wellbeck’s link to Mr Benn too.

     

39. Easier than it first looked, which suits me just fine 😀

    Had to cheat a bit; didn’t know EIGHT for a rowing crew, and never heard of jug meaning prison. On the other hand, I am slightly smug for having parsed clues others have admitted they couldn’t!

40. Generally a good, manageable quiptic for me. Manage to solve most on my own which is nice!

    A couple of questions though,
    Why is ‘tore’ rent?
    Not sure I understand the parsing of ROAST?

41. Hi Rebster.  ‘Tore’ is the past tense of ‘tear’.  ‘Rent’ is the past tense of ‘rend’ (as in ‘let no man rend asunder …’)  So since ‘tear’ and ‘rend’ are synonyms, so are ‘tore’ and ‘rent’.

    The reason you don’t understand the parsing of ROAST is that my explanation is cobblers.  Which is cockney rhyming slang for ‘balls’ (cobblers’ awls); hence ROT.  It’s an insertion of AS for ‘when’ in that.  I have confused you by writing that the insertion indicator is ‘when filling’, when it’s just ‘filling’.  I have amended the blog – thanks for your query.

42. Never heard of a pipistrelle. When you said ‘bats’, I though cricket, again. I seem to assume any unknown term has something to do with cricket.

    Wait – O is love as in tennis? I thought it was related to XOXO, love and kisses or w/e.

    21a – Rare=exceptional is a very British turn of phrase. That one took me a while for that exact reason.

    25a – I couldn’t parse this one at all, mostly due to not knowing jug=prison

    1d – Oh oh. I treated ‘upset’ as an anagram indicator. Makes sense.

    4d and 5d both included concepts I simply didn’t know. Not knowing much about rowing, I was trying to get Pb in there for the element ‘lead’, then guessing anything related to the sea at all: BIGHT? (Isle of) WIGHT?; and I had to play a game of ‘guess the answer from the crossers’ because I didn’t know either Mr Benn.

    17d – Like I was telling my dad a few days ago, an amphibian is a noun for a type of animal; amphibious is an adjective for something in both land and water, like the Boston duck boats (which are apparently reproductions of the US version of the Terrapin!). Turtles are amphibious, but they are not amphibians. (Fun fact: crocodiles are more closely related to birds than they are to turtles. Depending on which taxonomist you ask, either ‘Reptiles’ don’t exist as a taxonomic category, or ‘Reptiles’ include birds.)

    To be fair to Hectence, as soon as I had enough crossers, I thought ‘Oh, right: terrapin. I forgot about those’. Turns out I was thinking of the tuatara, which isn’t even amphibious!

43. Khitty Hawk@42 – O in XOXO is, I am led to believe, a hug. Hugs and kisses.

    Regards 1d, of course you can always consider the reversal of a word one of its anagrams!

44. Thank you, Pierre, for responding. I must admit I’m not that new a solver but still find solving hard depending on my mood, the setter, my ability to concentrate and so on.  A whole long list of excuses, in fact! 😉

     

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