Guardian Saturday Puzzle 28,231 / Tramp

47 comments on “Guardian Saturday Puzzle 28,231 / Tramp”

1. Thanks Eileen. I found this hard, it took some time to get started and I ran into a complete brick wall and left it in despair after battling to get about three quarters of it. Coming back a few hours later I was surprised and gratified to find the remaining clues pretty well wrote themselves in! STEAMSHIP was obvious early on but I couldn’t see why and even now am not really convinced. Perhaps a few too many rather doubtful synonyms, LATER=TA TA, FOR=AT, DRINK=ONE, SEE=C without a homophone indication but certainly a good workout.

2. I thought this was good all around, with a few outstanding clues. I especially liked the concise HOLY SMOKE, the misleading AMATEUR, and the nicely disguised definition of SHUTTERBUG. There were a couple of topsy-turvy constructions (BLUFFERS, STRAIN), but both fair. Before getting my LOI at 18d I spent a long time staring at O _ _ _ T _ N _, wondering if it was OVALTINE with ‘drink’ as the definition. Showing my age there?

   I couldn’t parse STEAMSHIP, SHEEN, and the BALL in 14a, not sure why now that I see them. Thanks to Eileen for explaining those, and of course thanks also to Tramp for the workout.

3. Thanks to Tramp and Eileen. GUNPOWDEER TEA and HELLBENDER were new to me but gettable, and I liked SHUTTERBUG and took a very long time getting IOTA.

4. Likewise found this tough to get started on. Eventually landed GUNPOWDER (remembering rod = gun from youthful reading of D Runyon). Slow but steady progress thereafter and had to resort to dictionary bashing to reveal Hellbender, which agree @Eileen — doesn’t really work though is close to brilliance. My fav was probably BASEBALL DIAMOND – I think is semi&lit? — the entire surface could well form the definition I think.

   I did not get BATS/STAB — being left with -A-S left too many permutations for my feeble brain.

   But an enjoyable diversion until then for which much thanks to Tramp and to Eileen for explaining it all

    

5. I think I agree almost completely with Eileen.  I said I think because I’m feeling too lazy after a large dinner to look up all those clue references in the blog, sorry, that’s on me.  I too was not completely convinced by 5d, er, HELLBENDER, but I think it does work.  I was a bit bemused by OVERTONE: if you say to your significant other, “shall we have a quick one?”, are you sure the subject is drinking?  Seriously, though, I enjoyed it a lot.

6. Thanks, Eileen, for the early and thorough blog. For some reason this was not as tough for me as I sometimes feel Tramp can be: must have just been on his wavelength this time. I didn’t know the supermarket at 12a LIDL (for LIDLESS) but think I might have encountered it in previous crosswords. I queried the maiden name bit in SHEEN (21a) momentarily as I thought that nee (pardon lack of acute) referred to the maiden name of any woman with or without children, not just Mums. So the joke was on me when I realised the “mum” referred to the SH part. My favourite was 15d PEDANTRIES which made me smile as I am often accused of getting hung up on them in my life in general – and certainly we occasionally find them on this site as well! Appreciation to Tramp for the setting of this challenge.

7. Don’t remember where this was on the tuffometer, but opened it this morning to find 14ac and 5d unfinished, the former because I’d forgotten hip for in (a bit of a worry, that!), and hellbender was a nho. I bunged them in with a hmmm and a shrug. I thought ‘later’ for tata was a bit slick, dnk Lidl the supermarket, knew rod = gun (Dragnet, maybe, or The Untouchables..?) and I thought ‘once called round’ for ‘een’ was pretty neat. Raised an eyebrow over ‘for’ for ‘at’ but I see from the blog there’s plenty of justification for it. So, I think I quite enjoyed this 🙂 , thanks Tramp and Eileen.

8. Very crisp and tight cluing – each clue in one line on my printout – and I remember wondering if that led to what seemed at the time to be some slightly stretched synonyms, although in retrospect most seem pretty fair and I particularly liked the armchair amateur. I couldn’t quite parse STEAMSHIP and CURATOR (the ‘hip’ and the ‘at’ respectively – thanks for clearing that up, Eileen) and could parse BLUFFERS but felt it didn’t quite work. I don’t mind product mentions, but I obviously left the UK before LIDL became a household name – I eventually had to Google “UK supermarkets”. Hard to get into, but BASEBALL DIAMOND came fairly quickly, being an armchair SHUTTERBUG helped, and in the end it was really quite satisfying, with a number of very neat clues, so thanks to Tramp – and to Eileen.

9. Thanks Eileen. Like others,I also got the feeling the setter was pushing the defining elenvelope quite a bit with The HELLBENDER,drink=one etc. But it was a pleasurable way to spend a spring afternoon in still LIDL-ess Oz.

10. I loved this-from SHUTTERBUG to HOLY SMOKE and fromBASEBALL DIAMOND to IOTA

    Great puzzle and perfect blog

    Thanks Eileen and Tramp

11. Thoroughly enjoyed this. Having been a butterfly crossworder for years, this crossword and the follow up here is now becoming my fix of the day! More time under current restrictions ? Or an addiction coming on?
    Thank you Eileen for the parsing of Taffeta. I didn’t know about ta-ta for later. Also steamship. I got hung up on ship being the vessel and then had nothing left for the definition. And for explaining the at in curator. Is the ´I can’ anagram bit missed out in the explanation ?
    New words for me were shutterbug and hellbender, and yes, I too got led astray with the giant salamander and the Ovaltine.
    Many thanks to Tramp for the fun.

12. *The I CAN bit in APPLIANCE I meant

13. trishincharente @11/12 – many thanks. In my enthusiasm for ‘supply’, I omitted to say what it applied to! – fixed now.

14. Thanks both. You’ve used K instead of R for king in 21d, Eileen.

15. Thanks, Shirl – fixed now.

16. Well I just loved this.  Having really had a downer on the crossword that preceded this, which I criticised for clunky clueing and poor surfaces, Tramp’s offering was a delight.  I sat there solving with a silly grin on my face as smooth (and generally relevant – LIDLESS is brilliant!) surfaces arose one after the other.  And generally very tight clueing.  I invited disagreement from another poster a while ago with the phrase ‘barely a wasted word’ (apparently there were three or possibly four!) so I’ll stick to the safer “very few wasted words” in this.

    Thanks, Eileen, for parsing STEAMSHIP – I couldn’t account for the second ‘S’ (never knew ‘section’ abbreviates to s) so tried to put ‘side’ on board, as in between two s’s but couldn’t make it work.  I think I’m more Dr WhatsOn @5 than Epee Sharkey @4 (and Eileen) re HELLBENDER.  I think it works well and, if not &lit, certainly &littish.  My problem was I kept finding the word defined as the blasted salamander and never as the debauchee.  So it ended as a bung and shrug.

    I was spoilt for favourites with ticks all over the place, literally from first to last.  HOLY SMOKE is delightful and clued with just three words whilst APPLIANCE is very clever with its surface.  I agree with Eileen – one of the best in the grid, along with NEARLY and the aforementioned LIDLESS.  Even the short solutions were well clued with IOTA earning another big tick for its surface.

    Thanks Tramp for a splendid effort and Eileen who hasn’t had a dodgy puzzle to blog for ages.  (Oh, and thanks also to Dr WhatsOn for conjuring up the lovely image of conjugal manners.  “Shall we..” indeed!  :D)

17. I found this mostly tough but eventually everything fell into place apart from 8d BATS, which has been blinking at me from the corner of my table for the best part of a week. Just didn’t think through possible flying things thoroughly, I guess. (GUNPOWDER was the opposite for me, as I sometimes buy China tea of this grade from local Asian shops.)

    Like others, I often look back after solving a clue and think, well, why didn’t I see that sooner. Epee Sharkey @4 blames a “feeble brain”, forgetting that said useless appliance managed to solve everything else! I prefer to give credit to the setter’s skill in disguising the true meaning of the clue by wrapping the hint up in cunningly constructed misdirection. Some do this with excess verbiage, but Tramp, as KeithS @8 points out, is the master of succinctness. Here we had three clues consisting of only three words, and several more with just four, five or six.

    Perhaps the cleverest clue is the one that gets solvers thinking, does it really work? HELLBENDER uses party as a verb in the surface (which doubles as the definition) and as a noun in the wordplay. Eileen and one or two others have doubted whether this works, but it looks fine to me. OK, bender is not a very close synonym of party, which makes the clue quite hard to solve, but it’s worth it if you can get there for the sense of satisfaction, the knowledge that your “feeble brain” is still working after all, and also a strange feeling of companionship with the setter, the feeling that you’re on the same wavelength.

    Thanks to Tramp for the hard work-out and Eileen for the blog (I agree with you about the paucity of anagrams, btw).

18. For a moment “Guardian Saturday Puzzle” at the top made me wonder if a new Saturday puzzle has been introduced and then I realised it referred to the Prize!

19. Unlike the others who have already posted, I found much of this impenetrable. I managed about half. Having now read Eileen‘s blog I can see why. Loads of words I have never come across so would never have got in a month of Sundays (or Saturdays): SHUTTERBUG, HELLBENDER, BASEBALL DIAMOND, ROD (for gun). It seems Tramp has gone all American on us (perhaps he is Trump in disguise-maybe not, the latter hasn’t got the brain power).
    Sorry I didn’t enjoy this at all, but that probably says more about me than the setter (or anyone else who is sharper than me!).

20. Thanks Eileen for the blog as ever and to Tramp for what I thought was great fun too with lots of penny drop moments with new crossers gradually helping with that process. For me, the pennies dropped slowly but I enjoyed that challenge and had quite a few ticks. I was fixated for a while with CHATTERBOX for 1d as it fitted the crossers and vaguely fitted the definition. The actual answer was not overly familiar to me but came when GUNPOWDER fell in.

    I particularly liked STEAMSHIP, OVERTONE and CURATOR where I thought the word play and definitions were particularly neat.

21. For me this would have been a brilliant puzzle but for SHUTTERBUG and HELLBENDER. Even if I had known the word “shutterbug”, surely it should be “one who likes to shoot” and like others, even when I guessed “hellbender”, I couldn’t find an appropriate definition. Still I agree with Eileen about some of the neat surfaces of many clues.

    Thanks to Eileen and Tramp

22. KeithS, Mark and sheffield hatter

    I’m glad you mentioned Tramp’s ‘tight’ and ‘succinct’ cluing, which was much in evidence in this puzzle. I was amused as I solved the puzzle last Saturday, remembering his first two puzzles, which I was lucky enough to blog, where a number of comments were made about the (over)length of the clues.  It’s worth having a look at 25308 and 25351. I did the same count as you, sheffield hatter and then calculated that the average word length in this one was exactly 6. (I do love Tramp’s story-telling clues, too! In his first puzzle, he managed to include the titles of all twelve ‘Fawlty Towers’ episodes in either the clue or the answer; as a debut, it was a classic.)

    Re HELLBENDER: it’s growing on me – but my main reservation is the equation of bender and party.

23. I couldn’t find that meaning of HELLBENDER anywhere – only the salamander, so I had a wrong and unparsed hellraiser for quite a while. Never did solve IOTA.

24. gladys @23 – it’s in my (12th edition) Chambers, after the salamander.

25. I did over half of this without resorting to looking up the answers, so was very pleased (I have just completed today’s, which for me is a first with the prize puzzles!) I had BOLSTER for while instead if BLUFFER but coukd not find a meaning for ‘boster’! Where I grew up, ‘Ta-ta’ has mostly become ‘Ta-ra’ or ‘Tra’, but I recognised Ta-ta as bye = later(s), and loved the clue for TAFFETA. I knew GUNPOWDER (Green) as tea but not rod as gun. I am another who did not find HELLBENDER worked. I know “He’ll go on a bender” but don’t think a bender is a party. Many thanks to Tramp and Eileen!

26. Apologies for the typos… *of* *could* …

27. Biggles A @1 – sorry, I forgot to respond to this when I got up! Re C in 23dn, ‘See’ isn’t a homophone: it’s the name of the letter C, as in the Chambers entry I quoted.

28. It’s odd: I had always assumed that the name of the letter C was spelled ‘cee’.

29. Me too!

30. PS: further research in Chambers reveals ‘cee: the third letter of the modern English alphabet’!

31. After a good night’s sleep, I thought I’d complement my earlier remarks@5 with a little research.  For HELLBENDER I used OneLook (a meta-search engine) and got back 22 dictionary hits.  All gave the salamander.  A few gave as an alternative definition “A reckless headstrong person” – close, but not quite a party, but maybe a party about to happen.  One, just one, gave “A protracted and reckless debauch or drunken frolic”.  So it got in, by the skin of its teeth.  My OED, when I could find the magnifying glass, gave the same debauch/frolic definition word for word – I can only guess who got it from whom.  So in summary, the party seems legit, but barely so.

32. wait a minute, I got it all wrong.  We’re looking for HELLBENDER to be the person who will party, not the party itself, so we do have a few online dictionaries supporting the clue, if a bit indirectly.  Sorry, need some coffee!

33. I”m another who found this very difficult, especially at first. I think I failed to solve any of the across clues, and maybe one down clue, on my first pass, but then it slowly yielded.

    I really admire Tramp’s ability to construct clues that are simple in hindsight but tricky when solving, especially when they are also compact and have diverting surfaces. My particular favorites were 3dn (ascent) and 8dn (bats), and especially 22ac (amateur) for the well-hidden definition.

    I couldn’t figure out how FOR = AT, but Eileen and Collins sorted that out for me. I do share others’ qualms about HELLBENDER. I didn’t know the word, but that’s not a problem, of course. The only issue is that a bender and a party are, to me anyway, quite different things. I also had an unparsed HELLRAISER penciled in for quite a while.

34. This was a slow but very satisfying solve for me. I never got HOLY SMOKE even though I’ve seen it in a recent puzzle. Part of the problem was that I had mufflers for cushions rather that BLUFFERS. I love Tramp’s clear and succint surfaces — I think he’s one of the best at this aspect of cryptics. TAFFETA, GUNPOWDER, SHEEN, and BROKERED were all favourites. I had no problem with HELLBENDER — it came to me quickly maybe because it’s the name of a brewery in Washington, DC.

35. Thanks Eileen for the super blog and thanks to all for the comments.

    Neil

36. Tranp @35: good to see the Grauniad’s typo gremlins have followed you here.  Thanks for a great puzzle, Neil.  Looks as if the vast majority of us enjoyed ourselves.

37. Surprising to see so many comments for a week-old puzzle – a good thing I think.

    I’m with Mark@16. This puzzle was excellent. every single clue is superb. Both cryptically and surface-wise. I loved it. Don’t see many like this, it stands out big-style.

    I really don’t understand the objections to shutterbug and hellbender – both ace clues, both common words, and i’ve had plenty a bender

    Many thanks Tramp & Eileen

     

     

38. I thought this was superb with just one pet hate rearing its head again. ONE only equals drink in a very specific context and if you don’t allude to that context in the wordplay then for me it doesn’t work. I often say to my wife “can I mix you one of these” so would it be ok to clue THESE=drink? Not really. Luckily I was so incensed by this last time that I spotted it immediately so I guess what goes around comes around. Still 99% excellent though 🙂

39. Hi Bodycheetah @38

    I guess Tramp would be pleased with 99% (though he is a bit of a perfectionist) and, if you have a particular bête noire, it’s always going to jar (I know!). My suggestion was ‘one for the road’, and then found ‘a quick one’ in Chambers, as in the blog. I’ll now throw ‘Have one on me’ into the pot – all of which work for me. (I don’t really think your ‘one of these’ is analogous, though – sorry.)

     

40. Bodycheetah @38. I sympathise with you on encountering your bête noire. I don’t want to get between someone and their pet hate, but let me just gently steer you in a slightly different direction.

    You say “ONE only equals drink in a very specific context”. I would be inclined to agree with you, but only if the clue is one and the answer is DRINK. In this clue, it is drink that is the clue, and the answer requires ONE. So the context has been provided. I hope you can agree.

41. When I first saw this crossword, I thought ‘this doesn’t look like a Tramp’.
    So many clues that were so short, almost like something was missing.
    What followed were ten minutes in which hardly anything happened.
    Another hour later it was all done and dusted, leaving me in awe of its brilliance.

    True, I didn’t like ‘at’ for ‘for’ at all – but how good are 3dn and 4dn, to name a couple.
    Or the totally apt reference to Level 42 in 21dn.
    So much clever misdirection, so much economical use of words.
    Not everyone will agree but we (my solving partner and me) found this phenomenal.
    Perhaps, even one of Tramp’s very best – just wonderful.

    Many thanks to Eileen for another fine blog & to Tramp for a quality puzzle.

42. Thank to Tramp and Eileen for giving me entertainment and shining a light on some small bits. I confidently tossed HELLRAISER into 5d  wry early on and gave myself all sorts of problems with the pitching vesssel. It took me sometime to convince myself I had things wrong but I got there eventually. I loved the whole thing.

43. Oops – that should be “very” early on. Fingers don’t fit keyboard easily.

44. Thanks to Eileen and Tramp

    A very fine crossword, but one or two things I’m not sure about:

    In 16a am I to read “that’s hard” as ” that is hard” or “that has hard”?

    And how does either = “diamond”?

     

45. 19a:

    “gunpower drink d is tea”?

46. And of course we also have “Maybe just the one then”.
    Great fun.

47. I’m sorry I didn’t find time to comment on this puzzle earlier. I thought it was excellent on the whole and particularly liked the clues for HOLY SMOKE and SOLVE amongst many other good ones, but I do think the clue for HELLBENDER was poor, both because it’s not widely documented in that meaning (which appears to be peculiarly American usage, equivalent to the British ‘hellraiser’ which, like others, I tried to make work) and, as I am familiar with the word, a bender is generally a solitary activity, not a social one. Also, as Dansar @ 45 highlights, the verb form “drink” is wrong for the cryptic meaning in 19ac.

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