Independent on Sunday 1,602 by Tees

16 comments on “Independent on Sunday 1,602 by Tees”

1. Quite a few new words for me today, so I’m a wiser man than I was when I got up this morning. Mind you, there’s always the possibility that I’ve forgotten more than I’ve learned. New words for me include: DOCTOR as a sea breeze, ATRIP and INSET for the teacher training day. REGIUS PROFESSOR was only vaguely known  and ERA=DAY isn’t the most obvious def.

   A touch of deja vu with 6d but that sort of coincidence does happen (APERTURE was in yesterday’s puzzle). Hope nobody is solving in reverse order and I’ve given the game away for one answer.

   Favourite was VISITED although I would have preferred daughter to daughters.

   Thanks to Tees and Kitty.

2. nice! altho I also was confused by the plural daughters in 1ac.. VI is also abbreviation for intercourse I believe? i tried to become confused by the plural places in 3d as well, but now I see the see, thanks Kitty.. also for explaining the definition of 14ac! for a short while I was contemplating the immediate neighbours on Eigers flanks, Jungfrau being 8 letters was tempting, and is curiously German for young girl, possibly virgin! my favourite was probably 24ac and the use of “boiled” in 13dn..clever stuff

   all in all most excellent.. thanks to Kitty and Tees

3. Slig (single-letter indicator guru, natch) says that in the GREAT HELP (anag) list you can only have ‘daughter’. However, in the IT’S ME (anag) list you can have ‘daughters’. Same rules apply to ‘son’. There is no ‘duke’ in the GREAT HELP list either, which has nobbled me a couple of times.

4. undrell moore @2: you were exploring subtleties in 1d that took you down an interesting rabbit hole, it seems.  VIRGINIA CREEPER was actually my FOI and, to be frank, a lucky guess based on the enumeration and working backwards.  Gave me some helpful start letters – though I needed the blog to understand the parsing of VI in VISITED.  I’ve also encountered the Doctor before – specifically in the case of the Fremantle Doctor in Australia which – apparently – has an impact on the weather conditions for cricket test matches.  (Another puzzle, a few months ago, brought up the topic of named winds which is worth a brief exploration if anyone has the time).

   I enjoyed SPOOF (my favourite crossword river is the Po), TRURO (and completely agree with Kitty’s observation), REGIUS PROFESSOR which is a splendid anagram (though I needed to get RIGOUR out of my mind as a possibility for the first word), IMPROVEMENT for the ‘HE’ device and PROVOCATEUR.  My two favourites, both earning their marks for brilliantly relevant surfaces as well as clever devices, are CASSANDRA and TEASPOONS.

   Thanks Tees (I’m really beginning to enjoy your work having ‘discovered’ the Independent a month or so ago – I think you were my first) and Kitty for the blog which I really needed for a couple of parses)

5. I couldn’t parse ‘improvement’, ‘sea breeze’ or ‘analogous’, so thanks Kitty for the explanations.  Very strange to have ‘daughters’ for D.  Otherwise much enjoyed and reasonably quickly solved.  Thanks Tees.

6. Thanks to Tees and Kitty

   D can be either daughter or daughters, as it’s a standard genealogical indicator for offspring:

   ‘Person x, 1S, 2D’. The same principle applies to S = son(s).

7. Thanks Simon S, and slig (which was me in case you hadn’t guessed).

   Back in the day, I would use just about any indicator I could find (in Chambers) to get rid of stray single letters. But after starting on The Times, like everyone else there I was required to work from a relatively short list of single-letter indicators. That made setting harder in some ways (I needed to be more disciplined), but better in others (the limitations imposed by the list forced me to become more creative).

   The Daily Telegraph also uses such a list, and the two are similar, but not exactly the same. For The Indy, I’ll use anything from either list, but that’s it: no more trawls through Scottish works of reference for an easier get-out. FWIW, I have nothing against compilers using very long lists of SLIs (that would be hypocritical), but I do feel it must be confusing for solvers, at least to some extent.

8. Thanks to Kitty for the excellent blog – like others, I needed it to parse 10a and 15d. Thanks also to Tees for a really enjoyable work-out and for dropping by here (once in disguise). Interesting insight.

9. Thanks to Tees for a challenging but entertaining crossword, and to Kitty for some bits of parsing that I’d missed (sex=6 in particular!). I was like Simon S in having no problem with D for daughters, but thanks to Tees for dropping in to explain. I must admit to having used the interactive grid a few times to confirm a few initial thoughts, and this helped me to get PROVOCATEUR (which I was looking for in some dusty memory banks, but couldn’t find without maximum crossers) and STRAPPED FOR CASH (just couldn’t see PARTS for ingredients). Certainly my most difficult solve since starting to do the Independent – not sure I’d have finished if doing it on paper!

10. Just right for me today, all done with no cheats but a nice steady pace over two sittings.
    I’m now similarly educated about ATRIP and OSAGE, having deduced and then checked.
    Many thanks Kitty for explaining the parsing of VE[HE]MENT in 10a which I didn’t quite see.
    Once again I kicked myself for remembering almost-too-late that sex is VI rather than M/F etc.
    Similarly was ignorant about the Doctor in 14a but the Spoonerism made it a dead cert (I heard Bill Deedes – of all people – once refer to “Dr Brighton” as a restorative trip to the seaside, so that fits too).
    Bravo Tees & Kitty.

11. I think the whole single letter ‘thing’ is something of a minefield.

    I would think that most of us would accept S M L for small, medium & large (clothing in general); S R L for short regular & long (trouser legs) and W D L for won drawn & lost (tables of sports results).

    Yet I believe that most of them aren’t supported by the major dictionaries.

12. All solved without too many problems, although 1dn and 8dn took a little while to see (we thought initially that the first part of 1dn might be ‘vertical’) and the spoonerism wasn’t immediately obvious.

    Lots to enjoy, though.  We liked 9, 17 and 24.  Thanks, Tees and Kitty.

13. Simon S

    There was some chat the other day on the FT blog about small = S being obscure, but S, M & L do feature in both the lists I mention above. W, D & L? Well, I’d love to see those added, but at least all the phonetic letter names are kosher (alpha bravo etc).

14. Tees @ 13

    I’m glad that both those lists include them: my point is that as they’re not (all) dictionary-supported some would consider them beyond the pale, even though they occur frequently in the real world.

15. Does i for information appear on any of these lists? It is commonly seen on remotes and in Tourist Information (and the occasional cryptic).

16. No Hovis, but international and independent are on the DT list (though not in Times, where you CAN have ‘upright character’). Whereas of course i=info is so well-used it should really be in such a list. That’s the substance of the chats we have about such things at the Athenaeum: why is such-and-such on a list whilst something else is not. As for dictionary support, if as you (Simon) say some items are not featured, then it doesn’t surprise me.

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