Guardian Cryptic 28,409 by Qaos

150 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 28,409 by Qaos”

1. The theme came earlyish and definitely helped me solve ASTRONOMICAL. I liked the simplicity of SPACE and RING plus ZABAGLIONE, EXTREME SPORT, IDIOLECT, OLD MASTER, DAHL and the groan-worthy ATTENDEE. No CLUE what was going on with HEAVENLY.

   Ta Qaos & manehi

2. A nice challenge this morning. Thanks to Qaos and manehi. Made a cosmic mess of the sw which resulted in yodelled for 27ac!!

3. Really enjoyed this – especially the cute simplicity of RING. Didn’t realise LUBE was American or that snooker was a sport (see also darts etc.) 🙂

4. JerryG @2: if yodel had been used in the clue for HEAVENLY, I might have parsed it 🙂

5. A very pleasant start to the Bank Holiday weekend.
   Happy Easter everyone.

6. Never come across cat=heave before, otherwise challenging but fun solve today.

7. That was a lot of fun and not too tricky for what I think is a Friday (although most seems to be ‘unaday’ since 23/3/2020).

   Even the DNKs fell in this morning thanks to the very precise cluing from Qaos – lovely beyond lovely.

   Favourite was 7d because it made me laugh and reminded me of the old joke:

   “I can’t rememeber how to write 1, 1000, 51, 6 and 500 in Roman numerals – I’m livid.”

   [Bodycheetah @3: One American version of ‘Kwik Fit’ is called ‘Jiffy Lube’ which caused much childish sniggering, ‘Jiffi’ being a now-defunct brand of German condoms from the 1980s popular all over Europe]

   Thansk to Qaos and manehi!

8. A lot of fun, with some very clever anagrams and constructions.

   I particularly liked NINETEENTH, EXTREME SPORT, ZABAGLIONE, APOSTASIES, LIGHTEN UP, RING and HEAVENLY – (I did, this time remember cat = heave, learned from crosswords). I would add ATTENDEE, but, as I’ve said before, I dislike the word too much – sorry, Qaos. 😉

   Many thanks to Qaos for a most enjoyable puzzle and manehi for a great blog.

9. A theme that was hard not to spot today. For some reason my first half dozen solves were all related and I wondered if it was going to be one of those puzzles that’s totally themed. I thought RADIO was tangentially related, I wondered if a solar system or a planet could be BELTED and, if we have ASTRONOMICAL, should we include LARGISH? Finally, aren’t the Crab, Horsehead and Orion all examples of NEBULOUS??? 😀

   It was satisfying to achieve a full solve but I needed manehi’s help with parsing DAHL (no idea at all), HEAVENLY (I’ve learned that cat=vomit from this blog but didn’t make the connection to heave) and I’d forgotten those D10 dice. IDIOLECT was a dnk but very gettable and OLD MASTER is delightful.

   Thanks Qaos and manehi

10. Thanks for the joke, MaidenBartok – not heard that one before.

11. I always like a bit of Qaos, today particularly APOSTASIES, NEBULOUS (spent some time looking for a lubricant) and ASTRONOMICAL. Didn’t know heave = cat, so HEAVENLY was a mystery. Many thanks to Q & m.

12. [MaidenBartok @7: there are II types of people in this world – those who understand Roman numerals and those who don’t.]

13. DAHL took ages, but I’m glad it wasn’t clued as lentils. I hadn’t come across a d10, never having been into D & D, and as for the at-10D I’m inclined to 23d with Eileen.

    Otherwise very nice, very accessible, and the theme was so unmissable this time that I suspected that there was something else going on that I was missing. But if I was, everyone else (so far) has missed it too. 😉

    I liked the drunkenness at the NINETEENTH.

    Thanks Qaos and manehi.

14. [mb@7 see also durex which in Australia is adhesive tape. Some sticks situations no doubt ensued]

15. Sticky!!

16. [PostMark @12: Only 40 excel at it though].

17. [Bodycheetah @14: Yes! I remember the first time I walked into Coles and saw sticky-tape and immediately laughed…

    As it is Good Friday, I’ll share an anecdote about mis-construed brands. My grandmother, replete with thick Russian accent, was very much a “maker-and-doer.” She had a fad of felt fabrications in the mid-1970s which involved cutting out felt and sticking them together. This required plenty of adhesive.

    Off she popped to the local fabric shop in Leigh-on-Sea, walked up to the counter and very loudly asked:

    “Sir, do you have a big Uhu?”]

18. In Oz, we take our cars in for alube…

19. … a lube

20. I thought ATTENDEE would make Eileen 1, 1000, 51, 6, 500 as it does me. (thanks MB).
    For 22 across I somehow knew the answer was going to be that dessert we had the first time I went out to an Italian restaurant with my girlfriend in the 1960s, without, at first, remembering what it was called. Strange how the mind works.

21. Whoops. Just 51, 6, 500

22. Never encountered “cat” in that sense, but “lube” has been common in the UK all my life.
    Postmark@9: The Crab, Horsehead, Orion (and many others) are indeed nebulae which may be described as nebulous.
    Thanks to Qaos and manehi.

23. Thanks Auriga @22: for the validation. I must confess I was going for the outrageous homophone and ignoring the correct plural but you’ve rescued me.

    [Petert: if you’re having problems with the numerals, just count to 159 and then it CLIX.]

24. I really enjoyed tackling this and managed to fill it in with help from the dictionaries and check button but there were around 6/7 I just could not parse including HEAVENLY.

    Lots of anagrams – straightforward ones and ones where you have to take away or add letters which I like – ASTRONOMICAL in particular.

    ATTENDEE made me laugh. Other favourites were IDIOLECT, APOSTASIES, NEBULOUS, COSMIC

    Can’t believe I didn’t see the theme.

    Thanks to Qaos and manehi

25. [PostMark @23: I often that I ask myself what Roman numerals are good IV…

    Perchance, may I borrow your coat…?]

26. MB @ 17, I can recall my son’s school project building a solar system model. Said lad was mortified when I asked the shop assistant if he had polystyrene balls.

27. Most enjoyable, with some typically Qaotic alphanumeric clues. I couldn’t parse HEAVENLY, but it went in easily as it fitted with the theme. Similarly RADIO as D&D means nothing to me.

    Favourites were APOSTASIES and IDIOLECT (because they are beautiful words!). A quibblet with LARGISH – ‘Relative size’ indicates a noun rather than an adjective (or am I missing something?)

    Like Eileen and others I winced at ATTENDEE. The OED suggests that it’s a mid 20th century abomination – what is wrong with ‘attender’ I ask myself? (The only usage which irritates me more is ‘paninis’).

    Thanks to Qaos for a very good Friday puzzle and to manehi for a fine blog.

28. I see I am not alone in not knowing that CAT=VOMIT=HEAVE. But I still don’t get it. Could someone please explain – thanks in advance.

29. Thanks for the blog, nice crossword and theme but far too easy. Only my third ever perfect write-in during 26 years.

30. I thought ATTENDEE was very good, and like Petert @20, as soon as I got it I thought “Eileen won’t like this!”

    The Nostromo in 14a is of course the spaceship in Alien. The website Xenopedia says:

    The Nostromo’s name was taken from the eponymous hero of the 1904 novel Nostromo by Joseph Conrad… People and places from Conrad’s works would go on to feature repeatedly as the names of space-going vessels in the Alien franchise, inspiring the names of the Narcissus (also from Alien), the USS Sulaco (from Aliens), the USCSS Patna (from Alien3), the USS Verloc (from Aliens versus Predator 2), the USS Marlow (from Aliens vs. Predator) and the USS Sephora (from Aliens: Colonial Marines).

    Many thanks Qaos and manehi.

31. Thanks manehi – for your heavenly explanation and for dahl.

    I would include RADIO astronomy (I have an MSc in it); and possibly Orion’s BELTed, at a stretch.

    Thanks Qaos for an enjoyable Xword

32. Fiona Anne @28

    The much maligned Wiktionary might help; see entries for cat (verb, definition 3) and heave (definition 11). Bon appétit!

33. [ Fascinating Lord Jim @ 30 , I did know the Nostromo and Sulaco links but none of the others. Where is the Narcissus in Alien ? I only remember the one ship Nostromo. ]

34. Maiden Bartok so you’d know The Broker and the Crooked Billet as would essexboy!

    I so wanted 9 to be RIGEL but the shoehorn said no

    Good fun seasons greetings

35. I did finally get DAHL (LOI), but I don’t like it. The parsing (which I did work out, but couldn’t quite believe that was it until I used the check button) is tortuous in the extreme, and there are so many authors to consider. HEAVENLY I biffed – no idea of the parsing. But there were many other lovely CLUEs. ATTENDEE was one of them – it’s not a word that bothers me in the slightest. IDIOLECT was another. Thanks, Qaos and manehi.

36. This was fun and a challenge. I saw the theme fairly early, but there wasn’t a huge number of astronomical solutions so it was a fairly light touch — which I prefer to the “cram in as many as possible” approach to theming. Like Gervase@27, I also consider LARGISH = “relative size” to be a bit iffy. And why/how is “money”=M? (Oh!… I know; don’t bother yelling at me — no doubt it’s included in Chambers…. along with elephant=E, custard=C, director=D, yesterday=Y, and another 300,000 initials.)

37. When I saw it was a Qaos I thought “there will be a theme” and then solved the puzzle without looking for it and came here to discover it was one even I would have spotted! I was pleased to discover that I had retained cat=vomit=heave from previous puzzles but took a while to parse the NLY bit. Loi was DAHL which MrsW parsed and APOSTASIES and IDIOLECT were new to me.
    Many thanks to Qaos and manehi.

38. I actually spotted the theme, which helped with NEBULOUS (though ´lubricant´is too similar to LUBE). NHO a D10. It´s not in Chambers, and of the fairly long list of alternative meanings in Wikipedia there is no mention of Dungeons and Dragons.

    Dare I say (again) that I baulk at supposed homophones like STELLAR for ´Stella´ (it just doesn´t work for many of us)?

39. PostMark @12 : There are 10 types of people, those who understand binary, and…

40. poc @38 – I’m bemused by the notion that anyone can pronounce stellar differently from stella, unless you’re using the Belgian pronunciation of Stella Artois!!

41. poc@38: I am intrigued by your assertion that STELLAR/Stella doesn’t work for you as a homophone. What is the difference in pronunciation for you? Is it an issue with the final ‘r’? Some accents (the so-called ‘rhotic’ accents in e.g. Ireland, USA, SW England) produce an audible rounding sound, while others produce no audible sound after the vowel (schwa).
    I ask because in my years of sharing comments on crossword blogs I notice that many people complain about homophones that don’t “work” but which, to me, seem to be valid across the range of native speaker accents. “stella/stellar” seems to me very close indeed (because the “-a/-ar” occurs on the unstressed syllable such that any rhotic tendency is weak).

42. I originally had SPARE for 4d (room key). It was only when the theme became apparent that I realised my error.

43. Loved it, but got in a right mess at the start as hidden word “towel” (Terry) popped out in 26 across!

44. pserve_p2 @36

    I’m not yelling – believe me – but the M=Money issue came up on this forum relatively recently – those who keep closer track of these things than I do may be able to say exactly when – where it was clarified that M is a standard abbreviation in macroeconomics for different measures of money and money supply (M1, M2, M3 etc). I too occasionally baulk at the use of an initial letter to represent a whole word and I sometimes do not know the context in which it is valid, but there always is one.

45. Beaten by the 4 letter DAHL I’m afraid. Should have guessed but was falling asleep at the time. Glad to see C being clued by something other than a drugs reference (now for E!). Couldn’t work out RADIO as i’ve never heard of d10, although the answer was obvious enough. I was really chuffed to get HEAVED, as about a year ago I came across ‘cat’ = ‘puke’ and I thought I woud never get the hang of this crossword lark. It’s strange learning words from crosswords which are only ever used in crosswords! Many thanks to Qaos and

46. Me @ 45. Sorry I meant HEAVENLy of course!

47. [SteveP @39: 😀 ]

48. [copmus @34: I don’t remember The Broker (I left to go to uni in the early 80s) but I do remember the Crooked Billet although my childhood trips into town were more likely to the Rendezvous Cafe (now called the Estuary Restaurant) and the hairdresser my mother and grandmother used to go to run by a Mr Sands.

    I’ve just noticed on a quick Google walk that the fabric shop, site of the large gluestick incident is still there – Belle Fabrics! My fav haunts were Maplins (the original, 1/2p for a resistor) and the Radio Constructors Center (q.v.). Thanks for jogging some lovely memories!]

    [SteveP @39: There are 239 types of people who understand programming – the rest can just F0]

49. I usually enjoy Qaos, but for some reason much of this morning’s was a bit “Hmf. Really?” It didn’t help that I have never heard of the 10 sided die of D&D, so RADIO was a washout. I did eventually remember cat=heave but couldn’t work out the rest of it, nor the convolutions of EMERALD CUT or the first part of LIGHTEN UP. No doubt RT=right is in some list of abbreviations somewhere (don’t tell me, I don’t care). And I always have to struggle to remember that a=one/1 so ones=as was definitely a stretch too far. Liked NINETEENTH and the groanworthy ATTENDEE.

50. And, orcwood@43, one does need a towel when travelling in space (or hitchhiking rather). Enjoyed this, got the theme and parsed everything yay, so not the final frontier today. Liked the simplicity of RING and enjoyed constructing IDIOLECT, a new word for me. Thanks to Qaos and manehi

51. pserve_p2 @41

    Go to Glasgow and tell the natives that where ‘the “-a/-ar” occurs on the unstressed syllable … any rhotic tendency is weak’. Actually, on second thoughts, don’t.

52. [There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t. By the way, isn’t F0 240?]

53. [gladys @52: Yes – that’s part of the very bad joke. You wouldn’t expect it to be bug free now, would you?]

54. [My old boss used to joke that there were only three kinds of accountants – those that understood numbers and those that didn’t. Except every single time he told it he got it wrong and started with “there are only two kinds …”. Which, ironically, ended up being funnier than the joke itself. The German’s bus have a word for that]

55. Me @45 again. Sorry thanks to Qaos and Manehi. Got to sleep very late and not really woken up yet!

56. Does anyone know how to turn off autocorrect – forever?

57. Well, I’ll wait for the blast from Eileen @8, but this is what Wiktionary says about ATTENDEE: Attender was originally the only word for a person attending. As with most nouns formed from verbs, as payer, trainer, employer, it was the receiver of action that was formed with -ee, as with payee, trainee, employee. In the 1980s with the advent of spell-checkers, the word attender was erroneously flagged as misspelled and attendee was its replacement. Since then attender is no longer in popular usage.

    Good crossword with a fairly obvious theme, although it didn’t help much in my solving. I couldn’t find DPD, DHL or FEDEX in 3D. The cat = heave or something similar has been seen fairly recently in the Guardian crosswords, so I managed to remember it, after the event.

    Thanks Qaos and manehi.

58. Thanks to Qaos and manehi.

    Once again I am amazed at the parsing capacities of 15^2 bloggers – left to me this would have just been BIFD city with a gap for DAHL. It’s always thus (for me) with Qaos and I’ve learned to live and like. A lot of edge-flirting here: “D10”, subtractive anagrams (NINETEENTH, ASTRONOMICAL), RT=right, M=money (twice), “STELLAR” McCartney, ones=”as” – but nothing unreasonable.

    (manehi – I am open to correction but I’m not sure that we have a CORONA borealis/australis?)

59. drofle@40, pserve_p2@41 and others: stellar and Stella do not sound the same to all of us. They would be close enough for a pun, but are definitely not homophones. This comes up repeatedly and is a constant irritant to the rhotic amongst us (as no doubt is our constant complaints about it are to the rhotically-challenged :-). Some setters are more careful and some not (Paul is particularly bad I think), but have little hope editors are paying attention.

60. [bodycheetah @56: I’m quite impressed that not only do they run on time, they also have a lexicographical purpose]

61. gladys @52, “Hex F0 converts to 240 in decimal and 11110000 in binary” . I have absy eff all idea what this means.

62. Corona Borealis and Australis are both minor constellations so okay for the theme. Nothing to do with the Northern or Southern lights. The corona itself is the outermost part of the sun’s atmosphere, we can see it during an eclipse.

63. Re: STELLAR et al. I think the best way to make peace with the way homophones are used in G. cryptics is to consider them like synonyms. There are very few pairs of words in English that are perfect synonyms of each other, but there are tons that overlap in meaning so that in some contexts they are interchangeable. Synonyms are used all the time in these puzzles and people are usually perfectly happy with the context-dependent equivalence.

64. poc @59: it seems that very few setters are rhotacists! I have seen ‘some say’ as an indicator for words that are pronounced identically in RP but not in other accents, but perhaps this is too blatant a homophone indicator to be used often.

65. “My friend Stella objects if stellar objects are obscured.”

66. A solve with a smile on my face. Mind you, my failure to spell APOSTASIES first time round (the second S was a C) messed up ASTRONOMICAL, until the theme (I got it!) clicked in. Then the theme helped with HEAVENLY and NEBULOUS, where I had no idea what was going on parsing-wise.

67. Gervase@64: make that “none”. I can´t recall a single example where the rhotic pronunication has been favoured over the non-rhotic. Homophones in clues are virtually always indicated somehow, so a hint that not all speakers would have the same pronunciation would at least acknowledge the possible discrepancies.

    Dr. WhatsON@63: I appreciate the point, but while we are used to synonyms being imprecise, and even extremely loose or obscure on occasion (cf “cat” = “heave”), homophones only work if you switch your brain into thinking in a different accent. It can be a much more complex challenge to hear in your mind´s ear (as it were) a possible solution to the clue.

68. Oh dear, not the dreaded homophones debate again! As I’ve said many times before, I think solvers wherever they come from have to abide by the dictionary pronunciations, otherwise homophones are unusable. Thus poc @38/67 and others, please see the Collins pronunciation of STELLAR here.

69. Robi@68 I’m not sure setters abide by dictionary pronunciations!

    Poc@67, I hear you (no pun intended), but I don’t think it is necessary to mentally construct a different pronunciation. Just imagine that the clue-based pronunciation was the answer being pronounced by someone from another region – would you understand it? I’m not saying such clues are perfect, but rather a way to accept and move on.

70. Do the answers to 11 across and 12 across on the grid lead to the 19th clue, 19 down, the answer of which is the theme?

71. Thanks Qaos and manehi
    A theme I saw, for once. Fairly straightforward, though interrupted by golf. Favourite OLD MASTER.
    I knew CAT = HEAVE from previous crosswords. Out of interest, has anyone come across it outside crosswords?
    STELLA/STELLAR isn’t the worst example of ignoring rhotic pronunciation I have seen, but I would ask – it the final R isn’t pronounced, why is it there?

72. Gervase @27: “‘Relative size’ indicates a noun rather than an adjective” – yes, I had a similar thought. The clue seems to indicate what the word can be used for rather than what it means.

    Fiona Anne @28. I’ve seen ‘cat’ used as equivalent to something meaning vomit several times now, but no one has ever been able to provide a real sentence where it is used. (Anyone with a full-size OED?) On the plus side, like Eileen, I remembered it this time!

    I actually spotted the theme in time for it to help with ASTRONOMICAL and STELLAR, which is a bit of a record. Regarding the latter, poc @59 says “close enough for a pun, but are definitely not homophones”; I would dispute this, as the implication in the clue – broadcast – is that the word is heard via a medium that may involve some distortion – think “blessed are the cheesemakers“. Equivalents are ‘on the radio’, ‘picked up’ and ‘alleged’. I agree that these clues are usually labelled as homophones by bloggers, but to my way of thinking they’re only meant to be as close as mondegreens are to the true lyrics of songs; or for that matter, as close as puns.

73. Nice spot by CliveinFrance @70. 🙂

74. I’m surprised that no-one else shot themselves in the foot as I did, trying out first B(l)at, and then B(l)ow to satisfy what might have broken the sports equipment in 12ac. Meaning that I didn’t have an earthly about HEAVENLY. Perhaps not, then…

75. Well sh@72, I do have an OED (Compact, needing a high-power microscope to read). It is not much help – there is no example sentence for this meaning. After several columns of catty definitions, the very last one given is, intriguingly, “To vomit. See To shoot the cat.”

76. Never mind Stella and Stellar, I had enough trouble trying to keep Paul out of the answer.

77. Thanks both – this was great. WRT 10D, manehi, my immediate ref was string theory which: ” holds that all particles that make up matter or transmit forces arise from the vibration of tiny strings. Those strings are one-dimensional. … There are five broadly defined brands of 10D string theory that compete to explain the universe, with no indication as to which, if any, is the right one”

    Sheffield Hatter@72 – here’s the relevant OED entry (Marryat’s lovely phrase is too close for comfort for me):
    d. to jerk, shoot, whip the cat: to vomit, especially from too much drink.
    1609 R. Armin Hist. Two Maids More-clacke sig. A2v Ile baste their bellies and their lippes til we haue ierk’t the cat with our three whippes.
    1630 J. Taylor Water-cormorant sig. B4v You may not say hee’s drunke..For though hee be as drunke as any Rat, He hath but catcht a foxe, or whipt the Cat.
    1830 F. Marryat King’s Own II. xii. 181 I’m cursedly inclined to shoot the cat.

78. Thanks DrW @78. This from thefreedictionary.com: shoot the cat – obsolete slang. To vomit intensely or profusely, especially due to seasickness or drunkenness.
    “I never drink spirits after I’ve been drinking ale, as I invariable spend the rest of the night shooting the cat.”
    “We can always tell who’s new on the ship by who’s shooting the cat over the side of the ship.”

79. Rolled out of bed at about 9:30. Spent a good ten minutes wondering why there wasn’t a prize puzzle before I realised it was Friday.

    Still, this came as excellent consolation. CO-STARS and COSMIC my favourites (possibly because I’ve just finished watching the Only Fools & Horses box-set). For some reason anagrams gave me most pause today: sometimes you just can’t ‘see’ them, can you?

80. geof @77. Wow! 1609: “I’ll baste their bellies and their lips till we have jerked the cat with our three whips.” 1630: “He’s only caught a fox or whipped a cat.” Nowadays we have “calling god on the big white telephone”, or is that out of date too?

81. muffin@71, je ne sais pas…

82. manehi, thanks for parsing HEAVENLY, which I never would have figured out. Didn’t know cat=vomit and even if I had I probably wouldn’t have got the rest of the word.

    Thanks to Qaos for a stellar puzzle and to manehi for curing my headache.

83. GinF @81
    Who knows why the French miss bits off their words?

    [I remember a story of a Dane called Høst checking into a French hotel. The concierge said “welcome Monsieur…” and then was stuck – he wouldn’t pronounce the initial H or the trailing ST, which only left him the O, but that was crossed out…]

84. Dr WhatsOn @69; my point is that there has to be a standard for pronunciations in the same way that there is a standard for spellings. Thus, in British crosswords one might expect theater to be prefixed by American as an indicator that it is an American spelling. Likewise, homophones can be prefixed by American, Irish, Northern etc if it deviates from the standard dictionary pronunciation. However, setters shoulduse the dictionary pronunciations. Otherwise, someone, somewhere will say: “that’s not how I pronounce it.”

85. PS, homophones are sometimes meant to be somewhat inaccurate puns, as Paul sometimes uses them. If it’s funny enough, that’s good enough for me.

86. Auriga @65: nicely done. We’re all rhoticists now!

87. Well done CliveinFrance @70. At least something interesting to divert from the tedious homophone debate.

88. Of course the nineteenth clue gives you LIGHTEN UP! It’s almost like Qaos knew what was coming.

89. Nice puzzle, thanks Qaos. As usual the theme escaped me until the very end, even though having an advanced degree in the subject.
    Sheffield Hatter@80: I don’t look at these blogs too often these days, but by chance on the topic of palindromes and similar, I caught your recent reference to lengthy mirror-image crossword streams, which I had forgotten about. I owe you some apologies: I transcribed a single letter wrongly from my original– T as in TORE (not R as in RORE) – and to save my face you came up with forward/backward words which are well beyond my pay grade (thanks). Secondly, I glibly stated these were for a 15×15 spiral, but of course these American variety-grids are typically only 12×12. But once you have the concept they are relatively easy to construct, at any length, and I have in mind constructing a 24×24, just for the fun of it. But for now, to try make up for my deficiencies, while just watching yet another boring re-run of Midsomer Murders I constructed another 12×12, which I think is slightly more appealing than the original, and would lead to better clues, cryptic or otherwise.
    This is the forward version – it’s easy to deduce the backwards-words (one obscure place name therein). I just hope that I have made no mistakes this time.
    TIMER DOORSTOP EMIRATE BROOM NAP ALIT TASSEL DOG SPAN TAFT EELS WEPT EREBUS NAGGER DERIDE NOONTIME MAR KNOWS TIPPING NITS POLL AWED AMBUSH OOPS PILL IF TAR BARONS MEETS TOWS.

90. Lovely; I solved it all and I even spotted the theme but a couple of parsings escaped me. I had forgotten HEAVE/CAT and I still don’t get the D10 part of RADIO. Thanks Qaos and manehi

91. essexboy@88: nice one

92. I think it is because normal dice have six sides and could be called D6 but we do not normally bother. In some games I believe they use other sorts , probably based on the Platonic solids with a different number of faces, such as D4, D8 , D10 and maybe even D20.

93. In fact I am talking nonsense , there is no D10 , it would be D12. Someone on here must know more about this ?

94. Roz@93 – see my comment at @77. String theory is 10D, but the maths (esp. wrt gravity) if you add one giving you superstring theory … I believe.

95. Roz, you lost me at I think 🙂

96. Homophones again?

    If someone said the word you think doesn’t sound close enough to the definition to you in person would you tell the person that you have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about, and ask them again and again to repeat it until they finally said it exactly how you think it should be pronounced, or would you just accept it as a different pronunciation? If you’re tending towards the second option then maybe give it a rest?

    Claiming it’s a mental leap to get from “Stella” to “stellar” for someone who clearly enjoys wordplay is frankly astonishing. If you got the answer, you almost certainly understood the clue. Imagine what it’s like for those of us who don’t speak proper. We’re having to do the same in reverse. We cope perfectly well, judging by the comments, and we’re having to think up, not down. This is the point that is never raised – we’re both in the same boat, but only one side keeps banging on about it. Why is that? Snobbishness, perhaps?

    As a final point – it’s almost certainly not going to change. Raising the point again and again will change nothing. I think I may have posted this before, but Albert Einstein is widely credited with saying, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

97. A Pentagonal trapezohedron is a 10 sided die used in gaming, in role playing games. It precedes Dungeons and Dragons. It is abbreviated to D10. Along with dodecahedron, D12, we made models of them in geometry at school in the 1960s. Never used it again but remember that mine was not considered inadequate for which I was slippered. Grammar School

98. Roz @92/93: d10s are not in the form of Platonic solids, but they do exist [wiki] – I remember using one to roll the hit points of my first ever Level 1 Paladin…

99. pserve_p2@36, I 100% agree with your views on C for Custard etc. It’s nothing to do with whether these words-for-single-letters are legitimate; it’s because they’re not fun. Not for me, anyway. I don’t do cryptic crosswords just because they are puzzles, I do them because they contain witty, quirky reflections on words and ideas. They’re a minor art form. And as such aesthetic criticism is just as valid as discussing the rules.

100. Very enjoyable despite missing STELLAR ( the only McCartney I know is Paul), HEAVENLY (I knew cat=vomit but I didn’t know cat=heave), and DAHL ( unfamiliar to me). Favourites included CO-STARS, NINETEENTH, ATTENDEE, and BELTED. The latter made me think of Orion’s Belt since I was thinking cosmically at that point. Thanks Qaos and to manehi for the blog.

101. Yep muffin @83, I remember the unpronounceable Dane…

102. An 11-year-old me spent 4 hours on maths homework one night making a icosahedron. Rather sadly, I still have it.

103. Julia@90
     DIO, = D10 is the abbreviation of a ten sided die used in role playing games and board games, it originates from the early 1900s and is a specific geometrical shape

104. Robi@84 (and others): my dictionary (Chambers) gives the pronunciation of “stellar” as: stel´?r, i.e. with a final r.

105. Sorry of that symbol didn´t come across. It should be the “upside-down e”. The point in any case is that the word has an ´r´ at the end.

106. [Rodshaw @89 re palindromes: I also made a transcription error, with NOTES where NONET was the first reverse answer!]

107. Essexboy@02
     Mine was crushed flat on a rush hour commuter train when I put them on the luggage rack and some business man pit his case on it.

108. How does cat = vomit please ?

109. phil elston @108. See #75, #77, #78.

110. Nooh, eb @102, not sad…all part of life’s narrative. [I still have Albert, The Magic Pudding (Oz lit), a clay blob with a tin hat and wire legs]

111. The internet she says “In English, Western Europe, and some East Asian countries, a homophone is a word that is pronounced the same (to varying extent) as another word but differs in meaning”
     Note the bit in parentheses and please god let’s move on

112. [essexboy @102 Yes, I remember making a truncated icosahedron and colouring the pentagons black, because it made one of those new ‘continental’ footballs. I don’t still have it though.]

113. sheffield hatter@80. Big white telephone? Wow back at you. There’s always ‘chunder’ as a contraction of ‘watch under’ – as popularized in the UK by the great Barry Humphries.

114. [Penfold @112: and there was me thinking the truncated icosahedron was a kind of dinosaur!]

115. sh @80
     I thought it was Hughie rather than God being called for.
     I wonder why Australians have so many euphemisms for vomiting? As geof says, generally introduced to the UK by Barry Humphries.

116. Tx Sheffield Hatter

117. [PM @114: a twenty-sided dinosaur with an unfortunate tendency to get crushed on luggage racks!]

118. Thanks for all the replies, sorry I am really slow at typing, A D10 cannot be a regular solid so I do not know how it can be fair, I do not know how to do links or look at them so this is only from memory.

     AlanC it is only solid shapes, normal dice are cubes, other shapes are like pyramids and so on.

     geof@ 94 . The 10D in string theory refers to the number of dimensions for the oscillations. More properly known as M theory ( membrane ) or just Brane theory. Ed Witten showed the five different versions are really the same fundamentally.

119. me @115
     “Technicolour yawn” was another…

120. [essexboy @117 So that’s why they died out. Still, as long as you’ve got yours, I suppose there’s always a chance that you could do some Jurassic Park cloning and bring back the icosahedrons.]

121. [muffin @115: you might have been calling for Hughie, but I’m pretty sure I was calling for the big fella – even though I’m a lifelong atheist!]

122. This took me a while to find a way in – FOI was STELLAR after a few tries fitting in PAUL – but from there it was pretty steady. I’d also never heard the cat/vomit/heave connection so couldn’t parse that. Loved RADIO and EXTREME SPORT. Thanks Qaos and manehi!

123. [Penfold @120 (and PM): …across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish… slowly and surely drew their plans against us.]

124. [eb @123: oddly absorbing, that. Although it did rather look more like a chicken at the end. With that amount of plastic in the dinosaurs, it’s no wonder all those hydrocarbons were left behind to slowly turn into oil…]

     I’m sure we had the throwing up anthology relatively recently. In association with cat=vomit. I didn’t expect to be seeing it all again. 🙂

125. Thanks both,

     I associate calling ‘Hughie on the big white telephone’ with Billy Connelly.

     I had ‘Blat’ (L in bat) for 12 ac and ‘heartily’ for 8dn, which almost works.

126. Late to the party again, but have to say, a very entertaining blog today. Hilarious in parts. So thank you, all.
     It seems a long time ago now, but I also thought the crossword was great … Happy Easter weekend to all.

127. As well as Orion’s belt, there is also a Kuiper belt and asteroid belts, so BELTED has to be thematic.
     I believe Pritti Patel is going to ban “Rhotic Pronunciation Matters” protests as being likely to cause trouble.

128. Robi @ 84 re standard dictionary pronunciations: surely a dictionary standard pronunciation is the pronunciation of the person(s) producing the dictionary.

     If people with different pronunciations produce a dictionary, surely that becomes standard?

     muffin passim: i new it as Ruth and Rughie [phonetically]

     And re homophones, I’ve posted several times before that if you regard them as puns the problem disappears – close enough for jazz, etc

129. [Petert @127: There we were having a lovely day with a fun blog and you had to go and spoil it by mentioning HER….

     http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2020/04/27/priti-patel-denies-un-pronounced-g-privatisation-scandal/ ]

130. I quite enjoyed this one, having finally twigged a theme early on, which came in useful when scratching my head over HEAVENLY. I’ve definitely used Shoot the Cat, frequently, but that was in the 1980s and it went out of fashion then (or maybe I and my friends eased up a little). Never, ever cat=heave on its own as a shot cat gives a graphic image of the aftermath. A cat – no connection whatsoever.
     I got Dahl as a plate (Tarka dhal) spun into an author. Good enough for me in Bung-Ho and check mode at the end. Thanks very much to Qaos and manehi!

131. poc @105: Just out of interest. How do you pronounce the name “Stella”? Because that’s not in the dictionary. There’s no “proper way” of pronouncing it as far as I’m aware. So, you seem to be insisting on a homophone being the pronunciation of one word that is in the dictionary equating absolutely precisely with one that isn’t and as a name is allowed to be subject to personal interpretation.

     Someone with the name “Stella” is perfectly entitled to claim that it is pronounced “Stellar” and anyone who was friends with her would almost certainly go along with that (if people will pronounce Magdalene “maudlin”, then having a stellar Stella is nothing).

132. As regards rhotic accents, my first son’s godmother, who I met in France, was Scottish. We were talking one day about how hard it sometimes was, with a British accent, to express oneself comprehensively to the locals in street markets and the like… She volunteered, in her delightful accent, that she herself never had any problems in getting the message over “I think it’s the way I roll my Rs”

133. blaise @132 – Haha! Very good. As trishincharente @126 said, the comments have been very entertaining today.

134. MaidenBartok@129 I enjoyed that. No GS and doesn’t know her Rs from her L .,

135. I’m not proud of that but I still took a bow

136. Thanks manehi, this one took me two sittings and I enjoyed it, similarly the comments and discussion above. I was a little miffed at “nineteenth” being described as a fraction (I think it needs a quantifier to avoid being a position in a list etc) and approximate would work better than relative in Largish.
     I only know heave=vomit=cat from this site and may be repeating myself but here the German speakers say they have the “ Kater” (=Tomcat) when hungover and presumably heaving, so whatever the original source it must be from some time ago. Thanks Qaos for this and for IDIOLECT, new for me, in your trademark style which made it gettable!

137. I am not an expert when it comes to the use of the English language.
     But, to me, it seems that ‘”ones” (in 3dn) should be “one’s” – otherwise I do not understand the surface.
     Perhaps, just another typo?
     If so, AS could be explained in a perhaps more natural way: “a’s” (something we see very often in crosswords).
     Maybe, someone else already mentioned this but there are so many comments today that I might have missed one or two.

138. I came here expecting to find that CAT=HEAVE was a British colloquialism derived from the word CATAPULT. Didn’t expect vomit…

     CliveinFrance@70: The nineteenth clue, by my reckoning (counting Across clues before Downs), is 5D, whose solution is LIGHTEN UP — not the puzzle’s theme, but perhaps good advice for many who post on fifteensquared.

139. Late to the game – another in for 22A – .za is the South Africa domain. Great puzzle and blog (and comments) – thanks both.

140. Sil @137. I had to check this myself today, because it’s one of those things that’s easy to get wrong in English, partly because it is so often misused. ‘Ones’ (no apostrophe) can only be a plural (as in “ones and zeros”, for example), but is often mistakenly used for the possessive pronoun, equivalent to theirs or its. Why theirs is like that but *one’s* demands an apostrophe I have no idea. I think I have read “their’s” and “your’s” in Jane Austen, so it may be that “one’s” didn’t change but the others did – or that Jane got it wrong, of course. (With an apostrophe it is also a contraction of either ‘one is’ or ‘one has’.)

     In the blog manehi has identified ‘ones’ as a plural (more than one ‘one’=more than one letter A) although its place in the surface makes it a mistaken possessive pronoun. But the surface demands an apostrophe, as you say; if it had been written in that way, it would still work as a clue because of the (in my opinion also incorrect) use of an apostrophe in plurals such as A’s.

141. If you’ve ever read Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky and Co you should be familiar with that sense of “cat”. If I remember correctly they’re hidden in the furze, having jusr smoked some dubious cigars, and decline it in French! “Je catte, tu cattes, nous cattons,…”

142. [Newsflash from MB @129’s Newsbiscuit link: Spoonerism expert dies from wangled turds and taxidental hypos]

143. [grantinfreo @142. Good to know that Spoonerisms are flourishing in your part of the world. I hope none of the Guardian’s setters are watching, or we’ll be getting Spooneristic anagrams. The answer to the first one appears to be SWORD.]

144. Sheffield Hatter @140, I am slightly confused by your last line.
     If the clue had “one’s”, it would be alright, wouldn’t it?
     It can mean either “A’s” or “i’s” as a possessive – of which the latter we see really very often in crosswords.
     And so, totally fine by me.
     As you know, I am originally from The Netherlands, and one of the things I really had to get used to in the UK was the pluralisation of words.
     The plural of A is in English “As” but on the other side of the North Sea it is “A’s”.

145. Sil: Yes, it’s complicated, and I had misinterpreted your reference to “a’s” (something we see very often in crosswords) as pluralising rather than possessive. I see what you meant now, though the idea of A possessing something is a little hard to get one’s head around.

146. Sil van den Hoek: the apostrophe is only plural if the subjects are Greengrocer’s.

     Anyone who has ever seen (and heard!) a cat dealing with a hairball or worse knows why cat is a synonym for the awful heaving noise that goes with vomiting.

     Quick, quick, the cat’s been sick!
     Where, where? Under the chair!
     Hasten, hasten, fetch the basin.
     No, no, fetch the po….
     Kate, Kate, you’re far too late.
     The carpet’s in a dreadful state.

147. According to Merriam Webster, to cat can mean ‘to bring an anchor up to the cat head’.
     Another way of getting heave?

148. poc @104; if you’re still there – The Collins phonetic symbols have a strange little superscript ‘r’ at the end but I don’t know if you actually listened to the pronunciation? Alternatively, please listen to the pronunciation at Lexico/Oxford. In neither case can I hear the pronunciation of an ‘r’ – but then again my hearing isn’t as good as it used to be. 🙂

149. Gladys @ 146: Apostrophes *can* be used to pluralise something if it makes it clearer to read. See “Dos and don’ts”, or “dotting the Is and crossing the Ts” for where they may be useful. I’d just not use those phrases in text rather than use an apostrophe that way personally, but that’s just me.

150. Didn’t know D10 or CAT but very enjoyable thanks both.
     Ps anyone apart from me see the comments numbering restarting at 1 after 99 then 00?
     (On iPhone)

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