Guardian Quiptic 1,116/Philistine

58 comments on “Guardian Quiptic 1,116/Philistine”

1. Thanks Philistine and Pierre
   Yes, quite a surprise to find Philistine in this slot. Good Quiptic, though. I didn’t see the MO of MOVIES. Favourite BRANDISHES.

2. I agree with Muffin@1 that this was a good Quiptic. With regards to 22d, I thought of this as a double definition (rather than a cryptic one) with “carpenter” and “with a coat of many colours” as the two parts.

3. I rarely do the Quiptic, but did enjoy this, though it didn’t take very long. I thought 22d JOSEPH was OK because of the question mark, indicating something not quite “right” about the clue. My only minor gripe was the definition of TATTIES – to me (a Scot) tatties are just potatoes, not necessarily mashed.
   Thanks P & P.

4. Did anyone else try PALMERSTON for 9a? A PM, has ER in the middle and ends in ON… Of course the rest didn’t parse.

5. Philistine does a good Quiptic – he should do more!

   Thoroughly enjoyed this – HUE and AFTERNOON being stand-out answers for me with their misleading surfaces.

   Thanks Pierre.

6. I thought ‘There must be a Bond spinoff called “M” starring Dame Judi, but no, just the first letter of movie, d’oh.

7. [25d reminds me of the Excelsior Hotel, Beirut ’68, in which I remember a ‘swimming pool bar’ (where you look at bikinis, or beefcake, underwater, while sipping your GnT), but I suspect it’s a false memory]

8. AFTERNOON, BRANDISHES and ODOURLESS were favourites. Good quality Quiptic

   Ta Philistine & Pierre

9. grantinfreo@6: There was a famous 1930s movie about a serial killer called “M”, starring Peter Lorre.

10. Rick @2: I’m still not convinced about 22dn as a dd. You can’t really define JOSEPH as ‘with a coat of many colours’. That might have worked if the clue had read ‘Carpenter, one with a coat of many colours’, but it doesn’t.

11. Yes, a nice surprise to see Philistine here this morning. I hope it will give newer solvers confidence to try his Cryptics.

    My favourites were AFTERNOON, BRANDISHES, FREE RANGE EGGS and RESISTANCE.

    I’m afraid I still winced slightly at EXPECTING but Collins has a quite lengthy comment on it, along the lines of what Pierre said.

    Like Rick, I took JOSEPH as a double definition and RUTH as another (without any reference to the OT): ruth =compassion.

    Many thanks to Philistine for the fun and to Pierre for the blog.

12. Sorry, Pierre, I hadn’t seen your comeback re JOSEPH. 😉

13. A proper Quiptic! I liked AFTERNOON and BRANDISHES. I think the question mark in 22dn allows the setter to elide the cd and dd. I just need to get the lines “Potiphar had very few cares. He was one of Egypt’s millionaires.” out of my head.

14. I rarely do the Quiptic but, having seen it was Philistine, gave it a go and, as others above, enjoyed. BRANDISHES deserves its plaudits, as does AFTERNOON and I also liked JASMINE and ODOURLESS.

    I have one tiny quiblet – the equating of ‘several’ with ‘many’ in 1d. Yes, I know neither of them are strictly quantified but, from a personal standpoint, the two are mutually exclusive. Chambers (almost) agrees with me (!) defining ‘several’ as more than a few, but not a great number and ‘many’ as consisting of a large number . So, instead of arguing about several versus many we argue about great versus large! Not that it’s going to keep me awake at night. 😀

    Thanks Philistine and Pierre

15. Pierre@10: I do take your point about the problem with taking 22d as a dd; your version of the clue resolves the issue and works much better (in my opinion). However, I still suspect it was intended as a dd (as you said in your excellent blog, it really doesn’t work as a cd).

16. [PostMark @14 – I’ve often amused myself over the years by asking folk what they meant by ‘several’ and thus opening a can of worms. I’ve done it here, several years ago and found considerable variations. Like you, I’m pretty much with Chambers.
    It goes back to a Latin lesson in my rural Norfolk school, when someone translated the litotical (I made that up – none of my dictionaries gives an adjectival form) ‘nonnulli’ (not none) as ‘several’ and our Latin mistress said, “Ah, but it’s a Norfolk ‘several’!”

17. Yes, a good Quiptic IMHO; like Pasquale, Philistine is dipping his toe into the Quiptic pool.

    Apart from the ones mentioned above, I liked TATTIES, my LOI.

    Thanks Philistine and Pierre.

18. beaulieu @3 – “to me (a Scot) tatties are just potatoes, not necessarily mashed.”

    I write as a fellow-Scot, and you are, of course, correct, but it may be that the legendary status of ‘champit tatties’ as an accompaniment (alongside ‘bashed neeps’) to haggis, may have made their ‘champit-ness’ an ineradicable precondition of their being accepted into and recognised within the anglophone lexicon. I shall, myself, be bashing a neep this evening, but alas, my needing to be careful about my carb intake means that tatties will not be co-present. Nor haggis, which is hard to find in East Anglia…

19. [Eileen @16: I’m just smiling at the idea of Latin with a Norfolk accent 😀 ]

20. ..me @6, er, make that “no, just the last letter of film…”.
    gladys @9, thanks, yeah I did get that via wiki, but thought ‘nope, too early’, which made me read the clue again…

21. Has anyone ever seen RUTH as an attribute of the non-ruthless? Seems to me another word that exists only in the negative.

    What a beautiful story, Eileen. Can I take it that a Norfolk several is a very small one?

    Welcome to Quiptic City, Philistine, and thanks for the blog, Pierre. But no birds!

22. Thanks Pierre for an excellent blog and Philistine for a first-rate Quiptic.

    This was probably the best Quiptic I have ever seen.

23. Hi Valentine @21 – no, the opposite: nonnulli means ‘by no means none’ – litotes, as I tried to say. 😉

24. As others have said, a great Quiptic from a setter who’s usually more challenging, but no less enjoyable for that.
    Count me among Pierre’s half-dozen who don’t like “anticipate” for “expect”, though I too have learned to accept it. I’m sure either Fowler or Gowers (great writers on English usage) illustrated this very well by pointing out the difference between a couple “expecting to marry” and “anticipating marriage”, the latter resulting in something along the lines of 29a; but it must have been in an earlier edition because I can’t find it in my copies of their books.

25. Pierre and Quirister @24
    The ‘anticipate/expect’ issue is an interesting one. Having time on my hands, as ever, I did a word-search in two Victorian novels. one by Dickens (Little Dorrit) and one by his friend and occasional collaborator, Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone). Dickens scrupulously uses ‘anticipate’ in the meaning preferred by you, while Collins uses it in this meaning (“we all anticipated bedtime, and fell asleep in our chairs”) but also in the sense of ‘expect’ – eg “The signing of the Will was a much shorter matter than I had anticipated.” and
    “Between six and seven the travellers arrived. To my indescribable surprise, they were escorted, not by Mr. Godfrey (as I had anticipated), but by the lawyer, Mr. Bruff.”

    So this bastardisation (if it to be considered such) of ‘anticipate’ is not a recent occurrence, despite the tendency to regard all straying from original and ‘proper’ usage of words as a blight of the modern world.

26. Spooner’s catflap @25 Just to follow up on my last intervention, I have found that Thackeray in ‘Vanity Fair’ also uses ‘anticipate’ in both senses (I will not bother my readers, if there be any, with the examples). I wonder, therefore, if the punctilio about ‘anticipate’, however it may have been supported by Fowler and/or Gowers, is something conjured up in defiance of even literary usage.

27. I read 19a as a triple definition: Hugh, hew (as in hew and cry), and hue. I expect the need for ‘sound’ to be the homophone indicator takes preference though.
    Thanks @25: Hard to find in-depth analysis with reference to Dickens and Wilkie Collins anywhere else.
    I enjoyed the conflation of the two Josephs. I suppose our crosswords would be diminished if we followed the family dinner rule of not discussing religion, sex, and politics.

28. acrossthepond @27

    Hey, I have one reader at least. Thank you. And finally, before withdrawing for the evening, both senses are also present in ‘Middlemarch’, so I think that Pierre, Quirister, and even Fowler and Gowers, may have to concede on this when confronted by the magisterial George Eliot.

29. acrossthepond @27
    The expression is “hue and cry”. See here

30. grantinfreo@ 20: I’m afraid I thought “Well, this is a nice change from ET!” and never looked at the last letter of filM.

    Visitors to Cornwall will encounter the huer’s hut, high on the cliff with a good view of the sea. The lookout’s job was to watch for shoals of pilchards, and “HUE” loudly to alert the village’s fishermen.

31. Spooner’s catflap @26 and 28 How did you find time to read The Moonstone, Little Dorrit and Middlemarch before teatime? And not only read but also mark all the uses of “anticipate”? Or is there some technical device I don’t know about?

    Eileen @23 Thanks, now I get the Latin part (my Latin is sketchy at best) but can you explain the Norfolk part? Are Norfolkers particularly litotious, or the opposite?

    A French friend once told me that “litotes” is the French word for understatement. What’s a highfalutin literary term in English is apparently the regular word for the same thing in French.

    Gaufrid — why does my name keep disappearing from the Name and email boxes below even though I check the little box? They don’t usually.

32. acrossthepond@27 I also though td with “hue and cry”. but that would mean sound is doing double-duty as definition and homophone indicator.

    I’m surprised to see grumbling over definitions equating expecting=anticipating and several=many, before ironic=funny! (None of the three are particularly egregious, but I still found amusement in which ones folks’ll focus on.

33. Valentine@31 Don’t wanna jump over Spooner’s Catflap, but I guess they’d probably use the search function in google books? All three are in the public domain, iirc, so they’d probably be very available.

34. Valentine @31.

    Where texts are out of copyright, Project Gutenberg can create an e-text. So you just ask Google for, eg, ‘Little Dorrit text’, then click on the free Gutenberg version that will be offered and use Ctrl+f to create a search window in the top right-hand corner. Type in the word you want to search for, and it will immediately tell you how many instances occur in the text; you then use the downward arrow to rummage through them. It is fun; try it!

35. Valentine @31
    It’s due to a problem with your browser. Please see the FAQ page.

36. In 23 D where does “ignored” come into it? Doesn’t “regularly” indicate the even letters of “pitch”? Thanks!

37. A good puzzle. I’m not sure if this was submitted as a quiptic or not by Philistine. Would be interesting to know. It seemed suitable for either slot to me. I liked AFTERNOON and FREE RANGE EGGS very much for their surfaces.
    Interesting point about “ruthless”, Valentine @21. I found “ruthful” in Collins online described as rare or archaic with a graph that suggests it was moderately used in the 18th century but dropped off dramatically after that.

    Thanks, Phil and Pierre.

38. Julie @36,
    It’s a useful trick: “regularly ignored” indicates you are meant to ignore the p,t and h. The “ignored” is added here to make the surface work better.

39. [In Swallows and Amazons, Ruth Blackett takes the name “Nancy”, as she had been told that the Amazons were ruthless.]

40. Hi again Valentine @31

    I can’t really remember – I only lived in Norfolk in my teenage years but I assume now that ‘several’ in Norfolk meant a large number. Coming from the Midlands, I do remember having had to learn some new vocabulary – and syntax. 😉
    I like your ‘litocious’!

41. Re: RUTH, our esteemed setter Philistine once constructed a crossword that contained many answers such as KEMPT, GRUNTLED, COUTH, etc. It was brilliant. (Guardian cryptic 26,447, Dec 19, 2014.)

    I too saw JOSEPH@22d as a teasing dd, and did not have a problem with the construction. The ? at the end is the hint that the coat-owner was not a carpenter.

    Like everyone else, I enjoyed this puzzle from Philistine, who seldom disappoints. And thanks, Pierre, for the helpful blog.

42. The discussion around ruthful makes me wanna share some neat linguistic things: fossil words, orphaned words, and cranberry morphemes.

    A fossil word only exists as part of a phrase, like champ as used in “champ at the bit”. An orphaned word would be like kempt, which is rarely (if ever) used (and then, only with a wink) versus the more commonly-used unkempt. A cranberry morpheme is a prefix, suffix, or root that doesn’t have any meaning in itself, like the cran- part of cranberry.

    I just think they’re neat.

43. … I forgot to add that, further to Beaulieu@3 and catflap@18, whenever I have had haggis (every Jan 1 and Jan 25) it has always been accompanied by “tatties and neaps”, with no adjectives added. Like Spooner, I think for most whisky-loving Scots tatties are always mashed and neaps are always bashed.

44. cellomaniac
    I’m not a Scot (though I do love haggis), but aren’t they “neeps”?

45. Yes, muffin – spelling was never my strong point, and of course spellcheck wouldn’t help with neeps. (I’m only half Scottish, but that’s no excuse.)

    Incidentally, here in Canada our Food Safety bureaucrats won’t allow the importation of real haggis, so the Scots have created an offal-free version just for us.

46. My (part-time vegan) daughter eats a vegan version. I’ve not been tempted, though!

47. …actually, that was unfair – she’s vegan nearly all the time, but can be led astray by occasional meat or cheese delights.

48. Khitty Hawk @42 I found it difficult to believe that “cran-” had no history, so I looked up “cranberry” in my beloved American Heritage Dictionary, which is a good etymological complement to the OED. The OED tells you every meaning a word has had since it entered English plus a bit about its extra-English connections. The American Heritage takes you all the way back to Indo-European roots and forward again to cognates in other languages. It says that ‘ “cranberry” is a partial translation of Low German “kraanbere”, or crane-berry, from the stamens, which resemble a beak.’ So that’s their story.

49. Valentine@48 “Cranberry” has an etymological history that derives from Low German, yes. The prefix cran-, however, conveys no semantic meaning in Modern English beyond an arbitrary label to distinguish the cranberry from other berries. Contrast blueberry, where both morphemes of the compound word convey meaning: blue, referring to color; and berry, referring to its culinary use.

50. [Re number words: I once made a list at work – we were writing reports and/or appeal letters based on evidence found in records, and it was often necessary to refer to how many occurrences of particular facts had been missed by the original assessor. So “a couple” were two, “a few” were three or four, “several” five, six or seven, “many” between eight and 16, “a plethora” 17 and “countless” more than 17.]

51. Forgot to say, an enjoyable Quiptic. Many thanks to Philistine and Pierre. I agree with those who see JOSEPH as a double definition – with liberty taken, as indicated by the query at the end. (The idea that the setter could have made a mistake, as suggested in the blog, doesn’t bear thinking about!)

52. Very nice Quiptic today.
    Favourites: BRANDISHES.

    Thanks, P+P.

53. Enjoyable and appropriate for a Quiptic – thanks Philistine and Pierre.

54. @Khitty Hawk
    a prefix, suffix, or root that doesn’t have any meaning in itself, like the cran- part of cranberry.

    I don’t expect it has any meaning in cranberry, but cran definitely does have a meaning in itself: a container for herring, specifically 37-and-a-half gallons of them.
    (see “with a hundred cran o’ the silver darlings” — Ewan McColl’s “The Bonnie Shoals of Herring”.)

55. Lovely Quiptic and blog! I too liked brandishes and had an unreasonable amount of trouble with movies. I’m too thick to follow the discussion of cranberries, anticipation and expectation but I’m enjoying it anyway. Amazing number of comments!

    Thanks Philistine and Pierre

56. A friend and I picked up cryptic crosswords about a year back. Was always looking for a group to discuss them and understand the exact solutions. This blog has been an absolutely amazing find for us. Brilliant explanations and a lovely community. Regarding this one by Philistine, loved afternoon and happy to have cracked odourless.

57. dai@54 *nodnod* cran is different from cran-, just like post is different from post-!

    Perhaps the term bound root morpheme may be a bit less fraught?l, though I think that term includes orphaned words like kempt and couth. (A bound morpheme is anything that can’t stand independently and retain the same semantic value, like -y in “bounc(e)y” or -(a)tion in “colouration”. Root here retains the same meaning as the term ‘root word’, which you might remember from English class.)

    Just for funzies: If we start with the nonsense sentence (nonsentence?) “The gostak distims the doshes.” and alter it to “Post-distimming the bluedoshes, the gostak distimmed the crandoshes.”, what new information can we glean? Well, thanks to post-, we can determine that the distimming of the crandoshes occurred after the distimming of the bluedoshes. We know there are two types of doshes, thanks to blue- and cran-, and we can guess that bluedoshes are probably the color blue. With crandoshes, however, we can’t really learn anything from cran-, save that they’re distinct from bluedoshes.

    …I might have just made things more confusing. -I just like talking about linguistics, you guys-

58. Re 22D, I took the clue to be a DD, referring to two separate biblical Joes. Pierre referenced “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”. With this in mind, “with” can be considered to replace “and” from the musical.

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