Guardian Saturday Puzzle 28,518 / Paul

68 comments on “Guardian Saturday Puzzle 28,518 / Paul”

1. Not the hardest prize challenge from this setter, but entertaining throughout. Some nice hidden anagrams, and crafty definition-deflecting clues. Enjoyed HOMO SAPIENS, COOK STRAIT & PRIVATE SCHOOLS among several others, plus the niftiness of the Spoonerism and the vulgarity of INTERRED. Thanks Paul.

2. Home made DROP SCONEs with homemade jam were a weekly treat in our house in Lancashire 60+years ago Eileen. I am familiar with the meat and two veg analogy so found this an amusing clue; HOMO SAPIENS and INTERRED were favourites as well. I found yesterday’s Paul considerably harder than this – thanks to him and Eileen.

3. Thanks Eileen. Another enjoyable offering. I made it more difficult than necessary by quickly and thoughtlessly entering ELEANOR for 1d and took too long on 10a when all I had to do was look out the window. I’m not too sure about the necessity for ‘saving’ in 9,18, the clue sits quite well without it and I don’t think I’ve come across it as another word for ’round’.

4. Enjoyable puzzle. MY favourites were: LETTER BOX, JUTE, COOK STRAIT, CUMBERSOME, CAT LITTER, NEWSFLASH (loi).

   New: DROP SCONE = pancake; KERB DRILL.

   I did not parse: PRIVATE SCHOOLS but I got it via the def = ‘might taking issue here prove costly?’; and ARARAT = biblical mountain -> A + rev of northern English vale + R? I was on the wrong track and could only find Tara = a hill in County Meath in the Republic of Ireland. So I guess the full parsing is A + rev of TARA (goodbye/vale) + R (runs)?

   Thanks, both.

5. I found this a lot of fun, the only problems were ones I caused myself by idées fixes.

   I was wondering, were some of the Scandinavian folk in 17a the JUTEs that did the sacking in 16a?

6. Thanks Eileen. Some cracking clues here including for last in NEWSFLASH, and the 9,18 endangered species: alas, that list is very long and I thought surely there was a bobo, coco or dodo somewhere, before light dawned. Until this I was happily like you oblivious of the meat & 2 veg phrase (o/l research afterwards explained it) but intuition assured me of the right answer with just the two bottom crossers. Good on you Paul.

7. I’m a week behind you guys now so delighted to be early enough to get a meaningful look in to the blog.
   Don’t understand “pick up line” – can someone explain.

8. PICK-UP LINE is a common term here in the US for the stereotypical situation in which a man is trying to get a woman interested in him, such as “do you want to come up and see my etchings?”

9. Ttt, if you address a pick-up line towards someone, you are making an advance (an oldish-fashioned term)

10. Indeed, GinF, more usually heard in the plural?
    Thanks Paul and Eileen. Still Scotch Pancakes to me 🙂

11. 9,18 was thought-provoking, e.g. What? More plague than endangered, although the plague is endangering the entire planet, in which case… yes. (Will check out Steve Jones’s talk, thanks Eileen)

12. Thanks both and Eileen and Paul of course.

13. Thanks, Eileen, for those detailed comments about the clues, and particularly for the explanation of the Tara part of ARARAT. I searched in vain for the geographical feature and was left puzzled – although the answer itself was obvious enough. And thanks, Paul, for the fun, but especially for the clueing of HOMO SAPIENS – not always all that sapiens, regrettably.

14. I enjoyed this, for the more economical (than usual) cluing, and surfaces with a story, and chuckles. Thanks Paul.
    And thank you Eileen for your explanations, especially ta-ra, and privates. (Never heard of, must be a bloke thing.)

    I was never sure of the difference between drop scones, pancakes, crumpets and pikelets. all of which seem to mean something different in different regions.
    We’re fond of crumpets and pikelets in Ozland. Chef Google tells me pikelet comes from the Welsh (bara) pyglyd ‘pitchy (bread)’.

15. Thanks for the blog, totally agree about 9,18 and 17AC , very neat but the rest were pretty good.
    Meat and two veg and privates commonly used when I was younger , maybe it is a regional thing or perhaps was fashionable for a time and then died out.
    For 7,19 an improved definition would be ………. prove costly for everybody.

16. Thanks, Eileen, and particularly for an explanation of ‘endangered species’, which seemed the opposite of the right definition to me, seeing how many of us there are.

    ‘Meat and two veg’ was new to me also (even as a bloke, pm@14), but I found it in Wiktionary. As to pancakes, I think the ones so called in the USA also resemble a DROP SCONE – they were described by the IHOP restaurant chain as ‘the size of a silver dollar’, and I bought one to find out what size that was.

    COOK’S TRAIT was clever, and brought back great memories, not to be repeated while NZ stays closed off. I trust you all thrive there, BigglesA@3.

    Thanks to Paul too.

17. Unlike his last prize I managed to complete this one albeit with a lot of use of the dictionaries etc.

    I enjoyed it too and there were only a couple I couldn’t parse.

    Favourites were CAT LITTER, NO FEAR, INTERRED, LAXITY, LETTER BOX (a Spoonerism and a homophone)

    Thanks Paul and Eileen

18. Hadn’t parsed ARARAT, much like others above. To my chagrin I never even considered vale as farewell.

    My old latin master will be turning in his grave. I remember getting lines for wilfully mispronouncing it – shouting WALLY as we left his class. I think I was fortunate as that happened only a short time after they retired the slipper.

19. In Scotland “drop scones” are simply called pancakes and when I was a kid we often used to make pancakes – or French toast – on Sunday evenings for tea. Lovely.

    Now I sometimes make them for my godchildren – and sometimes they make the other type of pancake for me – especially if they are staying with me on Shrove Tuesday.

20. Where are my manners? I do apologise.

    Thanks Paul and Eileen!

21. Another Paul delight, though I struggled … most especially with COOK STRAIT. The COMPLETE IDIOT centrally brought considerable relief. One of many smiles. Scandinavian has somehow become Scientific in your explanation of 17, Eileen, though “Scientific folk literature” might give clueing ideas for the future. Was I alone in checking out JUE as a possible word for failure in 16ac? Took me ages to pronounce “project” as a verb rather than a noun. Many thanks all.

22. Eileen, you’ve included the word “sea” in the clue at 6d – it isn’t of course there in the original. And although you’ve underlined the first five words, in fact I thought that it worked quite well as an &lit.

    An enjoyable “prize”, as so often these days not as hard as some of those during the week.

    Many thanks Paul and Eileen.

23. … I think I should have said semi-&lit or perhaps CAD!

24. Thanks both,
    [Paul may have been thinking of this classic Limerick.

    There was a young fellow from Ryde
    Who fell in a cess pit and died.
    He had a brother
    Who fell in another
    And now they’re interred side by side.]

25. Having missed out on the blog yesterday, I felt I shouldn’t let two Pauls go by in a row so, although much has been said as is usual by this time on a Saturday, I’m just dropping (without SCONES) in to mention JUTE – noted in one or two comments already but a lovely clue requiring that flip of mindset over ‘project’ – and NUDGE which has such a smooth surface that, as Eileen says, it could be an extract from a manual.

    Otherwise, in with the pack in liking HOMO S, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, COMPLETE IDIOT, KERB DRILL etc.

    Thanks Paul and Eileen

26. This was tricky and entertaining in equal measure. I particularly liked ARARAT, with CAT LITTER, PICK-UP LINE, HOMO SAPIENS, NUDGE and PRIVATE SCHOOLS running it close.

    When a J, Q and X appeared in the bottom left I thought this might be a pangram, but there was no Z.

    I enjoyed the ‘classic’ limerick given above by Tyngewick (@24), which was new to me.

    Thanks to Paul and Eileen.

27. It’s always nice to finish and parse a Prize crossword. I am sure in the week, I would have resorted to the dark arts of the Check button. Same favourites as others. [Blah @18 My Latin mispronunciation offence was to get causas wrong, merely to get the teacher to shout “Cow’s Arse, boy” back at me.

28. Thanks to Choldunk and Lord Jim @21 and 22, for pointing out the inexplicable howlers in the blog. I’ll fix them now.

    I liked that, Petert @27. Had the slipper been retired in your school, too?

29. [Eileen@28 Yes but not the thrown board rubber or the ear tweak]

30. Petert @27

    I’d say you were lucky not to get TARred ?.

    Anyone else remember Robert Donat bemoaning vicissim becoming wekissim?

31. [Petert @27. Great fun. This seems like an argument for introducing Latin to *all* schools!]

32. [Blah @30: yes indeed.

    “Well, I—umph—I admit that I don’t agree with the new pronunciation. I never did. Umph—a lot of nonsense, in my opinion. Making boys say ‘Kickero’ at school when— umph—for the rest of their lives they’ll say ‘Cicero’—if they ever—umph—say it at all. And instead of ‘vicissim’— God bless my soul—you’d make them say, ‘We kiss ‘im’! Umph— umph!” ]

33. A mnemonic we had at school: ‘Vicissim in turn and passim in all directions’.

34. PICK-UP was easy enough, but I never did decide what the final _I_E ought to be, so that was a DNF (we usually called them chat-up lines, but the Americanism seems to be taking over). Other than that, one of Paul’s easier ones, and good fun with some lovely oblique definitions ( as a cat owner I smiled at the gritty and absorbing stuff). I thought the costly place for issue might be somewhere like a theme park, but eventually the penny dropped.

    Favourites CAT LITTER, COOK’S TRAIT, JUTE, KERB DRILL, PRIVATE SCHOOLS and (ouch!) INTERRED.

35. I thought this was much better than yesterday’s Paul, where I despaired at the parsing of OLYMPIAN.

    I think chat-up line is much more usual in this neck of the woods. I had no trouble with meat and two veg. It reminded me of the comments (The Sun, of course!) about Linford Christie’s lunchbox. I ticked HOMO SAPIENS, COOK STRAIT and KERB DRILL.

    Thanks to Paul and Eileen.

36. [Eileen @33: vicid 😉 ]

37. Very entertaining, thanks to Paul and Eileen (déjà vu – must be a glitch in the matrix!).
    Like others, I loved 9,18ac 8dn & 7,19dn.
    At first I thought of ‘lumbersome’ for 24a until I saw the device (which I really like) – and then wondered at two similar words meaning almost if not exactly the same thing.

38. Just came here having just finished yesterday’s Paul. Thought I’d look in this blog first.

39. Quite a struggle but worth it.
    17a It was clear that the answer would have SFL in it but harder to work out what it might be. There can’t be many words in which it would fit.
    7, 19 I got this from the definition supported by the I crosser but spent too long taking meat and two veg literally before a distant memory swam out of the swamp.
    Thanks to Paul and Eileen.
    [Blah@30, essexboy@32
    I have had to use 4 ways of pronouncing Latin – at mass, “classical” at school , legal at university and lastly, when we moved to a house with an established garden 27 years ago, horticultural about which I still have some doubts.]

40. Late in and will just echo the many favourable comments above. NEWSFLASH took a while and was LOI. I was so taken in by the Scandi folk – several diversions into Wikipedia to look at the Edda and the Kalevala… Then I realised SENSELESS fit the crossers and spent a while trying to back-parse the clue.

    A very nicely balanced puzzle, Paul ! Very well explained Eileen, and greatly enjoyed comments above. Thanks one and all.

41. [Pino @39: interesting article here about botanical Latin pronunciation, although for some strange reason every time there’s a “fi” it comes out as “?”. I also thought he’d got his Greek derivations in a twist when discussing ‘Rheum’, but I now realise he means rhubarb not mucus!]

    By the way, apologies for getting side-tracked and forgetting to thank Paul for a fun puzzle and Eileen for an enlightening blog. I’ve just listened to Steve Jones’ lecture on HOMO SAPIENS. Most of it seems to focus on why we were an endangered species (apart from his parting mushroom cloud).

    I’m reminded of Martin Rees’ hypothesis that the era of “wet organic brains”, in which we now live, may be just a thin slither of time, sandwiched between the billions of years it took for intelligent life to evolve, and the eons to come in which the machines will have taken over.

    His lecture summarised here, delivered in 2017, includes some (possibly?) prescient comments on “Bio risks and ‘gain of function’ experiments“ (!)

42. Well I’ve been doing Quiptic and Everyman for a while now, but finished both this week and thought I’d look at this. I could only get three clues! Some way to go and these blogs really help, so thanks for the explanations. I’ll see if I can get any further with the new Prize and maybe now Everyman will be a doddle!

43. Thanks Paul and Eileen.
    Failed at the last hurdle, PICK-UP LINE. Like gladys@34, got pick-up but not line. Grrr! And needed the other meaning of “vale” from this blog to understand parsing of 20 down.

44. essexboy @41

    Thank you very much indeed for the article and the lecture summary – both very interesting.

45. Thanks to Eileen and to Paul. This was on the user-friendly side for a Paul puzzle, and none the worse for that. It also helped that Paul had for once desisted from using the vilest grids in the Guardian’s collection. Lots to enjoy here, but I think PRIVATE SCHOOLS and INTERRED have to be my favourites.

46. Pino@39 I actually wrote SFL in my grid and still could not see it until I had all the down clues, it was my last one in , you are right it is very hard to see. Can anyone think of other “SFL ” words ? apart from the obvious very rude one.
    PROJECT and VALE always make me think of their rarer meanings , have done too many crosswords. Many other words of this type, one day a setter will double-bluff us by using all the common meanings.

47. When I first looked at the grid, I thought it wasn’t very well connected, so it was good of Paul to make the long one down the centre so easy and not leave me with an unfilled grid feeling like a complete idiot.

    Pick-up artistry is a big thing in the USA, I believe.

    Roz@15, I used the phrase “meat and two veg” in situ just a couple of weeks ago. Maybe I’m just very old-fashioned?

    Eileen@33, I wonder what that’s a mnemonic for?

    Essexboy@41, I think you mean ‘sliver of time’.

48. Thanks, Eileen, the naughty bits part of 7, 19 escaped me.

    If is PRANDIAL facetious, does that go for post- and pre_ as well? I’ve thought of “postprandial” at least (not so sure about “pre-“) as a regular word.

    In the US I think scones are baked rather than drop-griddled. They’re not at all like pancakes, or what goes by that name here, which I think is the Shrove Tuesday confection.

    essexboy@32 Did you make up that harrumphery or is it a quotation from somewhere?

    Thanks to Paul for a pleasant evening (last week) and morning (today) and to Eileen again for filling in the gaps.

49. Roz@46, use of quinaplus.com tells me the only other 9-letter -sfl- words are caddisfly and disfluent. No mention at all there of p**sflaps. If you allow multiple words and any length there’s also luminous flux (you like that one, don’t you?), thermos flasks, Venus fly traps and more …

50. Thank you Tony @49 , luminous flux is fantastic and I like caddisfly. I did not mean just nine letters and surprised you have found so many already.

51. This was rather plainer sailing for me than yesterday’s Paul, and much more enjoyable as a result. I particularly enjoyed the schoolboy humour of 7,19 (although less so the unsavoury image conjured up by 21ac), but also appreciated it as a very well constructed clue – in fact, the whole puzzle is well constructed, with some clever and inventive cryptic definitions, wordplay and misdirection. KERB DRILL is another that stood out for me, but I don’t think there’s a single duffer here. Thanks Paul!

    And thanks, Eileen, of course – not least for the Steve Jones link. Re 12ac, I think you’re right to include “for” in the definition. I don’t think I’ve ever seen PRANDIAL alone like this, only ever PRE-PRANDIAL, as in “the pre-prandial sherry”.

    As for 25,2 – they’re all pancakes to me – along with crumpets/pikelets, blinis, galettes, boxty, even Welsh cakes… It seems to me that most Brits have a rather narrow view of “pancakes”, not looking beyond crepes (usually with lemon and sugar – or Nutella if they’re being really adventurous). They’re missing out on a whole world of pancake fun! And as for only eating pancakes once a year, on Shrove Tuesday, that’s madness! (Crumpets are a regular favourite of mine – home-made ones being infinitely superior to the shop-bought variety, especially when eaten hot off the griddle and dripping with butter…)

    “Meat and two veg” is a rather quaint euphemism – slightly surprised at so many being unfamiliar with it. But maybe that’s because it is a bit old-fashioned?

    Roz @46 – likewise, I’ve seen this use of VALE before, but I was still bamboozled by Paul into looking for a geographical synonym. I need to learn to think like you and ignore the surface!

52. widdersbel@51 I agree with you on all pancake related food.
    As for words, over 400 crosswords a year for many years has taught me to be suspicious of every word in a clue.

53. widdersbel@51; on a visit to Belgium, the home of all things crepe-y, we were surprised to find that the pancake shops would serve them with every topping you could possibly imagine – except the English classic sugar and lemon.

54. Tony C @47: you’re quite right of course, although my ‘non-standard’ slither does have some dictionary support.

    Valentine @48: the (harr)umphery @32 is from Goodbye Mr Chips (chap. 11, para. 17). I was prompted by Blah @30’s reference to the 1939 film version, in which Robert Donat played Mr Chips.

    [By the way, following our exchange earlier this week on the Brendan blog, I went on a virtual trip along the Dalton Highway from Coldfoot to Toolik Lake. Magnificent – thank you.]

    widdersbel @51 – Growing up, I remember the pattern in our house was that Shrove Tuesday reminded us all how tasty pancakes were. We then had them every day throughout Lent. By Easter we were sick of them, and didn’t have any more until the following Shrovetide. Somehow I don’t think that’s the way you’re supposed to do it.

55. [essexboy@54 I read Mr. Chips years ago, didn’t remember that extract — or much else of it except that it’s a lovable head of a modest public school rather like the protagonist of To Serve Them All My Days, which I read a few decades later and remember somewhat more.

    How does one go on a virtual trip? Maybe I’ll go back to the old haul road, whose official name I now know. It was about this time of year I was there.]

56. essexboy@41
    Thank for that. There ar 4 or 5 that I’ve been mispronouncing for years and am unlikely to change now. I’m sure I’ve heard BRUNN era and Cot EYE nus from proper gardeners. Perhaps it’s an American thing, though it shouldn’t affect where the stress falls.

57. [Valentine @55: Start here (Google Maps). Click on the little orange person in the bottom right corner – this will highlight the haul road/Dalton Highway in blue. Then click anywhere on the blue line – you’re now in Street View. Click on the circular arrows (compass) in the bottom right of the picture until you can see the road ahead of you, preferably heading north. Then just keep clicking on the road for as long as takes you, or as far as you want to go… 🙂 ]

58. Are there really that many solvers who find 21ac and 7/19d witty? How about French park rubbish (4)? This confused nonsense (4)? Or Paul might clue three piece suite in his inimitable fashion.

59. [essexboy@57 I never thought of using street view as a virtual tour. I always get tangled up in it and can never get myself pointed in the right direction to see what I’m looking for, but you’re inspiring me to try some more. Were you able to take in some of the scenery on the way? The Brooks range are far to the south, snowcapped even in August. You’d have to look backwards to admire them..]

60. [Valentine – yes indeed – when on a long drive I need regular breaks for tea and biscuits and to stretch my legs, at which point I turn all the way round to admire the view!]

61. My favourite use of the word PRANDIAL is in the expression postprandial thermogenesis, the increase in temperature experienced after consuming a substantial meal. In my case preferably a curry.

62. Roz@50, I take no credit for finding those examples. That goes to the author of the software I mentioned which may not be at quinaplus.com I suggested. I will have to check tomorrow now.. It’s designed to aid setters mostly, I think and you can use it to search for words using a range of literal operators. Interestingly, nothing short of nine letters fitted the template.

    Essexboy@54, delighted to see that slither, which clearly started life as a hypercorrection and then caught on, has made it to the dictionary. The word done good.

63. The word-matching utility is at https://www.quinapalus.com/matcher.html and all entries which contain the string ‘sfl’ (max length 31 chars) are at https://www.quinapalus.com/cgi-bin/match?pat=*sfl*&misp=0&minl=1&maxl=31&sps=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz&sbs=&outp=0&dict=0&ent=Search

64. When I was at university, some members of the chess club decided on this for a potential pick-up line: “Would you like to come up and see my openings?”

65. “Come up and bash my bishop sometime”

66. Failed pick-up line: How do you like your eggs in the morning? Scrambled or fertilised?

67. Nearly forgot… For 21A, I fortunately remembered the limerick about the…
    …young fellow named Hyde,
    Who fell down a privy and died.
    His unfortunate brother
    Then fell down another,
    And now they’re interred side by side.
    In “The Lure of the Limerick” WS Baring-Gould comments “Somewhat off-colour, and the only such limerick that Langdon Reed ever allowed to appear in any of his many books. It’s to be feared that Reed did not get the pun in the last line.”

68. Thanks, blaise – but see Tyngewick @24. 😉

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