Guardian 28,674 / Pan

64 comments on “Guardian 28,674 / Pan”

1. 27d had me scratching my head – though the answer seemed obvious. Found it eventually but quite an obscure bit of a habit! Otherwise it was all plain sailing. Thanks all round.

2. Wot you said, Eileen! I had heard of Wrangler being a scholarship maths student at Kings College, but then I do live here. But Barb as a nun’s habit was new.
   Thanks Pan and Eileen!

3. Same as you Eileen. Ta both.

4. This was a DNF for me because despite lots of Call the Midwife I wasn’t aware that a nun wore a BARB.
   Most of the rest was good stuff, and Paul would have been proud of the double entendre in 22a with the Head of Urology given a stretchy…
   21a seemed a bit unfortunate, though, with more than half of the solution appearing in the second word of the clue.
   But thanks to Pan and to Eileen as ever.

5. Bot had me beaten because I just couldn’t believe it was a maggot.

6. Overall quite good for a Monday but very surprised that most of the answer at 21a appeared in the clue. I left it until all the crossers were in just in case I missed something but there it was!

7. Yes, a real BARB in the tail with this one. I’d vaguely heard of a WRANGLER being something at Cambridge but had no idea what it was. Good to see it appearing with its synonym BUCKAROO.

   Favourites were the excellent wordplay for our ‘musicians’ at 2d and the surface for UTENSIL.

   Thanks to Pan and Eileen

8. Busy with Azed and Genius today so nice to have a relatively easy one with Pan. I had to look up WRANGLER, and BARB was new. Nicely done.

9. Please take solutions out of preamble

10. I thought UNTIDY was very neat.

    Not a theme, presumably, but lots of places as answers today. Was LORCA from CATALAN?

    Thanks Eileen for BARB – I cheated on this, because after googling Nun’s habits, I failed to find barb amongst them

    Thanks, too, to Pan

11. Lorca was from Andalusia Dave @10. Close but there are differences with Catalonia. One of my favourite places because of the music, despite having been mugged there.

12. My sincere apologies, James @9.

    I was careful, as always, not to include solutions in my first ‘paragraph’ but didn’t realise / notice that it was too short! Fixed now.

    (I included both clue numbers and solutions because commenters have been saying recently that’s helpful in saving scrolling when solving on a phone.)

13. Thanks Eileen and Pan. Like others, WRANGLER and BARB are new to me, but both very gettable from the clues and crossers. I thought Wrangler might be the name of a person… Good one to add to the memory bank for future use.

14. A mixed bag. UTENSIL was clever, CLASSIC weak. I also did not know BOT was a maggot nor BARB part of a habit , but was vaguely aware of WRANGLER from somewhere. Thanks to Pan and Eileen.

15. Barb, bot & wrangler defeated me. Otherwise most enjoyable.

16. Same 2 new words for me, plus 14 for which I was fortunate to have just recently tramped to the Angelus Hut in Nelson Lakes National Park. Agree that 2nd class was, well 2nd class. Thanks Pan & Eileen.

17. Can anyone demonstrate that barb is part of a nun’s habit? Fairly extensive googling has revealed that a barb was a mediaeval headdress. Can habit be a word for all of a nun’s clothing, or just the main garment (its usual meaning in my very limited experience)?

    Whatever the answer to that, I thought that the very obscure definition for BARB spoiled quite a good puzzle.

18. Thought 24d might be High, as in “old” and “horse’s kick” a double definition with horse meaning heroin. Oh, well. I actually gave up early on this as CREDO didn’t fit the G crosser. Too many weak or lazy clues today I thought, LORCA, CLASSIC for two. Didn’t know BARB, only knew the word gentle as an alternative word for maggot. This all sounds particularly negative, so I’ll close…though I did like STEVEDORE and UNTIDY, so not all bad.

19. Like a number already I failed on Wrangler and Barb. Both seem to me to be pretty obscure bits of GK, otherwise this was a pretty straightforward Monday puzzle. Thanks Pan and Eileen for the blog.

20. Failed 7d WRANGLER [I am sad to be leaving the Lake District today, but ironically I will to go to Cambridge for the next two weeks]

    New for me: TALA = Samoan coin (13ac); Frank Hornby (for 17ac); BARB = part of nun’s habit; BOT = maggot.

    I did not parse 5d. Firgot about MET = police.

    Thanks, both.

21. This was very Monday-ish, I thought. The weird words (BARB, WRANGLER, BOT) were fairly easy to construct from the wordplay, so went in with a shrug. The ‘Cambridge mathematician’ was my LOI because I immediately embarked on a hunt for a proper name of someone like Turing or Russell or whatever… and eventually I looked at the detail of the clue!
    Thanks to setter and blogger today.

22. Hi Monkey @17 – I couldn’t find BARB named on the internet, so couldn’t give a link. It’s in both Chambers and Collins, with rather a long definition, so I left it to you folk to look up – but here it is: ‘a white linen cloth forming part of a headdress extending from the chin to the upper chest, originally worn by women in the Middle Ages, now worn by nuns of some orders’ (Collins – Chambers’ definition is very similar).

23. Monkey @ 17 From Chambers:
    barb
    noun
    6. A woven linen covering for the throat and breast (and sometimes the lower part of the face) worn by women in the Middle Ages, still part of the habit of certain orders of nuns

24. Mostly gentle, well-clued puzzle. I knew WRANGLER because of inside knowledge (though I didn’t study mathematics) and that BOT flies lay their eggs on horses and the larvae develop attached to the stomach lining (most unpleasant). However, that meaning of BARB was new to me, and rather left field for a puzzle of this level of difficulty. Pan’s motivation was presumably the surface reading which it enabled.

    Monkey @17: the Chambers app gives the following definition (last of 6!):
    A woven linen covering for the throat and breast (and sometimes the lower part of the face) worn by women in the Middle Ages, still part of the habit of certain orders of nuns.

    Thanks to Pan and Eileen.

25. Thanks Pan and Eileen
    Another DNF here with BARB. I didn’t know TALA (or was it ATAL?) either. Some slightly clumsy clues – CLASSIC has been mentioned; also LORCA isn’t well hidden!

26. 21ac

    It’s a fairly standard rule or convention of cryptic puzzles that in Across clues ‘A on B’ = ‘BA’, but evidently not today. I don’t recall seeing the Guardian or Everyman going against this in the year or so I have been solving their puzzles regularly but I shall be prepared for it in future!

27. Thanks to Simon S and Gervase for giving the Chambers version. 😉

28. Like others I had not heard of WRANGLER or BARB as defined here and didn’t know BOT was a maggot.

    I also really liked BUCKAROO (made me smile).

    Other favourites were NARKS, CHARADES, GINGER SNAP

    Thanks Pan and Eileen

29. Sincam @2. Wranglers can be from any college, not just King’s. To add an obscure fact for a cold Monday, King’s College is not actually called King’s College, but is correctly The College of Our Lady and Saint Nicolas.

30. jackkt@26: “It’s a fairly standard rule or convention of cryptic puzzles…” — after I switched from the expensive Times to the free Guardian puzzles, I slowly realised that those standard rules and conventions don’t apply very rigorously in Guardianland.

31. Like a broken record, I’m afraid: same three unknown but gettable solutions. Given that the words, themselves, are not unusual, it’s down to the setter’s choice of definition and, if you’re prepared to plumb the lists in the more detailed dictionaries, there’s a good chance of finding something that will bemuse most solvers. If I hadn’t been able to complete the grid, I might have felt less forgiving.

    STEVEDORE, SEXTET, UTENSIL, NEW ORLEANS and WRANGLER (despite not knowing the definition) are my favourites today.

    Thanks Pan and Eileen

32. [The student coming top in the Final maths exam is given the title of “Senior Wrangler”. There used to be a title for the student coming second – “Junior Wrangler” – but thiis was dropped due to the distressingly high incidence of suicide among Junior Wranglers.]

33. Like many others, didn’t know bot, barb or wrangler. Didn’t know Lorca either, but was pretty obvious when you had the crossers in.

34. I liked SEXTET as a SEXT is also an “extremely suggestive text”. Cute

    Jackkt@26 I the ON debate will no doubt rumble on and on ad infinitum along with its close relative the homophone / rhotic thing

35. All this talk of Wranglers had my mind straying to Terry Pratchett and one of his senior wizards, or is my mind playing tricks.

36. I agree with the criticisms of ‘class’ appearing in the clue for 21a – editor asleep on the job again? And LORCA was just a little too obvious. Other than that I thought the wordplay was sufficiently helpful that the obscure words were easily solvable. I had never come across that definition of BARB before – Chambers has it deriving like almost all other barbs from the Latin for beard! I had heard of WRANGLER, but I needed the wordplay to facilitate retrieval from the memory banks. BOT was a biff-and-shrug.

    Thanks to Pan and Eileen.

37. I have to admit to assuming that ‘maggot’ was another word for an automated computer thingy, i.e. a BOT (though perhaps a malicious one). WRANGLER I knew (and maybe, AnnieClem @35, from the glorious Terry Pratchett, RIP). BARB was a biff and shrug. I won’t list the ones I liked because others have already. Thanks, Pan and Eileen.

38. jackkt @26: as bodycheetah suggests @34, we have discussed this before! The situation is that the Times crossword has a house rule that “on” can only mean “after” in an across clue and “on top of” in a down clue. This is just an arbitrary convention, and there is no particular reason why setters for other publications should follow it. In reality, as the SOED says, “on” can mean:

    Expressing contact with any surface, whatever its position

    (Think of headlights on a car, and brake lights on a car; a spider on the floor, and a spider on the ceiling.)

    Crossword conventions and “rules” are fine when they have some sort of logic or reason to them, but when they are just arbitrary I think we are better off without them.

39. A pleasant puzzle apart from the BARB at the end. I think the last time we had maggot = BOT was in the Guardian Cryptic 26,797 by Pasquale, February 3, 2016.

    Thank you Pan and thank you Eileen for the helpful blog.

40. On the easy side even for a Monday but with some beautifully smooth surfaces. Only pauses were for 7d and 27d but the wordplay seemed clear enough.

    Thanks to Pan and Eileen

41. Like most failed on barb. Forgot “over” meant reverse otherwise might have got bra backwards. Nonetheless a very pleasing solve. I know a wrangler so that helped!
    (Glad you enjoyed the Lakes, Michelle, despite our poor weather last few days. Hope you’ll come back.)

42. A lot I didn’t get today, finished what I could and had to leave the rest. Once I revealed them, I wasn’t that surprised not to have got them at my current level and knowledge.

    Not sure if I’m getting worse or Mondays are getting harder, it used to be the only weekday puzzle I could complete!

    Thanks Pan and Eileen

43. Good start to the week with only the ‘CLASS’ blemish that I could see.

    Lord Jim @38, yes, we have been here before. The spider on the ceiling has often been quoted, but in terms of a Down clue, as you say, it doesn’t mean below but just ‘attached to.’ Of course, if a word is ‘attached to’ couldn’t it mean in the middle as it’s attached to both ends? I think we do need some accepted rules in crosswordland to make both the setting and solving fair. It seems to me that ‘on’ in a Down clue would represent on top of to most people. And I’m happy to try to abide to the A on B meaning BA (jackkt @26) when setting.

    Like Eileen and many others BARB and WRANGLER unknown in the present definitions, but were well-clued, thus possible to solve and check later. I liked HEAD START among others.

    Thanks Pan and Eileen.

44. Muffin @32 – I knew WRANGLER, and knew that they used in the very early days (pre-Great War) actually to list the Wranglers in order. I’d wondered why they stopped doing that; your post offers an explanation.
    Apparently even if you didn’t come top, the Maths Tripos was regarded as a bit of a health risk. Researching one of the men from my village who died in the Great War (the then Rector’s only son), I found that as well as being a Wrangler he was a champion runner and rowed in his college boat, so evidently had taken good care to be as physically healthy as possible to cope with the strain. (And the sheer waste involved in him ending up face down in the mud of the Somme makes me seethe).

45. When I saw 7d, I thought “I know plenty of them, this shouldn’t be hard” since I did maths at Cambridge. I was, of course, thinking of proper names. However, with each subsequent crosser it became “curiouser and curiouser”. The answer eventually dawned on me. I wasn’t one myself, but I did indeed know plenty of them!

46. New to me TARA and tensile=stretchy

    Thanks for parsing MERCHANT, Eileen, I biffed it in.

    I did know that a wrangler was some sort of high-class Oxbridgean, and the phrase “senior wrangler” bubbled up from somewhere, so I looked that up. It’s the top-scoring mathematics student at Cambridge each year. I learned that in 1890 the top scorer was a woman, when women were allowed to take the exam but not to be members of the college or to receive degrees, so somebody else was senior wrangler and she was “above the senior wrangler.” Article is here: https://mikedashhistory.com/2011/10/31/above-the-senior-wrangler/

    TB@1 I’m impressed that you found “BARB,” since I couldn’t after some googling. What part of the habit is it? TALA was also new,

    A Meccano set in the US is (or was?) called an Erector set. I had one as a child. Didn’t know about Hornby, thought he was a novelist.

    Thanks for the puzzle, Pan, and Eileen, thanks for the helpful blog.

47. I knew WRANGLER from somewhere but not sure where. Either “Fermat’s Last Theorem” (the Simon Singh book) or “The Theory of Everything” (the Stephen Hawking biopic). Others may remember.

48. Another pair of vocabulary items for you on the subject of Cambridge maths, although I doubt they will occur outside of an Azed puzzle. 1st class recipients were called Wranglers, as explained above, 2nd were Senior Optimes, and 3rd were Junior Optimes. (2nd class wasn’t divided.) It used to be the case that class lists were published, in the smallest print possible, in the Times and Telegraph every June (don’t know about the Graun). So at 21, we could claim we’d already been in the papers several times, FWIW.

49. Same NHOs as others. The wordplay was fair for each of them, though.

    Thanks Eileen and Pan.

50. Thanks Pan and Eileen. I enjoyed this after my struggles with the Saturday FT. UTENSIL was my favourite among many good clues. I managed to solve BOT, BARB, and WRANGLER without really understanding them but the wordplay made them accessible. When folks say they “failed” with these clues is it that they had wrong answers or answers they didn’t quite understand?

51. Valentine @46 – I think Frank Hornby was the man behind both Meccano and Hornby/Hornby Dublo model trains.

52. Here in the states we spell it “narc” and I would never have gotten “wrangler” without a crossword solver. Otherwise a gentle and fun start to the week. Thanks to Pan and Eileen.

53. The nuns who taught at my girlfriend’s school in the Sixties were known for their habitual sarcasm, so BARB came to mind for the wrong reason. I have a vague memory of a WRANGLER being somewhere in the hierarchy of how long you could keep a fruit gum in your mouth????

54. Tony S. @50
    I revealed BARB, I think that counts as a fail!

55. A bizarre puzzle. It is presumably meant to be easy as it is a Monday one, but it is not written well, very clumsy in places, which causes difficulty in my opinion, and it uses words like TALA, ANGELUS and BARB (the latter in an extremely obscure sense). Crazy really, and in dire need of an edit. That said, it could have been made palatable in 5 minutes tops. What a thing!

56. Wrangler! I didn’t know that.

57. Wrangler is new to me. Must remember it.

58. Very late to the party as I was glued to Komorník’s charitable challenge this morning and only remember I hadn’t done the G an hour or so ago.

    Just two unknowns for me BOT and BARB in the sense used here that is, the words themselves being common enough. Both clued accurately and fairly though so no complaints, in fact I thought the cluing throughout was smoothly done. Perhaps classic and lorca the least so as others have observed.

    Dewey @52 narc or narco with the c is actually a policeman in a drug squad or agent of the DEA or equivalent, whereas with the k its an informer usually a criminal one I believe.

    Finally a story about the Angelus, which is still played on RTE the Irish state broadcaster. It was several years ago and I forget the party involved and couldn’t find on google to verify but I remember an interview with an English DJ who had guest presented a radio show on RTE saying he had received some feedback that he hadn’t played the Angelus. His response was ‘I’ve never heard of them. What sort of music do they play?’

59. I agree with muffin@25 and Sheffield hatter@36 – two clunkers (21a CLASSIC and 10a LORCA) in an otherwise very nice puzzle.

    My DNF was 7d. I wrestled / wrangled with this clue, not knowing the first class meaning, and bunged in a semi-parsed WRINKLER, assuming that it might be a word relating to resistance. I got WRINKLER from WINKLER, a Harvard graduate mathematician, with R for right in it.

    2d SEXTET was my saucy musical favourite, for its extremely suggestive surface.

    Thanks Pan and Eileen.

60. I also agree with the two clunkers, although I’m not sure I’d call them that to their faces 🙂

    Anyone else think the NAP in GINGER SNAP was a reversal of PAN (= flat expanse of land)?

    Thanks to Eileen and to the raised raised surface.

61. Pleased to say I got Wrangler, not least because way back in the mists of time my Grandpa was one! A Senior one, no less.

62. Thanks both. I didn’t find a definition of TALA that specifies that it is silver (though silver commemoratives exist apparently). Any offers?

63. Gonzo @ 62

    I suspect it may be a misconstrued homophone (dons tin hat and dives into trench) of thaler (Chambers) ‘An obsolete German silver coin’.

64. I only suspected a BOT might be a maggot because I’d heard of botflies before. I did consider that 19a’s answer might be NIT (under the logic that, since a nit is a louse egg, the word might also be used for larva of other invertebrates) which would be parsed as reversal of “[firs]T IN”, but ‘beef’ threw a wrench in that interpretation (unless it has a meaning I’m not aware of)!

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