The puzzle may be found at https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/everyman/3932.
Everyman checks all the usual boxes, including the long pair of START and STOP in 7D and 8D.
| ACROSS | ||
| 1 | CASTOR SUGAR |
It’s sweet, actors and soldiers getting behind students’ flipping paper (6,5)
|
| A charade of CAST (‘actors’) plus OR (‘soldiers’) plus SU (‘students’ union?) plus GAR, a reversal (‘flipping’) of RAG (‘paper’). | ||
| 9 | TROUBLE |
Worry, tense, wanting money (7)
|
| A charade of T (‘tense’) plus (‘wanting’) ROUBLE (‘money’). | ||
| 10 | UTRECHT |
Hour in cutter assembled in Dutch city (7)
|
| An envelope (‘in’) of H (‘hour’) in UTRECT, an anagram (‘assembled’) of ‘cutter’. | ||
| 11 | RHINE |
River, huge, in northwest Europe, primarily? (5)
|
| The ‘primarily’ clue, &lit as per. | ||
| 12 | CASH CROP |
Returned enclosure and most of container to get food for sale (4,4)
|
| A reversal (‘returned’) of PORCH (‘enclosure’) plus SAC[k] (‘container’) minus its last letter (‘most of’). | ||
| 14 | APOSTROPHE |
Character in A Winter’s Tale perhaps too farcical (10)
|
| Hastily pretending that I was not hunting out my copy of Shakespeare, an anagram (‘farcical’) of ‘perhaps too’. It’s between the R and the S. | ||
| 15 | PSST |
Listen to me: wasps sting, taking a segment (4)
|
| A hidden answer (‘taking a segment’) in ‘wasPS STing’. | ||
| 17 | UPON |
Above using some coupons (4)
|
| A hidden answer (‘using some’) in ‘coUPONs’. | ||
| 19 | GUANTANAMO |
Where US troops are in uniform … in Georgia … Montana, possibly? (10)
|
| An envelope (‘in’, the second one; the first is just linkage) of U (‘uniform’) in GA (‘Georgia’) plus NTANAMO, an anagram (‘possibly’) of ‘Montana’. | ||
| 21 | RED ALERT |
Warning: wine before beer starts off rumbly tummy (3,5)
|
| A charade of RED (‘wine’) plus ALE (‘beer’) plus R T (‘starts off Runbly Tummy’). | ||
| 23 | AMISH |
In the morning, quiet overcomes Everyman, who shuns wider society? (5)
|
| An envelope (‘overcomes’) of I (‘Everyman’) in AM (‘in the morning’) plus SH (‘quiet’). | ||
| 25 | EARDRUM |
Contract killing involving artist that’s twisted: it’s essential to hearing (7)
|
| Reversal (‘that’s twisted’) of MURDRAE, an envelope (‘involving’) of RA (‘artist’) in MURDE[r] (‘killing’) minus the last letter (‘contract’ i.e. the instruction “shorten”). | ||
| 26 | EMOTION |
European proposal’s a sensation (7)
|
| A charade of E (‘European’) plus MOTION (‘proposal’). | ||
| 27 | DISASSEMBLY |
Taking to pieces lax messy ad-libs (11)
|
| An anagram (‘lax’) of ‘messy ad-libs’, | ||
| DOWN | ||
| 1 | CHORIZO |
Sausage, unfinished slice and port, imbibing last of fizz (7)
|
| An envelope (‘imbibing’) of Z (‘last of fizZ‘) in CHO[p] (‘slice’) minus its last letter (‘unfinished’) plus RIO (‘port’). | ||
| 2 | SUBJECTS |
Queen’s given these topics (8)
|
| Double definition. | ||
| 3 | OWED |
Promised a poem read aloud (4)
|
| Sounds like (‘read aloud’) ODE (‘a poem’). | ||
| 4 | SOUSAPHONE |
Very good: America supported by largely bogus instrument (10)
|
| A charade of SO (‘very good’) plus USA (‘America’) plus PHONE[y] (sometimes spelled without the E, ‘bogus’) minus the last letter (‘largely’). | ||
| 5 | GIRTH |
Measure of belly‘s wrong, right? (5)
|
| An anagram (‘wrong’) of ‘right’. | ||
| 6 | RECORDS |
Criminal convictions concerning trousers (7)
|
| A charade of RE (‘concerning’) plus CORDS (‘trousers’). | ||
| 7 | START A QUARREL |
Small cake, water and starters of raw rissoles offered by the French, rising to get feisty (5,1,7)
|
| A charade of S (‘small’) plus TART (‘cake’) plus AQUA (‘water’) plus R R (‘starters of Raw Rissoles’) plus EL, a reversal (‘rising’, in a down light) of LE (‘the French’). | ||
| 8 | STOP AT NOTHING |
Got in hot pants, resolved to be ruthless (4,2,7)
|
| An anagram (‘resolved’) of ‘got in hot pants’. | ||
| 13 | DOCUDRAMAS |
Director represented Maud and Oscar in fictionalised events (10)
|
| A charade of D (‘director’) plus OCUDRAMAS, an anagram (‘represented’) of ‘Maud’ plus ‘Oscar’. | ||
| 16 | CATACOMB |
Cool guy with a grooming item that’s cool and underground? (8)
|
| A charade of CAT (‘cool guy’) plus ‘a’ plus COMB (‘grooming item’). | ||
| 18 | ORDERED |
Chose from menu that’s laid out neatly (7)
|
| Double definition. | ||
| 20 | AGILITY |
German supplanting Britain in talent for nimbleness (7)
|
| A[b]ILITY (‘talent’) with the B replaced by G (‘German supplanting Britain’). | ||
| 22 | LORDS |
Reportedly praises sporting venue (5)
|
| Sounds like (‘reportedly’) LAUDS (‘praises’), for the cricket ground. | ||
| 24 | MERE |
Simple lake (4)
|
| Double definition. |
A bit STOP-START, this one. Actually, I found it the usual enjoyable Sunday solve. Some nice anagrams, no quibbles from me. Thanks, Everyman and PeterO.
Didn’t get 4d. From crosses and clue got S_USAPHONE so thought *very good* might be ST (saint) but when I googled STUSAPHONE, it suggested SOUSAPHONE which is an instrument I have never heard of.
Apart from that I got all the rest in just over an hour which is my fastest by far – so maybe easier than usual.
Favourites: EARDRUM, CASTOR SUGAR (FOI), GIRTH, START A QUARREL, CATACOMB
Thanks Everyman and PeterO
Howdy, can someone please explain the parsing of ‘very good’ for ‘SO’?
Thanks and regards
I’ve always spelled CASTER SUGAR and CASTOR OIL thus, which held me up a bit. But luckily I played the sousaphone. By God, they’re heavy.
Thank you Peter O. Nice to see R R clued by the starters of raw rissoles than the usual luxury car.
My favourites were
APOSTROPHE if ever there was a ‘hidden’ this was it, and the fodder well-disguised.
GUANTANAMO great find, great surface
CATACOMB cool clue, loved the image of a cool guy with a grooming item that’s cool and underground, made me laugh.
RED ALERT – for the surface, also chuckle-worthy.
Hi Beginner @3. I think (it was last week, after all) that I just saw “very” and took it to be SO (e.g. that’s so interesting = that’s very interesting). Now you point it out, that leaves the ‘good’ without a purpose. I can’t think of a sentence where we can replace “very good” with “so” – “very good” with “so good”, yes, but not just “so”.
Beginner @3 and Tassie Tim@6. The only thing I can think of for ‘so’ and ‘very good’ being equivalent is as a kind of marker at the beginning of someone’s response to another interlocutor, a kind of acknowledgment of what’s been said already. I’d never say ‘very good’ in that context, it’s not in my dialect. I find ‘so’ as a marker is sooooo over-used these days, usually to start an answer, or tell a story, rather than following what someone else has said. It annoys me. 100%.
Thanks for the blog. So = very good is actually listed as one of the definitions in Chambers but I think it is a little out of date now.
Agree with PDM@7 , my students start virtually every reply to anything with the word SO. A modern affectation and intensely annoying.
Well done Fiona Anne , you are just getting better, this puzzle was not noticeably easier.
A good puzzle with EARDRUM a strong favourite.
Very good possibly in the sense of ‘just so’? Although I appreciate then we would need just as well, so it doesn’t really work.
Thanks to setter and blogger.
I found this quick and easy, but I recognised the SOUSAPHONE from Bellowhead.
25. Okay, I now get it, but I had a grump on about it, thinking that the A alone represented artist and contract killing…that’s twisted was – SHOCK! HORROR! – an indirect anagram.
Thanks PeterO. Nice overall but was (and still am) confused at parsing of 1A.
Why is “OR” soldiers? And SU for students *union* seems a bit iffy as only students is mentioned.
Apologies for such basic query in a sophisticated forum. Thanks for any enlightenment
I too spell it CASTER SUGAR I had the Royal Engineers rather than Other Ranks, but then I had to flip them with the RAG but leave the students unflipped, So that didn’t work. And then I got OWED, but I am still not convinced.
OR is other ranks , a very patronising term for non-officers. SU is often used for THE student union , a building where lots of things go on. NUS is the actual “union” . I agree 1Ac is the weakest cue because of this.
Thanks Petert@13 for OR
I had originally got deflected by trying to parse ACTORS as anagram of CASTOR and then reversing RAG and US but got nowhere.
CASTOR and CASTER both in Chambers for the sugar, I think of it as CASTOR as in the twin of POLLUX
An enjoyable Everyman as usual. I still haven’t parsed every letter in 1 across, but I loved the APOSTROPHE hidden in Winter’s Tale, as well as ‘contract killing’ to produce MURDE.
cosmic @12, OR stands for “Other Ranks”. It is commonly used in crossword construction. I had never heard of it before finding it in a puzzle ages ago, but assume it is a military abbreviation to denote soldiers who aren’t officers. Worth remembering since OR crops up in so many words, and setters often use it.
Thanks to Everyman and PeterO.
Thanks @17 1961Dannyboy
Thanks Everyman and PeterO
This was the sloppiest puzzle I’ve done for ages. Yes, CASTOR SUGAR is in Chambers, but nowhere else that I can find. “Students” for SU simply doesn’t work. “Money” for ROUBLE is very loose; “foreign money” would be a bit fairer. The play is THE Winter’s Tale. AMISH needs “one who shuns…”. I’m not buying “very good” for SO – the “good” isn’t needed. RECORDS needs a question mark for trousers=cords. I won’t even mention dubious homophone!
Cosmic @12
OR is Other Ranks (British Army)
For me, the usual laboured stuff. It just doesn’t have that pleasing ease that is, again for me, so desirable.
One clues I did like: the ‘rumbly tummy’.
PDM@7,Roz@8 – agree about how annoying SO starting every sentence for some people can be. To my horror, I found myself doing the same. It’s incredibly infectious (R number = 5). You need a strong constitution not to succumb or, once infected, to shake it off.
PS another enjoyable offering from the consistently good Everyman. I can’t remember specifics of crosswords I did yesterday never mind last week.
3D was almost my loi because I had (after checking the packet of Tate & Lyle in the kitchen cupboard) 1AC as CASTER SUGAR.
Eventually I checked with Chambers and discovered the alternative CASTOR.
My copy of Collins also allows the OR variant.
Much enjoyed 14AC, though must confess that, not being familiar with the Winter’s Tale, I had checked the dramatis personae before finding the solution.
Favourites: CHORIZO, EARDRUM, APOSTROPHE.
I could not parse 1ac sugar bit. Seems to be a rather weak clue – I agree with Roz @14.
Thanks, both.
I wonder about 21a’s use of “starts off” to mean “first letters of”. This use of “off” rather than “of” seems illegitimate and I think we’ve been seeing more of it lately. How is this justified?
I’ve heard a students; union referred to as “the union”, but never “the students'”.
muffin @19
– ‘The Winter’s Tale’ is how it is in the clue (not sure if it’s been corrected since last Sunday?)
– If ROUBLE should have been clued ‘foreign money’, then presumably CHORIZO should be ‘foreign sausage’?
– Why does trousers = CORDS need a question mark? It’s not definition by example – that would be the other way round.
Grateful you didn’t mention the homophone though 😉
I agree with pdm, Roz and pdp11 about how intensely irritating it is when you ask a question and the answer begins ‘So…’. I know it’s not intended that way, but to me it comes across as ‘I’m going to ignore the fact that you asked me a question, I’m going to carry on with the logic of what I was saying before, and in a while you will see that I would have explained that point anyway, if only you’d had the patience not to interrupt’.
However, I think the SO = very good in 4dn is a different animal, and doesn’t depend on the modern usage. Imagine you are chairing a meeting: both ‘Very good’ and ‘So’ can be used to sum up, or to mark a break between agenda items. It’s like saying ‘OK, we’ve dealt satisfactorily with that point – now what’s next on the list?’
Like pdm @5 I thought CATACOMB was a very cool clue – in fact it’s the Fonz of crossword clues.
Thanks Everyman and PeterO.
EB @27
It was definitely “A winter’s tale” when I did it, as it is in PeterO’s blog. If it is now “The” it must have been corrected.
I thought that this was quite good.
I particularly liked the clue for APOSTROPHE, which gave a pleasant PDM moment once a few crossers were in. I also ticked GUANTANAMO, although it didn’t really need the ellipses, and the simple GIRTH, where ‘right’ was an unusual piece of fodder.
Muffin @19, as well as Chambers, CASTOR SUGAR is given as an alternative spelling in the ODE and Collins. I agree though that SU for students doesn’t work, and I can’t even find dictionary support for SU meaning Student Union, although, as Roz @14 says, it may well be used frequently on campus.
Thanks Everyman and PeterO.
eb @28. By that logic, ‘moving on’ is equivalent to ‘very good’. As is ‘time’s running out, everyone’ or even ‘OK, we’ve dealt satisfactorily with that point – now what’s next on the list?’
Robi @30 SU is used occasionally , perhaps more often written down – There is a 60s night in the SU on Friday – . I agree with Muffin, it really means the building, never just “students” . I thought the clue could have been better.
Definitive answer , I keep the clues when I cut out the puzzle to send off – A Winter’s Tale was in the paper.
So= very good is in my Chambers so I can’t possibly grumble. I could not think of an example but MrEssexboy has a nice idea.
The modern use of so is like I a drum roll – I am going to say something really important so everybody listen carefully.
I thought this was very, very good… or, to put it another way, so-so.
Thanks Everyman and PeterO!
I think “so” is just a filler, it seems to have overtaken the equally meaningless “yeah, no” which was common for a while. “That’s a good question” is another filler often overused (imo) by interviewees.
Roz @ 8
Thanks. I continue to persevere and am enjoying the journey.
The problem with Everyman puzzles is that by the time the parsing comes round I’ve forgotten how I felt about the puzzle. Completed it though.
It’s obvious that whoever “Everyman” is, he or she has never cooked with castEr sugar, as clearly spelled out on every packet. But it’s equally obvious that that’s the way it has to be spelled for this crossword (and Chambers allows Everyman to get away with it).
Enjoyed APOSTROPHE, once I’d stopped kicking myself, but life’s too short to parse START A QUARREL.
[widdersbel @33: 🙂 ]
To me “so” at the beginning of a remark doesn’t convey all that essexboy@28 hears behind it, just a sound like “umm …” to mean something like “give me a second to think.”
I realized that though I was familiar with the words “caster/or sugar,” I didn’t actually know what it was, just something British people had. So I looked it up and found that it was something I vaguely remember from childhood as maybe “superfine sugar”? Something like that. It was supposed to be extra good to sprinkle on fruit instead of the regular stuff. I haven’t thought of it in ages and I think it’s disappeared.
I enjoyed this, especially the brow-smiting APOSTROPHE. Thanks, Everyman and PeterO
It’s caster sugar because it was ground fine enough to be used in a sugar caster – once an essential part of any posh family’s table silver.
Lin@34 The use of the linking word “so” to start a question simply rattles my teeth*, and for some reason even more so than “well”. The other one is “basically” when used not to encapsulate or read between the lines but merely as a superfluous word thrown in when describing something literally…oh yes, “literally”, don’t even get me started on that one.
*Along with the host it’s why I can no longer watch Pointless, a shame really as I like Richard Osman.
So, I thought this was Everyman back on form, despite a certain lack of consistency. The good clues and surfaces outweighed the clunky ones.
Monkey@42 AAARRGGGHH!!!
I don’t care what the dictionaries say, it’s CASTER sugar. As Gladys @40 says it’s for sprinkling out of a caster.
I suppose the question might be, given that the preferred spelling is CASTER (esp as Gladys has revealed the dope on this), why use the other one. Changing OWED wouldn’t have been much of a chore surely.
In addition to queries above, isn’t Amish a plural noun? By which I mean, perhaps obviously, that I am not sure if one can be an Amish. If so, then ‘who shun wider society’ would be the way to go with the definition.
Bit non satis this one for me today, with too many debatable items.
I meant also to gripe about an apostrophe being a ‘character’ — I think it is rather a ‘mark’.
Well, I enjoyed it.
Just DNF on 12a, never heard of it.
Thanks both.
lady g @46/47: I queried AMISH too, but I think there are two possible ways round it:
1) AMISH is a plural noun as you say – with or without ‘the’ – eg ‘Only some conservative Swiss Mennonites and Amish still hold on to the sixteenth-century forms of their creed.’ (from Lexico)
But this is OK if we take ‘who’ in the clue as an interrogative rather than a relative pronoun, in which case it’s standard to use a singular verb. If you haven’t seen a photo, you could ask someone who has seen it, ‘Who’s in that photo?’ You don’t know, at the moment of asking the question, whether there’s one person in it or 100, and it doesn’t make any difference to the question. (You would never say ‘Who are in that photo?’)
2) We take AMISH as an adjective. ‘An Amish octogenarian’ = ‘An octogenarian who shuns wider society’.
Re character = APOSTROPHE, I know what you mean but it’s such a good clue. I’m not a computer person, but I think (no doubt an expert will correct me if I’m wrong) that, in word and data processing, a ‘character’ in a character set can include all kinds of symbols and punctuation marks.
I think even a space is now a character, we get Personal Statements for UCAS applications, 4000 characters maximum, pretty sure that it is letters, any punctuation marks and spaces . Other people might know more about this.
Fwiw, the OED gives numerous citations for CASTOR SUGAR – “so called from its suitability for use in a castor” – and doesn’t list CASTER SUGAR. This perhaps suggests that CASTER has only relatively recently become the more popular variant.
Valentine @39 – I often work on cookbooks and I can confirm that caster sugar and superfine sugar are regarded as interchangeable depending on where the book is being published (likewise icing sugar and confectioners’ sugar).
Roz@50, “special characters” such as apostrophe are now commonly required as password components (along with lower & upper case letters and numbers). Space is a bit of a stretch (even for you). Its just that a space takes up space.
For me this was a fun puzzle & I don’t recall pondering too much on the inconsistencies mentioned above. Thanks PeterO & Everyman.
You may be surprised to know that not only are spaces and punctuation examples of characters in computer-land, there are characters you cannot see. One of them you use everyday: it’s , a character which results in text continuing on a new line. There are many character sets; ASCII was the dominant one in the early days. Now, characters are encoded using Unicode. You have the Unicode Consortium to thank for the creation of hundreds of emojis (and more every year) and also allowing us to display almost any character in any writing system that humanity has created.
The character you cannot see turned out to be invisible when I entered it in angled brackets! Plainly, I was referring to the ENTER key.
HoofItYouDonkey
I spent longer on that one clue than I did on the rest of the puzzle!
Most porches I’ve been in have been open on one side….
Re so: I think the language has always had these fillers. ‘like’ is another one. People can’t think fast enough when they’re talking. Years and years ago people used to say ‘don’t you know’. In my youth people used to say ‘sort of’. No doubt there are plenty of other examples.
Um – what’s wrong with “um”.
Thank you Paul and pdp11.
Enjoyed this puzzle. Rushed through by 8.10am so have the whole day free.
Really liked apostrophe and sousaphone.
Our print version had at least three typos that should have been picked up by a decent checker, and that might also have highlighted the erroneous spelling of Caster although to be honest I biffed it in on the basis of OR without a thought.
Apostrophe was clever, as was contract killing.
Had to look up Sousaphone, never heard of it.
Several comments above refer to the delay between the crossword being published and the blog being posted. We may moan about the Herald being so far behind, but I do love being able to read the blog immediately after completing the puzzle.
Robbie
We were put to a disadvantage in 14 a; in our paper we had ‘Te Winter’s Tale’ !!
I, too, was going to mention all the typos in our Herald version of the puzzle, but Barry beat me to it. Really annoying to see them.
A sousaphone is the brass instrument with the long tubes coiled around so the player can put it over his head and under his arms when marching. Named after Sousa, the well known composer of brass band music, especially marches.
And there I was thinking that there was a ref to a te Reo version of Shakespeare. Wonder if the typos were genuine sloppy editing or a gremlin. CLues I liked were Red Alert, Apostrophe, Castor Sugar though after reading the explanaton I still had absolutely no idea why OR or SU would be terms we should know,
I thought when ‘wanting’ was in a clue ( 9d) it usually pointed to a letter removed/missing. It would SO help if the indicators were consistent.
Vanessa, read this and weep https://www.crosswordunclued.com/2015/09/wanting-clue-study.html
We did this in 3 sittings, helped along by copious quantities of hot cross buns & lashings of butter. Loved Catacomb, Apostrophe, struggled with Sousaphone but got it finally. Great crossword for Easter weekend.
I counted five typos in the NZ Herald version. Managed it anyway with the help of a friend. Felt so so on completion.