Our fortnightly delve into the psyche of Psy-ch-lops…
…where we have a few medical conditions – ‘urinal malfunction’ giving ‘real pain’ in 8A; MORNING BREATH at 13A/14A; SCABIES at 22A; the ‘death process’ of AGEING at 4D; a ‘bellyache’ at 5D; all ending on the DEATHBED at 19D….cheery stuff!
On the brighter side, there is a HAPPY PAIR getting married at 24A…er, and that’s it!
I enjoyed the definition of 9D ALGEBRA as where ‘X often makes an appearance'(!); the Sun as a ‘disease’ in 22A SCABIES; and 7D where a ‘duke’ has to have his ‘kNOB LEngthened’!
No sign of Putin this time – although Ronald T Dump makes a brief appearance, and there are a few nods to the slightly more distant past, with a George Bush; Theresa May; Ed Balls…
Many thanks to Cyclops, and I hope all is clear below…
| Across | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clue No | Solution | Clue (definition underlined)
Logic/parsing |
||
| 8A | NEURALGIA | A real pain, e.g. a urinal malfunction (9)
anag, i.e. malfunction, of EG A URINAL! |
||
| 10A | HELLO | This is a bit unusual for a predictable celeb mag (5)
double defn. – HELLO can be an interjection, meaning ‘what’s going on here?’, or ‘this is a bit unusual’; and HELLO is a fairly predictable celebrity-watching magazine, or so I am told |
||
| 11A | HATED | Giving head badly (tense inside), so despised (5)
HA_ED (anag, i.e. giving badly, of HEAD) around T (tense, inside) |
||
| 12A | IN GENERAL | Current applied to enlarge bust, for the most part (2,7)
IN (current, trendy) + GENERAL (anag, i.e. bust, of ENLARGE) |
||
| 13A | MORNING (BREATH) | & 14 An odious aspect of you, your partner might wake up to? (7,6)
CD – your partner may not like your odious ‘MORNING BREATH’ – and the feeling may be mutual! |
||
| 14A | BREATH | See 13A (6)
see 13A |
||
| 17A | KNUCKLE SANDWICH | Unshackled Nick, recklessly drinking wife’s punch (7,8)
KNUCKLE SAND_ICH (anag, i.e. recklessly, of UNSHACKLED NICK) around (drinking in) W (wife) |
||
| 20A | PERMIT | Let‘s give a wave before sex (6)
PERM (wave, in hair) + IT (euphemism for, you know, how’s your father, rumpy pumpy, etc!) |
||
| 22A | SCABIES | Union’s bête noire, i.e. Sun – “it’s a disease!” (7)
SCAB (a trade union’s bete noire) + IE + S (sun) |
||
| 24A | HAPPY PAIR | The bride and groom’s drunk, mate (5,4)
HAPPY (drunk) + PAIR (mate) |
||
| 26A | HALVE | Share bed, to get around Labour’s leader (5)
HA_VE (bed, have ‘it’ with) around L (leading letter of Labour) |
||
| 27A | GORGE | Stuff Bush? Senate’s finally lost (5)
G( |
||
| 28A | TENNESSEE | State of ‘X’, the FBI agent on drugs? (9)
TEN (X, Roman numeral) + NESS (Eliot Ness, FBI agent) + EE (two Es, ecstasy tablets, drugs) |
||
| Across | ||||
| Clue No | Solution | Clue (definition underlined)
Logic/parsing |
||
| 1D | ON THE MAKE | Determined to shag someone in connection with article (fashion) (2,3,4)
ON (in connection with) THE (definite article) MAKE (fashion) |
||
| 2D | SUBTERFUGE | Begs, with future looking grim – it’s a stratagem (10)
anag, i.e. looking grim, of BEGS + FUTURE |
||
| 3D | HAND-PICK | Choose one associated with Donald Trump’s extremes, welcomed by redneck? (4-4)
H_ICK (redneck) around (welcoming) AN (one) + DP (extremes of ‘Donald trumP’) |
||
| 4D | AGEING | Death process that is taken up by crooked gang (6)
AG_NG (anag, i.e. crooked, of GANG) around EI (ie, that is, taken up) |
||
| 5D | WHINGE | Wife with joint gets bellyache (6)
W (wife) + HINGE (joint) |
||
| 6D | BLUR | Band’s jacket recommendation – black’s out (4)
BLUR( |
||
| 7D | NOBLE | Duke possibly gets some knob-lengthening (5)
hidden word in, i.e. some of, ‘kNOB LEngthening’ |
||
| 9D | ALGEBRA | In which ‘X’ often makes an appearance with large fancy pyjama bottom round knob end (7)
ALGE_R (anag, i.e. fancy, of LARGE) around B (end letter of knoB), plus A (bottom letter of pyjamA) |
||
| 15D | TRIVIALISE | Make light of one victory in Test, Cyclops only half despatched (10)
TR_IAL (victory) around IV (I – one, V – victory), plus I (Cyclops) + SE( |
||
| 16D | CHASTENED | The scan’s bad? Balls to be restrained (9)
CHASTEN (anag, i.e. bad, of THE SCAN) + ED (Ed Balls, former UK politician) |
||
| 18D | ENTRANT | Storm after barmy Net candidate (7)
ENT (anag, i.e. barmy, of NET) + RANT (storm) |
||
| 19D | DEATHBED | Have a lie-in here and you’ll be late (8)
CD – If you lie in your DEATHBED, you are probably ‘late’ (expired, deceased, gone to meet your maker, rolled up the curtain, and joined the choir invisi-bule – an ex-solver…with beautiful plumage…) |
||
| 21D | MAYHEM | Ex-PM at border riot? (6)
MAY (ex-PM, Theresa May) + HEM (border) |
||
| 22D | STRING | Rex, into pop star, might get balled (6)
ST_ING (pop star, Sting, né Gordon Sumner) around R (rex, king) |
||
| 23D | THIGH | Temperature raised, showing some leg (5)
T (temperature) + HIGH (raised) |
||
| 25D | PURE | Virgin gets up, up and on (4)
PU (UP, up!) + RE (on regarding) |
||
Thanks for the blog , very gloomy clues this week. SUBTERFUGE was very neat and I liked TENNESSEE with X becoming TEN instead of the other way round.
I associate ON THE MAKE with money, never heard it in this sense but Chambers does give support.
Is SCABIES a disease ? I would call it an infestation.
Very minor typo for HAND-PICK, one = A = AN
Thank you for the blog. I got stuck for a short while with this. I put CEMETERY for 19D…..which fit the clue well but buggered the grid for me!!!!
Thanks mc_rapper67 – I found this harder going than usual, missed the first sense of HELLO entirely so am relieved that the answer is that after all, didn’t spot the intended meaning of “have” in 26A as I just thought it meant “to get”, with HALVE somehow specifically referring to sharing a bed, and took a long time to think of Sting, May, and a couple of others (and I always think of a happy couple, not pair!). But I thought it was a very good puzzle, highlights as mentioned above plus IN GENERAL.
Thanks for Chambers confirmation of 1D Roz, in return I found two online sources that give SCABIES along the lines of a “contagious skin disease caused by an infestation of the itch mite”, so I think that’s a fair clue. But is it possible to be infested without contracting the disease, I wonder?
Thanks for the comments so far…
Roz at #1 – well spotted on A/AN – duly corrected.
Winsor at #2 – I guess CEMETERY could be a logical deduction from the clue, although the hyphen in ‘lie-in’ hints towards a bed. I must have already had some crossers that took me straight there…
I agree that there are a couple of phrases that don’t quite feel right – ON THE MAKE, rather than ON THE PULL? And HAPPY PAIR, rather than HAPPY COUPLE?… But I think we ‘mite’ be nit-picking over the SCABIES!
I initially liked this one, managing to complete most of the upper left in about 5 minutes! Then got a little stuck, so took a couple of days in the end giong back and forth. Agree that ON THE MAKE and HAPPY PAIR are odd versions and they did confuse me for a while until they were the only possible solutions. I did also think that HALVE was pushing the parsing a little with bed. Conversely, did like the DEATHBED clue.
Thanks Gazzh and mc , I do not really have a strong view, not sure how tightly disease is defined. I would never call nits in the hair a disease and scabies is the same principle.
Perhaps ON THE PULL is a bit out of fashion now, the students say on the COP , I do not know why.
Roz at #6 – that must be derived from ‘to cop off with’, which in my day (or my experience!) only used to mean a snog, whereas Chambers seems to imply it can include going all the way…if only I had discovered Chambers way back then!…
Cop off – not in my Chambers 93 even though it was very prevalent in the 80s and 90s . They probably put it in when it had died out . You are almost certainly right that ” on the cop ” has evolved from this.
In 1988 (three years before the term “heteronormative” was coined) the latest edition of Chambers defined “get off with” as “to gain the affection of or have a sexual encounter with someone of the opposite sex”.
Thanks mc_rapper67 and Cyclops. I also ‘starred’ 7d and 9d in my copy as favourites as well as 22d and 23d. Like Gazzh@3 I had slotted in the solution for 10a without being able to fully parse it. It took me over a week to get the sense of HELLO as an expression of puzzlement or curiosity. Likewise with 6d (BLUR), it was after I had posted the solutions to Private Eye that I realised that blacking out wasn’t a weak definition for blurring. Anyway, got there in the end.
Didn’t get round to starting this all week, so did it straight after breakfast last Friday, getting the email in by midday, wondering if that’s early enough. Then realised I hadn’t actually written in BREATH and had to export to pdf and send again. Reading the instructions again, I decided the deadline is probably start-of-business Friday. Anyone know for sure?
In 20ac, I think it’s “give a wave” which stands for the transitive verb, to PERM.
I shared misgivings about HAPPY PAIR and ON THE MAKE.
We used to say “get off with”, but doesn’t ‘cop’ just mean ‘get’ anyway? Isn’t someone who’s ‘on the cop’ hoping to cop a shag?
To think (Quizzed @9), the word ‘heteronormative’ has been around since 1988 and I have no idea what it means. Robotic keyboard interference has suggested to me the coinage ‘heretonormative’, obviously meaning ‘tending towards what has been considered normal up till now’.
The 1979 edition of the Collins Engish Dictionary had a gender-neutral definition of get off with: “to establish a sexual relationship (with)”.
Quizzed@18
… although it seems unlikely the 1979 Collins covered the term ‘gender-neutral’ or even ‘gender’ in the sense you are using it. In 1988, Chambers had: n. kind (obs.): a distinction of words roughly answering to sex (gram.): loosely or jocularly sex.
The obsolete meaning reminds me that in Arabic, the word gens means ‘kind, type’ or ‘sex’ (in the sense of male or female) and when Close Encounters With the Third Kind came to Cairo, despite there being little or no interest in science fiction there, it opened to full houses for about a week — until the word got round about the actual content, after which it did zilch.
Perhaps I over-complicated a simple observation by using some of today’s jargon. I looked up “get off with” in two dictionaries (1979 Collins and 1988 Chambers) and was surprised to find an exclusively heterosexual definition in Chambers, whereas Collins provided an open definition.
U.S. solver here, being pedantic about 28A. Eliot Ness wasn’t an agent of the FBI. His most celebrated exploits took place while he was attached to the Bureau of Prohibition within the U.S. Treasury Department. But, it’s nice to see him remembered here in this way.
Patrick @15 this is the place for pedantry and I have now learnt something new about Eliot Ness.
Quizzed@14, yes, I understand you were simply pointing out that the homonormative tendency in society was embraced by Collins before Chambers. Perhaps even earlier in Merriam-Webster?
Patrick@15, maybe ‘g-man’ would have been a better choice? Or is ‘g-person’ preferred now?