Independent 11148 / Eccles

23 comments on “Independent 11148 / Eccles”

1. As always with this setter, this proved to be a very enjoyable challenge. Most of the grid fell into place quite steadily but a handful of clues needed teasing out, together with some assistance from Chambers.

   I’ve never come across the feminine form of artist before, and BLASTOID and INSOLATE were new words for me. I also failed to parse REEBOK, so am grateful to Duncan for the explanation of that one.

   DYNASTY was my favourite.

   Many thanks to Eccles and to Duncan.

2. Hard work. I’d never heard of ‘swipes’ for BEER and thought ‘swipes to the left’ was a reversal indicator for ‘South African maybe’ = BOER, so put in ROEBOK at 11a. Just three small problems: there’s no such word, it meant ‘South African’ was part of the def and wordplay and I reversed the O and E without noticing. One I was never going to get! Never heard of BLASTOID or INSOLATE either.

   A DNF but with so many difficult clues, satisfying to get out what I did. I liked the ‘belonging to fleeing’ bit of FENDER and the wordplay for DYNASTY, which reminded me of a review (? in the Guardian) of the 1980’s TV soap: “The first two letters are superfluous”.

   Thanks to Eccles and Duncan

3. Thanks, Eccles and Duncan. Excellent crossword, fun and witty, as usual. Nho swipes meaning beer and not familiar with the mating habits of reeboks but guessed that one from “South African”. Otherwise no problems – not that it was easy, thanks to some clever misdirection – eg, took me a looong time to parse [of]FENDER. Neat clue.

4. Looks like REEBOK will be the parsing discussion point of the day. I was with WP in thinking it might have been ROEBOK (S African equivalent of Roebuck perhaps?). But noticed all the same problems so it went in as REEBOK with a shrug. Swipes = beer is definitely scouring the dictionary for obscure synonyms – very tricky. I also spent too long thinking of British seaside resorts.

   DYNASTY and FENDER – already highlighted – are favourites. I also like TENDON and ALTERCATIONS (on the last, thinking it’s a shame Roz from the G page doesn’t do the Indy as she’s always crying out for more particle physics).

   Thanks Eccles and Duncan

5. Thanks to Eccles and to Duncan.

   The golfer was a nho

6. For 21a, I took SAID as the past tense of ‘say’, so ‘in the past, say’.

7. I parsed 21a just as Hovis@6 did.

8. Even more misdirections than usual from Eccles this time. I look forward to using ”swipes’ with my pals in the pub. Thanks Eccles and Duncan.

9. I like Eccles. I made them in a bakery as a staple. Ate them too. Sugar on top. Lots to like – ‘insolate’ (is new and tickled my fancy), ‘nates’ (ditto 🙂 and ‘blastoid’ which is a cool word and clue. ‘Corvid’ was fun. 17d was a bind. I went with ‘aeroform’ because I thought ‘flying’ … you know … and being antipodean and I haven’t much idea which seaside Eccles would resort to. I know one now. Entry points for arrivistes as well. Big ups.

10. Hovis @6 and KVa @7 – Is that not how the blog parses it too? I may be missing a subtlety. I parsed it as a homophone PORT SIDE, an old fashioned way of saying ‘left’ – but it isn’t so much old fashioned as nautical, so my parsing doesn’t work.

    Never heard of INSOLATE or swipes for BEER – good additions. Took a min or two to come with the right GL— for GLAZE and made mean wonder while so many tiny words begin with GL. Glimmer, glisten, gloss, gleam. Any linguists out there with an answer?

11. Good stuff, I liked PORT SAID particularly and the clue for GLAZE reminded me of Klingsor, not sure why.
    As Duncan describes, DECOR is a hidden word. I’m not quite convinced that ‘reveals’ is an equivalent instruction to ‘hides’. Apart from anything, reveals could just be a link word for any type of word play.
    Salad @10, is that meant to be shiny words?

12. Yes it is James! Autocorrect strikes again!

13. James @11 and Salad @12: thank you so much for that. I’ll be honest, Salad, I did look at your question and think ‘Glimmer, glisten …?’ Not really that tiny? Odd comment. Interesting coincidence that he’s picked a selection that all mean the same kinda thing though … 😀

14. Needed to dig out my Chambers for a few in this one – swipes, blastoid & insolate spring to mind – and thought PAINTRESS verged on the ridiculous, sounds like another of those wretched ‘woke’ words.
    Tops for me were DYNASTY, STICKLER & CORVID.

    Thanks to Eccles for the challenge and to Duncan for the review.

15. Salad @10 – yes, me too. I went for GLOSS where GOSS = gossip = opinion = view or GLIST where GIST = content = view. But that’s not a word is it? No idea what the common root is for those GL-words

16. … and thanks Eccles and Duncanshiel. Entertaining as always 🙂

17. I once heard that the reason most questioning words in English begin with WH (when, why, which, what, who, where etc) and, for example, why they begin with a Kay sound in Spanish say (qué, cual, cuándo, quién, cómo etc) stems from a proto-Indo-European language. Whether that applies to Salad’s enquiry, I have no idea but I found it interesting.

18. Thanks both. Needed help with the crossing BLASTOID and INSOLATE where for the latter the cluing as ‘6 am’ instead of ‘6 a..m.’ caused me to fixate on so many things irrelevant to the answer. Of course, I will therefore claim it made a difficult clue harder, whereas perhaps my focus should be on keeping Mrs TFO away from the nearby Reebok Stadium

19. This compiler seems to have some ability but was this puzzle not wilfully obscure? CATIONS, PAINTRESS, SWIPES in that sense, BLASTOID, INSOLUTE, to an extent NATES, and TICKLE in that sense in the opaque SR abbreviation all fell foul of my taste for a reasonable simplicity in blocked puzzles. I didn’t like ‘taking’ as a containerind at 13 Down, nor the ‘getting naked’ subtraction at 4 Down, and I would have preferred to see ‘must’ rather than ‘can’ at 22 Down.

    Lastly I would respectfully point out to the compiler that Covid (short for Covid-19) is not a virus, but the disease arising from an infection with a virus, namely SARS-CoV-2.

20. People have often commented on the pleasure of discovering a new word from the wordplay alone (sometimes called a Jorum), but there is also the pleasure of discovering new general knowledge from a definition, and deducing a slang term from the wordplay, both in one clue today with REEBOK. Nice puzzle and blog.

21. TFO@18 I was going to say that you’re safe, now it’s the Macron stadium (to the amusement of my French lodger) but even that has changed now.

22. Thanks Eccles for a crossword that was both a challenge and fun. Top choices included PORT SAID (I too saw “said” as the past tense of “say”), GLAZE, YUGOSLAV, and DYNASTY. I didn’t know INSOLATE or BLASTOID, needed a word fit for BENIDORM, and couldn’t parse REEBOK in the least. Thanks Duncanshiel for the help.

23. Quite a challenge but we got there needing only two bits of help – for INSOLATE and BLASTOID; for the latter we had guessed that it ended -OID and for the former that IN..LATE was part of it, but we couldn’t make the final connection. And (surprisingly since one of us was a chemist) we couldn’t parse 1ac – we took ‘reform’ to mean ‘alterations’ and couldn’t explain the insertion of the C.
    But we knew ‘swipes’ as slang for beer so got REEBOK without any trouble, and we parsed PORT SAID as did Hovis@6.
    Thanks, Eccles and Duncan.

Comments are closed.