My third Picaroon blog in succession!
As mc_rapper67 commented last week, Picaroon is now a regular in the prize slot. As usual, there was no theme that we could discern, although some might see a connection between the two central down entries, IN HOT PURSUIT and ON THE RAMPAGE, along with SHAKE OFF at 8 down. Our favourite was probably the subtle J M Barrie reference at 27 across. Our last entry was ASIDE, whose definition eluded me until I came to write the blog. Thanks to Timon, and of course to Picaroon.
| ACROSS | ||
| 1 | TURNSPIT |
Item for kitchen goes with mine (8)
|
| A charade of TURNS (goes) and PIT (mine), | ||
| 5 | PAMPAS |
Plain idiot with plan to retreat (6)
|
| SAP (idiot) MAP (plan) (all rev). | ||
| 9 | NEW DELHI |
City backing shop that’s picked up capital (3,5)
|
| WEN (city, rev), homophone of deli (shop). A wen is a sebaceous cyst, so “the Great Wen” is a metaphor for a city, particularly London. | ||
| 10 | SIESTA |
Break Sierra and another car that won’t start? (6)
|
| S(ierra) (f)IESTA. | ||
| 12 | ISLAM |
African nation in recession clings to singular belief (5)
|
| S(ingular) in MALI (rev). | ||
| 13 | TANGERINE |
Fruit or nettle with spike around it (9)
|
| ANGER (nettle) in TINE (spike). | ||
| 14 | DRAUGHTPROOF |
Resisting current rough work, we hear, by old boring academic (12)
|
| Sounds like draft (rough work), O in (“boring”) PROF (academic). | ||
| 18 | ADMINISTRATE |
Notice tiny country in which Republican is to run (12)
|
| AD (notice) MINI (tiny), R(epublican) in STATE. | ||
| 21 | PANTHEISM |
Criticise those people constricting one’s faith (9)
|
| PAN (criticise) IS (one’s) in THEM. | ||
| 23 | NIECE |
How tale ends in delightful relation (5)
|
| (tal)E in NICE. | ||
| 24 | IGNORE |
Give a wide berth to high region (6)
|
| Anagram (“high”) of REGION. | ||
| 25 | MACAROON |
Bickie and a doughnut separately scoffed by Gallic bigwig (8)
|
| O (a ring or doughnut) and A in MACRON (French President). | ||
| 26 | TRENDY |
Outside of tweedy coats tear with it (6)
|
| REND (tear) inside T(weed)Y. | ||
| 27 | PETER PAN |
Darling ally‘s safe with cooking equipment (5,3)
|
| PETER (an old term for a safe) PAN. Putting “Darling” at the front of the clue meant that the significance of the capital letter was not immediately obvious. | ||
| DOWN | ||
| 1 | TENNIS |
Figure rising crime is court’s raison d’être (6)
|
| TEN (figure) SIN (crime, rev). | ||
| 2 | REWILD |
No longer cultivate a lot of wit, following soldiers (6)
|
| RE (Royal Engineers, soldiers), WILD(e) (Oscar Wilde, noted wit). | ||
| 3 | STEAM IRON |
Small club overrunning eg Chelsea, one doing lots of pressing (5,4)
|
| TEAM (e.g. Chelsea) in S(mall) IRON (a golf club). | ||
| 4 | IN HOT PURSUIT |
Stifling short satisfied sound, wearing attractive outfit for dogging? (2,3,7)
|
| PUR(r) (short satisfied sound) inside IN (wearing) HOT (attractive) SUIT (outfit). | ||
| 6 | ASIDE |
Not everyone should hear this song (5)
|
| A-SIDE (of a record). | ||
| 7 | POSEIDON |
Act I put on, a divine fellow in the main (8)
|
| POSE I DON. | ||
| 8 | SHAKE OFF |
Get rid of starter of salt fish no longer on the menu (5,3)
|
| S(alt) HAKE (fish) OFF(no longer on the menu). | ||
| 11 | ON THE RAMPAGE |
Where to write about horny male running amok (2,3,7)
|
| RAM (horny male) inside ON THE PAGE. | ||
| 15 | POTENTATE |
Emperor, say, spread guards round part of camp (9)
|
| O (round) TENT inside PATE(spread). | ||
| 16 | WAR PAINT |
Pervert isn’t commonly getting slap (3,5)
|
| WARP (pervert) AINT. | ||
| 17 | EMINENCE |
Big reputation? Artist consequently loses head (8)
|
| EMIN (the artist Tracey Emin) (h)ENCE. | ||
| 19 | RECOUP |
Get back ruler overthrown by power grab (6)
|
| ER (ruler, rev) COUP (power grab). | ||
| 20 | LENNON |
Tunesmith‘s numbers filling holiday season up (6)
|
| NN (numbers) in NOEL (holiday season, rev). | ||
| 22 | HIRED |
Not half elated on daughter getting engaged (5)
|
| HI(gh) RE (on) D(aughter). |
Thank you bridgesong and Timon and Picaroon.
ASIDE also my LOI. I took it to be a double definition, an aside as spoken in a theatre or personally not intended for everyone to hear, and as you say, the A-Side of a record.
.
Thanks bridgesong. This took some time and the NW corner held out to the last though I can’t quite see now why it should have done. 21a was FOI but even though the second word of 16d had to be PAINT the first was much more elusive, mainly because I’d never heard of that definition. Can’t find it in a dictionary either.
I didn’t see the song in ASIDE! IN HOT PURSUIT pretty racy clue there. Pleasant solve.
Thank you Picaroon and bridgesong.
Ah–I had a different parsing of 4D–HOT (stifling) + PUR (short satisfied sound) wearing IN + SUIT. Not a lot in it either way.
Thanks to Picaroon and Bridgesong.
Enjoyed this but got stuck in the SW and didn’t get 24 ac and 17 d. Also didn’t get ASIDE.
Favourites included PETER PAN, DRAUGHTPROOF, MACAROON, POSEIDON.
Thanks Picaroon and Bridgesong
For SIESTA, do we have to ‘break’ SIERRA to get the S, or is it an abbreviation?
I’ve been revisiting 20 and 25 all week to see if light dawned (for Gallic = par? Gallic bigwig = Asterix, Obelix, etc?), but no luck, though I now see they are perfectly fair and another week I’m sure would have been no problem.
Still, I mustn’t let my personal failure stop me from saying it was a splendid offering. After all, without failure, where do we find the limits at which to push?
For 4:58 @ 6:
S is sierra in the NATO phonetic alphabet
I was with JohnH@4 for IN HOT PURSUIT. Also like some I just couldn’t get ASIDE, and even seeing the answer I still couldn’t get the parsing, not spotting the music reference, so many thanks to bridgesong for the blog and Picaroon for the crossword.
Biggles@2 WAR PAINT and slap are both common terms for make-up .
Anyone else use that favourite crossword fish and write in SLING OUT for 8d?
Thanks for the blog, I agree the capital was well hidden in the clue for Peter Pan . The clue for MACAROON was very neatly and accurately put together. IN HOT PURSUIT is well constructed and rather suggestive but not actually insulting anybody unlike yesterday. I liked the word play for all the 12 letter answers.
David@7 I admire your attitude.
I found this took several goes to solve, the northwest corner holding out to the end, with, in common with many others, ASIDE my LOI, but SIESTA was only just before. PETER PAN was my first in, followed by STEAM IRON and TURNSPIT, which led me to suspect a theme of kitchen equipment, until disabused.
Thanks to Picaroon and bridesong.
I found this rather harder than I’d expected, and ended up with an unusually large number of unparsed answers: NEW DELHI, SIESTA (I saw the Fiesta reference, but it didn’t seem to work properly to me), ASIDE, POTENTATE and HIRED. And MACAROON took me ages, although it is clearly clued. I just seemed oddly off Picaroon’s wavelength this time, but I still enjoyed it and – having seen the explanations – can’t complain about anything other than my not seeing how they worked. (Although ‘Wen’ was completely new to me.) So, thanks Picaroon, and thanks bridge song.
Also, I know we don’t discuss the current puzzle, but I think this is a legitimate thing to mention. I found the PDF very hard to read when printed on the single A4 page that’s the largest my printer can do. (The cataracts really do have to be sorted out!) If it helps anyone else with the same problem, I did quickly and crudely reformat the PDF so that the clues are easier to read and have some scribbling space next to them. The result should be downloadable here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ljx7u5ovuw6w4ji/MaskaradeReformatted.pdf?dl=0
Did anyone else have S (Sierra) with Hummer without the H to get SUMMER, a break of sorts for 10 across? It messed up the NW corner until I realised none of the others would fit!
I did have the sling out of Pavement@11 but it would not fit when I came to put the Downs in.
Fortunately I did not think of the summer of Ant@15 which I think is pretty near. Hummer is low down on my list of cars to think of.
Many thanks KeithS @ 14. We always find the Maskarade puzzle difficult to read and with nowhere to write the answers as they obviously can’t be entered straight into the grid.
I think you’ve got yourself a permanaent Bank Holiday job!
I found this relatively straightforward for me apart from the 5Ac, 6Dn and 7Dn in the NW corner. I thought of ASIDE for 6Dn fairly early on for “Not everyone should hear this”, but could not reconcile it with Song. I distinctly remember my father having classical 45rpm records such as the Sabre Dance as the main track. So in my mind ‘Song’ is an example of what might be on an A-Side, but does not equate to it.
Am I being too picky here?
Once I spotted PAMPAS, then had to accept ASIDE as the solution.
Thanks to all setters and bloggers. I enjoy their efforts on a weekly basis, but I rarely post myself.
I guess clueing PAMPAS by the singular “plain” is about OK. It made for one of many polished clues. Looking through my scribbles, I’d jotted down IN HOT CATSUIT at one stage. Suggestive indeed, Roz @12.
The parsing of RECOUP passed me by. But REWILD was one of many generating a grin when the penny dropped.
My other parsing failure was on HIRED. Might have had a smidgen greater chance had “not” been omitted from the clue.
Many thanks, all
Another SLING OUT for a while. I was also distracted by assuming there was a significance to the MACAROON being a bickie rather than a biscuit.
[Thanks KeithS@14 I’m needing a bigger grid at the moment as I’m having to use my left (non-dominant) hand for writing having broken my right wrist the other day. 🙁 Really need the app, as typing is much easier in the circs, but bigger boxes is good! ]
Big unfinished grid staring back at me even today, 10 blank spaces not helped by having biffed in DRAUGHTBOARD for 14A.
Well done Picaroon, this was an excellent challenge, entertaining, even if not completed.
Thanks bridgesong for explaining it all so well.
It’s interesting to see that it wasn’t just me who took a while to sort out ASIDE – I still can’t really see why.
My favourites were ADMINISTRATE, MACAROON, PETER PAN, IN HOT PURSUIT, which I parsed as bridgesong did, POSEIDON and ON THE RAMPAGE.
Many thanks to Picaroon and bridgesong (and Timon).
To KeithS @ 14
I just wanted to say thanks for the link. I have downloaded your reformatted version.
It will be an absolute boon.
Very grateful.
Anna
Quite tough. Failed 6d.
Liked TRENDY, WAR PAINT, ON THE RAMPAGE, PETER PAN, TENNIS.
I did not parse 10ac SIESTA – never heard of Fiesta cars.
New: WEN = city (for 9d).
Thanks, both.
I loved 11d. You can of course parse it as “Where to write” = ON THE PAGE containing (“about”) “horny male” = RAM. But I rather like to see it as the more whimsical “Where to write about horny male” = “On the ram page”.
Many thanks Picaroon and bridgesong.
I wonder if I was the only solver with checkers ?E???N in place to have considered (Irving) BERLIN as a suitable answer? Showing my age, I guess!
I looked back at this to refresh my memory and the two clues that stood out as making me smile were POSE/I/DON (simple yet clever) and ON THE RAMPAGE (like Lord Jim @26 I parsed this in the whimsical way).
I will confess to being momentarily distracted by the word ‘dogging’ in 4d, and checked the name at the top to see if Paul was involved 🙂 but it’s Picaroon and I decided that it wasn’t that kind of dogging. In 25a I was distracted by ‘bickie’ – why not ‘biscuit’, I thought. I assumed the choice of this particular form of the word was relevant eg anagram fodder. But no, I was overthinking it…
A good mental workout, I recall. Thanks both!
Another good one from Picaroon.
I liked NEW DELHI with the wen<, DRAUGHTPROOF for the 'old boring academic', and LOI HIRED, where I spent ages trying to put in half of an 8-letter word for elated, missing the 'on', doh!
Thanks Picaroon and bridgesong.
Lord Jim @26 – yes, like Rob T, I parsed ON THE RAMPAGE as you did.
[I’m sure you’ll enjoy ‘All’s Well’, especially with your added interest. 😉 ]
Lovely ingenious puzzle from one of my favourite setters with some splendid surfaces. Managed to complete, but not so cleverly, a stupid misspelling of NIECE holding me up. Failed to parse STEAM IRON (parsing STEAM as ‘Small club ‘and wondering what Chelsea had to do with it), NEW DEHLI, POTENTATE and HIRED. So grateful to bridgesong for the clarifications and, of course, to Picaroon.
Glad to see some people have found the reformatted Maskerade puzzle useful. Maybe I should have mentioned that I didn’t include the special instructions, but I guess that’s obvious.
I was getting on really well with this until coming to a grinding halt on 6d. Put it aside (see what I did there?) and forgot all about it until reading this blog, when I belatedly realised the light was still incomplete.
Thanks Picaroon and bridgesong.
I couldn’t do 6d either, and I would dispute that ‘a side’ defines ‘a song’. It may be a recording of a song, or it could be a recording of a concerto or a comedy routine. It’s not the actual song.
Just noticed Tigger@18 said something similar. So no, Tigger, I don’t think you’re being picky! But thanks to Picaroon for the puzzle.
Thanks bridgesong especially for confirming NEW DELHI – what else could it be but though I now dimly recall London described as the Great Wen it did not come to mind as a general term for a city. I avoided a couple of traps mentioned above but held back from entering the second part of STEAM IRON for the same reason as Len Masterman above.
Re 6D: On top of the A vs B side usage, I think some time ago “side” was a synonym for “track” aka song, maybe before albums when perhaps only a single song fitted on an old 78, which was retained for a while. EG my “Jazz on record” guide from 1960 makes several references including “You will have to search …for a magnificent LP containing the 1928 sides”.
Another cracker, thanks Picaroon.
Thanks Picaroon and Bridgesong. I am another one with ASIDE as last one in. Also couldn’t parse HIRED and eventually cheated on POSEIDON. I was fixated on the definition being Act One. Kicking myself now!
Atrica in the Independent had “Remarks directed to the audience for the better songs” 6. That seemed to raise no questions. Maybe because the “better” makes you think of the contrast with B-sides.
Regarding A-sides. In modern K-pop (and maybe elsewhere) any song on an album that isn’t the title track is called a B-side. This is inspired by the old vinyl singles, but in this usage the B-sides vastly outnumber the A-sides. People tend to say “title track” rather than “A-side”, but both are fine. Incidentally, the title track doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the title of the album. It refers to the song that has been chosen to promote the album, through music videos, performances on music competition shows, and so on.
Regarding what a “song” is. I think it is the very mutability of language that enables cryptic crosswords to be the wondrous joy that they are. That’s why I have no objection to using words like “track”, “side” as a clue for “song” or vice versa. Originally a track was a groove on a record, and a side was a side of the record. However, we know that human brains have a tendency to speed up communication by reaching for convenient words that are close enough to the intended meaning and which dominate other possible meanings in the given context. When this becomes a collective habit for a particular word and meaning, then the pairing has a chance of being certified in a dictionary.
The important thing, for a cryptic clue, is a well established context in which the definition word is frequently used as a synonym or generalisation of the target word. If the context is too esoteric, then this will be an unfair definition. If the context is well known but not to a particular solver, then it might seem like an unfair or imprecise definition.
For example, in the recorded music industry people use words like “song”, “track”, “side” with heavy overlap (and often complete interchangeability). This, to me, constitutes a well-established context for the use of “song” to be a fair definition for “A-side”.
The best setters have an unusual skill in finding definitions that are surprising but precise. What allows for the surprise is the flexibility in choosing the linguistic context. The level of precision of the clue is measured within that linguistic context. What do musicians and record producers actually say, on a day-to-day basis?
Many thanks, Girabra @39, for a thoughtful contribution that goes well beyond the immediate context of the ASIDE clue, and illuminates the whole question of synonymy and equivalences in crosswords.
Good puzzle, but I didn’t manage to finish NW, SW and SE corners. Should have got NW and SW, having looked at answers in Guardian solution and above. Have forgotten most of Peter Pan, so wouldn’t have got 27ac, but good clue. I liked the multiword clues, 3d, 4d, 11d.
I enjoyed this mostly for the quality of its clues. I liked PETER PAN, PANTHEISM, STEAM IRON, DRAUGHTPROOF and SHAKE OFF best, but there were several other impressive ones too.
I enjoyed the blog and comments too, making an interesting read for me this evening.
Thanks to Picaroon, bridgesong and everyone else.
Turnspit, evocative image, mediaeval garden parties, etc. Does anyone have one in their kitchen?
Thank you Girabra @39 for an excellent articulation of the subjectivity inherent in crossword solving (or not solving!)
Quite a lot of the time I would suggest that “quibbles” are a roundabout way of saying “I didn’t get it”.
There is a fascinating theory of communication by the academic Stuart Hall that (somewhat paraphrased) says that all communication is a matter of three steps: encoding, transmission and decoding. In crosswords the encoding is what the compiler does, transmission is what the publisher does, and decoding is what the solver does.
Solvers (myself included) often get encoding errors and decoding errors mixed up 🙂
10ac I thought some less experienced solvers might wonder about “S(ierra)” in the notes (see 4:58@6). Bridgesong, I think your parsing is sometimes a little on the terse side, considering this is where (some) people come (at least in part) to learn about cryptic cluing.
Unusually for Picaroon, I think the surface for 13ac, TANGERINE, doesn’t really bear very close examination.
In14ac, DRAUGHTPROOF, the unusual adjective order “old, boring” is a bit of a giveaway. It would normally always be ‘boring, old’. See e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary
I got the PROOF bit quickly, but it was quite a while before the penny dropped on current = DRAUGHT
In 25ac, MACAROON, the word “separately” was a nicely thorough piece of cluing, indicating that the A and O weren’t sequential.
27ac: I’m not sure PETER is an old word for safe, just one that’s (still?) used as slang amongst those who think of a safe more as something that needs opening somehow than keeping closed?
2d REWILD was my LOI and was made all the more difficult by not being known to Chambers online. I did know the word, though, and it came to mind eventually. I hadn’t been considering the possibility that a specific wit was being referred to.
4dn IN HOT PURSUIT: When the answer came to mind as a candidate, I also started trying to parse it with (as JohnH@4 and others) stifling = HOT and actually checked its meaning before fully accepting it as a container.
6d ASIDE: I had trouble with this at first, but finally parsed it as ‘a side’ — rather than (what I now agree is the correct) ‘A-side’.
Roz@10 I’m not sure that slap and WAR PAINT are “common terms”. Slap is polari (originally, at least), I think, and I’ve only ever heard women use the term WAR PAINT (and that not for about fifty years), so a heterosexual male wouldn’t necessarily find that clue easy.
Girabra@39, Don’t the K-pop usages just demonstrate that Koreans generally don’t know how to use English very well? Oriental languages are so different, it is hard for their native speakers to really get it spot-on.
Thanks Picaroon for another joyful crossword. PAMPAS, MACAROON, TENNIS, ON THE RAMPAGE (groan-inducing), POTENTATE, and WAR PAINT all got ticks. Next up — Buccaneer in today’s FT. Thanks bridgesong for the blog.
Tony@45: There are all sorts of populations of people who speak English as their first language, but do it it ways that annoy some other populations of people who also speak English as their first language. This doesn’t mean that anyone is failing to get things spot-on. It’s just how language works.
On those grounds alone, I reject your suggestion that it has anything to do with Oriental languages being so different. You need only walk from one part of London to another to encounter the same phenomenon.
Personally, I think the A-side/B-side terminology in K-pop shows that whoever thought of it knows very well how to pick a suitable English word for a concept. Here the concept is that the A-side is the selling point, and a B-side accompanies it. There may be one or many B-sides now that the physical geometry of a vinyl record is no longer a constraint.
It’s not as if there’s no precedent for this usage in the purely English speaking world. The Beatles’ Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane record is often described as having two A-sides.
My deeper point about these mutations of language is that we benefit, as cryptic crossword enthusiasts, from centuries of such mutations that have been fully assimilated into the language. The question is, how do we, as setters and solvers, respond to mutations that are happening right now, that are only partly assimilated? My own preference is to respond with enjoyment and excitement while also acknowledging that setters need to exercise fine judgment when playing in these shifting landscapes.
Let me shed light on how I came to this preference. When I got hugely into the Beatles in the 1990s, I occasionally entertained the wish that I’d been around in the 1960s to enjoy their records as they came out, and perhaps see them in concert. One day it occurred to me that if I had been a teenager in the 1960s, that I might not have listened to them at all, but rather looked down on them for being rather vulgar, for not being as good as Bach, for not knowing their place. After all, I wasn’t listening to any contemporary music in the 1990s. Ever since then, I’ve always asked myself, what am I missing now as a result of my automatic pre-judgements? Could I be missing something as good as the Beatles, in whatever domain?
I apply this to my relationship with the English language. What am I missing about the beauty of the language as it is spoken today, if my appreciation is filtered through a harsh lens of comparison with a version of the language that is frozen in time?
Tony Collman @ 45. Thank you. Learn something every day, I’d never heard of polari and Google has furthered my education. That explains why I can’t find that definition of slap in an English dictionary.
Tony@45 I am of course very common, perhaps you should be a bit more adventurous.
I only wear make-up for punk nights with assistance from the scary Goth girlies, they are young but do use the terms SLAP and WAR-PAINT so both terms still in use.
Just checked, Chambers93 has a definition of each as make-up.
Tony Collman @45: I take your point about Sierra, and my tendency towards tenseness in general. There’s a fine line between being informative on the one hand and teaching your grandmother to suck eggs on the other, and perhaps sometimes I make an unwarranted assumption about what is common knowledge.
Having said that, I am surprised by your comment about REWILD: it’s certainly in my version of the Chambers app, although it wasn’t in the paper version of the dictionary in 2008 (checking the nearest version to hand).
REWILD again: it seems to have made its first appearance in Chambers in the 12th edition in 2011.
Re REWILD. It’s in the app but not in the online dictionary. My understanding is that the online version is a deliberately abridged version of the app, otherwise the latter wouldn’t sell, would it.
BigglesA, my pleasure, as always. You have, of course, spent much of your life with your head — and the rest of you! — in the clouds … and beyond (lucky devil!).
Roz@45, I didn’t say those terms were no longer current (although I may have seemed to suggest that with my aside about not personally having heard WAR PAINT for a very long time) but that their use might not be widespread (in which sense, I meant “common”, although I’m pleased to hear you’re common in the other sense, like me.)
[I hope you’re not getting help with the crossword from those scary Goth girlies.]
Girabra@47, perhaps it’s because you weren’t around in the sixties that you don’t feel so tied to the original, physical meanings of A- & B-side? Btw, Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane was an example of a fairly common phenomenon when popular songs were released in pairs, one on each side of a vinyl disk and the record company didn’t know which to treat as the ‘lead’, i.e., the side they expected would be played on the radio. Sometimes it happened that the nominal B-side would become more popular than the A-side: see here, often as a result of a particular DJ taking a liking to it and promoting it.
Bridgesong@51,52, I thought the point of 15² was that we don’t expect everyone to be a cryptic crossword ‘grandmother’? I don’t think you should fear sounding patronising, because those of us who know the standard setters’ playbooks are happy to feel self-satisfied about already knowing what you’re explaining.
Re Chambers online, is a different dictionary from The Chambers Dictionary (as featured in the app and current paper).
[Btw, I take it “tenseness” is a typo for ‘terseness’, which is what I mentioned.]