Guardian Cryptic 28,856 by Brummie

64 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 28,856 by Brummie”

1. Thank you Loonapick for the notes and Brummie for the clues. Can someone help me with the cryptic definition of PREMIUM? I can understand the “charge” part but “cover” isn’t clicking for me

2. Nearly completed. 2 missing. Not bad for me and Brummie. But needed a few synonym lists.

3. Rhona@1 a PREMIUM is what you pay for insurance cover

4. Very enjoyable, though grease had me stumped. Perhaps I mix in the wrong circles.
   Thanks Brummie and loonapick

5. If she’ll tell you all about it, won’t she be a RACONTEUSE? Asking for a friend.

6. We’ve strayed a bit into continental Europe linguistically with CAHIERS, BONHOMMIE, COCO DE MER, LEITMOTIF. Not complaining, just saying.

   Thanks Brummie and loonapick

7. greaser

8. Liked ASHMOLEAN, ASTRAY (loi).

   I did not parse 18d.

   Thanks, both.

9. Quiet = ease? I don’t quite see that. And I didn’t know that cahiers was in use as an English word. No criticism intended. More likely my lack of knowledge. Thanks Brummie. I enjoyed it. Lucky you, loonapick, to be in Morocco!

10. trish @9 – my Chambers has “Quiet, peace” as the third entry under “ease” as a noun, which kind of makes sense now I’ve thought about it.

11. I thought the same, Crossbar@6, and would add RACONTEUR and FIGARO to the list.

    Stu@5 – I suspect that we are entering the same territory as actor/actress. RACONTEUR covers both male and female with the SHE of the clue being purposefully misleading . RACONTEUSE does exist as a word, even in English, but would only cover females.

12. I know we often ignore punctuation in clues but I still don’t like ‘ladies do’ for ‘hen night’ – they don’t mean the same without the apostrophe.

13. Grr – couldn’t parse that one. And TROTTING for that matter, which is just ridiculous.

    Thanks both – lovely puzzle.

14. Been in Oxford a few times, regret never visiting the famous Ashmolean. Forgot clown Coco (thinking more that novel with Chanel, Hemingway et al at the Ritz). Nice associations, ta B and l.

15. Nice Goldilocks puzzle. I hadn’t heard of cahiers or ashmolen. Nor that meaning of lush. I particularly liked ASHTRAY.

16. Nice puzzle, though with some slightly bizarre surfaces, eg 11a!

    I’m not sure that PLAY ONE’S CARDS RIGHT means “Act in your own best interests”. It means “Do the correct things to achieve the desired result” (online Cambridge Dictionary). Couldn’t the desired result be an altruistic one? “If you play your cards right you could win a lot of money for your favourite charity”?

    I wondered about the “to” in 12a, but I suppose “war” can be a verb, as in “warring factions”.

    Thanks Brummie and loonapick.

17. Thanks Rob@10. Yes, I’ll go with that.
    Alan@12. I do know what you mean about punctuation, but had the apostrophe been there, we wouldn’t have got the wonderful misdirection. Ladies do climax .. yes, I’ll go with that too.

18. I’m a Brummie fan and really enjoyed this. I share the squeamishness re lack of punctuation in 11 A, though including it would clearly have made it too obvious. I especially like 4D: MUGSHOT. With thanks to both.

19. Stu@5 – I’ve a similar friend! Speaking personally, it jarred. I don’t like “actress” in place of “actor” though I guess I’m used to it. But this is more like describing a female driver as a “chauffeur” rather than a “chauffeuse”, and didn’t feel right to me. Maybe I’ve a more old-fashioned understanding of French (unlike English, my use was probably fixed in my youth – rather like the more precious attitude the French have to their language?!)
    That apart, this was an enjoyable solve.
    Many thanks

20. Thanks both,
    I had my doubts whether ‘greasers’ needed to be gang members, but it’s there in OED. As is ‘cahier’ including a citation from C. Bronte 1855.

21. I remember greasers from S E Hinton’s The Outsiders.

22. Re: RACONTEUR/RACONTEUSE. Raconteuse would only cover females ? Fine. That is all the clue specified. If the clue had specified “he’ll” then all would have been well, but it didn’t.

23. William @19 – I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a chauffeuse and I have no great wish to do so. If we can have female actors we can have female raconteurs IMHO.
    Alan @12 – reluctantly I have to agree about the missing apostrophe in 11a – reluctantly because I thought the clue was hilarious in the best Paul vein of near-smut.
    Grantinfreo @14 – You’ve missed a treat with the ASHMOLEAN, and I thought it was a pretty good clue,too.
    Overall, an enjoyable and challenging solve. Thanks both.

24. I have issue with 5 down, especially/despite recent furore over pronouns, perhaps the setter was trying to be non-sexist, but as its from the French “raconteur” is specifically male so should be-“He’ll tell you all about it”? If it obeyed the “She’ll tell…” wouldn’t it be “raconteuse”?

25. I haven’t heard the term ‘greaser’ in over 40 years Malken @4 & 7. Took me right back! MUGSHOT and COERCE my favourites today.

    Thanks Brummie and loonapick

26. I struggled with this but got there in the end.

    Larry @11, there is a word ‘actress’ in all the dictionaries but these days most people just use actor for men and women (except of course the Oscars where they don’t use ‘female actor’). I suspect the same is true for RACONTEUR i.e. raconteuse is probably not used much any more. Arachne characteristically used to use ‘she’ in her clues for gender-nonspecific words.

    I guess I can’t be the only one who tried to find fodder of the correct length for the long one, and failed miserably. I also took to looking up famous Barneys (27), doh. I liked TROTTING for the ‘in decline’ (in not being an inserter here), ASTRAY for the ‘to go off the rails’, FORESIGHT for the Barney, and ALCOHOLIC for lush.

    Thanks Brummie and loonapick.

27. Thanks for the blog, good set of clues here . Not heard of CAHIERS but the word play was very fair. Spent many hours in the ASHMOLEAN in the past, would always be so quiet during the week, I could spend a whole day just looking at the ceramics.
    Surely the Fonz was a GREASER? do not think he was in a gang.
    I think PLAY YOUR CARDS RIGHT used to refer to potential romance more than anything else.

28. Thanks Brummie. This was a bit of a struggle and I eventually revealed COCO DE MER, BONHOMIE, and ASHMOLEAN. My ticks outnumbered my reveals — COERCE, ASTRAY, HEN NIGHT, and MUGSHOT — so that counts as a satisfying endeavour. Thanks loonapick for the blog.

29. @Roz Yes, the Fonz was supposed to be a biker/greaser, but I always thought his 1970s denim and brown bomber jacket were more suitable for a Honda 50 than a Norton Commando.

30. Thanks Bhoyo, I thought his jacket was black, maybe 1970s TV sets.

31. Does nobody else have an issue with “horse racing” as “trotting”? Because if a horse was trotting during a race there would be penalties applied. Even outside the world of actual racing a trot is not fast. The first definition when I searched for it included this example: “our horses slowed to a trot”.

32. Nevermind I’ve seen that trotting races are a thing. Silly horses.

33. Quite a lot of French in there today (COCO DE MER, BONHOMIE, RACONTEUR, LEITMOTIF, CAHIERS) though not quite to the extent of a theme. I reckon all bar the last of those are common enough English, but even as a French speaker I wasn’t aware that CAHIER exists in English. I agree that the ‘she’ in the RACONTEUR clueing was unfortunate, if well-intentioned, as French has more of a tendency to have gendered nouns of this type; ‘they’ would have been better than ‘she’ in this regard. And re BONHOMIE, it may be a local thing but where I’m originally from (the north of England), NOB refers to a different body part, but that is not backed up by reputable dictionaries…

    Good puzzle though – it started off tough (only two answers on my first pass) but then gradually opened up clue by clue in a very satisfying way.

    Thanks both.

34. Somehow that felt harder that it should have, because when we got there it was all very fair. Although for some reason it took us ages to see TROTTING (T in TROTING just didn’t seem right). PREMIUM was a bit weak, and our LOI, and I need to come here to parse GREASER.
    We have no problem with RACONTEUR; it may have a French root but once it’s made its way into the English language there’s no reason for it to refer only to male story tellers.
    Thanks to Brummie and Ioonapick

35. RobT@33 the nob you allude to has a silent K .

36. Stu@5, just what I was thinking!

37. As a feminist I’m in favour of retaining words like actress and raconteuse. Every time we lose a feminine word it’s another little victory for the patriarchy!

38. Rob T @33: Isn’t leitmotif German? (As in Wagner’s interminable Ring cycle). Though perhaps the French use the f ending rather than v, which seems more Germanic (?)

39. Neil@23 – Oh dear! Having “no great wish” to encounter a chauffeuse is considerably more sexist than still liking the word actress (as many actresses/actors do). I’ve known a few capable women drivers whom I’ve been happy to “encounter”! ??

40. I found this to be an enjoyable romp! HEN NIGHT was the stand out clue and the surface makes complete sense to me!!! (As others have said, mostly we are to ignore punctuation.)

    Also liked COERCE and BONHOMIE

    Thanks Brummie and loonapick

41. Re PLAY ONE’S CARDS RIGHT – Roz thought of romance, I thought of Bruce Forsyth (but then I often think of Bruce Forsyth, as regular readers will know). I’m inclined to agree with Lord Jim @16 that ‘Act in your own best interests’ is a bit off-centre as a definition. Self-interest may be an implied feature of playing your cards right, but it doesn’t capture the essence of it.

    I think the intended definition for COCO DE MER may be not just ‘nut’, but ‘What a nut!’ According to wiki, “the nut of the coco de mer is… the largest seed in the plant kingdom”, and “The exceptional size and suggestive form of the nut, the circumstances of its discovery, and some unusual qualities of the trees have given rise to several legends”.

    Enjoyed this, thanks Brummie and loonapick.

42. [MarkN @32 and others] Trotting is a faintly ridiculous form of racing, usually for ponies (which I believe, though I’m no expert, have a maximum height. The ponies legs are hobbled, left fore to left rear and right fore to right rear, so that their gait is unnatural and restricted in speed. I’ve seen it and lost a few bucks a few times at Gloucester Park in Perth, Australia, as said track is right opposite the old WACA and it makes an entertaining hour or two after the cricket has finished (or it did: the WACA, of course, is sadly no more, at least as a test venue). I recall an official Perth tour guide telling a group of Pom cricket fans once that “You should go to Gloucester Park where we have the trots every Friday evening”. She really did not understand our advice that she should go easy on the meat pies.

43. Thanks Brummie and Loonapick. Found this as enjoyable as ever but struggled slightly this morning – possibly an after effect of stopping for a pint on the way home last night…

    I’m not convinced French people would say raconteuse. It comes across as terribly old fashioned, even in French.

44. Widdersbel @43 – both raconteur and raconteuse are actually quite rare in modern French. The much more usual terms are conteur and conteuse, and the feminine form is, in my experience, always used for a female storyteller – see here for examples.

45. 25a typo I.E. is “that is,” not “the is.”

    Priscilla@24 If RACONTEUR were just a French word, it would have to refer to a male one, but it has become an English word as well, and in English it can be either, like a chauffeur or a coiffeur. So instead it’s an Arachne-style misdirection/political point. robi@26 As far as I know “raconteuse is not much used any more” is greatly an understatement — I’ve never heard the word in my life. If it ever was a part of conversational English it’s long gone.

    I think the only use of 21a I can recall is by Eeyore on the subject of Bon Hommy.

    AuntRuth@37 I think every time that the feminine word can’t refer to everybody but the masculine word can it’s another victory for the patriarchy, and we’re better off losing the separation.

    WFP@39 I’m happy to encounter a chauffeuse but no wish to encounter the word, which may be the point Neil@23 was making.

    Fine puzzle, thanks to Brummie and lucky loonapick.

46. Roz @35 – funnily enough, in my part of East Lancashire it didn’t! The 3-letter version was much preferred by the semi-literate bus shelter graffiti artists of the day 🙂

47. Nuntius @38 – ah yes, of course. I was distracted by the -motif part. Maybe it got partly Francified over the centuries…

48. Rob@46 it could also be used in a reversal clue like today but perhaps more suitable for Cyclops , also set by Brummie.

49. Like Roz, I spent many hours in the Ashmolean.
    Had tutorials there a couple of terms, too.
    More kouroi than vases, though.

50. AuntRuth@37: A young friend of mine recently won the “Best Actor” award in a radio play competition. I was very proud of her.

    I think ‘ladies’ in the definition for HEN NIGHT is purely adjectival as in ‘Dog Show’ so an apostrophe would be superfluous.

51. Apart from providing/provided used twice for IF, I thought this was marvellous. MUGSHOT, WARHOL, FIGARO were nice but the stand out was the slightly SHOCKING HEN NIGHT. COCO DE MER went in from the crossers and parsed after.

    Ta Brummie & loonapick

52. Re GREASER: I remember the old battles (especially at seaside resorts) between rival gangs of Mods and Rockers in the 1960s: the ‘Mods’ favouring Lambrettas and the like, whilst the ‘Rockers’ were on motorbikes. Both were natural successors to the ‘Teddy Boys’ of the 1950s.

    And I think I’ve heard GREASER as another name for a Rocker. Perhaps someone can elucidate?

    A fun puzzle, quite tough in places – and I needed to brush up my French! I don’t know whether there are any rules as to how many ‘foreign’ words are allowed in a puzzle. Should there be? I’m not bothered.

    Thanks to Brummie and LP.

53. Came late to the party today, but eventually solved this, though wasn’t particularly enamoured by the connection between TROTTING and loi JOGGING…

54. I remember being taken to Saratoga for the “horse racing” and being surprised that something so dull could attract so much betting. Maybe enjoying the sport and the gambling would be too much for American Puritan sensibilities. (See also baseball – slow cricket – and American football.)

55. I was another who didn’t parse TROTTING. Oh dear. Was trying to think of a synonym for gang member…still can’t remember it.

    Thanks Brummie and Loonapick

56. Laccaria @52: GREASER was certainly being used in the late 60s and early 70s to refer to Rockers or their descendants. And if I remember rightly, those men’s zip-up ankle boots that we all coveted at school were referred to as “grease boots”. The idea was to wear them with metal heel taps and try to kick up sparks.

    [Nice to see your comment by the way. I don’t think you’ve appeared much on the Guardian blogs for the last few years?]

57. Enjoyed this, particularly 13D as I live in a quiet spot on the outskirts of Aachen. Somehow I used to really struggle with Brummie’s puzzles but now often manage them, maybe it just took time to get onto his wavelength but he certainly writes some exquisite clues.

58. I woke up this morning hoping to find someone may have cracked a theme here, then smiled to see loonapick from Morocco, as I went to bed thinking of Os.

    I wondered if there may be some significance in the number of instances of the letter O, both in the clues and the answers.
    I thought of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in relation to LEITMOTIF. Is there a ‘recurring theme’ in all the Os, or is there something more?
    There are number of syllables with Letter +O, including quite a few with HO and a couple of connected COCO’s which jumped out at me from the grid. WARHOL intersects with LEITMOTIF and makes a HOLE.
    Is Brummie having some HOHOs or am I making something out of nothing. 🙂

59. Paddymelon@58, not sure about your O theory, but just to reinforce things, there’s a horse called Coco Jamboo running in the first race at the Doncaster St Leger meeting tomorrow, which I’m very happy to be attending this year…

60. BigNorm@42

    LOL

61. Failed on this one. I thought of PREMIUM, but couldn’t parse it and was all ready to be grumpy about it, until Crossbar@3 enlightened me. And got stuck trying to think of a suitable poet, so didn’t get COERCE.
    I didn’t get GREASER, mainly because I had managed to put SHOCKINS instead of SHOCKING. Nope, no idea why. Although I don’t think I would have equated it with Gang Member anyway.
    Jumping into the debate – if I was discussing someone who told good stories, I think I would use the word RACONTEUR, regardless of gender. I know there is a word Raconteuse, but it would seem to me to be like using Poetess, or Authoress. Old fashioned and to my ears a bit sexist. I see AuntRuth@37 feels the exact opposite (I am also an Aunt and a Ruth), which just goes to show how tricky/adaptable the English language is. Which of course is why it makes for such good cryptic crosswords. (Not to disparage crosswords in other languages – I have no hope of being able to judge.)

62. Valentine @45 – Indeed. I have no problem with women drivers (Audi drivers and people in BMWs are sometimes another matter); my problem is with pretentious and diminutive names for them. Just as (thank you, Moth @61) I don’t think of Emily Bronte as an authoress or Elizabeth Barrett Browning as a poetess.

63. […..and when will we outlaw “mother” and “father” in favour of “parent”? An unique quality of English is the enormity of its vocabulary. And I love our language.]

64. I can’t agree that it’s OK for the definition in 11 to be misspelt. A clever idea that should have been abandoned, because it doesn’t work..

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