Guardian 28,864 – Philistine

by

I was slow to get started on this, with only about five answers entered after my first pass through the clue, but gradually it all fell satisfyingly into place. Thanks to Philistine.

 
Across
1 SABOTAGE How old is footwear damage? (8)
SABOT (clog) AGE is how old some footwear might be. The word sabotage comes from sabot=clog, though apparently not, as popularly believed, because workers damaged machinery by throwing clogs at it
5 BREWER Who can fill an empty beer jug? (6)
B[re]R + EWER (jog) and (sort of) &lit
9 MOMENTUM Weight and rate of progress of male fatty tissue (8)
M[ale] + OMENTUM, a layer of tissue in the abdomen. As far as I can see omentum may contain fatty tissue but isn’t completely made of it, but I defer to the setter’s professional knowledge. I can nitpick with slightly more authority on the definition of momentum, which is mass (not the same as weight) multiplied by (so not really “and”) velocity
10 NUCLEI Many a centre came out of ecumenical order (6)
Anagram of ECUMENICAL less CAME
12 LASSO Professional association has a thing for cowboys (5)
Hidden in professionaL ASSOciation
13 INUNDATES One chaste woman goes out in floods (9)
1 NUN + DATES (goes out [with])
14 SIX FEET UNDER Defunct fixtures need replacement (3,4,5)
(FIXTURES NEED)*
18 DEVIL‑MAY‑CARE Not good to get covered in day cream formulation for rash (5-3-4)
EVIL (not good) in (DAY CREAM)*
21 NONPAREIL Unique and special online cover­age of retro music genre (9)
Reverse of RAP (music genre) in ONLINE*
23 FOCUS Food course occasionally subject of attention (5)
Alternate letters of FoOd CoUrSe
24 ATAXIC Without coordination, a cab’s beginning to circle another (6)
TAXI in A C[ab]
25 CORNICHE My special area of coastal mountain road (8)
COR (my!) + NICHE (special area)
26 ELICIT Bring out dope, finally legal! (6)
[dop]E + LICIT
27 USED CARS Old wheels recovered from crusades (4,4)
CRUSADES*, with “wheels” being slang for a car or cars
Down
1 SIMILE One putting on happy expression in comparison (6)
I in SMILE
2 BEMUSE Inspire and perplex (6)
To BE a MUSE is to inspire
3 TONSORIAL Switched on tailors for barbers (9)
(ON TAILORS)*
4 GO UP IN FLAMES Burn and flog Ames? (2,2,2,6)
“Go up in flames” is a cryptic indication (in a down clue) for FL(OG) AMES
6 ROUND Drinks shot (5)
Double definition – round of drinks and a gun shot
7 WELL-TO-DO Rich and healthy in the in tray? (4-2-2)
WELL (healthy) + TO DO (in the in-tray)
8 REINSURE That’s right about nurse training to provide more cover (8)
Reverse of IE (that is) R[ight] + NURSE*
11 SUPERCILIOUS Snooty is up, or clue is misleading (12)
(IS UP OR CLUE IS)*
15 UNREFINED Crude and underdeveloped, with excellent content (9)
FINE in UNDER* (i.e. “under, developed”- when the setter is Philistine you know there’s going to be a “lift-and-separate” somewhere)
16 EDENTATE Gummy garden gallery (8)
EDEN (biblical garden) + TATE (gallery); edentate means “without teeth”
17 SVENGALI Spiritual leader leaving out powerful influencer (8)
S + LEAVING*
19 ACACIA Spies appear after hiding odd bits of larch and oak tree (6)
Even letters of lArCh and oAk + CIA (spies)
20 ASSETS Items of property, like radios and televisions? (6)
AS (like) SETS
22 ALIBI Bail arranged by one for the defence (5)
BAIL* + I

58 comments on “Guardian 28,864 – Philistine”

  1. That was fun, and I found it accessible after a slow start. The left hand/west side went in last. I didn’t parse MOMENTUM, SVENGALI and EDENTATE held me up longer than they should have, with clunking PDMs.

    Thank you to Andrew and Philistine.

  2. I thought I was going to be defeated by the NW corner as yesterday but I ground this out. Thanks for explaining MOMENTUM. Liked SIX FEET UNDER, GO UP IN FLAMES and the lovely CORNICHE.

    Ta Philistine & Andrew.

  3. Nice puzzle but still finding MOMENTUM rather loose. Weight is not mass and, as Andrew says, momentum is mass x velocity so hardly and.

    Didn’t spoil an otherwise pleasant solve.

    Many thanks both.

  5. I thought this was on a par with the rest of the week ie relatively easy but still enjoyable. Never heard of Omentum and actually never knew Corniche was a mountain road. 4dn was my favourite. Thanks Philistine and Andrew for the excellent blog.

  7. Most enjoyable. I kept looking for OK in 8d, and couldn’t account for the “I” till I came here. I was bamboozled by MOMENTUM. Otherwise nothing too taxing, and plenty of smiles.

  8. Yes, as an old Engineer I could pick at the first order tensor of MOMENTUM but then mass and weight, and speed and velocity are also not used precisely in common speech, and it is some combination (and) of the two so I was prepared to go with it in the ‘not always exact’ crossword land.
    I liked BREWER and wondered if it’s been done before, and EDENTATE which I clued in a similar way in my first attempt at setting. BEMUSE was also nice and the favourite was GO UP IN FLAMES.

  9. Very unusual indeed for me to rattle through (in my terms anyway!) five successive daily grids with nary a hitch but that has been this week. Filled with foreboding for next! Today’s was better than some but Philistine has set ones that are much more fun; possibly too many anagrams today?

  10. I agree with Andrew about the MOMENTUM definition, but thanks for the explanation. I was toying with two explanations: MEN TUM appears there; and M OMENTUM, but thought OMENTUM was a cow’s stomach.

    Unlike others I started out quickly, but slowed down for the NW. GO UP IN FLAMES is my fav clue, now I have seen the explanation.

    Thanks Philistine.

  11. Thanks Philistine and Andrew
    Mostly on the easy side for a Philistine, though I too was held up in the NW. Favourite SVENGALI.

  12. I enjoyed this, despite the looseness of MOMENTUM. Particularly liked EDENTATE=gummy.

    I thought ATAXIC would work equally well without the “another”, thus: A (a) + TAXI (cab) + (‘s=has) + C (beginning to circle). The revised surface would refer to cruising around. Just a thought.

  13. I took “momentum” to mean “of significance” (that kind of “weight”). Having said that I had a really silly , wrong and incomplete parsing with a mystery MO (modus operandi?) and “men” for male (I know – tisn’t right) and “tum” for the flabby tissue (I was thinking of my own). So; defeated on that one but grateful for the wit and ingenuity as ever from Philistine – and thanks for explanations, Andrew.

  14. I wouldn’t tackle a corniche in a Roller Corniche (not that I’ll ever have to worry!). Smooth puzzle, and pretty quick. Only head-scratch was m+omentum, who knew? The aged sabot, the be [ing] a muse, and the upwards go were all fun. Ta PnA.

  15. My impression is that Philistine’s puzzles are lately becoming easier to unravel. Only really held up for a while with the SW corner, the last ones in NONPAREIL, SVENGALI and ELICIT. Thought NUCLEI terrific, but always thoroughly enjoy this particular setter’s offerings…

  16. An enjoyable, slow, steady solve. I didn’t know OMENTUM, EDENTATE, or SABOT, but all’s fair. SVENGALI and BREWER were especially good.

    Thanks Philistine and Andrew.

  17. Thought I’d solved it but couldn’t quite parse ATAXIA. Now I know why.
    MOMENTUM was clear from the crossers but as I’d never heard of OMENTUM I was sure that MEN and TUM were the male fatty tissue, but couldn’t see where the MO had come from. I’m probably not the only one

  18. So many good clues already mentioned.
    I especially liked SUPERCILIOUS – not one superfluous word, no link word, even though there are 2 x ‘is’ in the wordplay/fodder. And there are 3 potential anagram indicators, ‘up’ , ‘clue’ and ‘misleading’. My COTY.

  19. Well. I am full of admiration for all those who found this easy. However, I did manage to finish, with a lot of help from the dictionary, after a very slow start – I only got FOCUS on the first pass. There were several I couldn’t parse, but the early ones were absolutely delightful. Especially liked 5a, 12a, 13a, 14a, 16a, 22a, 25a and 27a, plus 4d, 6d, and 15d. Thank you Philistine (who I usually can’t finish) and Andrew.

  22. I was a member of the MO-MEN-TUM team! But I was not satisfied with it, so delighted to read the correct parsing. Thank you Andrew.

  23. All good clean fun. Thank you both.
    Thanks to Andrew especially for the explanations of MOMENTUM (yes, the definition is inaccurate, but A-level Physics is another of the childhood experiences I’m glad to have left behind) and REINSURE.
    And particular thanks to Philistine for NUCLEI, GO UP IN FLAMES, SUPERCILIOUS.

  24. Really enjoyed this. I had ELEGIT rather than ELICIT which held me up on SVENGALI. I do still think it rather works, though of course not so well as the right answer!

    Overall good fun. Plenty of words I did not know but still came out from excellent cluing. And a grid which doesn’t only cross on vowels!

  25. I also took a while to get going but loved it. The usual “medical” touches – two unfamiliar words in OMENTUM to make 9a MOMENTUM, and ATAXIC at 24a – but I found them gettable from the crossers and wordplay. I had about a dozen favourites here which have been mentioned – except perhaps for 18a DEVIL-MAY-CARE. Top though was 11d SUPERCILIOUS, so I am with you paddymelon@18 – such a lovely word! Many thanks to Philistine for being such a terrific setter and to Andrew for a thorough explanatory blog.

  26. Enjoyable puzzle, but as muffin @11 said it was on the easy side for Philistine, so like others have mentioned I am beginning to suspect this is policy for this week.

    Thanks Philistine and Andrew

  27. JiA@25. Agree, SUPERCILIOUS is a wonderful word, coming from the Latin for eyebrow, as I’m sure you’d know. A great image. Whereas ‘snooty’ seems to come from the nose. I imagine they’re both connected. Can’t have one without the other.

  28. Yes, I too couldn’t see beyond MEN TUM for ‘male fatty tissue’: lovely!
    These are a really great set of clues, I think.
    As soon as I saw ‘garden gallery’ I thought “Right … that must be EDEN and TATE… ‘edentate’? Nah! that doesn’t make a valid word” and spent the next 10 minutes desperately working on something ‘adhesive’.
    Much thanks to setter and blogger.

  29. Good Philly crossword, certainly helped by the 10 anagrams/partial anagrams.

    I toyed with the MO/MEN TUM, but saw OMENTUM at the last. I liked the inventive GO UP IN FLAMES, although, of course, AMES appears in both clue and answer. I also liked SIX FEET UNDER as a good anagram, NONPAREIL for the wordplay, and SVENGALI for the surface/wordplay.

    Thanks Philistine and Andrew.

  30. A fun solve, thanks Philistine and Andrew. Am l the only one not happy with “go up” coming from “flog”? “go round” surely, as it doesn’t go up in the clue?

  31. Thanks P & A. I thought this was terrific – varied and witty. Paul8hours@30: seems OK to me. OG is up in the answer.

  32. Thanks both,
    I don’t think ‘reinsure’ equals ‘provide more cover’. Either it means ‘renew’ cover or, for an insurance company, lay off its bets with another company. That said, I suppose some people might say ‘I’ve got more cover for the car’ to mean ‘I’ve renewed the car insurance.

  33. Me too for MO-MEN-TUM.

    GO UP IN FLAMES was my COD, though I also really liked SVENGALI. I got stuck on that for a while with __V__N__A__I because I thought that the first letter of course had to be a vowel. I think “svelte” is the only English word that starts with that combination of consonants.

    Thanks to Philistine and Andrew..

  34. Re. SABOT (clog), I have read that sabot is also the French word for the “shoe” attached to a railway sleeper that holds the rail in place. (I think these are called chairs in English?). So “sabotage” would involve damaging the sabots to interfere with the running of the railways. While this sounds plausible in context, I should emphasize that so do many other folk etymologies!

  35. Dave Ellisson@10: Cows’ stomachs are Rumen, Reticulum, Omasum and Abomasum, the true stomach.
    Can’t say I sailed through this at all, but got there in the end.
    Thanks to P&A. I needed the blog for a couple of parsings, but now I see them, I wonder why?

  37. Thanks Philistine – so much of this made me smile, very enjoyable indeed. I agree with Valentine on GO UP IN FLAMES.

    And thanks for the blog, Andrew – omentum does ring a bell now you mention it. I have no problem with momentum meaning weight in a figurative sense, as per Terri Blislow @13.

  38. Thanks Philistine for a most satisfying crossword. It took me a second look to get the parsing of 4d — when the light went on it became my clue of the day. I had the right answer for MOMENTUM but the wrong parsing — not the first time I’ve done that. Great clues all around including BREWER, NUCLEI, DEVIL-MAY-CARE, USED CARS, and UNREFINED top the list. Thanks Andrew for the blog.

  39. I loved this crossword, and all my many favourites already have their supporters.
    I was another MoMenTum club member, but was quite happy with my parsing: MO for me was “rate of progress”, as in Are you ready yet? – I’ll just be a mo…
    Well, it made me laugh anyway.
    Big thanks to P & A.

  40. Thanks Andrew as I was another in the men’s fatty tum camp having rejected an unlikely MADIPOSE thanks to crossers.
    Tyngewick@32 yes I see what you mean but in very unusual cases if a risk is reinsured i think there have been cases where the policyholder gets paid by the reinsurer if the original insurer can’t pay – all depends on contract clauses but in that case the policyholder would have more cover in some sense. For my money it’s not as loose as 9A.
    I also enjoyed SUPERCILIOUS. And paddymelon@27 did you know that the Mr Uppity of my youth is now called Mr Snooty?
    Thanks Philistine!

  45. Following yesterday’s discussion, I would classify 5A as “sort of semi &lit/extended definition”. “Sort of” because the initial definition would be very vague without the rest. Still liked the clue, though.

  46. Thanks for the blog, had my first head scratch of the week for the top left. Five baa-lambs in a row , please can we have a big , bad wolf tomorrow.
    Some very nice clues here especially the Playtex for UNREFINED , NUCLEI also very good.
    MOMENTUM is so bad I will not even start. For those allowing momentum=weight you have the issue of ” rate of progress” .
    [ AlanC only at number 2 tut tut. You will have to watch Kings Park Rangers tomorrow as penance. ]

  48. Roz @46 depending on when the blog is published, I quite often see it with no comments then don’t post, but your comments to AlanC encouraged me to start posting early.

  50. A happy additional twist for 25A: the CORNICHE is famously the seaside promenade along the Mediterranean in Beirut. Since the Philistines were the successor population to the Phoenicians along the Levant, they would certainly enjoyed the pleasures of Beirut’s beaches. Therefore the promenade would certainly have been “my special area” for a Biblical Philistine.

  52. Geoff @51
    I was going to suggest looking at the FAQs on this site. However I note that there it is (more correctly, though less commonly used) COTD. Clue Of (The) Day.

  53. Many of the clues seemed increasingly familiar as I progressed, eg sabotage, svengali, alibi and refined, so that by the end I was beginning to think it really was a repeat. Odd that.

  55. Hey, I’m posting after midnight your time! Didn’t get to this one until after work today. It went pretty smoothly for me–remarkably quickly for Philistine, actually.

    The words I didn’t know (EDENTATE, CORNICHE) were clued so well that they couldn’t have been anything else, which is always nice to see–clue obscure words plainly and (at least sometimes) plain ones obscurely. I also didn’t know OMENTUM, so I was also in the mo-men-tum camp, but of course couldn’t actually explain the MO.

    I liked the image of a nun on a date, and I admire the elegance of “Drinks shot”–I love two-word double-defs that also make meaningful phrases.

    Hope those of you seeing this are not among those stuck in the queue to see the queen, and are instead tying one on somewhere.

  56. I’m still a noob at these, but I think I like Philistine. I couldn’t figure out CORNICHE, EDENTATE, or ATAXIC, not having them in my vocabulary, but the rest fell into place for me with pencil, paper, head-scratching and many satisfying ‘aha’ moments. Some favorites were DEVIL-MAY-CARE, NONPAREIL, TONSORIAL, GO UP IN FLAMES, and SUPERCILIOUS.

    Thanks Andrew and Philistine!

  57. The UPIN letters of GO UP IN FLAMES had us flummoxed for so long I wrote them out and stared at them for quite a while, until all I could see was LUPIN. There is a recent TV version of this old French “master criminal” series of stories, but the first English language film version was in 1916, starring… Gerald AMES. Pretty big stretch, but I like the idea that the L was flogged off

  58. Too tired to do this on a Friday night, but it made for a very enjoyable Saturday morning; a slow but steady solve. Now that Andrew has explained GO UP IN FLAMES to me it is my favourite. Paul 8hours @30 and @36 the GO is up in the phrase ‘flog ames’ when written as a down crossword clue (it would be reversed in an across clue). So the clue for ‘flog ames’ could be ‘go up in flames’ with ‘in’ (not around) used to indicated that ‘go’ is inside ‘flames’. Thanks Andrew and thanks Philistine.

Comments are closed.