Everyman 3,961

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Although initially you might think otherwise (by chance the two clues I have doubts about are the first two) my opinion of this crossword tallies with the general feeling about these crosswords over the past year or so: they are getting better and better and the clues are on the whole pleasant and sound. I can’t see the alliterative pair, but am not in the habit of looking for it and no doubt someone will point it out.

Definitions underlined in crimson. Indicators (homophone, hidden, anagram etc.) in italics. Link-words in green. Anagrams indicated *(thus) or (thus)*.

 

ACROSS
1 RESUMPTION
Importunes sadly for a new beginning (10)
(Importunes)* — I’m not entirely convinced that if something resumes then it begins anew; perhaps there is a sense of ‘resumption’ of which I’m unaware
6 AS IF
Starters of appetising soups in Fontainebleau? I think not (2,2)
The first letters clue. These are usually rather good but this one doesn’t in my opinion quite cut it. It does manage to avoid the giveaway word ‘primarily’, but soups are themselves starters, so that the starters of them seems wrong. I suppose it could be read as ‘Starters, which are appetising soups …’ but that seems to me to be a bit of a stretch. And ‘Fontainebleau’ suggests that Everyman was casting around desperately for a word beginning with F.
9 BURGUNDIES
In retreat, massage, good lingerie and fine wines (10)
(rub)rev. g undies — rub = massage; g = good; undies = lingerie
10 SAKI
Everyman’s after snack every so often, and wine (4)
s[n]a[c]k I — our self-referential clue — saki is a rice wine, although this article suggests it is spelled ‘sake’.
12 THE WORLD CUP
Shivering, cold, threw up: it happens every four years (3,5,3)
*(cold threw up)
15 ELITIST
Title is stirring for him? (7)
(Title is)* — an attempt at an &lit. I think — the idea seems to be that an elitist is perhaps someone who is overly impressed by a title
16 SMARTER
About time, forces retreating: that’s more intelligent (7)
(re t rams)rev. — re = About (as in ‘re your dental enquiry’); t = time; rams = forces
17 INSIGHT
Enlightenment in, we’re told, theguardian.com? (7)
“in site” — theguardian.com is a website and the fact that it’s only an example of one is indicated by the question mark
19 GLUCOSE
Clues go pear-shaped, sugar (7)
(Clues go)*
20 LABRADOODLE
Experimental facility with artist drawing dog (11)
lab RA doodle — lab = laboratory, experimental facility; RA = artist; doodle = drawing — a labradoodle is a cross between a labrador and a poodle
23 TURN
Second person in French Resistance, note, to become revolutionary (4)
tu R n — tu = ‘you’, the second person singular, in French; R = resistance; n = note
24 HORIZONTAL
In this puzzle, one is – and isn’t – this! (10)
A sort of CD which may be very clever or may be rather banal (I’m not sure) — in this puzzle 1ac is horizontal and 1dn isn’t horizontal
25 REST
Others snooze (4)
2 defs
26 STREET LAMP
Settler working with map: it provides illumination along the way (6,4)
(Settler map)* — here the way is the road
DOWN
1 RIBS
Kids‘ barbecue staple (4)
2 defs — to rib is to tease or kid, spare ribs are staples of a barbecue
2 SORE
Furious as god of love is brought up (4)
(Eros)rev. — ‘brought up’ because it’s a Down clue
3 MOUNTAIN GOAT
Masculine fellow abandoning jet to attack resident of high altitudes (8,4)
m [f]ountain go at — m = masculine; fountain = jet; f = fellow; go at = to attack
4 TIDIEST
Coati dies, tasting a little spruce? Ever so much (7)
Hidden in CoaTI DIES Tasting — if something is ‘spruce? Ever so much’ it’s the tidiest
5 OCELOTS
Regularly poaches many wildcats (7)
[p]o[a]c[h]e[s] lots — lots = many
7 STAYCATION
At any cost I organised a kind of holiday (10)
(at any cost I)* — according to Wikipedia a staycation (a portmanteau of “stay” and “vacation”), or holistay (a portmanteau of “holiday” and “stay”), is a period in which an individual or family stays home and participates in leisure activities within day trip distance of their home and does not require overnight accommodation.
8 FRIPPERIES
Perspire if consuming trifles (10)
(Perspire if)* — the anagram indicator looks odd, but one needs to read it in the sense of the fire consuming the forest, i.e. destroying it
11 PLEASURE BOAT
So, a reputable resort offering vehicle for fun (8,4)
(So a reputable)*
13 LEGISLATOR
Showing some leg, Isla to rankle regulator (10)
Hidden in LEG ISLA TO Rankle — I’ve never actually seen anyone spell it out, but all the hiddens I’ve ever seen begin after the first letter or letters of a word and end before the last. Whether this is some sort of rule or best practice or something I don’t know.
14 FIRST-BORNS
Oldest and shattered, little deer (so Spooner tells us) (5-5)
“burst fawns” Spoonerised — burst = shattered; fawns = little deer
18 TROT OUT
Reiterate call for Communist to leave? (4,3)
The wordplay is something you might see in a demo calling for trot (a communist, named after Trotsky) to leave, a bit like that Labour party conference in the 80s when Neil Kinnock was trying to move his party to the right.
19 GODLIKE
Grand Old Duke with story about York, ultimately divine (7)
G o D li([Yor]k)e — G = Grand; o = old; D = Duke; lie = story; k = York, ultimately
21 ETNA
Evil Typhon’s necropolitan abode, primarily? (4)
Another first letters clue to go with 6ac. This one uses ‘primarily’, so perhaps 6ac wasn’t the real one. However, I hold by my remarks about 6ac. Typhon was a giant who was buried under Mount Etna after his defeat; ‘necropolitan’ is something to do with the clue; based on necropolis.
22 FLAP
Panic in part of aircraft (4)
2 defs

49 comments on “Everyman 3,961”

  2. Sounds like a pretty swish retreat in 9ac, but then I’ve had some pretty rough Burgundies. And took ages to wake up to horizontal… not clever (me, that is). Ok with morning coffee, thanks EnJ.

  3. A bit more going on in Everyman these days. I appreciated PLEASURE BOAT for the &lit and linking the previous week’s enormous pleasure boat clue. Thanks John and Everyman.

  4. I’m in the clever, not banal, camp on 24a HORIZONTAL, my COTD.

    Whether I would prefer a 9a or a 10a with my appetising soup might 23 on the 25 of the meal – definitely a red 9 with a plate of 1d.

    Thanks Everyman and John for the mouthwatering fun.

  6. Thanks for the blog, again I thought this was very good, great to see Cellomaniac @4 , late or early or whatever time zone.
    I see Paul@3 has the follow on clue which I completely missed.
    HORIZONTAL is my favourite too, even the dashes in the clue are horizontal.
    I am not keen on LEGISLATOR, it is not wrong but not very elegant, I prefer hidden clues to stay hidden.

  7. A good Everyman at the right level, I thought. Seemed quite anagrammy this time (eight, I think?)

    @John, re the quibbles in the first two clues: I had no real issue with RESUMPTION meaning a new beginning, though I can see a nuance between continuing something that one had paused, and starting again entirely – but I think the clue wording adequately covers both and so it’s down to subjective interpretation as to whether that ‘works’ or not. For what it’s worth, my Chambers has one definition of ‘resume’ as “To begin again”.

    Re AS IF, I took the mention of soup as simply helpful to the surface reading, and so any misdirection, intentional or not, is perfectly fair game!

    Thanks both.

  9. Rob T @7: I have the subscription Chambers which offers no fewer than seven definitions for ‘resume’ including the one that had come to my mind: ‘To begin again in continuation’. I was thinking of a paused recording of some kind. I’m with cello, Fiona Anne and Roz on HORIZONTAL as a good ‘un.

    I look to Everyman to raise a bit of a gentle smile and this one delivered with the anagram for THE WORLD CUP, the nice assembly and surface for LABRADOODLE – though it’s a dreadful word – and, whilst I’m not a huge fan of the ‘Primarily’ clue, I liked ETNA and think Everyman’s ‘casting around’ for a word beginning with N was more successful than the earlier ‘desperate’ choice of Fontainebleu.

    On the subject of complete or overlapping hiddens, I reluctantly go with the flow. It is convention that they are completely hidden though, technically, to me ‘Showing some …’ could certainly embrace the initial letter of a string of fodder. In a way, by insisting on the convention, we solvers do deprive setters of the opportunities existing at either end of a string. If the solution was neat enough that it could be obscured simply by spacing, capitalisation, punctuation etc, I’d have no particular problem with it coinciding with either end of the fodder. But that’s just me.

    Thanks Everyman and John

  11. I like the idea of a recording from MrPostMark@9 for resumption.
    Personally I like Fontainebleu for AS IF , setters should be outrageous when we are just taking the first letter, France would have been boring.
    I do not think the hidden word is wrong or against convention, just a bit clumsy when it sticks out at one end. A matter of taste really.

  13. P_M@9: Everyman could have used Fishguard, Frome or France instead of Fontainbleu, I don’t see the desperation, just the use of a town that sounds as though it produces good soups.
    LEGISLATOR was rather clunky, but I have no objection to it being hidden in plain sight.
    HORIZONTAL floored me for quite a while, one of my last ones in and I chuckled audibly when the penny dropped
    Thanks to Everyman and John.

  14. SAKI to me is H H Munro. The rice wine is SAKE, and that’s the only way I’ve ever seen it written, though Chambers does allow the alternative.

    14d combines a Spoonerism with a non-rhotic homophone, thus managing to irritate two sets of solvers in a single clue. Is this a record?

  15. nicbach @13: my epicurean education has been limited. I know not the soup culture of either Fishguard of Frome so have no idea how they might compare … And ‘desperate’ was only picking up on John’s usage in the blog; Fontainebleu didn’t particularly affect me one way or t’other. But ‘necropolitan’ was delightfully chosen imho.

  16. My take on AS IF – Fontainebleau was one of the French royal palaces. A starter of ‘appetising soup’ sounds like something you might get in a common or garden caff (and nothing wrong with that), whereas presumably in such high-falutin places they had more high-falutin fare, quails and truffles and what-have-you. Hence the “I think not!”, highlighting the incongruity.

    You could see 1ac as one of Roz’s Gossards: ‘A new beginning’ = ‘anew, beginning’ = beginning anew = re-starting = resuming. As in ‘play resumed after lunch’ (of appetising soups, ribs and burgundies no doubt).

    Thanks Paul in Tutukaka for the PLEASURE BOATS connection (that was my nomination for a follow-on clue too).

    [Also – my apologies to Petert for being slow on the uptake with regard to his SUITS suggestion a couple of weeks ago. I’ve now added ‘track SUITs’/’en SUITe’ as the connection between 3958 and 3959 on my not-very-definitive list.]

    Thanks Everyman and John.

  18. Re LEGISLATOR, I’m not too concerned either way about its ‘hiddenness’ but do believe it’s not a particularly strong synonym for ‘regulator’. While they may operate in the same linguistic sphere, the former makes laws, the latter enforces them. Maybe there are examples where they overlap and I’m just being pedantic 🙂

  19. I tend to concur with John that the Everyman is getting better, but then, with so much room for improvement, this welcome trend was probably inevitable. And yet, once again, I’m left feeling that the new Everyperson is struggling to produce smooth clues, which is surely, by tradition, what this puzzle is about. To my eye there are still clues which invite quibbling over things like their definitions, or their indicators, and that really ought to have been ironed out by now, if ever such things are going to be. And there’s also the rather clumsy technique.

    I vaguely liked BURGUNDIES, albeit a plural (one of three), with its marginally nonsensical surface, and the fact that its reversal indicator was repeated four clues later.

  20. Thanks Everyman and John. Strangely, I found this a bit trickier than some recent Everyman efforts but that could just be down to tiredness. All good fun as usual though.

    We’ve discussed hidden word clues before. I agreed with Roz then and I agree with her still – it’s not a case of right or wrong, it’s simply more elegant to have both ends of the solution hidden. If the solution is a multiple word phrase, it’s also preferable for the word breaks to not coincide with word breaks in the clue.

    SAKE/SAKI is a transliteration from the Japanese, so I don’t think there’s an objectively right or wrong spelling. Since it’s effectively an anglicised homophone, I might even be inclined to argue that SAKI works better. The E variant usually has an accent, SAKÉ, which it strictly needs otherwise you might pronounce it to rhyme with hake.

    tlp @19 – On the days when I have to travel up to London for work, I usually pick up the Metro and have a go at their cryptic crossword. It’s a rum affair, often a strange mix of trivially easy clues (eg anagrams with just two letters swapped) and some that are impossibly hard for all the wrong reasons – vague and/or inaccurate definitions, bizarre cryptic definitions, clumsy and grammatically inaccurate wordplay, that kind of thing – and the grids are often horrendous. By comparison, Everyman is a beacon of exemplary Ximenean standards. I’m also impressed that Everyman consistently manages to turn out a new crossword every week and keeps the standard generally pretty consistent, as well as keeping up the running jokes with the primarily clues, the rhyming pairs and alliterations, and the follow-on clues. It takes no small amount of skill to do this. So while I agree there may be room for improvement in some areas, the balance is very much in Everyman’s favour for me, hence I generally prefer to focus on the positives when commenting here. YMMV.

    That said, I wasn’t a fan of the HORIZONTAL clue – definitely leaning more towards the banal camp on that one. Plenty of others I did enjoy though – BURGUNDIES being my favourite.

  23. Widdersbel@21: Since you ask, according to Wikipedia it’s apparently either ??? or ?? – not that I expect either to appear in a crossword.

  25. The only problem with the beginning of a hidden word also being the beginning of a fodder word is just that it’s a bit more obvious.

  26. Totally agree with the fourth paragraph from Widdersbel@20, I really like all the extra touches from Everyman. Occasionally I do think it is a bit tricky for newer solvers. Hard to judge but I try to think about when I was learning.
    MrEssexboy@16, I cannot see much support for yous Gossard idea.

  28. Re 20, ‘a beacon of exemplary (sic) Ximenean standards’ new Everyman will never be, I am almost certain. Even by comparison with a dreadful thing. As for the ‘running jokes’, they are for me, I’m afraid, but rather annoying stylistic idiosyncrasies, which seem to add little, if anything. So yes, my mileage varies, if that’s what you meant.

    We may add, and I feel someone has said this before but I can’t be bothered to trawl back, to these stylistic ‘touches’ the -IEST-ending word, which seems to come up occasionally so that the compiler can use a definition that is at best requiring the sort of explanation, as to part of speech, that solvers really could do without. Is this a thing? Maybe I am hallucinating.

  30. [Roz @26, I expect you are right – although I sometimes have the immodest thought that, even if I can’t see any support, it doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t there 😉 ]

  31. Nobody has really convinced me one way or the other on the matter of hiddens beginning at the start of a word etc. One can be fairly sure that Azed would outlaw it — in his Printer’s Devilry crosswords he doesn’t allow it (he says in his competitions ‘Preference is given to clues which …’ but that amounts to outlawing it), so that ‘What’s a stay? Whatever is starting toss-up’ becomes ‘What’s a stay? Whatever is starting to sAG IT PROPs up’ — but he doesn’t have a Hiddens competition so we never hear. Time for Paul B to tell us.

  32. John@31 quite right about Azed , but even he only says “preference” , but we know what that means of course. I rarely see it in other puzzles. Like many things in crosswords there is no actual rule, some people do not mind, it I just think it is a bit clumsy.

    [EB@30, I see , you are a believer in the mythical invisible support. ]

  33. A small point but the wine is sake. If it’s written in Japanese Hiragana it uses the ‘sa’
    and ‘ke’ characters, definitely not the ‘ki’. Google Hiragana chart…

  37. I can answer on poc’s behalf, Annieh. Rhotic speakers sound the r in words like ‘born’ and some (but not all) don’t like homophones where it’s not clear how the word sounds, since some people are rhotic speakers and some aren’t. Is it ‘burst fawn’ or ‘burst foRn’? Personally I should have thought it was pretty obvious and it’s nitpicking.

  39. John@37: I have to assume that you aren’t rhotic yourself. To me the putative similarity between “forn” and “fawn” is, if not completely incomprehensible, much less obvious than it presumably seems to you. The implicit assumption in every crossword I’ve seen is that the solver is expected to be non-rhotic, and that those of us who are not should just shut up about it. I don’t agree that we should.

  40. Came to the party late (was on holiday), but this was just about the easiest cryptic I’ve ever done. Pretty much a write in, taking 15 minutes. Either I became much better without regular defeats, or this one was just not very difficult. I know which I suspect …

    Didn’t like LEGISLATOR for the reasons above. HORIZONTAL I DNP but I’d got all the crossers by that point.

  42. Agree, this was one of his better ones.

    Also agree that HW are better when completely hidden.

    I quite liked 24A but needed all crossers.

  44. Sake not saki. Loved Labradoodle and Horizontal. Did not like First Borns! But thank you John & Everyman, love our Saturday mornings with the cryptic crossword

  45. Thank goodness someone came to the rescue re sake – saki is not an option _ it’s just plain wrong, even in romaji or English letters
    Enjoyed this —it was a massive challenge but enjoyed being stumped on many. Liked labradoodle though it put me wrong with 18d I had ‘read out’
    Still don’t like the spooners much, unless they’re really clever and mean something both ways
    But lovely way to spend an arvo

  46. Perhaps someone can tell if the pronunciation we are trying to convey is sarkay or sarkee ( but not rolling the R’s obviously)

    we have had some discussion in NZ about newsreaders pronunciation of Ireland when they try to make sure that it doesn’t sound like island. The phrase ” The island of Ireland” sounds silly if the two words sound the same!

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