Guardian 28,935 / Picaroon

90 comments on “Guardian 28,935 / Picaroon”

1. Breathtaking themed puzzle today. Very tough with SW holding out last. Apart from the homophone of EYE used twice, I thought this was faultless with a tick beside almost every clue. Learned the meaning of PALLADIUM and LADING was a nho. NEMO is becoming a regular in recent crosswords. Brilliant.

   Ta Picaroon & Eileen.

2. Eileen, you need the U in EQUABILITY. Lovely blog.

3. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen. I solved 24 down without understanding how. The only thing I could think of was the early trombone!

4. Thanks Alan – amended now.

5. Epeolater @3 – That struck me as curious, too. 😉

6. It was quite tough going? You can say that again.
   Thought this was an excellent challenge. But it was above my level. Everything makes sense when it’s explained and it’s not a Monday but…
   I fear Friday if we’re up to this today.

7. Eileen @5; Epeolater @3 In Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays sack features frequently as Falstaff’s tipple of choice, as here in Prince Hal’s first speech to Falstaff in the second scene:

   “Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack and unbuttoning thee after supper and sleeping upon benches in the afternoon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know.”

8. Enjoyable but hard going. EYEBEAM was new and I ended up revealing the second syllable. Didn’t understand SAFEGUARD at all, either def or wordplay. Not surprised to find it’s something to do with Pallas Athene, but I tried Googling palladium and found only the metal (one of the many scattered through the clues). Failed to parse MINUTEMAN or BULLSEYE, and got very confused over CLUE because of trying to make cue=lead instead of cue=pole.

   Liked some of the offbeat definitions: SEVENTIETH, Silver and such and the naked malefactor.

9. Me @7. I hit Post precipitately before adding that the early trombone has only one ‘t’.

10. gladys @8 – re. EYEBEAM, it was believed in the Early Modern period that the eyes sent out ‘beams’ to take possession of the objects in the visible world. This theory of optics features, for example, in John Donne’s poem, ‘The Ecstasy’:

    “Our eyebeams twisted and did thread
    Our eyes upon one double string.”

    That’s enough from me today.

11. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen
    Difficult – I wouldn’t have finished without electronic help. Clever the way that most (all?) elemental names didn’t in fact refer to elements.
    I didn’t know that meaning of Palladium.
    GENDARME is technically an indirect anagram, as the RD don’t appear together.
    I hadn’t heard of EYEBEAM. Wiki tells me that it refers to a long-discredited theory that vision is a result of rays from the eye. A bit unfair, I thought.

12. Spooner’s catflap @ 7 and 9 – yes, I know sack as wine from its fairly frequent appearance in crosswords: I meant that I was amused by the coincidence of the musical sackbut(t) – from the Old French saquebout, ‘pull-push’.

13. Well that was a toughie!

14. A tough puzzle after a short break – enjoyed the theme and the misdirection, but struggled with some of the not so general knowledge. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen

15. Excellent and tricky puzzle with a lot of cleverly misleading definitions. Too many favourites to list them all, but I did like SAFEGUARD (I remembered the Palladium from the Aeneid), PIRATES (a self-referential clue?) and the Pauline DERV 🙂

    A DNF for me, as I had to reveal OVERFOND – I couldn’t see the definition here because I was interpreting ‘Gaga’ as FOND. I wouldn’t equate OVERFOND with gaga either, but this may just be sour grapes.

    Thanks to the PIRATE and Eileen

16. John Donne’s “The Ecstacy” has the lines:

    Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
    Our eyes upon one double string

17. Picaroon is one of my favourite setters, and I completed the puzzle without aids, but I really did not enjoy this offering. Apart from toilets and a STI, I don’t like G.I.s being clues as a single word. Otherwise, many excellent clues as one would expect from Picaroon.

18. Sorry, should, of course, read ‘clued’.

19. Hard work, but worth it; very enjoyable. I don’t think we use DERV here; it’s the only one I had to look up the answer. Didn’t know David Steel and had never heard of Minutemen. Nor LADING nor EYEBEAM. One could argue that 19a isn’t a three-letter word, but then, I don’t know whether (2,1) or (1,1,1) would be accurate either. This one took a bit of work, but then, most of them did. I hadn’t heard of Freddie Mercury’s work. Regarding 20a, there are of course at least five different words in German for “you”. (Just sayin’.)

    Plenty of smiles, good fun, thanks Picaroon, and Eileen for the blog.

20. GdU
    Yes. I have no German, so I used Google Translate for “you”. It confidently but unhelpfully told me it was SIE, adding that this had been confirmed by Google Translate users!

21. Tour de Force-didnt mind it taking an age as it was breathtakingly entertaining

22. Quite a tough one, this. AlanC@1, coming originally from a seaport town, I know that the term “lading” is most often integrated into the phrase “bill(s) of lading” – the manifests of ships’ cargoes. In fact, absolutely loads of the (in)famous Brexit legislation and paperwork manoeuvres have been tied up with altering physical bills of lading & e – ( electronic ) bills of lading & we’re not there yet ! Witness: the Northern Ireland protocol ! Oh well, hope springs eternal ….
    Thanks Picaroon and Eileen.

23. Yep loved the Bohemian Rhapsodist naming his relative, old Hermes. But there were lots of subtleties that went past the ginf noddle, like the safety of Trojans (cf their horse), and that as well as king, Stephen might be the writer (deffo not my genre). And there were fun teasers, like poor naked Eve (my bet is it was really him who ate it), and the pigs’ unquiet grunts. Gnarlyish but lotsa fun, ta PnE.

24. Thanks Flea @22. As an Ulsterman, I weep at the NI protocol and everything about its vacuous REGIME.

25. …oh yes and the butt that contains sack or malmsey escaped too, ignoring that the instrument not only doesn’t parse but has only one t …

26. Muffin@11 mentioned the indirect anagram, but there were some indirect-something-else’s, such as CENTS, LOGIC, PRESS where you first think of a synonym or instance, then do some non-trivial manipulation. All fair, but these tend to be harder, imo, and so contribute to the puzzle’s overall difficulty.

27. What Eileen said, a splendidly brilliant crossword. Lots of great clues, 13a 17a and especially 21a, as I taught no 1 son how to spell his name with a step and a hen

    Thanks very much to Eileen and Picaroon

28. I needed electronic help to finish this. Perhaps because I am “a foolish, fond old man” (for those unsure about OVERFOND and Gaga) I think sometimes it’s worth ‘cheating’ a little when a crossword is very good like this one but just beyond your solving ability.

29. Excellent puzzle with lots of trickery and fun. Of the “real people clues” I particularly liked 16d for its smooth surface.

    Thanks Picaroon and Eileen

30. I’ll out this down as a fill. I managed to fill in perhaps three quarters of the clues, but several of those remained unparsed. Tomorrow will be better.

31. Thanks Picaroon. It looks like I’m not the only one who found this tough. I failed with GIS, CENTS, and SAFEGUARD. Even after I revealed the latter I had no understanding of it. However, I liked so many of the other clues such as NERVE, DERV, PRESS, MEDAL, and GENDARME that my net enjoyment overcame my deficits. Thanks Eileen for blog.

32. My heart sank initially when I saw all the metallic references, but this wasn’t about the metals after all. The whole thing felt like a misdirection. Had to think outside the (metal) box. Nearly got there, but thwarted by CLUE, and in the SW corner – SAGEGUARD and OVERFOND. Thought EVOKE very clever. A genuine, if ultimately unsuccessful, workout this morning for me…

33. Does the poet laureate still receive a butt of sack?

34. I finished it, but it took a long time, about 2 hours in, it’s raining here in Hoi An, things started to click and what looked like impenetrable clues became understandable. I suppose a lot of pennies dropped. I parsed them all too which is unusual, but btanks to Eileen for confirming and Long John SILVER for setting it,
    My car broke down the other day, I had to call a mechanic. He opened the bonnet and there was a bat sitting on the electric motor ( I am a Guardian reader). The bat looked at the mechanic and said “What a smart and intelligent mechanic you are”.
    The mechanic turned to me and said ” Oh, obvious case of bat flattery”
    That was for Paddymelon to add to her Christmas cracker jokes.

35. A first rate blog to a first rate crossword!

    My goodness, that took some time and lateral thinking to separate the apparent elements from their intended meaning.

    This was a masterclass of setting.

    Thank you Eileen and The Pirate.

36. Great fun. I especially enjoyed the misdirection of the metals — I won’t say elements, because a few of them are alloys. I think Freddie the Messenger was my fave. It was really hard, though. Last night I had only eight answers. Got a good many more this morning but still had to resort to the check button for some.

    DERV was a jorum for me. It didn’t look like a word at all. Eileen, the whole word is reversed, not just RE.

    For MEDAL, Eileen, you don’t say that it’s an anagram of “made.”

    I had no hope of parsing OVERFOND, so thanks Eileen.

    gladys@8 I kept bopping between CUE and CLUE, and which one was the lead?

    “Bill of lading” swam into mind, so without quite knowing what “lading” was, I popped it in.

    Gdu@19 There’s Sie and du and euch. What are the other two?

    Thanks to Picaroon for the challenge and Eileen for the enlightenment.

37. Valentine @36
    Quite right on “elements”. Smacked wrist for me!

38. Valentine @36: slap for me, too!

39. Thanks, Valentine @36 – careless errors, which I’ll fix when I get home.

40. btw Valentine, DERV is an acronym – Diesel Engine Road Vehicle

41. I found this tough too, but doable eventually, didn’t finish it before we headed out walking and completed it when I got home with lots of brain twisting to see beyond the obvious metals and alloys.

    Valentine @36 – the familiar singular you gives du, dich and dir (if I remember correctly, dich and dir are accusative and dative forms), then the formal singular and plural form of you gives Sie, Ihrer and Ihnen and the informal you plural gives you ihr, euch and eurer. I haven’t included the genitive deiner because I think of that as your.

    Thank you Eileen and Picaroon.

42. [I once counted the number of different words in Italian that could be used for “you” in English in different contexts. As I remember, there were 16. Our “you” is a very versatile word!]

43. Valentine @ 36 – I count seven: du, dich, dir, Sie, Ihnen, ihr, euch

44. Ihrer and eurer don’t count – they mean your

45. and you can add ‘man’ in the use of ‘you’ shown in the second word of this sentence

46. Where is answer to 18 down?

47. My only quibble is with 8d. Pole’s not covered. L is covered by pole. It would make more sense if the ‘s was omitted. Otherwise it was a great puzzle.

48. Debbie @46
    That’s odd – I’m sure it was there earlier. It’s OVERFOND.
    (l)over f(o)und

49. fo(u)nd – sorry!

50. muffin@40 Yes, I looked it up to see if there was such a word.

51. Thanks to Spooner’s Catflap@10 and Martin@16 for the poetic reference below, in which Donne seems to show a remarkable anticipation of the ‘Transactional Interpretation’ of quantum mechanics.
    Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
    Our eyes upon one double string

52. Debbie @ 46.
    I think it’s OVERFOND.
    FOuND (losing heart), after lOVER, (fan rejecting l (from lady)
    Gaga could mean OVERFOND.

53. Re 18dn, my apologies: in my rush when I got in to amend 16 and 19dn (see Valentine @36), I managed to delete 18dn in between! I’ll reinstate it now.

54. Valentine # 36, German has four cases (nominative, accusative, genitive and dative), along with singular and plural, and to confuse things further, there’s a formal and “friendly” form of “you”. It’s a while since I studied German, and I may be a little rusty, but off the top of my head I can think of du, dich, dir, Ihr, Ihn, Ihnen, Euch, Sie, Eurer (although, as some have pointed out, one or two of these are probably better translated as “your”).

55. [We don’t make distinctions (or, at least, no longer) for “you” between singular/plural, masculine/feminine, formal/informal, or subject/object. Italian does, which is why it has so many alternatives.]

56. Loved this puzzle. Thank you Picaroon. Also thanks to Eileen for filling in parsing gaps.

    My parsing if UPEND did not require any knowledge of German. I just had D for German and U for you.

57. Suzydimple @47, the ‘s is for “pole has covered”. I agree with you though, I found it a poor clue due to the “large, pole has covered” Yoda-speak and the superfluous in which ruined the definition, for me. I’m surprised Eileen liked it. The rest was pretty good though

58. Muffin@55 triggered this chain of associations: Italian informal you uses 3rd person (weird) -> so does Spanish, Usted -> = short for Vuestra Merced -> = Your Grace.

    So are the English expressions Your Grace, Your Majesty etc considered pronouns, since they take the place of the name, or noun phrases, since they contain nouns?

59. CanberraGirl
    Much more simple for UPEND!

60. Thanks, Picaroon & Eileen. Top puzzle, just the right side of my limits as a solver – tough for a weekday and took me a few stabs but I got there in the end and it was worth the effort. Phew!

61. Still cannot parse 17

62. Hard going, but well worth it. Dnk meaning of palladium other then for the element or Brucie’s former stamping ground.
    On the subject of LADING – I have a one quart lading can used to measure out milk to customers in former times. Several ancestors were city cowkeepers.
    Thanks to Picaroon and ever-meticulous Eileen

63. Gavin @61
    Eileen’s blog seems clear.
    Eve, reputedly naked, who didn’t keep the rules, is accepting (holding, collecting ..) o.k. = fine
    cheers

64. Many thanks indeed, Eileen, for the expert blog.

    DaveJ @ 57, by all means dislike the clue, but neither of your concrete objections is correct. Firstly, it’s normal English syntax exactly like e.g. “the apple my brother’s eaten” or, even more similarly, “the wall he’s covered in paint”. Secondly, the word “in” is considered a perfectly correct link word either in the form “wordplay in definition” (in = constituting) or in the form “definition in wordplay” (in = consisting of, as in a concerto in three movements) in every quality crossword series. On a technical level, both in terms of grammar and crossword convention, the clue is absolutely fine.

65. Eileen’s explanation for 17 is clear enough but I couldn’t parse it at the time of solving – spent too long looking for a suitable word that fit the *EVE* pattern with no joy. Picaroon cunningly misled me by using naked literally, the swine!

66. Picaroon @64 – some people do object to “wordplay in definition”, but… for specious reasons, in my opinion. I thought the clue was fine.

67. I smiled with Widdersbel re the (unusual!) use of naked. I was about to refer Gavin to Genesis 3 https://www.bible.com/en-GB/bible/111/GEN.3.niv but nametab (many thanks 😉 ) got in first.

    I hadn’t got round to addressing the objections to 8dn, so I’m more grateful than ever to Picaroon for dropping in and elucidating. It’s always so good to see you – thanks again for a super puzzle.

68. Eileen @67, likewise, always a pleasure to run into you for a blog.
    Widdersbel @66, you’ve written some really good crosswords in other places. Keep up the setting – you have strong ideas and I like what you’re doing. (Let me know if you ever want to chat about one of your puzzles.) There are very few things that some people won’t object to, including extremely well-established conventions in many series, but I don’t really see the point of it.

69. gdu@54 I already knew that, I’ve studied German too, it just didn’t occur to me to think of the same word in different cases as different words.

    DrW@58 I think you meant “Italian formal” for “lei” etc.

    Picaroon and Eileen, nice to see the two of you colleagues dropping in and chatting.

70. Love Picaroon puzzles just find them extremely difficult- I seem to fare better with this setter’s puzzles elsewhere. Pleased therefore to get to within 2 of a completed grid & all bar one of those correctly parsed. Absolutely top notch clueing with the biggest PDM when the Radacanu clue finally dawned on me. Thought MESSENGER a real beauty & my fav though there wasn’t a dud in there.
    Many thanks both.

71. I had heard of lading as part of “teeming and lading”, a bookkeeping and accountancy fraud. But then I used to be a Tax Inspector. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeming_and_lading

72. Picaroon @68 – thank you, coming from you that means a lot.

73. Can someone explain where IN comes from in MINUTEMAN? I’m missing something, clearly!

74. Widdersbel@65. Another one here who tried wildcard options for the naked EVE, until the answer came out of the blue.
    No one has commented that EVE is really a malefactress, a word I hadn’t heard.

    I wondered if malefactress has gone the way of actress, that is reverting to the non-gendered noun, but I see it’s had a sharp rise in usage from 2012 to 2019.

    https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=malefactress&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3

75. Cerberus@73. ‘wearing’ clues IN. ‘keep’ is the containment indicator. eg. S/he’s in a tracksuit.

76. Thanks very much Eileen, this needed some sleep to winkle out the SW but worth the effort (got there thanks to belief in Picaroon not using the same device twice so the Iron in 24a had to be FE somewhere, didn’t know the classical ref but very neat use of screw for guard) and have thoroughly enjoyed the blog and comments (spooner’s catflap@10 au contraire, it’s never enough). I wondered if Mercury is an unindicated example of a messenger but i suppose being a God is sufficiently synonymous and anyway it’s a great surface.

    I learned a lot here and look forward to tomorrow evening when some friends are coming round and I can confidently offer the ladies a choice of “Sack or Tent?” – wonder how they will respond? Thanks for a cracker Picaroon.

77. [Depends on the weather Gazzh@76. Down here I’d go for the tent at the moment, but if you’re in the northern hemisphere , the sack might be preferable. 🙂 ]

78. [wise decision paddymelon, first snow of the winter here falling as I type!]

79. Very tough puzzle. gave up on LHS. Failed to solve 13, 17, 21, 28ac and 3, 13, 18, 24d.

    New for me: David Steel = leader of the Liberal Party; DERV; palladium = SAFEGUARD

    Thanks, both.

    I did not see a theme.

80. Just finished but found this very enjoyable. It’s all been said above. My admiration for Picaroon grows every time he appears. He is a master of his craft. Good to see he seems like a nice fella too with the two contributions above: gentle logic (@64) and warmth/generosity (@68).

    PS Picaroon, can we have some more of your 15-letter answers 🙂

81. Hi Eileen…and any very latecomers. This was tricky for me. Palladium statue and EYEBEAM were new though the light theory wasn’t.
    Good test though.
    Thanks Eileen and Picaroon

82. Picaroon @64. Hmmm, I’m sure your knowledge of grammar is better than mine, but isn’t “large” an adjective and apples and walls nouns? If we convert the apostrophe to *has* to get the cryptic bit to work we get “large pole has covered in lead” (with implied comma after large). What?? This is gobbledygook compared to “the apple my brother’s eaten” or “the wall he’s covered in paint”

    Yes of course you *can* use “in” as part of the definition, but it usually weakens the clue IMO,

    For me, clues worthy of note have smooth, sense-making surfaces and don’t need link words like “in”; hence my surprise at the tick from Eileen, and my comment.

    I did enjoy the puzzle, and thank you for it.

83. Thanks Paddymelon!

84. Thank you nicbach@34 for another one for my Christmas crackers. Loved the bat flattery, and the Guardian reader’s electric cars 🙂 Your joke will go down here on all silly(u)nders. (Groan.)

85. Just finished this (I’m a bit behind with crosswords at the moment) but wanted to add my appreciation to that of many others here. Terrific puzzle, thanks P & E.

    DaveJ @82, I’m a great admirer of Picaroon, but your adjective/noun distinction is exactly the reason I had doubts about 8dn too. Picaroon is quite correct to say that “The X (that) Y has verbed” is normal English syntax. But that construction requires X to be a noun. If the word in the clue (in this case, large) isn’t recognisably a noun, then it doesn’t matter that it functions as a “thing” (the letter L) in the cryptic instructions – the clue still breaks the normal syntactical rules of English, because it ain’t the kind of word that can have that kind of thing done to it.

    I suppose at a stretch you could say “the large” is a noun in restaurant language – “Mine’s the large, yours is the medium” – but that really is pushing it. I’d prefer to simply treat the clue as Yoda-speak, and grant the setter a little poetic licence.

    [Noel01/Shanne/GDU et al – very unlikely that you’ll see this now, but some German verbs, eg gedenken, are followed by the genitive (ich gedenke seiner = I remember/commemorate him). So we could include deiner, Ihrer, and euer (not eurer, confusingly) as words for ‘you’, although normally they aren’t listed as possible translations.

    Noel @45, good point about man. Which means of course we could include the acc. and dat. forms einen and einem (no genitive this time). And just for completeness, how about the reflexive pronoun sich? Sie können es mit sich nehmen = You can take it with you. So I make that 14 words for you in German: du, dich, dir, deiner, ihr, euch, euer, Sie, Ihnen, Ihrer, sich, man, einen, einem.]

86. essexboy@ 85, Thanks for the positive comment.
    As for 7dn, I fear you’re conflating surface reading with cryptic instructions when the two must always be kept separate in order to parse a clue correctly. Large is an adjective only in the surface reading, and in the surface reading the apostrophe s is read is a contracted form of is: Large pole’s (is) covered in lead.
    In the cryptic reading, it’s the letter L (a noun), which the string of letters CUE has covered: L (that = relative pronoun omitted as in e.g. “walls [that] he’s covered”]: L [that] CUE “has covered” in (=constituting) CLUE. My examples of normal English syntax pertain strictly to the cryptic mechanics of the clue, not to the surface, which requires the apostrophe s to be read differently in any case.

87. Picaroon @86, many thanks for taking the trouble to respond, especially given how late I arrived at the party, and let me re-iterate how much I enjoyed the puzzle. Thank you also for succinctly drilling down to the point at issue in 8dn.

    I’m afraid the next paragraph is going to try your patience (and probably Eileen’s too!).

    My argument is two-pronged:
    1) I take your point that surface reading must be kept separate from cryptic instructions. But in the cryptic reading of the clue, in the collection of words that must be interpreted as cryptic instructions, the word ‘large’ is still there – it hasn’t yet been converted into an L. Realising ‘large’ as L happens at the solution stage, which I would suggest is one step on from the cryptic instructions stage.
    2) The inclusion operation, whereby X gets incorporated into Y, is triggered by the recognition of “X Y’s covered” as a “man I saw”/”apple my brother’s eaten” construction. But the presence of a non-noun in the X position precludes that recognition, and hence invalidates the operation.

    It probably seems I’m trying to impose an arbitrary restriction on setters, based on a personal whim dressed up as logic. But I’d argue it’s based on “fairness to the solver” principles (no one could say the CLUE clue was unfair, but a more complex example might run the risk of being so) – so I respectfully submit it for your and others’ perusal and amusement.

88. @essexboy, firstly I really like your contributions to this site as you’re one of the few people who delves into the mechanics of clues in a meaningful and analytical way. (And we all know that Eileen has the patience of a saint – she often has to!)

    We’re all free, of course, to view things as we choose; I can only say what the general consensus is amongst the experts, and it’s that the referents of any words which indicate letters in an answer are either a single letter or a string of letters treated as a singular noun. For this reason, it’s generally considered wrong to say “people have eaten a” to indicate MEAN: it would have to be “people has eaten a” to be correct in terms of wordplay grammar. “I take in recipe” is wrong to indicate “ergo”, it has to be “I takes in” because “I” stands for the string of letters EGO. (Such faulty constructions can be corrected by the inclusion of a verb like “must” in order to reconcile the conflicting demands of surface grammar and cryptic mechanics.) It’s also why it’s fine to say “rook seizing king” to indicate CORN, despite the fact that, in order for this to work, we have to read “rook” as a verb, which can’t of course seize anything, but the string of letters CON can, and that’s what we’re really talking about. In short, it’s not relevant what kind of word we’re dealing with in the surface when we consider a clue from the point of view of its cryptic reading: its referent is always a letter or string of letters, thus always a noun, and the mechanics of technically accurate clues will reflect this. This application of consistent rules is precisely what is seen as fairness to the solver in many series. (These are also rules that, as a setter, you have to master in order to set for many series where they are rigorously applied.)

89. essexboy @87, I confess to being amused, and am a little worried someone’s put something funny in your tea.
    Here’s how I’d explain it:
    Wordplay consists of (1) elements to be translated into parts of the solution, and (2) indicators that act on those elements.
    For each element in (1) the solution contains a substitute for it, whether that is a synonym, abbreviation, anagram, etc.
    Rewriting the clue with ‘a substitute for [element]’ replacing each element, and leaving indicators as they are reveals the cryptic grammar.
    Here, we get:
    A substitute for large a substitute for pole has covered in a substitute for lead

    ‘the presence of a non-noun in the X position precludes that recognition’: no, it doesn’t. It puts a cryptic barrier in the way of recognition, the enjoyable getting over of which is the very business of solving cryptic clues. But you know that.

90. Not really sure what the fuss is all about with regards to 8d. It’s a pretty common cryptic mechanism, is it not? I am fairly sure I’ve seen it used numerous times.

Comments are closed.