Guardian Prize 29,021 / Picaroon

69 comments on “Guardian Prize 29,021 / Picaroon”

1. Thanks Eileen. Challenging and enjoyable with just the right degree of difficulty for me. It lured me into overthinking some of the clues that TURNED OUT (FOI) to be more straightforward. Have to confess that I entered the second word of 1a quite early but the blindingly obvious – and clever – FOOTBALL eluded me until much later. I should have learned by now not to question synonyms but wasted = potted?

2. Great puzzle, great blog. The only theme-y thing I could see, other than 3d, was the presence of a few words that clearly betrayed their French (or in one case Italian) origins, but that’s a real stretch.

   I loved FOOTBALL MATCH because it’s so different than the surface suggests.

   Thanks P&E

3. Biggles A @1:
   Chambers has for potted “Intoxicated by drugs or alcohol (N Am inf.)”
   Thanks Eileen and Picaroon. FOOTBALL MATCH was very clever.

4. Didn’t have much time last weekend, so although I surprisingly got three of the four long border clues, I was unable to leverage that into anything approaching completion in the time available. Still don’t get the LINEN clue.

5. @Bodge, N is the fourteenth letter of the alphabet, so if you assigned letters to each line…

6. I didn’t spot LINE N : drat and wasted some time thinking of jail sentence synonyms and a 7 letter jewel including some where to “go” I.e. loo, etc.
   Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen

7. Enjoyed this.

   Favourites included: GREEN-FINGERED, NOMINAL, AU NATURAL, REPREHENSIBLE, ANNOYANCE, LINEN

   Thanks Picaroon and Eileen

8. Thanks Picaroon. This was suitably challenging for a prize and I needed outside help for several clues but overall this was a joy with my top picks being AMBIENT, URINE, REALM, AITCH, and LAMBASTED. Thanks Eileen for a most useful blog.

9. Thank you Eileen for your great blog and perseverance with technical hitches. Totally agree with your comments about the delights in this Picaroon puzzle, and with Tony S’s comment@8 about it being suitably challenging and a joy.
   So many good clues already mentioned by Eileen and in earlier comments. I’d also add ELONGATED, SOMME, MAGNETISE, AITCH, COATI, RARER, OBBLIGATO, DAGUERREOTYPE for their surfaces, chuckles and misdirections.

10. Thank you, Eileen, for your blog – you must have been up very late to put it up in such a timely manner and given some annoying technical hitches. I particularly appreciated your full explanation of 16d ASTROTURF, as I missed the “red” for TROT bit. I also really liked 9d REPREHENSIBLE, as well as the afore-mentioned 26a GREEN-FINGERED, but what am I saying? I really liked it all. Many thanks, Picaroon. It’s always a pleasure to solve your puzzles.

11. P.S. Oh, and I also really needed the blog to explain the ANNOY part of 16d ANNOYANCE. I thought _ANNOY must have been a Parliamentary Speaker in the UK.

12. JiA@11. LOL. I hear you loud and clear.
    Agree with you@10. I liked it all.

13. Tough and enjoyable challenge.

    My favourites: AMBIENT, FOOTBALL MATCH, AU NATUREL, LINEN, REPREHENSIBLE (loi).

    Thanks, both.

14. Yes. A really enjoyable puzzle full of tricks and smiles. Took me forever (three mini-sessions) to make even one entry. SAYS I was my way in. But then it was pure joy. I too am kicking myself to miss N=14 to explain LINEN. So very many delightful clues. Great thanks Picaroon and Eileen.

    [Tim the (very early) toffee @6. When you say “wasted some time”, hope you’re not potted by the latest Everton news.]

15. Did this today as I was away last weekend. Struggled but got there in the end. (t)ANNOY took me back to school, I had forgotten it. Took a long time to get AU NATUREL, but I laughed when I did. Anagrams usually get me going, but I needed a few crossers for DAGUERROTYPE, I couln’t work out what I was looking for and REPREHENSIBLE went in late.
    Plenty to enjoy , Thanks Eileen, I still needed help with some parsings, and Picaroon for the puzzle.

16. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen
    Excellent puzzle as always, and educational too – I haven’t had much occasion to write DAGUERREOTYPE, but I discover that I’ve always misspelled and mispronounced it (no O)!

17. [me @16
    Actually I probably have been pronouncing it correctly, if the second E isn’t voiced. Is it -OTYPE or -EOTYPE?]

18. Thanks E and P. Very enjoyable.
    Had to be ASTROTURF and LAMBASTED, but needed some help with the parsing. I couldn`t get past fancy r +fur +coats giving “astrocurf” and have never heard of potty as a meaning of wasted.
    (Many other alternatives for wasted – including “well cidered”, especially if you are from the West of England. In my case, however, I am Ed, and where we live has a(n) historic well and a small cider orchard.)

19. muffin@17. You’ve jagged it. E-TYPE. 🙂 (I hope that translates. I don’t know if jagging it is an Aussie expression.)

20. An excellent puzzle, as seems to be generally agreed. I agree with what Eileen said about all the trademarks being there. The only clue I had difficulty with was LINEN. There were many favourites.

    Thanks Picaroon and Eileen.

21. Perfect Prize Puzzle for me since it tested the limits of my capabilities whilst suiting my time schedule of a number of short visits throughout the week. Each visit yielded three or four devilishly clever solutions, though DAGUERREOTYPE came to me whilst lying in bed and musing over the different possible meanings of ‘still’.
    I did not quite manage to complete, missing out on REPREHENSIBLE, MANDATE and PURLIEU (which I would never have solved).
    A thoroughly enjoyable experience rounded off by Eileen’s customary excellent blog. Thanks to both.

22. Another amused by AU NATUREL when I got, and counting on my fingers for LINEN to check N=14. Lots to enjoy and relish. All solved and parsed, but a bit bitty solving as I was finishing it off on the Tube heading out for a led walk we abandoned as wading through puddles was just cold and wet.

    Thank you to Eileen and Picaroon.

23. LINEN was among my first in, but I struggled to get any further than 10 entries in the grid last weekend. None of the four long outside clues meant anything to me, so I never really had a foothold, and I gave up with a groan.

    Picked it up again this morning and completed over breakfast, so must be in a better frame of mind this Saturday. I don’t normally mention favourites, but I gave a small and probably inaudible round of applause to the setter for spotting PREHENSILE in REPREHENSIBLE.

    Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen (hope you slept well).

24. A lovely crossword. My favourite was AFTERMATH, brilliant.

    I always remember “potted” from Fawlty Towers when Polly is trying to tell Basil, in front of the guests, that the chef is drunk: “He’s potted… the shrimps. He’s soused… the herrings. He’s pickled… the onions…”

    Re LINEN, I think about two or three years ago this sort of clue became very popular and we regularly saw for example “fourth vehicle” for CARD etc.

    Many thanks Picaroon and Eileen.

25. Thanks for that reminder, Lord Jim – loved it!

26. As tightly crafted as ever by Picaroon and hugely enjoyable – even if I didn’t parse LINEN. FOOTBALL MATCH my favourite.

    JinA @11: if you were pondering British Parliamentary speakers last Saturday, you were, at least, well prepared for Pauls’ puzzle!

    The Cap d’Antibes clue made me smile: many years ago I was one of a hundred or more colleagues flown to the extremely expensive and luxurious Grand Hotel in the equally glamorous St Jean Cap Ferrat, a few miles along the coast towards Monaco, where we spent a week trying to understand why our business was not as profitable as it should be!

    Thanks Picaroon and Eileen

27. Another splendid crossword and blog. Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen

28. Challenging- in a good way. Considered AFTERWASH and when checking that it was a word, saw its synonym with MATH and the relevance of US students suddenly became clear. Needed my partner’s help with LOI REPREHENSIBLE though – as I just couldn’t see it despite all the crossers – after search in vain for a book ending in FIELD.

29. Another good ‘un from Picaroon.

    I liked the ‘king going around with’ in MANDATE, the topless and bottomless aunt in AU NATUREL [that reminds me of the hilarious clip from Fawlty Towers], the DAGUERREOTYPE definition, and the ‘fancy fur coats’ in ASTROTURF.

    [PM @26, I also had a business meeting staying at the Grand Hotel. When the boat that had been chartered broke down after lunch, with the captain refusing all assistance just as it was getting dark, there was a lot of consternation from the cardiologists and wives onboard.]

    Thanks Picaroon and Eileen.

30. muffin @17/pdm @19 – Collins online gives dag-erro-type as the British English pronunciation, and either dag-erro-type or dag-errio-type for our friends across the pond.

    (With the ‘a’ in ‘dag’ actually being a schwa)

    The French aren’t so laissez-faire – they insist on an acute accent on the second E – daguerréotype – so for them, approximately, it’s da-gay-ray-o-teep.

    pdm – I think ‘jagging it’ must be Aussie – to me it conjures up a picture of cruising around in my E-type 😉

31. Talking of French, AU NATUREL is one of those expressions which the French don’t use to mean what we think they do. A straw poll of my French friends revealed none of them would say ‘au naturel’ for ‘naked’, and WordReference only gives the culinary sense (‘plain’/nothing fancy).

    However, I did manage to track it down here with the meaning ‘sans voiles, nu’, supported by a quotation from a 1935 novel. So it seems that, like double entendre and connoisseur, we borrowed it from French some time ago, and it’s now become ‘stuck’ in English – meanwhile, the French language has moved on and they don’t use it any more in that sense.

    None of which detracts from the clue of course, because it’s an English crossword! Thanks Picaroon and Eileen.

32. A succulent offering that lasted through the week, yielding gently with attendant amusement.

    And educational (as per muffin@16) – TENON, OBBLIGATO, DAGUERREOTYPE. Favourite was FOOTBALL MATCH which took forever to unearth. An inability to make the (Tarzanic?) leap from ‘bay’ to ‘laurel’ led to a ‘?’ and left me with some residual ANNOYANCE but on a ‘my bad’ basis.

    Thanks Picaroon; thanks Eileen.

    eb@31: V interesting – I knew about ‘double entendre’ but not ‘connoisseur’ or ‘au naturel’. So the Madame in Robi@29’s clip was perpetrating something of a linguistic singularity?

33. [Alphalpha – I think she (and the scriptwriters) were probably English!]

34. eb @30
    Thank you very much for your detailed exposition.

    You’ve probably all heard of the Essex girl who asked a barman for a double entendre, so he gave her one…

35. Hard but fun.
    I didn’t know that potted = drunk and wasted time with pot=stomach=waist (waste).
    A bit surprised that there wasn’t an indicator that 23d was a foreign word but it was easy enough without.
    Thanks to Picaroon and Eileen (no typos, etc, in the blog that I can see in spite of your technical problems).

36. Hello, didn’t finish the crossword but, for the theme, is it ‘ma’ that reappears several times. It is directly below theme in the grid and Mother’s Day (uk) was the next day… a special message for someone perhaps?

37. Pino @35 – I’m not sure what you mean by 23dn being a foreign word but you have made me realise that I didn’t note ‘department store’ as being a third ‘lift and separate’.

    Interesting thought, Dave @36 but I don’t really buy it.

38. Liked that, just about the right level for a Prize, I thought. Was briefly held up by misspelling DAGUERREOTYPE but apart from that it was a steady solve over a few visits. Even though I did parse LINEN, I’m not sure about this device of using the alphabet as a basis for numbering; I even wondered if sonnet lines were labelled as such but research suggests not, it’s simply a setter’s trick. Oh, and the choice of Cap d’Antibes to indicate the Frenchism seemed so specific, I spent far too long trying to work out if it was anagram fodder. Lovely place by the way, not far down the coast from me.

    Thanks both.

39. What crypticsue said @27. Lovely stuff.

40. Very entertaining puzzle (nobody has pointed out that Picaroon has sneakily included a THEME, as usual 🙂 ).

    Many good clues – I particularly liked the constructions for REPREHENSIBLE, ELONGATED and LINEN, and the anagram for the ur-photo.

    [essexboy @31: Re AU NATUREL, the opposite is also widespread – anglicisms in other languages which seem odd to English speakers. In Italian, a dinner jacket (tuxedo) is ‘uno smoking’ (usage borrowed from French and widely used elsewhere) and a morning suit is ‘un tight’. The best example of reciprocal Franglais I have come across was on a cross-channel ferry, where the cafeteria was signposted alternatively as ‘the buffet’ and ‘le snack bar’]

41. … thanks to the Pirate and Eileen

42. Gervase @ 40

    What is the theme please?

43. Is GREEN-FINGERED a thing? I know that having green fingers is (in the US we say having a green thumb), but but I’ve never heard it put this way.

    eb@31 What’s with “conoisseur” and “double entendre”? I don’t think I’ve ever said either of them while speaking French. Do they not mean in French what they’ve come to mean in English?

    Why would the French pronounce the photo thing “d-gerray-o-teep” when the inventor has no acute accent at the end of his name?

    Thanks to Picaroon, Eileen and essexboy.

44. Fiona Anne @42: The theme is simply the word THEME – in this way Picaroon has incorporated a THEME in the puzzle, as he almost always does.

45. Gervase @44

    Thanks I was looking for something more complicated.

46. Great puzzle and blog. On the subject of English borrowing in French, I remember a young French guest saying he was going to wear a bob to go footing.

47. Valentine @43: it’s enough of a ‘thing’ to have made it into Chambers:

    green-fing?ered adjective
    green fingers or green thumb noun
    A knack of making plants grow well

    We have a local lawn maintenance franchise that goes by the name of Green Thumb so that usage is clearly transatlantic.

48. [Gervase/Petert – the French have a penchant for English-looking words that end in ‘-ing’. As well as le footing, there’s also le lifting (face-lift), le brushing (blow-dry), and even le shampooing!]

49. [Valentine @43: the issue with connoisseur is the spelling (sorry, that wasn’t clear from my post @31). Our spelling is taken from the verb connoître, an archaic variant of connaître. The French spelling is now connaisseur (or connaisseuse, of course) and thankfully it still means the same thing!

    ‘Double entendre’ is more complicated. The best discussion I’ve found is here on WordReference. Basically, no one says ‘double entendre’ in French any more. There is the expression ‘à double entente’, but it wouldn’t be an ideal translation of double entendre, because there isn’t necessarily any suggestion that one of the meanings is sexual/risqué. So where did we get ‘double entendre’? There’s an interesting quotation at post #8 on the link (from 1688!) suggesting that ‘mots à double entendre’ was used in French, with a sexual meaning, in the past – and that this usage somehow found its way into English, and got stuck there.

    Re daguerréotype, you’re quite right, the inventor was Daguerre. I think it can be explained if we remember that the French are much more conscious of the ‘e’s at the end of their words, even if they’re normally not pronounced or emphasised. Think of Piaf singing La vie en rose, or Trénet’s ’Pour la vie !’ at the end of La mer. So ‘cutting off’ the ‘e’ by pronouncing it ‘daguerrotype’ would feel wrong – instead they make jolly well sure everyone knows the ’e’ is there by honouring it with an accent.]

50. [essexboy @48: I wonder why that is. In many cases the word is a noun describing an action, and may be a bona fide English gerund, but it may just be that the desinence makes it sound more English and therefore more chic. ‘Le shampooing’ is particularly odd, because it’s the detergent itself, rather than the use of it. In Italian it’s simply ‘lo shampoo’, although its spelling is sometimes Italianised to ‘sciampo’]

51. [Even odder – the French say ‘pooing’ in ‘shampooing’ like we say ‘points’ in ‘nul points’! (another thing they don’t say in French)]

52. [Are Eurovision scores ‘chant points’? 🙂 ]

53. [I think ‘chant points’ is how a French Sean Connery might have said ‘Pointless’]

54. Came here to say that I made the AFTERMATH joke (probably annoyingly) often when I was in school–if (say) fourth period was math, whatever I had in 5th that semester was the aftermath. I *think* I outgrew saying this by the time the math in question was calculus, but I can’t really recall. Which is fair, since I don’t recall much calculus either.

55. eb@49-53, including Gervase@50 The French do that stuff to :”faire anglais,” make it look English (even though it already is). So there’s “le parking” (parking spot) and “le camping” (campsite). They do it with spelling, too –French for “steak” is “steack,” because that -ck ending is so English — except that now it looks less English, since English doesn’t put “ck” after two vowels, except for the very rare word “hoick.”

    Is there a special way to say “nul points,” not pronounced like points in other contexts? When do you say it anyway? Not something I’ve ever said.

56. [Valentine @55 – ‘nul points’ is a jokey Eurovision Song Contest thing – the UK for many years had a reputation for being given zero by our Continental neighbours. But the French don’t say ‘nul points’, they say ‘zéro’, and in any case the nil scores aren’t announced. Re the pronunciation – no difference from the normal French ‘point’. If you put the French words ‘chant’ and ‘point’ together, that’s exactly how they pronounce ‘shampooing’.]

57. Thanks Eileen, agree with the praise for a tough but so enjoyable puzzle, kept me going til Tuesday and like others I can now spell 8d properly (i would have skipped the second E which would at least simplify the pronunciation!).
    Enjoyed the discussion above too, over here the gardeners have “grüne daumen” (green thumbs) and maybe this is how the transatlantic difference originated. (We also press our thumbs together rather than cross our fingers for luck, could be that PREHENSILE thumbs are recognised as the source of our fortunate position in the animal hierarchy?) In general I suppose a lot of phrases maintain their original meanings in the borrowing language long after the natives have moved on (US vs UK English too I think).
    Thanks Picaroon.

58. Thanks Picaroon and Eileen. A slow burner, this one. Kept me going until about Thursday. Don’t think I needed to cheat except to check if PURLIEU was a thing. Still not sure what it is though.

59. We did not finish until Saturday night when we gave up on PURLIEU having not heard the pearl. A word I never used or really understood and the dictionary doess not seem to think it is ‘a place you often go’. So very interesting to read this blog on Sunday evening. I immediately got FOOTBALL MATCH without even trying and assumed because of the link with 3 down that it would be the theme. Football is my, as the French probably don’t say, bete noir. So I was lured into thinking this would be easy. Four 13 letters seemed hard setting and hard solving and that proved to be the case. So we managed some to the east but on Tuesday, and Wednesday and Thursday were saying we were fed up with this crossword and that we needed to solve 8d. It was very chicken and egg because we needed it to get the acrosses and needed the acrosses to get it. We gave up on Friday night and ‘cheated’ using crossword solver and declared that we would never have got that although we saw that it was an anagram. We were right once we got DAGUERREOTYPE much was revealed. We did not know the word and thought that it was unfair but clearly it was known to some of you and so okay. So this was not a good week for us.

60. Peter R @59 – now that one they do say! – although strictly speaking it’s bête noire 🙂

    I was puzzled by PURLIEU too, but Collins has “a place one frequents; haunt” as its third definition.

61. Graham @58, and Peter R @59, if you’re still there: I’ve been occupied all day and have only just seen your comments.
    Re PURLIEU: I don’t know what dictionaries you’re using but Collins has ‘a person’s usual haunts’ and Chambers: ‘a place one frequents’, so it seemed to be just what it says on the tin – but I admit that, on first reading, like tim the toffee @6, I was initially cunningly misdirected by ‘a place you often go’. 😉

    Sorry you had a bad experience with this one, Peter R- but I admire you for persevering. Better luck next time!

62. Crossed again, eb – sorry!

63. Amazing, isn’t it, that it took almost exactly two hours for us both to come up with the same response?

64. Ta Eileen. Purlieu seems to have some particular historical origin (and French presumably). A place to go and do what, though? Go for a walk?

65. Perhaps to meet one’s local purveyor of nitrous oxide?

    (I bet Eileen’s going to say the same thing in a couple of minutes 😉 )

66. Sorry eb – I would have but I was engaged with the excellent new FT News crossword
    https://www.fifteensquared.net/2023/03/26/financial-times-17368-ft-news-puzzle-march-by-neo/ (blogged by our own Widdersbel – recommended!

67. Eileen@37
    Sorry for the long delay. I was just a little surprised that there wasn’t an indication that the Department was in France.

68. Pino – though I doubt you’re still there – I was just puzzled by your ‘foreign word’.

69. Very enjoyable, although quite tough. I knew DAGUERREOTYPE, but would have spelt it without that E. Unfortunately never twigged “still” until I fed crossers to Word Wizard.

    Didn’t know that meaning of PURLIEU, but got it from the homophone and checked.

    I solved a ‘car D’-type clue somewhere else, recently, so after staring at LINEN for a bit, I got the wordplay.

    MANDATE: Loved ‘defeat of king’.

    REALM: Although Picaroon often has football references, they never require back-page familiarity and I find them accessible.

    AFTERMATH was clever and a great pdm.

    SAYS I: A nice colloquialism to put in.

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