Guardian Cryptic 29,054 by Fed

81 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29,054 by Fed”

1. Liked ON AVERAGE, PET NAME, HORDE, POWER DRESSING and DIARRHOEA.
   Thanks, Fed and manehi!

2. Thanks manehi for explaining DIARRHOEA; I would never have worked it out by myself. I also missed (D)EVO(N) as the county in EVOKE, and was trying to work XI or ELEVEN in somehow. I find Fed is just a bit above my level ATM.

3. Quite a few answers were pencilled in before the complex wordplay was figured out — a couple I didn’t parse till I came here. But plenty of smiles. Never heard of TANGA, and I’m not entirely comfortable with tang/touch.

   Thanks Fed & manehi.

4. Fed’s second offering today after his alter ego Bluth’s appearance in the Indy. This was the harder of the two with plenty of tricky parsing. I managed to work out everything except 1a/8d which I confess I just bunged in from enumeration and a few crossers. I remembered HORDE and TANGA from previous crosswords.

   I was watching a true crime program on TV the other night set in the ‘Capital of Kentucky’, making the surface of 23d even more misleading, so I’ll go for TOKYO as my favourite.

   Thanks to Fed and manehi

5. I was surprised at “pop” as an anagram indicator but it’s in C’s list and the word play for that was pretty tortuous. One of these days I’m going to learn how to spell DIARRHOEA without having to look it up every time.
   Favourites were IMITATE and PET NAME for the “making 6p”.

6. Beaten by TANGA which is nho for me but everything else parsed in the end. Very satisfying to finally tease out what was going on with LOI DIARRHOEA. I had an idea about the construction of the long phrase but wasn’t going to start counting that many letters in the pre-dawn half-light so waited until I had enough crossers to bung in the phrase.

   EVOKE, ON AVERAGE, PET NAME, BUMPTIOUS, KNOCK-DOWN, NOISOME and INCLEMENT were favourites today. As always with Fed, lots of variety and creativity – albeit with some very tricky-to-find synonyms. Of my list, PET NAME is COTD for the outrageous substitution.

   Thanks Fed and manehi

7. Tim C@5 and PM@6
   Loved PET NAME for the unique device ‘making 6p’ just like both of you did.
   GregfromOz@2
   I have a suspicion ‘some authority’ keeps changing the spelling of
   DIARRHOEA every now and then. Why can’t I get it right ever? 🙂

8. Was defeated by diarrhoea. Still find Fed’s surface a bit clunky and convoluted. Enjoyed the challenge, though. Thanks to Fed and Manehi.

9. I’m going to put this down as a fail because I failed to fully parse EVOKE, PET NAME and DIARRHOEA, the latter going in only because I had all the crossers. I also needed a lot of crossers before the penny dropped for the sordid business.
   TANGA took a while, and I took it to be tang as in tangible rather than as a trace.
   Altogether pretty tough though I admired some of the clues. Enjoyed APARTMENT and PET NAME is genius – now that I understand it!

10. KVa @ 7. It’s the fault of the Americans and their mania for simplifying our spelling. I suspect a lack of sense of humour is at the root of it.

11. I must be getting on Fed’s wavelength because the 6p substitution leapt out at me, and overall it was probably the quickest I’ve ever solved one of his puzzles – helped by the long one giving away a good number of checked first letters.

    All great fun, as usual. Hard to pick a favourite, I enjoyed all of it. Thanks, Fed and Manehi.

12. PS would it be acceptable to say DIARRHOEA fell out rather easily for me?

13. Quite tough to parse.

    Favourite: IMITATE.

    New for me: TANGE = bikini.

    I was not sure how to parse
    12ac apart for cricKEters for the KE bit
    16ac
    20ac – apart from thinking it was a ref to Vietnam somehow – P in [vi] ETNAM + E
    4d
    17d

    Thanks, both.

14. With DIARRHOEA, DIRTY LINEN and TANGAs in the mix I was grateful Scchua wasn’t blogging today 🙂

    I thought this was great and Fed’s definitely moved up into a Champions League qualification spot

    Personal faves; PET NAME, PASS OUT and APARTMENT

    Cheers M&F

15. Widders @12 I did think the definition was abit loose. I already have my coat on

16. Other than looking at some of the anagrams (DIARRHOEA, WASH ONES DIRTY LINEN IN PUBLIC) and not checking every letter, all in and parsed.

    I enjoyed this, particularly the outrageous 6p substitution.

    Thanks to Fed and manehi.

17. And I say “air dirty linen in public”, so it didn’t leap out at me. I had the first four letters blank until I finally tackled that corner, and had to look up alternative phrases.

18. Widdersbel@12 and bodycheetah@15
    LOL! Punny indeed! Runs in the (crossword) family!

19. I wasn’t up to this level of convolution this morning. Sorry, Fed. Glad others apparently loved it.

20. As most commenters have found, some solutions were much easier for me than the parsings.

21. Several I couldn’t parse, but all perfectly above board when manehi explained them.
    The definition of 11 could be “positive american” (as in can-do attitude = positive attitude in the US) but it works either way.

22. To borrow Crispy@8’s words, many of the clues were too clunky and convoluted for my taste. In contrast, an example of a clue which was admirably neat, and therefore my favourite, was for IMITATE. Some others, e.g. MASON, TANGA and ISSUE were also short clues, but I saw the answers immediately, so less interesting to work out.
    I didn’t parse PET NAME, but now see it’s clever, though the surface is pretty meaningless, which doesn’t much bother me.
    I see I wasn’t the only one not to verify the anagram for the public laundry.
    Thanks manehi and Fed.

23. Tanga really is just the bikini bottoms.

24. Tim C@5 and KVa@7
    I could never spell diarrhoea either until someone taught me Dash In A Rush Right Home Or Else Accident. Never had a problem since.

25. Very pleased to see Mr Gorman’s name on both the Guardian and Indy puzzles today. I found this one rather harder, especially in the parsing department, but both highly enjoyable.

    I agree, as so often, with manehi’s favourites, with the addition of 18ac PAGEANT (great surface), 2dn APPROVING, 20ac PET NAME and 15dn APARTMENT – I’ve commented on the Indy thread on DG’s penchant for ‘substitution’ clues, which I always enjoy: he’s having a field day today!) and 20dn PASS OUT (for the construction – I remember being fascinated by this term as a child.)
    I raised an eyebrow at the definition in 16ac – if I were sewing, it would be the opposite of a hem but the reference to Edinburgh went a long way to redeeming it.

    Many thanks to Fed for a most enjoyable work-out and to manehi for a great blog.

26. Way beyond my pay grade this morning. I suppose if I had got 1,8 across early on it would have helped greatly, but scratched around at the bottom for a while with a little success, but then threw in the towel and had a look on here for enlightenment. The start of a very noisy loft extension next door today probably didn’t help with my powers of concentration…

27. Some marvellous anagrams this morning and the best of them involving the medical world – penicillin and tinnitus. DIARRHOEA was very clever ( and FED/BLUTH’s has indeed put post mortem and doctors in his Indy clueing this morning ).

    My faves were DIARRHOEA, PET NAME and APARTMENT.

    Should Spooner’s catflap drop in later, I’m sure there will be remarks about 15d.

    Thank you Fed and manehi.

28. Thanks simonc @24 but that mnemonic sounds as forgettable as the spelling of dioreea. 😉 I think I should squit now.

29. The germans have a great word “durchfall” which can be loosely translated as “through fall”

30. I liked this offering (quite a few I ticked have already been canvassed above), though some of it was tough. Several parses were ??? for me so I was glad to come here for manehi’s help. Thanks to both.

31. Enjoyable solve where I managed to parse everything eventually, but I took far too long to see the Devon in EVOKE – good wordplay.

    I also liked NOISOME for the surface, APARTMENT for the flat cap, CAN-DO for the positive American and PET NAME for the unusual substitution.

    Thanks Fed and manehi.

32. Tricky parsing today. I had to come here to parse EMENDED and only spotted the parsing of 6p in a late flash of inspiration.
    Tim C@5, KVa@7 and simonc@24: many years ago I worked with a chap who taught me to think ‘die – are – ho, he, ha’ and I find that works for me.
    Thanks Fed for the usual marvellousness and Manehi for the usual clear and helpful blog.

33. Some attractive new tricks deployed here.

34. I struggled to think how do could mean imitate but then thought of TS Eliot “ He do the police in different voices”!

35. Thanks for the blog, Fed just keeps getting better, great for The Guardian to have a setter who prioritises the word play. I could name many clues, PET NAME for “making 6P ” , APARTMENT for a clever substitution , EMENDED for how the H is dropped, but my favourite is IMPARTIAL for phone=DIAL , something I still do.
    Agree with Tony@23 , strictly TANGA only half of a bikini , but you do get TANGA style tops of triangles and string .

36. I had a rather cunning plan for starting this puzzle. Observing that getting 18a, 21a and 24a would give me a good chance of identifying the last word of the long phrase, I tackled those first. Luckily they were reasonably solvable, the word seemed likely to be PUBLIC, and the phrase popped into my mind – success!

    There were certainly some complicated parsings here, but it was satisfying to try to unravel them. But my favourite was one of the more straightforward ones, BUMPTIOUS – very nice with the clever lift-and-separate of “put forward”.

    “Drove” meaning HORDE is one of those words that you don’t often see in the singular. People came in droves but not often in a drove.

    Many thanks Fed and manehi.

37. I enjoyed this – although it seemed impenetrable at first, it fell out fairly easily in the end. Quite a few entries went in from one or two crossers without my stopping to parse them.

    I like Fed’s imagination, but it does lead to wordy clues with tortuous constructions and contrived surfaces – DIARRHOEA is a prime example. I got WASH ONES….. from the numeration and just a few crossers but life is too short to bother to parse it. Surely a double cryptic definition would have been a more succinct method to clue this?

    Nevertheless, thanks to Fed and manehi.

38. I’m going to be different and say that Fed was friendlier than Bluth. Equally enjoyable

    Many thanks to Fed and Manehi

39. A great puzzle, with many tricky clues. I tried the long ones first and succeeded with the two individual ones but not the long phrase. There was much to admire in the wordplay, with some definitions disguised so well as to be almost hidden. I especially liked HORDE, IMITATE and KNOCK-DOWN. I needed help with the parsing of EVOKE and DIARRHOEA.

    Thanks to Fed and manehi.

40. SueB@34: there used to be an “impressions” show called Who Do You Do? on TV at one time. But “do” is one of those frustrating all-purpose verbs that can stand in for many others (as well as sometimes being a party…) I remember an argument here once about whether do=cook was valid.

41. Thanks for explaining PET NAME Manehi, I knew it had to be something along those lines, but the “making 6p” part passed me by.

    Not sure whether it’s just me, but I dislike clues where you have to add a bit of this word, a bit of that word, etc. EVOKE was one of many examples today – surely there’s a more elegant way of cluing that word than having to hack bits off the words “Devon” and “Cricketer”? Such an approach always seems very clunky… and there was an awful lot of that from Fed today.

42. SueB @34: ‘He do the police in different voices’ which Eliot considered as a title, was originally a line from Dickens’s ‘Our Mutual Friend’ – Betty Higson describing Mr Sloppy reading the newspaper aloud to her 🙂

43. Enjoyed this, particularly PET NAME. Recognised the clue for PAGEANT but still took a while to remember the answer. Turns out it was in a quiptic just a couple of weeks ago

44. I enjoyed this, having found myself on Shed’s wavelength for once. But I agree with the criticism of clues like the one for EVOKE–“let’s take a random bit of an unspecified county and add a slice out of the middle of “cricketers” and call it a day” makes for a choppy clue.

    That mnemonic for DIARRHOEA doesn’t work here, of course, since American English renders the Latin digraphs ae and oe, in almost all words, as just e. Similarly, I was a bit flummoxed by what the American was doing in the clue for CAN-DO, since I’d forgotten that “candor” is an American spelling. I thought we were being told that CAN-DO was an Americanism, which would have been surprising.

45. Me @44: “Amoeba” is the only exception I can think of off the top of my head.

46. To say I found this unsatisfactory would be an understatement. I thought many of the surfaces were clunky and some of the constructions overly convoluted, and only parseable with hindsight.

    Oh well. On to Thursday.

47. Oh, and plurals like alumnae, of course.

48. BUMPTIOUS is a word I’ve seen, but I realized I had no idea what it meant, beyond that it sounded uncomplimentary. Now I know.

    JB@43 I knew I’d seen PAGE + ANT recently, thanks for reminding me where.

    I laid out the structure of 1, 8 in dashes and got _ _ B_I_ at the end. That had to be PUBLIC, so the two-letter word before it had to be IN, and there I had it.

    mrpenney@44 and following — how about “phoenix”?

    Thanks to Fed for an enjoyable diversion and to manehi for explanations, especially of EMENDED.

49. Wow. Convoluted, but perfectly fair, I thought. Plentiful use of crosswordsolver, and a couple remained unparsed, but too many great clues to pick one out. Very enjoyable.

    Can’t believe nobody’s mentioned you’d have to WASH ONE’S DIRTY LINEN IN PUBLIC if you had DIARRHOEA …

    One tiny nitpick, is Don Bradman famous enough to non-cricketers to use in a clue? I’d heard of him, obviously, but an American would struggle.

50. Mr Marmite back! I find some of his cluing far too complex. Still lots like Mr G which is fine. Can’t please everyone. Super blog though must have pushed you to the limits.

51. Thanks Fed and manehi
    Very little enjoyment for me. I particularly dislike clues such as 1,8 – I was never going to get it from the vague definition or the Byzantine parsing, but when the crossers made it likely that the last word was PUBLIC, the rest was an easy guess from the enumeration – bingo, a quarter of the puzzle done with zero satisfaction.
    Several others unparsed, and a reveal for TERMS – never would have seen that.
    I did like BUMPTIOUS and NOISOME.

52. I’m in the positive camp! I thought this was a witty puzzle with a few clever devices thrown in as a challenge. I thoroughly enjoyed this.

    Some great surfaces as has already been remarked.

    Favourites were EVOKE, PET NAME, INSTITUTIONAL and NOISOME.

    Thanks Fed and manehi

53. Thanks to Fed for todays puzzle, which was so tricky I was forced to have a power nap but came back fully restored to hammer out the answers. Thx to manehi for help with parsing a few.

54. Most of SE left blank. Very tough. I find some of the parsing a bit too elaborate. I got EVOKE from the crossers and retro-parsed it. But surely clues should allow you to build up the answer? There’s no way I’d ever have got dEVOn on its own.

    But thanks both anyway.

55. I would like, one day, to reach the point where I can thank the setter for something like this however I am nowhere near that point yet (either in grace or aptitude).
    Thanks for the blog though

56. Late to the comments today because, much as I admire and appreciate the work of our bloggers, I try to figure out the parsings of all the answers before coming here. I think it makes me a better solver, but we’ll never know. DIARRHOEA took the longest, followed by APARTMENT, but great clues. I had to look up dictionary definitions to verify TANGA and KNOCK. Not the easiest of puzzles, imo, but keep ’em coming, Fed.

57. Whitedevil @49. You argue about a person in any particular field is well known. As I’ve pointed out before, the puzzle is still set to go in a daily British newspaper – the on-line availability is just a fortuitous add-on. In any case, Bradman is pretty much the best there’s ever been in his field, so I think he’s a fair enough inclusion.

58. As is common with Fed for me, first read through provided precisely zero answers. But then like a couple of other posters here, the SW corner yielded to the extent that the last word in 1,8 was likely to be “public”, and the phrase was likely from the definition and word-count. I too couldn’t find the motivation to actually parse it. It all went in from there, but again like many others, I had to come here for a few other parsings.
    The only minor disagreement I would have with Fed is that I don’t see “tang” as meaning “touch”.
    Great fun – thanks to Fed & manehi.

59. WhiteDevil@49 I bow to nobody in my lack of interest in cricket but even I have heard about Don Bradman . I even know that he scored zero in his last game.

60. simonc @24 — a friend once coined the mnemonic Did It Always Run Really Horribly Over Each Ankle, and I’ve never misspelt it since 🙂

61. Thanks Fed, I loved this. My top picks were 1,8 (for being so convoluted), CAN-DO, and POWER DRESSING. I solved KNOCK-DOWN partly because I thought Bradman was DON Manley, the setter. Spelling DIARRHOEA has always been a crap shoot for me but I managed to get it right today. I couldn’t parse NOISOME so thanks manehi for the blog.

62. Me @60 — in fact I’ve belatedly remembered that I once used that mnemonic in a clue in an amateur puzzle:

    Originally did it always run really horribly over each ankle in a fluid motion? (8)

    🙂

63. Didn’t know TANGA. When I saw trousered I was on alert but took a while to see it wasn’t one bit inside another.
    Thanks Fed and manehi

64. I’m in the positive camp. Always look forward to seeing Fed as the setter. Loved this one as usual. Several favourites, especially KNOCK DOWN which I thought a great surface (although I know lots of people hate cricket clues).
    Thanks F and M.

65. I wonder if any solvers did get 1,8 from either the definition or the wordplay, rather than the crossers?

66. muffin @65
    I can tell you that I got 1,8 from crossers (just the P and B but not from just the B), then the enumeration and then the definition, in rapid succession. I admit I did not test the wordplay for that one.

67. muffin @ 65
    I got it from the definition and the numeration. There’s not a lot that 4, 4, 5, 5, 2, 6 can be. I just assumed it was an anagram – of something!

    Anyway, I just wanted to say how impressed I am with the blog. Well done and thanks manehi. All clearly explained, and in plain English too, with no recourse to ‘envelopes’ and ‘charades’ (whatever they are) or any of the other nonsense that some use.

68. Muffin @65: For 1,8: I guessed the definition and worked out the anagram of bun and penicillin after I had several crossers; I then had enough to guess the rest. The “was” from WASH was the last piece I entered.

69. Really enjoyed this but solving early in the morning and from the crossers it took me a while to get rid of the notion that 1 began with “wash anus” and ended “in public”. NHO Tanga which was my only fail. Absolutely loved the 6p solution. I love Fed’s wordplay.

70. Thanks manehi and thanks all.

    Surprised to see a couple of people querying TANG/TOUCH – it didn’t seem at all controversial to me. One of the definitions for TANG in Chambers is “a smack, tinge or hint” and I’ve definitely met the word being used in this way out in the wild.

    The mnemonic that’s stayed with me for DIARRHOEA is: Died in a Rolls Royce having over eaten again

    Cheers!

71. Thanks Fed and manehi. I enjoyed this one. RC@69: was your issue with 1,8 to do with 17d?

72. Well that was a struggle but I got through it in the end with only TERMS needing a reveal. For some strange reason I knew TANGA, possibly because it’s a bikini bottom which reveals a large amount of the wearer’s bum – as favoured in Brazil and increasingly across the rest of the world, sometimes with disturbing results. I obviously don’t get out enough !! Thanks to manship and to Fed

73. Anna@67 In case you read this at this hour ridiculous to me and even more so to you — do you recall the game of charades? You have to portray the name of a song, book or film in pantomime, and you do it word by word and sometimes syllable by syllable. In cryptic charade the setter presents successive bits of the answer with various cryptic devices: anagrams, additions, subtractions, synonyms, whatever.

74. Wow, a bit of a slog but certainly worth it with some really amazing clues. I think Fed is a bit of an outlier and I love the clues where all the words seem to go together such as 25ac and 4d. Make the mistake of thinking that “Do” in 14ac was short for “Ditto” as it seemed a very Fed thing.

75. A mixed bag for me. I prefer the clues requiring lateral thinking to overcome clever concealments and smooth, misleading surfaces to the grind of charades with many parts and long anagrams with the parts separated and modified before reassembly. I live for the “aha”. So like others I put in answers like 1,8 and am unmotivated to go back and work out the parts. I appreciate others have different preferences.

    Liked IMITATE (nice surface, and mental search to arrive at “do” as the definition), ISSUE (all definition(s) and no wordplay, plus a surface that works) KNOCKDOWN, POWER DRESSING (double misdirection on parts of speech).

    Haven’t heard of TOOLKIT in context of software rather than hardware. A quick Google suggests it’s a proprietary name, yes? NHO Tanga (and I’m nor Robinson Crusoe there). (I like the “because” in John B @79.

    I thought “typically” a mis-hit as a definition of ON AVERAGE (we typically have 2.3 children?) even if one is thinking of mode rather than mean (or median) as one’s type of average. Liked the construction though. And although TERM is a period of time, I struggle to think of a context where it means TIME (i.e., where you could substitute one for the other). But I have no problem with “touch” for TANG.

    Anyways, thanks to Fed and manehi.

76. Thanks for the responses to mine @65

77. 3d probably the best – for its surface.

    I couldn’t parse DIARRHOEA (I’d rather not, thank you! 🙂 ) though it was obvious from the crossers. I did see that RADIO provided some fodder but I was stuck on this POP ART concept.

    TANGA is a word I’d never heard of, and the crossers/wordplay didn’t help much (I was wondering if TINTA is a word). So I had to look up the possibles.

    I think TOOLKIT is acceptable with the ? for a DBE. There are all sorts of “Toolkits” in softwareland, not all of them for solving problems.

    1a etc. and 26a: very topical!

    Thanks to FED but a real toughie! Well done manehi for explaining…

78. Valentine @73 – I have to admit I share Anna’s view, in that I don’t like the word “charade” in parsing explanations. Possibly because the old party game of “charades” is so tacky and passé nowadays (but I’ll make allowance perhaps for Monty Python’s hilarious sketch).

79. A day late but just to say cracking puzzle. Thanks to manehi for clearing up a couple I was too lazy to parse & to DG both for the crossword & the mnemonic

80. Several days late … gosh that was a toughie. But thoroughly enjoyable so wanted to post to say thank you to Fed, and Manehi for the blog. We are proud (and somewhat amazed) we got it all correct. Favourites PET NAME, BUMPTIOUS, and PASS OUT.

81. Found this one at the bottom of a pile for recycling. Rather surprised to find the comments still open.

    Failed on TANGA. I do find Fed hard work at times, but I can’t see why some found EVOKE so tricky. KE comes from the middle of cricKEters, so we need a five-letter county ‘discovered’. Perhaps it’s the irrational dislike of cricket that puts some off.

    Belated thanks to Fed and manehi.

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