Another fine Quiptic from one of the more recent additions to the setting stable for this slot. Bravo/Brava to Chandler.
Abbreviations
cd cryptic definition
dd double definition
cad clue as definition
(xxxx)* anagram
anagrind = anagram indicator
[x] letter(s) removed
definitions are underlined
Across
1 Lever caught with things in line by counter
CROWBAR
A charade of C, ROW and BAR.
5 Model on holiday has to leave hurriedly
MAKE OFF
A charade of MAKE and OFF.
10 See person holding back fencing sword
EPEE
Hidden reversed in sEE PErson.
11 A couple object to such a fruit
GOOSEBERRY
A cd. Playing GOOSEBERRY is an informal phrase for making up a group of three when the other couple would much prefer – for romantic reasons – to be a twosome. It comes, apparently, from the times when young couples would need to be chaperoned. If you are interested in the origin of the phrase and have five free minutes this bank holiday, this site has some interesting thoughts.
12 Filter list I’d assembled
DISTIL
(LIST ID)* with ‘assembled’ as the anagrind. For chemists, the verbs describe actions that are entirely distinct; but in common usage they overlap.
13 Least costly copy held in strong box
CHEAPEST
An insertion of APES in CHEST. The insertion indicator is ‘held in’.
14 Artistic work secures a place firstly in church
LANDSCAPE
A charade of LANDS followed by A and P for the initial letter of ‘place’ in CE for ‘church’.
16 Risk with director departing in fury
ANGER
[D]ANGER
17 Son gets bite in tiny spot
SPECK
A charade of S and PECK.
19 Same motor working in place generating heat?
STEAM ROOM
(SAME MOTOR)* with ‘working’ as the anagrind.
23 Recall top independent male that’s civilised and hard working
DILIGENT
A charade of LID reversed, I and GENT.
24 Central part of idea by deputy for contrivance
DEVICE
A charade of DE for the central letters of iDEa and VICE. Think vice-chair, or vice-president.
26 Mystification shown by a pair of fellows among British lot missing a leader
BAFFLEMENT
This appears to be an insertion of A FF in B and [E]LEMENT, but I can’t equate ‘lot’ to ELEMENT.
27 Hot drink taken by king in wood
TEAK
A charade of TEA and K.
28 One on two wheels in Cyprus, not a top celebrity!
CYCLIST
A charade of CY and CLIST. Not A-list, not even B-list, but …
29 Pair avoid introduction to a work
PRELUDE
A charade of PR and ELUDE.
Down
2 Antiquated type keeping page and a duplicate
REPLICA
An insertion of P in RELIC, followed by A. The insertion indicator is ‘keeping’.
3 Western hotel with varied tea and cereal
WHEAT
A charade of W, H and (TEA)* H for ‘hotel’ is from the NATO/phonetic alphabet and the anagrind is ‘varied’.
4 A good priest in North Carolina having shining virtue?
ANGELIC
A charade of A followed by G and ELI inserted in NC. The insertion indicator is ‘in’.
6 Woman who was first among everyone to get educational qualification
A-LEVEL
An insertion of EVE in ALL. The insertion indicator is ‘among’.
7 Mention of first person, one topping the order? That’s a surprise!
EYE-OPENER
A homophone of I (grammatically, the ‘first person’) and OPENER, a batter who would top the batting order in cricket. The homophone indicator is ‘mention of’.
8 Envision hostile figure penning note on Kent region
FORESEE
An insertion of RE for the second note of the tonic sol-fa and SE for (in crosswordland) ‘Kent region’ in FOE. The insertion indicator is ‘penning’.
9 Coaches opt out after mobilising lazy types
COUCH POTATOES
(COACHES OPT OUT)* with ‘after mobilising’ as the anagrind.
15 Retrograde journalist cut file into pieces, being dishonest
DECEITFUL
A charade of ED reversed and (CUT FILE)* with ‘into pieces’ as the anagrind.
18 Leading priest, one with Joseph’s partner
PRIMARY
A charade of PR, I and MARY. As a very lapsed Catholic, I must point out that Mary was Joseph’s wife. Partners and all that living in sin business didn’t exist back then: the Immaculate Conception ensured that Mary was born without sin, and December 8th is the Feast Day when you can celebrate the fact. Blame Pope Pius IX.
20 Accounts examiner said in France to be captivated by gold in different forms
AUDITOR
An insertion of DIT in AU and OR, two options for ‘gold’, the first a chemical symbol and the second used in heraldry. DIT is indeed the past participle ‘said’ in French. I knew that, but I’m not sure everyone could or should be expected to. We will find out below, no doubt.
21 Children between old river and a road to source of fruit?
ORCHARD
An insertion of CH in O, R and A RD. The insertion indicator is ‘between’.
22 Small space in building in which a court of law is absent
RECESS
A dd.
25 Key volume on much of Mediterranean country
VITAL
A charade of V and ITAL[Y].
Many thanks to Chandler for the Bank Holiday Quiptic entertainment.
Good stuff, apart from distil = filter, which I can’t accept.
I am with you on that Shirl, also ELELEMENT used as in an element of…. would imply a little.
But otherwise good stuff.
I too am uncomfortable with DISTIL/filter, although the latter is listed in Collins as a synonym. Never having studied French, I thought “dit” was a bit of a stretch.
I couldn’t work out why it was GOOSEBERRY, but reading the blog it does ring a very faint bell.
Good fun with plenty of smiles.
Nice Quiptic, but I couldn’t convincingly parse BAFFLEMENT – I had BEMUSEMENT for a while until the final crossers told me otherwise. Playing GOOSEBERRY was a familiar term in our family – always in the sense of an unwanted third party rather than a useful chaperone. My eldest aunt, as a teenager, often had to look after one or more much younger siblings, who played gooseberry on her time with boyfriends, to the discomfort of all parties.
Thanks Chandler and Pierre
Nice puzzle. I struggled with the first word of 5a, spending some time trying to justify RACE. I agree about the ELEMENT part of 26. Favourite CHEAPEST.
Sorry, if dictionaries equate “filter” with DISTIL, they are just plain wrong!
Enjoyable but it was less Quiptic than today’s Cryptic. Is there still an editor of puzzles at the Guardian anymore? If yes, what does he/she do?
I could not parse 26ac – I only got as far as A+FF in B + [e]LEMENT But I was baffled as to why element=lot.
New for me: GOOSEBERRY = a third person in the company of two people, especially lovers.
Thanks, both.
With some of the wordplay, looked up potential solutions for Kent region and got FOSSE. Fail.
Still baffled about BAFFLEMENT.
I must admit I biffed 26A, but I wonder whether it can be justified by this:
“The rowdiness was caused by the English [ contingent | element | lot ]”
No entirely convinced of this myself, but I thought I’d put it out there for comment…
Distil ? filter? Surely if you distil a liquid, you filter out its impurities?
Redrodney @10
Mmm – no! In simple distillation the liquid is boiled off and the impurites are left behind.
michelle@6 – I found this quicker than the Cryptic, but neither particularly challenging, so I’d give the editor a pass on this one.
Another who couldn’t parse BAFFLEMENT and corrected an equally unparsed bemusement when the crossers proved me wrong, but the rowdy element/lot of British tourists usage seems to work.
Thank you to Chandler and Pierre.
“Dit” and “On-dit” are in Chambers, meaning reputed and rumour/hearsay, respectively. But a bit much to expect Quiptic solvers to need the full crossworder’s Bible – the Pocket Oxford, possibly!
Pretty good relatively easy crossword, though I had the same doubts as others about BAFFLEMENT and DISTIL. I came to the same conclusion as Phil@9 regarding the former – and have the same lack of enthusiasm for it; and I suppose distillation and filtration are two (entirely different) means of separating or isolating components of a mixture/solution and therefore can sometimes be synonyms when used metaphorically – so just about OK, but again I don’t much like it.
The comments about ‘dit’ made me think idly about what level of knowledge of widely-spoken foreign languages can reasonably be expected, to solve fairly simple crosswords like this. I’d have said ‘dit’ was OK, but then I did study French at a basic level, and like many Brits do visit France from time to time. I certainly wouldn’t object to ‘merci’ or ‘bonjour’, and some food/drink words eg ‘bière’, ‘fromage’, ‘vin’ are commonly seen on packaging in UK supermarkets so should be acceptable in a UK crossword. But that’s just my opinion.
Thanks Chandler and Pierre.
I am trying to do this again without looking at answers/discussion.
17a. I think the first letter is S, but I cannot figure out the rest of the clue.
Do you have any suggestions/tips?
Got it!
I too came here wondering about 26ac. I think Phil @9 probably has the explanation, although I can’t say that I think highly of this clue.
I didn’t think to be bothered by DISTIL and filter, probably because as an American I was distracted by the spelling difference — we’d write DISTILL over here. I suspect there are probably cases in which the two can be used interchangeably, both in a metaphorical sense, although I can’t immediately come up with a great example.
I’d never heard of the GOOSEBERRY expression, so I learned something today.
Steffen
You might find this site very useful, especially for help on clues.
muffin @5 – I proffer the opinion that dictionaries inherently cannot be “wrong” in and of themselves, as their role is to reflect and document the usage of language, not define or regulate it.
So, as with many words with a precise scientific meaning, it is the average English speaker that is mistaken on the distinction between distil and filter, not the dictionaries – which are unfortunately not fact-checkers 🙂
In addition, many words acquire secondary, often figurative, meanings that do not correlate to their scientific origins. So whenever I see a claim that a dictionary is “wrong”, I urge the claimant to consider wider linguistic usage accepted in everyday life beyond the precise scientific definition 🙂
great stuff! loved anger, gooseberry and vital. didn’t like bafflement or foresee so much !
thank you to both Chandler and Pierre
I’m in the “dit is too much French” camp. Especially for a Quiptic. I haven’t studied French, though I’ve absorbed more than even I might realize through study of English literature, knowledge of opera, analogies from Latin and Spanish, and general intellectual snobbery. And when I saw after entering AUDITOR that “dit” had to mean “said,” I realized that I did know that. But I think foreign words are fair game in a crossword only when they are in common usage in plain English or are so commonly known that you don’t need to have taken French 101 to have encountered them.
(I would say that food words are an exception. But then American crosswords, ever hungry for vowel-rich words, have started an annoying trend of assuming that the entire sushi bar is fair game, like we all know our enoki from our unagi. The Japanese places near me all translate that stuff into English, guys, and I live in the nation’s third-largest city!)
On the vowel-rich words thing: ETE and EAU have long been staples of American crosswords, and at least ETE violates my rule for how much French is too much.
Ever notice that it’s rarely Spanish and even more rarely German, by the way?
One more comment: ENERO (Spanish for January) is another American crossword staple. Would that fly in Britain, where many fewer people study or speak Spanish? (Recall that the US is the world’s third- or fourth-largest Spanish-speaking country, depending on who’s counting.)
Rob T @19
Perhaps dictionaries should be more prepared to add “incorrectly”. Honestly, I cannot see how anyone could use “distil” to mean “filter”, or vice versa – it’s just wrong! The only thing they have in common is that they are both methods of separating mixtures, though quite different types of them.
Mrpenney@23 my impression is that dit and on-dit were very much English usage in the 19th Century, on-dit (literally one says) means a tit-bit of gossip and I’ve read it in a number of older books, maybe including Jane Austen, but if not her, authors copying her style.
However, in England I learned both French and German at school and have picked up a smattering of Spanish.
Muffin @24: perhaps in a non-chemical sense? “Please take your report and filter/distill it down to the two-page version.”
mrpenney @26 – this is what I meant in my comment about secondary / figurative meanings of words, so thanks for providing an example 🙂
Glad to see that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t like DISTIL. Mrpenney@26 just about manages to come up with a sentence in which distil = filter, for which congratulations; but basically I am with muffin@24, bold type and all.
Also relieved to find that I wasn’t the only one who could make no sense of BAFFLEMENT, beyond wondering whether there was a mini-theme going on – “Use scientific terms in such an imprecise way that anyone with any sort of scientific background will do a Pedanticus”.
On the other hand, I had no problem with AUDITOR. Yes, I studied French to O-level more years ago than I care to admit; but “on-dit” is a legitimate English expression, “diction” presumably comes from the same root (a lot of English is derived from Norman French, after all), and the mindset of “But we’re BRITISH – why should we have any interest in what FOREIGNERS do?” is one that’s given us a lot of grief over the last seven years.
A pleasant diversion from coronation-related blah. Thanks to Chandler and Pierre.
MrP @26
Even metaphorically that doesn’t work. If you distil ideas you are picking out the best bits; if you filter them you are discarding the worst bits.
My first venture into Guardian Quiptic,fared ok i guess.Much,much easier than Guardian Cryptics which i simply have not much success tackling.
Re 26 ac, one definition of ‘lot’ according to my copy of The Concise Oxford Dictionary is ‘each of a set of objects used in making a chance selection’. Thus ‘lot’ stands for ‘element’.
muffin@29, I get a feeling that you might be arguing for arguing’s sake, which as a confirmed curmudgeon I like to see. However, regarding MrP’s example @26: if you pick out the best bits you are discarding the worst bits, and if you discard the worst bits you are left with the best bits. In that sense the two words are metaphorically (not chemically) equivalent.
For BAFFLEMENT, I took the pair of fellows to be MEN and lot to be RAFFLE, hence B-(R)AFFLE-MEN. I’m still not sure where the final T comes from though