A thoughtfully constructed and tractable cryptic from Everyman this week. Just like every week, really.
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 Mariners with beers for each: they try to move stuff
SALESMEN
Everyman is inviting you to exchange EA for ‘each’ in SEAMEN for ‘Mariners’ with ALES; the result is SALESMEN, whose job it is to move, or sell, stuff.
5 Grotesque, having caught drunken expostulation
GOTHIC
A charade of GOT and HIC!
10 Say the thing
ARTICLE
You need to take ‘say’ in its ‘for example’, sense; and ‘the, for example’, gives you an ARTICLE of the definite variety. So it’s a dd.
11 Land crumbling into sea
ESTONIA
(INTO SEA)* with ‘crumbling’ as the anagrind. Great surface.
12 With energy, canter and get hitched on the run
ELOPE
A charade of E and LOPE.
13 Second lag
GET BEHIND
A dd, using ‘second’ in its ‘back’ sense: ‘She seconded his proposal.’
14 Focus, as this may provide you with drink
CONCENTRATE
A dd. Think dilute-to-drink orange squash.
18 Scare away Ed Balls, showing aromatic ingredient
CARAWAY SEED
(SCARE AWAY ED)* with ‘balls’ as the anagrind. ‘That government policy is complete balls.’ An anagrind of choice very often for Cyclops (aka Brummie) in Private Eye.
21 ‘All-star’ assortment that includes Everyman: sense a problem?
SMELL A RAT
An insertion of ME for ‘Everyman’ in (ALL STAR)* The insertion indicator is ‘that includes’ and the anagrind is ‘assortment’.
23 Grasses often seen adjacent to violas etc?
REEDS
A dd. The second part is referencing the orchestra, where the sections are often referred to by their instrument type: the strings, the reeds, the brass.
24 Part of boat for rowing, or, we’re told, one found on canal
OARLOCK
A charade of a homophone of OR and LOCK.
25 Aggravated, annoyed? It’s innocuous
ANODYNE
(ANNOYED)* with ‘aggravated’ as the anagram.
26 Bar that will prove attractive?
MAGNET
A cd.
27 Belittled as ‘average’, puncturing performance
DEMEANED
An insertion of MEAN for one of the mathematical ‘averages’ in DEED. The insertion indicator is ‘puncturing’.
Down
1 Being held up, goes over what creates a gap
SPACER
A reversal (‘being held up’, since it’s a down clue) of RECAPS.
2 Cleansing substance‘s left unopened, ‘magical concoction’
LOTION
A charade of L and [P]OTION.
3 South American with reputation: bully that you can’t criticise
SACRED COW
A charade of SA, CRED and COW in its verbal sense.
4 Back-up for safety can be key when involved with merger
EMERGENCY BRAKE
(CAN BE KEY MERGER)* with ‘when involved with’ as the anagrind.
6 Some accoutrements being de trop
OUTRÉ
Hidden in accOUTREments. De trop and outré are both French expressions meaning ‘too much’ or OTT.
7 Disadvantage: partial hitch, and I capitulate
HANDICAP
Hidden in hitcH AND I CAPitulate.
8 Crime novelist who may provide illumination?
CHANDLER
A dd. The first element is referencing Raymond CHANDLER, who created the PI Philip Marlowe; the second element is a historic word for a candlemaker, and is of course the reason it ended up joining – for example – Butcher and Baker as a surname. It comes from the old French word for ‘candle’, une chandelle, which has come into English in ‘chandelier’. Modern French has une bougie for a candle (and a spark plug).
9 ‘Allow the flesh to congeal’? Notoriously callous pronouncement
LET THEM EAT CAKE
A charade of LET, THE MEAT and CAKE. The usual translation into English of the French phrase Qu’ils mangent de la brioche! and attributed to Marie Antoinette as her response to being told that the peasants had no bread to eat. Except she never said it: it was a phrase created by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his (not entirely factual) autobiography when Marie Antoinette was only nine. She would never have heard the phrase and it was attributed to her decades after she was taken to the guillotine.
15 Patriotic icon loudly started to consume a wine served chilled
TUDOR ROSE
A homophone of CHEWED A followed by ROSE for ‘wine served chilled’. Not everyone pronounces the first consonants of TUDOR and CHEWED the same way; indeed, rhotic and non-rhotic speakers would have different ways of pronouncing the second syllable. But lots of people do pronounce it this way, which is good enough for a homophone type clue to work.
16 Primarily inclement, chilly – even Siberian – tempest, often restricting mobility?
ICE STORM
The initial letters of the second to eighth words of the clue, and a cad.
17 Forest creature and ferret go wild
TREE FROG
(FERRET GO)* with ‘wild’ as the anagrind.
19 East African knowledge certainly not heading north
KENYAN
A charade of KEN and NAY reversed (‘heading north’ works because it’s a down clue). KEN in this sense is a (mainly Northern) dialect word: ‘It’s beyond my ken.’
20 Rise like condor to begin with, then halt
ASCEND
A charade of AS, C for the initial letter of ‘condor’ and END.
22 Shapeless, abandoned
LOOSE
A dd. Loose women perhaps don’t traditionally wear loose clothes.
Many thanks to Everyman for this week’s puzzle.
Lovely puzzle. Great blog. Thanks, Everyman and Pierre!
Liked SALESMEN, REEDS, OARLOCK, LET THEM EAT CAKE and TUDOR ROSE.
Very annoying. I got all but one quite quickly. Took me ages to get SPACER.
Liked: DEMEANED, GOTHIC, SACRED COW, CHANDLER, ASCEND
Thought HANDICAP was well hidden.
Thanks Everyman and Pierre
I also had trouble with the SALESMEN/SPACER pair.
Everyman seems to be pitching his puzzles as slightly harder than thequiptic, or the Guardian Monday puzzles in general. Another superb example.
Thanks both.
SPACER also my LOI. SAY THE THING favourite.
I don’t know that it’s fair having OUTRÉ, ACCOUTREMENTS and DE TROP in one clue.
Alan Connor, our current Everyman, when he interviewed himself in Meet the Setter, said “The solver I have in my head has recourse to a friend or family member who will gently explain something arcane”. Not necessarily true, as he did acknowledge in a 15sq blog. He’s been around the greatest of setters over a very long time, who largely have a classical education and bias in clue setting, in my experience. Frankly, I do think that clue is OTT, or maybe a joke, but only for the ones in the know.
PDM@5 I have the same bugbear with foreign language (invariably French or Latin) clues generally. Friends and family members would be no help unfortunately; I usually resort to google once the crossers are in. Unlike unfamiliar English words their revelation has no value to me. For those who speak the language I would think they are write-ins and therefore equally unrewarding. That aside, I thought this crossword was up to Everyman’s usual high standard. Loved the congealed flesh and SALESMEN. Thanks Pierre and Everyman.
Enjoyed this one. ??I noted at the time that the ‘mariners’ from 1a (“SEAMEN”) would fit as a solution in 1d, which might have made for a cross-reference. I wonder if Everyman considered this.
Thanks to Everyman and to Pierre for an entertaining blog.
Just come here to see what people thought of SPACER. It eluded me. This is because, in my life, I have only come across spacers as things that fill in gaps rather than create them. They are typically bits of motorcycle wheels.
I’m not quibbling with the clue – Google says they create gaps in some areas – just that that isn’t the usage I’m personally familiar with.
I speak French all-day, but I think that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be expected to know what “de trop” means. If I dropped it into my conversation I think I’d be (a) not understood by most people and (b) look extremely pretentious.
As usual though, great crossword – about my level.
Thanks for the blog, another fine puzzle, the rhyming pair back in the long down clues . For Jay we have ESTONIA and ANODYNE. I liked GOTHIC and CARAWAY SEED , both a bit like Cyclops. HANDICAP was very well hidden.
For OUTRE I see the points made by PDM@5 and Paul@6 but overall I think it is okay, all three words are in Chambers. I would say that ACCOUTREMENTS and OUTRE are no longer specifically French words as such , although French originally. It is also a hidden answer which helps with obscurity .
The experts may be in the blog later, I was barred from doing French O Level .
Gliddofglood , tiling spacers are used to create gaps of the right size between the tiles .
It really depends on your reading material – outré I know from reading English books, but it feels old fashioned now. We used to use a lot more French smattered through English – ton meaning society, on-dit for gossip, déjà-vu, nuance and naif have been absorbed. From the books, they were all introduced, probably with the Hugenots and French émigrés at the time of the French Revolution.
The words we got from the Norman invasion aren’t seen as French now – beef (boeuf) old English gave us cow, pork (porc) OE swine, mutton (mouton) and lamb (l’agneau) OE sheep, but loads more. It’s why our meats have different names from our animals.
[Shanne@11. Love your examples. I did read books some time ago in the dark ages. Core vocabulary in any language is food, glorious food. Particularly meaningful to me, daughter of a butcher/sheep-farmer’s son and a dairy-farmer’s daughter.
I found out that my Irish ancestry came from Norman ancestry. It’s all very interesting to me, but my point is really about attracting newer solvers, which is what I understand Everyman is meant to be about. I’m 70, Australian, and a troglodyte, having had some education in French and German.]
A question about 4 down: is it unusual (or stretching any conventions) to have an anagrind working on words that precede and follow it? For me at least, it was an effective misdirection as I couldn’t parse the solution.
Enjoyed the crossword, blog and comments.
Chris Smith@13. The instructions are quite clear i.e. can be key involved with merger.
On the one hand, I like the way the linguistic style is itself OUTRE, on the other I think de trop means unnecessary rather than OTT. If you are de trop you are more likely to be a gooseberry than outrageous, I feel.
Chris@13, as long as the clue provides accurate instructions I think it’s all fair. In this case “when involved with” explains what to do.
Sorry Chris I now see Nicbac had already responded
To answer your question, Chris: no, there is no break or stretch of a convention in this clue. As nichbach says, it’s a question of following the instructions. CAN BE KEY, when involved with MERGER, gives you the solution. I suppose the anagrind is slightly different, in that it’s not a one-word instruction.
An enjoyable crossword, even though I failed to fully parse 1a, I take it that ‘ea’ is short for ‘each’ ?
As regards 9d there was, and still is, a law in France that say if a baker runs out of bread he must sell brioche (cake like bread) at the same price.
Thank you everyman and Pierre.
I seem to remember that SPACER was my LOI and was a good clue, I thought. I also enjoyed the well-hidden HANDICAP.
Thanks Everyman and Pierre.
Thanks Nicbach, Paul & Pierre for responses. I seem to be alone in seeing ambiguity (which is no bad thing in a clue?) in 4 down.
Is ‘involved’ doing double duty as anagrind and connecting the two parts of the fodder? Or is the clue relying on ‘with’ to connect them? If the latter, it’s unclear to me that ‘merger’ is subject to the anagrind rather than any other form of wordplay (synonym).
Not a complaint, just intrigued.
Quite tough. I rather miss the days when the Everyman was a good puzzle for beginners. I’m prepared to spend a bit longer on a Saturday Prize puzzle but I prefer the Sunday puzzle to be over quickly.
I was unsure how to parse:
5ac GOTHIC apart from def = grotesque
13ac GET BEHIND apart from def = lag
15d TUDOR ROSE apart from rosé = wine / def = patriotic icon
Favourite: ARTICLE.
Thanks, both.
Fell down on the NW corner, couldn’t parse any of it and both SALESMEN and SPACER eluded me. I like ANODYNE as a word.
Chris @21 there’s no double duty. It’s as others have said, X ‘involved with’ Y, with the cryptically superfluous ‘when’ chucked in to help the surface along.
Though for cryptic readers, I think the deployment of ‘when’ forces involved to be an adjective rather than a pp. Any takers?
The solving of SALESMEN seems like a lot to ask of beginning solvers. It was certainly too much for me.
Shanne@11 To add to your point about French words for meat and English words for the animals the meat comes from, it was the Saxon peasant who had to raise the animal and the French aristocrat who got to eat the meat.
Lots of fun. Thanks Everyman and Pierre. Too bad, no birds.
I’m quite a fan of outrageous homophones, but TUDOR = CHEWED A is pushing it.
Though what really caused the eye-roll with 15d was the idea of the TUDOR ROSE as a patriotic icon. It was the symbol of a family of grasping parvenus, two of whose members (Fat Hal and Bloody Mary) wreaked damage in their lifetimes which endured for centuries.
But times change. Declaring “Not my King!” nowadays may get your collar felt by the Met, if they haven’t got any black people to duff up. The same declaration in the time of Fat Hal would have got you hanged, drawn and quartered…
All of which being said, thanks to Everyman and to Pierre.
Well I’m a relatively new solver; I’ve been working my way through Everyman, Quiptic, and Monday Cryptics for a few months now (hoping to advance to Tuesdays soon), and I had no problem with outré or de trop. Although as Shanne noted further up thread, it may depend on the books one reads. These are words that I regularly see sprinkled in the kind of fiction I read. I think accoutrements is already accepted as a normal word in English parlance.
I’m probably a bit late for this, but I’ll ask anyway – I got LOTION, but was (and still am) struggling with the parsing. How does “unopened” indicate that the first letter of POTION should be dropped?
TanTrumPet @29 (if you drop in again) – the way I think of it is this:
Imagine that the letters P, O, T, I, O and N represent successive acts in a musical line-up. P is due to do the ‘opening’ or introductory performance which gets the evening underway. If P goes missing, the programme is lacking its opening element, and so in a sense is ‘unopened’.
I too thought that Handicap was well hidden and got stuck in the top left corner for a bit. As usual I’ve gained some useful general knowledge from the comments. A great start to the weekend.
Liked this puzzle a lot, but could not parse “salesmen”, “article”,
and “Tudor Rose”. Struggled with “spacer”. Saw no problem with outré/de trop which it seems to me should be terms familiar to any educated person.
Agree with NeilH@27 that “chewed a” = “tudor” is pushing it, in respect of homophones.
Favourite was “Chandler”.
Thanks to Everyman and to Pierre.
Enjoyed this and got most of it. Favourites were elope, article, reeds.
ROLLOCKS to oarlocks!
Got to salesmen after considering helmsman.
The parsing was too arcane for my taste.
I didn’t get SPACER or LOTION, had no problem with OUTRE, really liked HANDICAP and SALESMEN
Plenty to make me work hard today on this!