Guardian 29,120 – Qaos

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Mostly straightforward clueing from Qaos today, but is there any more to the puzzle?

Yes, of course there is: we have a theme of characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (who could perhaps be described as CARICATURES). As is often the case with Qaos, some of them and hidden within other words. Along with mALICE[‘s] ADVENTURE[s in] WONDER lotusLAND, we have the sHATTERs, the MOCKed TURTLE, the QUEENs of HEARTS and the MARCH sHARE. And I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d missed others.

Thanks to Qaos for the entertainment.

 
Across
1 CHESHIRE He’s rich, eccentric and fourth in line for county (8)
(HE’S RICH)* + the 4th letter of linE
6 MALICE Ill — will he swallow one capsule to begin with? (6)
1 C[apsule] in MALE (he)
9 REVAMP Prime Minister to declare U-turn and modernise (6)
Reverse of PM AVER
10 SHATTERS Name-dropping Star Trek actor takes time with small breaks (8)
[William] SHATNER (Captain Kirk in Star Trek) less N and with an extra T (time), plus S[mall)
11 ADVENTURE Exciting incident as a criminal turned to steal banks from Venice (9)
A + V[enic]E in TURNED*
13 PSYCH Mentally prepare for endless horror film (5)
A truncated PSYCHO (Hitchcock film)
15 MOCKED Derided and cut short after capital doubles? (6)
DOCKED (cut short) with the initial D (500 in Roman numerals) replaced by M (1000)
17 INFANT Female, one entering pub with tense baby (6)
F A in INN + T[ense]
18 NUANCE Subtlety shown by religious person describing a church (6)
A in NUN + CE
19 WONDER Ruby present sent back in amazement (6)
Reverse of RED NOW
21 STEEP Difficult actress rejects Oscar, finally (5)
[Meryl] STREEP less [osca]R
22 OUTERMOST Some tutor moving farthest away (9)
(SOME TUTOR)*
25 HANDMADE Personally crafted by female attendant discounting one note (8)
HANDMAID less I, + E (note)
26 TURTLE Express disapproval over end of supper with extremely little soup? (6)
[suppe]R in TUT (to express disapproval) + L[ittl]E
28 HEARTS They beat qualifiers’ outstanding run (6)
R[un] in HEATS (qualifying races)
29 SCYTHING Cutting very critical leading actor to be replaced by unknown (8)
SCATHING (very critical) with A[ctor] replaced by Y (unknown)
Down
2 HUE Grant delivered dye (3)
Homophone of Hugh (Grant, actor & comedian)
3 SHARE Singer voiced part (5)
Homophone of Cher
4 IMPATIENCE 999p ÷ @1 causing irritability? (10)
AT I “dividing” IM (999 – though this is probably not really valid in Roman numerals) PENCE +
5 ENSURE Guarantee blame after Conservative loss (6)
CENSURE less C
6 MEAN Average bloke touring Spain (4)
E (Spain) in MAN
7 LOTUSLAND Idyllic place of contentment for auto enthusiasts? (9)
Double/cryptic definition – Chambers has this hyphenated, as Lotus-land: “the country of the lotus eaters”
8 CARICATURES Exaggerated profiles rate a circus ‘poor’ (11)
(RATE A CIRCUS)*
12 DEMONSTRATE Tate Modern’s 9:23 (11)
Anagram (indicated by the 9: “revamp”) of TATE MODERN’S
14 INNOCENTLY Pope’s legacy: avoiding prison in retirement, simply (10)
INNOCENT (one of 13 popes) + LEGACY minus the reversed CAGE
16 CHAVENDER Fish and tea seller in New York (9)
CHA (tea) + VENDER – apparently a spelling favoured by the New Yorker. Chavender (new to me) is another name for the chub
20 QUEENS’ Pieces of Cambridge college (6)
Double definition – chess pieces for the first. The Cambridge college was founded (separately) by two different queens, so has its apostrophe after the S, unlike the one at Oxford, which is Queen’s
23 MARCH Walk over hot stuff (5)
Reverse of H[ot] CRAM
24 CATS Not hard to talk with small animals (4)
CHAT less H + S
27 LAN Family wanting the ultimate speed for local network (3)
CLAN less C (speed of slight, the “ultimate speed”)

122 comments on “Guardian 29,120 – Qaos”

  1. Thanks, Qaos and …
    Liked MOCKED (quite an interest-ing one) HEARTS (have to tick), IMPATIENCE(some change for sure), MARCH(almost misled by walk over) and LAN (I did C).

  5. Thanks Qaos and Andrew
    CHESHIRE CAT
    Qaos is rising up my “don’t bother with” list. 999 has never been IM; the surface of 12 is meaningless (though the construction is clever); I could go on.
    Andrew – where does the IENCE in 4 come from?

  7. CHESHIRE CAT is also there and, tbh, rather got me thinking along the theme’s lines from FOI. All very nicely put together. SHATTERS made me laugh, CHAVENDER was new but gettable and I enjoyed the mathematical clue (or both of them if you include MOCKED). Slightly surprised when both the first two down clues share identical formation – and both of them could be parsed in either direction which was slightly tricky.

    Thanks Qaos and Andrew

  11. Thought INNOCENTLY was very good, as was the whole puzzle.
    Thanks Qaos and Andrew.
    PS – Andrew. As the comments above show, your parsing of 4 down is incomplete.

  13. Continuing a fairly easy week. And I continued a long-standing tradition of not spotting the theme! Thanks to Qaos and Andrew.

  15. Got the spelling of ‘chavender’ wrong. Never heard of it and, though I deduced out how the clue worked, I mistakenly thought that it was the American spelling of vender that had o rather than e. Tough puzzle and not the most enjoyable Qaos I’ve tackled.

  16. Steffen @10. 23 gives you the definition of the answer – DEMONSTRATE being another word for MARCH.

  19. Mostly fun clues, even another Cherry on the top, though one or two felt a bit like flat pack assembly instructions. I had “Ill will” as the definition for MALICE and parsed HANDMADE as “handmaiden” less I&E. Thanks Andrew and Qaos.

  21. Paul@19
    MALICE
    I agree with you.
    ‘Will’ has to do double duty or grammar has to be compromised with ‘he swallow’.
    Maybe Ill as a noun means ‘ill-will’ too. Will wait for someone to explain.

    HANDMADE
    Your parsing doesn’t seem to work.

  26. I only cottoned on to the theme towards the end, so the final three: HEARTS, TURTLE, and QUEENS fell easily into place. A really enjoyable workout. With thanks to Qaos and Andrew.

  27. Enjoyed this, especially the rebus in 4d.

    One other themed solution that I thought that I spotted was in inFANt. Waving a fan is one of the ways that Alice shrinks in the book.

  28. Thank you Qaos for the fun puzzle!e and Andrew for the helpful blog.

    MAD is in HANDMADE for the HATTER

  31. handMADe goes with sHATTERs, I think.

    Also Alice means what she says, even if she doesn’t say what she means, although that one might be pushing it.

  32. I assumed 999 was a cryptic / playful allusion to IM rather than an exact reference. Given the theme perhaps Qaos was channelling ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less’

    For once I got the theme and even found it useful to get TURTLE as I’d been fixated on BOO for express disapproval

    Cheers Q&A

  33. Muffin@5 I took 9:23 to be the title of a work of art, so makes sense to me.

    Thanks Andrew for the explanation of MOCKED – I am sure we have had such a device recently (Probably Qaos again)?

    Thanks also Qaos. Cheshire was first one in so I suspected the theme straight away, for the first time ever.

  34. I liked this. The clue for MALICE is a little dubious as noted @19 & @21, but could be parsed with definition=’Ill will’, followed by an imperative ‘MALE: swallow I C’. No problem for me with IM=999; the ancient Romans may not have done it, but it’s no less logical than IX=9, and there is a ? at the end.
    Thanks both.

  36. 16 reminded me of this :

    A False Gallop of Analogies

    by Warham St. Leger

    There is a fine stuffed chavender
    A chavender, or chub
    That decks the rural pavender,
    The pavender, or pub,
    Wherein I eat my gravender,
    My gravender, or grub.

    It goes on much longer, very witty.

  37. beaulieu @34
    It may be logical, but there is actually a rule that the number subtracted in front must be at least a tenth as big as the number it is subtracted from. Hence IX is valid, but IL, IC, ID and IM are not.

  39. KVa@35: Yes. He can = male,as in asking about a baby ‘Is it a he or a she?’.

    muffin@37: Lots of crossword clues rely on not following the ‘rules’. The ? indicates something unusual is to be expected.

  40. I only saw the theme about half an hour after finishing the puzzle. I liked 28a but thought the use of 2 different clues in 12d a bit Pauline. I got the anagram quickly but failed to work out why. I’d never heard of 16d.

  41. Complete snafu in SW corner, and totally missed the theme. Bad day at the office… Thanks Andrew for all the enlightenment

  42. I must confess I was surprised at the blog’s first three words.
    I’d started off in fine form, getting CHESHIRE, HUE, SHARE and ENSURE swiftly, and giggling at SHATTERS.
    Then things started getting trickier.
    The theme sailed right over my head – as did the parsing to 12D (try as I might, I really couldn’t make head or tails of “Tate Modern’s revamp march”. Hey ho)
    I also drew a blank with the parsing of 4D, a CFE for me (crossed fingers entry) thinking the “@1” was a reference to cheshire…
    But, be that as it may, I got there in the end, and am therefore feeling dead chuffed. Clearly not as bright as I could be, but chuffed all the same.
    Thank you Andrew for all the help, and big thanks to Qaos for the entertainment.

  43. The version of 29a in the paper has an extra word, ie “Cutting very critical leading actor, one to be replaced by unknown (8)”, which puzzled me. In any case, does “leading actor” = A?

    Apart from that, all good fun. Thanks Qaos and Andrew.

  48. Seeing it was Qaos (who could be defined in a clue as “setter of themes”), and given that 1ac CHESHIRE went in straightaway, I WONDERed if the theme might be ALICE, and sure enough…

    CHAVENDER and LOTUSLAND were new but clear. INNOCENTLY was nifty, and the theme added to the fun; I haven’t watched that film since the kids were small (OK, I know it’s really a book: I’m not a Philistine). Tenuous connection but I used to know a fancy dress shop called REVAMP, which had a sort of Alice theme in its logo, as I recall.

    Thanks to Q&A (and extra thanks to Andrew for the Cambridge/Oxford colleges trivia, of which I was hitherto unaware).

  49. MOCKED just seems the wrong way round. Surely it should be ‘after capital halves’? Lovely solve throughout.

    Ta Qaos & Andrew.

  50. Very nice. Totally missed the theme, as usual. Had to check that CHAVENDER was in fact a fish, but the clueing was precise. Like AlanC@49 I wasn’t entirely happy with MOCKED. In my view “Short cut is derided after capital doubles” works better.
    Thanks to Qaos and Andrew.

  51. I saw the theme of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland after I completed the puzzle – lovely!

    Favourites: IMPATIENCE, HUE, NUANCE, INNOCENTLY (loi).

    New for me: William Shatner – I had a vague memory of this actor’s name but I needed Google to confirm it; CHAVENDER fish (thanks again, Google!)

    I could not parse 15ac.

    Thanks, both.

  53. [revbob@40 – the usual practice here is to refer to clues by the answer in capitals as in HEARTS and DEMONSTRATE rather than “28a” and “12d” as you have. This saves commenters the bother of having to keep scrolling back – while making it less likely that later commenters jusr can’t be bothered so that repeated points are also more likely to be made! I haven’t been very clear but it seems to be part of the unwritten etiquette…. and makes good sense to me]

  58. [Thanks muffin – I use them so rarely here that I’ll probably forget and you’ll have to remind me ? ]

  60. Qaos: You’re one of my favourite setters. You make me think outside the square and teach me new things. Which is a welcome for someone at a pension age.
    Andrew: You’re one of my favourite bloggers. I find it easy to check with your blog if my parsing was correct, or (on the rare occasions I didn’t fully parse, joke) where I didn’t quite make every letter behave the way it should.
    Love (most) of the comments too of course.
    You’re all a great bunch of folk to be interacting with.

  61. I enjoyed this a lot. I don’t mind unorthodox Roman numerals (4 on clock faces is traditionally IIII) and ‘Tate Modern’s 9:23’ works for me. I opted for the parsing HANDMA(I)DE(N). I do agree that the clue for MALICE doesn’t quite work – reading ‘swallow’ as an imperative (or a subjunctive) is rather forced.

    Lots of good clues, though there is heavy use of single letter additions and subtractions. And I spotted the theme, though I managed to solve the puzzle without recourse to it.

    [Further Oxbridge trivia: there are 9 colleges with the same name at both universities. In most cases the Cambridge one is the older foundation – the only exceptions are the two that are written differently: Queens’/Queen’s and Magdalene/Magdalen]

    Thanks to S&B

  62. Just here to say that I have never seen vendor spelled as vender. If Andrew is right and it’s a New Yorker thing, know that that magazine is notorious for having quirky house style rules. They may be the last publication left, for example, that still puts a dieresis over the second vowel in words like cooperate and reexamine. Anyway, “vender” is by no means widespread over here!

    About the puzzle itself, I have little to add. I enjoyed it. Qaos often plays fast and loose with Roman numerals, so I had no objection to IMPATIENCE–that was just him being cheeky, as the question mark was intended to indicate.

  63. Also, IMPATIENCE works fine if you read it as Crossewordese rather than Latin. 999 is one before 1000, which is an instruction to put an I before an M. A bit like this clue: Naked fan is an ass (7) for BUFFOON, with “naked” to be read as “with nothing on,” so + O ON.

  64. With CHESHIRE slipping in straight away this quickly opened up the top half of the puzzle, but eventually almost ground to a halt in the SW corner. Knew Chub, but not CHAVENDER. And I’m perhaps one of the few people who have never watched Star Trek, so had to have a sneaky look at the cast list to get SHATTERS. Couldn’t see how MOCKED worked, or indeed how to arrive at the last 4 letters of IMPATIENCE. Didn’t know LAN, and loi was HANDMADE. Appreciated the complexity involved with arriving at DEMONSTRATE. Lots to admire and learn from for me today…

  65. mrpenney @62: From Wiktionary:

    vender (plural venders)

    Alternative spelling of vendor

    Usage notes
    Although vender is rare in modern English writing, The New Yorker still uses this spelling.[1]

    References

    1. Jen Doll (2012) “Words We Would Eliminate From ‘The New Yorker'” The Atlantic, 20 April 2012.

  67. A tad trickier than the last couple of days for me, but not by much. A few more than average were spotted as definitions and back-parsed. The theme whistled over my head as per.

    I don’t personally mind the faux-man numerals trick in a crossword. Interesting to see a couple of alternative parsings that work equally well: I thought the def in MALICE was ‘ill-will’ rather than ‘ill’, as the rest of the clue made a kind of tenuous sense in its own right if you read it in a certain way. For HANDMADE I thought the setter meant for us to remove I + N from HANDMA-i-DE-n rather than remove an I and add an E to HANDMA-i-D(E), but see both as logical in their own way.

    Cheers both.

  68. Thanks for the blog, totally missed the theme , I was hoping for cheese. As Lord Jim @42 notes the clue for SCYTHING does not quite work in the paper, a shame because it is nearly very good. I liked DEMONSTRATE , INNOCENTLY was very neat with the reversed missing cage. CHAVENDER is pretty obscure but the clue was fair and the reference gave the “er” ending whether it is true or not. Never heard of LAN , the wordplay is fine but c for ultimate speed is highly speculative.

  69. Thanks for the laugh TonyM@36!
    I enjoyed this far more than many Qaos offerings, but missed the theme entirely, so it’s been fun going back to find lots of Alice names and words.

  70. TonyM@36: here’s the whole poem

    Goodness knows how long ago I read it, but the Chavender or Chub stuck in the memory – today is the first time I’ve ever seen a CHAVENDER in the wild. Glad to see somebody else remembers it.

  71. Roz @68
    I’m surprised you haven’t heard of LAN. You’ve probably used one – it’s a Local Area Network of computers.

  72. As soon as I saw ‘999’ in the clue for 4d I knew two things: 1) the answer would begin with the letters IM, and 2) muffin would be on here to complain that that’s breaking the rules of Latin numerals. 🙂

    The other numerical clue, with ‘9:23’ was also very clever, I thought. The reference to the answers to other clues was neatly done, and the anagrist was a tremendous spot. But I disappointed myself by not remembering the “D becomes M” device that Qaos used to get MOCKED from DOCKED, which meant that was my only unparsed solution.

    Thanks to Qaos and Andrew

  74. Lord Jim@43. It looks like someone realised too late that the clue for SCYTHING was wrong. ‘Leading actor’ for A is fine, but the ‘one’ is superfluous, it seems to me.

  76. Nicola@66
    Thanks.
    My apologies to Steffen!
    I gave a wrong answer to Steffen, looking at 3D (which incidentally is a homophone clue) instead of 2D.

  77. Sorry, PeterM@52: I see you got there ahead of me.

    Either you enjoy Qaos’s off the wall clues (I do) or the rebuses and hiccups like IM for 999 really annoy you. It took me an age to get James T Kirk’s actor to come to mind, and another age to stop wondering why some tutor wouldn’t make UTTERMOST, but I enjoyed both, along with IMPATIENCE and particularly CHESHIRE for an amusing surface.

    And the theme didn’t surface until after I’d finished.

  78. Muffin@5 – I took the surface of 12 as a quiet barb against a lot of modern(not so modern, by now) – eg. Cage’s notoriously piss-taking “4:33” “composition” – piles of bricks, artfully arranged rubbish taken out and junked by the cleaners, most of Emin’s and Hirst’s oevre etc …

  79. I’m surprised that nobody has quibbled about the word ‘actress’ in the clue for STREEP. It violates the Guardian house style. Though not all female thesps object to being so labelled, and personally I think it is justified – it is the one occupation where exponents most often represent their own sex, so the term shouldn’t be considered to be demeaning.

  81. I was really pleased to see that it was Qaos providing today’s puzzle for me to solve on my train journey home after a great day yesterday on the front row of the Centre Court.

    As it was Qaos, I was on the theme alert from the outset and, as for PostMark @7, CHESHIRE at 1ac immediately seemed significant and it didn’t take many more entries to show that the association was cats rather than cheese.

    I was so chuffed at the early discovery that I composed a comment on my phone – a new experience for me: I couldn’t be doing with all that scrolling every day! – only to lose my connection at the very end and so I decided to leave it until I arrived home. In the meantime, all I would have wanted to say had been said and it only remains to thank Qaos for a very pleasurable accompaniment to my journey and Andrew, for another great blog, as well as others for an interesting conversation along the way…
    … and I’m home in time for Alcaraz later on. 🙂

  82. Roz@68 and 75!
    I remember that you expressed similar reservations about C/speed light being the ultimate speed. I think the setters may not change their habit soon though for an expert in physics like you, it may be an irritant.

    We discussed IM for 999 a lot today. Almost all cryptic solvers would have immediately thought of IM rather than CMXCIX. Still accepting 999=IM doesn’t feel good.

    Your view above @75 is something interesting. And I know you don’t use email as well (There was a discussion on SPAM…). I am sure you haven’t felt handicapped or else you would have chosen to use these tools. My way is not the only right way! Rather my way may not be the right way!!!

  83. SH @74: I’m afraid I don’t agree that “leading actor” for A is fine. It’s like “first actor”, which doesn’t mean A either. This has of course been discussed here before. I think the problem was summed up quite well by TheZed @46 on Pan 28,202, and I quote:

    It’s not that the odd letters of “hats” (or, indeed “hat”) are not “h” and “t” but that “odd hats” is not the same as “(the) odd (letters of) hats” where the missing “of” is the most critical… A similar issue is when setters use forms such as “first time” to indicate “t” or “last night” similarly, as opposed to the more accurate “First of May” or “Last of all” for “m” and “l”. The missing “of” means that one has to accept a new form of grammar just for cryptic crosswords in order to make this work.

    Gervase @79: notwithstanding the Guardian’s style guide, “actress” crops up quite often in the crossword, including in one of my all-time favourite clues (Paul, 27,523):

    Actress was less inclined to sketch Robin and Maurice Gibb, but…? (4,9)

  85. Gervase @79 – you clearly haven’t visited the RSC lately. The latest travesty was ‘Julius Caesar’, with both Brutus and Cassius played by women, referred to as ‘she’ throughout, apart from the funeral speeches, where Brutus is ‘an honourable man’ and Mark Antony’s speech over Brutus’ body:
    … nature might stand up
    And say to all the world, “This was a man.”

  86. Guessed the theme from CHESHIRE and TURTLE, which was helpful since a number of the other theme words were only parts of answers.

    I like Qaos’s numerical wordplay and don’t mind the occasional stretchiness – it is play after all (especially with a question-mark).

  87. Very unusually for me I got the theme right away, got 1a first and thought “This will be an Alice-themed puzzle.”

    I’m not sure anyone has mentioned it, but the MAD for Mad Hatter can be found in handMADe. (Which like several others I parsed as Handmaiden minus I and N.)

    Another American here to say that we don’t spell it “vender”–if the New Yorker does that’s a very recondite reference! I had to Google “chavender” to check that it could indeed be a fish, which we only call “chub.”

    I very much liked this–the way REVAMP comes out of the clue was very satisfying, and I liked the Roman numeral clues even if they’re not purist. Another quibble, though: Since LAN stands for “local area network” it’s very close to the given definition!

  88. I was dissatisfied with 16D. As usual I object to fish (and plants) unless very common. And despite living in the US for several decades I have never come across the spelling “vender”, and consider it even more of a stretch if it requires familiarity with New Yorker magazine in particular.

    Anyway, as usual I completely missed the theme, the number play in 15A, and the obvious-in-hindsight parsing of 23D. Thank you Andrew and Qaos.

  89. Gervase @79 I was once told off by a female actor on the grounds that “actress” was at one time a disapproving euphemistic implication that a woman had “loose morals”, which was insulting to women at the time and all kinds of problematic today.

    Historical stories aside, there are remarkably few roles that on close inspection are inherently gendered, albeit that the choice of gender can sometimes be relevant to the plot, e.g. a woman in a male-dominated field. See, for example, Hidden Figures. So the actor/actress distinction does seem to be an obsolescent one not seen in many other job names these days. We should also note the growing acceptance in society of non-binary gender, making it even more problematic to insist on actor/actress. There is in fact debate in the industry about dispensing with separate Best Actor and Best Actress categories for show business awards.

  90. In defence of CHAVENDER , I have no idea if vendor is spelt as vender in New York or the New Yorker magazine. If the clue had said “tea seller” I put in CHAVENDOR. The clue says “tea seller in New York” , this alerts me to something going on, probably er instead of or , I put in CHAVENDER and check Chambers when I get home.

  91. Lord Jim @83 – I’m with you on this. To make grammatical sense such letter indications should use either some form of possessive (‘of’, ‘in’, etc) or an adverbial form. Plain adjectives just don’t work satisfactorily, although it’s often easy enough to work out what the setter was getting at.

    Interestingly, if the updated clue had removed “leading actor” and retained “one” then it would have made more grammatical sense to me (with “one” indicating the ‘A’).

  92. [KVa @72 I do not really mind c , at least some science in the clue. Setters are unlikely to use – ultimate speed for particles of non-zero , real rest mass created delow the speed of light . ]

  94. Eileen and Jacob: I watched the TV transmission of the Globe’s Midsummer Night’s Dream on Sunday: Puck, and all the rude mechanicals apart from Bottom, were female and the four lovers were Demetrius, Hermia, Lysander and – Helenus (who was of course played by an Actor).

  95. As usual, I didn’t look at the setter’s name last night, so only this morning with the blog did I see “Quas” and think, “Oh, then what’s the theme?” It wasn’t hard to spot once I looked for it.

    Andrew — though others have mentioned the entry in comments, your list of ALICE-related entries doesn’t include 1a CHESHIRE 24d CATs. And the definition for 5a MALICE is “ill will,” not “ill.”

    And thanks for parsing ADVENTURE and MOCKED.

    CHAVENDER was as new to me as to (I think) everybody else, except those who knew the chub poem.

    Thanks to Qaos for the puzzle and Andrew for the enlightenment.

  96. Roz @68 in the blog C is defined as “speed of slight” which I assume must relate to the rate at which one can deliver insults?

  97. Thanks Andrew, also TonyM@36, PeterM@52 and anyone else who noted that excellent poem, I will try to incorporate some of these in daily use, and (as someone who looked up chavendor first and only then saw the light) think Roz makes a good point @90 to use all available info, even if not sure exactly what it means, to make an educated guess at what might be going on – though this would not rule out “chavendar” i suppose.
    Offspinner@73: “Alice in Sunderland” exists! It is an excellent graphic ‘novel’ by Bryan Talbot, featuring our Alice from this puzzle, but working in all sorts of other things including the death of Sid James and the famous Hartlepool spy monkey. I recommend it!
    Thanks Qaos.

  98. Bodycheetah@96 it is simply a misprint for speed of sleight, how fast you can cheat whilst dealing cards.
    Gazzh@ 98 I do not think the US change our “or” endings to ar , but some get changed to er .
    I am no expert on this.

  99. I don’t know an accent where s share and Cher are homophones. Being Scottish, such irritations are routine, but I do know lots of English speakers from diverse parts of the country.

  100. Graham @99
    They’re not the same for me either (another clue that irritated), but I suppose a Frenchman would pronounce “cher” the same as our “share”; I don’t know how he would pronounce the latter, though!

  101. Graham @99 and muffin @100 — I pronounce Cher and share the same (originally from Lancashire). And no-one ever said that ‘aural wordplay’ clues in crosswords need to be exact soundalikes in every accent… Ximenes for example referred to such clues as ‘puns’, not ‘homophones’, a distinction that may make irritation less likely 🙂

  102. Actually the main irritation was defining SHARE as “part” – yes, a share is a part, but “share” has much deeper layers of meaning.

  103. muffin@102. If SHARE has “much deeper layers of meaning”, do these always have to be expressed in a crossword clue in order to have your approval? It seems a little demanding. I’d rather go with your initial thought: “a share is a part”.

  104. SH @103
    I just wouldn’t use them interchangeably, so, for me, that means they aren’t equivalent.

  106. So the ch in Cher is a sh sound, the r is either pronounced or not in both words and the vowel is more or less the same, it seems to me. What’s the problem?

  107. Body Cheetah @32: the problem with your “nothing more, nothing less” theory is that today’s theme is Wonderland not Looking Glass, which is where Humpty Dumpty is to be found.

    Gervase @79: “actress” in the clue is entirely defensible since Streep’s 21 Oscar nominations so far (she may reject one, finally) are for Best Actress (in a leading or supporting role). The clue is following the stylebook of the Academy Awards, not that of the Grauniad.

  108. Thanks Qaos for a fun crossword. Another puzzle recently had an Alice theme so I had no trouble spotting this one. I liked many clues including MALICE, SHATTERS, WONDER, STEEP, IMPATIENCE, INNOCENTLY, and CATS. Thanks Andrew for the blog.
    [Andy Smith @78: I had the privilege of seeing John Cage in concert in the 1980’s; regarding 4:33″, he explained that sitting in silence can open your ears to the tapestry of sound that’s always present in your environment wherever that may be. It’s an instructive piece, not an “entertaining” one.]

  109. Pretty straightforward I thought and wonderful to spot the theme… just after I’d finished.
    Seeing WONDER I reflected again on why people on radio or TV use WONDER and wander as though they mean the same thing.
    Thanks both

  111. I have heard rural folk pronounce SHARE as “shur”, whereas Cher is always “sher”.

    It’s funny to me that with all the bizarre conventions crossword setters use it is IM for 999 that has caused such outrage.

  112. Piino @110: And Queens’, Cambridge is officially The Queens’ College of St Margaret and St Bernard 🙂

  113. All over bar the shouting, but just want to record my thanks to Qaos for a great theme (which I only saw when I’d finished the puzzle, but which gave me a lot of smiles), and to Andrew for a very enjoyable blog.

  114. Missed the theme, and I lazily put in ‘uttermost’ rather than OUTERMOST’, so I had to give up and reveal QUEENS, after which the rest eventually settled.

  115. Chris @111
    I’m sure ‘IM for 999’ is not one of ‘the bizarre conventions crossword setters use’. To the best of my knowledge, only Qaos uses it (plus IC = 99 and a couple of others). It is a whimsical way of using Roman numerals, and I have never seen the rules for their use broken in this way anywhere else. The year 1999, by the way, was MCMXCIX and not the whimsical MIM (or MCMIC).

  116. Total newby here, and a bit late to the party. Non-native speaker and typically able to complete only about 80% of any given quiptic or Monday cryptic.

    Nevertheless, the theme made me come up with my very first cryptic clue. It’s a total write-in and likely not original. It can, at best, be described as cute:

    Nothing new, off with their heads! (4)

    PS Qaos, love your work!

  117. I am now mystified by how many other people must be pronouncing Cher the singer. I’ve always pronounced it as a homonym of share. French “dear”. But then I do spend most of my day speaking French. How is anyone else pronouncing it?

  118. Glidd@117 I’m also deeply mystified! Are people saying ‘chare’, ‘chur’ or ‘shur’ instead?? Good clue Ilard@116

  120. Cher sounds like were, and share rhymes with hare, dare, bare, etc.
    I cannot understand how anyone could call these words homonyms!
    Doug

  121. Another American who’s never seen the spelling “vender”. I’d never heard of the fish either, so I had to troll through the CHA section of the dictionary to solve that clue.

    [mrpenney @62 is quite right about the New Yorker‘s quirky spelling. In addition to the examples he mentions, they used to spell the word “employe” with only one E. I don’t know if they still do, nor do I know if they used the standard spelling for female workers, as they would do if their motive is fidelity to the French. I didn’t know about “vender”.]

    [I suspect that many readers of this site would enjoy the Thursday Next novels by Japer fforde, which are full of wordplay and literary allusion. (In my opinion, the first four are excellent, and then they start to decline.) Because Cheshire is merely a ceremonial county, that character is known in those books as the Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat.]

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