Guardian Cryptic 29,137 by Pasquale

72 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29,137 by Pasquale”

1. A DNF for me, having to reveal BEEHIVE, NUMERATE and WEBSTERS. I enjoyed the rest and was helped along by the long anagrams. I liked ISLAND, LESSEES and TASTELESS. Nho of DIRAC or SACKBUT but both guessable.

   Ta Pasquale & manehi.

2. I also had BEAT until I checked.

3. Thought the weakest clue was NUMERATE but that was compensated for by the lovely PERADVENTURE and the clever WEBSTERS.

4. I thought PERADVENTURE a weak clue until I read your explanation – I had forgotten it means maybe. Apart from that, no really obscure words today, unusually for Pasquale.

   Thanks both

5. Paul Dirac, from Bristol, was one of the most brilliant mathematician physicists.
   I sort of guessed ‘Websters’ as final entry at 16d, but needed manehi for definition.
   Thanks to him and Pasquale.

6. Thanks, Pasquale and manehi!
   Liked BEEHIVE (‘Hairy’ has a sting in the bee-speak. Neat as a pin),
   LESSEES (Just one letter creates a ruckus in our Punnistan. Grrr. Anyway, this pun seems sound enough),
   TIRED OUT(Spent-no time. Just fell in place. The Spooner solicitors have a case? For me, it’s objective!),
   NECK OF THE WOODS (friendly neighbourhood stuff presented in menacing garb. Neck? Nothing that friendly implied.) and
   WEBSTER (Nice American flavor and color. U-busters!).

7. Belt is much better for the definition zone. In fact in English zone originally meant a geographical belt, and derives from the ancient Greek for a belt or girdle.

8. Good solid puzzle from Pasquale, with less of his usual esoterica (I thought), but then as a scientist I was familiar with ACTINIDES and DIRAC – and very pleased to see them.

   A splendid anagram clue for UNRECOGNISABLE and a couple of good homophone clues which avoid the rhotic trap (other setters take note!). Another favourite was PERADVENTURE (lovely word).

   Last one in for me was WEBSTERS – I like the subtly allusive definition, but it made it far from a write-in.

   Thanks to S&B

9. thanks Don and manehi! i found myself mouthing LESSEES out loud embarrassingly at a cafe before I got it!

10. BEEHIVE
    Both options seem to work though I prefer the straightforward one: (It) bespeaks busy activity=BEEHIVE.
    In the homophone option, is ‘be-speaks’ all right grammatically?

    NUMERATE
    I agree with the blog.

11. I had no problem with 6a, other than taking an unconscionable length of time to see it. I never thought of ‘beat’ as calling a policeman’s beat (do they still have them?) a zone seems odd. Lots to enjoy in this crossword and thanks to manehi for easing out the possible wordplay for BEEHIVE. I just saw it as a double definition. Pleased to see the brilliant (and autistic) DIRAC feature, as I don’t imagine he’s widely known outside of scientific and mathematical circles. I thought 16d WEBSTERS was brilliant. Thanks to manehi and Pasquale.

12. I thought 5d was SACKBUT, but had no idea why wine could be sack. I should have looked harder — here ’tis in Collins …

    archaic or trademark
    any dry white wine formerly imported into Britain from SW Europe

    So I learnt something.

13. DIRAC was a write-in. Newton, Dirac, Hawking – they should all be household names. [C P Snow’s essay The Two Cultures is still so relevant today.] I also liked ACTINIDES. WEBSTERS was one of those clues whose wordplay can only be seen after arriving at the solution, but ful all the same.
    Thanks to the Don and to manehi.

14. [John Polkinghorne said watching Dirac work stuff out in real time on the blackboard was like watching Bach compose].
    Nice puzzle, ta both.

15. [It’s worth reading The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac by graham Farmelo.]

16. A cold capon and a cup of sack (not sure where, but I’d guess Doll Tearsheet’s place …)

17. GeoffDownUnder@12: I only know about sack from the references to it in Shakespeare. Falstaff is addicted to it.

18. Found that tough. Never heard of SACKBUT, PERADVENTURE, DIRAC and only vaguely of WEBSTERS.

    The long anagrams helped a lot. Particularly liked NECK OF THE WOODS.

    Also liked: ALDERMAN, ADULTERATION, ABEYANT

    Thanks Pasquale and manehi

19. I really enjoyed this. I found it fairly straightforward until I got to the final two: ABEYANCE and TASTELESS…Took ages for the penny to drop. Like others above, I was pleased to see a reference to Dirac; one of the true giants of Twentieth Century science. His plaque in Westminster Abbey has his famous equation inscribed on it. Apparently it took a while for the Abbey to agree to this as he was not a believer; but he’s hardly alone: Darwin, to take but one other example, was almost certainly an agnostic, if not an atheist, at the end of his life.

20. “Solicitor as in someone who solicits, rather than a lawyer.” In crosswordland, TOUT is always the intended meaning of “solicitor” – it must get rather wearing for people in the legal profession. Good Spoonerism though.

    I needed a wordfinder for ACTINIDES, and WEBSTERS was my last in.

21. A relief with an obscurity-lite from the Don.

    I thought the UNRECOGNISABLE anagram was excellent, and I enjoyed the hanging tree worker and the American guys using their dictionary.

    Thanks Pasquale and manehi.

22. I thought I would look up the Dirac equation, it says: ‘the Dirac equation is written in terms of a Dirac spinor field taking values in a complex vector space’. I don’t think I am any the wiser!

23. Thanks for the blog, very good puzzle and a few head scratches at times. WEBSTERS is very neat and clever, PERADVENTURE nicely misleading, ABEYANT very precise in the wordplay.
    DIRAC is simply the greatest of the greats, although he was actually half-Swiss I think the definition is fair enough. I wish I could write the equation but I do not know how to do the symbols, so compact and beautiful and still providing new insights today.

24. Afraid I’ve never heard of DIRAC, but then science is not my thing. I was trying to work in a reversed 3 letter Greek character, until I finally woke up to that character. I don’t begrudge scientists here getting their kick out of this clue. But I’m peeved about their double bite of the cherry, as, according to studies previously posted on 15sq and elsewhere, they/you are in the upper echelon of solvers of cryptic clues.
    And I would also say to people here and on the Guardian blog, can you name an eminent linguist, apart from Noam Chomsky perhaps.
    But I solved it! Yeay!

25. [ AlanC straight in at Number 1 and 2 , you are only getting 1 point. Number 1 for me in Azed on Sunday counts double. It is now 29 – 17 ]

26. Hard going. For some reason I solved ACTINIDES straight away which helped get a foothold, but there were plenty of subsequent clues I found difficult including PERADVENTURE, LESSEES, ABEYANT, NUMERATE and my last in and favourite WEBSTERS. I had BEAT for 6a which maybe wasn’t right, but it wasn’t wrong either; my assessment anyway!

    Thanks to Pasquale and manehi

27. Wordplodder@26 Are you a scientist? Good to see you also liked WEBSTERS.

28. Held up longest by the left hand side of this puzzle. Had only pencilled in TIRED OUT early, but just couldn’t hear how the Spoonerism worked here. And eventually had to look up the nho DIRAC. So eventually solved another unknown scientific entry in ACTINIDES, and finally NECK OF THE WOODS. I’m definitely more at home with the literary rather than the scientific references these days. The Why rather than the How, although that is maybe more Philosophy v Science. Excellent long anagram with UNRECOGNISABLE, some less precise clueing I thought elsewhere today – WEBSTERS, BEEHIVE for two…

29. …a bit back to front today, hadn’t read Manehi’s excellent blog before I posted, and see now that BEEHIVE is an excellent clue, those hairdos sported by the ladies selling ice creams in the interval at the cinema in the old days having slipped my memory. Also see how the Spoonerism worked…

30. I’m ashamed to admit that I had never heard of DIRAC but that’s my fault not Pasquale’s. I didn’t know ACTINIDES either so the north west corner was difficult. WEBSTERS was the last in and I’m grateful to Manehi for the complete parsing. The solving of this puzzle was a bit of a grind for me I’m afraid.

31. Roz@23 If you are referring to Robi@22 the Dirac equation is written in terms of this is not a definition, just as 101 is written in terms of digits 0 and 1 isn’t.

    I found this from CERN:
    Dirac interpreted the equation to mean that for every particle there exists a corresponding antiparticle, exactly matching the particle but with opposite charge. which makes sense to me. Quoting the actual Dirac equation would not really exhibit its beauty to most people, I imagine, without a vast (years ?) amount of explanation

32. Robi@22 I cannot help you much but I can give you the flavour and the importance.
    It basically expresses Conservation of Energy but it is relativistic ,meaning it works for speeds near to c , the Schrodinger Equation does not.
    It is linear , basically meaning no second-order or “squared” terms, the Klein-Gordon equation is not.
    The concept of electron spin occurs naturally , for Schrodinger it has to be added “by hand ” .
    It predicts particles with the same mass as the electron but positive charge, the positron , Dirac discovered anti-matter.
    It is CPT invariant, very deep, very obscure, very important.

33. Dave@31 I had not seen the post from Robi when I wrote @23 . I have tried to help him a bit @32 .

34. [paddymelon @24: What makes you think that scientists aren’t interested in language? I could name you plenty, from de Saussure and Jakobson to moderns like the splendidly monikered W Tecumseh Fitch. I find your attitude pretty Grimm 🙂 ]

35. I only knew DIRAC from the audio / hifi room correction software of that name. Not sure if it’s named after him or uses any of his work?

    I wasn’t a fan of WEBSTERS – “buster” was a familiar term to me growing up in the 70s and there’s no suggestion in Chambers that it’s American. Add in the uncryptic WE and it was more grimace than grin when the penny dropped

    I thought PERADVENTURE was excellent

    Cheers P&M

36. Tough but enjoyable. I needed help from google for some of the GK. New for me: SACK = dry white wine; DRIFTER = fishing boat; ACTINIDES; physicist Paul DIRAC.

    New for me: Y = male chromosome.

    Thanks, both.

37. I must have been on Pasquale’s wavelength today, because this was a pretty smooth solve. I was helped by a friendly grid, I suppose. Seeing DIRAC straight away unlocked the NW corner in pretty short order. Very much liked ACTINIDES and TIRED OUT.
    Thanks to Pasquale and manehi.

38. Fairly steady solve, but slow, as always for Pasquale in any of his manifestations. Lots to enjoy though.

    paddymelon @24 – I started as a scientist but also have child development stuff (and accountancy) in my background, so I immediately thought of David Crystal (I’ve read him and Chomsky, but I’ve also seen David Crystal at the Globe with his son performing and discussing plays in original pronunciation).

    The actinides are a section of the Periodic Table, of mostly radioactive elements.

    Thank you to Pasquale and manehi.

39. nuntius@19

    “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [a family of parasitoid wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”

    Charles Darwin

40. Roz@23: I’m not sure what “half Swiss”, or half of any other nationality, really means? But I think it is right to describe Dirac as English or British, rather than, say, Swiss English (if there is such a thing…). His father was certainly a Swiss immigrant, and his mother was English; but he was born in Bristol and doesn’t seem to have had any particular connection with Switzerland. (From memory I think (?) he was forced to speak both English and French at home). He died a British citizen, albeit he had emigrated to and died in the US (Florida) as he was forced to retire here but could stay active there until the end.

41. NDJWL@39 Indeed. David Attenborough has made a similar point with reference to a parasite that “loves” to burrow within the soft tissue of the eyes of children in parts of Africa and in consequence blind them…All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small…

42. Nuntius@40, his father always made him speak French at home, maintained that Paul was Swiss and he was registered at birth as Swiss , fortunately Braverman was not around then. He was born and raised in Engalnd and most of his working life here as you say , so I did say the definition was okay .
    I have spent most of my life in England but my mother insists that I am half Welsh and I have to agree.

43. Roz@42: Thanks. Interesting. I agree though that whatever his father might have thought (and he does sounds a bit of a tyrant who might well have approved of Braverman in other respects), it makes no real sense to think of Dirac as in any way Swiss. A good contrast might be Handel, who lived a good part of his life in England, was naturalised British and died here, but was born and lived the first part of his life in Hanover and other parts of “Germany”. So I think British German certainly fits the bill in his case.

44. PS I’m not a scientist, but I thought his key insight was combining special relativity and quantum mechanics. Happy to be corrected?!

45. Yes the Dirac equation writes the energy equation from special relativity using quantum mechanical operators. The important thing is he managed to construct it as a linear equation, the Klein Gordon equation did the same but was second order , “squares”.
    Incorporating special relatvity leads naturally to electron spin , the positron and CPT invariance, plus what is really an extra layer of structure in energy levels of atoms.

46. In my opinion, this was a real proper crossword from Don. Really sharp on the language usage and semantics — nicely exploring some of the cobwebby corners of English (PERADVENTURE, SACKBUT, ABEYANT) — and with a subtle wit evident throughout the clueing. The “be-speaks” detail was one I missed but lovely to see it pointed out here.
    My thanks to setter and blogger today.

47. [nuntius @41: nice ironic reference to Mrs Alexander’s twee creationist anthem, still foisted on children, I believe, although the third verse has been quietly dropped:

    The rich man in his castle
    The poor man at his gate
    He made them, high and lowly
    And ordered their estate

    Hmmm]

48. Roz@45: Thanks. At some point I must read Graham Farmelo’s book on him: The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genuis. It had very good reviews.

49. Gervase@47: I’ve no doubt there will be some who regard that as political correctness gone mad. One for GB News perhaps..

50. There are already 30 occurrences (so far) of DIRAC in this blog. Here’s one more:
    I managed to dredge the answer up from the dim and distant past. No – I tell a lie – it was 5 weeks ago in Buccaneer’s FT puzzle.
    https://www.fifteensquared.net/2023/06/23/financial-times-17450-by-buccaneer/
    “A week is a long time in politics” (Harold WIlson). And 5 weeks is an AEON in CrosswordLand. How quickly we forget.

51. [ Nuntius @48 I have the first edition and I found it a bit long , 438 pages and a bit dull. Too much biography and not enough science but it is not aimed at people like me. Perhaps the paperback edition has been edited a bit?
    Farmelo also edited a book called- It must be beautiful , Great equations of modern science – much better and the Dirac equation has the starring role. ]

52. Roz@51: Worth knowing as I’ve been trying to teach myself more of the background science before reading it, so perhaps that’s not needed. I am half way through Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb which I want to finish before I go and see Oppenheimer next week. Having a basic understanding of, say, the difference between alpha and beta rays or why slow neutrons were so important is really helpful. There are some “popular” science books, and this is one of them, that really do require some basic prior knoweldge, or you just get a bit lost.

53. Thanks Pasquale. I didn’t enjoy this much and only ticked LADY and WEBSTERS as favourites. I revealed 1a, 17a, 15d, and 18d — I didn’t have the patience to continue or the energy to use Google. Thanks manehi for the blog.

54. Thanks Roz @32 and others. Believe it or not, but I am a scientist. However, I was never very good at Physics (B at A-level). PM@24; I think when the analysis was done, the top category for solvers was STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths). This is a very broad church. Whether the TEMs regard themselves as scientists is a moot point. The top individual category was IT, possibly because coding and wordplay have some similarities (?) TEMs are a different breed from us scientists, I think, no offence intended. 😉

55. Took some time today, but worth the effort. pserve_p2@46 put it nicely I thought. Thanks Manehi for illuminating WEBSTERS, ACTINIDES (I just thought of the radioactive elements as doing no good – a very one sided view! – and wrote it in) and the marvellous subtleties of BEEHIVE. Thank you Pasquale.

56. BEEHIVE is the standout clue. it came up in the Indy 5 weeks ago in a Hoskins puzzle.
    My favorite “beehive” wearers: Dusty Springfield (1939-1999) and Amy Winehouse (1983-2011).
    The hairstyle even has its own Wikipedia page – of course it does, no surprise there – on which Amy features, but no Dusty, How soon they forget.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beehive_(hairstyle)
    It’s packed full of fun facts, as is this from the Guardian, Dusty is there, along with Jackie O, Brigitte, Adele, Aretha, Marge, Ronnie,The Ronettes and The B52s.
    https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/shortcuts/2016/jun/14/history-beehive-hairdo-creator-died-1960s
    We mustn’t forgetting Mari Wilson, who played Dusty in Dusty – The Musical
    Thanks P&m

57. Thanks for the crossword, blog, and discussion. I have enjoyed them all. I agree with manehis picks, but would add SACKBUT for the humour and REDCOAT because although I could see it was a n anagram of decorat, it took me forever to work out. I had DIRAC as DARIC, I had forgotten his name and it parsed. Sorry.
    pdm if scientists don’t like language, why are they doing crosswords?

58. I got all except WEBSTERS, which still looks an awkward clue to me, despite our blogger’s explanation and the praise of others.

    Enjoyed the DIRAC discussion as well as (most of) the crossword. Favourite was PERADVENTURE – simple but witty.

    Thanks to Pasquale and manehi.

59. Excellent puzzle. Just enough of a challenge. Knowing some science helped!

    PERADVENTURE was my favourite, UNRECOGNISABLE a close second.

    (I had BELT for 6a. Beat never entered my head.)

    Thanks Pasquale and manehi

60. nicbach @ 57 If DARIC parses, then the “backward-looking character” is CRAD. Dubious.

61. Simon S@60: So it is. I managed to read CARD, somehow. Probably a slip between pen and lip.

62. [pdm @24, I’m a bit of a Whorf fan, esp his Hopi chapter … ]

63. [ … oh yes and I’m also an embodied cognition fan, so I like Lakoff et al too. Went to their conference at ULB in 2000, not a Chomskyite in sight!!]

64. Thanks both,
    Defeated by ‘Websters’. I heard Dirac give a guest lecture once. He ascribed his breakthrough to studyng non-commutative algebras. His tip for the future was to look at non-associative ones.
    Thanks to Nuntius@48 for the book recommendation; I’ll put it on my Christmas list.

65. Interesting crossword and blog. I had BELT ok but then seem to be alone in justifying BARRED for in rows at 8d, until the crossers proved me wrong. Thanks Pasquale and manehi.

66. Didn’t like PERADVENTURE. A=PER specifically. It’s just so vague. And not sure TIRED OUT is a spoonerism. Surely DIRE TOUT becomes TYRE DOUBT which I have on left rear at the moment.
    Thanks both.

67. Tyngewick @64 you were very lucky to see Dirac. His first breakthrough was to use the idea of Poisson brackets to express non-commutation in Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics. The uncertainty principle is simply due to the position and momentum operators not commuting.
    They came from the Hamiltonian classical mechanics. We still use the {p,q} notation and the idea of a Hamiltonian operator .

68. I could parse WEBSTERS but couldn’t see a definition. So slept on it overnight, to be no wiser in the morning. Bunged it in regardless, phew, correct. So thanks, manehi, for explaining and I now appreciate this excellent clue
    Thanks to Pasquale for this and many other excellent clues and to Roz for enlightening me on the importance of Dirac’s contribution to our understanding of the world

69. Gervase @34: What makes you think that scientists aren’t interested in language? I could name you plenty, from de Saussure and Jakobson to moderns like the splendidly monikered W Tecumseh Fitch. I find your attitude pretty Grimm ? ] LOL.
    And grantinfreo@ 62. I’m impressed.

    Loved this blog today. I get so much edjumakashon from 15 sq and a whole lotta fun.

70. I think BUSTER exists only in the vocative singular. Somebody might say, “Look here, buster ..” but I can’t imagine “You see those busters over there?”

    I remembered that actinides and lanthannides lurked somewhere as an interior leaf in the expandable periodic table, though I don’t recall anything else about them.

    I’ve always thought of “sack:” as sherry rather than a “dry white wine,” and wikipedia agrees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

    Thanks, Pasquale and manehi.

71. Could NUMERATE be:
    Definition: Figure things out
    Cryptic definition: Knowing how to figure things out? (because it sounds like it could be a feasible numbery version of literate)

72. FrankieG @56, I also particularly liked 13a, because it recalled a limerick of mine of which I particularly like:

    Wow, your beehive is hot, but beware
    Of a candlelit evening affair.
    Naked flames are romantic,
    But coifs so gigantic
    Are hazardous — candle with hair.

    http://www.oedilf.com/db/Lim.php?LimerickId=73123&button=Approved+Limerick

    Thx to the Don, and the man.

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