Guardian Prize 29,141 / Paul

71 comments on “Guardian Prize 29,141 / Paul”

1. As far as I can recall this was a fairly straightforward puzzle from Paul, with the obvious exception of the “ingenious device” that you have mentioned, Eileen. Working out what was going on took me a little while, but it made for a pleasurable penny-drop moment. And something to look forward to in future offerings from this setter!

   I enjoyed identifying the WAILERS having a party at 22a, but it would be nice to find The Crickets, The Mindbenders or The Pacemakers taking their place in a crossword clue some day.

   Thanks to Paul and Eileen.

2. Yes pretty straightforward and I enjoyed the technique already mentioned.
   Why was particular = nice?
   Thanks Paul and Eileen

3. Bottom is the character in Shakespeare’s play, an ass.

4. Thanks, Eileen, for explaining IN ESSENCE, I saw the 1 missing from NICE but not the (f)inesse. Didn’t try too hard, tbh.

   I really enjoyed the tussle as always with Paul. I like his sense of mischief and word selection and misdirections. He always gives me a chortle or two.

   Favourites include WHETSTONE, FREEDOM OF CHOICE (because I had to build it, very slowly, before the penny dropped), FLOWERINESS (so clever – once I saw it!), WASSAILERS (because I like the word) and the puzzle within a puzzle of SMALL INTESTINE.

   Enjoyable puzzle, illuminating blog, thanks both. 🙂

5. I enjoyed this, the ingenious device was a challenge and I needed two or three sessions but finished with a sense of accomplishment. LOI, I’m a bit ashamed to admit was 1d which I had to admire for its simplicity. Only not too sure export = sell.

6. I made a note next to 17 down which said “Not Collater” which I must have thought was the answer at one stage. It just about satisfies the definition but doesn’t parse with the “ad” bit. Otherwise the memory was it was pretty straightforward, Favourites have to go to the 2 long hiddens formed from other answers.

7. Yes this was a puzzle that I found not too tricky and quite satisfying, with some good ones to enjoy especially in the accrss clues such as 1a DECIBEL, 11a UPPER CRUST, 14a BRAIN-TEASER and 27a EARDRUM, a couple of which interesect with Eileen’s ticks. [By the way, did you ever find your lost blog, Eileen, or did you have to go to all the trouble of revising everything and re-inventing it? If the latter, thank you for the dedication to the cause.]
   I was unsure of a few (glad I had company for a couple of these) but I can now see 18a FLOWERINESS (so I missed that use of the clever device), 5d IN ESSENCE and 13d LENS TISSUE more clearly (!).
   With warm gratitude to Paul and Eileen.

8. [Eileen, there’s a rogue slash which has crept into your explanation of the device where you refer to the clue at 26,25]

9. @2 tim the toffee, I assumed that it was an offshoot of the old meaning of ‘nice’ as ‘precise’, but Merriam-Webster Online gives ‘particular’ (as in ‘difficult to please’) as a direct meaning https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nice

10. I liked this puzzle a lot, especially said “ingenious device”.

    Am I right in thinking that 5a is a definition-by-example, since the INTEGERs include the cardinals?

    Like BigglesA@5 I first thought that EXPORT does not have to mean sell (you can export culture, say), but several dictionaries give sell as one sense, so the clue 8d seems fine.

11. With you Dr Whatson@10

12. Nice puzzle from Paul. I finished with 1, 5 and 9 across unparsed, but managed to work them through the next day.

    I loved the two cross-reference clues: 18ac and 26ac. Just brilliant, and I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to construct the puzzle around these devices.

    While I wonder whether anyone actually ever said “DIAL UP”, I thought the clue was clever. Ticks also against DECIBEL FREEDOM OF CHOICE, REWARD (how do the setters ever see things such as REWARD is drawer backwards?) and the nice use of two females in SHEAF.

    Some questions: do WAISSAILERS still exist?. How does EXPORT = sale? They are two different steps and it is perfectly feasible to export something without a sale, isn’t it? In what context does NICE = particular (5D). Does anyone outside GB know the date of St Andrew’s day?

    Thanks for the great coverage, Eileen, and thanks Paul for an enjoyable puzzle

13. I found this a delight. Great to be on the compiler’s wavelength and to complete in a couple of sittings. Had RING-UP briefly in place of DIAL-UP but otherwise no alarms. Beautifully crafted clues with WASSAILERS and INTEGER favourites. Thanks, Paul and Eileen.

14. Martyn @12: Collins has “A nice point or distinction is very clear, precise, and based on good reasoning.”. That’s particular enough for me. Maybe the usage is less common than in my youth?

15. I thought Paul was on sparkling form with this one. Not tremendously hard, but very satisfying, particularly when SMALL INTESTINE appeared from the set of other answers. Liked lots of the others too – DECIBEL, FREEDOM OF CHOICE, WASSAILERS. Thanks Paul and Eileen.

16. My only criticism was the lack of a question mark in 5a to denote definition by example which others have already mentioned.

17. Thank you, JinA @8 – fixed now.

18. Enjoyed this. Not seen the device used in 26/25 ac and 18 ac BEORE. Got the former very quickly from one of the crosses but took a while to realise how the device worked.

    Loved BANK ROBBER – reminded me of all those times bobbing for apples as a child at Halloween.

    Also liked: LENS TISSUE, ANIMALISM, EARDRUM

    didn’t parse WASSAILERS

    Thanks Paul and Eileen

19. Martyn@12. I’m sure there are ex-pat Scots around the world who know whne St. Andrew’s Day is.

20. Martyn@12 and Crispy@19: And if they don’t know it there is always Wiki or the internet at large to tell you, without giving the game away. 😉

21. Thanks, Paul and Eileen, enjoyed this a lot – especially the neat trick with 18 and 26/25.

    Martyn @12/Crispy @19 – St Andrew’s day is observed by the RC church around the world, and the Eastern Orthodox Church too. It’s a national holiday in Romania. He wasn’t even Scottish, you know.

22. Same favourites as others.
    Dr.WhatsOn@10, Hovis@16: I had no problem with INTEGER=cardinal – in everyday speech they are the same thing (I do know that negative whole numbers are technically integers but not cardinals.)
    Thanks Eileen and Paul.

23. Not usually a fan of Paul’s puzzles in general, especially the interllnked clues, but I rather liked 26/25 and 18ac as they helped me to solve other clues.

    Thanks, both.

24. Rosella2 @20, Widdersbel @21. Thanks for that. Seem to recall lots of saints do double / treble duty – I know St. George does (and, also, he wasn’t English)

25. Mainly straightforward but I loved the ingenious device as described. Pretty much the same ticks. Didn’t know WASSAILERS but pleased to guess that one. Eileen, in your preamble you have written CLEANER instead of TISSUE.

    Ta Paul & Eileen.

26. Much enjoyed, especially the said ‘ingenious device’, which helped a lot when I discovered the first of them. Many good clues, the three I remember best being DECIBEL, GOODNESS and EARDRUM.

    Many thanks to Paul and Eileen.

27. As with Paul’s previous Prize puzzle, a delightful solve with ingenious clueing and accessible parsing. I have no problem with the level of difficulty of this for a Prize. I managed to complete in record time for me, but found it all the more enjoyable for that. As ever, I greatly enjoyed Eileen’s commentary.

28. Forgot to than Eileen for the blog, which cleared up a couple of parsings, and to Paul for the challenging puzzle.

29. 21ac is also a reverse cryptic: BIT is HALF of BITter.
    Many thanks to Paul and Eileen.

30. GrahamH – so it is! How did we miss that? Many thanks.

    And thanks to Alan C @25 – fixed now.

31. HALF is defined cryptically by example: the word BIT is exactly half of BITter.

32. … beaten to it!

33. Minor error: it’s 29,141, not 29,241.

34. Martyn@12 The tradition of wassailing in its old pagan sense of a ritual to bless apple trees/ excuse for a party in the orchard has been revived by the community orchard movement.

35. Thank you, RamonSauvage – amended now.

36. The device for FLOWERINESS and SMALL INTESTINE was brilliant and I can’t recall ever having seen it before.

    HALF was also a little gem. (I think the phrase “a swift half” is often used euphemistically to propose a rather larger amount of alcohol consumption.)

    Many thanks Paul and Eileen (I had the same thought at 7d 🙂 ).

37. Martyn@12 wassailing exists enough for Tradfolk to produce a Wassailers’ Directory for 2022-23.

    I enjoyed this, particularly the hidden answers in answers device. A puzzle where I had to resort to pen and paper to see it.

    Thank you to Eileen and Paul.

38. Thank you, Eileen@35 – I thought I’d gone a bit Rip van Winkle there…

39. Martyn@12 yes, Wassailers still exist. Two of our local towns have a Wassail event where people walk through with blazing torches and sing at the town orchards to ensure fruitfulness for the coming year before throwing a glass of cider at the roots. It sure they would qualify as Bacchanalian though! In the north when I was growing up Wassailing and Carol singing had become intertwined with groups of Wassailers going from house to house and taking a glass of something at each place after their singing – that was probably a bit more in line with the clue!

40. Plenty of things to like, including the new trick.
    I thought 13a LENT = “period of over a month” was loose and 22a should technically have had an indicator that the bum was American.
    Thanks to Paul and Eileen.

41. As always, plenty of clever constructions with HALF, EARDRUM and FLOWERINESS the podium for me. Some later commenters on yesterday’s blog observed that Paul’s surfaces are not always the smoothest; there were more to like in this offering with only LENS TISSUE and ANIMALISM producing real shudders.

    Thanks Paul and Eileen

42. Pino@40. “22a should technically have had an indicator that the bum was American.” But as very succinctly pointed out by mart@3, ‘Bottom’ is the character in MSND who is transformed into an ASS, so it’s a straightforward equivalence.

43. Shades of the clue in Paul’s puzzle yesterday:
    20, 24 ‘I have had a most rare vision’, for example — that’s what it’s all about (6,4)

44. Eileen – yes, when I read mart@3 I did wonder if the post was meant for the other blog! But on reflection I remembered that I had seen ‘Bottom’ in 22a and noticed its position as the first word in the clue, thus disguising (very slightly) the intended meaning. I’m not suggesting that your parsing is faulty, because I disagree that an indication of an Americanism is needed for such a well-known deviant spelling as ASS.

45. sheffield hatter @44
    I didn’t take it that you were querying my parsing and I agree with you re the well-known deviant spelling – but I do hate the word and was at pains to point out in the blog that it was an Americanism. 😉

46. Thanks Paul and Eileen. Finished in record time, ie before Wednesday! I thought W-ARSE-AILERS was great.

47. I think DIAL UP would work better than DIAL-UP in 1d. The hyphen is superfluous and makes the definition questionable.

48. After an almost crossword-free couple of weeks I tentatively dipped back in today with this, and was pleasantly surprised to find it on the more accessible end of Paul’s Prize output. Loved the cross-referenced hiddens.

    Now, a favour to ask — I don’t think I’ll go back and do a full fortnight’s worth of Guardian puzzles, so have there been any particularly excellent recent ones I’ve missed?

    Thanks in advance 🙂

49. I wrote on my printout: ‘A bit easier than some of Paul’s crosswords’.

    I liked DECIBEL for the DEC 1, INTEGER for the ‘put under wraps’, and EARDRUM and BANKROBBER for the surfaces. I was a bit flummoxed by particular = nice, but I see that has been explained above.

    Thanks Paul and Eileen.

50. [Rob T@48 – Brendan’s offering this past Wednesday, 9th August (29,144), is worth looking at. Many used comments such as marvellous, superb crossword, just brilliant. AuntRuth went as far as to say «  this was the crossword I’ve been waiting for all my life ». ] A slight warning that some, however, did not like it but they were in the minority.

51. Pino @40 et al.: I’ve long been of the opinion that the setter is under no obligation to signal an American usage (or in an American puzzle, a British usage). We the solvers are charged with knowing the language, in all of its quirks and complexities, be they British, American, Australian, Irish, or Jamaican, what have you. A signal might be helpful but is not required.

    Foreign *spellings* are a different matter, because those affect what goes in the grid. But in this instance an American ass is not a re-spelled British arse–two different words there.

52. Larry @50 – many thanks!

53. Martyn@12 DIAL-UP (with hyphen) is a computer term, at least in the US. In the early days of the Internet you connected through a phone , line, and it was very slow. It’s been replaced long since by fiber optics and such.

    There’s a reference in a clue in the current AZED to a “small ear bone.” (Roz, I took your recommendation and am partly through it.)

    Eileen, thank you! I’ve finally learned why commenters on this blog keep saying “Snap!” I kept meaning to ask, and I kept forgetting, and now I’ve read the answer to my question linked to 12A.

54. Rob T @48: I’d add the Nutmeg/Arachne combo and last week’s Jack from the G, Hippogryph, Grecian and Salty from the I. (No offence to those I haven’t included) Should keep you busy!

55. PM @54 — ah the Nutmeg/Arachne was one of the very few that broke through my busyness — I saw the byline and couldn’t resist. Loved it! Will seek out the Jack too. Thanks.

56. There was a recent Imogen too. Mind you I think in general the standard is sky-high across the board.

57. 1ac The wordplay seems to lead to BELDECI, not DECIBEL

    18ac, FLOWERINESS: yes, the two ‘hidden-in-the-answers’ clues did help me unravel the puzzle.
    21ac,

    1dn, DIAL(-)UP: I don’t think this phrasal verb should have a hyphen. I see now POC@47 agrees. (Valentine@53, the computer term doesn’t mean “contact”, though, does it?)

    13dn, LENS TISSUE: LOI, I guessed the def must be “glasses cleaner” and so the first word, LENS. Then (lazy?) word search on the second word brought TISSUE, confirmed by the wordplay (I take Paul’s word for it that Lent is “period of over a month”). I wasn’t familiar with this phrase and it doesn’t seem to be in my English dictionaries, only the American Merriam-Webster. Another unindicated Americanism from Paul? Or has it reached more up-to-date British English dictionaries already?

    MAC089@9, I assumed the same as you, re nice, but turns out it’s another one.

    Martyn@12, I, a non-Christian Englishman, had to look up St Andrew’s day, too.

    Pino@40, see Mart@3, but Paul probably meant the Americanism (see above and many other blogposts I’ve contributed to).

    SH@44& Eileen@45, since ‘ass’ is not only spelt differently, but also pronounced differently from ‘arse’, doesn’t that make it a different word with a common root? It is well-known here, though, and is gradually taking over via the younger generation, I think.

    Eileen, I’m always impressed by your mastery of Latin but in 5ac, I wonder how useful anyone found the expansion of ‘e.g.’?

58. 21ac, HALF: that being half of BITter went over my head, too. I think ‘a half’ to mean a half-pint of beer has much wider usage than just the phrase ‘a swift half’.

59. One of Paul’s easiest, I thought. Not appropriate for the Prize slot in my view.

    Thanks to Paul and Eileen.

60. Tony Collman @57

    I don’t understand your query re LENT: “period of over a month”). I wasn’t familiar with this phrase …”
    LENT – which quite often appears in crosswords (admittedly, perhaps usually as ‘fast’) is, liturgically, a period of forty days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lent so ‘over a month’.

    Re ASS: in the blog, I simply said that this was an American slang word. I agree that this makes it a different word with a common root* – and I would never dream of using either of them. Chambers’ second definition of ASS has, simply, ‘see arse’!
    (*and I admit that I did agree with sheffield hatter re ‘a deviant spelling’.)

    There’s real irony in your final comment: despite having a Classics degree, I (may be wrong but) I don’t think that, in all my years of blogging, I have ever spelt out ‘eg’, thinking that it was self-evident, but I have noticed that some other bloggers do, so I decided I would, today! …

    … which gives me an opportunity to cite (again) my all-time favourite clue, the classic ‘I say nothing (3)’.

    @58, I did say that ‘a swift half’ was just an example: I’m with Lord Jim @ 36!

61. Me @ 40 and the commenters.
    I was reminded of the version of the Red Flag that begins “The working class may kiss my arse I’ve got the foreman’s job at last”. In Leeds, where I was born, it would have had to have been “ass” to rhyme with our pronunciation of “last”.

62. Eileen @60: a friend on here recently told me he prefers not to admit to his failings on 225. Which I understand. I have no such qualms. I consider myself reasonably well educated – and I turned 60 this year – and I have never actually seen e.g. written out in full until today! Or, if I have, I have missed it which is equally dim. So I, for one (= e.g.), was delighted with your expansion. 😀

63. Larry @50 — good shout on the Brendan recommendation! Great fun 🙂

64. Thank you, PostMark, @62!
    I’ve been blogging for fifteen years now and, for all that time, I’ve been caught on the horns of the dilemma of how much of solvers’ GK to take for granted – and I still wrestle with it, practically all the time!

65. Postmark @62. Ditto.

66. Eileen: I think you should do just what you’re comfortable with. If someone is puzzled by the parsing or the surface of a clue, or which words are the definition, they will surely ask. Except for Mark’s friend who prefers not to admit his failings. 🙂

    Some of the bloggers fill in all the gaps, cross the I’s and dot the T’s, and I’m fine with that if that’s what they’re comfortable with doing. For me, it’s almost as much work to read the blogs as it was to do the crossword.

    I prefer the bloggers who engage with us below the line, seem interested in the setter’s intentions, admit their own failings, share their joys in the incidental bits and pieces thrown out in the course of indulging our shared pastime, and don’t take things too seriously.

    I think it’s clear from the responses that you get to your blogs that the vast majority of people here are more than happy with what you do for us.

67. sheffield hatter@65
    Hear, hear.

68. I think scchua always spells out eg.

69. Tony Collman @57: I grant you I may not have found the expansion of ‘e.g.’ in Eileen’s blog ‘useful’ but I assure you that I found it interesting. Latin wasn’t in my educational curricula and I often feel the lack.

    I appreciate Eileen’s and other bloggers efforts to share and clarify. That is why this site is so important to so many as evinced by the reaction to the recent outage. We sometimes learn something new or get a different perspective. And have a little fun along the way. 🙂

70. Eileen

    Regarding Lent, I was simply pointing out that since I have never partaken of this or any other Christian ritual, except when required to at school (not Lent but, exempli gratia, daily recital of the Lord’s Prayer), I wasn’t really aware how long it lasted, so “a period of over a month” wasn’t that helpful for me, personally. Following the link, I do now recall from school R.E. that it is connected with the ‘forty days in the wilderness’ and will try and remember that.

    Re ‘ass’, it was SH’s characterisation of it as merely “a deviant spelling” (and your agreement therewith) with which I was taking issue. I’m glad you are happy to agree with me that it is in fact “a different word with a common root”.

    As for ‘e.g.’, my point was that, although some seem to have been pleased to be educated about what the abbreviation actually stands for (I already knew, having studied Latin to ‘O’-level), it played absolutely no part in helping to explain the clue, except perhaps to someone who understood the Latin but had no idea it was commonly abbreviated like that 🙂 .

    I’m a bit taken aback at comments apparently taking vicarious offence on your behalf as if this were some sort of vicious attack on you. I assumed you would laugh and agree it wasn’t of any help. To me, you are the cream of the 15² bloggers and you were absolutely right not to bother expanding ‘e.g.’ for fifteen years and perhaps shouldn’t have let yourself be encouraged to bother this time by the practice of lesser bloggers

    Btw, the legendary “I say nothing (3)” is also one of my all-time favourite clues.

71. Thank you, Tony @70 – no offence taken here. 😉

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