I found this a bit harder than usual for a Vulcan, with the SE corner holding me up longest. Others may of course have had a different experience. Thanks to Vulcan for the puzzle.
| Across | ||||||||
| 9 | NEVER FEAR | Raven free to fly around, no worries (5,4) (RAVEN FREE)* |
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| 10 | CLEAR | It’s obvious Charlie’s a foolish old king (5) C (Charlie) + LEAR (foolish king in the Shakespeare play) |
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| 11 | SOWED | With meaningless opening word, joined broadcast (5) SO (used by some to start almost any sentence: “So, I was doing a crossword…”) + WED (joined) |
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| 12 | CASSEROLE | Cereals so cooked in pot (9) (CEREALS SO)* |
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| 13 | CALLS IN | Withdraws from circulation, but drops by (5,2) Double definition |
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| 14 | BACK OFF | Taking this to repair appliance perhaps retreat under challenge (4,3) To repair an appliance you might take the BACK OFF |
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| 17 | BRAVE | Burrowing into hill is very daring (5) V[ery] in BRAE (hillside) |
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| 19 | NEW | Every direction but south: that’s unusual (3) N[orth], E[ast] and W[est], but not South |
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| 20 | WORLD | Earth used to rotate very rapidly, some say (5) Sounds like “whirled” |
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| 21 | ACTED UP | Took part in court and behaved badly (5,2) ACTED (took [a] part) + UP (in court: up before the judge) |
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| 22 | HEALTHY | Repair your old well (7) HEAL + THY |
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| 24 | OLD MASTER | Teacher coming up to retirement probably worth a lot of money (3,6) Double definition |
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| 26 | SOUND | Probe deep inlet (5) Double definition |
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| 28 | GET TO | Old Jewish quarter not hard to reach (3,2) GHETTO less H |
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| 29 | SCREECHER | Small animal we may hear that makes harsh cry (9) S + “creature” |
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| Down | ||||||||
| 1 | GNUS | Latest headlines caught in browsers (4) Sounds like “news”, and gnus are browsing animals |
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| 2 | AVOWAL | Any of five letters read out is a confession (6) Sounds like “a vowel”, i.e. one of AEIOU |
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| 3 | BRIDESHEAD | House that’s revisited, often veiled (10) Reference to Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, and a bride’s head (or rather her face) may be veiled |
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| 4 | BEACON | Danger signal as English tuck into some breakfast (6) E in BACON |
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| 5 | CROSSBOW | Not pleased to submit to old killer (8) CROSS (not pleased) + BOW (submit) |
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| 6 | ACHE | What a revolutionary suffers? (4) A CHE [Guevara], with a rather vague &littish definition |
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| 7 | ZERO HOUR | Start of operation with nothing on time (4,4) ZERO + HOUR |
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| 8 | FREE | Not charged in public punch-up: that’s not for all (4) A public punch-up is a “FREE for all” |
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| 13 | COBRA | Horse artillery in crisis meeting (5) COB + RA (Royal Artillery); COBRA is an acronym for the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms, used by the British government for crisis meetings (famously not attended by Boris Johnson in the early stages of the Covid pandemic) |
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| 15 | COW PARSLEY | One growing wild may intimidate trembling players (3,7) COW (intimidate) + PLAYERS* |
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| 16 | FADDY | Hard to please feminine parent? Not at first (5) F + [d]ADDY |
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| 18 | ANTIDOTE | Does it counteract a love potion? (8) Cryptic definition, with a play on dote [on] = love |
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| 19 | NEPOTISM | Most pine grievously for assistance from relative (8) (MOST PINE)* |
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| 22 | HARARE | Former Salisbury hotel area, excellent (6) H + A[rea] + RARE; capital of Zimbabwe, formerly Salisbury, capital of Rhodesia |
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| 23 | TOUCHÉ | Party drug: after small quantity, I felt the hit (6) TOUCH (small quantity) + E[cstasy] |
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| 24 | ORGY | Internet suffix given to Yankee — what a party! (4) ORG (suffix for Internet domain names) + Y[ankee] |
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| 25 | ATOM | Minuscule part of anatomy (4) Hidden in anATOMy |
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| 27 | DARN | Mend? Oh no (4) Double definition |
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BRAVE NEW WORLD
Good fun, thanks to V&A
Jay@1
If I’d noticed that then I might have been quicker to get BRAVE. Unlike Andrew it was the NW I found harder. Thanks to V and A.
Best Vulcan ever in my book. Double-ticks for GNUS, SOWED, TOUCHE, and BRIDESHEAD
I imagine the homophone police are donning their riot gear and calling for back-up
Cheers V&A
Thanks to Vulcan and Andrew.
I await the usual discussion on homopunaphones. Even I struggle with GNUS and NEWS. I’ve always gone with the Flanders and Swann pronunciation, which I now guess is wrong!
So, as is my wont with Vulcan I over-thought SOWED and parsed it as a verbified SO with a homophone of “joined” = “sewed” as the wordplay and “With meaningless opening word” as the definition
Where’s Occam’s razor when you need it 🙂
Thanks Vulcan and Andrew
I too struggled in the SE. Mostly very good, but some quibbles: “Scottish hill” would have been fairer in 17a; “excellent” for RARE in 22d is very loose (I tried to use “area”, but was missing an R); “part” is doing double duty in 25d.
I only noticed BRAVE NEW WORLD after I’d finished. It’s a bit weird that there isn’t a theme to go with it. Thanks Vulcan and Andrew.
COBRA stands for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A.
In other words, the biggest room that most people can fit in.
Stared dumbly at the crossers for loi Brideshead, thought oh dammit, put in a, then b, at the top … loud teatray clang. I mean, revisited, it was shouting at me! Hey ho. Thanks V and A.
Tried to post a youtube link to The Gnu Song, but failed. Feel free to look it up yourselves!
COBRA was the only one that befuddled me. My UK knowledge was found wanting. Hadn’t heard of COW PARSLEY. Rare/excellent is a bit of a stretch (22d). Didn’t know FADDY was a word.
So is “so” so meaningless? So it is. (My pet hate, though, is “like” which some people of a certain generation seem to insist on putting into every sentence.)
I enjoyed this, and thank Vulcan & Andrew.
RARE/EXCELLENT is entry number three in my Chambers – maybe not common usage now but surely spotting unusual words and usage is all part of the fun?
Agree that this was trickier than expected. Ashamed to say that 1d was my last one in. Didn’t notice the BRAVE NEW WORLD, of course, but wondered if BRIDESHEAD was leading somewhere. Took me a while to remember that Salisbury was the old HARARE. Don’t have a problem with the near-homophone in 29, but the word seems slightly odd. Did like OLD MASTER. Thanks to Andrew and Vulcan.
Probably a coincidence but the row after BNW gives the initials AH.
The Gnu song is here … always a pleasure to revisit F and S.
Fun crossword – I agree one of his harder one’s.
Thanks polyphone @14. I bow to your superior IT skills.
I’ve heard “gnu” pronounced “new”, “noo” and even without the “g” silent (and the latter was serious). I’m in the “new” camp, so the homophone works for me. (I like to wake each day to the grieving wildebeests.)
A bit chewy for a Monday, perhaps, but got there in the end. Mild grin at the surface of 10 across. For the first time in ages, actually saw the Nina across the middle, but then spent some time wondering whether there was more, before concluding that there wasn’t (though polyphone @14 has a clever suggestion).
Thanks, both.
I enjoyed this puzzle rather more than usual for a Vulcan, with ticks for 14ac BACK OFF, 22ac HEALTHY, 3dn BRIDESHEAD, 15dn COW PARSLEY and 26ac SOUND – which I parsed as probe deep/inlet.
I can’t quite make 22dn work: it seems to be that Salisbury is former HARARE? As Andrew says, HARARE was formerly
Salisbury. (Is it just me?)
Thanksto Vulcan and Andrew.
I meant to say ‘seems to me‘.
My lack of UKGK and ZWGK didn’t help. bodycheetah @3, can’t see what the homophone police have to complain about: “some say”, “we may hear”.
GDU @16. Do I detect a little mockery at those of us (possibly just me, though, since you’ve heard it and we’ve never met, probably not) who pronounce the hard G at the beginning of Gnu? I’ve been on several safaris where the guide has pronounced the G, though they usually call the animal a wildebeest.
Thanks Vulcan and Andrew
“Harare is the former Salisbury” works for me.
Yes, much tougher than usual with both the NW and SE holding out longest. I noticed BRAVE and NEW early so WORLD was a write-in and then went looking for Huxley’s extensive output but without success. I thought AVOWAL, CLEAR, BRIDESHEAD, COW PARSLEY and SCREECHER were excellent.
Ta Vulcan & Andrew.
Crispy @ 21, no, no mockery. If I ever sounded the “g” it would be because I was fooling around. Which is why I was surprised to hear it pronounced that way in all seriousness. I can’t remember where I heard it — it may have been America? If so, I can assure you I’m not mocking the Americans. I’ve travelled there twice and have found Americans to be delightful.
GDU @24. Likewise re the Americans. I looked up the pronunciation in that C-book, and it seems I’ve been wrong all these years. You live and learn
Eileen@18
Agree with you on HARARE.
Parsed SOUND as a triple def.
Probe
deep (as in deep/sound sleep)
inlet.
Liked ANTIDOTE a lot.
Didn’t like ACHE much.
Thanks, Vulcan and Andrew!
Blaise@20
Sounds right!
I found this very tough. Maybe I was not on Vulcan’s wavelgth today.
Failed to solve 1d GNUS and I did not parse 21ac.
New for me: COW PARSLEY, FADDY; former name of HARARE = Salisbury. I guess that Salisbury was not much in the news when I was growing up in Australia but I havd definitely heard of Harare.
Thanks, both.
Crispy @4 – having checked Chambers for pronunciations, we’ve been misled by Flanders and Swann (my parents courted at their shows and we had the LPs as soundtrack to my childhood).
I struggled with GNUS too, but TILT and I’ll remember in future, so it and the southeast corners went in last.
Thank you to Andrew and Vulcan.
Also found the SE corner toughest. NHO BRAE but the answer was inevitable from the definition and crossers.
All in all good Monday fun, thank you Vulcan and Andrew.
A delightful start to the week – lots of attention to nuances of meaning, particularly in the compound expressions like 13A, and 21. I’m not sure that the throat-clearing ‘so’ at 11 is meaningless: to my ear it means something like ‘I’ve heard your question, and I need a moment to gather my thoughts in order to present my best answer’ – if I’m right, that’s an impressive amount of meaning for such a little word.
My problem was not with the homophones, as the only ones I object to are those relying on non-rhotacism. However I really disliked the definition of FADDY. We had it the other day too, but it’s not in Chambers, I’ve never seen it used in this way, seems to be mistaken for ‘fussy’, and steps on the existing word ‘faddish’.
Robert @ 31, certainly “so” can meaningfully begin a sentence, which shouldn’t be frowned upon, but I think the point was being made that a lot of people these days use it for no reason, and it serves no purpose.
I also found that this gave me pause for thought in places. It took me a while to get Harare. I kept thinking of the old name for Salisbury (Old Sarum?) or perhaps something to do with the Cecils. All red herrings. Once I had h and a, the penny dropped. I’m also one of those who has been pronoucing gnus incorrectly. A very good puzzle, and certainly tougher than is usual for a Monday. With thanks to Vulcan and Andrew.
Thanks Vulcan, that was fun from meaningless opening word (a pet peeve of mine) to small animal. It needed some thinking around corners for things like HARARE (wasted ages trying to fit SARUM into that one), BACK OFF, AVOWAL and BRIDESHEAD, and like others I was too familiar with the F&S animal to spot GNUS (most people these days seem to avoid the problem by calling it a wildebeest).
My dad was in the Horse Artillery on the North West Frontier in India, in the 1930s when they still had horses, so it was a struggle to do the lift-and-separate for COBRA: familiar to UK solvers but probably not elsewhere.
And now I really must pop down to the local 5chemists and see if they stock ANTI-DOTE (TM)…
Is FADDY a regional thing? I have childhood memories of it being used in Yorkshire to describe anyone (ok, me) who was fussy about what they ate
Another one here astonished to find out that you don’t pronounce the G in gnu. 🙂 You’d think I’d have come across it somehow before now… (I’m 73 for heaven’s sake!)
Very glad to see and read that there have been no slightly superior “write in” comments for a Monday Vulcan. Thought this was splendid too. Innumerable ticks, especially for OLD MASTER, HEALTHY, BRAVE (when I finally worked out the parsing), ACHE and FREE. Much wit as well. Bravo, Vulcan, much more than simply SOUND this morning…
bodycheetah @ 36 – that’s how I’ve (here in the Midlands) always used the word.
Collins gives ‘being excessively fussy, esp with food’.
My LOI was GNUS; noo, I didn’t see it for a long time. I liked BRAVE for ‘burrowing into hill’, HEAL THY, although it must have been done before, COW PARSLEY for the wordplay, and TOUCHÉ, where I thought at the beginning that small quantity was tad. I also liked the FREE-for-all.
Thanks Vulcan and Andrew.
nuntius@34.My firs stab at former Salisbury was a google search and came up with Old Sarum. Great misdirection. That one I didn’t know but I did know HARARE as the former city in Zimbabwe, which ended up being my LOI.
Sooo happy that Vulcan clued SO in SOWED as meaningless opening word. It really annoys me.
I get your point Robert@31. From my linguistics studies days, that’s what I would call: phatic communion (which) serves to establish bonds of personal union between people. brought together by the mere need of companionship and does not serve any purpose of communicating ideas. ( Malinowski 1936: 314-316)
Although you may disagree with that in the case of so
Straightforward enough, and no real quibbles. Didn’t notice BNW. I am (or was!) another mis-pronouncer of the big antelope. Surprised FADDY not in Chambers – it’s a word I might use.
muffin@6 – in Scotland, where BRAE means hillside, RARE can certainly mean excellent (for me, indicating Scots usage would have made either clue too easy).
Thanks V&A.
Camilla@37. I’ve never heard the g pronounced in GNUS. But I have heard British (not only American) pronunciation of news as noos.
While we’re on the subject of silent letters, does anyone else cringe when people take such care to pronounce the L in “almond”? Great crossword. Thanks to setter and blogger.
beaulieu @43… FADDY is in Chambers 2016.
Tim C@46 – good. (I don’t own a Chambers, but was reacting to poc@32.)
Have to agree with@bodycheetah-best Vulcan in ages.
GNUS, BRIDESHEAD-just for starters.
Great fun to start the week and if you are a Gunners supporter-even better but not a brilliant game just a nice result
Whereas this was great fun form start to finish
Not even a yellow card.
Thanks V and Andrew
Norfolkdumpling@45: the aL-mond version seems to be gaining ground over Ar-mond: grumpy old women like me will stay with the version we grew up with.
Likewise, FADDY is what I’d say rather than FADDISH, though what I’d probably say in reality is FUSSY (which is what I thought that clue was for quite a while).
Same here, Andrew, SE corner held me up, largely due to superb misdirection in HARARE and HEALTHY. Looked in vain for BRAVE NEW WORLD references. TOUCHÉ was my LOI, rather enjoyably!
Fwiw FADDY is in the OED as going back to 1824.
I had a few unparsed, which is unusual for a Vulcan puzzle, among therm SOWED, COBRA, and ACTED UP. I didn’t spot BRAVE NEW WORLD, until I read some “helpful” Guardian commentor providing a spoiler nice and early.
My favour clue today was 18 down . I thought ANTIDOTE was a very elegant solution.
Got fixated on BEN instead of BRAE and failed BRIDESHEAD.
GNUS first encountered 70 years ago in school Dragon Book of Verse in P. G. Wodehouse’s splendid Good Gnus
Meatier than usual Vulcan. LOI for me was also GNUS – which I would normally pronounce as ‘wildebeest’, but ‘nooz’ if pressed.
‘So’ meaningless? It depends what you mean by ‘mean’. It has more force than ‘like’, which serves principally as a punctuation mark. I’m with Robert @31 on this. Phatic communication certainly has a function (though the ‘phatic communion’ (sic) of paddymelon sounds more interesting 🙂 ).
Thanks to S&B
Cow parsley, also known as Queen Anne’s Lace and lots more besides, is a common wild plant in U.K, pretty but smelly. https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/pictures/190000/velka/cow-parsley.jpg
Gervase@55 – your ‘(sic)’ seems to suggest it’s a typo – it isn’t.
FrankieG @57: Wow (phatic), so it is! Apologies to paddymelon. That was Malinowski’s original phraseology, though I think ‘phatic communication’ is now a more general and commoner term.
Thanks to Vulcan for a fun puzzle, a little bit more challenging than usual. We didn’t spot the nina ‘BRAVE NEW WORLD’ until the end.
Favourites: BRIDESHEAD, COW PARSLEY, HARARE, and ANTIDOTE.
Thx to Andrew for the blog.
Aural wordplay – I don’t mind it as long as it’s fun, but I’m !rish so pronounce the AITCH in whirled – HWIRLED.
There’s a song by The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band – Hawkeye The Gnu – Och aye the noo
Many thanks Andrew. Like you, I got stuck for a while in the SE corner. A highly enjoyable crossword, but not really Monday fare I think because of the relatively abstruse definitions in many clues. Thanks a lot Vulcan.
paddymelon @41. I tried to fit Sarum in but it just wouldn’t go. However, it did remind me of the limerick:
There was a young curate of Salisbury
Whose manners were quite halisbury-scalisbury.
He wandered round Hampshire
Without any pampshire
Till the vicar compelled him to walisbury.
(W.S. Baring-Gould, in The Lure of the Limerick, commented “Included as a prime example of English English at its most frustrating”)
Beaulieu@43 et al: FADDY is indeed in Chambers:
fad noun, colloq 1 a shortlived fashion; a craze. 2 any seemingly unimportant belief or practice that is too strongly advocated, usually with regard to food. faddiness or faddishness noun. faddy (faddier, faddiest) or faddish adj.
ETYMOLOGY: 19c.
In other words, fashionable rather than fastidious.
Well spotted, Jay@1.
I liked the reference to the g-nicest work of g-nature in the g-zoo.
COBRA was a new one on me, as probably for others, maybe even some UK folks.
Andrew the SE and 1dn were the only ones I didn’t fill in last night.
Crispy@25 What pronunciation did the C-book give?
Thanks Vulcan and Andrew.
Valentine @64; Chambers: noo, or (humorous) gnoo/
Probably a little off beam this, but when I first tried to order Gnocchi off the menu in an Italian restaurant I was completely mispronouncing it to the waiter. Had no idea it was supposed to sound like “No-Kee”…
I remember seeing a cartoon of a gnu in a cage wallpapered with crossword grids. The zookeeper explained “we like to keep the animals in their natural environments”.
Thanks Andrew. I didn’t have an issue with GNUS because my father used to tell an awful joke (that I can’t fully remember) where the punch line was “no gnus is good gnus”. The rest of the NW held me up a bit, and my general view was that this was within the difficulty bandwidth for a Monday but definitely not one for beginners. Enjoyment was also marred by a run in with an idiot on my train this morning, but that’s hardly Vulcan’s fault. I liked SCREECHER a lot, and thought NEPOTISM was very neat.
NEPOTISM derives from “nipote”, Italian for “nephew”, from the habit of popes of favouring their “nephews”.
When I saw GNU I was just hoping that there might be a HIPPOPOTAMUS (Oh all right, a HIPPO) somewhere in the grid – along with perhaps an OMNIBUS, a GRAMOPHONE (HI-FI of course), a GAS-MAN and a FRENCH HORN. Along with any other F&S gems that’ll fit in.
Oh, well, can’t have everything!
Quite a lot of work to finish this Vulcan, I was stuck for a long time on SOUND (that must be one of the most multi-definition’d words in Chambers). Can’t explain why… 🙂
HEALTHY gets a plus for misdirection, until I realised it couldn’t be an anagram of YOUR OLD. Very good clue and surface. Also liked AVOWAL and BRIDESHEAD (though I did try to write in BRIDESMAID – dunno why…)
Thanks Vulcan and Andrew.
Fun puzzle – thanks to Vulcan and Andrew.
The joke in the gnu song is that a hard g is put in front of other words (“the g-nicest work of g-nature in the zoo”).
As a civil servant many years ago I attended some Cobra meetings. There was only one room, called COBR, and the A was only added so it didn’t sound like “cobbar”.
Mandarin @68 – I hope your ‘idiot on the train’ didn’t discompose you too much – but I couldn’t help thinking of this one.
[muffin @69: That’s certainly the origin and motivation of the term, though strictly it’s from the Latin ‘nepos’ rather than the Italian reflex ‘nipote’. But, as you know, in Italian (as in Latin) it means ‘niece’ and ‘grandchild’ as well as ‘nephew’, which gives much more scope for familial favouritism]
Thank you Polyphone@14 a lovely trip down memory lane.
We found this a bit tricky, but managed to finish.
In which part of the kingdom are world and whirled homonyms?
So, an excellent crossword in my view, full of wit and variety.
I hope readers were moved to phatic fellow-feeling by my opening word. As used by our correspondent in wherever it inspires in me quite different emotions, along with the wildly overused ‘iconic’.
Many thanks to V and A.
With or without an audible g, gnus are grazers, not browsers.
Thanks for the blog, I will simply agree wth Bodycheetah@3 .
AlanC@23 I see that KPR nearly made it to Hawaii on Saturday.
Late commenting as I didn’t get around to this until this afternoon, but I just wanted to say that I thought SOWED was great, with the surface suggesting the meaningless opening word being used in a broadcast – it is very common for people in radio discussions (“In Our Time” etc) to start their comments with “So…” (and then go on to talk in the historic present). My son commented that “So” is the new “Well”.
Peter @75: they are for me!
Many thanks Vulcan and Andrew.
Very rare for me not to complete the Monday puzzle but thanks both anyway
Peter@75 – in the same world that rhymes hippopotamus with ignoramus (the world of aural wordplay).
Peter @75 World & whirled are homophones the way I say them. Northern English accent.
Is nobody else rather discomfited by “ghetto” being clued as “old Jewish quarter”? Seems particularly tone deaf given the current news. As my (Jewish) other half commented, “Jewish quarters were common in medieval times. It’s just where the Jews lived. A ghetto is an enforced segregation.”
Lin @ 83 While I agree with your principal point, I think “Seems particularly tone deaf given the current news.” is misplaced. Crosswords in the G are scheduled about three weeks in advance, so ‘unfortunate’ rather than ‘tone deaf’ I would say.
Simon – OK, fair point.
The initial ‘g’ in ‘gnu’ is a European approximation of the initial click in the Khoisan/Bushman name for the animal. The Flanders and Swann pronunciation is actually more accurate than the homophone with NEW is, though the ‘g’ has been ignored in most European dialects for a long time.
That’s the only one I never got, though I couldn’t parse COBRA — I learn more from Guardian cryptics than from most journalists’ articles. I spent way too long certain that “former Salisbury” must mean SARUM — very much the wrong Salisbury…
Late today, since it’s a fake holiday here that I happen to have off work, and I lazily didn’t get to the crossword until afternoon. [The holiday is called Columbus Day in red states and, increasingly, Indigenous Peoples Day in blue ones. (Columbus was a dick.) Here in Chicago, it’s usually the last holiday with decent weather until May.]
There was a children’s show on TV here during my childhood called The Great Space Coaster. One of the characters was a puppet gnu named Gary Gnu. He was a gnuscaster, and he read the gnus; his catchphrase was “no gnus is good gnus”. Except that he pronounced, exaggeratedly so that even children could get the joke, ALL of thos Gs.
For most Americans, though, gnu is a homophone for new and nu–and all three words are pronounced “noo”.
So if COBRA is an acronym for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, do they skip all the way down to E for the next smallest so it can be pronounceable? [By the way, here in America, COBRA is an acronym for a form of health insurance, named after the act that created it, which–as so often happens–had a name with nothing to do with insurance. This was back when Congress was still functional enough to actually do things, but already dysfunctional enough that they had to do a lot of unrelated things all at one go to get the votes.]
Also, Lin @83: the term “ghetto” also dates from the Middle Ages. For centuries, enforcement in most places was by custom rather than law, so in (say) 1850 you could speak of the ghetto without it carrying any particular anti-Semitic baggage. No longer true in 1938, of course, and I agree with you, for that reason, that this definition is tone-deaf.
Of course, the usual modern definition (a majority-Black slum) has its own baggage…
There was a recent (well, I suppose at least 5 years ago now) follow-up by John Finnemore to the Flanders & Swann tribute to 1dn. Also very funny, and to the tune of ‘New York, New York’ as I remember.
On the subject of today’s crossword, 18d is my favourite, I’m annoyed that had never struck me.
In the words of Rick Deckard: they don’t advertise for killers in a gnus paper.
22a – where does “old” fit into the answer?
16d – surely the feminine parent is MUMMY? Where does DADDY come from?
Muffin @ 67, you remind me of how astonished I was when I came across a coati in South America. Until then I was sure they existed only in crosswords.
ThemTates @ 86, thanks for your explanation of the origin of the non-silent “g” in “gnu”. It makes sense. I have visited parts of Africa and have been intrigued by the way they click in the Khoisan languages.
Steffen@91 “Thy” is an old form of “your.’ 16dn FADDY is F(eminine) + (d)ADDY (parent not at first).
[GDU@93 My first encounter with a coati was in the Brazilian Iguacu Falls park, (The Argentine part of it is most of it and much bigger. Both are wonderful.) Coatis were all over the place, not at all afraid of tourists. I bought a snack from a vendor and before I could even taste it a coati climbed me like a tree and grabbed it out of my hand. ]
Thanks Andrew and previous participants on the blog. I really enjoyed this challenging solve even though I only had time to complete it today (Tuesday morning Aussie time). I had lots of ticks to count and BRAVE NEW WORLD was just icing on the cake as far as I’m concerned. [Sorry if it’s all been said but there are too many comments now for me to do anything other than skim read them.] Just wanted to say thank you very much to Vulcan. [And to say that I find homophones fun – and for me, near enough is good enough as I truly enjoy the way setters play with them.]
Tripped up on GNUS, and a couple I couldn’t parse.