Guardian Saturday Prize Crossword 29,195 by Paul (7 October 2023)

88 comments on “Guardian Saturday Prize Crossword 29,195 by Paul (7 October 2023)”

1. Even after having HIGH-MUCK-A-MUCK and NICEY-NICEY explained, I’m still little the wiser. I’ve never heard either expression before, so I forgive myself for not having a clue about them. I also think there should be something in the clue for NICEY-NICEY that gives a nod towards French; failure to do so is pretty unfair in my book.

2. As gregfromoz @1 … I hadn’t heard of several of these answers. I don’t get wrecked on a pub crawl either but probably should have guessed it. Bound as rim..well?
   Nah I didn’t get this one but thank to setter and blogger for the reasoning.

3. Thanks mc_rapper67. I only finished this through sheer doggedness and can’t say I enjoyed it, When I say I finished it I mean I filled in all the squares with the same answers as yours but I lost patience and interest trying to justify 21 and 24a. I was fixated on the initial letters of ‘in surprisingly moderate’ in 21 and couldn’t explain the ‘r’. NICEY NICEY, which I’ve never heard of, defied all attempts at interpretation. The SE corner held out the longest and 23, 25 would be my pick for COD but there wasn’t a lot of competition.

4. Top fave: NICEY-NICEY!
   Thanks, Paul and Pete!

   AVID
   VID is an authentic short form of VIDEO (if one is not comfortable with removing the
   last two letters of ‘video'(film) guided by the ‘short’).
   A+VID (short film).

   SLURRY
   Parsed as in the blog.

5. Thanks, Paul and mc_rapper67!

6. gregfromoz @1
   NICE as in the south of France – your choice of which one.

7. me @6
   Probably the first.

8. Found this difficult and not helped by the grid. Not heard of HIGH MUCK A MUCK but got it from crosses and a word search.

   Liked: RAIN FOREST, SKEW-WHIFF, FRITTER, FIRST RATE, DIRECT

   Thanks Paul and mc-rapper67

9. Thank you mc_rapper67 for your blog. I’m another who doesn’t fully get the parsing for NICEY-NICEY, despite the assistance of yourself and PeterO. I’m no further than I was last week, having got the setters’ trick (more than one setter as it’s been done before) of a word in Nice, being a word in French, and jolie meaning nice, and the 2 x y at the end, but I still can’t put it all together.
   Was pleased to have been able to parse HIGH MUCK-A-MUCK so that’s not bad for an unknown (to me) word. Initially I thought the clue was unfair.
   I did like BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, for the surface, wordplay and def, even though the letter count and a quick scan made it fairly easy to solve. Also liked AFFAIR for the short and sweet thing, and the cute BOW-WOW.

10. I thought there was at least a mini-theme of “doubles”: the three solutions with repeated words plus (seemingly) an awful lot of solutions with letter pairs, e.g. the two in SKEW-WHIFF.

11. paddymelon@9
    May I…
    NICEYNICEY
    Jolie is nice in Nice (say; in France)—->So you can say ‘Jolie is Nice nice’.
    Yankee=Y, —–> in NICE NICE —–> NICEY NICE
    luvvy unltimately=Y —–>backing (going to the end of) NICEY NICE—–>NICEY-NICEY

12. Got off to a good start with this, writing in DIRECT (I did like that one, along with SLURRY) and BOW_WOW straight away, then slowed down rather a lot. The HIGH-MUCK-A-MUCK held me up for a while (not helped by thinking _U_K might be ‘Musk’ or the gun might be a musket), and then I ended up with a set of blanks in the south-west that were slowly, tentatively, filled in with SPECIES, CENTRISM, and NICEY-NICEY – the last of those only when my wife suggested it would at least fit. I missed the ‘in-specs’ trick for SPECIES, thought the premiers of ‘in surprisingly moderate’ gave the final ‘-ism’ and so couldn’t see where the ‘R’ came from in CENTRISM, and ‘Nice nice = Jolie’ was clever but too clever for me. So a bit frustrating with the parsing at the end, but a lot of fun along the way. Thanks Paul, thanks, mc_rapper – there was a lot I needed to have explained here!

13. Thank you KV@11, I think. errrwwwwuuuggghhhhmmm….. I knew I should have left it alone. Does my head in. No wonder Paul can set clues on a marathon run. High on his own endorphins. 🙂

14. 😀
    I hardly added anything to what mc_rapper said. Therefore, it had to be ponglingly the same.
    Yet, I thought I could pongle you out of this labyrinth. What an illusion!

15. Put in nicey-nicey with a Gallic shrug and carried on (always thought of jolie as pretty, but yes it is nice as well, hey ho). As for others posters, the muck-y thing was a nho, but the other long one made up for it by jumping straight in. Ta Paul and rapper, now for today’s over a coffee or two.

16. KVa@14. LOL, pongly pongly, jingly jangly. I did attempt the maze at Hampton Court, back in the 70s. Another fail.

17. Can someone please enlighten me, is it a Guardian thing to present clues like 13ac (multi-word answers across the grid) without indicating where all the components are to be entered? The positions were cross-referenced elsewhere amongst the clues, but I’d not met this before this puzzle and I found it disconcerting. It happened again later in the week – in Friday’s puzzle, I think.

18. Jackkt @17 sorry I cannot really help you, in the paper the references are fine, 13/18/7 for example, I do not know what the custom is online.

19. jackkt @ 17

    I think it was an error. The paper version which I got did indicate the order of the components

20. Thanks for the blog, a very typical Paul crossword . I have one circle and one cross but both for the same clue which is unusual.
    SPECIES has very clever wordplay but the definition… I will not even start.

21. Petero @6. From my recall of schoolboy French, “jolie” is French for “pretty”. Google translates nice into “bon” or “bonne”. I still maintain that the clueing is too vague to guide one into thinking of French, especially when we are looking at an obscure answer as well. It remains pas jolie for me.

22. jackkt@17
    The positions get highlighted once we select the clue. However, the order of components is sometimes not given. In most cases, we can guess the order from the enumeration. Said that, there are times the enumeration is 4,4 or 5,5 or …
    It should be an error as Fiona@19 says.

23. JOLIE, I spent ages trying to get ANGELINA to make an answer that made sense! I’m with many others above who thought this one to be unfair, also like others I had the first letters of ( in surprisingly moderate ), ISM, and left with a random R to explain in CENTRISM. Never heard off HIGH-MUCK-A-MUCK, and don’t get how you place the IE in SPECS, there isn’t an indicator, but just thought Paul was being way too crafty again and meaning SPEC-IES as a way of describing 4-eyed peoples!!!

    So thanks for all the explanations MC, but this one was not Nicey-Nicey at all.

24. A rare DNF for me as I had AFFAIR and FIRST RATE pencilled in but couldn’t parse them to enter them. I really struggle with those two word answers crossing in a corner as there’s so little confirmation, they’re usually what trips me up.

    I laughed at SKEW-WHIFF – quite a few whiffy plants in those glass houses, and DIRECT, got there with NICEY-NICEY (I speak enough French to automatically translate jolie) and HIGH-MUCK-A-MUCK.

    Thank you to mc_rapper667 and Paul.

25. jackkt@17, I find the Guardian online crossword (I use the Guardian app, not the crossword app) fills multipart clues in order, and highlights the clues I’m completing as well as the squares/lights and the first clue gives the order. (The app that’s a real pain is the FT which just about highlights where multipart clues follow on, but jumps to the next clue in order when the first section is completed, not where the multipart clue fits.)

26. Ant@23 four-eyed means wearing specs , so that is will be inside specs.

27. Thanks Roz, I now understand!!

28. Thanks mc_rapper, i thought this was the Pauliest Paul for a long while and really enjoyed teasing out the solutions, ending with the HIGH-MUCK-A-MUCK – i took a chance on the assonance elsewhere being repeated in the Mucks before understanding the parsing but then after googling MUCK A MUCK learned that it should be prefixed with HIGH. I don’t consider this cheating (well, not really) but a necessity whenever devious wordplay meets a new word or phrase. only real objection is that surely the TSAR is left-leaning when being written RA…ST, or am I missing something as usual? Anyway thanks for a worthy challenge Paul.

29. I thought this was jolie good.

30. I thought SIGNAL was a brilliant clue as it’s an anagram and a hidden reversal. Both clued perfectly. Well done Paul

    Cheers MC&P

31. 10a RAIN-FOREST(4-6) with a hyphen is very uncommon – more common as two words(4,6) – most common as one word RAINFOREST(10)
    Spelt with a hyphen it has a Wikipedia redirect page – https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rain-forest&redirect=no

32. Bodycheetah@30 – fantastic spot and agreed. It was one of the very few I got on first pass through and never occurred to me to look for more. Jolie indeed!

33. bodycheetah@30
    Great spot!

34. Couldn’t parse, so didn’t like NICEY-NICEY – but here’s an earworm: The Stranglers’ Nice in Nice(1986) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfpyZKuI1GU

35. bodycheetah@30 Nice one!

36. Favourite: SKEW-WHIFF.

    New for me: DSM = Distinguished Service Medal; HIGH-MUCK-A-MUCK.

    Thanks, both.

37. Fg@34 and of course Nice and sleazy 🙂

    Stranglers theme anyone?

38. On the harder side, I thought, with some rather tricky parsings here and there. For me it was the NW corner that held out the longest, though for no particular reason I can see now.
    I did think that crossing 23 and 25 in the SE corner might be considered unfair by some as there are only 3 separately verifiable crossers available for a 9 letter solution.
    Thanks, both

39. jackkt@17 and various replies:

    This does seem to be a recent deliberate change in the formatting of the online puzzles. But while it may be obvious, from the highlighting of letters in yellow, which order the components of a multi-word clue should be entered, you lose that if you follow the print link on the page and print out the puzzle on paper. This has occurred in a number of puzzles in the last week and it’s very irritating. The old system of denoting a clue, eg 13, 8, 7 was fine and I can’t why they would have changed it.

    (You can follow the PDF version link which duplicates the printed paper format, but that prints the squares as solid black and uses loads more ink.)

40. Well, I liked it, although it was certainly harder than our comfort zone (Corundum on Paul’s mhos scale?), in fact we had 3 left unentered in the SE corner, though having seen the blog, they weren’t particularly abstruse.

41. Anyone else spend time looking for a connection with the Stubby Kaye character from Guys and Dolls – ‘Sit down you’re rockin’ the boat’? He turns out to have extra Ls, NICELY-NICELY Johnson. But left me with a great earworm.

42. Thanks to all those who responded to my query about the linked answers.

43. 1d DEVOLVE – Transfer fee in conclusion very, very much appreciated when raised (7) – mc_rapper67, your parse needs an extra very and an L
    E (concluding letter of feE) + V (very) + LOVED (very much appreciated), alL raised to give DEVOLVE

44. The “extra L” comes courtesy of g larsen@41’s NICELY-NICELY Johnson.

45. Wow – what a busy morning – lots of marmite on the boiled-egg soldiers today!

    jackkt at #17 – you have uncovered an anomaly – as many others have pointed out, the PDF (and dead tree) versions seem to give the connections – and order – e.g. 13/18/7, but the online/interactive version just ‘back-refers’, i.e. 18 and 7 say ‘see 13’…but if we all gave full vent to all the things about the Grauniad site that annoyed us our spleens would burst! I prefer to take a deep breath and remind myself that it is FREE!…(and you get what you pay for…)

    Lots of discussion on the misleadingly capitalised ‘Jolie’ – not sure I can add much more…’Nice’ is a frequent indicator for ‘French’, but obviously here it was hidden in a French word! Lastly – my various e-Chambers don’t seem to have ‘nicey-nicey’ at all, but the Android and Apple Collins apps do…

    Bodycheetah at #30 – yes – a good spot…completely missed that, but will update the parsing and give you a credit! And I’ll double-check DEVOLVE, as per FrankieG at #44.

    Ant at #23 – apologies if my parsing of SPECIES wasn’t completely clear – I have tweaked it a bit. (Having spent many teenage years as a ‘speccy four-eyed tw@t’ in NHS glasses, that one resonated with me! And I am amused to see Roz’ indignation at the definition…I can’t divulge whether it was her I was referring to as ‘some may quibble’ in the preamble!…)

    Last word goes to Gazzh at #28 – ‘the pauliest Paul in a while’…we are all addicted masochists – we could just go ‘oh, it’s a Paul’ and put it down and get on with life…but we don’t!…

46. A slow burner for me with only HANDS OFF, SORE and TIER going in on a first read through. The brilliant BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR broke the back of the puzzle with DIRECT and BOW-WOW being delights in passing. As was SIGNAL which I read as a reversal without even seeing the anagram. Count me in as a fan of NICEY-NICEY, but I was finally defeated by AFFAIR, which I would never have solved, and FIRST RATE.
    But a first- rate puzzle well deserving of the prize slot.
    Thanks as ever to Paul and mc for the necessary help with some of the parsing

47. I normally relish a tussle with Paul but on this occasion was almost totally defeated by the SE: it had to be CUTTER but I couldn’t parse it; I couldn’t get any traction on the 23/25 cross; FRITTER only suggested itself just before I came here. SPECIES and CENTRISM went in with a couple of ginf’s shrugs, the MUCKy big gun surfaced from a dim recess quite early on and, with crossers in, the sycophant couldn’t be anything else, although leaving Jolie to do double duty and capitalising it seemed a bit cheeky. Thanks Paul for the fun and mc for a brilliant blog.

48. Good work-out, so thanks to Paul and mcc for informative blog.

    We also struggled to parse NICEY-NICEY and CENTRISM, and the very vague bell for MUCKAMUCK was muffled by it’s enumeration as 4,1,4. A single word on Google and in my residual memory – from chinook jargon per wiki – TILT. ?

49. ? was a smiley.

50. This was a difficult solve for me, not helped by DNK NICEY-NICEY and HIGH-MUCK-A-MUCK; who uses these?

    I did like the Welshman wrecked, HANDS OFF for the wordplay, the KEW WHIFF, and FIRST RATE for the misleading surface.

    Thanks Paul and mcr.

51. mc_rapper67@45 – most of my friends needed glasses, so we called the exception a ‘two-eyed git’

52. I’m with gregfromoz@1 and Biggles A@3, and others about the cluing for 8d and 24a, both timewasters in my book, obscure clues supposedly leading to obscure answers. With hindsight from mc_rapper’s blog, I should have done better with the rest of the puzzle. Luckily, I didn’t get enough letters to tempt me into trying to solve 8d and 24a by brute force and google if this was possible. I normally relish Paul’s challenges, but this one was a let down.

53. I’ll remember with gratitude the advice from our blogger @45: “put it down and get on with life”. In fact, that’s what I did with more than half left blank last weekend. Where I went wrong was looking at it again this morning before coming here for enlightenment.

    Huge kudos to all who completed this. I shall think of 8d every time I see or think of “Paul” in future.

    Thanks to the high muckamuck and to mc_ as always.

54. I too started by thinking Jolie meant pretty, but a few phrases occured to me in which NICE woud be a better translation. I was smiling even as I was working it outas it felt a bit elusive.
    It took me three goes over three days to complete, but I parsed it all, arare thing for me.
    I am sure the clue enumeration was a mistake, as it is normally indicated at the primary word. If you are going to complain about the Guardian , try the Independent online. I have to check crossers all the time because of the way it fills and there’s no clear button. I only do it occassionally because of this and some political objections.
    I remember being very young and on the upper deck of a bus with my grandmother, when she referred to another passenger as LORD MUCK-A_MUCK, it’s the only time I have heard it and that particlar grand mother was French. NICE eh? No, Normandy!

55. How is ‘censored’ (‘red-pencilled’ in 3d) an anagrind? Surely censoring implies striking something out.

    Congrats to Paul for triggering my homophonophobia at 16a. SORE/Saw is the archetype, the very paradigm, the ne plus ultra of non-rhotacism. Say no more (or say no moa if you prefer).

56. poc at #55 – on your first point, that is lazy parsing by me…my Collins has ‘red-pencil’ as to ‘revise or correct’…I will red-pencil my parsing!…

    (It doesn’t seem to be in any of my Chambers, but Miriam-Webster online has ‘to censor’ as an alternative definition…)

57. Worth the struggle as usual with Paul. Some, to me, borderline synonyms – AVID= with energy, NICEY-NICEY = sycophantic, RIM = bound (not boundary), FRITTER on its own, without “away”= blow, MUCK= scum (both kinds of dirt, but different somehow). I guessed my LOI 8d from the crossers and wordplay then Googled it, rather expecting to be asked “Did you mean something else “.
    Thanks to Paul and mc_rapper67

58. Thanks both and a fine entertainment in defeat (nho HIGH MUCK A MUCK).

    Many quibbles have been well aired in the heretofore and the only residue for me is from SKEW WHIFF: under pressure I could surmise to have met this in (perhaps) a Biggles book some 60 years ago and not since. Do others think it’s in common (enough) parlance? (Because it could be useful in conversation….)

59. Oh and I meant to say that BOW-WOW tickled the ulnar nerve of this particular settee.

60. Alphalpha@58. I’ve never read any Biggles but I use SKEW-WHIFF sub-vocally nearly all the time, as I have a camera where the shutter release requires such a determined press that horizontal lines are rarely horizontal. Using it in conversation would be more challenging, I grant you.

61. poc at #55 – as to your second point, surely homophones are ‘de-rigueur‘, they add, I dunno, a certain ‘je ne sais quois‘ to the dénouement…n’est-ce pas?

    Alphalpha at #58 – ‘skew-whiff’ has been pretty common in my family/acquaintance’s parlance over the past 50 years-or-so, although I don’t think I’ve ever written it down or wondered how it was spelt until I did this blog! Maybe I read too many Biggles book in my youth!…

62. In answer to Alphalpha@58, I confess that I have used the term ‘SKEW WHIFF’ for many decades. I don’t know where I picked it up. Google suggests that it is derived from weaving. It is in the SOED (dial. or coll.).

63. …and a quick search of this site gives about 14 blogs containing SKEW-WHIFF, although often as an anagrind or part of a definition or in a comment, rather than as a solution…

64. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skew-whiff has quotations from 1971 to 2009

65. I’ve usually encountered NICEY-NICEY in the phrase “make [or sometimes play] nicey-nicey with [someone]”, essentially meaning to suck up to someone, especially someone you don’t like. “Sycophantic” is I guess in the ballpark. Surprised so many hadn’t heard it.

66. …but yes, I agree with those who found that clue well on the unfair side. The ongoing and inaccurate assumption that the solvers are all fluent in French is massively annoying.

67. I enjoyed solving this for a while, starting with HANDS OFF and BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, but later on, after noting down some some favourites (including SLURRY, CUTTER and FRITTER), I came to HIGH-MUCK-A-MUCK and NICEY-NICEY. Both were quite tough to work out, but what I didn’t much like about them was the setter’s choice of these answer-words. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so choosy, but I noted that the first of these is a North American usage and the second is not in the (Chambers’) dictionary.

    Thanks anyway to Paul, and to mc_rapper for the blog.

68. Alan B: it’s in Collins.

69. To amplify one of my comments @ 57, you can be an avid reader without ever getting out of bed.

70. I think I like reading blogs about Paul and Anto puzzles best. They seem to be able to stir such antipathy. I don’t know how anyone can get so stirred up about a crossword>

71. mrpenney @68
    Thanks. I mentioned Chambers because that is the dictionary generally specified or recommended in crosswordland, even though the Guardian does not (as far as I know) recommend any particular one.

72. Completed successfully, but unable to parse half a dozen.
    Nho SKEW-WHIFF or NICEY-NICEY or Dai as a name, Welsh or otherwise. Never seen AIRSTREAM as one word, except as a brand name for a trailer (caravan). In America I have heard “High Muckety-Muck” all my life, but never “High Muck-a-Muck”.
    Least favorite clue: BOW-WOW. “My” = “WOW”???
    Utterly failed to spot the anagram behind BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, even after knowing it had to be right. My bad; great clue.
    Monkey = IMP is uncomfortable in AmEng at present, for complicated reasons, but that’s not Paul’s fault.

73. Them Tates; Dai for David is nearly universal in Wales, Dewi is the Welsh version MY!= Goodness Me!= WOW! seems perfectly fair to me.
    SKEW-WHIFF is a word still use, it has a wonderful, almost onomtapaeic, sound.
    I have heard NICEY-NICEY, but not in the last 60something years.

74. nicbach@70, spot on. Especially for Paul, commenters on this site use two related words – “clever” = a tricky clue that I was especially pleased to get, and “unfair” = a tricky clue that angered me because I couldn’t get it.

    I was another surprisingly moderate person in search of an R at 21a CENTRISM. And 1a DIRECT was a lovely (nice?) bit of aural wordplay.

    Thanks P&mc for the fun.

75. Germany isn’t Deutsche, it’s Deutschland.

    I think the US version of 8dn is “high mucky-muck,” but that was close enough.

    Thanks, Paul and mc.

76. mrpenney@66. I think it’s not so much the assumption that we all know French that makes this clue unfair; for me at least it’s the fact that the French indicator is in the answer rather than the clue. So it’s ‘Jolie’ (with a capital letter?) = NICE in French, therefore it’s NICE NICE, then insert Ys as appropriate. This means solving the clue requires a little bit more work from whichever synapses facilitate deviousness. (In my case, none of them, apparently.)

    To be fair to the high muckamuck, in my Larousse French-English dictionary “nice” is the first option in English for joli. The second one, however, with the label femme, is “pretty”. Most people in England who have come across jolie will think of pretty rather than nice, because that is the feminine form and is therefore used when referring to a pretty woman. (Elle est jolie, n’est-ce pas?)

    Turning to the English-French section for the English word “nice”, we find the French equivalents agréable, gentil, sympathique, bon before we finally see joli.

    This is why, to use Cellomaniac’s terms @74, I find this clue unfair rather than clever. Though I do acknowledge its cleverness too. After all, the setter is the high muckamuck.

77. mc_rapper67@61: my objection is not to homophones per sebut to the implication, which appears to be pretty much universal among setters and editors, that rhotacism can be ignored despite it being the preferred pronunciation of a substantial portion of the English speaking world. Some people ignore the r, or introduce one (“drawRing”) while others don’t, but these clues assume that we’re all the same. Contrast this with the use of regional or dialect words, where there is a certain amount of balance and often an explicit indicator to guide the solver. In the case of rhotacism no such balance exists. In fairness. I think it would be very hard to achieve, so my preference would be to avoid clues that rely on non-rhotic pronunciation.

78. For NICEY-NICEY you have to invent an extra clue – “24a (bis) Nice in Nice (5)” to which the answer is not “BONNE” but “JOLIE”
    But at least it gave me the “great earworm” (apart from The Stranglers), as g larsen@41, of Stubby Kaye as NICELY-NICELY Johnson singing
    Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJq7J2uzSlc
    ‘…the devil will drag you under | By the sharp lapel of your checkered coat | By that fancy tie ’round your wicked throat | With a soul so heavy you’d never float’

    “

79. poc @77; as I have said many times before, we use dictionaries as a standard for spelling, so why not for pronunciation? Chambers, Collins, the ODE etc all use RP, and they do not usually give rhotic pronunciation. If the intended pronunciation is not as in dictionaries, setters will often append a descriptor, such as Scottish, Irish, Northern etc. This would seem to be an answer to the often quoted “I don’t pronounce it like that”. I don’t seem to see objections that “I don’t spell it like that”, although there are of course also regional differences in spelling (especially US etc).

80. This has been the blog that has kept on giving…it has even given Paul a new nickname!…thanks for all the continued comments and stimulating debate…

    Valentine at #75 – Deutschland duly updated, danke.

    poc at various – I was only pulling your ‘chien’ with the Franco-phrases…the rhotacism debate is way above my grammatical head (and attention bandwidth, if I am honest). At some point, after many similar quibbles and debates about homophones, I took the cop-out of saying that ‘x can sound like y’ in my blogs, to try to deflect the incoming ire…

    Anyway, time and tide, etc…the cruciverbal clock ticks on, there are Sunday puzzles to solve, and some speed-solve training to be done for the Times champs next week!

81. If it helps, re NICEY-NICEY — I live in Nice and speak French and I still didn’t parse it until I got here!

82. Rob T, now that made me giggle!

83. poc@77, re rhotic versus non-rhotic, these clues do not assume that we all speak the same, as you argue. But they do assume that we are all familiar with both rhotic and non-rhotic pronunciation. They assume that, whichever side of the divide we are on, we can recognize that “sore” can be aural wordplay for “saw”, and vice-versa. Since large numbers of people are on each side, I think that is a reasonable assumption.

    I am a rhotic speaker, so these clues require that extra recognition, but it only adds to the fun of the aural wordplay.

84. 12ac HANDS OFF: your parsing suggests HANSDOFF. It’s not HANS D plus OFF but HANSOFF around D

    24ac, NICEY-NICEY: Wasn’t really familiar with this term and only got it from word search then didn’t really figure out the wordplay. It’s difficult because it’s a sort of ‘reverse clue’: i.e. (part of the answer (‘Nice nice’) could be a clue to something in the actual clue (jolie).

    27ac, CUTTER: adjective/noun mismatch?

    3dn, CARLYLE: ‘red-pencilled’ is a very good and, afaik, original anagram indicator.

    8dn, HIGH-MUCK-A-MUCK: unknown to me (and most English people?) so got it from word search. I though “scum done over” meant ‘more than one CUM reversed’, but then the K’s are unexplained, so I reluctantly accept the blogged parsing (scum doesn’t seem a very good synonym for much).

    19dn, FRITTER: The cryptics work perfectly, but the surface that’s wanted is really ‘blow on hot dish’, isn’t it? Maybe ‘waste of hot dish’ could be better? (Although not everyone likes ‘of’ to link two definitions).

    20dn, SIGNAL: Someone on the Guardian blog pointed out this clue as being very good, without saying more at the time. I only saw the anagram, though.

    21dn, FIRST RATE: LOI. Multi-part answers whose parts cross like that are always very difficult, as you’re deprived of a crosser in each of two lights.

    JohnJB@52, the effective “brute force” approach to such clues is not Google but word search, e.g. Chambers Word Wizard, which is what I used.

    Irishman@49 make smileys by using characters with at least one space either side. ‘:-)’ becomes 🙂 .

    Regarding the query about multi-part clues, it’s not usually a problem but it is here because of the repeated 4,3. You don’t know which order they come in till you start to fill, so crossers are less helpful. To get round it, fill in any old junk and see where the automatic navigation takes you.

    Mc@80, “the rhotacism debate is way above my grammatical head”. It’s not a point of grammar but phonetics. Some dialects, including most, if not all North American ones pronounce the Rs that RP English speakers don’t. Surely that’s not so difficult that you need your “can be” cop-out?

85. “27ac, CUTTER: adjective/noun mismatch?”No! What was I thinking?

86. Too late to comment but, like geeker @10 I thought there were a remarkable number of solutions with doubled letters in. I counted nine. A nice puzzle. AVID + WORDSMITH were favourites with me. Thanks all.

87. Hi Choldunk at #86 – a bit late to the party, but it’s never too late, until the Comments close, which I think is a few months after publication…

    Yes, I noticed Geeker’s comment but forgot to respond…I had noticed this as well while putting the grid together for the blog, but there didn’t seem to be any pattern, so I put it down to coincidence…

    Tony Collman at #84/85- later than usual – I was wondering where you had got to!… Too many points to reply on, but I fixed HANDS OFF…

88. Mc, it was a bit late, really, to bother with all those comments at a time when most had probably moved on, but at least you got to read them and fix up your parsing for HANDS OFF.

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