Guardian Saturday Prize Crossword 29,266 by Picaroon (30 December 2023)

67 comments on “Guardian Saturday Prize Crossword 29,266 by Picaroon (30 December 2023)”

1. This was a surprisingly good subject for a theme. Meticulously clued, and not too, too hard, once I figured out what “25” was. Nice job on the blog.

2. Pleased to be 25 down of this!
   I’m still not convinced with 29 across EVERGREEN, REV meaning gun, is it to “rev up” as in to gun, put ones foot down?
   LOI was 3 Down, it took me an age to see this!
   Also 8 Down was sneaky, took a while for the penny to drop with this one, and Laurence Of Arabia was playing on TV as I was doing the puzzle!

   Thanks for the blog MC

3. Thanks mc_rapper67. Another of those that got off to a flying start and soon came to a grinding halt. SHOT was quickly apparent and helped with a few but others required a lot more thought. The NW corner held me up at the last and took several sessions to complete. With two crossing letters I found it hard to get past ‘achieve’ for 13a, (achieve = get and chive for the salad ingredient) even if I couldn’t account for tequila. EVERGREEN was my immediate reaction to 29 but it took much longer to see why. Perhaps carelessly I accounted for 12a the same way as you did initially and I still can’t see too much wrong with it A very good workout.

4. Clever to find all those different ways to use SHOT.

   Since you provided a link to Collins online, would it have been any more trouble to make the link point at the entry you were discussing (cis)?

   Not sure about this, but shouldn’t it be mot du jour?

   Antonknee@2, yes, if you gun the engine, you rev it.

5. Learned about cis and trans in Chem 101 a long time ago, something to do with which way organic molecules spiral (chirality?). Its adoption re gender is rather apt. Yes, lovely themed puzzle, thank Pickers and rapper.

6. Thanks Picaroon and mc_rapper67!
   Enjoyed the puzzle and the blog.

7. Thanks Picaroon for everything a prize crossword should be — I found it challenging but not impenetrable, clever, and, above all, entertaining. It took me a couple of days but I managed to solve and parse the whole lot. My top picks included AMERICANA, SHELL, IN A MESS, EVERGREEN, and CASSIS. Thanks mc_rapper67 for the detailed write up.

8. Picaroon was very kind with the SHOT clue, which made the puzzle accessible if not easy. I liked the variety of shots, I should have come away feeling quite woozy.
   Lovely puzzle, finished and parsed on Saturday. I had to come back to it and , as is so often the case, saw through what had been impenetrable clues quite quickly. I think my GK and solving skills, such as they are, chimed with the clues
   Thanks both.

9. Really liked the puzzle, and the blog.

   Regarding CIS, OneLook.com gives 23 different dictionary resources that have it as an entry (I didn’t check which senses they all had, but some at least had the meaning here).

   Thanks Picaroon and mc_r

10. This was great fun working out the varied usages for SHOT. Like grantinfreo@5 25 had to be gettable or the puzzle would have ground to a halt. I first encountered cis and trans as optical isomers in organic chemistry. More recently cis has become a gender identity term in common usage, so surprised to hear it hasn’t made it into all dictionaries. Many thanks MC and Picaroon.

11. Sorry about 10, looks like my cursor made a jump as it is prone to do.

12. Believe SNAKESKIN is just
    (SNEAK)* + SKIN(fleece)

13. So very close. I suppose that if I’d ever heard of David Lean I might have been able to finish the puzzle. (Or maybe not.) Otherwise, very enjoyable.

14. I parsed 12a SNAKESKIN as mc did at first, but with the definition being “clothing material”. I think that is as good a parsing as his final one.

    For me the extensive use of 25 didn’t make the puzzle easier, because, as mc noted in his excellent blog, there were so many different shots in the cross-referenced clues that deciphering was still needed.

    Thanks Picaroon for the clever and delightful puzzle, and mc for the most helpful blog.

    [ The cis reference at 4d brought to mind the acronym that I created to describe myself – COWPOP, which stands for Cisgendered Old White Person Of Privilege. I use it to illustrate why in enlightened political discourse my opinions, although I am of course entitled to have them, are to be given no weight because of my privileged lived experience. ]

15. Shaji@12, we crossed. I agree with you, as long as “clothing material” is the definition, as I took it to be (@14).

16. Thanks for the blog, I liked BRAILLE even though I am not fond of fake capitals, brae is such a lovely word . SNAKESKIN works both ways, clothing could be removed from the clue.
    CIS is often in Guardian articles with reference to gender , it may have come over from astronomy ( cis or trans lunar etc ) or as Grant@5 and Paul@10 mention , it may have come from molecular physics.
    Good to see Cellomaniac back in the blogs for the New Year.

17. Entertaining puzzle, and someone else who found the northwest corner went in last, I couldn’t see beyond Spain not SHELL for ages, although it only fitted the wordplay.

    I know cis/trans isomerism from organic chemistry, but came across it before I was taught the topic, there’s a Dorothy Sayers that hinges on the way nature tends to only use either the cis or trans molecule.

    Thank you to mc_rapper667 and Picaroon.

18. Splendid blog, mc_rapper. I hoped this would be plain sailing once I solved the rather straightforward SHOT, but in fact I found this very tricky, and at one point quite early came to an almost complete halt. I wondered if my solving ability was just shot (sorry) after last weeks Maskarade, but fortunately my wife came to the rescue by pointing out SNAKESKIN, and things got going again (gratitude mixed with embarrassment there). Even so, I’d not appreciated just the variety of uses English finds for such a simple word, and the home stretch was quite slow. I did like the Scottish bank, once it clicked. The final embarrassment was the time it took to get my LOI, BOOZE. Faced with B-O-E, I eventually took a piece of paper and wrote BAO_E all the way to BZO_E without seeing the obvious, then wrote B_OAE all the tedious way to the final B_OZE at which point the answer leapt out at me. Not one of my finer moments. Anyway, Happy New Year, Picaroon, mc_rapper67, and everybody!

19. The antonyms I remember from chemistry are laevo and dextro but the geographical terms transalpine and cisalpine seem to go back to Roman times.

20. Stared at 17ac for a while, without any crossers. I then had a good chuckle and confidently filled in HACKS. ( I have been told to ignore punctuation, so reporters are well known as hacks and a poor golf shot is referred to similarly.)
    I then discovered that HACKS will not fit the required crossers and had another chuckle when I saw the “correct” answer.
    I am still pretty new to the world of cryptics, so, is it an accepted setter`s misdirection to have an alternative plausible, parsing solution? Or, can anyone advise as to why HACKS would not fit the requirements for definition and wordplay ?

21. I rarely comment on Saturdays as I have normally forgotten the Prize of a week ago. This time, I have remembered and I do enjoy a theme that plays with a single word in the way Picaroon has done with this one. And a good job done in not making the surfaces truly irritating as a result which is always the risk. I very much enjoyed BRAILLE.

    Which made me wonder whether anyone had ever attempted a braille crossword. I found this online as part of a 2018 MIT puzzle treasure hunt. TBH, I understand neither the overall treasure hunt nor the braille puzzle but there are far greater minds than mine on this site. There is a solution button top right corner – but pressing it left me none the wiser.

    Thanks Picaroon and mc

22. BOOZE
    Wellcidered@20
    Reporter’s disdainful utterances for a 25, say (5)
    Assuming that ‘a 25, say’ could be interpreted as HACKS, your parsing leaves
    the ‘disdainful utterances’ part of the clue unaccounted for.
    I find the word ‘hacker’ to describe a poor golfer. Does ‘HACK’ mean a poor shot?
    Or is HACKS a poor shot (I am tempted to think of poor shots here)?

23. KVa@22
    A disdainful utterance when witnessing a poor shot could be “hack”. (Yes, a hack is a term for a poor shot. )
    Disdainful utterances could therefore be hacks.

24. I do agree though that BOOZE is the better solution.
    Maybe I should just be grateful that I had a bonus chuckle.

25. Wellcidered@23
    Impressive!

26. Wellcidered@20 Amongst the things that slowed me down was having HITS instead of JABS for 1d, before I had either of the crossers . I thought it covered socks to the face and shots in the arm could be drug hits. One of the attractions of cryptics is that generally a good clue has an unambiguous answer, but wild enough imaginations can often find other possibilities!

27. Best New Years wishes to you too, mc_rapper67. That was a very thorough blog, and the Preamble and preceding comments have really said it all. But just to say that I did have a lot of fun with this one. I found the many variations on the theme added a whole new level of interest once I began to see how “shot” in its manifold applications was being included. The aforementioned Emmental sandwich, the SWISS ROLL at 22a, and 7d PICK-ME-UP were my firm favourites. With thanks to Picaroon – what a great setter!

28. Interesting re cis/trans historically. Badger’s @19, meaning this side v the other side wrt the observer. [Great moniker, btw. The late Mrs ginf used to call Rommel, and the occasional progressive Tory 😉 , good Germans]

29. … Badgerman@19 … verdammt auto thing …

30. Great puzzle and blog, thanks. My first experience of cis and trans was with Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul, which provided an early lesson in seeing things from others’ perspective, as cisalpine for the Romans was on the Italian side.

31. As is often the case for me with Picaroon, I found this much trickier and less enjoyable than others seem to. I was stuck with eight lights unfilled, a huge swathe of white in the NW quadrant. I came back to it several times but never got any further. I think my problem may come from being seduced by the surfaces, and consequently not “seeing” what is the definition and what is the wordplay, or mistaking nouns for verbs and vice versa. Elementary errors that I normally avoid with other setters, but not this one.

    Chapeau to Picaroon, and thanks to mc_ for solving those that I couldn’t.

32. A prize cracker & just the booster required post festivities.
    I also initially had ‘hits’ for 1d
    and in 29a I assumed ‘rev’ was an abbreviation for revolver.

    Thanks Picaroon & mc_rapper67

33. Here in London, the Latin cis- and trans- prefixes are used to describe which side of the river you are on… “cispontine” or “transpontine”.

34. To show how desperate I was getting in the NW, when I only had the I and T at 3d CIVER BRUNT came to mind as “cricketer, almost”. All ended satisfactorily after 11a arrived unbidden in the middle of Sunday lunch.
    Thanks to Picaroon and mc_rapper67

35. grantinfreo @5, Badgerman @19:

    In organic chemistry, it is indeed laevo- and dextro- for chirality, distinguishing molecules whose structures are mirror reflections of each other.

    The prefixes cis- and trans- refer to when two functional groups on an organic molecule lie on the same or opposite sides of a carbon chain.

36. Thanks for all the comments and feedback so far – much appreciated, as usual…and for once I am not ‘hack’ing a golf ball around the ‘Ampshire countryside on a Saturday morning…

    Looks like this was generally well-received, although a bit tough for some?…

    Antonknee at #2 – what serendipity to be watching a David LEAN film at the same time!

    Tony Collman at #4 – yes I could have done the work for you with the link, but I thought people might like to keep it as a generic link. It is permanently open in my browser – a useful counterpoint to Chambers for GK solutions – just a shame it doesn’t seem to allow wildcards… And my ‘jour’ identifies as male (;+>)

    Re. the general discussion on misdirection, and specifically HACKS/BOOZE – I can’t imagine that Picaroon meant to (mis)lead solvers to HACKS. But we’ll never know unless he pops in. There are innumerable examples on this site where the ‘wild imaginations’, as KeithS put it, of solvers come up with something plausible enough to be an alternative – also HITS and JABS, as per various comments above – and which the setter/editor probably never even considered…and as wellcidered put it, he soon reached the correct answer due to the wonder of crossing letters.

    And as for SNAKE + SKIN vs S_KIN clothing NAKES, we will probably never know unless the Pirate p-p-p-pops in… It seems the ‘annotated solutions’ dried up in September last year – hopefully an item fairly high up on the new Editor’s to-do list will be to reinstate them… I don’t tend to think of snakeskin as a clothing material – shoes and handbags yes, but clothing no – except maybe the odd ageing rockstar in snakeskin trousers or jacket?…and obviously the skin originally ‘clothed’ the snake…

37. Good puzzle from the Pirate with clever use of the theme. BRAILLE was my favourite. I parsed SNAKESKIN with ‘material’ as the definition. If we take ‘clothing material’ as the def, ‘skin’ has to do double duty as both the containment indicator and the covering – or so it seems to me.

    CIS is a Latin preposition meaning ‘near’ or more specifically ‘on this side’, and was and is still used a lot geographically, as others have pointed out. (It’s actually cognate with English ‘here’). Its scientific usage came first in organic chemistry. There seems to be a bit of confusion about this amongst our colleagues. ‘Dextrorotatory’ and ‘laevorotatory’ are (old-fashioned) terms relating to chirality – the handedness of molecules with a tetrahedral geometry. Cis and trans relate to isomers of planar molecules in which substituents can be on the same or opposite sides of a double bond. With three or more substituents, cis and trans become ambiguous, and in modern nomenclature they have been replaced by Z (from the German ‘zusammen’ – together) and E (from the German ‘entgegen’ – opposed) respectively. This is a bit confusing for novices because the letter Z has a trans shape and the letter E a cis one 🙂

    Thanks to S&B

38. Wellcidered @20:

    Congratulations on finding an alternate possibility! That said, it doesn’t quite work. It is an unspoken convention that “NOUN’s …” would not be an acceptable clue for a pluralised noun, nor for a possessive noun with ending in apostrophe-s. At best, it would be considered poor style on the part of the setter.

    Richard E. Maltby Jr, who has been compiling beautiful immaculately-clued variety cryptics for years and years, nowadays published in Harper’s Magazine, gives the following delightfully apt guidance to his (mostly American) solvers: “Mental repunctuation of a clue is the key to its solution.”

    (Maltby is a distinguished figure in the history of American musical theatre, quite apart from being a crossword setter. His friend, Stephen Sondheim, was a regular solver of the Listener crossword.)

    This might suggest that one can freely repunctuate until one finds what one is looking for, but it doesn’t quite work that way. Certain things have come to be regarded as acceptable and others not. These are conventions, but they are not entirely arbitrary. Rather, they arise from the expectation that clues be surprising but fair. The search space of possible interpretations has to be deep enough to create mystery, but not so vast that the solution becomes ambiguous.

    Acceptable repunctuation would include adding or removing commas, full stops, colons, quotation marks, etc, to support an alternative parsing of the words in the clue.

    Unacceptable repunctuation would be taking an uncapitalised word in a clue, and capitalising it to make a proper noun, and using that sense of the word to interpret the clue. For example, the uncapitalised word “worms” cannot be used in a clue to allude to the historical “Diet of Worms” because that latter “Worms” is the name of a city and must always be capitalised. If the setter means “Worms” then they cannot say “worms”.

    This respects Ximenes advice to setters: you need not mean what you say but you must say what you mean.

    The opposite situation, where a usually uncapitalised word is capitalised in a clue, is acceptable because there are many circumstances in which that uncapitalised word may sometimes appear in capitalised form. A setter may certainly use “Worms” to refer to annelids, say.

    It’s generally considered unacceptable to mess around with apostrophes in possessive forms. For example “boy’s” cannot be used as an example of “children” because we are not free to remove the apostrophe to turn “boy’s” into “boys”.

    On the borderline of acceptability is the matter of removing or introducing spaces. A special exception is conventionally carved out for the “lift and separate” device, where we break a word into two parts and interpret the clue accordingly. So “indeed” sometimes means “in deed”, and we may have to put what comes before inside the word “deed”.

    Why is this a special exception with a special name? I think it’s because (i) people enjoy the element of teasing surprise when they solve such a clue; (ii) it’s limited in scope, so that it doesn’t lead to a hopeless proliferation of possibilities; (iii) it is used rarely, so that the people who don’t like it are not disturbed by it too often.

    I hope some of this is helpful.

39. I mangled part of what I meant to say above.

    “NOUN’s” would not be an acceptable definition for a pluralised noun (because we are not supposed to remove the apostrophe). It would be fine to use it to refer to “SYNONYM’s” but it would be poor style to have that be the entire answer (just as it is poor style for a setter to fill out a grid with plurarised nouns ending in “s”).

    I’ll be grateful to see corrections to my lengthy post from others with a clearer grasp of all these subtleties!

40. Well I solved this without any reference. I did know “cis” regarding gender/identity but thanks to others here for the origin in science.

41. Girabra @38: ‘Reporter’s’ could conceivably be a definition for HACK’S, although I don’t think I have ever seen a ‘genitive’ form of a word as a single solution, rather than part of a phrase. The other objection to Wellcidered’s parsing is that ‘for’ separates the wordplay and the definition, making ‘reporter’s’ a homophone indicator. Otherwise ‘disdainful utterances’ becomes redundant.

    Lift-and-separate is only permitted according to strict Ximenean usage for separating two words of a well known phrase so that one becomes part of the wordplay and the other part of the definition. Splitting words (indeed for de…ed) is frowned upon – but great fun.

    (And apologies for crossing with your post @35)

42. ThemTates@13, heard of Lawrence of Arabia?

    Girabra@38, it was not Ximenes, but Afrit who originally said “you need not mean what you say but you must say what you mean.”

    Also, the term ‘lift-and-separate’ was not coined to describe splitting a word as you say and would not have been approved by Ximenes. It was coined by Mark Goodliffe (aka Magoo) in blogging Times puzzle for something a little different.

43. On the subject of clues with two plausible answers – Ximenes once did this deliberately for a whole quarter of a barred puzzle, each clue in the top left had two valid answers that fell into two groups , A and B say. All the A answers joind together where they crossed , same for all the B answers. A and B answers did not cross successfully. Only one set joined the rest of the puzzle successfully. It was published on April 1st.

    Lift and Separate ? Why bother with a term for this? Has anyone EVER been fooled by two words that are ALREADY separate ?

44. Roz@43,

    “Has anyone EVER been fooled by two words that are ALREADY separate?”

    When words are commonly associated in a well-known phrase, one has to make a certain effort to interpret them as separate lexical items. To take an example from the linked page at Crossword Unclued:

    Aching to cook and eat Welsh rabbit (7)

    One has to make a certain effort to split “Welsh rabbit” to realise that the def is “rabbit”, while “Welsh” is part of the wordplay. There are other examples at the link which you, for reasons best known to yourself, refuse to follow, as well as a link to the blog post where the phrase was first used in the context of crosswords, rather than bras.

    The effort is not as great as that required to actually split a whole word, something which Ximenes, along with a number of present-day crossword editors, regarded as unfair. In fact, I think it may only be the Guardian that allows this, except where there is an indication within the clue to suggest splitting the word.

    CHIN(W)AG = rabbit, anagram of *aching ‘eating’ the abbreviation for Welsh

45. Tony@44 I take it you think this clue deserves a special name ? How about calling it a clue ( barely ) ?

46. An appropriate time to thank both Picaroon and mc for a brilliant year of setting and blogging that has given me enormous pleasure throughout 2023.
    This puzzle and blog were well up to the usual high standard; challenging and ingenious but perfectly doable.
    Heartfelt thanks and Happy New Year to both.

47. Roz @43: ‘Has anyone EVER been fooled…?’ Yes, frequently! Only those rare individuals who are able to read a clue as a string of isolated words without unavoidably comprehending it as a sentence are NEVER fooled.

    Afrit’s quip has always amused me by its ambiguity. The Ximenean interpretation is that you need not mean what you WRITE but you must WRITE what you mean. An alternative interpretation would allow not only for misleading punctuation, but also allow unspecified homophone clues 🙂

48. Thanks Picaroon and mc. After solving (very nearly) all of Maskarades epic last week, disappointed with myself for nowhere near finishing this fine crossword, with most of the west side incomplete. Even needed this blog to explain some of the parsing for ones I did get right! I don’t mind ambiguity of any sort in clues, but if one possible interpretation of the clue doesn’t fit with crossers, it (ie that interpretation) is wrong, I think.

49. Tony Collman @42, @44:

    Thank you for correcting my incorrect attribution. Thank you also for pointing me to the original use of the phrase “lift and separate”. I had not known that.

    Regarding the latter: I’m with Roz on this. It’s pleasant enough to have a phrase that describes what happens when a clue takes a set phrase and splits it. The set phrase has a magnetic pull on our thought processes, which we have to detach from so that we can see the correct parsing of the clue. But, as Roz implies, this is what any good crossword clue does.

    I did a quick google search (“fifteensquared lift separate”) and followed a few links. It turns out that the other meaning, of taking a word and splitting it into parts that are also words, occurs quite frequently here. Because of the way language evolves, I expect that this usage will stick. It’s close enough to the original usage, and more importantly it describes something that needs a name but doesn’t otherwise have one. This operation (breaking a word into two parts) seems to me to need a name more urgently that the other operation (breaking a phrase into two parts, along existing word boundaries). The only currently available phrase is “lift and separate” so probably this will stick to it unless an alternative phrase shows up that people prefer.

50. [ Roz@16, thanks for the welcome back. I do the puzzles in chronological order (for ft^2 continuity) and after a brief hiatus am only a week behind, so I am still lurking except for Saturday and Sunday. Wishing you health and happiness in the new year. ]

51. Girabra@49 the name is Playtex for splitting a single word, far fewer letters to type. It ialso links to the rarer opposite process when we need to push two words together to solve a clue, this is called Gossard.

52. { Cellomaniac@50 the same wishes for you of course , this morning was a momentous occasion in crossword history, I will reveal more next week.]

53. Roz @51: Thank you for those two words!

54. [ Roz@52, re the momentous occasion: does that mean that AlanC is ahead of you in the score this year? If so, it won’t last long – we all know that the rule-makers always win. ]

55. Roz@45, Mark Goodliffe (aka setter Magoo), multiple Times Speed-solving Competition winner, who would probably make you look slow, thought it deserved a name. I simply report that fact. Of course ‘lift-and-separate’ is now commonly used for the similar, but different device involving splitting words.

56. Occurred to me that 14a (IN A MESS) could conceivably have been defined as 25 (SHOT), as in 8D.

57. Gervase@47, Roz never pays any attention whatsoever to surface meanings. She just likes to get the whole thing over as quickly as possible. Being distracted/misled by the surface would be an obstacle to that.

    Since you’re here, maybe you can tell us what clue/puzzle Anna was talking about in General Discussion?

58. Girabra@49,

    “it describes something that needs a name but doesn’t otherwise have one”

    Mark Goodliffe would not have thought it needed a name because, as a solver and blogger of the strictly Ximenean Times Crossword, he wouldn’t have come across any, such clues not being allowed there.

59. Girabra@53, note that those names, cute though they are, are only really used by Roz, afaik, and not by the wider crossword community. Perhaps they’ll catch on, though

60. [Cellomaniac@54 I do not make the rules , I simply enforce them fairly and obey them, I have now retired from competition, go out at the top, I will discuss the event next week.
    Tony@55 I am sure you know my views on the Times crossword ]

61. Oh dear – we seem to have disappeared down a rabbit hole, or maybe a cleavage, on ‘lift-and-separate’…a discussion that could maybe be lifted and separated off to General Discussion?…

    Thanks to those who have stayed on topic – lenmasterman at #46; Graham at #48; and Dave at #56…

    Roz and Tony C – I feel like a teenager hiding in their bedroom while Mum & Dad have an argument – just ‘get a room’, you two!

62. There is no SO in DO-RE-MI-FA-SOL-LA-SI-DO
    is this a HUGE Picaroon mistake?

63. mynollo at #62 – Chambers gives “sol – n the fifth note of the scale in sol-fa notation (also so or soh ).”

64. mc_rapper @63 – the tonic sofa?

65. [Roz, I know your views on the Times’s proprieter. That needn’t reflect on the crossword editor, Richard Rogan, who is a fine fellow upholding a tradition.

    Mc, just a discussion arising directly from girabra’s essay @38. Roz and I don’t need ‘a room’ for that.]

66. [ Very sorry MC but he started it. This is my very last word I promise. Tony @65 you either support Murdoch or you don’t , there are no grey areas. ]

67. Thanks mc_rapper for a comprehensive blog of what I found a very tough but typically inventive and rewarding puzzle. I have learned a lot about the cis prefix as a result of the comments too.

    mynollo@67: also for So vs Sol, surely we need listen no further than “So, a needle pulling thread” – infinitely preferable to “Sol, a ball of fire that’s red”?

    Thanks Picaroon.

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