Everyman 4,035

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The puzzle may be found at https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/everyman/4035.

A little unusual for an Everyman – we still have the self-reference in 6D COMIC, the geographical 26A ESTONIA, and the one-on-one anagram 15A ENDURINGLY; but there are only wisps of long answer pairings, and a couple of pieces of parsing needed careful consideration.

ACROSS
1 JOINED FORCES
Jocose friend trashed United (6,6)
An anagram (‘trashed’) of ‘jocoe friend’, with a misleading capital letter.
10 APERCUS
Somewhere in Bolivia, personal assistant coming back with illuminating insights (7)
A reversal (‘coming back’) of SUCRE (‘somewhere in Bolivia’ – its capital, actually) plus PA (‘personal assistant’).
11 TUMBLER
One that’ll take a drink, or one that’s had too many? (7)
Double cryptic definition.
12 ELBOW
Joint enterprise finally getting large yield (5)
A charade of E (‘enterprisE finally’) plus L (‘large’) plus BOW (‘yield’ – “I bow to your expertise”).
13 ANACONDA
A nasty aquatic creature. One’s nature? Drowning animals, primarily! (8)
The first letters (‘primarily’) of ‘A Nasty Aquatic Creature One’s Nature Drowning Animals’, with an &lit definition.
15 ENDURINGLY
Underlying – put another way, having long-term effect (10)
An anagram (‘put another way’) of ‘underlying’. Everyman is fond of one-word to one-word anagrams.
16 BEAU
Ribbons arranged, we’re told, for fancy man (4)
Sounds like (‘we’re told’) BOW (‘ribbons arranged’).
18 EASE
Most common Scrabble tiles gathered, bringing comfort (4)
I think this must be: sounds like (‘gathered’) Es – E being the most common tile in English Scrabble (there are 12 of them in a set). I eventually decided that it was a red herring that A (9 of them) is the next most common – S (4) is some way down.
20 THUMBSCREW
Tries to get a ride from ship’s company: it’s torturous! (10)
Ancharade of THUMBS (‘tries to get a ride’) plus CREW (‘ship’s company’).
22 OVEREATS
Displays gluttony having consumed tea before end of cricketing encounters (8)
A difficult parsing: an envelope of EAT, an anagram (‘consumed’) of ‘tea’ in OVERS (‘cricketing encounters’) – with EAT placed ‘before end’ – i.e. prior to the final S.
24 BOGUS
Fraudulent old girl taking public transport? (5)
An implied envelope; O (‘old’) plus G (‘girl’) in BUS (with the “in”, ‘taking public transport’).
26 ESTONIA
Ecstasy tablets and C illegally acquired at source in Baltic state (7)
A charade of E ES (‘ecstasy tablets’) plus TON (hundred, ‘C’) plus IA (‘Illegally Acquired at source’).
27 VULPINE
Uranium record held by source of wine: cunning! (7)
An envelope (‘held by’) of U (chemical symbol, ‘uranium’) plus LP (long-playing ‘record’) in VINE (‘source of wine’).
28 RAISED A LAUGH
Proved highly amusing? (6,1,5)
Hardly cryptic definition – with play on ‘proved’ referring to yeast and ‘highly’ indicating a raising.
DOWN
2 OVERBID
Taking some cover, Biden poorly estimated risk (7)
A hidden answer (‘taking some’) in ‘cOVER BIDen’.
3 NICE WORK
Wine – cork removed – bravo! (4,4)
An anagram (‘removed’) of ‘wine cork’.
4 DASH
Tear and shatter (4)
Double definition.
5 OUT ON A LIMB
Where a nest egg may be found to be at risk (3,2,1,4)
Definition and literal interpretation,with the ‘limb’ being of a tree.
6 COMIC
Initially chatty, Everyman’s accepted by company that’s put up with one trying to amuse (5)
A charade of C (‘initially Chatty’) plus OMIC, a reversal (‘that’s put up’ in a down light) of CIMO, an envelope (‘accepted by’) of I’M (‘Everyman’s) in CO (‘company’).
7 SILENCE
Quiet, because around the French (7)
An envelope (‘around’) of LE (‘the French’) in SINCE (‘because’).
8 LATE DEVELOPER
One-time occupier of dark room who’s been relatively immature? (4,9)
Definition and literal interpretation.
9 GREAT UNWASHED
When graduates trained hoi polloi (5,8)
An anagram (‘trained’) of ‘when graduates’. Neat.
14 IN THAT CASE
Then where might I have packed those items? (2,4,4)
Definition and literal interpretation.
17 ISABELLA
Being twisted, I’ll abase Catholic monarch (8)
An anagram (‘being twisted’) of ‘I’ll abuse’; there have been several Queens named Isabella, but the reference is to Isabella I of Castile, also known as Isabella the Catholic.
19 SWEATER
Armpit often seen in leisurewear (7)
Double definition – note the break.
21 RIGGING
Arranging – in a bad way – support for masts and sails (7)
Double definition.
23 ENNUI
Feeling fed up with starters of escargots nightly, night in Paris cut short (5)
A charade of EN (‘starters of Escatgots Nightly’) plus NUI[t] (‘night in Paris’) minus its last letter (‘cut short’).
25 UVEA
Somewhat nouveau – that includes Iris (4)
A hidden answer (‘somewhat’) in ‘nuUVEAu’. The UVEA is a part of the eye including the iris – another misleading capital.

picture of the completed grid

50 comments on “Everyman 4,035”

  1. Thank you Peter O. I found this Everyman perhaps the trickiest yet and not as humorous as usual.
    Small tweak needed in the blog for ESTONIA. ES for the tablets.

  2. Thanks PeterO for the lovely blog!
    Top faves: EASE, OVEREATS and IN THAT CASE.
    EASE
    Agree with the blog. ‘A homophone of Es’ seems to be the right option.
    SWEATER
    Do we need the ‘seen in’ included as a part of the def? leisurewear works fine, I think.
    RAISED A LAUGH
    The clue works as a def. Doesn’t it?
    proved=RAISED. The ‘highly’ probably makes it like ‘RAISED a lot/very well’? Not sure.

  3. Thanks Peter O for the blog. I agree with your interpretation of EASE, with gathered as a kind of picked up/homophone indicator. I fell for the ”red herring”, and despite thinking the clue was a bit loose, didn’t take the trouble to check the tiles.

    RAISED A LAUGH did produce a smile for me, and I found it sufficiently cryptic with the double meaning of proved. . NICE WORK I think works if you separate removed into re-moved. A tick for that one too. And also for LATE DEVELOPER.
    A bit of old technology for those 3 clues. Not many people bake their own bread these days, and I haven’t had a bottle of wine in a while which had a cork in it, or taken my photos to somewhere to have them developed. I thought the one-time was apt.

    I found the grammar in SILENCE and ENNUI a bit awkward, and APERCUS verging on unfair with foreign words or unusual GK in both the definition and wordplay.

    A chuckle for the usual self-deprecatory primarily clue. COMIC

  4. Agree with you paddymelon@3 on SILENCE and ENNUI. The surfaces don’t make elegant reading.
    APERCUS: seen it before in a couple of puzzles.

  5. Always a tilt or two to be had in cwland: Sucre the capital of Bolivia; uvea the part of the eye, and that anacondas are primarily aquatic (this I think I’ve forgotten). Also bunged in Estonia without grocking C = ton (just lazy). All good value, thx PnE.

  7. I had an idea that E was the most common letter in Scrabble, so that’s as far as I went. I don’t think I found this particularly difficult, I can’t really remember, but rereading the clues doesn’t ring any bells re struggling. Not particularly beginner friendly though.
    I have just completed this week’s and if I say the same thing next week, you’ll know senility is slipping in.
    Thanks both.

  8. Correction to me@3. I meant the self-referential clue COMIC.
    KVa@2. SWEATER. I think “seen” is meant be read in the surface along with ”often”, ie “often seen”, as armpits aren’t in all leisurewear. If we drop “often seen” or just “seen”, we still need “in” as the link word.
    RAISED A LAUGH. If you’re saying that it’s a cryptic def I would tend to agree.

  9. paddymelon@8
    My understanding is marginally different.
    SWEATER
    Def 1: I am fine with ‘Armpit often’ as underlined in the blog.
    Def 2: leisurewear
    Link words: ‘Seen in’
    (seen in leisurewear vs SWEATER: there’s a part of speech mismatch)
    RAISED A LAUGH
    Def 1: CAD Proved highly amusing-the simple surface reading
    Def 2: A CD playing on the ‘proved’ and the ‘highly’.

  11. KVa@9 I agree. As a lockdown legacy baker I found ‘proved highly’ for RAISED amusing. In lieu of a rhyming pair there’s OUT/IN leading the long downs.
    Thanks Everyman & PeterO

  12. Thanks for the blog, ENDURINGLY another good long anagram for Jay’s list, VULPINE was a neat clue.
    OVEREATS and COMIC are both too convoluted for a puzzle with the stated aims of Everyman.

  13. Everyman occasionally uses antonym pairings at the beginnings of solutions in symmetrical grid positions. Here we have IN/OUT.

  14. My last two took me ages. When I looked at 10a, having got the first three crosses, APERCUS did come into my mind but I didn’t know what it meant and had never heard of Sucre. Once I looked it up I realised it was right and filled in DASH to finish.

    Liked THUMBSCREW, VULPINE, IN THAT CASE, EASE

    Thanks Everyman and PeterO

  15. There are two symmetrical pairings in the long down solutions – LATE/GREAT as well as IN/OUT.

    Thanks to Everyman and PeterO

  16. Regarding levels of difficulty, Everyman commented last year that “gradually stretching us” was “part of the mission”.

  17. Yeah Jay @16. But who’s “us”? And how does one define ”gradually”‘? Alan Connor also said something about his view of solvers is that they have others, family members or whoever, who could help them along the way. His articles on the Guardian are excellent for newer solvers, and I’ve learnt a lot from them myself. Perhaps we need to link them here?
    I’m interested to hear from newer solvers.

  19. All in and dusted, when I saw APERCUS I knew Sucre was in Bolivia.

    I wonder who Everyman is aiming at too. I find I’m solving it in similar times to those I solve a lot of Cryptic crosswords, Quiptics vary hugely, but the ones everyone agrees hit the mark for the description I solve a lot faster. When I started solving crosswords regularly again, I was solving the Everyman in the same times as the Quiptic, so my feeling that the Everyman is nearer a Cryptic than the starter crossword most of us began on.

    Thank you to PeterO and Everyman.

  20. Favourite was ELBOW, for the surface. Didn’t get the homophone part of EASE, though would accept the explanation above. Not sure ENDURINGLY (an adverb) is something “having” (an adjective) whatever effect, however nice an anagram it may be. Not very happy with “consumed” and “removed” as anagram hints, but, well, it’s probably fair in a cryptic (and even I got them in the end 🙂 )
    Thank you, Everyman and PeterO

  21. This one felt like pulling teeth from start to .. well, I never did finish it as APERCUS held out on me.

    Assumed I was looking for somewhere in Bolivia, which I suppose I was but not for the actual answer. Big irony is that I’ve just spent this past week reading one of my daughter’s university essays on Bolivia – but all about the ex-President Evo Morales. No mention of Sucre in there though.

    Not interested in being ‘gradually stretched by Everyman. If I want to stretch myself crosswording, I go for one of the Daily Cryptics which I know I’m unlikely to complete.

    I think my time doing Everyman is coming to an end.

    Sadly.

  22. Wow, this was tough. Beginners, beware!

    New for me: UVEA; SUCRE = the legal capital and seat of the judiciary of Bolivia (for 10ac).

    Favourites: VULPINE, THUMBSCREW.

    I guessed these but I could not parse them:
    22ac OVEREATS – I thought of OVERS but could not parse the EAT bit.
    28ac RAISED A LAUGH – that is a cd?
    8d LATE DEVELOPER – was not sure if it was a cd or what.

    Thanks, both.

  23. Held up by trying to understand why the ribbons were plural in 16a. Surely most bows are made from a single ribbon.

    Is there an anagrind for TEA in 22a? I fail to see it.

  24. Beginner’s corner again…I actually managed it this week! ‘Week’ being the operative word. I print them out and have them on the go for 7 days 😃 but I got there in the end for some reason…thanks everyone always.

  25. Well done Cara , I used to take all week. I feel sorry for newer solvers now, I learnt a lot from the Everyman when I was a novice. Now I do not think I would like it at all .

  26. DuncT @15
    These are the “wisps of pairings” I mentioned in the preamble. I should have been more explicit.
    poc @23
    For 22A, OVEREATS, see my blog.

  27. I think I must be emerging from beginner’s corner….as I managed this one fairly well. Next week could be completely different and I could be struggling again. I find the blog enormously helpful- and all the comments. So thanks to all.

  29. [For those who care, the reason there are fewer Ss in a Scrabble set than one might expect is because they’re worth their weight in gold. Since so many words can be lengthened by adding an S, very high scores are possible by putting an S onto the end of an already high-scoring word and making a different high-scoring word in the other direction. So if, say, ZOO is on the board as an across (12 pts) you might be able to make ZOOS across and, say, SIXTY down (13 + at least 15 = at least 28 points, probably more if you hit a premium square or two). The designer of Scrabble initially had a number of S tiles in the game that was proportional to how frequent S was in the language, but he cut back when he realized how valuable the S tiles are.

    Also, this means that you should never waste an S. If it’s not scoring you at least 20 points, hang onto it and play something else.]

  30. @25 Roz, ur encouragement is always so precious.
    @28 KVa, thanks! This blog is such a supportive, kind, positive place…

  31. I found this trickier than most Sunday ones although in retrospect I’m not sure why. Aside from apercus, which I had trouble believing at first, and the parsing for COMIC, it really shouldn’t have taken so long.

  32. 25 minutes, but pleased to have completed it, as APERCUS and UVEA were new to me. I enjoyed VULPINE and GREAT UNWASHED.

  33. I managed to finish it but spent far too much time on 10 across since the personal assistant also lives in La Paz, which everyone knows is the capital of Bolivia. Only a persistent google search informed me that La Paz is the administrative capital and Sucre is the Judicial capital. ESTONIA went in easily from the ES but I couldn’t parse the rest of it. Thanks setter and blogger.

  34. I have only done a couple of Everyman puzzles, and only recently. I agree with the sentiment that these are far from beginner puzzles. Similar to others I struggled with a few unknown terms and I will swear ANACONDAs are semi-aquatic, wrecking the &lit. No real favourites, indicating I am probably not on the setter’s wavelength. If pushed, I will name ISABELLA

    Thanks Everyman and PeterO

  35. DuncT@15 & PeterO@26: There are actually 2 pairings built around the same clues, used both as homophones and literally elsewhere in the puzzle, that is, BEAU vs ELBOW and EASE vs ESTONIA. This seems rather intentional, if I were to guess.

  36. I worked out apercus by parsing alone, new to me. And to a lesser extent, uvea.
    Didn’t parse ‘ui’ bit of ennui.
    Belatedly begrudgingly liked: Nice Work – when I realised that ‘removed’ was an anagrind.
    For a newbie, too many &lits / CADs / DDs / multiple wordplays for small words. Too cryptic if that makes sense. I prefer Everyman’s witty anagrams.
    Fewer smiles than usual when completing this crossword.

  37. Relative beginner here – and relative regular here! I completed the majority of this, but I didn’t get late developer and apercus was beyond me.
    I’d say this was at my current level – really couldn’t get far at all with the Hugo prize or the Friday crossword. Off to try today’s quiptic!

  38. Coincidentally, I finished on 3dn (not convinced by removed as an anagram indicator). Not as hard for me as some recent Everyman’s though I struggled to parse Estonia and Raised a laugh.

  39. APERCUS defeated us but favourites today were THUMBSCREW, VULPINE & RAISED A LAUGH. Definitely a bit trickier but not complaining, just being challenged.

  40. Found this one relatively easy; got it all out without recourse to wildcard dictionaries. Could not parse several “obviously correct” answers (e.g. Estonia).
    Was not sure about “dash” but put it in on the basis of “What else could the answer be?” but I do not understand “dash” to mean either “tear” or “shatter”.

  41. It just shows how we all think in different ways – I found today’s Everyman the easiest for ages . But
    I still don’t see how tear = dash, whether it’s rip or cry meaning. It doesn’t seem to have bothered anyone else.

  42. SOMETHING odd here – when I did my post Rolf ‘s wasn’t there. DASH as in ” he dashed the glass against the wall” was OK but , like Rolf, I still can’t see the other meaning. Maybe someone will give us an apercu!

  44. I think ‘tear’ and ‘dash’ can both mean ‘to move quickly’.

    In my copy of the NZ Herald the first letter of ‘gathered’ was missing from 18a, but I managed to solve the clue before working out what the correct word was.

  45. I’m happy to be stretched by a few difficult clues each time. It expands my vocabulary.
    I still don’t get the connection between armpit often and sweater….

  46. Mike Bryan @45
    Perhaps, like Prince Andrew, you do not sweat (yes, I know that is not quite what he said).

  48. I understood 19d as sweater = 1. Armpit 2. Person who sweats, who is often in leisurewear eg at the gym or jogging.

  49. Rolf@40.
    I (eventually) took tear as in ‘tear along at speed’ and ‘shatter’ as in ‘shatter one’s hopes’
    Initially I went with drop as in tear drop and break/shatter something by dropping it.

  50. Didn’t finish. APERCUS escaped me.

    Got 22A but I really have no idea how ‘consumed’ can be regarded as an anagrind.

    Otherwise, pretty happy over all.

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