Guardian 29,340 / Pangakupu

97 comments on “Guardian 29,340 / Pangakupu”

1. Nina, HARIWA, giving the Māori silver lining to this excellent challenge (glad you got there paddymelon, and looking forward to hearing about your Oz theme). Lots of interesting words including CHICANERY, CARBON SINK, BOWDLERISE, HIEROGLYPH, DENOUEMENT and SLIPCASE (new). My favourites were the shorter words, ROAM, BRIO and RIPE, POLE POSITION and the lovely nod to Shakespeare’s The Tempest in TITANIA. I can’t work out BOWDLERISE either, Eileen.

   Ta Pangakupu & Eileen.

2. ROAM is either A in ROM or O in RAM. Your parsing of OLD PRETENDER seems fine to me Eileen. I can see we crossed ANGUS @3.

3. Thanks setter and blogger. Two types of memory: A in ROM and O in RAM

4. BOWDLERISE
   I think, you have parsed it right, Eileen. It looks like a CAD as well. Blue-pencil/censor… b*****, d*** and worse!
   POLE POSITION
   Def 1: First (possibly)
   Def 2: The rest of the clue
   OLD PRETENDER
   Anything to do with the King James’ Version?? The rest is explained in the blog.

   Forgot to mention O in RAM. Others have taken care of that.

5. 6dn: careless omission – fixed now, thanks all.

6. Thank you Eileen. After writing it out and counting letters a few times I parsed
   BOWDLERISE as you and KVa did.

7. OLD PRETENDER
   Could well be just (an) ‘old impressionist version’ as opposed to a ‘new pretender’.

   Thanks Pangakupu and Eileen!
   I find HIRIWA in a column the grid. It seems it means silver in Maori.
   PHI is there. Followed by two versions of LOVE.
   EIHTUT is in a row. It means That’s it (I know Maori if online).
   Can’t make the connections.

8. Thanks, KVa and paddymelon – I thought it must be CAD: otherwise, ‘blue-pencil’ is doing double duty.

9. Thanks Pangakupu and Eileen
   Only APERCU on first pass (and I raised an eyebrow at PERS for “person” – is it valid?) I speeded up after a few more went in, but some still entered from definition alone.
   I wouldn’t equate RIPE with “fresh” – almost opposite in meaning!

10. KVa @7 – so ‘exile in Italy’ is the definition? That works for me: I’ll amend it now.

11. CHOIRS
    Parsing by Eileen is all right. I considered CHOSe instead of CHOSen.
    ROAM
    One question:
    Are ‘ramble’ and ‘ROAM’ not synonymous? Why the ‘ramble a bit‘?

12. For OLD PRETENDER, I think that ‘exile in Italy’ is the definition. I think you’ve parsed BOWDLERISE correctly, Eileen – at least it’s the way I parsed it. Found myself on P’s wavelength today, so less perplexing than usual and I got off to a good start with ALCOHOL and AIRLOCK. Spotted HIRAWA and thought there should be the Maori for ‘fern’ somewhere. Liked the elegance of ERODE and the surface for HERNIA (with gratitude to the NHS for a recent successful op). Thanks to Pangakupu and Eileen.

13. btw Eileen, OVER in 7d is deliveries (plural).

14. I think POLE POSITION is a double meaning. FIRST as in on the race track, and then concern of slalom contestant.

15. muffin @13 – another careless error, apologies: I will amend.
    btw, I think you have one yourself @9: person = PER (It’s in Chambers. 😉 )

16. KVa @ 11 – a computer bit in situation when it is switched off???

17. BRIO brought to mind the bit of “What a Carve Up” where “lacks the necessary brio” is misprinted as “lacks the necessary brio”. I tried to make AMAZING work for AWESOME. It had the a the mass and the energy but only left a for our team.

18. [Thanks Eileen. I’m trapped under a cat so can’t get to my Chambers!]

19. AlanC @1. I liked your silver lining. CHICANE(RY) and POLE POSITION reminded me of the Formula 1 Motor Race held in Oz on tbe weekend. And the CARBON SINK as well. Made me laugh.

    As you said Alan C@14 re POLE POSITION

20. Tough but fair, and eventually gettable, which is more than can be said for a few Guardian puzzles lately.
    I was initially puzzled by OLD PRETENDER but as others have pointed out if you read “[an] exile in Italy” as the definition it makes perfect sense. (Of course, we ought to use “The old pretender” to mean Henry VII, who usurped the last legitimate King of England, but there you go).
    And BOWDLERISE (my LOI) seems to be a rather clever &lit. The eponymous Dr Thomas Bowdler was also a keen chessplayer; a game by him against Henry Conway from about 1788, in which Bowdler sacrificed four pieces to force checkmate, can be found on line.
    Lots of clever stuff – liked the mildly nostalgic ERODE, also CHICANERY, CARBON SINK (about which I, too, had a snigger), TRANSVAAL, TITANIA, HIEROGLYPH, PASTORALE and HERNIA.
    Thanks, both

21. Angus@16
    ROAM
    That bit is not clear to me.
    Is ROAMing not ‘much of rambling’?

22. I had to think twice about the L “taken” in the clue for DELFT. Not subtracted but added or embedded.
    And “perverse” in ALIGNMENT had me looking for some sort of contrary wordplay or meaning.

23. Amusingly AIRLOCK(ed) is a slang word in NI for having imbibed too much ALCOHOL. You may have heard it, when you lived there Eileen. 🙂

24. It took several goes to identify the right fodder for BOWDLERISE (last in). Raised an eyebrow at RIPE=fresh and didn’t spot HIE=race, so HIEROGLYPH went unparsed along with TRANSVAAL. The double wordplay for ROAM was clever, and I do appreciate getting words that are unusual without being wilfully obscure (CHICANERY, DENOUEMENT, BOWDLERISE).

25. Awesome for wonderful, or even for merely cool, seems well settled-in. Enjoyed the puzzle, ta PnE.

26. Not that one, AlanC @23 – but it was way back in the 60s. My favourite one was ‘stotious’. 😉

27. It took me a while this one, but all in and pretty much all parsed. Like some of the more entertaining words, like CHICANERY.

    Thank you Pangakupu and Eileen.

28. Eileen @26: haha, my favourite is ‘blootered’.

29. PS: thanks Eileen for sorting out OSLO, which at first sight looked suspiciously like an indirect (if short) anagram.

30. KVa @ 21 – sorry for being rather vague in wording. Ramble = ROAM; speculated (hence the ??) that ‘a bit’ loosely refers to a memory unit (0/1) stored in ROM, whilst RAM will be empty when computer is off

31. Usual high standard from today’s setter. CARBON SINK and DENOUEMENT were both cheeky and good fun to solve.

    Slightly surprised that the Apartheid era TRANSVAAL was not clued as “former part of South Africa” or something similar.

    Thanks Pangakupu and Eileen

32. Really enjoyed a more than satisfying struggle today. CARBON SINK, HIEROGLYPH and SLIPCASE were the clues that I spent quite a bit of time on towards completion. But all fairly clued…

33. Thanks Pangakupu and Eileen

    I took the concern of the slalom contestant to be the position of the poles that form the gates rather than the ski poles.

34. Simon S @33: I thought the same but I assumed they are also called ski poles?

35. I’m sure you’re probably right, Simon @33 – I’m not a skier!

    You’ve reminded me that I have not noted AlanC’s better explanation @14, which I will do now. (Not really my day. 🙁 )

36. Thanks Pangakupu & Eileen,
    I loved ALCOHOL, the alignment of ‘lamenting’ and the vehicular activity at 11a.
    I missed the silver lining but then my enjoyment was unclouded.

37. Good puzzle, with some straightforward clues and others that took a bit of disentangling. LOI for me was DENOUEMENT – it took a while to see that ‘bondage’ was part of the containment indicator.

    Lots of nice words here. I’ll second Eileen’s choice of clues, plus the &lit BOWDLERISE and the neat double definition POLE POSITION.

    muffin @9: I also wondered about RIPE = fresh. They could both mean ‘cheeky’ but it’s a bit of a stretch.

    [NeilH @20: The last legitimate King of England was Harold Godwinson, since which time there has been a stream of foreign dynasties 🙂 ]

    Thanks to the pakeha and Eileen

38. Pangakupu is rapidly becoming a favourite of mine. Among the very many excellent clues I would like to award big ticks to SLIPCASE, APERCU, LOCUS, TIFFIN, ELFIN, HERNIA and the long anagram for ALIGNMENT. CARBON SINK made me laugh. Perhaps a little liberal with the device of clueing a word and then losing an unspecified letter (ALCOHOL, CHOIRS, TITANIA) I failed to parse TRANSVAAL and OLD PRETENDER, so thanks for the explanations Eileen and KVa@7. Many thanks Pangakupu for a lot of fun.

39. AC @ 34 As far as I know those are, logically enough, the gate poles.

40. A very likeable puzzle with a level of challenge that seemed to suit me today. The ones I enjoyed the most have already been mentioned by Eileen and others. I did enjoy finding and translating the Māori word for “silver”. Thanks to Pangakupu and Eileen.

41. KVa@7. I also noticed PHI O LOVE in Row 2, and ANNE in Row 8, Phi being Pangakupu’s alter ego. Wondered if it could be P’s SILVER wedding anniversary with the central nina HIRIWA, Māori for silver.
    However, I could be reading too much into it. As Paul Henderson as Phi said in Meet the Setter:

    I have no idea how I got the reputation for themes and messages, since I did not set out to do them regularly.
    However, one thing I have is horror vacui, and anything that gets me a toehold in the grid is to be welcomed. So perimeter messages, lists of thematic titles and so on are trotted out purely as words to be clued.

42. I struggled at first but it all came together satisfactorily in the end. Thank you for the parsing of 10A and 13D, both of which eluded me but went in thanks to all the crossers.

    Thanks Eileen and Pangakupu.

43. Simon S, indeed you’re correct. Not that I’ll ever meet them. Red runs are my limit😉

44. That was a fun brain stretch today. I really enjoyed CARBON SINK, DENOUEMENT and POLE POSITION. I completely failed to spot the Nina because I was looking at the rows rather than the columns!

    I’m not sure that I entirely agree with the “bit” being the computer term here Angus@30, KVa@various. I think the definition of A in ROM or O in RAM is sufficient. I viewed “a bit” as misdirection. To “ramble a bit” could be to go for a “roam” or it could be to talk or write at length in a confusing way, which is what I’m doing now.

    Altogether, though, a really enjoyable puzzle. Thanks Pangakupu and Eileen.

45. [Lost my comment and now can’t recall all of what I said!]
    I liked this puzzle which was at the right level of challenge for me. The ones I particularly enjoyed have already been mentioned by Eileen and others. I really liked finding the Māori word for “silver” at the end of my solve. Many thanks to Pangakupu and Eileen.

46. Neither of my comments have appeared. Not sure what’s going on or if it’s operator error.

47. My main thrust was it was enjoyable and at the right level of challenge for me today. Liked the Māori Nina for “silver”. And thanks to P and E…

48. My third attempt also hasn’t appeared. Will give up now. Anyone else having strife?

49. [Frustrating JiA. I’m sure it’ll be good when it comes through. Has there been a line inserted at the top of your post saying something like ”your post is pending”, and only you can see it?
    That’s happened to me for various reasons but you can contact admin and ask. I’m amazed that poor old Ken Mac is often awake at all hours and usually gets back pretty soon.]

50. Mostly plain sailing, though I didn’t much like the BOWDLERISE clue. It was clear what was going on, but the definition is in an unconventional place, though I suppose it could be taken as an &lit.

51. paddymelon@40
    SILVER PHI LOVE & more! All of us Māori scholars (incidentally, this is the first time I have got the name of the language right!) have so far not succeeded in deciphering the code.
    POLE POSITION
    After reading poc@47, I remember something that I wanted to say @4 (There’s another selfish motive to turn your attention to me@4!). I could think of only slalom canoeing, which too has gates like Simon S and AlanC explained in the context of skiing.
    poc@47
    I loved BOWDLERISE. Different people; different tastes!
    Lechien@43
    ROAM (yes…again)
    A bit or a lot of misdirection in any clue is welcome. No redundant word is. In all probability Pangakupu/Phi
    doesn’t leave a superfluous word in a clue.
    airlocked, stotious and blootered: Thanks Eileen and AlanC!

52. Only beaten by the CARBON SINK. Sounds like greenwash to me. The greenbelt where I grew up was a ring of golf courses around NW London and I doubt they’ve sunk a lot of carbon.
    muffin@18. Ditto. And another sprawled over my ankles. Glad I’m not the only one.
    Thanks Pangakupu and Eileen.

53. Eileen I am utterly confused by carbon sink. What’s it got to do with green belt??

54. Cedric @53
    I took a “green belt” as an area of land where photosynthesis could take place, thus removing carbon dioxide from the air.

55. Ye gods that really is complicated! Would never have got it! Thanks though

56. Cedric@53 it’s a bit of a cryptic definition: a carbon sink is a “green belt” because carbon sinks are often plants or trees (also green). Additionally, it is an area that absorbs carbon and is therefore good for the environment (green). And finally, they are represented by green bars on maps of the “carbon budget”.

57. [Thanks to kenmac for restoring normal transmission]

58. Here’s something interesting, I think. We’ll start with the Samoan for silver, which is SILIVA. Seems a straightforward borrowing (I learned a little in college). I also learned that the Polynesian languages are very related, and that there is a table of letter transformations you can use to get from one to the other (think of Z in German going to T in English in many words).

    Said table, when going from Samoan to Maori, has S –> H, L –> R, V –> W. So you can get to HIRIWA without knowing any Maori, technically.

59. Got only one clue on the first pass and thought I was in for a slog, but then everything fell into place and it was very enjoyable…although had to guess at 14a (thanks to the discussion here re it’s parsing) Thanks Pangakupu and Eileen

60. @56 many thanks: amazing what one learns from crosswords. AZED would be proud of this clue!

61. I had no gripe with ripe, as both can mean cheeky albeit informally but they’re in the big red book

    Great fun and my favourites, as they often are, were the last two in OLD PRETENDER & CARBON SINK

    Cheers E&P

62. Enjoyable puzzle, it was a good challenge and I was happy to be able to parse all my answers 🙂

    Favourites: KEYBOARD, CARBON SINK, RIP, ELFIN, TIFFIN, DENOUEMENT.

    LIke muffin@9, I wondered about 1d PER = person. Is it an abbreviation?

    New for me: HIE = race or go quickly.

    Thank you, both.

63. michelle @62
    Chambers: ‘per. abbrev: period; person’

64. Bodycheetah @61
    ….but if applied to cheese, fresh and ripe are opposites!

65. Quite tough for me; I got somewhat BOGged down in the SW corner.

    Enjoyable puzzle but I found some of the surfaces a bit weird eg the clue for TRANSVAAL. I liked POLE POSITION, the French colonial meal and the running glory.

    Thanks Pan. and Eileen.

66. Four answers then ground to a halt. Reading the blog, there were a few I’m annoyed I didn’t get. Overall it was just too obscure for my tastes.

67. I fear I will never succeed in getting on this setter’s wavelength.
    To rub salt in that wound: my knowledge of Maori is non-existent so the ninas and other clever touches will always be beyond me.
    I’d never heard of a SLIPCASE (I keep books in a bookcase), nor CARBON SINK (my thanks to Cedric@53 for raising the matter) so both were guesses based on the crossers.
    I agree with Arklark@31 about TRANSVAAL, and with SimonS@32 about the skiing.
    On the other hand, I thought TIFFIN and LOCUS were fun – and ROAM was a little cracker.
    Thanks to Pangakupu for making me aware of my failings, and to Eileen for helping fill in the holes in my knowledge

68. Wellbeck @67: I agree with you and Arklark that TRANSVAAL is a former province of South Africa, so the name is officially obsolete. On reflection I would also have a slight quibble about using ‘climax’ to define DENOUEMENT, which is the tidying up of loose ends (literally ‘unknotting’) at the end of a drama – after the climax, surely? But wothehell…

69. I loved this puzzle, particularly the &lit / cad at 22ac (BOWDLERISE) and the double wordplay for 6dn (ROAM). I agree that “a bit” is unnecessary in this clue, but it’s harmless.

    I learned in school that the denouement is different from the climax: the former is the wrapping up of loose ends that happens after the latter. But it only takes a bit of looseness to equate them, so that’s a minor quibble.

    I have to take “version of” to be a link in 14ac: I can definitely see “historic Impressionist” leading to OLD PRETENDER, but not “historic Impressionist version”.

    Like others, I’d never heard of a slipcase.

70. Well, I ended up with a completed grid but I still find this manifestation of the Indy’s Phi to be a difficult one. I just don’t seem to chime with the way he thinks in Guardian mode. A couple of unknowns and a couple of definitions I would never have equated with the solution, GREEN BELT/CARBON SINK being the most obvious. It seems to me any large area of countryside could be defined as a carbon sink – golf courses, yes, but also fields, forests and national parks. Despite Dr Whatson’s encouragement, I cannot see myself acquiring any Maori beyond the word haka so the nina will always be rather lost on me. That said, plenty of cleverness in the cluing and I enjoyed many of them, in particular BOWDLERISE.

    Thanks Pangakupu and Eileen

71. The first person to bowdlerise Shakespeare was Thomas Bowdler’s sister Henrietta Maria (known as Harriet). She produced the first Family Shakespeare but it did not include all the plays – as a lady there were some texts she did not want to admit to having read. Her brother finished the job with an edition including all the plays – and as is the way Harriet was effaced from history.

72. ….being female!

73. I suspect many people know some Maori words: Kia Ora, for example, as it is (was?) a well know drink in the UK. I hadn’t realised it is a Maori greeting till watching “The Gone” on BBC TV4 on Saturday night. Wiki tells me the Kia Ora case was responsible for revitalising the Maori language, but I have no idea how true this is.

    Thanks, Eileen and Pangakupu – a toughy for me today.

74. I know nothing about pottery, but Chambers defines DELFT as earthenware, not porcelain.

75. Late to the party as the blog wasn’t up when I solved the puzzle this morning. A challenge, but very enjoyable as all the solutions unfolded. Thanks to the setter, snd to Eileen as always. No chance of me seeing the nina, but I never do.

76. Delft is not porcelain. It was made in the Low Countries and England in imitation of Chinese porcelain.

77. Enjoyed this. Favourites were BOWDLERISE for the fun clueing of a great word and OLD PRETENDER for a fine surface. Very much enjoy this setter nowadays, which hasn’t always been the case.

78. According to Wikipedia,

    However, the term “porcelain” lacks a universal definition and has “been applied in an unsystematic fashion to substances of diverse kinds that have only certain surface-qualities in common”.

    The quotation is from something called The Combined Nomenclature of the European Communities .

    Good enough for me.

79. Found this particularly hard. I find the verbosity of the clues very off putting and difficult to parse. For example “A lot of anger among most of selected” (although of course once it’s explained it’s actually quite clear).

    In this regard I find additional unnecessary words even more distracting than normal. For example the “a bit” in ROAM really doesn’t make any sense, since roaming is explicitly over a large area, which I think is contradictory. Likewise what is the point of “version” for OLD PRETENDER?

    Possibly as Kva@51 would have it “In all probability Pangakupu/Phi doesn’t leave a superfluous word in a clue” and there is meaning here, but it doesn’t seem like we can find it!

    Anyway, I managed only about 30% of this after completing Everyman, Quiptic and yesterday’s Cryptic. Back down to earth with a thump and a dent in my pride today!

    Thanks Pangakupu, more practice needed for me, I think. Thanks for clearing up all my confusions, Eileen!

80. Pangakupu
    Kei te pehea koe
    Whakawhetai ki a koe mo te kupu
    Whakawhiti
    Kia ora fromOtorohanga!

81. billypudcock@78 and others re Pangakupu’s style.
    Another quote from Phi’s interview on Meet the Setter 2 years ago:

    I’m not as wedded to brevity as some – I like a bit of narrative; each clue should be a little story, or generate an image.
    I dislike clues that are credible sentences but incredible situations (think: “Help! My postilion has been struck by lightning” in its intended role as a colloquial phrase for non-English speakers), and there are often puzzles with one or two clues that are close to Chomsky sentences. Mind you, it might be fun to contrive a puzzle where all the clues are Chomsky sentences.

    We should be careful what we wish for! 🙂

82. It would be a very imaginative production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that turned Titania into its heroine. Usually, the depiction of the wife being fooled into having sex with a donkey is portrayed as humiliating rather than heroic — a Bottom Bonk that would certainly be a candidate for Bowdlerisation.

83. paddymelon@80
    Thanks for the quote, very illuminating! I might visit Meet the Setter to get some insights into everyone’s style.
    I am learning that it’s very much “horses for courses” and every setter goes about things differently. Reading the blog I see that grids I find more doable are impossible for others, and vice versa. Possibly I need to give up the notion that I will get to a point when all crosswords are solvable, and just enjoy those moments when one of them is 🙂

84. Still don’t understand where ‘version of‘ comes into OLD PRETENDER, or why all these dashes in the BOWDLERISE clue – was expecting it to be something clever, and turned out to be just an anagram with randomly inserted underlines. In fact, I‘d dismissed this interpretation from the off – totally silly, like having a hidden word in a rambling sentence most of which does not signify.
    Then again, I am perpetually fed up with all this shortly/briefly stuff which could mean anything rather than compiler-speak for knock one letter off the end and strikes me as lazy setting – but here we have 2 occurrences in one clue (CHOIRS) and I also think that RIPE is rather the opposite of fresh, if anything. Sorry, not a fan of this.

85. Completely impenetrable for me.
    Zilch.

    Someone kindly provided guidance for the anagrams on website Crosswordsolver.org

    22a – what/where is the definition in this clue?

    19d – FIT/APPROPRIATE? Could someone explain this please?

86. Carole @83 and Steffen @84, here goes.
    To bowdlerise something is to take out all the rude bits. Hence the blue pencil, and hence the b___ and d_____ which might be bloody and damn or whatever. And taking the blue pencil to the bloodys and damns (and worse) is an example of bowdlerisation. So the whole clue becomes its definition – what is sometimes called an &lit. Some people find them very clever. Others find them as irritating as can be. Who’s to say which is the better view?
    If something is fit for purpose I guess it’s appropriate. As near to a synonym as we generally get in crosswordese.

87. Ticks in abundance. Tough but really enjoyable. Thanks to Eileen for confirming my understanding of the whys & to Pangakupu.

88. Caroline@83, in an earlier age, if a book or periodical contained a curse word, or other strong language unsuitable for children or delicate women to read, it was common practice to indicate it by printing the first letter followed by underscores for the rest of it. (Or sometimes the first and last letters, with the intervening letters dashed.) So in a bowdlerised edition one might find the word “bloody” indicated by “b_____” and “damn” by “d___”. It’s why Captain Corcoran, in “H.M.S. Pinafore” says that he “never swears a big, big D”. (Which he then does later, when provoked, by singing “Damme [damn me] it’s too bad.”)

89. Ty 86.

90. I thought I was doing so well, with APERCU and CHOIRS much easier than they seemed at first, but was defeated by DENOUEMENT, or more specifically by the verbosity of the surface which prevented me from seeing ‘exposed’=OUT. Like some others I occasionally find the extra words a little irritating, or even deliberately misleading – like ‘version of’ in the clue for OLD PRETENDER, when surely doing would be the right word to use.

    Thanks to Pangakupu and Eileen.

91. Muffin @64 true and exactly how I like my cheese. But we only need one pair of synonyms for the clue to work?

92. billypudock@83. Yes, I find Meet the Setter helpful in getting to know the quirks and foibles of the setters, and what to look out for. Agree with you that it’s horses for courses and enjoying the moment. Some you get on their wavelength, and some you don’t, and some days you do, and some days you don’t.

93. Thank you Neil and Eleanor (@86 and @88) — I‘ll rethink!

94. I thought I was clever as I put LYON (unaccompanied =only) in for 24A and grumbled at the indirect anagram… And then failed to make head nor tail of that – amongst many other things…
    Thanks P&E – I need to up my soving skills!

95. EleanorK@88. The Bowdlers (brother and sister) never used the form ‘b——‘. They either cut entirely or substituted a more ‘acceptable’ word. The idea was that no young person would ever suspect there had been a naughty word in the first place!

96. Alec@95 – Thank you! I love learning new things.

97. Easily the hardest Guardian Cryptic I can remember doing in recent years. It’s now late on Friday evening, having started this on Tuesday, having completed others in between. I had another go at this one today and finally cracked it. Funny how what is relatively straightforward to some is incredibly tough to others, and on a different day it can be the other way around. I guess I just wasn’t on the same wavelength… quite enjoyed it though, in a masochistic sort of way!

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