Guardian 29,449 – Pangakupu

82 comments on “Guardian 29,449 – Pangakupu”

1. Thanks Pangakupu and Andrew. Got the grid filled but a lot unparsed. Time to study the blog and fill in my missing knowledge.

   Some lovely long down clues without which I would have failed to finish

2. I haven’t been able to find the Nina either. I actually found this one a bit chewy…the across clues yielded very little on first pass. I didn’t realise that in apocryphal church tradition, Jesus’ grandmother is supposed to be Anne, so that held me up for a while too. That being said, there were some lovely anagrams and TICKER TAPE was a nice clue. I had to back-form CORPULENCE.

   Just a point about EPIDEMIC, I think the answer is just “outbreak”. I think Large-scale is EPIC.

   Nice to see Picaroon in the Quick spot today too! Thanks Pangakupu and Andrew. I look forward to someone telling me what the Nina is 🙂

3. Andrew

   I think Epic in Epidemic is clued by Large-Scale. The solution is synonym of just Outbreak

   And your parsing of Esoteric is incredible – I wouldn’t have seen that in a month of Sundays

4. Thanks Pangakupu and Andrew
   GNOSTIC and ERRANCY went in from definition only. I had several goes at which letter of I ACCEPT RAIN to drop in order to get the anagram for 13d.
   Nice anagram for TINTAGEL CASTLE.
   [If asked who was born as a result of the “Immaculate Conception”, most people would get it wrong.]

5. A few biffed and parsed later. Not sure about “smaller proportion” for an offcut. I’d have thought remnant or waste piece .

6. Pleasantly chewy, assisted I guess by knowing who St Anne was supposed to have been.
   I hadn’t heard of the Stoppard play DIRTY LINEN (which, apparently, “concerns the investigation of a Select Committee into the moral standards of the House of Commons”, remarkably prescient as it was written in 1976) but the wordplay was clear. Similarly with the STANLEY CUP. Brilliant anagram for TINTAGEL CASTLE and a particularly neat clue for CORPULENCE.
   Thanks to Pangakupu and Andrew.

7. I normally struggle with Pangakupu but this one went in OK although the odd nho inc the ice hockey cup, Mary’s mother and the abbreviation for encyclopaedia. So the blog was needed. TICKER TAPE and TINTAGEL CASTLE were my favourites, along with the very nice OATH &lit.

   Thanks Pangakupu and Andrew

8. Tough puzzle, I think it took me more than one hour to complete it.

   I was unfamiliar with the North Americanisms. New for me: STANLEY CUP = the National Hockey League (NHL) playoff champion in North America; 29ac ENCY = encyclopedia (American English).

   I wrongly parsed 1ac although I did see the rev of C and SONG.

   Thanks, both.

9. Unlike others, I found the long down clues trickier, and needed to get quite a few acrosses first. Failed to parse GNOSTIC and took a while to sort out the right anagram fodder for PICNIC AREA. Not sure that COLLABORATOR=spy and haven’t seen the ENCYclopedia abbreviation before. Favourites TICKER TAPE and the Cornish cattle rustlers.

10. I wondered if EINARE in the middle column might be the elusive Nina, but if it has a Maori meaning, I can’t find it.

11. I was held up for ages with “errancy”, mainly because I had somehow entered “flight recorded” and not noticed my typo! Even so, the structure of 29A was odd – “Word meaning…” is usually assumed, and so “sinning” on its own would have been fine, but then the surface of the clue would be less neat. I wasted a fair bit of time looking for “word meaning” being the definition.

    I had never heard of any of Jesus’s grandparents. I presume that on one side they would be the parents of the Christian God which would make for an interesting theological debate! Easier to sort in Greek mythology for sure 🙂 Luckily the clue could be solved without that bit of obscurity.

    I thought the double lights running vertically were very neatly done – much more satisfying that jumping all over the grid like a deranged cricket.

    Many thanks to Panagakupu and Andrew

12. I thought that the abbreviation of contralto should be A for alto, as in SATB; though I bore in mind the possibility of C, I have never seen that as an abbreviation for contralto.

    Not at all an easy puzzle fir me – harder than last week’s Vlad.

13. Starting from the W of 1d, and reading up, there is the word WANGNOA, which means SIMPLY (google translate). If that’s the nina, I imagine there might be another word somewhere to make a phrase, but I can’t find it.

14. Interesting puzzle. Rather a lot went in from the crossers rather than pieced together from the wordplay (or even the definition in a few cases). Some of the definitions seemed to me a bit off-centre: ‘esoteric’ for GNOSTIC, ‘smaller proportion’ for OFFCUT, ‘worry’ for GNAW (‘gnaw at’, surely), but perhaps I’m just being pICKY.

    I particularly liked APNOEA, TINTAGEL CASTLE and DIRTY LINEN. Nice to see ‘point’ = TINE rather than N, S, E or W, and I appreciated the arrangement of the split entries.

    Thanks to Pangakupu and Andrew

15. I solved NET.

16. I agree with Andrew and gladys @9 that ‘spy’ for COLLABORATOR is another pairing that doesn’t equate.

17. I like how the parsing for GNOSTIC is suitably esoteric but TINTAGEL CASTLE was my favourite.

18. Perhaps I’m just not esoteric enough, so this is just me harrumphing along this morning…
    I don’t particularly warm to this setter’s style. Dream up a word, chop off a letter here and there, then maybe reverse things. 1ac GNOSTIC a good example to kick things off. I do much prefer a clue that has a smooth, meaningful read to it. Unlike several other clues today. Though I managed to complete the challenge with the minimum of fuss, winging it mostly through the strongly indicated definitions, then retroparsing. I did however take one short cut/cheated! by looking up the Tom Stoppard play, once I had a couple of helpful crossers in place, as I was getting a trifle exasperated by then.
    I did know about loi (Sleep) APNOEA (a good friend suffers from this condition), once I had sorted out the OE component that strangely occurs in some English words. But I’d not seen it written down before, oddly enough.
    Thought the anagram for TINTAGEL CASTLE was excellent. I first visited this magical site about 65 years ago as a young boy. When I wasn’t quite such a grumpy old thing…

19. Thanks Andrew, I’m another who didn’t know ENCY (anyone ever seen/used it?) nor Anne, but both gettable and overall found this smoother and therefore somehow more straightforward than others from the setter.
    Probably minor query on 1d: the cryptic instruction seems to suggest that only ArroW is to be “gutted”, which is fine if GN is a standard abbreviation for Green, and according the OS it is, so maybe that was the intended parsing?
    https://maps.nls.uk/os/abbrev/g.html
    Some lovely clues as noted above, I appreciated the aligned split entries too, spotted an EEL and a LEEK lurking but no idea if they mean anything. Thanks Pangakupu.

20. L2i (last two in): 1a GNOSTIC and 2d OATH – liked them both.
    Thanks P and A

21. The gulls in Conwy especially boisterous at 4 a.m. today, so was able to get an early if grumpy start. Didn’t really help, though. Not convinced by GNOSTIC=ESOTERIC. Nor ANTE=BET. Nor CITY=SETTLEMENT. These (and others) felt lazy and imprecise rather than amusingly subtle and allusive. And DNF, predictably.

22. Filled the grid but I’m rather with Ronald @18 here. Some lovely clues but rather too many convoluted parsings and surfaces for my taste. The clue for GNOSTIC is the best example.

    Many thanks, both.

23. I think the reason no-one here has ever heard of the ENCY abbreviation for ‘encyclopaedia’ is because it doesn’t exist. Fifteensquared commenters are always such self-effacing folk and quick to declare their own lack of knowledge or understanding when the setters’ wordplay beats them.

24. I needed the blog for ERRANCY and GNOSTIC – which went in from crossers, but the rest was OK, helped by actually knowing about the STANLEY CUP and Ss ANNE and Joachim – they have a saints day, although I can’t remember when, and an amazing representation, in, iirc, Westminster Cathedral (although it could be Paddy’s Wigwam)

    I also remembered to look for a Nina and couldn’t see anything.

    Thank you to Andrew and Pangakupu

25. I was fully expecting someone to pop up to tell me that ENCY is in Chambers or Collins.

26. pserve_p2 @23: I am one who has never encountered it but it does appear to be in Chambers –

    ency., encyc. or encycl.
    abbrev
    Encyclopedia
    Encyclopedic

    gladys – you were right to expect

27. Don’t recall ever seeing encyclopaedia abbreviated to ‘ency’, which made parsing ‘errancy’ impossible, though I entered it with a shrug. I don’t think that I’ve ever encountered errancy either, though it looked like a very plausible word. I felt that some of the definitions were rather loose. So, all done but a bit Meh.

28. G@25 et al ENCY is in Chambers. NHO for me too though 🙂

    Thought this fell short of the setter’s usual standard. I did like APNOEA and TINTAGEL where as a surly teenager I saw The Taming of the Shrew and actually enjoyed it

    Cheers P&A

29. I needed Google for confirmation of DIRTY LINEN and STANLEY CUP – gettable with crossers but outside of my GK. Word Wizard helped me with the final bit of ERRANCY, too, and the parsing was beyond me.

    It took a while to get my first clue in and so I was initially feeling disheartened, but after getting 13 and 19 close together, the rest flowed steadily if not quickly, and this made for an absorbing and satisfying puzzle.

30. Labour being described as “leftwing” is very debatable, to put it mildly.

31. Thanks to Andrew and Pangakupu. I thought parts of this were lovely, such as TINTAGEL CASTLE, but was unable to parse others e.g. ERRANCY. I’m pleased I was not alone with that. I can’t even think of an earworm, so I’m obviously out of sorts today 😞

32. Pauline @31
    Arnold Bax’s Tintagel is a lovely piece, but perhaps a bit long for an earworm!]

33. Finished, but this was a slog for me and didn’t find much to like.

    Couldn’t parse 1a, went in only after all the crossers. “Errancy” also guesswork, unparsed… didn’t know Jesus’ grandmother…

    What I felt were some stretched synonyms and convoluted constructions didn’t make things easier…

    Liked “Tintagel Castle” but that’s about it…

    Thank you to Pangakupu and Andrew for the blog.

34. Maybe there’s a separate thread where I should post this, but is this the first time the setter of the Quick has been identified?

35. is this the first time the setter of the Quick has been identified?

36. I agree with Richard Evans@30 but overall I enjoyed this. To a long time speed writer the use of ENCY was obvious.
    Stay cool out there. Thanks, all.

37. [copland @34/35
    It might just be a Grauniad error. The setter isn’t identified in the paper version, and Picaroon did set the recent Quick Cryptic.]

38. I’ve never heard of MANSION HOUSE. It sounds like one of those same-thing-twice phrases like River Avon or chaise lounge. News to me that somebody actually lives there.

    Nobody else has said this, but I don’t think RUST = DECAY. Decay has to be organic, doesn’t it?

    Anybody else try to work in OED as the reference work? Ency indeed, phooey.

    Enjoyed this, thanks to Pangakapu and Andrew.

39. Could we have a ban on words ‘found in Chambers’ which is not so much an authoritative dictionary as an anthology of solecisms?

40. Like others I balked at ENCY. I have lived for three decades in America and never encountered it. It might at best be something British people attribute to Americans? Even Chambers has it as “abbrev.” which deserves some kind of indicator, IMO.

    Is C a common abbreviation for contralto? Musical folks, please enlighten!

    Otherwise, a satisfactorily chewy solve, with several parsings requiring explanation from the blog.

    Thanks Pangakupu and Andrew.

41. Valentine@38: “Chaise longue” is the original spelling, so not in fact same-thing-twice, although American usage it seems to be routinely corrupted to “chaise lounge”. I cannot imagine what they think this phrase means.

42. There’s nothing really wrong with Phi’s puzzle but, having looked again at the clues I think the reason I find it rather dull is because there’s no real attempt to hide the definition or add a layer of wit to it. I mean, if you have a clue that ends in ‘black box’ which is 6,8 most solvers are just going to bung in FLIGHT RECORDER, very swiftly check the parsing and move on.

43. @39. It’s recognised as a standard. What do you suggest – the Urban Dictionary?

44. I never venture out of my comfort zone i.e doing Quiptics.Today I took a stab at this and all I can say I’m not ready for the big league yet.Even after analysing the answers,I know left on my own device I won’t even be able to solve a single one!

45. Jacobz @40: your query came in one post too late. It could have been answered with ‘it’s found in Chambers’ but that phrase has been banned as of post 39 😊

46. Jacobz@41 Another American weirdness is “bleu cheese”. Not “blue cheese” or “fromage bleu” but that strange hybrid.

47. Jacob@41. I know that “chaise longue” is the original spelling, French for “long chair.” “Lounge” is what Americans who didn’t look carefully at the spelling made of it. If that meant anything, it would be “chair chair,” or another River Avon. That’s why I put it in.

    DrW@46 I’ve never encountered “bleu cheese.” It’s blue cheese, as in blue cheese dressing. (Which doesn’t taste much like blue cheese.) But there is the odd pronunciation (I don’t know how it’d be spelled) of “par-me-zhan,” which is neither parmesan nor parmigiano.

48. I was all set to moan about 1a being an indirect anagram where you were expected to guess ‘hit song’, then drop the H and anagramise (re-pulse?) it. It’s only now I see it’s simply (?) a reversal. We did find this a rather humourless slog though. Great anagram for Tintagel Castle, nice double-lights in the downs, but agree with the majority about ‘spy’, was unimpressed about Stanley Cup, and just rather .. meh overall. Sorry. Thanks Pangakapu anyway, and Andrew.

49. Braun @44: I solve the cryptic every day, the genius each month and I find this setter particularly difficult to get my head round, so please please please do not be put off having a go. You’ll find many setters who are much more approachable – Vulcan if you like double definitions, for example. Even some of the “harder” solvers like Pasquale you might find you manage parts of because the cluing is more classical than setters like Paul, who plays fast and loose with such rules as we might’ve once thought to expect. The difficulty with people like Pasquale is that often the answers are obscure words, or require bits of general knowledge such as Jesus’ second cousin once removed. That’s a different kind of problem and your vocab and GK may actually far exceed my own.

    Even a few solutions a day is a good start and there are almost always helpful and kind words to be found here. Plus I would heartily recommend use of a wordfinder (dictionary apps, or onelook.com) to help fill in some blanks. You can use them for things like solving anagrams once you have sorted out that it is a anagram and you know the letters for it. Also let’s say you have a clue such as ‘Freak dog pens article’. You might think “I know this is an envelope of a 4 letter word meaning ‘dog’ round the letters ‘an’ (perhaps you have a useful crosser) and should mean ‘freak'”. Rather than search for the whole word you could look for 4 letter ‘dog’ words and see if you can make them fit.

50. Valentine@38 yes i couldn’t get beyond OED for a while either. I don’t know if there is a specific scientific definition of “decay” but I was happy enough with a process involving loss of integrity over time so in in went. and MANSION HOUSE is known as one of the two Tube stops that contain all five vowels – maybe there are more now as there have been some new stations opened since I heard that old chestnut. I think it more of a ceremonial place for business dinners etc rather than a minor Buckingham Palace, but don’t quote me.

51. Jacobz@40 No. C is not an abbreviation for contralto. As someone else has pointed out, the four voices are indicated by SATB. These days in baroque music contralto parts are often sung by male altos – countertenors.

    .

52. Valentine@46 You must only go to the classier restaurants, then 🙂. I see it as a type of dressing all the time.

53. @48. 1ac may not be an indirect anagram but I don’t see how it can be a reversal. The fodder isn’t in the clue. Indirect reversal maybe?
    Surely CORPULENCE is the wrong part of speech for “being unduly weighty”? That would be “corpulent” wouldn’t it?

54. jeceris @53
    I actually entered CORPULENCY before checking showed it was wrong.

55. muffin, jeceris – me too

56. Thanks for the blog , I was a mezzo soprano , only student productions, often asked to sing contralto because there was nobody else. Parts were definitely marked C and it is in Chambers 93.
    Jeceris @53 (H)ITSONG to be REPULSED .

57. I suffer from corpulence / being unduly weighty?

    TBH by the time I got to this I’d decided the whole thing was a bit loosey-goosey and moved swiftly on

58. Yet another ‘too clever by half’ Guardian cryptic crossword.

    It’s about time the crossword editor clamped down on wayward garbage.

59. From the grandmother of Jesus to the Stanley Cup by way of Tintagel Castle and Mansion House. Wang! (a reversal of gnaw, no less.) Oh, how I love the diversity, charm, general knowledge, wit, huge enjoyability, and those neologisms, in my daily Guardian cryptic crossword. I even enjoy the hugeability of the comments. Thanks to Panga and Randew, and Tutu five for making my daze.

    Love it all,

    Ludwig

    (So on man nicht sprechen daruber miss man schweigen.)

60. From the grandmother of Jesus to the Stanley Cup by way of Tintagel Castle and Mansion House. Wang! (a reversal of gnaw, no less.) Oh, how I love the diversity, charm, general knowledge, wit, huge enjoyability, and those neologisms, in my daily Guardian cryptic crossword. I even enjoy the hugeability of the comments. Thanks to Panga and Randew, and Tutu five for making my daze.

    Love it all,

    Ludwig

    (So on man nicht sprechen daruber muss man schweigen.)

61. Wittgenstein@60

    ‘Spillchuck’ appears to have ‘mew-till-eighted’ my German quote:

    Wovon man nicht sprechen kann daruber muss man schweigen.

    Ah, that’s butter.

62. @6 You could just use English so the large number of non German speakers on here could understand and would solve the autocorrect problem, albeit it would be a less satisfying showcase of your erudition! Personally I speak English, French, German Latin and Russian but I never mention it. Oh…

63. Well, I liked it. Faves MANSION HOUSE and TINTAGEL CASTLE.
    Thanks for the GNOSTIC pronouncements, Ludwig.
    Thanks also to Panga and Andrew.

64. Always good to be reminded of Tom Stoppard, though the play was not familiar to us. Not so pleased with having to accept ENCY as an actual thing.
    Amused by the jabs at American adjustments to the use of French words (bleu/blue, longue/lounge), as it reminds me that I wondered what sort of crash course American announcers underwent (or failed to) before having to pronounce the various places involved in the summer Olympics.

65. Nice puzzle with some hard ones. I wouldn’t say GNOSTIC = esoteric, but no doubt it is in Chambers. Errancy new to us.

    The Stanley Cup for Ice Hockey reminded me of the trophy the Oxford and Cambridge chess teams play for.

    It is the Pugh Cup. I tell you no lie.

    Thanks to setter and blogger.

66. I confess I was so engrossed in getting the multi-word answers in place that I all but forgot the Māori Nina. But it’s there: one of my favourite examples of the language’s ability to reuse the same word in multiple contexts. WHAI is symmetrically placed in unchecked letters: it’s basically ‘have’, but also ‘stingray’ and ‘cat’s cradle’ (as in the string game).

67. I’m with the grumpy folk today, having got a few, then not being able to parse some, therefore not knowing whether to put them in or not, and losing enthusiasm. Perhaps it was just too difficult for me with its tossed salad of obscure abbreviations, choppings and reversings.

68. Pangakupu
    Thanks for lining the multi-word answers up – it’s much more elegant than scattering them about. Philistine did a very good example recently.

69. An example of how not to engage your audience.

70. In response to Dave F @62:

    I truly adore this Guardian crossword site. I love the educated, clever, life-affirming and witty responses to many difficult clues. There’s a kindness and intelligence, almost all of the time, that metaphorically rises off the digital page.

    Paul, Picaroon and many splendid earlier setters, have set clues that have had my wife and I superlatively enchanted, befuddled, and so often, literally laughing out loud.

    All in all, I was just being nice Dave; and yet, I seem to have raised raised your blood pressure; hopefully, in all of your fine list of languages.

    Thanks for the advice and the subtle bit of sarcasm. It has made its mark and left a wound. Sleep well Dave F. Should you wish to proofread my future messages, please publish your home address in any of your tongues.

71. ‘Stealing cattle etc’ makes for a very smooth surface but CATTLE and CASTLE are too close for the anagram to be very challenging.

72. To Phitonelly@63

    Thank you.

    Gnostically yours,

    Luddy

73. FrankieG@20. 🙂 Oldie but a goodie. Nice pic o’the panda/

74. [Thought I might have seen the play14d DIRTY LINEN, but was mistaking it for The Real Thing (1982), which features 14d in the plot, as far as I recall.]

75. Wittgenstein @70. I didn’t see any raised blood pressure or sarcasm in Dave@62’s little dig at you, but maybe I would have if it had been directed at me! I thought it was a pleasant change from all the grumpiness on here yesterday.

    Luckily I didn’t finish until just now, so missed the grump-fest! Although coming here and seeing Andrew’s rather wide of the mark “straightforward” nearly raised my blood pressure. 😁 However, I was pleased to have solved this without any aids other than what one of my school teachers called my “native wit”, so I just grinned instead.

    OATH was my last one in, and my first thought on solving it was that it was a little unfair not to have any indication that it was not a normal clue. But I decided I wasn’t feeling grumpy enough to complain about it.

    A pity no one will ever read this.

    Thanks to Pangakupu (loved the well-hidden Nina!) and Andrew the Straightforward. 😃

76. Sheffield Hatter@75 I did! Ps Blade or Owl?

77. Zoot@76. Thanks for reading.

    I don’t make hats – I follow Luton Town!

78. In that case I could be Birmingham Gooner.

79. …and I’m a Galway Gooner. [And ‘er indoors is a Goonette, apparently.]

80. Jeez, what a tough crowd.
    I thought this was terrific!

81. To Sheffield hatter @70:

    Thanks for your calming response.

    It appears that your contribution has been faithfully read by, at the very least, two well-intentioned people; which is not a pity, at all.

    Watching these young talented Olympians seems to lower my blood pressure.

    Please call me Ludwig.

    Luddy

82. Due to holidays and other distractions, I’m late enough getting to this that probably nobody will see this comment, but it amuses me enough that I’m going to send it out anyway.

    I guessed how the clue in 12ac was probably put together, and also that it was likely to end with HOUSE. With only a short anagram left, I thought I’d make quick work of the clue, only to pull up short, saying, “Surely there’s no municipal building called ONANISM HOUSE!”

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