Quiptic 1,312 by Anto

42 comments on “Quiptic 1,312 by Anto”

1. Fun thing to do along with the Everyman. with one eye on the Women’s Ashes on a lazy Sundy morn. Thanks Anto and Shanne.

2. I have seen Anto set much tougher ones than this for the Quiptic slot: this was about right.

3. I agree with you Shanne that Monday may be better.

   It may be a wavelength issue, but I had no favourites and a few frowns, with several loosely-worded clues. In the end, any crossword is fun.

   Thanks Anto and Shanne

4. I didn’t think the clue for TAIL GUN was cryptic, until I remembered that for some strange reason in Crossword Land gun=piece.

   Enjoyable, thanks Anto & Shanne.

5. I agree GDU. TAIL PIECE was quite an odd clue

6. Didn’t get that “picked up” in 23A was a “sounds like”, but makes sense. Only other one I wasn’t 100% sure about the parsing was 12A, but I agree it being a triple definition seems the most likely explanation. Only knew “RA” for artist from a previous explanation here, seems overused to me but maybe it’s a term used in the UK rather more than in the antipodes.

7. Very good Quiptic.

8. I thought a perfectly pitched Quiptic. Harder than yesterday’s quick cryptic – but probably easier than tomorrow’s. I am sure I see Onesie(s) more in crosswords than in all my other reading combined; it must be a useful grid filler. Per Dylan – RA is also used a tremendous amount; this is unlikely to go out of fashion though

9. Lovely Quiptic from Anto, thanks Shanne.

   Just didn’t parse the soundalike on IN TURNS
   I had ATTIC in 21 as ‘supplies room’ otherwise ‘supplies’ isn’t really used in the clue

10. Thanks Anto and Shanne
    Rapid up to the SE, which took considerably longer than the rest put together (not helped by originally having a partly parsed WATER POLO @ 16d!)
    Mostly very good, but “lacks nothing”, though making a good surface, doesn’t make sense in 8a, and I don’t think INSPECT works – it’s not a synonym for “review”.

11. Thanks to Shanne and Anto for this week’s quiptic. I found it to be very enjoyable and pitched at the right level, I learned the word Maladroit and only needed help parsing 6d, which now that I have seen it is obvious, but the clue was unwilling to yield that information on its own!

12. Excellent. REVERSING LIGHT was a great spot.

    Ta Anto & Shanne.

13. GDU @3 ‘Piece’ = ‘gun’ is not peculiar to crosswordland. In fact, it’s not peculiar at all. As Steely Dan sang in ‘With a Gun’ (from Pretzel Logic), ‘Did you pay the other man / With the piece in your hand / And leave him lying in the rain?’

14. I think OASIS is one of Anto’s trademark “reverse subtractions” where you take O away from the answer and you get AS IS. Maybe a bit out of place in the Quiptic?

    Chambers has “to examine …” for both review and inspect

    Cheers S&A

15. I thought it was a fair Quiptic on the tougher end, couldn’t do it in one go, the lower half came together quickly, the top half after a nights sleep, and I needed this blog for the parsing of some of them. Thank you Shanne.

16. Bodycheetah @14
    Can you think of a sentence in which review and inspect could be exchanged without changing the meaning?

17. I found this more quiptic than what Anto usually offers in this slot. GRAFT = corruption is a new one for me.

18. Thank you Anto and Shanne. This one did not exactly fly in but got there in the end.

    I’m curious to get an idea of how contributors see Everyman vs Quiptic in difficulty.

    In my head I have the Quiptic as the easier but the reality is it usually takes me longer and I find myself having to grind answers during crossers more often.

    Thoughts?

    Sorry if this had been done to death already, happy Sunday all.

19. Finally remembered to do a quiptic on a Sunday and I found this one just at right level. Bottom half came quicker than top as I was slow to see the fairly straightforward 1 across. Got Oasis from the crossers, but when I parsed it I thought, unlike some above, that it was very good.
    Thanks to the compilers and bloggers and to this site, which I read a lot but rarely in time to comment.

20. I can see why Shanne asked whether this would have been better as a Monday Cryptic. It’s certainly on the tough end of the Quiptic spectrum in my opinion. I did like OASIS and REVERSING LIGHT.
    rickk@18, I think the relative difficulty depends on who sets the Quiptic, with the caveat that Everyman can be variable even though the setter is a constant… I generally try the Everyman after the Quiptic because it is usually tougher and there is a week to mull it over.

    Thank you to Anto and Shanne.

21. I seemed to be on Anto’s wavelength today, so everything slotted in nicely. For some reason, I sat staring at a mostly completed 4d for a while before it finally clicked as my LOI.

    muffin@16 – I think you’re right that etymologically speaking, review means to “view again”, but according to the OED it has been used to mean “general examination” since the 1600s. I’m often asked to review documents at work that I haven’t seen before. So I suppose “can you review/inspect this before it goes out?” would work.

    Thanks Anto & Shanne

22. Thanks Bodycheetah @14 for explaining the use of “lacks” at 8ac OASIS

23. Ditto shed53@23. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the “reverse subtraction” device before, and I can’t say it grabs me much, but I’ll add it to the toolbox. It seems rather similar to the dubious “definition for wordplay” grammar (which for me could only be “wordplay for definition”).

    I use “review” to mean “inspect” all the time, although I accept that etymologically one can only review something that’s already been viewed (by somebody; not necessarily me).

    Dylan N@6, this Brit has never seen or heard RA outside of crosswordland, though I assume that within the field of the arts it comes up. It’s a right old chestnut though; I would say it turns up at least weekly in the Guardian/Independent puzzles that I do. In fact I’d almost put it up with with “about = RE”.

    Overall I thought this was a fair Quiptic, within but at the harder end of my own scale of reasonableness.

    Thanks both!

24. I thought it was tougher than the Everyman for the second week running. It was tough for a Quiptic but the harder clues were spread out so atleast people had help with them. This could have been either a tough Quiptic or an enjoyable Monday. IMO that’s good for people, like myself, who have or are using these as a bridger to the main crossword.

    I liked the multi-word clues including TAIL GUN. I have probably watched so many cop and gangster movies that gun=piece is just second nature to me.

25. This went in fairly smoothly for me. Even where the answer was unfamiliar (TAIL GUN, REVERSING LIGHT) the cluing made the answer clear. I think in the U.S. we say NAIL SALON rather than NAIL BAR (at least I do) so that was the LOI for me.

26. “Fowling piece” is a term for a gun that I have read in classic books, and is how I got to TAIL GUN. As usual with Anto, I didn’t find this particularly easy, but I did enjoy most of the periphery and thought the anagrams were very neat.

27. Mostly enjoyable, and the anagrams were great.

    I’m still confused over the wording of 8a – surely ‘Refuge that lacks nothing for the present?’ Is a deletion indicator rather than a charade?

    I’m not quite sure I get the ‘reverse subtraction’ discussed @8 and @22 – this seems to go beyond misdirection to saying the opposite of what was meant. The checking letters meant the answer was gettable but I’m very confused by the wordplay.

28. I agree 19ac could also be a charade of TAIL (end) and GUN (piece, which I believe is American slang but occurs often enough in Hollywood films to be gettable) but I suppose either works.

    Thought using “lacking” as a filler word was a bit cheeky :/, although I suppose Bodycheetah’s explanation of “reverse substraction” makes some sense.

    @muffin – WATER POLO would be a fun answer for “pool game”. I might steal that for my amateur setting.

    RA is one of the acronyms I take the least umbrage to – RE (royal engineer, usually clued as “navy”), SA (sexual attraction, rather behind the times as this now refers more often to a crime) and many other more obscure ones leave me gnashing and howling. I think I’ve mixed it up with “rah” in my mind but if it works it works.

    All in all nicely positioned today – gettable with only one check all and not spilling into the rest of my week.

29. Completely agree with @27 on 8a. Apart from that, I agree with the consensus that this was much more hitting the quiptic brief than some previous Antos.

30. Throwing my lot in with the grammar in 8a doesn’t seem to be what’s expected. I’m pretty new to cryptics/the Quiptic but it doesn’t fit the grammar definition + wordplay.

    I’m also confused by 21a – what is “supplies” doing here?

    Thanks Shanne for the blog and Anto the puzzle.

31. HWBY @30 – it’s why I’m unconvinced Anto is a good fit for the Quiptic slot – he plays somewhat fast and loose with the conventions. As do other setters we see in the weekday Cryptics – but I personally think that the Quiptics should be teaching you all to walk before running and turning cartwheels.

    8A – Refuge that lacks nothing for the present? (5) – OASIS. Anto regularly uses this trick of cluing words by reducing them, sort of a reverse cluing. If you take O off OASIS you get AS IS – is sort of how I read that.

    21A Network supplies room in empty lodge (7) I actually read the “supplies” as part of the insertion indicator – so insertion of (supplies … in) ATTIC (room) in LE (empty LodgE). Although I wasn’t that convinced by lattice meaning a network.

32. Just to add my 2 pence’s worth to what Shanne@31 has said:

    OASIS that lacks O produces / is used to arrive at / “for” AS IS. As I mentioned higher up, it’s similar to “{definition} for {wordplay}” and I can’t say I like it much. The pieces of the Jigsaw puzzle give the final picture; the final picture doesn’t give the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.

    And as it happens, the clue for LATTICE is an example of that; I take “supplies” to be a link word similar to “for / produces”, and to my mind the directionality is wrong.

33. muffin @10 — I think that in a military parade, the commander might review / inspect the troops.

    I initially had EXAMINE instead of INSPECT for this one. I think they both work.That sort of ambiguity comes up in double (or triple) definitions when the various definitions are quite close to each other as here. I think that a dd (or td) is better if the definitions are different enough that only one word can match both / all, but that’s a minor complaint.

    The expressions NAIL BAR and REVERSING LIGHT are unfamiliar to me (probably for geographic reasons), but they were clearly clued, so I learned a couple of new phrases.

34. Bev @28. RE for Royal Engineer (sapper) in the army has always been straightforward for me as my father was one. Navy would be RN or RM for Royal Marines.

35. Sometimes I find Anto’s clues easy to decrypt and then other times very obscure. This Quiptic was a good old mix of these extremes, for me at least. For example, 8a the ‘lacks’ had me thinking of removing an O from something, but was looking for a word for ‘refuge’ to remove an O from to get ‘in the present’ not Anto’s reverse removal trick. Took all the crossers and a guess and check this. I almost think the clue would work better (at least more obviously for a Quiptic) if it was ‘refuge that has nothing for the present’. So 8a was my weekly crossword ‘doh!’ moment 😄
    Thanks Anto and also Shanne for the great explanations.

36. We often see an excellent puzzle described as a masterclass of setting, but we don’t see the same thing for blogs. Let me change that. Shanne, this was a masterclass of blogging – everything clearly explained, with no assumptions made about our general knowledge. Well done.

    And well done, Anto. I thought this was an enjoyable and well-judged Quiptic.

37. I enjoyed it a lot, over two days. I’ve never heard of Messi, nor eight ball. Due to my sheltered female upbringing, I expect. 🙂

38. Always fun to see how people’s different life experiences lead to different experiences with the crossword! Lattice is a common synonym for network in mathematics and computer science, but if you’re thinking of a decorative pattern then it makes no sense.

    Hawa @34 I have never known what a sapper is despite reading a few stirring naval adventures! Another clue cracked open for me.

    Agree blogging is excellent. I’m so glad to have found this resource rather than butting my head against clues. Between this blog and Guy Kelly’s cryptic crossword stream I am getting a great education

39. Bev @38, you won’t have read about sappers in naval derring-do books, they are soldiers, specifically engineers (RE or REME – Royal Engineers or Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers). They go in to, for example, build or blow up bridges or to fix the kit used to support troops on the ground.

    I thought LATTICE in materials science as I solved this, but thought it was a stretch in general language.

    Florrie Boleyn @37 – female or not, I play 8 ball pool, and have done so on and off since student days.

    Cellomaniac @36 – aw, shucks

40. I really struggled with this, and in the end managed just over half of it. Managed all of the right hand side but the left hand side was mostly empty.

    Like Bev@28 I read TAIL GUN as a charade. I thought NAIL BAR was very clever but perhaps a bit hard for a quiptic?

    Thanks Shanne and Anto.

41. Great Quiptic and blog, thanks both!

42. I agree that Anto’s Quiptics are more like the easier Cryptics. And way more difficult than Everyman. I am just transitioning from Everyman, which I now generally get through quite quickly (not least because you get used to a particular setter) and this Quiptic was a real battle.

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