Guardian 29,591 – Qaos

106 comments on “Guardian 29,591 – Qaos”

1. Fortuitously, I started off in the SE, where SILVER, HUNT and HILL gave me an early clue as to the theme and it was then a matter of looking for STONES, PITS, FORMULA, BRANDS HATCH(ERY) etc, although the sport itself leaves me cold. WHEELMAN and OVERLAPS are other themed clues Andrew. Nho of HAMILTON but it was nicely constructed and DELIGHTFUL was exactly that, along with ON AND ON. AGE appearing three times was slightly surprising but hey ho, it was a lovely solve.

   Ta Qaos & Andrew.

2. Presumably ANARCHY is referring to Stallone. I suppose DENTS and ON AND ON could be included in the theme, as that is what it feels like !

3. Nigel MANSELL in 21 and 23…

4. Thanks Andrew and Qaos. For once I managed to parse everything in a Qaos puzzle.
   Andrew – you need to add Making to your first letters list in FORMULA.

5. Nigel Mansell is lurking in there in 21 23 as well.

6. Didn’t spot the theme until I’d crossed the finish line. Podium places for HAMILTON, ON AND ON & DELIGHTFUL

   Cheers Q&A

7. I share Andrew and AlanC’s lack of interest in the theme, so I’m quite chuffed to have seen it half way through. I thought HAMILTON might be significant, thinking of the musical but when I reached MOSS (I remember him from my youth) my eye was caught by BRANDS HATCH and the penny dropped. I didn’t expect to recognise much else but I did see PITS, HUNT, FORMULA ONE and HILL.

   Apart from that, I really enjoyed the puzzle. Like AlanC and Pauline in Brum, I thought DELIGHTFUL was spot on. Other favourites were OMEGA, AGES, OVERLAPS, KANGAROO, GROWN-UPS, ON AND ON and SILVER. [Just out of interest, does anyone else notice how many folk say ‘slither’ for SLITHER?]

   Many thanks to Qaos and Andrew.

8. Didn’t think to look for a theme. I was just pleased to see the name of a mathematician, HAMILTON, in the grid without thinking of his racing namesake. I see I’m not the only one who finds motor racing a boring spectacle. Liked HATCHERY and the number cluing for DELIGHTFUL Thanks to Qaos and to Andrew for pointing out the theme.

9. Didn’t spot the theme as usual, and last few in were the intersecting WHEELMAN, NUMBER LINE and BRANDS. Very last one in was DENTS. Several I struggled to parse, one or two used the same device of a sequence of first or last letters within the wording of the clue. Overall, enjoyable, wasn’t driven to distraction too much…

10. I love a Qaos which today was worth it for DELIGHTFUL, which was delightful. The other favourite was SELL ON.
    I’d heard of HAMILTONians.
    I think your parsing of GROWN-UPS should be W[ome]N’s in GROUPS Andrew, and FORMULA is FOR + first letters of Making Unique Lunch Asparagus

11. Eileen @7, what is the difference between ‘slither’ and SLITHER?

12. Tim C – Oops! I meant ‘slither’ for SLIVER’, of course. 🙁

13. Can someone kindly explain why a NUMBER LINE is a thing, to someone who hadn’t heard of the Irish mathematician HAMILTON before?

    Missed the theme, but enjoyed working out DELIGHTFUL and many others. I dislike the cluing of Y as “ninth pregnancY” but this now seems to be an accepted way of doing it.

14. Fun puzzle and I did spot the theme early enough to help. It’s all British Drivers and race tracks: HAMILTON, MAN SELL, HUNT, MOSS, whichever HILL (I was at SILVERSTONE for the minute’s silence for possibly Bob Anderson, the date is about right) and have been around BRANDS HATCH and SILVERSTONE for the victory lap, in my father’s lap as a toddler, before he gave up. Personally I think FORMULA 1 racing is the PITS – noisy, smelly, polluting – we used to live near enough Silverstone to watch the private planes flying in.

    Thank you to Andrew and Qaos.

15. Didn’t look for the theme, and the brrm brrms bore me stiff, but I do remember Stirling Moss (and Jack Brabham). But a cruisy one from the Q I thought, liked the number clue (and I’ve read about Hamiltonians, but I forget what they are). All good fun, cheers Q & A.

16. Gladys @13: the number line is a teaching device – it is, literally, a line with the whole numbers marked on it.

17. I felt this was a bit clever for a Tuesday – enjoyable nonetheless. I too was pleased to see WR Hamilton make an appearance, but will now have to remind myself of quaternions.

18. Eileen @12, understood. I can’t say that I’ve come across that, but I can see that it could happen.
    gladys @13, a number line according to Chambers is “An infinite straight line on which the points correspond to the set of real numbers”.

19. I share what seems to be a general lack of interest in motor racing, but did spot the theme right at the end in time to give me Hamilton, my last one in – unlike the more mathematically erudite, I have heard of the racing driver but not of the mathematician, whose existence I had to google. I thoroughly enjoyed this – some answers were a bung in and parse (‘grown-ups’ and ‘anarchy’), while others yielded nicely to working through the elements of the clue (‘delightful’ and ‘number line’) – so I never got really stuck, but always needed to think.

20. Thanks Qaos and Andrew
    No theme, of course. I had heard of the Irish mathematician (a Hamiltonian operator is important in quantum physics), but couldn’t parse it otherwise. The “of” in 23d grates.
    Why would anyone say WHEELMAN rather than “cyclist”?

21. 21a WHEELMAN meant “Cyclist” (or “helmsman” or “Scottish miner”) in the 19th century, but “Driver” would’ve been too helpful:
    “…3. 1935– A driver, spec. (Criminals’ slang) the driver of a getaway vehicle. Originally U.S.”
    13d NUMBER LINE “Mathematics. 1964– A graduated line representing the ordered set of real numbers (sometimes only the set of integers or natural numbers), used esp. to illustrate simple numerical concepts and operations.”
    [Ashamed to say I hadn’t heard of the Irish mathematician.]

22. Thanks: I tried Googling NUMBER LINE: yes, it’s now obvious what it is – I just didn’t know until this morning that mathematicians had a special term for one of those.

23. Tim C @18 – maybe it’s just me then but I wouldn’t mind a pound for every time I’ve heard, ‘Just a slither’ from someone offered a slice of cake.

24. Saw the racing car theme when I finished but did not see all the related words (eg never heard of silverstones or brands hatch or driver Hill) – like Andrew I have less than zero interest in Formula One! or like grantinfreo, “the brrm brrms bore me stiff.” 🙂

    Favourite: DELIGHTFUL.

    New for me: Irish mathematican HAMILTON, Sir William Rowan (1806–65); WHEELMAN = cyclist; NUM = UK National Union of Mineworkers (for 13d) – I see they still have a website but it is mainly for historical purposes.

    I could not parse 16ac apart from recipe = FORMULA.

25. Typically clever and amusing puzzle, thank you Qaos and Andrew.

    I thought KANGAROO was an outstanding clue.

26. [Eileen@7, Yes, I’ve even heard Jon Sopel on the BBC and C4’s Matt Frei say ‘slither’ for ‘SLIVER’, and they both should know better.]

27. Found this incomprehensible, no fun at all. My problem, clearly.

28. I was another themagnosic, much enjoyed it all the same. Anyone else recall Paul’s “F1 driver’s ‘otel in southeast London?” (5,8)? (24,407) Thank you Q&A

29. Adrian @28 – yes, I do (and I’ve often searched for it and failed to find it for my little book of classic clues.) Thanks for that! 🙂

30. Loved this, some clever clues. Favourites were 14, 8 and 11. Totally missed the theme, even though I’m an F1 fan.

31. [If any of the mathematically-inclined wish to discover more of the history of Hamilton’s quaternions, and that of his predecessors and other personalities, then ‘Vector’ by Robyn Arianrhod is a fascinating, elegant read].
    Thanks to Qaos and Andrew.

32. [23d SILVER: the definition should be “of metal”, to prevent the “of” from grating.]

33. [FrankieG @26

    Many thanks for that – so I’m not going even more barmy than I thought. 😉 ]

34. I’m not a petrol-head at all, but I did get the theme about half way through (BRANDS HATCH was the giveaway), and it helped with HAMILTON and FORMULA. CAR must be a themed word too. There are a number of cycling clubs with WHEELMeN in their name. I pretty much always enjoy Qaos’ crossies and this was no exception. Thanks, Qaos and Andrew.

35. I remember using Hamiltonian operators back in the dark ages when I was a chemistry student, so that was my FOI. LOI was SODA, having forgotten the American usage.
    COD was DELIGHTFUL, which it was.
    Thanks Qaos and Andrew.

36. I started very slowly with just two solutions in my first pass through the Across clues, but slowly picked up steam. As a recovering mathematician I knew of Hamilton but could not otherwise parse it.

    As usual, the theme sailed over my head, but happily it was not required in order to solve the puzzle, nor did it hamper the smoothness of the cluing.

    Thank you Andrew and Qaos.

37. A lot of chewy stuff here and I needed help with a handful, but one of those which compelled me to continue to completion rather than give up.

    I’ll blame my post-flu fatigue for missing the theme even though it was familiar enough and not exactly hidden.

    Overall a bit of a stretch for me, but in a good way.

38. Saw someone in the comments mention a theme as I got towards the end, had a look out and still couldn’t spot it. Have heard of HAMILTON as a driver, and FORMULA one as a sport, but that’s about as far as my knowledge on the subject goes, so no surprise I didn’t see it.

    Had to give up on SODA/CAREER/OMEGA all crossing each other (I really should know OMEGA by now at least). I also had to reveal FORMULA which left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth with the extra ‘with’, but I think that’s common and I’m just being sour about it.

    Also NHO HAMILTON but with the crossers I got ‘milton’ in and then the rest made sense.

    Thanks Qaos and Andrew

39. Eileen and Frankie G. Slither/Sluver. Is it possible thete is some unconscious linguistic pattern going on here? I”m thinking of bruvva/ brother etc.

40. It’s Qaos, so there’s a theme but I spotted it too late to be of much help. And I missed MANSELL.

    Despite it’s awful carbon footprint, I do love FORMULA one, probably because I was exposed to it at a young age. I have driven a Ferrari around SILVERSTONE and a single-seater around BRANDS HATCH. I did enjoy this crossword, particularly HAMILTON’s ‘hit off’, the WHEELMAN’s stiletto, OVERLAPS for cryptic solvers, the delightful DELIGHTFUL, and GROWN-UPS stealing women’s clothing.

    Thanks Qaos and Andrew.

41. [A friend of mine claims to hold the U14 record for a circuit of Silverstone on a bike – he went to school right next door (the school is no longer there).]

42. Robi @40 – I was exposed to motor racing as a baby, taken as a toddler and child, and hate it with a passion. I went back as a teenager/early twenties with friends and was taken back to the noise and smell, remembered throwing tantrums about not being there when I was small. Exposure as a child did not encourage me at all.

    muffin – it would have to be the local primary school, since rebuilt – there wasn’t a secondary school in Silverstone village – I went to the local secondary school.

43. [Shanne @42
    It would have been nearly 70 years ago. He tells me that it was a big house housing a private school with not many pupils. The headmaster was Major something or other. When it was demolished, one of the wooden staircases was rehomed at East Riddlesden Hall, a NT property not far from me.]

44. [Eileen and FrankieG: I think Pedanticus has commented on the slither / SLIVER confusion in the Guardian’s Pyrgic Puzzles. A similar common mix-up is between “on one’s part” and “on one’s behalf”. I’ve several times heard something like “There was no malice on his behalf” when the speaker clearly meant “on his part”.]

45. I refused to be intimidated by Qaos’s number games and went directly for 6 down which turned out to be DELIGHTFUL. Couldn’t 100% parse quite a few clues: SODA, ON AND ON, ANARCHY, NUMBER LINES, HOUNDS, SELL ON but the definitions worked so in they went. COTD: LEAFAGE. And of course I didn’t spot the theme. Thanks Qaos, thanks Andrew 😊

46. “Irish mathematician” clearly had to be HAMILTON or Boole, either of which would count as GK, and it obviously wasn’t the latter. Wasn’t sure of the parsing of SILVER but obvious in retrospect. Completely missed the theme but enjoyed the puzzle nonetheless.

47. Despite enjoying F1, I didn’t catch the theme. My partner knew Hamilton, the Irish mathematician. Anyway, we got there in the end.

48. gladys #13. ‘Ninth pregnancy’. I agree.

49. I knew there had to be a theme since it was Qaos, but only figured out after finishing, so no help while working my way through. Fortunately cluing was relatively straightforward. I did have to google HAMILTON to confirm his science credentials, and then later again to confirm the F1 driver….Thanks to Qaos and Andrew.

50. [Shanne @42, my exposure was only watching it on TV]

51. Liked the puzzle a lot, but wasn’t terribly convinced by knocks=DENTS (you can knock without denting and dent without knocking). Didn’t stop me though – rather RACED through it. Tx.

52. @Gladys – 13

    It is annoying enough that Qaos continues to indicate letters in this way. What’s even more depressing is that his editor allows it and that it’s now so much used by Qaos that most people on here don’t even comment on it any more. It is – quite simply – wrong. There is no logical way that ‘9th pregnancy’ leads to ‘9th letter of pregnancy’. You’re simply expecting the solver to pretend a word/two words is/are there because otherwise it wouldn’t make grammatical sense in the surface. It’s simply poor setting and even lazier editing but people just accept it because it’s the Guardian and therefore operating to its own (non) rules.

    I guarantee there’ll be replies to this saying ‘yes but you know what he means’. Sorry – that is not how cryptic clues are meant to work, particularly if you want newcomers to understand and learn the conventions that enable them to do so

53. It looks as if, in a Venn diagram mapping aficionados of Formula 1 and aficionados of the Guardian crossword, the overlap would be a mere SLIVER. I recall many years ago in the G the late Benny Green passing on something that I think his father had said – that if it involves petrol or music it isn’t a sport. I have always found this to be a pretty sound overview.

54. The usual themagnosia for me (thanks for the coinage, Adrian @28) – knowing HAMILTON the mathematician perhaps distracted me from the obvious. (I share the distaste for the boring and environmentally damaging ‘sport’ of motor racing. And why don’t they allocate cars at random to the drivers to make it more of a human than a mechanical contest?).

    Nevertheless, the puzzle was DELIGHTFUL (great clue). Other favourites were WHEELMAN, SODA (chestnut notwithstanding), KANGAROO and GROWN-UPS.

    muffin @20: ‘of metal’ works with SILVER as an adjective.

    Thanks to Qaos and Andrew

55. Enjoyed this quite a lot, though I can barely spot the theme even after having it explained. Particularly liked the number clue and the inventive initialisms. I do take bingy@52 and Gladys@13’s point that “ninth pregnancy” is very loose, and the ‘s in 18ac seems misplaced.

    For 5d, what sweet carbonated drinks get called where is surprisingly contentious, it used to be that in Boston they were called “tonic” but that was dying out even when I was there in the early 90s. “Soda” would be the word now, if as I gather “pop” can be used as the UK definition. There are parts of the United States where it’s “pop,” and in much of the South it’s “coke,” whether or not it’s Coca-Cola. I’ve seen a map suggesting that “soda” has been eating away at the others, but the pop vs. soda page still shows the non-soda terms holding strong.

56. [paddymelon@39 re slither for SLIVER : possibly hypercorrection of a perceived th-fronting?]

57. Bingy@52 I agree with you, cryptic grammar matters. Most editors I know would roundly reject that wordplay.

58. Just out of interest, would all the people objecting 9th pregnancy have the same objection to 9th January? Surely it just calls for a little bit of lateral thinking.

59. matt w @55 Growing up in western Scotland, all carbonated soft drinks were ‘ginger’. Whether or not this is still the case I don’t know, but someone around here may.

60. Bodycheetah @58
    There’s a more obvious problem with 9th January 🙂

61. I did remember to look for a theme (it was Qaos after all) and had no hope of finding one. I share Andrew and Eileen’s lack of interest in the sport, but not their ability to recognize terms from it.

    A = acting?

    DELIGHTFUL was just that, my favorite clue as it is others’

    I have to leave for an hour and haven’t read all the clues, so I’ll resume when I get back.

    Thanks to Qaos and Andrew.

62. Thanks Qaos and Andrew! Not my theme, but we got it when my sister got FORMULA and I spotted ONE in stONEs, and I knew there was a someone HILL and they drove CAR[eer]s with WHEELs, but after solving it I had to look here for most of the theme words. I appreciate that you don’t have to know anything about Qaos’s themes (or even spot them) to solve the grid—and, strikingly, we almost always get the theme even when it’s something we know almost nothing about.

63. muffin#60 🙂
    Bodycheetah#58 Solving requires plenty of lateral thinking. 9th pregnancy doesn’t work.

64. Matt w@55 that is some website, respect to your bookmarks if that one is typical! Gladys@13, Bingy@52, Jay@57, Bodycheetah@58, Muffin@60 – when it comes to clueing ‘Y’ I’d reckon: 9th pregnancy ❌, 9th January ❌, 7th January ✅ (because ‘of’ is implied). Bingy’s newcomers argument is crucial IMO – tricks shouldn’t have to be learnt, and they should elicit an ‘ah!’, not a frown.

65. Very nice – plenty to like including the hidden MANSELL across the middle – and I think OMEGA might be linked too, such luxury timekeeping and watch brands have a close association with Formula One.

    This marks my first official appearance in 2025 as I was too busy scurrying through all the Grauniad fun I’d missed since 19th December to comment. A self imposed 2 week break although I did go to the trouble of “writing” a very rudimentary Christmas Quiz cryptic, on an 11×11 grid, issued in the same way as a picture round at the start and collected in before the end. Seemed to go down well although I suspect the good folk of this parish might have had quite a bit to say about its quality!!! A nice exercise which highlighted just how hard it must be to set!

66. Heavens am I the only one into motor racing! Go to any F1 race and the circuits are packed with lovers of the sport. I wonder how many of the anti petrol heads are also anti cricket! I love that too! Loved solving it. I wonder if Qaos tried to get Verstappen into it: perhaps asking too much. Thanks Qaos for jogging the memory and a good blog.

67. Please to see that I’m not the first to harumph at “9th pregnancy” to indicate a Y. It just does not work grammatically. Making it work doesn’t require lateral thinking so much as loose thinking, which is quite different. Bodycheetah @58 – yes, I’d have the same issue with the device being used as a date – “7th of January” correctly indicates a Y but “7th January” does not. I will die on this hill 🙂

68. MattW@55, Balfour@59
    [Growing up in Ireland in the 60s&70s the generic term was “soft drinks” or more specially “minerals” for carbonated drinks – “Will the young fella take a shandy or a mineral?”(Coke/Fanta). Also, our lemonade was red.]

69. Commenting late after a day’s skiing, so just wanting to add a thanks to Qaos and Andrew. I quite enjoy watching F1 highlights occasionally but I do have a bit of a guilty feeling about the total lack of green credentials (and the attempted greenwashing). I also like cricket, so that’s a data point for Cedric@66.

    Dr. WhatsOn @51 – no-one else has tried to justify “knocks”=”dents” so I’ll have a go! If you went to buy a second hand car in the UK and the seller said it “had a few knocks” then you’d understand that to mean it was dented in a couple of places. It may not have dictionary support, and it may be one of those Britishisms using understatement which translate surprisingly badly to other cultures.

    And I’m another for whom “9th pregnancy” does not work. “7th *of* January” would, as would “4th in line” for “e”.

70. Quaternions had a revival recently. In computer games they are used to give a smooth 3D rotation of objects.

    Thanks Qaos for a fun Xword, and to Andrew, especially for the use of the “word” methematician.

71. Perfidious Albion @65 – congratulations on setting a puzzle! Funnily enough my first attempt at crossword setting was as a pub quiz round 🙂 and now I’ve compiled many more and published them online. If you found the experience interesting enough to repeat, I can highly recommend the marvellous MyCrossword website.

72. @66 Cedric He didn’t get Max in but he did get Jos into the clue with Marks and Russells (Russell also being an F1 driver)

73. Can someone spare a moment to explain 25d to me? I’m not seeing where MO (moment) is coming from. And I thought the brain fog of Christmas had cleared.

    With regard to the F1 shenanigans, I’ve always thought that if they are in such a tearing hurry, they should have set off earlier.

74. @monkeypuzzler above – I’ll be with you in a ‘mo

75. I managed to complete it.

    The Hamiltonian operator is named after the Irish mathematician.

    Nando that is part of “oN AND On” is apparently a nickname for Fernando Alonzo.

76. Thanks Qaos for the fun. Except for HAMILTON this was smooth sailing for me with my favourites being AGES, DELIGHTFUL, GROWN-UPS, MOSS, and HILL. I missed the theme, knowing nothing about Formula One but I was happy to see a few fans here — I would hate to think that we were all carbon copies of one another! (I’m a casual fan of NASCAR myself and I may be the only person in the US who’s attended the Daytona 500 & enjoys the British crosswords 🙂). Thanks Andrew for the blog.

77. Frogman @ 75 I was going to post about the Nando nickname, but when I used google, I couldn’t find a confirmation for it. Do you have a source?

78. An enjoyable puzzle, the theme totally passed me by. Favourite was KANGAROO.

79. For some reason I find it difficult to spot the kind of clues that involve building (parts of) the answer letter by letter, unless they’re signposted like 6d, so I found this a bit of a slog. But that’s just me. Thanks Q and A

80. Quite enjoyed it. Didn’t finish it. Didn’t see the theme.
    Liked HATCHERY and KANGAROO when I saw them.
    Eileen @7 and Lord Jim @ 44, Pedanticus did indeed express his fury at sliver/slither quite recently.

81. Enjoyed this one, perhaps because of a mathematical background, albeit nearly four decades ago. HAMILTON confident FOI and motored from there – but completely overlooked the theme despite being a fan.

    OMEGA the watch brand do quite a lot around F1 though that may just be a coincidence.

    No issue with 9th pregnancy personally (so to speak).

82. Thanks Woody @80 (and Lord Jim @44).

    I’ve just found this: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-difference-between-sliver-and-slither-is-a-piece-of-cake/

83. Give me strength, I wasn’t suggesting 9th January would yield Y but I suspect many of you knew that 🙂 Clearly I should have picked a month without a Y!

84. Ricardo@74 thanks if that was an attempt at an explanation, but unless I’m being extra dense I still don’t see where mo or moment comes from in the clue. I get seconds = SS, and the definition of moss = growth, but what does “Three” correspond to?

    Put me out of my misery someone!

85. monkeypuzzler
    You have 3 “seconds” – MO, S, and S.

86. monkeypuzzlr@73 and 84 MOSS is made up of three “seconds;” MO of minute/jiffy/second + S + S.

87. Thank you muffin@85! So simple. (Me and the answer)

88. I think this was an ideal themed puzzle, in that you don’t have to get (or know anything about) the theme in order to solve and enjoy the puzzle. For me, even seeing the theme explained in the blog didn’t add much to my enjoyment, and the theme didn’t seem to cause Qaos any difficulty in creating clear and clever clues.

    Some of my favourites, for their surfaces especially, were 10a AGES, 21a WHEELMAN, and 15 d TIE. Lots of other delightful clues – I could go on and on, but I won’t.

    Gervase@54, I like your idea, but to make it an even truer test of driving skills, they should all be given identical cars.

    I’m clearly in a small minority on the “2nd X” issue. Whenever I see that construction in a clue, the first thing I look for is the corresponding letter in X. Cryptic grammar often relies on implied words (like text-speak, or telegram language in former times). Implying “of”, or even “letter of” does not strike me as untenable.

    Thanks Qaos for the fun, and Andrew for the exemplary blog.

89. Had a slightly different parse for STONES – tone (tense as in muscle toning) in Sat/Sun = individual rocks (definition). Otherwise, no probs. Even saw the theme at the end. Yeah, 9th pregnancy grates. Henry V is ok. July 4th has even nicer misdirectional possibilities.
    Thanks, Q&A

90. Thanks both and all commen(or garden)tators.

    I don’t usually finish a Qaos but I did with this one and I was thoroughly entertained (while yet stubbing my pencil on many of the quibbles quoted). And I spotted the theme too! Yay me!

    HAMILTON is known (like Newton with his apple (or perhaps Coleridge with his ‘Xanadu’?)) for having a sudden flash of inspiration. He felt compelled to record it immediately.

    [poc@46: Although he did much of his work while living and teaching in Cork, Boole was English.]

91. monkeypuzzler@84. I didn’t mean to prolong your agony – glad the penny dropped for you.
    [I’m slowly getting to know the various setters’ styles and quirks and (for me) there’s an added satisfaction to knowing thine enemy and dismantling their fiendish stratagems. Qaos is unorthodox but adheres to a consistent internal logic which I choose to embrace 😁]

92. [Eileen@82 and others.. slither/sliver continued. Thanks for the Spectator article link, , Eileen. It’s behind a paywall, but as well as the apparent misuse of slither for sliver, I was able to read a little of the second paragraph, which goes into what Greg@56 linked about Th-fronting. Thanks Greg, that was what I had in mind.)

93. I missed the theme (I usually do) and struggled a lot with this but finally completed without aids. I thought that the clue for ‘hounds’ was particularly tricky.

94. Qaos has some clever devices, like ‘hit it off’ and ‘as criminal escapes’, so the fact that he includes what many of us find jarring in ‘9th pregnancy’ suggests that he has received editorial approval for it. Does this mean that ‘first act’ for A and ‘last December’ for R will be coming soon? Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?

    I met some young people in one of my local pubs the other day who are just starting cryptics. I recommended the Guardian Quick Cryptics and Fifteen Squared, which they made a note of. When solving 5d today I imagined having to explain to them why ‘it’=SA. 🤔😱

    Thanks to Qaos and Andrew.

95. Quite enjoyed that tonight (got to it late today), did eventually spot the theme and that helped finish it off, although the parsing of my LOI, SODA, remained a mystery, so thanks for clearing that up. Even after all these years of doing Guardian cryptics, I’m still learning new crossword abbreviations – yes I knew compilers will use “it” to mean sex, but had not previously come across SA = Sex Appeal. You live and learn, as they say….

96. sheffield hatter @94 – we’ve already done the it/sex appeal bit – in the first 6 months of the Quick Cryptics – back at Quick Cryptic 15

97. Thought BRANDS was a terrible clue. Marking cattle? Marks & Spencer.

    Shan’t be tackling Qaos again

98. Although it’s very late there is another themed entry. SILVERstone: UK’s premier race track.

99. Cedric: I mentioned SILVERSTONE in my preamble.

100. [The Guardian‘s Corrections and clarifications | Sliver/slither malapropism: “…signature dishes include…a​ slither of corn bread”]

101. Local cycling club is the San Antonio Wheelmen.

102. 5dn made me curious about pop vs. soda. Having grown up in Boston, I can confirm what matt w says: the standard term there is “soda”. “Tonic” used to be an alternative but is now rarely heard. Saying “pop” would clearly mark you as an outsider, probably from the midwest. The map matt w links to confirms this.

     I initially assumed that English people use the term “soda” and that in the clue the phrase “In Boston, pop” meant “the thing that is called pop in Boston”. This would not be correct.

     I assumed that Qaos had made an incredibly tiny error there and should have said something like “In Chicago” rather than “In Boston”. But perhaps I misunderstood. If in fact English people call fizzy drinks “pop”, then “In Boston, pop” can mean “the term used in Boston for the thing that we [English people] call ‘pop'”, and there’s no error.

     So the correctness of the clue depends on whether you (English people) call fizzy drinks “soda” or “pop”. Google NGram viewer seems to suggest the former. Is it wrong?

103. Ted @102
     In my experience, “soda” is just water with fizz (and probably sodium hydrogencarbonate – “bicarb” – dissolved in it), as used in “whisky and soda”. If it’s flavoured, it is more likely to be referred to as “pop”. Tonic water has quinine as well as fizz.

104. muffin @103 — Thanks!

     Except for that somewhat strange usage in Boston in my youth, “tonic” generally means fizzy water with quinine in my (mostly US) experience too. In the US we tend to call unflavored fizzy water “soda water”, “seltzer”, or “club soda”. The word “soda” by itself usually means flavored / sweetened, except in the context of cocktails (e.g., the example you mention, “whiskey and soda” with “soda” referring to unflavored fizzy water).

     It occurs to me that my experiment with Google Ngram was poorly designed, as “can of soda” would include mentions of both unflavored and flavored drinks.

     I also note that I spelled “whiskey” differently from you. I remember that one spelling is Scottish and one isn’t, but I always forget which is which. (Just looked it up — no “e” in Scotland.) The “ey” spelling is standard in the US.

105. Late to the comments because I did the prize in between starting and finishing this one. Missed the theme as usual but I wasn’t looking for it.

     I’m also of the faction who can’t see how 9th pregnancy = Y. I guess that’s what you call non-Xymenian

     Great puzzle though

106. Second completion in a row — yay! I did look for a theme afterward and couldn’t see it, but with Qaos it doesn’t usually matter

     SILVER was not my last one in, but it was the last one parsed — couldn’t figure it out for a long time

     Good to see the community calling out “9th pregnancy” — keep up the fight! 🙂

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