Guardian 29,628 – Paul

86 comments on “Guardian 29,628 – Paul”

1. 25a The minus sign is a – and means ‘take away’.

2. TAKE-AWAY – I think a short dash is a minus sign, or “take away

   Mc @1 we crossed

3. Another smashing puzzle from Paul which I solved from the bottom up. A mini theme of SHOOTER, BARREL and CARTRIDGE plus the whimsical animals pointed out by Andrew. Also a few nice linked words like MOON RIVER, MOON TREK, WATER BARREL, WATER SHOWER and METEOR SHOWER. Favourites were ALBATROSS, WHOMEVER, BABY CINO and OIL TANKER. Same parsing of TAKE-AWAY as MCourtney and Crispy.

   Earworm https://youtu.be/QooCN5JbOkU?si=GGpbJjox8UiuRzZX

   Ta Paul & Andrew.

4. Nice to be endorsed. I’m just amazed I had anything to say.
   On my first run through I had only one letter, not even one whole word.
   Just got the last letter of 16A (which was the first letter of 18d). And that was playing the odds.

5. I’m not sure what it says about me, but my first one in was THROW UP. Entertaining puzzle when I spotted the oinker, cooer trick. My autocorrect wants to correct cooer to COOPER.

   Thank you to Paul and Andrew.

6. Perhaps 1D could have referenced 18 instead of ‘bottle’?

7. The comments about dash=minus prompted me to ask this question: are dash, minus and hyphen (and maybe others) actually all the same character, or has the use of typewriters and computers made them all the same when they were not originally?

8. Thanks Paul and Andrew.

   Needed more than one explanation of parsing from blog. Really enjoyable whimsical puzzle.

9. Very tough slog. I am never on Paul’s wavelength so it is not unusual for me to have trouble with his puzzles.

   I could not parse the ‘short dash’ bit of 25ac, 27ac.

   New for me: WATER FLEA; winchester = bottle (for 1d); ralph = vomit (for 2d).

10. Charles @6: indeed.

11. Great fun though perhaps a little too quick once the OINKER pointed the way, having found it hard to get a foothold in the grid (OUTWARD, in fact). Thanks Andrew especially for parsing WINCH though agree Charles@6.
    ravenrider@7: interesting question, I couldn’t parse TAKE-AWAY fully as I don’t think of the subtraction sign as a short dash (at least, not in my scrawl) BUT in Excel it seems to be. In Word, I can get both a short dash eg N-S or a longer one N – S by using spaces, no idea why! Are these related to the el, em, en spaces that we sometimes see used in clues?
    Thanks Paul!

12. Thanks, tuned in on the right wavelength and got through a Paul puzzle. He seems to be a bit of a bogey setter for me. Have been plugging away though and reading the blogs so thanks FifteenSquared bloggers, I think I may finally be in tune with his style:

    I was going to comment on the whimsical animal names but see the blogger beat me to it.

    Enjoyed that: BABYCINO somehow still being in my brain having once ordered from Starbucks for my young son about a decade ago. Also enjoyed: OIL-TANKER, GLAD-RAGS, LONGBOW (helpfully always my first thought with Agincourt thanks to a very enthusiastic English Teacher and cryptic crossword fan) plus much else:

    Thanks Paul, Andrew and previous bloggers of Paul’s puzzles.

13. Most enjoyable, thanks Andrew and Paul, but BABY CINO? Really? Guess it must be a thing, but wish it weren’t.

14. I enjoyed the animal motif and it helped in solving some of the clues. I am always rather less enamoured by the cross-referencing and split solutions but that’s personal preference. The WINCHester was a toughie that required a fact-check and WATER FLEA is not exactly your everyday small creature so I’m glad the cluing of that one was fair. Like Shane @5, somewhat embarrassed that THROW UP came so readily to mind – though I’m not sure I’ve heard it used since university days.

    Charles @6: I agree. No trickier an allusion and it would not have needed the fact check.

    Thanks Paul and Andrew

15. On the gun theme, in addition to above, COOPER is a somewhat famous (enough to have a Wikipedia page) gunmaker in America.

16. Very enjoyable. I loved all the “-ER” animal noise clues once I’d twigged what the theme was., and unusually for me they helped with the solve. Like Andrew I didn’t spot the parsing for TAKE-AWAY initially, but saw it on the revisit. It occurs to me that since “take-away” is arguably oxymoronic with home delivery and the length of the minus symbol is unspecified, a simpler “Dash for food” would have worked rather well.

17. Like Shanne@5 my FOI was THROW UP . Ralph is not in my idiom, but previous crosswords threw up the technicoloured yawn from Barry Humphries.
    TAKE-AWAY my second one in. Got the minus sign. ravenrider@7 and Gazzh@11. I think you’re overthinking it.
    SPOTTY made me laugh, although I had to look up pics of Bengal cats to get it.

    The heavy weight in ALBATROSS is from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and sailors’ beliefs. I’ve seen an albatross in the bow wave of a ship. Magnificent bird. Albatrosses can have microsleeps in the air, and otherwise sleep on the sea at night, and go for years without landing. Half their luck.

18. That typical Paul experience of not getting anything at first and it all coming in a rush at the end, once you have spotted the device. I liked TAKE AWAY.

19. Excellent’s about all I have say. Had trouble so the check button got a workout but loved the cleverness and the fun. Thanks for the blog and thanks Paul

20. ‘Lift half of 18’ does sound far more Paul-like than what was served up. I wonder if that clue suffered from over-zealous editing somewhere down the line?

21. Gazzh @11 The reason that you can get different dashes in Word is that although you can only enter “-” because only that character is on the keyboard, Word can decide you meant a different character from the context. That partially answers my question because although Ascii only has one character that has to cover dash/minus/hyphen, extended character sets can and do have more than one. The question I should have asked is how many people actually care about the difference?

22. Maybe Paul couldn’t find a word based on BAA-ER.

    Enjoyed the puzzle after a slow start.

23. I sometimes find Paul’s puzzles too hard, but this was more manageable. Completely solved starting in the SW, and all parsed apart from 1d ; I’ve only ever heard of a Winchester as a type of 18d. Thanks P and A.

24. Andy in Durham@20. Who would dare to edit Paul? Or did you mean self-editing? Likewise. So many of the G crosswords seem to have neither a test solver nor an editor. I didn’t mind WINCH, but I did have to look up the bottle.

25. I was somewhat mystified by this at first and, like AlanC, solved it from the bottom up – from the SW quadrant, in fact But once a couple of solutions showed we were in ‘Old Macdonald Had A Farm’ territory, the rest fell out quite easily. We’re back to the split entries and cross-references here, but fortunately only to a limited extent.

    If it hadn’t been for the theme, MOON RIVER would have been almost impenetrable; how do those who regularly complain about the boy/girl device feel about ‘number’? Even vaguer I’d have thought. (And encased in a meaningless surface). But it all turned out fine.

    As a chemist, WINCHester is very familiar as the name of a 2.5 litre bottle, although I’ve never heard it used to refer to other sizes – and I was glad to have been spared another cross-reference 🙂

    Thanks to Paul and Andrew

26. Staticman1@12: My sentiments exactly. My first Paul was a complete bust while in this one my only DNF was BABYCINO which I never heard of, and even with the crossers I didn’t spot the anagram. That’s down to the excellent bloggers and commentators here that have helped this beginner immensely. I haven’t always thanked people individually for their guidance but it is always appreciated. Favourites today were THROW UP and SPOTTY, and I was grateful for the animal noises once I spotted them.

27. All good fun. Thanks Paul and Andrew.

    Gazzh@11 and ravenrider@21: As your keyboard has only one symbol, being based on old-fashioned typewriters, but typesetters have multiple symbols, Word goes for a compromise. If you type something like “bed-ridden” with no spaces it assumes you mean the shortest dash used to link compound words, which is the hyphen. If you put spaces – perhaps to introduce a clause – then Word will assume you meant the punctuation dash which is longer, called an em-dash. An en-dash, which is in between in size, is harder to generate but it tends to appear in things like date and page ranges e.g. “Agincourt was part of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453)”

    The minus sign is none of these dashes and will appear if you use either Word’s equation mode or a decent mathematical typesetting system such as TeX. The names “em-” and “en-” do indeed derive from the typesetters widths, being the width of a capital letter of that name. As you can guess, some people do care about these things, which made parsing “take-away” very hard for me!

    Enjoyed the moo-ers and oink-ers and agree Winchester was more familiar as the shooter, having lived close to the gun factory in New Haven. But then, working in a lab I also regularly ordered Winchesters of solvents so would have been happy either way, though I accept the latter is a much less common usage.

28. I had a problem equating BONG to TOLL
    It had to be LONGBOW as I was there (or thought I was even reading Henry V let alone seeing it)
    BONG comes from Cyprus Hill (hits from the bong)
    Its even worse than “what’s brown and sounds like a bell?”

29. Oh my goodness. This is just a crossword. All the techspeak about the short dash in TAKE-AWAY is spoilng a simple joke. I got it, so it must be simple
    . 🙂

30. Oh my goodness. This is just a crossword. All the techspeak about the short dash in TAKE-AWAY is spoilng a simple joke. I got it, so it must be simple.
    . 🙂

31. Great fun from Paul today; loved the ‘cooer’, brayer’, ‘oinker’, ‘hooer’, and ‘mooer’ mini-theme. Thanks Andrew for the excellent blog, especially for explaining about ‘winchester’ – the famous rifle is another shooter to add to ‘bow’ and the rest. Thank you Paul for the entertainment.

32. joft@27: I agree. These characters are decidedly not the same in all typefaces, despite the limitations of MS Word and the ilk, and they certainly have different meanings. A period of working at CUP back in the 70s made me very aware of this sort of thing.

    Nho of Ralph in that sense and it’s not in Chambers. BABYCINO unfortunately is, but I would prefer to forget it. Also didn’t know what a Winchester was, other than a rifle.

    I surprised myself by managing nearly all of this once the cross-references became clear.

33. Alternative thought on 25ac.
    If you are short (of a) dash, then you take the dash (-) away.
    TAKE-AWAY

34. Very enjoyable. Thanks to Paul. And also to Andrew for helping me with a couple of incomplete parses. I actually liked 21a BABYCINO – I thought it was a clever anagram. It’s a drink much favoured by my three year old grandchild when we go to my local coffee shop, especially with a marshmallow on top. Just to add to the groans from some solvers, said coffee shop also serves puppucinos — a friend bought one for my border collie just this morning. He lapped it up!

35. [Re the dashes, Jack of Few Trades@27 has summed it up nicely. I’d just add that plenty of people do care, especially those working in (or producing content for) publishing, with the baffling exception of newspapers, where anything seems to go. My pet peeve is things like ex-Tory MP. Nope, quite the opposite: he’s (probably) still a Tory, and he’s no longer an MP. An n-dash is needed, not a hyphen.]

36. I was familiar with “talking to Ralph & Huey on the great white telephone” but haven’t come across Ralph solo before – raised a chortle though
    Spotted the themette in time for it prove useful 🙂

    Cheers P&A

37. I now get the minus sign gag… didn’t before… but don’t quite understand the clue. Perhaps I’m not up in modern catering modes, but i thought TAKE-AWAY was when one went and fetched the nosh. How is this food delivery?

38. AP @35: excellent peeve. What’s an n-dash?

39. I thought this was Paul back on top form. I spotted the *-ers during the solve for once, which helped me with some, including COOPER. I also liked the SPOTTY bats, the spilt children’s drink for BABYCINO, and the natural park for REALISTIC. The ralph for THROW UP seems to be US, according to the main dictionaries.

    Thanks Paul and Andrew.

40. Definitely a game of two halves for me, with early this morning having to put this down after getting spots in front of my eyes trying to decide whether Bengals were covered in stripes or in – yes – spots. Then late this morning picked up again, and as often happens things slotted into place much more smoothly. Though had no idea, with all the crossers in place whether it should be Threw or THROW UP, or indeed why? BABYCINO a completely new one for me, even though all the letters were offered up for anagrinding. Last to succumb therefore was the SW quarter, with TREK unnoticed until that moment as a reversed hidden word.
    All good fun, many thanks Paul and Andrew….

41. I don’t think anyone’s used GAT for gun since about the 1930s. Like Model T Ford and It Girl it lives on in crosswords. Or has it made a comeback?

    I enjoyed the noisy animals. Thanks Paul and Andrew.

42. [William@38, as per Jack of Few Trades@27, it’s the dash whose width is based on that of an N. Like hyphens, en-dashes should be typeset without surrounding space, whereas for em-dashes that’s a stylistic choice I believe.]

    Back to the puzzle, I’m another one who loved the animals and for whom the -er device helped for several clues. Thanks both!

43. [I share AP @35’s dislike of linking the qualifier to the adjective, rather than (usually) its noun. In the good old days, newspaper subeditors, or even typesetters, would have corrected this. I suspect that, nowadays, hacks’ copy often goes straight to the presses, unimproved. ]

44. [Thanks for all the dashing comments. I’m interested — and pedantic — enough to care about them, and to have looked up how to generate them on my Mac. Don’t know if I’ve got the right one here, but it looks nice.]

45. …and re 2d, never ever having heard the term Ralph used to mean vomit, I wonder how it is pronounced. For sometimes the forename Ralph is pronounced Rayf. A little boy in my primary school school class often had to be prompted when identifying common trees. When we got to sycamore, the rest of the class would poke their tongues out and make the most dreadful retching noises. My contribution as thought for the day…

46. The Winchester bottle and Ralph=vomit were new to me and I wasted a lot of time trying to make the small creature be a WATER VOLE, but I enjoyed all the noisy animals.

    I tend to use quite a lot of dashes when writing – poor style, I know – but I really don’t care how many points long any of them are. Is there actually an example where using one variety rather than another makes it difficult to understand the intended meaning of the text? After all, in handwriting there is no distinction.

47. Unusually gentle for a Paul, I thought, a setter who usually leaves me flummoxed and frustrated. I was held up for a while thinking that Bengal cats had stripes.

    However… isn’t a take-away the very opposite of a food delivery, i.e. food that one picks up oneself? Or has the meaning mutated since my English childhood?

48. [AP @35: Your punctuational punctiliousness is most impressive. Interestingly, other commonly used equivalents of your bugbear, such as ‘former Tory MP’ are ambiguous. But as gladys @46 remarks, nobody would fail to understand the intended meaning of the phrase, however inaccurately it was represented. The study of the understanding of meaning in context is known in linguistics as ‘pragmatics’; this ability is an essential component of human interaction 🙂 ]

49. I still don’t get SPOTTY, my LOI, – what’s it got to do with cats or even Bengal cats?
    Otherwise all good. Thanks Paul and Andrew

50. [Gervase@48, yup, ambiguities like that crop up everywhere. With the hyphen, though, the ambiguity is amplified somewhat, due to the nature of hyphens themselves; they do rather like to glue their adjacent components together. An ex-Tory MP (with hyphen) is just as likely to be a sitting MP who’s crossed the floor, as a former politician (particularly in times of parliamentary upheaval) – and it sometimes requires quite a lot of context to decide which was meant. Sometimes there’s no pertinent info in the article at all and so we’re left none the wiser.

    It was just a side remark though, so I’m not sure what prompted your sarcasm. Did it irritate you so much?]

51. hello SinCam@49 – if you google Bengal cat, you will see that it is a breed that has spots. Their coats range from spots, rosettes, arrowhead markings, to marbling.

    Lord Jim@41 – there are plenty of outdated words in crosswordland! Recently I saw niblick – golf club…

52. Jacob @ 47 A ‘take-away’ operates as a blanket term for food that is eaten at the consumer’s home rather than at the premises where it is produced. As it happens, the only take-aways that I (rarely) order are from outlets just around the corner from where I live, so I get my son to go and take them away himself, but even if I did not, someone (the restaurant itself or one of the various go-between who act as agents in such transactions) would take it away from the outlet on my behalf and convey it to me, so I don’t see the problem.

53. Got about half way with this, which is good for me.
    I looked at the ones I left and glad I did as most of them were well beyond me.
    Thanks both.

54. [paddymelon@29 – You can say that again. 🙂] — Especially liked 2d THROW UP for the Fed-like/Bluth-ish ‘Lift and Separate’ of Sir Ralph (1964–):
    “1995 [US] A. Heckerling Clueless [film script] Oh, actually, I was really bad today, I had two moccaCINOS, I feel like ralphing.”
    Chambers (’93) only has him as “the imp of mischief in a printing house” – seems — appropriate — today.
    [I’d’ve preferred 1d WINCH to’ve been clued as Arthur Daley’s local in Minder.]

55. [Earworm, written in ’67: Mike d’Abo’s Handbags And 16a]

56. [AP @50: I’m sorry if you mistook my facetiousness for sarcasm, and I wasn’t in the least irritated. I had hoped the emoticon at the end would serve to disambiguate my comments! My point is simply that there are more egregious examples of syntactic ambiguity, particularly in newspapers, and not always of the humorous ‘Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans’ type]

57. Re the typography discussion: if you want to make an em dash without those unsightly spaces on either side, type two hyphens, which is what they used to do in the typewriter era. Nearly all word processing software has known for decades (since the very first version of Word, for example) to make that an em dash for you–like this (with fingers crossed that this site will do it).

    And yes, the distinction between yoking together two words into a compound word and yoking two phrases into a compound sentence is sometimes an important one, so it matters which length you use!

    For the record, I didn’t get the TAKE-AWAY thing (I thought it was some sort of cryptic def), and maybe that’s because like most Americans I’ve always called the arithmetic thing (both the sign and its function) “minus.”

58. [Gervase@56 No worries!]

59. Thanks for the blog , the cross-linking was not too bad in terms of solving in order and only two references to 18 . I found the clues very good , especially the ones with animal sounds .
    I have seen BABYCINO in the FT a few times , clued from cabin boy . I wish that the word and the product did not exist .

    Does mansplaining need a hyphen , dash , minus sign or none ? I need to make a new label for my Paddington Bear .

60. Gervase@56: My favorite syntactic ambiguity is the wonderful “British Left Waffles On Falklands”, which I think once appeared in this very newspaper.

61. Well that was great fun! Started slowly but accelerated once I spotted the animal trick.

    Out of a host of great clues, COOPER was my favourite.

    Thanks Paul and Andrew

62. Great fun. Slow start, but like many others, I found a lot went quickly once I worked out the main gimmick, but still fun for all that! My first of these was METEOR SHOWER which was completely a reverse parse from the W, I didn’t even have SHOOTER at the time. Then I realized it was an anagram in MEOWER and… well fortunately the penny dropped before too long.

    Speaking of transatlantic animal sounds, I thought that “and translated” meant that RAT was not only the definition but anagrammed in the word for “donkey,” and figured “BEYER” must be a UK spelling of a donkey sound.

    Thanks Paul and Andrew!

    [Lord Jim@41: On NWA’s “—- tha Police,” after some gunshot sounds MC Ren rapped “Yeah something like that/but it all depends on the size of the gat.” But 1989 was a long time ago as well!]

63. More enjoyable than usual for a Paul. I quite enjoyed that.

64. Thanks Jack of Few Trades and others for further on dashes etc (Big Norm you should change your name to BigDash) and thanks matt w for bringing NWA into play, on which other site would we get gangsta rap alongside the niceties of typographical spacing?

65. Re BABYCINO, my German grandson calls it Kinder Coffee.

66. Thanks matt w @62 re GAT, interesting. I wonder if it continued in use through that time or if it was deliberately revived? Like peeler, which was very old slang for policeman but I think came back into use at some point.

67. Great fun and a steady solve. When I were young and drank too many beers the aftermath was known as ‘calling for Huey and Ralph’

68. Very enjoyable, loved all the “barker” etc clues. I had a cat as a “meower” which meant I could quite see how the clue worked until the blog helped me. Favourite, unusually, was the Spoonerism LONGBOW.

69. Yaaay – I actually finished a Paul puzzle.
    By the way, RALPH was brilliant!

70. A tiny correction: in the explanation of 14dn, there’s an I missing. It should be “A LIST (to tip) I found in …” rather than just “A LIST (to tip) found in …”. The I (like the A) is taken directly from the clue.

71. Barf is/was common, but ralph is new to me, don’t get out much these days. Not a great day for ginf, below 90% on the Indy, and some check button here. Enjoyed ntl, ta PnA.

72. Nothing against chemical elements or sub-atomic particles but it’s a relief to wrestle with nice furry animal words once in a while. Thank you Paul and Andrew, and JofT@27 for the hyphen masterclass, loved it!

73. I really loved this. There were a few I just couldn’t parse until the animal noise trick finally clicked with me. COOPER was one of my first in and I parsed that with no problems but then failed to see the same device used in OIL TANKER for ages. I did spot the minus in TAKE-AWAY, one of my favourite clues – I didn’t expect it to generate such a lively debate though.

    Ros @ 59, I share your pain with BC ( can’t bring myself to type it!) plus similarly icky names for drinks. Why? I mean really, why?

    Thank you to Paul for a really fun solve, and to Andrew for a great blog.

74. KateE @13 – I wouldn’t have known what a “babycino” was either but for one of my colleagues telling me about her granddaughter having one the other day. I understand it’s basically hot milk. Good puzzle though – thanks Paul and Andrew.

75. Re minus, en-dash, em-dash and hyphen and all you typographical fiends (thanks)… One of our local café/restaurants (in Chaville, between Paris and Versailles) is called the Bistro De Chaville and the signs outside call it BDC. But if you have ever corrected proofs for French printers you know that “bdc” means “bas de casse” (i.e. lower rather than upper case; the “casse” was the box they kept the letters in) and you never wrote it “en majuscules”…
    It worries me that this worries me. Maybe I’m doing too many crosswords?

76. Blaise@75: I share your pain. Honestly some people cannot seem to distinguish between pedantry and precision 🙂

77. Very rare I totally finish a Paul, and the repeated motif with the animals was a delight.

    Even then I struggled with COOPER for a minute, mainly because I was staring at it thinking it couldn’t be a reference to a character on Riverdale, which I was watching last night. The penny eventually dropped that it might just be referring to the considerably more famous Alice Cooper. Who I’ve seen live, which should probably have been a sizeable hint.

78. Very enjoyable and loved the double theme. Rarely do guns and animals co-exist to produce such a positive outcome. Admit to scanning all 250 odd species of owl and trying to shoehorn screech in before the penny dropped. I feel I should stick up for cross-references as they’re getting such a beating. I’ve always felt they add richness and complexity, often leading to that satisfying moment where a blank becomes a flood and everything falls into place at once.

79. ronald @45, Ralph meaning to vomit is pronounced with a flat ‘a’ vowel sound and with the ‘l’ voiced. I’d never heard it until I moved to Australia (maybe things are different in the west grantinfreo @71 — I’m assuming you’re in Fremantle).
    The other names I’ve heard are George (a copious projectile vomit) and Ruth (the sort of sound made with a dry retch).

80. DannyH@78 Agreed, I also want crosswords to be more than a list of clues, I love themes/cross references and don’t understand people’s opposition to them 🦉

81. Hard but brilliant. Thanks Paul! I found it tough to get started but ultimately very satisfying, much more so than the Enigmatist on Saturday.

82. I can’t remember a puzzle being more fun.

    Many thanks to Paul and all.

83. I liked the animal theme.
    I always thought that huey and ralph for vomit came from Billy Connolly.. you can find it if you search for Two Scotsmen in Rome on YouTube.

84. Had several where we got the right answer, but either couldn’t figure out why (winch) or don’t know that definition (flog=overexert?). The animal noises were a nice addition to the solving process.

85. I thought the clue for 2d THROW UP was both gorgeous and wretched. I’ll get my oxymoronic coat.

86. Completed about two thirds of this one. I was on the verge of a breakthrough for the final third, but it didn’t quite come

    16a I was trying FEED BAGS (muzzles), but eventually arrived at GLAD RAGS

    25a in North America the term for restaurant food consumed at home is TAKE-OUT (instead of TAKE-AWAY), so I didn’t get one that should have been simple

    Thanks for the interesting comments about various dashes! I’ve used two consecutive dashes in informal typing for years, and was pleased to find that on this site you get (I think) an em-dash when you type them — like that! Unlike paddymelon@29, I find the extensive discussion enriches the joke! Reading enlightening discussions about various topics by people who know what they’re talking about is one of the great pleasures of this blog!

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