Quiptic 1,320 by Hectence

44 comments on “Quiptic 1,320 by Hectence”

1. Is there actually anybody who would ever use “E GEN” to mean online information?? (“gen” to mean info I’ve only seen in Guardian crosswords, I gather it was reasonably widely used in 1960’s Britain…apparently you had to be a Biggles reader!)
   I thought the wordplay for “pecu” in 4D seemed a bit forced, and “caught” seemed stranded, but it was gettable enough.
   Should’ve picked that “south side” would indicate the last letter of a word in a down-clue, though of course…the word itself is never written out in that configuration!
   22D’s pretty obvious on reading the explanation but the exact parsing had me stumped for whatever reason.

2. My only head-scratch was beer/courage. I thought it might have been alluding to the occasional reference to any alcohol as “liquid courage”. But I see it was a British brew I’d never heard of. Didn’t fully parse SKIN-DEEP, but should have.

3. Harder than quiptic level for me. I did not get full parse for “SKIN-DEEP”, the “I” in “UNIVERSE”, and the “N” in “TARZAN”. That’s what fifteensquared’s for!

   Thanks Shanne and Hectence.

4. Thanks Hectence and Shanne. Nice puzzle and great blog (neat and detailed).

   PECULIAR
   I was thinking if it was CUP* with E caught=PECU (E caught in PCU)….

   Dylan N@1
   I share your view on E GEN (maybe it’s just whimsical/cryptic).

5. Not the easiest Quiptic I’ve ever done. I remembered that Hentence likes a pangram about 3/4 of the way through and found I was missing a Q. I had two Us lurking alone and PLAQUE jumped out at me. I had already used all the other letters of the alphabet, so it was of no further help. 4d was still holding out , but I wrote it out horizontally and stuck LIAR on the end and the anagram jumped out.
   It was a lot easier than the Everyman though.
   Thanks both.

6. I guessed a few answers and parsed them afterwords, eg THWART, TREMOR, TEAR-JERKER.

   I wrongly remembered COURAGE as an Australian beer brand – I have never heard of the English one.

   I couldn’t parse 14ac apart from P = beginning to provoke.

7. Courage was the local brewer where I grew up (SE London), but I haven’t seen (or drunk) it for years. It appears the brewer was taken over years ago, but the beer is still made.

8. Shirl @7 – I realised having read that link that I was drinking Courage in one of its later forms, not the original. The brewery had been taken over a couple of times by then. (And Youngs, which I preferred, was still a small independent brewery. I lived and worked near for a bit. It was a bad idea overindulging the night before walking into work to be faced by a pungent smell as the mashes were being opened.)

   KVa @4 – I’ve added your parsing – I didn’t find it easy unscrambling that clue clearly.

   Dylan N @1 – I don’t think Hectence imagines anyone is going to say E GEN – but it’s crossword shorthand – e-learning is another one I come across.

9. There used to be a cute cracker-level joke shared among us older vicars, in the days when people still read the old Authorised Version, about the only beer brand mentioned in the Bible: Acts 28.15 reads, “when the brethren heard of us, they came to meet us as far as Appii forum, and The three taverns: whom when Paul saw, he thanked God, and took courage.” Cue groans …

10. Chris @9 groan …. 🙂

11. Thanks to Hectence and Shanne for this week’s puzzle and explanation. I can say with only a touch of shame that I was sitting drinking a brew while trying to get bruise which was my LOI.

    I thought this was a very enjoyable puzzle. I struggled with courage = beer, and like others have said decided it was a very particular case of liquid courage before coming here. I can say that I have never used the term e-gen (or gen on its own for that matter) but through the helpful lens of 225 it becomes commonplace in my head to say info = gen and online means put e before it, I never considered it an actual term to be used but rather a fun quiptic quirk that I enjoyed.

12. Took a couple of visits and a couple of coffees but got there. I think this was just about right as a Quiptic. A few more obvious answers and a few tricky ones. I did guess a few from crossers and then reverse engineered the wordplay but they all seemed fair. Thanks Hectence and Shanne.

13. I struggled with this one, and would think that the more experienced weekday cryptic folk would enjoy it more than those of us on the learning curve. A lot of quite complex charades, really appreciated this blog this week, many thanks Shanne.

14. Couldn’t quite suss which was riding who in comb.

15. Re Shanne @8 I have used the term e-learning, in a work context, many times for many years. I have, however, never come across gen meaning information or e-gen specifically meaning online information, although there is ‘to gen up on’ meaning to gather information, so maybe it’s linked to that? Another one to try to store in the memory banks for future reference, I guess.

    Thanks, Hectence and Shanne

16. Please could the more experienced explain CHEERS=AT?

17. Numbfoot @16 – it’s TA = cheers, up, so reversed to become AT.

18. grantinfreo@14: I had trouble finding an insertion indicator for COMB too: if the COB is a “riding horse”, there just isn’t one, and if it’s simply a horse then I don’t see how “riding” indicates inside.

    Found this quite tricky for a Quiptic.

19. Thanks, Shanne. It all makes sense now!

20. A few of these clues felt trickier than quiptic-level. Didn’t parse 14A SKIN-DEEP — the connection between “understanding” and “kind” seems a little loose. And agree that riding is a problematic insertion instruction for COMB. I weakly justified it by imagining the “M” sitting a little higher on the baseline than the other letters, as if “riding” the CO and B.

21. I suppose if you were riding a train or a plane, you’d be inside it – but not a horse!

22. Many years ago I was told that, on entering Hampshire, travellers on the GWR in a westerly direction would see a trackside poster saying “You are now entering the Strong Country (Strong’s Romsey Ales)” shortly followed by another saying “Take Courage”.

23. Thanks to Hectence for a perfect quiptic, and to Shanne for a meticulous blog.

24. Half enjoyable; half thought it had too many hyphenated phrases and overly complicated charades for a Quiptic.

25. Gladys et al: If you are riding a horse ,then you have some of it in front of you and some of it behind.

26. I often guess a word or fiddle around with letters and then parse afterwards. Very occasionally I manage to parse first. Beginners tactics I suppose. Do others do that?
    Thanks to Hectence (I’m on to the pangrams) and invaluable Shanne.

27. Of course, snatch and jerk are two rather different olympic lifts….

28. Sue@26
    I think we all guess first and parse later some of the time and I’ve been solving Guardian Cryptics for 75 years.

29. Sue@26
    I think we all guess first and parse later some of the time and I’ve been solving Guardian Cryptics for 65 years.

30. 65 is right! There doesn’t seem to be an edit facility here.

31. Thanks Hectence and Shanne
    Far too difficult for a Quiptic – I found it harder than Saturday’s Prize (I haven’t looked at today’s Cryptic yet). “South side of house” for E simply doesn’t work – yes, it’s a down clue, but “house” isn’t entered in the grid.

32. This was enjoyable and mostly fair, but goodness it seemed very hard for a Quiptic! Apart from a few easy hiddens, would this have felt out of place as a mid-week puzzle?

    I do think it’s helpful to try to analyse why one finds a puzzle hard rather than just exclaim “it’s not a Quiptic”, so here’s what I’ve come up with:

    – unhelpful grid with loads of non-crossing initial letters
    – unhelpful letter placements with loads of vowels as crossings letters
    – difficult anagrinds such as sculpture, laced and enlivened
    – several complex charades
    – the foreknowledge of the pangram (it’s a Hectence) didn’t help much, since the Z and Q came from hiddens, one of the Js from anagram fodder and the X obvious from “former/ex”, i.e. these less-common letters just fell out by themselves rather than being helpful pointers
    – some looseness, such as snatch=JERK (they’re not), understanding=KIND, injury=BRUISE (not the first injury that comes to mind for me), stimulated=ENCOURAGED, “South side of”, the horse riding, the CUP-E thing…

    The fact that some pretty experienced solvers didn’t quite parse some bits, and that a number of us are commenting a day late, says it all, I think.

    Personally I had to reveal PECULIAR in order to make progress on ENCOURAGED and BRUISE… the first time I’ve needed to do a reveal on a Quiptic for a while!

    Viewing it as a normal cryptic, it was fun though. Thanks both!

33. I’m glad that several others found this difficult. I’ve reached the stage where I find the Quick Cryptics too easy and am disappointed not to complete the Quiptic. So, solving only half these clues (and realising from the blog that I’d never have solved the others) is rather a knock-back.

34. AP @32 – if I’m trying to grab something from you, I may snatch/jerk it away (I shouldn’t have misled with weightlifting in the blog)

    Rogerpat @33 – I didn’t comment on difficulty but I know when we were having a conversation about Quiptic setters before, I have said I don’t find Hectence as accessible as some of the other setters – and at the time I named the more accessible setters as:
    * Matilda, who hasn’t set a Quiptic since May 2023, having just checked, but used to appear regularly;
    * Picaroon – who is now employed by the Daily Telegraph and not setting for other newspapers;
    * Pasquale – who when he sets Quiptics is scrupulously fair, more challenging when setting elsewhere.
    * Carpathain – mostly setting Quick Cryptics now
    * Chandler – another regular Quiptic setter.
    * Ludwig – new to the slot – level variable.

    I like Anto, but don’t think he’s always the best fit for the Quiptic slot. Looking back through the names there was a Bartland setting a couple of years ago, but they seem to have disappeared a while back, also Pan and Beale.

35. It’s very unsatisfying when the setters mistake an associated word for a definition: like Dutch Girl @27 says, snatch and jerk are different things, and it’s the same with hop and skip in 1D (otherwise it could be called the hop, hop and jump), and e- and online in 6d.

    Having learned cryptics on the Times, I found this use of associated terms one of the hardest adjustments with swapping to the Guardian

36. Dylan N @1 — I think Shanne @8 is right regarding E GEN. I think you could put it either of two ways. You can think of “electronic” and “information” as cluing E and GEN separately, or you can think of it as a whimsical imaginary construction: if an electronic book is an e-book, then electronic gen is e-gen.

    (Either way, we have to just accept that GEN is “information”, which I’ve only ever seen in crosswords. Maybe in other people’s experience this usage remains common.)

37. Shanne@34 my bad – I got the weightlifting thing into my head and failed to disassociate it when analysing the clue. Your other example shows that the association is fine. (Also, I said “looseness” above, but perhaps some of the things I listed there weren’t so much loose as just less obvious.)

    Thanks for that list of setters; I agree with your choices.

38. I enjoyed this puzzle and I enjoyed Shanne’s excellent blog, so thanks both.

    Re 23a TEAR-JERKER, I initially saw “jerk” in the non-weightlifting context; then I thought of weightlifting and said “but snatch and jerk are different actions”. Like Shanne, I was right the first time.

    When I think of Tarzan (22d), I prefer to think of Burroughs rather than Disney. I don’t know why.

    Every time I write Shanne, auto-wrong changes it to Shane. I hope you don’t mind when we sometimes forget to override the machine.

39. Managed to get ~70% done before I finally threw in the towel and having read the comments above I am quite pleased with that since it was really quite gnarly in places. Quite a few were parsed after the effect and while I did get the answer to 6D I questioned my thinking more than once as it just felt wrong and rather inelegant. Other than that disappointed I didn’t get the first half of 20A after successfully figuring out the second part but overall a reasonably successful outing I think.

40. Sorry – obviously been unhelpful with the snatch / jerk – so edited that above.

41. Just completed! This was a real challenge but I was pleased with myself on parsing most of the clues without just guessing the definition or looking at a dictionary. For the bottom left corner, I had to cheat a bit, but was satisafactorily close in my parsing in the end. With regards to parsing, the ones that really threw me were TARZAN (I thought maybe TARTAN with the T replaced with the Z from Zara), SKIN DEEP (not a clue on this one but guessed the answer), TALK SHOP (guessed but again, couldn’t figure out the parsing, but kicking myself now, so obvious!), TWART (I got the answer at the start, but couldn’t justify through the parsing, because I forgot right could be abbreviated to RT). My favourite ones were BRUISE, CHOKED, and TALK SHOP, even though the latter frustrated me. Didn’t know WELL NIGH but found it through the parsing, Shakespeare perhaps? Definitely tricky but loads of fun. Thanks Hectence and Shanne.

42. Didn’t finish this one but the ones I didn’t get seemed fair when I read them … except E GEN, which is, frankly, nonsense to me. Time to dispense with crypticese and start relying on words and meanings people actually use?

43. 21dn has at least one alternative solution. MEETLY fits the clue, with “meet” short for “meeting”, a horseracing synonym of fixture.

44. Adrian @43 – normally in cryptic crosswords, and especially in the Quiptics, “cut short” in a clue means removing one letter from the end. So your example of a meet doesn’t work because you’re either removing three out of seven letters or no letters – so it doesn’t fit the wordplay.

    Very occasionally more than one letter is removed, usually to howls of protest. To remove more letters, there’s usually some device that says 75% or 60% to show that 2 letters from a 8 letter word or 2 letters from a 5 letter word are to be removed.

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