Quiptic 1,324 by Hectence

42 comments on “Quiptic 1,324 by Hectence”

1. Thanks Shanne. I finished the crossword but some of my answers were definitely guesses based on the crossers. So it was good to come here and parse the answers. Also reading that you also had trouble parsing some of them made me feel better!

2. Thanks Hectence & Shanne.
   I thought this tough for a Quiptic but was able to enter & eventually parse them all. I didn’t know Hectence was famed for pangrams so was chuffed to realise we were going in that direction early and it helped a few.
   Favourite was 24. LOI 26 needed all the crossers, and even then took me an age to parse.
   One quibble: although 4 was clear from the wordplay I’d argue that ‘tactic’ and ‘strategy’ are far from synonyms, indeed I’d say they are close to antonyms.

3. Thankyou Hectence and Shanne. That was lovely.

4. Thanks Shanne.
   I like Hectence’s economy in cluing. Nice surfaces. Didn’t think to look for the pangram.
   Hum>PONG etc I only know from British cryptics, but it comes up often, as does BOTTLE.
   HEARTBREAK my pick.

5. Plain sailing and very enjoyable. I even remembered that in the Motherland for some reason hum=pong.

6. What Pm@4 wrote. I add LYCHEE as a second pick

   Thanks Hectence and Shanne

7. Like Graham@2, I thought this tough for a Quiptic but was able to enter & eventually parse them all.

8. Was the pangram referenced anywhere? I completely missed this was a thing. Only discovered it when i came here to understand the parsing of a couple of clues.

9. Neil @8 – there are some setters who like using every letter of the alphabet in their crosswords – a pangram. I haven’t seen a Hectence puzzle that isn’t a pangram, so it’s worth bearing in mind when looking at odd words, that it might contain the J, Q, X and Z.

10. I’m afraid to say this is another crossword from Hectence in this slot that was not very quiptic.

    The combination of jaunty syntax, esoteric references and loose definitions made this a pretty unrewarding solve.

    Shanne’s just told us what 24a is and I’m still fairly incredulous…

11. I wasn’t on Hectence’s wavelength today and unfortunately let my impatience tempt me into using the check function instead of coming back later.

    LOI was FRIEZE since I had BREEZE but couldn’t figure out the wordplay.

    “available” for OUT seems mean, since I’d assume unavailable to mean that – out of stock, she’s (gone) out, out like a light, etc

    succeeded = S is one I’ll have to remember, along with money = M.

12. I thought this was a decent Monday Cryptic rather than a Quiptic.

13. I found this very difficult for a quiptic as IMO more solving required more methods than typical. However, most of the parsing made sense.

    Strangely, I needed to come here to parse three of the short answers (even though guessed correctly):
    9a – got last 3 but forgot U = POSH.
    15a – tried to use “tune” as an anagrind for PiANO (dropping “i” for “intro), but remembered HUM for a stink from years ago.
    25a – got RME for “retired man’s energy beginning” and tried to use “to go” as anagrind.

    23a, 27a, and 14d were my favourites.

14. Deebster @11 – for OUT, that’s the cryptic setters’ playbook – any meaning is fair game, but words that mean several things, so are ambiguous, are more useful because they take the solver down the wrong rabbit holes. And once we, the solvers, have got that wrong direction in our heads it’s difficult to re-see the clue differently. That’s why we all suggest taking a break away from the puzzle – it’s often helpful to reset inaccurate preconceptions based on misleading elements in the clues.

    For that clue I could produce a sentence with the words used interchangeably, so I didn’t quibble.

    M for money comes from M0, M1, M2 – economic measures of money supply.

    AR @13 – GERM was the thing that took me longest to parse to blog this. I also looked at an anagram of 1st letters, but couldn’t see any indicators for that other than the G from go. And it was working out I knew how to parse the E and G, so I was left with RM / MR suddenly made me see it.

15. Thank you for the blog Shanne. I found this at the tough end of quiptic level, it felt like tackling a midweek cryptic in places.

16. Arrgh, forget to include:

    Thanks Shanne and Hectence.

17. But why does hum=pong?

18. I don’t understand why U = posh in 4A. And I couldn’t understand why goods minus good plus good equals goods in answer for 26A until I eventually realised the first symbol was a dash and shouldn’t be read as a minus.

    JFH @ 17 hum is British slang for a bad smell – if something smells bad we would (could) say it hums. Hence pong which also means a bad smell. Hum could also be used in the sense of being bad at something so I might say I really hum at solving Quiptics. I hope that’s helpful.

19. JFH @17 – the penultimate definition of HUM¹ in Chambers is “to have a strong, unpleasant smell (slang);”

    It’s a common Britishism – “you don’t half hum/pong/stink” – usually said to someone coming in after mucking out something smelly

20. Mac @18 – U for posh comes from U and Non-U – popularised by Nancy Mitford in the 1950s, originally coined by Alan Ross. It’s a crossword staple. U stands for Upper class, and if you’re really into this, there’s a poem by Betjeman which is a pastiche on that concept – How to Get on in Society – where the conceit is that none of the usages are U, they’re all non-U.

21. I’ve mixed feelings about inclusion of the U/Non-U reference in a Quiptic. I find it annoying because it seems out of kilter with what I’d expect from a Quiptic clue – it may just be that when I first came across it (in cryptics), it took a long time for it to become lodged in my memory.

    On the other hand, on the evidence of the comments above, it’s perhaps served a useful purpose in introducing more people to it, to add to their arsenal (or armoury?) for future solves.

22. Thanks to Shanne and Hectence for today. Overall I thought the puzzle was very enjoyable, and one again my lack of boating knowledge proved my undoing with coaxing as my LOI.

    My personal favourite was mahjong, it was a perfect level for a quiptic and I appreciated the service and wordplay.

23. Wow! Tough! But perhaps that is what the ‘quip’ in quiptic means – not ‘quick’ but ‘quite’
    Anyway thanks Shanne. The blog was very helpful in parsing. It was only toward the end that I managed to solve the clues without peeping:) No complaints about pong or u etc but working out the type of clue and hence how to solve is more than half the battle.
    Thanks Hectence.

24. Scraggs @21 – we’ve had U for posh in the Quick Cryptics, number 34 by Chandler. I’ve also posted the link to that poem before, and it’s likely to be a puzzle I blogged.

25. Shanne @9: If I recall correctly, there was one Hectence puzzle a year or two ago where she accidentally left out one of the easy letters (like maybe F or something), and actually saw fit to post an apology here!

26. mrpenney @25 In that Chandler Quick Cryptic, no 34, he missed out an A and apologised. Is that it? Which I only know because I was looking for where we’d had U for posh before.

27. Shanne @24, thanks for the info, I appreciate that.

28. Very tricky but got through it eventually. Trickiest part was parsing it all after getting the answers. FRIEZE is new to me but it couldn’t be anything other than a soundalike of freeze and the Z was needed for the pangram so finished with no reveals so overall I’m pleased.

    Some really nice clues and surfaces in there. I liked THANK YOU and LETS SLIP. A couple I didn’t like but won’t grumble.

29. That was tough. Took a few visits and a few guesses with crossers to get through. The bottom half of the grid was relatively ok but the top half especially the NE corner I found really tricky. And I forgot that this was likely a pangram due to the setter. Thanks Hectence for the brain stretch, and Shanne for the explanations.

30. HI all, first time posting here. I was wondering if there is any way of parsing whether 11a is Frieze or Freeze from the wordplay? It seemed to me that either could side could be the definition and the crossers did not disambiguate it.

    Thanks Hectence and Shanne

31. Loved PILS STEL, especially as our local microbrewery just won a gold medal in Lyon for one of their brews.

32. WonderBrad @30: First of all, welcome. As to your question, yes, normally having the homophone indicator in between the two elements leads to ambiguity. But for once, that hyphen in “cool-sounding” matters! It clearly links “sounding” to “cool,” telling you that you need a word that sounds like one meaning cool. So the answer is FRIEZE, not freeze.

33. WonderBrad @30 – welcome to the site.

    I read it as FRIEZE as the soundalike indicator (sounding) was hyphenated to “cool”, so I took that “cool-sounding” as the wordplay and the rest as the descriptor. It’s also a Quiptic, so the setter is supposed to be playing straight with the solvers, unlike some of the other Cryptics. We had a case for a Prize recently when a lot of us put the wrong option in.

    Sorry, slow to answer as I was trying to track down the puzzle where a lot of us made the same mistake on a Prize puzzle – found it – Prize Puzzle by Pasquale on 21 March where there was a choice of AWAKE or AWARE – https://www.fifteensquared.net/2025/03/21/guardian-prize-29643-pasquale/

34. Tough but fair so probably OK as a Quiptic if on the tougher end.

    One mistake from me with FREEZE instead of FRIEZE. I was expecting a pangram which helped (or didn’t) with that one.

    Liked: BOTTLE, GERM and MAHJONG

    Thanks Hectence and Shanne

35. Wonderful surfaces, smooth and witty, bravo Hectence (and thank you both)!

36. Suspecting a pangram helped me with my LOI – 7 down. I thought this was fine for a quiptic. Thanks Hectence and Shanne.

37. Tough quiptic this, but enjoyable! Ta Shanne and Hectence

38. Was never going to get PONG. Hum may be common British slang, but if I have ever heard it in a British TV show (my only exposure to Britishisms) I didn’t notice it – perhaps because I didn’t understand it so just ignored the word.
    Another where my lack of knowledge let me down was SLIP – I knew it had to be that, but lager=pils was outside my life experience. It’s all beer to me.
    All else was gettable for me. Hooray!

39. Really couldn’t get started with this and just found it frustrating and largely impenetrable – not being on the required wavelength doesn’t come close to my experience with it. Looking at the answers there is definitely some I probably should have got but don’t think I was ever going to finish this.

40. No. Just no. This is not a Quiptic. I know I don’t get on with Hectence – as Lazarus Churchyard says, I’m not on her wavelength but it is more than that. Just for example I don’t think the jump from “female flocks” to “she herds” falls within Quiptic.

41. Very late to the party but I stuck with this far longer than I usually do because it felt finishable. In the end I did have to concede defeat and reveal the last two. One of which was 10a which I’m kicking myself over, I parsed it correctly but my brain was only letting me think of heartburn and heartache. I don’t agree that it was too hard to be a quipic, I’m rubbish at cryptics and managed almost all of it.

    I did do a double take over out=available l like Deebster@11, but eventually settled on out as in a new album or film (out now!) as in it’s available to buy/see etc. The one I’m still struggling with is undo=cancel, I’d have thought undo means doing something and then going back on it, whereas to cancel means not doing something in the first place. But it’s in chambers so what do I know.

    Thanks Shanne and Hectence.

42. RabTheCat@40 – the jump from ‘female flocks’ to ‘she herds’ was one of the few I did get. In fact I think it was one of the very early ones but ultimately the ones I did get was not really worth writing home about so my very small victory there and the resulting smug points won are more than cancelled out overall.

    I have only just got back to Quiptics again recently – started out with the Quick Cryptics and tried to move up to the next level but really struggled and threw all the toys out of the pram for quite a while. Finding it easier second time around but I still have a bit of a moment occasionally where I can’t get a corner worked and it just doesn’t work and subsequently ends in frustration. Those times it doesn’t work is usually a sign for me that I need to practice more on the deconstruction\parsing of the clue which I do struggle with massively at times so I just try not to get overly daunted when I see a setters name I struggle with. Not sure that’s working out exactly as planned yet though.

    Anyway if all else fails tell yourself that Carpathian will be along again soon with another Quiptic that makes us feel good about the world.

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