Prize crossword No 29,703 by Imogen

41 comments on “Prize crossword No 29,703 by Imogen”

1. I think 29ac MOUSETRAP’s definition also alludes to the child’s game of the same name, hence cheesy play!

2. Antoknee@1: Surely MOUSETRAP is referring to Agatha Christie’s theatrical work of that name?

3. I would be surprised if any other puzzle, ever, with a grid this size had as many K’s and V’s in it. Not all were from the city names, even!

   Nho SEALYHAM, but it was the most sensible-looking word that could be created from the grist and crossers. I suppose the HAM bit was fairly obvious.

   CITY (1d) seems a little under-specific given that all of the instances were Ukrainian. Unless the absence of a definition was an attempt to render “suppressed city” or something like that to describe the tragic state of these places.

4. My faves: IMPULSIVE, HACKING, MOUSETRAP, HIJACK, CURATIVE and CUTE.

   DRANK
   Agree with bridgesong that the ‘then’ seems redundant.
   Had a few…departs: Isn’t the story mixing two tenses?

   CUTE
   The surface reads ok with echo, but the WP needs Echo.
   Which gets priority?

   Good puzzle and blog. Thanks Imogen and bridgesong.

5. Yep, that’s what I thought, George @2. [Was it cheesy? Can’t recall. Saw it decades ago with mrs ginf, along with Les Mis and Phantom, as you did back then. It was formulaic]
   Guessed Sealyham and got the nod from my housemate, who knows dogs. The cities, too, were gettable. Secular prayers for their citizens. Thanks Imogen and bridgesong.

6. Grant@5 and others
   MOUSETRAP
   Collins says mousetrap is a cheese of indifferent quality (British informal).
   Considering this, ‘cheesy play’ seems to be a good cryptic def (bridgesong
   says the same thing, I think).

   COOPERATES (a very minor point)
   set up=TES is a reversal.

7. I was a bit mystified by “to be deduced” but in the end got the theme quickly, the ‘K’ of KING COBRA leading straight to KYIV and then the ‘Y’ in YOUNG suggesting CITY and prompting “I wonder if they’re all in Ukraine?” And they were. I wondered if there might be some supportive message included as well, but didn’t see anything. Otherwise, I had to check that Daisy May Cooper existed, but the rest flowed fairly well and very enjoyably. Thanks both.

8. Something was wrong with my brain last week when solving this. I spent far too long trying to figure out how EVE parsed in ALLEVIATE. Then for the ODESA clue, I decided Horace was the guy reading poetry That’s Life back in the mists of time, rather than Cyril, but got the right answer anyway!
   Didn’t know SEALYHAM or Daisy May Cooper, but figured them out.

9. Nobody has yet mentioned that MOUSETRAP can also be noun – (American football) a play in which a defensive player is allowed to cross the line of scrimmage and then blocked off as the runner goes through the place the lineman vacated.

10. Nice prize crossword, just about the right level of difficulty for me. LOI Hijack. The hija(b) doesn’t cover the sides of the cloak does it? Thanks to both.

11. Xchurchbob@1O. I was also puzzled about covering sides of cloak in HIJACK, but finally resolved that ”covering” is indicating the placement of the parts of the wordplay in a down clue. I think that’s right. Good surface reading, and nice misdirection, whether intended or not.

    Or was your question a literal or humorous one, and I’ve been got again. 🙂

12. Thanks Paddymelon@11. No you’re OK it was literal! You could be right about “covering”.

13. I don’t understand the desire to change the names of places with well-established names. We call them KIOVA and HARKOVA (to take just two examples) here in Finland.
    My Ukrainian friend says it’s even more ridiculous in the cases of cities where Russian is the first language to change the language away from Russian. A bit like insisting that Caernarfon be called Carnarvon.

14. Thanks for the blog , a keystone theme done well , the wordplay for each city very clear
    to help with the spelling . MOUSETRAP , I thought of the play but I do like all the other suggestions and the clue did flow nicely . CUTE I think of as meaning clever but I do see the other meaning , I never like capitals being mis-used in either sense .
    KING COBRA we have BRA=supporter yet again , when will Dirac get a mention ? Could even clue it using the symbol <| .

15. Thanks, Imogen. The MOUSETRAP is also the name given by Hamlet to the play he arranges to be put on to expose the guilt of Claudius for the murder of Hamlet’s father, so there are three or four cheesy plays there.
    I felt the clueing should have indicated all the cities are in Ukraine, not just that each is a CITY. Any views on that? Does the highlighting of some in blue above, and others in yellow, have some significance?
    I had no problem with ‘echo’ without capital E, but I note the point.

16. The theme of Ukrainian cities, which are mentioned in our news stories on an almost nightly basis, made for an intriguing and ultimately satisfying puzzle. Thanks to Imogen, bridgesong and Timon.

17. The Ukrainian flag colours, sjshart@15?

18. I solved this fairly quickly, but felt it was an enjoyable mental work-out with an engaging theme.

    I liked WHEE, though hadn’t heard of the dog in 5D.

19. Oh, of course. Thanks, Julie@17.

20. Sjshart @15: Julie in Australia @17 has spotted the intended significance of the highlighting.

21. An interesting query about echo. Looking back in the archives there are loads of examples of an uncapitalised echo = E appearing in clues across all the major publications, including the Times and the Sunday Times. Same goes for delta and, of course, we encounter golf, hotel and uniform in their uncapitalised format quite regularly. Whilst I strongly support the convention that false decapitalisation is to be avoided, particularly with names/proper nouns, somehow I find myself comfortable with excluding those elements of the Nato alphabet!

22. Much enjoyed this. Many thanks Imogen and bridgesong.

    A little puzzled by the CITY theme being so specific yet unexplained. Are we missing something? The clueing was very precise so we were left in no doubt on spellings.

    BRA-KET was new to me, Roz @14. Sadly, I’ll have forgotten it by tomorrow. But the Dirac delta function lives on (just) from my mathematical youth. Given the vast array of trickery that is such a part of (Guardian) cryptics, it seems on the Heaviside to complain about the non-capitalisation of echo for E in 25D.

23. The supposed “rule” always used to be that misleading capitalisation was ok but misleading decapitalisation was not. I understand that the reasoning was that a common noun could sometimes have an initial capital (in the title of a book or play for example) but a proper noun would never start with a lower case letter. But, as I’ve said on previous occasions, this reasoning is surely completely out of date now. Ximenes’s book was written in the Sixties. These days it’s very normal for proper names to be decapitalised, for example in email addresses, or the names of businesses. Or indeed user names on here — bridgesong, sjshart, grantinfreo…

24. I usually enjoy Imogen’s work, but this one was an uphill struggle.
    Given the lack of clue, 1D was one of the last I solved, and only after figuring out all the places. As for the cities themselves: I couldn’t have managed them without digging out a map of Ukraine – which I suppose counts as cheating.
    It didn’t help that, mentally, I was spelling a few in what I presume is an outdated way.
    Many thanks bridgesong for the help with various half-parsed answers – especially ALLEVIATE: I had Eve as the person (in fairness, there are a lot of people in that book!) and couldn’t make any sense of the rest.
    I enjoyed KING COBRA, ABACUS, DRANK & ANDRÉ.
    Thank you Imogen

25. [ Choldunk@22 , bras and kets my favourite notation , so compact making calculations so much easier , especially on the board . Heaviside also has form here , he invented the notation we now use for Maxwell’s field equations , again very compact . He also was the first to use a simple Dirac Delta function , years earlier , for switching on currents . ]

26. Most enjoyable.

    Any objections to 25D would seem to me more Gormenghastian than Ximenean.

    To balance those who haven’t heard of them, a 5D is a member of our Sunday breakfast crossword club. Largely in it for the toast crumbs.

27. A good, topical idea for a theme. I guess Ukraine could have been fitted in at 14A but maybe that would have made the theme too easy. I liked the rash being scratched for IMPULSIVE, the td for HACKING, the MOUSETRAP cheesy play, the surfaces for FLIGHT DECK and GAPE, and the gangsters with their explosives for DIVE BOMB.

    Chambers gives Echo/echo for the NATO letter, so the setter seems to be on safe ground (the ODE gives echo and Collins gives Echo).

    Thanks Imogen and bridgeson for the appropriately coloured grid.

28. I stuck with OPERA for longer than bridgesong, confidently writing it in as my FOI as it is the Latin for “works” and Horace was a Latin poet. It was only at the end while checking parsing that I looked to see if there was a Ukrainian city called “opera” or “oper” and stumbled across ODESA, which I have always thought had two “Ss”.
    Thanks to Imogen and bridgesong.

29. ODESA sprang out at me straightaway, and so also the theme. I got some of the other cities directly, but used a list plus crossers for the last few. Favourite clues were HACKING and AWING. I was puzzled about the E in CUTE, so thanks to bridgesong and others above for sorting that out for me. I managed to solve the anagram for SEALYHAM with the help of crossers and a distant memory from another puzzle. Overall, an enjoyable puzzle, finished earlier in the week than usual for me.

30. I totally agree with Mark@21 about the capitalisation in 25d. Like Pino I had OPERA early on and only changed it after getting KYIV.

    I liked HACKING and MOUSETRAP. I’m far from being a dog lover and I only knew SEALYHAM because A.Wainwright, the writer of the fell walking guides, revealed in one of his works that he had acquired one, and attempted to blame her for any shortcomings in his handwritten pages.

    Thanks to Imogen and Bridgesong.

31. I’ve never watched The Mousetrap so I don’t know how ‘cheesy’ it is (n.b. I already know whodunnit…!) but I do know that cheese (of any variety) isn’t the best bait for mousetraps – mice don’t like it very much, in spite of Tom and Jerry. Never mind, I thought the clue was funny!

    Not heard of Daisy May COOPER but it was clear enough from the def.; looked her up later.

    I had my doubts about AGENDAS. ‘Agenda’ is already a Latin plural, of the second-declension neuter ‘agendum’, so, pedantically, I don’t think it can be further pluralised. I remember once seeing a post where someone tried to pluralise it as “agendae” – thinking it’s a Latin first-declension noun. It isn’t – and the poster duly got taken to task.

    Much to like apart from that. I noted that all the Ukrainian cities are transliterations of the Ukrainian spellings (e.g. KHARKIV from “Харків”, not KHARKOV from Russian “Харьков”). Important point, given the political situation – good call! (unless Putin’s reading this…)

    Also liked IMPULSIVE, HACKING, UPTURN, SEALYHAM (yes, I’m not a ‘dog’ person but I’d heard of the breed), HIJACK, DIVEBOMB, ABACUS, CUTE. And more!

    Thanks to Imogen and Bridgesong.

32. My way into the theme was KYIV. I usually start these puzzles with the short words (I know that makes me a minority). Kentucky is KY, always, and the list of four-letter words with KY, proper or common, is not long! I then figured they were all Ukrainian, which ODESA confirmed.

    The pre-war six most populous Ukrainian cities were the choice here, by the way. No doubt that list will be shuffled once they are finally able to take a proper census again, sadly.

    I concur with the view that the NATO alphabet words needn’t be capitalized–at least not the ones that are common nouns in their regular usage; so echo and golf, but not India or November. (But now I’m imagining some tricky setter writing a clue involving lima beans, where they actually meant lima to stand for L. If that ever happens, maybe I’ll revisit this.)

33. Me @32: Idiots with lima beans to eat: briefly unknown (9)

34. I learned a lot about cheesy plays!

35. Laccaria@31- agenda is a plural of the gerundive agendum ‘thing to be done’, so the plural refers to the things to be done, which together (as enumerated items) form a list, or an agenda, which itself is then a singular noun. So the plural ‘agendas’ is a plural of ‘a list of things to be done’, hence it’s a grammatically good and useful word.

36. [In the same way that a collective noun, which by definition denotes a plurality, can itself be pluralised (eg flocks, armies etc)]

37. Hadrian@35,36: OK I’ll accept that – and I turned to Fowler’s, which I treat as my bible when there’s a discussion over spelling, grammar, etc. Fowler states: “Although agenda is a plural word, it is pedantry to object to the common and convenient practice of treating it as a singular one.”

    But there’s a distinct difference between collective words like “flock”, and plural words treated as singular – especially those already ending in s. We can’t say “trouserses” or “scissorses”!

38. Laccaria@37 fair point! And you won’t be surprised to learn that Pedantry Corner is my favourite bit of Private Eye; it takes one to know one.

39. ECHO: the dictionaries are at variance on capitalising the NATO alphabet. Collins capitalises them all, COD only the proper names, and it defines separately echo the reflection and NATO letter, and Echo the nymph. The Times rule is and has been since my day to lower-case common nouns (delta, foxtrot, golf) and upper-case proper nouns (India, Lima, November). I suppose we could use either for e, depending on the surface sense.

40. Imogen @39: many thanks for dropping in and for clarifying the rules about capitalisation, so far as the NATO alphabet is concerned. The issue is more complex than I had appreciated in my original comment.

41. Re E/echo, I don’t think the capitalization issue is complicated at all. Deceptive use of punctuation is OK. Deceptive conjoining or disjoining of words (fusion or fission) is OK. So deceptive capitalization or decapitalization is OK.

    The key word is “cryptic”. And as Roz has said, there are no rules – the setter’s job is to deceive, and the solver’s job is to discover the deception. My corollary is that deception must be fair; and since the assessment of fairness is purely subjective, any attempt to objectify fairness through rule-making is unfair.

    I don’t see how deceptive decapitalization is in any way unfair. That’s my subjective assessment.

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