Independent 12,058 by Italicus

16 comments on “Independent 12,058 by Italicus”

1. Had trouble with West side but came back to it via a roundabout route… liked WEEVILS n REPLICATE eventually, and enjoyed the surface of SQUANDERS… a sheltered life has excluded the psychedelic from my experience but the cactus finally emerged.. good puzzle
   Thanks italics n MOH.. not sure exactly the hardness of fluorite, but I’ll accept it..

2. Apologies: Italicus

3. A pangram, to boot. I thought it was going to be a double at one point. All very smoothly clued. Admirably succinct and meaningful surfaces hiding elegant simple constructions. Full marks to the setter. Faves inc WILLPOWER, REVAMP, SNAKE OIL, PEYOTE, WHALE, SWARTHIER and CONTOUR.

   One query: Chambers gives ‘score’ as twenty (or twenty-one) pounds in weight. Is there another non-Chambers def out there that associates it with currency? If not, the £-sign is a bit misleading.

   Thanks Italicus and MOH

4. Bobby Moore is cockney rhyming slang for score – the currency implication of same – £20 – so certainly East Londoners use “score” for £20

5. Good puzzle. Great blog.
   Liked WILLPOWER, INIQUITY, SNAKE OIL, OXYMORON, REPLICATE and CONTOUR.

   OXYMORON
   ‘cunning fool’ is an example. Isn’t it? An additional layer.
   ESCORT
   I find that score is slang (CRS) for 20 pounds (currency). Edit: Flea has explained it well above.
   Thanks Italicus and MOH.

6. Thanks, Flea, for that. A new one on me.

7. Pretty much the perfect puzzle, ‘though PEYOTE 24(ac) was a punt, as my last solution, and left a bit of a sour taste right at the end.
   It’s a new world, these days, but drugs seem to be an overused feature in wordplays and definitions, to me.
   Moan over: an excellent crossword, some lovely surfaces and devices.
   Great stuff, Italicus & MOH

8. Thanks KVa @5 – I totally failed to spot that “cunning fool” is in itself an oxymoron – will amend the blog.
   As Flea @4 points out, “score” is used by Londoners – based on it meaning 20 – to indicate a £20 note. My brother-in-law – a Bermondsey boy through and through – uses it all the time, along with “pony” (£25), “monkey” (£500) and “grand” or “large” (£1,000). As in, “it cost me three large”. You never know when such things might be useful in Crosswordland…

9. Thanks both. For me, an ideal mixture of the quickly-gettable and the head-scratchable , with SQUANDERS just winning the award for best surface. I got lost in parsing ESCORT partly as we end up with a coincidental second Ford model.

10. WEEVILS and SQUANDERS were both fun, as was the whole puzzle. Thanks both.

11. Enjoyed this although had one question – I always thought that ‘stir’ was a slang term for a prison, not the time served in there? PEYOTE was new to me but, fortunately, sympathetically clued.
    As for favourites – PRIMP gets my vote with a nod to the laugh-out-loud SQUANDERS.

    Thanks to Italicus and to MOH for the review.

12. Re PEYOTE, for those not familiar: it’s native to southwestern North America, and has been used since pre-Columbian times in religious ceremonies there among Native Americans. Attempts to ban it as a hallucinogen ran into religious-freedom arguments, leading to some interesting caselaw. There is a statutory exemption for Native religious use now.

13. MrP @12 the question is, does it leave a sour taste in the mouth?
    We will both move on, I think.
    best, Mr p

14. Hi Jane @11 – I had exactly the same thought about ‘stir’, but assumed that it could be used to mean both the place and the time spent there. But now that I think about it, I’ve got it wrong in the blog – the definition is just “Time”, with “served” as the hidden-answer indicator. “He’s doing stir/He’s doing time” being approximately the same. Will amend blog accordingly, thank you!

15. Thanks Italicus and MOH, first full solve on the day of publication in a month. Quite enjoyed that even spotting the pangram early on.

16. Found this a challenging and rewarding solve

    Agree “score” is twenty pounds, all day long, so no problems with this clue construction, but interesting to see it might be just a London thing.

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