Quiptic 1,340 by Hectence

46 comments on “Quiptic 1,340 by Hectence”

1. I found this very accessible for a beginner such as myself. All done and dusted without too much difficulty in fairly short order. It feels like the first Quiptic I’ve managed to complete without checks or reveals in weeks.

2. I made heavier work of this than I should have. I blame the vodka. (I really should wait until the morning (I’m in Chicago) for these.) Anyway, time once again to point out that NAAN BREAD is redundant, since “naan” means “bread.” (Same thing with “chai tea”.) We have fewer South Asian restaurants per capita here than you do in Britain, of course, but still we have plenty, and the ones I’ve been to all just call it naan, so so do we.

3. How is “EN” opponents? (other than being the opposites of W-S I guess, but I don’t know much about Bridge!). That was one of the few clues I didn’t have a workable parsing for. Hadn’t seen “on vacation” used to mean “after emptying out the middle letters” before either, it’s a nifty one.
   13D – kudos to anyone that solved it just from the wordplay, given it requires coming up with slightly cryptic synonym for HAIR, a Latin one for “prayer”, figuring out a non-too-obvious insertion indicator, then putting it all together along with the “obvious” ones (article, church).

4. Agree last week’s Zamorca was easier.

   I ticked EIGHT, YONKS, and UNEXPECTED

   Mrp@2 beat me to it with the comment on NAAN. DEBT seems backwards. It says busted suspect leaves America but doesn’t American leave busted suspect? And in GODSEND – what’s the purpose of “often”?

   Thanks Hentence and Shanne

5. Gods are often superheroes?

6. Dylan N@3 – in bridge, North and South are partners playing against East and West, one of whom is the dummy.

7. Great clues, often with excellent surfaces. I had TAKE A CHAIR and wondered at length why I couldn’t parse it. I didn’t think of AVE for prayer.

8. I’m not sure if I’m missing something obvious with B-SIDES – what does the reference to prime numbers have to do with it?

9. Scraggs@8 The a-sides would be the main song (prime number) on a record.

10. Ah! Thanks @9 Petert. Obvious once you put it like that.

11. Tough puzzle, took me longer than expected to complete this “puzzle for beginners and those in a hurry’.

    Favourites: B-SIDES, SCREW CAP, GRAPEVINE.

    mrpenney@2 – good points about naan and chai.

12. Look, I know Hectence has her fans who will inundate us with comments like ‘Lovely gentle stroll. Perfectly pitched. And a pangram to boot!’ but she’s missed the mark again.

    I take it as a given in her crosswords that sensible word order is liable to go out the window for the sake of the surface; see EBBS, JEWEL CASES, HAVE A CHAIR.

    B-SIDES I’m not convinced works as a CD. Surely JEWEL CASES would be far more useful to have ‘disc holder’ or something as the definition. Try putting it into Google Images and see how many antiquated trinket boxes you see…

    Other questionable stuff at quiptic level includes: EN as opponents, Shock = HAIR?, Superheroes = GODS?, TURNS = Fainting fits? High Class = U (I guess the beginners have to learn this at some point)? Do people really just refer to an Ave Maria as an AVE?

    After the Harpo quiptic from two weeks ago, I hope the beginners aren’t being discouraged on a Sunday, I’m not surprised to see comments to that end and I hope they’d be reassured that sometimes it really is the setters’ calibration that’s off.

13. @12 Tachi, I largely concur. I found some of this to be a gentle stroll, a fair few answers fell into place nicely as I’d expect/hope them to in a quiptic puzzle. But there were plenty that took far more of my time and brainpower – including some of the examples you’ve cited – and this would have been a more satisfying solve for me if it was classified as a cryptic.

14. Tachi @12 – AVE means “hail”, Ave Maria means Hail Mary and is a specific prayer. Ave is also the opening to the Hours of Office in Catholic prayers, or the Ave Maris Stella – the prayer of the sea. So Ave meaning prayer is not the same as the Ave Maria.

    If you haven’t met shock meaning HAIR it’s time you learned it – Struwwelpeter translates as “shock-headed Peter” and is well known for its cautionary tales and as the origin of Johnny-look-in-the-air. But that description is found elsewhere too.

    In Norse, Greek and Roman mythology the gods are superheroes – and many feature in among the Marvel and DC superhero stories – if you know the stories to recognise that.

    I know you don’t like U and non-U, but I’ve come across it outside crosswords, not so much now, but it isn’t unknown in other places, specifically in linguistics where it’s used.

    Bridge is a regular in cryptic crosswords (and yes, I’ve played it) – the four players are labelled as North, East, South and West, with North and South partnered, also East and West. When the bidding is done, one of the players from the winning team lays their cards down as a dummy hand – which means that all the players know 26 of the 52 cards – and only have to calculate on the other 26. But the bidding also suggests where other players may be strong. Cryptic crosswords also use other bridge terminology – trumps and no trumps (NT), and the C, D, H and S for the suits. So SN and EW are partners, SE, SW, NE, NW are all opponents.

15. I very much enjoyed this and don’t understand the problems some people have found with it. The idea of a shock of hair, having a ‘turn’ (feeling faint) – both seem perfectly ordinary uses of the English language. U and non-u, though not in common use, are surely well enough known. I still have my copy of Noblesse Oblige edited by Nancy Mitford which has a lengthy chapter on it. And I loved ‘B-sides’ though I suppose you have to be quite old to remember the joy of 45s. I didn’t get the bridge reference in ‘opponents’ and will have to note that. It’s come up before, I know.

16. Thank you Shanne; as you write, a lot of this puzzle is fair and there a plenty of things worth remembering within to those who want to get better, but much takes quite a bit of explaining if you don’t know what you’re looking at. It’s not to say references to bridge, prayers, U/non-U are invalid; but they’re not the GK that they possibly once were and it’s worth them being combined sparingly for people who aren’t big on crosswordese for puzzles like this one.

    As someone who has improved vastly at cryptics over the past year or so (not least thanks to yourself and the other bloggers here), I think the Guardian Quiptic and Everyman are great places to improve and among a lot of experienced solvers, it’s well worth speaking up for the beginner. It’s sad for both setter and solver if the solver sees the solution and wouldn’t know why they’d be expected to suss a clue out.

    I’d be interested to know how many people who try the quiptic don’t come here for the parsing, and would parse some of today’s solutions out, or would have to admit they just weren’t on the setter’s wavelength.

17. Tachi@16 There’s never going to be a consensus on the question of what should be expected in terms of general knowledge. Like you, I’ve been doing cryptics for only eighteen months or so and have learned a great deal from practising every day and coming here for enlightenment. Unlike you, I was on the setter’s wavelength today, indefinable though that is. On another day I’d be at sea with cricket, football, rugby, computer language, physics, Taylor Swift etc etc. You win some, you lose some.

18. @16 Tachi

    I am rarely on the setter’s wavelength. I come here for the parsing everyday.

    I solved 5 clues today.

19. @4 Martyn
    I’m guessing that GODS are often (but not always) superheroes; some (like Loki) are supervillains?
    Also, “BusTED suspect leaves America (out)”, or “…leaves America (behind)” would make sense in the same context as “I went the store, but I left my wallet.”

20. I wouldn’t count myself as a beginner, somewhere in the intermediate range (I complete the regular cryptic pretty much every day in under an hour with an answer check or two, a thesaurus, and some googling), and this took me a good hour to solve!
    I guess there has to be a range of difficulties in every puzzle type though, and if they were all easy it would be hard to progress.

21. This didn’t seem too easy to me; there were quite a few answers that I couldn’t parse; I didn’t know YONKS, and didn’t know these meanings of NOSE, TURNS IN or CAUSE A SCENE, so put these down with quite some hesitation (I didn’t know HAIR as “shock”, either). But there’s a lot to like – my favourite was COMBINATION. Pangram helped with JEWEL CASES… LOI was MESMERISE – I couldn’t believe “style” was an anagrind (but now, when I think of it, it actually makes sense)

22. Re. naan and chai in comments @2, @4 and @11. Naan isn’t just bread in India, it’s a very specific type of bread. As are paratha and roti/chapati. They don’t call chapatis naan, do they? Similarly, chai isn’t just tea brewed any old way. It’s black tea with spices, and milk and sugar generally. Both chai and naan are so commonplace in India that there is no need to qualify them as bread and tea. Everyone knows what they are. In non-Asian countries it’s not a given that everyone knows. In certain circumstances then, it’s totally valid from a language perspective to give these words qualifiers. They’re not tautologies.

    It’s like if you were to import peanut butter to a country that had no tradition of eating it. There they might feel the need to call it ‘peanut butter spread’ so people get that it’s something to put on your toast (or roti maybe!); whereas an english speaker might feel that the word ‘spread’ is redundant because a butter is obviously a spread per definition. But it would be a totally legitimate qualifier in that circumstance.

23. Thank you so much, Shanne.
    I am one of those who failed today, so I definitely needed the explanations.
    Shock meaning hair was new for me.

24. I solve this one and enjoyed it. I am French and had no problem with the vocabulary used in this crossword (though I’ve been leaving in the UK for thirty-one years.)

25. Really struggled with this. Barely got half way.

    At least I have learned something here with BB and DD being books and days plurals respectively. So not a total waste of time.

    Thanks Shanne

26. I made heavy weather of this, although I can’t really see why in hindsight, save for a few somewhat crafty definitions – not working, often superheroes, carry on – and a “leaves X” for ‘”leaves X out/behind” (thanks Coloradoh!@19). In fact for that latter one I was going to quibble, suggesting that “abandons” would have been clearer, but as we see, both to leave and to abandon have this interesting kind of bidirectionality. In the same vein, a bidirectional verb that indicated inclusion (as opposed to subtraction) came up the G the other day, but I’m darned if I can remember what it was now.. Very useful words for setters!

    Faves were EBBS and B-SIDES (both took me a while). LOI was DID WRONG, which I thought might be DID CRIME for quite a while which I found jarring (with the verb tense trick being that way around; however, we often see it the other way around, where did X as the def gives Xed as the solution, which has never bothered me). But in the end I was proved wrong anyway by the eventual N checker, and of course DID WRONG is a different and perfectly legitimate beast, not being a compound verb construction.

    Thanks to Hectence for the Monday-ish challenge, and to Shanne for the detailed write-up.

27. I found this hard work. Still not sure how student = L?

28. MichaelC @27 – L = learner (as in drivers) and gets used for all students.

29. It’s “bananas” = crazy that can indicate an anagram, no? — not “banana” as in the clue for 10.

30. mrpenny@2 -in Persian. “naan” means “bread” in Persian, not in English. In English, it refers to a specific type of bread.

    I know people are mostly being pedants for fun when they do this, but this strain of pedantry always baffles me because you have to pretend you don’t know how human language works to engage in it. It makes as much sense as arguing that a woman can’t be virtuous because “virtue” means “manliness”, or that any wild animal is a “deer”.

31. Why does on vacation mean take out the middle letters?

32. Eddie @31 – if you vacate something you empty it, so a word on vacation (on emptying) loses its innards, becomes just the outer letters.

    It’s the playing with words to use alternative meanings that makes cryptic crosswords such fun / so infuriating, depending on whether you see it or not.

    VinnyD @29 – yes, bananas is usually the anagrind, but using banana as part of the anagrist helps with confusing solvers, because we’re so attuned to reading it as an instruction.

33. Eddie @31 Because you “vacate” the word (by removing the middle letters)

34. I’ve gone through today (Monday) adding in the extra explanations into the blog.

    Not the bread argument, because that’s just nit-picking – in English English, naan comes up with bread automatically when I Google it. Yes, naan may mean bread in Persian/Farsi and have translated into Urdu with a variation in spelling, but on Indian menus in England, naan usually appears with chapatis, pooris, parathas, rotis and other breads under a heading of breads or breads and sides, whereupon it would be tautology to call them breads.

    We also call sour-dough bread along with pitta bread (pita in American English), brown, white or rye bread because it’s a descriptor of the kind of bread. Cholla, baguettes and ciabatta get to stand alone – although baguettes are usually sold as bastardised French sticks, as a pale shadow of their originals.

    (As someone who eats and has cooked both naan and pitta, I wouldn’t bother writing bread on a shopping list that included them, as I’d know what I was buying. And in my recipe books, naan would appear as that, but in the bread section.)

35. Back to the usual Quiptic standard after someone made a mistake last week and put something in that I enjoyed and almost completed. This week was five solves and then eventually hit Reveal All.

36. Tachi@12, Shanne@14
    Someone queried whether AVE could mean prayer when it appeared in a regular cryptic or maybe a Prize a few weeks ago. It can be short for Ave Maria as in “You’ll come and find the place where I am lying/And kneel and say an Ave there for me” in Danny Boy. Ave maris stella (Hail of the sea the star) is a hymn to the Blessed Virgin Mary. There’s a hymn that ends (from memory) Mother of Christ, Star of the Sea, pray for the wanderer, pray for me”. At his request it was sung at the funeral I attended of a football fan from Bolton.

37. As a beginner, there was certainly a lot to learn here — which is fair enough, as that’s part of the process. That said, it did feel like quite a lot all at once, and a bit inaccessible for something billed as quick and accessible.

    @18 Steffen, I found this one tough too — I only managed to get six clues right.

38. I enjoyed this one, but I often do with the Hectence puzzles. Yes I had to guess some but with crossers, and yes I’ve come here for enlightenment on some, but mostly I could parse these. So all in all I feel this was a fair Quiptic. Thanks Hectence and Shanne.

39. At peril of stoking up sensitive topics, and speaking as an Australian of Indian descent, I think “naan bread” irritates some not simply for being tautological, but because it’s perceived as insensitive and/or agnostic to how the loan word might be used in the original language/culture – and that once it enters the vernacular of the new culture, its origin is irrelevant. That’s why there might be range of reactions to its use – some who view its use as indicating dismissiveness or a lack of cultural curiosity, and some who see there being much greater issues to battle over.

    Perhaps a good comparison would be Australians referring to “football” as “soccer” – this would no doubt will rile up some who consider football sacred and the usage inconsiderate of its cultural significance, but not others who see them as synonymous and not worth getting het up over.

40. Thanks Hectence and Shanne. I enjoyed this but struggled towards the end. I got hung up on TAKE A CHAIR and couldn’t see an alternative, and couldn’t get near SCREW CAP though it’s a very clever and fair clue. Ho hum.

41. While I’m no philologist or linguist myself, such experts are familiar with this kind of redundancy (as apposed to putting your PIN number into an ATM machine to pull out USD dollars to pay for a PCV valve) as a result of people speaking one language encountering a food in another tongue communicating about it, so not only naan bread (“bread bread”), but also pizza pie (“pie pie”), chai tea (“tea tea”) and chili peppers (“pepper peppers”).

42. As I think part of the target audience for quiptics, I found this a slog. The clues aren’t unfair, but the number of less obvious indicators, double abbreviations based on the plural etc all made it feel tough going.

43. I too took a chair, and moved on without parsing it, so this was a dnf for me.

    I always enjoy Hectence’s puzzles inc(ol)luding this one, so thanks H&S for the healthy and safe crossword and blog.

44. [The redundancy of “naan bread” always makes me think of the fact that Sam Gamgee, in the Lord of the Rings films, refers to “lembas bread”, which is redundant in precisely the same way. (“Lembas” is the elvish name for a type of bread.) I don’t think this phrase occurs in the books, but it’s a nice touch on the filmmakers’ part: Sam is rustic and uneducated compared to the others, so he gets this foreign (to him) usage wrong.

    I recently heard someone refer to “focaccia bread”. Same thing.]

45. I suspect EBBS (Declines books on tablet and terminal apps) refers to BBS as a computer terminal app/system. Standing for “Bulletin Board System”.

46. RichardEC @45 – so how do you see the rest of the word play working? I querying this because there is a system for how wordplay works in cryptic crosswords and I’m not sure your suggestion fits it.

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