Today we match wits with Bobcat, a setter who usually employs a wide variety of clue devices, this puzzle being a prime example.
On a couple of clues, either the innovation has outpaced my understanding, or there is an editing goof; I have provided my best guess on the parsing.
With two feline ninas plus a greeting from the cat in the grid.
| ACROSS | ||
| 1 | SLIMMED |
Frenchwoman wearing Shilling hat’s lost weight (7)
|
| MME (Frenchwoman, i.e., Madame) inside (wearing) {S (shilling, with a capitalization misdirection) + LID (hat)} | ||
| 5 | HEPATIC |
Pathetic (but not, ulimately, poignant) novel about an organ (7)
|
| Anagram of (novel) PA[T]HETIC minus last letter of (but not, ultimately) [POIGNAN]T | ||
| 9 | COCOA |
Beverage companies against commonest feature of amalgamations (5)
|
| {CO. + CO.} (companies) + A (commonest feature of amalgamations, i.e., the letter A appearing four times in that word) | ||
| 10 | SCHOOL BUS |
Transport fish in bulk at front of aircraft (6,3)
|
| I think this parses as: SCHOOL (fish in bulk) + BUS (front of aircraft). The “bus” on a spacecraft or missile is typically at the nose, where the payload or warhead is installed. Chambers also mentions that in slang, an airplane may be referred to as a bus “as a term of affection,” so the parsing then might be: SCHOOL (fish in bulk) + BUS (aircraft). But I am not quite sure what Bobcat is getting at here. | ||
| 11 | ELBOW-ROOM |
Freedom to perform Othello perhaps withdrawn by army section (5-4)
|
| ELBOW (cryptically, “arm-y” section, i.e., a part of the arm) + MOOR (Othello, perhaps, with an italicization misdirection) reversed (withdrawn) | ||
| 12 | EXTRA |
Run a bit more (5)
|
| Double definition, the first referring to cricket | ||
| 13 | TOTES |
Revolutionary somewhat averse to teddy bears (5)
|
| Hidden in (somewhat) [AVER]SE TO T[EDDY] reversed (revolutionary) | ||
| 15 | GUESSWORK |
Guides losing heart arriving at factory back to front? That’s speculation (9)
|
| GU[ID]ES minus central letters (losing heart) + WORKS (factory) making the last letter first (back to front) | ||
| 18 | CARTRIDGE |
Case of recurring Xmas present being given fresh introduction (9)
|
| [P]ARTRIDGE (recurring Xmas present, i.e., “in a pear tree”) with the first letter changed to C (being given a fresh introduction) | ||
| 19 | REHAB |
Swimmer about to spend time drying out? (5)
|
| BA[T]HER (swimmer) reversed (about) minus (to spend) T (time) | ||
| 21 | MACAW |
Bird starts to make awful crow-like noise (5)
|
| First letters of (starts to) M[AKE] A[WFUL] + CAW (crow-like noise) | ||
| 23 | MAELSTROM |
Swirling stream, primarily menacing or life-threatening? (9)
|
| &lit and anagram of (swirling) {STREAM + first letters of (primarily) M[ENACING] O[R] L[IFE-THREATENING]} | ||
| 25 | ISOLATORS |
They segregate active political prisoners without principle, unfortunately (9)
|
| Anagram of (active . . . unfortunately) [P]O[LI]T[IC]AL [PR]ISO[NE]RS minus (without) PRINCIPLE | ||
| 26 | SPIES |
Scouts’ special food (5)
|
| S (special) + PIES (food) | ||
| 27 | EXHALED |
Former news chief, bored by prince, sighed (7)
|
| {EX- (former) + ED. (news chief)} around (bored by) HAL (prince) | ||
| 28 | STIPEND |
Pay band essentially lacking limit (7)
|
| ST[R]IP (band) minus central letter (essentially lacking) + END (limit) | ||
| DOWN | ||
| 1 | SICKEST |
Most unhealthy model inspiring US fashion brand eats without stopping (7)
|
| SIT (model) around (inspiring) {CK (US fashion brand, i.e., Calvin Klein) + E[AT]S minus inside letters (without stopping)} | ||
| 2 | INCUBATOR |
Fancy aircon, but bacteria may thrive in it (9)
|
| Anagram of (fancy) AIRCON BUT | ||
| 3 | MIAOW |
Part of Queen’s Speech upset without intention (5)
|
| {W/O (without) + AIM (intention)} all inverted (upset), with a capitalization misdirection, “queen” here referring to a female cat | ||
| 4 | DISLODGED |
Moved away from infernal place where freemasons meet by day (9)
|
| DIS (infernal place) + LODGE (place where freemasons meet) + D (day) | ||
| 5 | HO-HUM |
Boring transposition of halves of humble home (2-3)
|
| Transposition of [first] halves of HUM[BLE] + HO[ME] | ||
| 6 | PROFESSOR |
I’m occupying a chair adapted for posers (9)
|
| Anagram of (adapted) FOR POSERS | ||
| 7 | TIBET |
Extended family having no right, initially, to land (5)
|
| T[R]IBE (extended family) minus (having no) R (right) + first letter of (initially) T[O] | ||
| 8 | COSSACK |
Russian cooks regularly given the boot (7)
|
| I think this is supposed to parse as: Alternate letters of (regularly) C[O]O[K]S + SACK (the boot). Either that, or “given” is a typo for “give,” since “given the boot” = SACKED, past tense. Also, although the Cossacks historically lived in Russia and Ukraine, I am not sure that ethnically they were/are Russian? | ||
| 14 | SCREWBALL |
Crazy place to dance the twist? (9)
|
| Double/cryptic definition | ||
| 16 | ELEVENSES |
Football sides scoffing extremely saccharine refreshments (9)
|
| ELEVENS (football sides) around (scoffing) outside letters of (extremely) S[ACCHARIN]E | ||
| 17 | OTHERWISE |
Different white rose cultivated (9)
|
| Anagram of (cultivated) WHITE ROSE | ||
| 18 | COMPILE |
What setters do in school on French island (7)
|
| COMP (school, i.e., presumably, a comprehensive school) + ÎLE (French island, i.e., in French) | ||
| 20 | BEMUSED |
Confused birds overwhelmed by garden plot (7)
|
| EMUS (birds) inside (overwhelmed by) BED (garden plot) | ||
| 22 | CLOTH |
Liberal in bed with hot cleaner (5)
|
| {L (Liberal) inside (in) COT (bed)} + H (hot) | ||
| 23 | MOOED |
Second dictionary supports derivative of bovine expression (5)
|
| MO (second) + OED (dictionary) | ||
| 24 | SUSHI |
American man’s recycled food from the East (5)
|
| {US (American) + HIS (man’s)} making the last letters of each first (recycled) |
I think “given” in the COSSACK clue is fine, within the slightly loose parameters we’re used to from Bobcat: COS is given SACK. And I guess if you were born in Russia, you are in one sense Russian, no matter your ethnicity; this might not be a meaning of the word that all Russians have always acknowledged, of course.
I took BUS as the front of the aircraft, but you’re right that that might be wrong.
I saw the OCELOT early, which helped; I didn’t think to look for another cat. MIAOW was my last one in; I’m currently sitting underneath a lap cat who is alternately purring and snoring–this one only meows when he’s hungry or annoyed–so I feel bad that that one took so long.
Double the feline fun!
So much to like in this puzzle, eg, the ‘recurring Christmas present’, INCUBATOR, DISLODGED, PROFESSOR and OTHERWISE.
Thanks, Cineraria, for confirming the suspected cricket terminology, ‘extra’ and for a great blog in general.
Ah, mrpenney, you bring back fond memories of being ‘pinned in’ by one, sometimes two, felines when needing to move!
Thanks, too, to our ailurophiliac compiler.
I solved it all without understanding a substantial number of clues. Accordingly, I am really not sure what to write about this puzzle.
Let me start with a big congratulations to Cineraria for explaining.l it so well.
I liked BEMUSED for the surface and SPIES.
Even after reading the blog (no reflection on Cineraria) I have so many questions, doubts and quibbles…..
….thanks to Bobcat and especially to Cineraria
Goodness, I’ve lived with a queen for years and never knew. All that time I just thought it was a cat.
Couldn’t fathom comp/school, or bus/front of aircraft, or where the A in COCOA came from. The “without stopping” in the clue for SICKEST I found a bit unusual.
But there were some clever clues and plenty of smiles, despite my not having thought to look for feline ninas. The “army section” in ELBOW ROOM elicited a chuckle.
Cineraria There doesn’t seem to me to be anything amiss or loose about 10A and 8D, and there are no superfluous words.
10A SCHOOL BUS “Transport” = definition, “fish in bulk” = SCHOOL, “in front of” = juxtaposition indicator, “aircraft” = BUS
8D COSSACK, “Russian” = definition, “cooks regularly” = COS, “given” = juxtaposition indicator, “the boot” = SACK
Both these juxtaposition indicators are standard.
Good puzzle/blog but got bogged down in the northwest.
Liked hepatic, cartridge, incubator, Cossack.
Didn’t love isolators (too clever by half) elevenses (should be spelt elevensies!) or mooed (odd definition).
Obviously I missed both Ninas, as usual, which is doubly annoying as I’ve actually heard of both, which is unusual.
Enjoyable stuff and only tiny whinges.
“Army” for elbow – very good.
Thanks Bobcat and Cineraria. No one seems to have mentioned COUGAR in the middle column of the grid.
16dn elevenses is the only spelling I could see in Collins 2023 p 643, ODE 2010 p 569 or the Concise Oxford 2011 p 463. Chambers 2016 p 498 and SOED 2007 p 811 have elevenses or elevens, although the SOED marks elevens as earlier and dialect.
PB@8
COUGAR was highlighted and two felines mentioned in the blog.
SM@9: Thank you. Now I know the highlighting is there, I can see it, but it was not very clear on my screen to my eyes.
I usually struggle with Bobcat but I did fairly well on this one, just easy enough to encourage me, just hard enough to be not too easy.
I immediately thought of BUS as the WW2 slang for ‘aircraft’, and parsed as Rudolf@5. I didn’t know about the spacecraft/missile connotation. Perhaps it’s to do with my age.
Thanks Bobcat for a wonderful crossword complete with 2 cats who helped me solve this. Favourites included CARTRIDGE, ELBOW ROOM, TIBET, COCOA, & PROFESSOR. I was able to parse most of this, sometimes after getting the solutions from the definitions and crossers. Thanks Cineraria for the blog.
GDU @4: How could you possibly live with a cat and not know they were royalty? 😄
When I ask a cat for help, it just says “Me? ‘Ow?”.
I struggled today, completing only just over half, and many of those by definition only as I couldn’t parse them. Lucky Cineraria was there to explain. A very clever puzzle.
I’ve beefed about this before, but I really don’t think setters should be allowed to use “essentially” to mean “the middle of”. Every letter of a word is essential to it, not just the central one. I see Chambers defines “essence” as meaning “The inner distinctive nature of anything” which may perhaps suggest an excuse for treating it as meaning “the middle of”, but not if you read the whole of that definition with intelligence. I think last time I moaned about this someone kindly explained that it was a crossword convention for it to mean “middle of”, but I don’t see why we as a group should be allowed to twist the English language to the extent of altering its meaning.
It follows that I would have no objection to “essentially lacking” meaning “lacking any one or more of its letters” but that might lead to an unfairly difficult clue.
Am I being unreasonable?
Thought of MEOW as wordplay but didn’t think of the alternate spelling, somehow didn’t get the very reasonable COCOA. Didn’t love the MOOED defn- was convinced it would be some sort of cheese going in.
Babbler @15. I don’t think you’re being unreasonable in questioning convention. There are plenty of crossword usages that don’t really stand up to close scrutiny, but which have become accepted by editors because they have been so widely used. For example, “occasionally” does not mean “regularly” (in fact, it means the opposite – infrequently, now and then, irregularly), but it is often used as an alternate letters selector.
To go right back to basics, what is the justification for “the French” to mean LE, LA or LES (“the” in French)? If a clue were to have “house French” for CHEZ, it would be considered illiterate. I suppose “the French” works if one adopts the “missing comma” trick and regard it as “the, French”, but I see no justification at all for that device. A particular bugbear of mine is the use of “endlessly” as a both-ends deletion indicator. I can see no dictionary support at all for it to be used as other than a tail-deleter, but the Times editor is not alone in sanctioning its use as a both-ender (which would be OK if the word were “endslessly”). The Times also sticks to the “on convention” – ie “A on B” means BA in an across clue – despite the fact that dictionaries support the meaning AB.
As far as “essentially” is concerned, if it is to be used as an interior letter selector, which is justifiable by reference to the dictionaries, it needs, in my view, to target just the middle letter or letters (depending on whether the target has an odd or even number of letters), otherwise it would be imprecise.
A fairly quick solve, helped by taking a wild guess at the OCELOT nina when we only had the two Os. We liked the ‘recurring Xmas present’ trick, but took a while to realise that a first letter change was needed, so that COMPILE was our LOI.
All good stuff, though. Thanks, Bobcat and Cineraria.
Rudolf @17
The French for LE etc. When you say ‘I see no justification at all for that device’, you seem to be referring to putting adjectives in front of the nouns which they refer to. Take your clue (Bobcat 18,179, Oct 6) ‘Speak off the cuff, taking line from Primo Levi’s novel’ for IMPROVISE. How is ‘Primo Levi’s novel’ any different to ‘the French’? Similarly, in eg 16d today, ‘extremely saccharine’. Extremely is not an adjective, and needs at the very least a comma inferred.
endlessly: you say endslessly would be OK to remove both ends, which implies that you accept that the left-hand letter in a word is one of its ends. Describing something as ****less means that it has an absence of ****’s, whether they be singular or plural. Eg treeless doesn’t mean one tree has gone, it means there are no trees. Really, wouldn’t it make more sense to argue against using endless to mean that only one end is deleted?
Your argument in favour of ‘essentially’ seems to be simply ‘the dictionary justifies it’. That doesn’t address Babbler’s point, which cites the dictionary, it simply denies it. Personally, I agree with Babbler. It’s a convention we’d be better off not using. Rather embarrassingly, there’s one in my puzzle today.
James
Thanks Rudolf and Filbert. It has certainly given me food for thought that if one is going to carp at a convention then there is a risk that logically one will have to carp at many more than one.
Interesting points, Babbler@15, Rudolf@17 and Filbert@19, to which I’d add that, from testers’/editors’ feedback received on my own puzzles, it would indeed appear that the so-called invisicomma — implicit between an adverbial operator and its preceding/following target-fodder, or when (in English) an adjectival operator follows its target-fodder — has crept its way into convention. It’s noteworthy that a few setters barely, if ever, use adverbial operators, so hats off to them for going the extra mile.
Why not send your comments here, where they could well seed wider discussion at the excellent Clue Clinic, whose Clinical Data pages are frequently (periodically, intermittently, now and then, off and on …) being updated in response to just such feedback.
My essential comment in response to the convention-carpers is that the essence of these puzzles is cryptic wordplay, with an emphasis on “play”. They are designed to exercise our lateral thinking grey cells, and to amuse us. Advocating for unambiguous precision seems somewhat counter to this notion.
Cellomaniac@22, surely “advocating for unambiguous precision” is tantamount to advocating for the very essence of Ximenean clueing: that “a clue should say what it means …”. Given that as the starting point, surely the ‘play’ then demands skill and flair from the setter to entertain and mislead (in a lateral way in the surface reading) within a rigid and unambiguous setting (a grammatically perfect cryptic reading)? Clues possessing these combined attributes are, for yours truly, by far the most rewarding, whether setting or solving them.
I have only been compiling for just short of four years, but I solved for much of the preceding forty. As a solver, I think I was unaware of many of the finer points of clue construction and suspect that I spotted indicators and was happy to apply them vaguely to fodder and, if the solution appeared to match the definition, I was happy. A nounal anagrind following fodder or a single letter indicated without a possessive would not have fazed me. Nowadays I am more demanding of setters and absolutely prefer ‘unambiguous precision’ and, yes, the clues I really admire are those that fully meet two criteria: they are grammatically perfect and yet, despite that constraint, they present a smooth and credible surface. I don’t buy the argument that imprecision contributes to lateral thinking: I have never solved a Torquemada clue but am led to understand that that was his approach. There’s a solution in there somewhere but how you find it is entirely up to you.
I do have to confess to using the – extremely useful – ‘essentially’ to indicate a middle letter/pair, though! I may have to ponder on that one.
Thanks to those who have inspired and contributed to this discussion. And, of course, to Bobcat for the puzzle and Cineraria for the blog
Very good point, PostMark@24, about the decades we spent ‘solving’ clues, many of which by today’s standards simply hinted at answers without orchestrating fodder in the way formally required. (I look back on some of my own old clues and wince …)
And hear hear re the“imprecision => lateral thinking” tack, when it’s the skill of the accurate setter in conveying imprecision that’s the ultimate deception.