Our longest-standing provider of Guardian Quiptics, Hectence, is on the oche today.
Noteworthy today is the inclusion of two clues that require the ‘lift and separate’ treatment. Your chance to get acquainted with it if you’ve never come across it before. Elsewhere a steady solve, I found. And of course, since it’s Hectence, it’s a pangram: all 26 letters of the alphabet feature somewhere in the grid.
Abbreviations
cd cryptic definition
dd double definition
cad clue as definition
(xxxx)* anagram
anagrind = anagram indicator
[x] letter(s) removed
definitions are underlined
Across
1 Waxwork reflected leftist leader and his struggles
POLISH
A charade of OP for ‘work’ reversed, L for the initial letter of ‘leftist’ and (HIS)* The anagrind is ‘struggles’. We need to perform what some people call a ‘lift and separate’ manoeuvre on ‘waxwork’, turning it into ‘wax’ and ‘work’. Then the first particle becomes the definition and the second particle leads us to OP. Not a super common device, but if it’s the first time you’ve come across it, worth tucking away for future reference.
4 Turning point is introduction of Iago in RSC production
CRISIS
An insertion of IS and I for the initial letter of ‘Iago’ in (RSC)* The insertion indicator is ‘in’ and the anagrind is ‘production’.
9 Start sobbing, saying ‘Reduce speed!’ before feathers accompanied by shriek
BREAK DOWN AND CRY
A charade of BREAK, aural wordplay (‘saying’) for BRAKE, DOWN for ‘feathers’, AND and CRY.
10 Dismiss court to pursue concerning point about judge
REJECT
A charade of J inserted into RE and E for the compass ‘point’ and CT. The insertion indicator is ‘about’.
11 Stand by sea skipper blowing top
MAINTAIN
A charade of MAIN and [CAP]TAIN.
12 Son laid back lazily with no thought
STUPIDLY
A charade of S, PUT reversed and IDLY.
14 Browsed primarily in Google running streetmap edition
GRAZED
A charade of G and R for the initial letters of ‘Google’ and ‘running’, AZ for the city streetfinder that no-one uses any more because they all rely on Google maps, and ED.
15 Way sunlight diverges
STRAYS
A charade of ST and RAYS.
18 Less polite exclamation of surprise embraced by nouveau riche?
CHEEKIER
An insertion of EEK in (RICHE)* The insertion indicator is ’embraced by’ and the anagrind is ‘nouveau’.
21 Obtains specialist remedies
PROCURES
A charade of PRO and CURES.
22 Nicely warm when central heaters brought into play
TOASTY
An insertion of AS and T for the middle letter of heaTers in TOY. The insertion indicator is ‘brought into’.
24 Accommodate old supporter with hotel, given you’re inside for some time
QUARTER OF AN HOUR
A charade of QUARTER, O, FAN, H for the phonetic alphabet ‘hotel’ and OUR for the inside letters of yOURe. ‘The troops were accommodated/quartered in barracks outside the town.’
25 Shove spades in shed and leave borders
HUSTLE
An insertion of S in HUT followed by LE for the outside letters of ‘leave’. The insertion indicator is ‘in’.
26 Gets sick filled with retiring party’s heavy carbs
STODGE
An insertion of DO reversed in (GETS)* The insertion indicator is ‘filled with’, the anagrind is ‘sick’ and the reversal indicator is ‘retiring’.
Down
1 Left hospital department with foreboding
PORTENT
A charade of PORT and ENT for Ear, Nose and Throat.
2 Set off for holiday
LEAVE
A dd.
3 Tranquillised, steadied, I dropped off
SEDATED
(STEAD[I]ED)* with ‘off’ as the anagrind.
5 Travelling’s not right without including French friend
ROAMING
Here’s your second chance to get acquainted with the lift and separate device: this time we need to separate ‘without’ into ‘with’ and ‘out’. Then it becomes an insertion of AMI in [W]RONG. The insertion indicator is ‘including’ and the exclusion indicator for the W (‘with’) is ‘out’.
6 Put off team on course
SIDETRACK
A charade of SIDE and TRACK.
7 Suspect serviceman involved in complex issue
SURMISE
An insertion of RM for Royal Marine in (ISSUE)* The insertion indicator is ‘involved in’ and the anagrind is ‘complex’.
8 Small path circling edges of map gets waterlogged
SWAMPY
A charade of S and MP for the outside letters of ‘map’ inserted into WAY. The insertion indicator is ‘circling’.
13 Have a game of bridge with amusing people following theatre show?
PLAY CARDS
A charade of PLAY and CARDS.
16 By putting personnel in harsh surroundings …
THROUGH
An insertion of HR, Human Resources, or ‘personnel’ in TOUGH. The insertion indicator is ‘putting in … surroundings’. Welcome to the vagaries of English spelling and pronunciation. Pity I didn’t have CHOUGH for my bird link.
17 … rulers unexpectedly have caught one that’s very odd
SURREAL
An insertion of A in (RULERS)* The insertion indicator is ‘have caught’ and the anagrind is ‘unexpectedly’. The ellipses between the two clues can, as in 99 cases out of 100, be ignored. They are there just to make a bit more sense of the two surface readings.
18 Mimic us to mirror characters in tradition
CUSTOM
Hidden in MimiC US TO Mirror.
19 Pull out old pamphlet
EXTRACT
A charade of EX and TRACT.
20 Tunes he composed make one excited
ENTHUSE
(TUNES HE)* with ‘composed’ as the anagrind.
23 Fly kept out of sight after Dad turned up
APHID
A charade of PA reversed and HID.
Many thanks to Hectence for this weekend’s Quiptic.
Long-time lurker, but couldn’t resist making the first comment this morning. 🙂 I always forget to look for the pangram. Thanks very much to Hectence and Pierre, and to all the other 225 bloggers.
Thanks for the blog Pierre and the useful explanation about the ‘lift and separate’ which I’ve not really understood until now. Two good examples, probably my top clues of the grid. I could not parse 1a but I can now. I thought this was a pretty fair Quiptic. Very smooth. Thanks Hectance.
I enjoyed the ‘lift and separate’ clues.
I failed to parse 22ac, and I see now that I wrongly parsed 14ac as G R + a-zed = A-Z street map instead of as Pierre has shown above.
Can someone explain why in 17d one refers to A rather than O or I?
Too tough for me overall but when revealed the clues were fair.
Lapwing @4. Sometimes one can simply mean I, or it can mean A – you just have to figure out which one works. Haven’t come across O meaning one, though.
I had POL as in Pol Pot for the leftish leader thereby missing the lift and separate. Also had SERIOUS for 7d for a while as anagram of OR and ISSUE. Both failed when trying to parse the definition although one was right for the wrong reasons. Also minor quibble but my thesaurus has STAND BY for MAINTAIN. None of which detracted by a pleasant time. Thank you Pierre for explanations and Hectence for gentle frustrations!
Thanks Hectence and Pierre
I found the acrosses quite hard, but fortunately the downs were easier. Favourite POLISH when I eventually worked out where the PO came from.
Pedants’ corner: graze and browse are not the same when applied to animals. Grazing is eating off the ground; browsing is eating off trees and shrubs above ground level. I suppose the terms are used interchangeably for humans, though.
Absolutely interchangeably for humans, muffin, which is why the clue works perfectly and there was no need for your pedantry.
Pierre
Important to zoologists; and to people too – they probably don’t realise why are there two different words for the same activity!
Couldn’t see how 22ac worked although I can now see that AS means “when”. Not quite a full explanation by Pierre I feel. However, thanks Hectance and Pierre.
Another very enjoyable and reliable quiptic from Hectence. I found that I didn’t always make an effort to exactly parse an answer once it was clear – a dangerous habit, which I must try to avoid… Didn’t understand how CARDS = “amusing people”. Thanks Hectence and Pierre!
Lapwing @4: an indefinite article sometimes literally means “one”, e.g. “not a chance” = “not one chance”, “an apple a day” = “one apple per day” etc.
I for one appreciated muffin@7 ‘s pedantry. Knowledge I didn’t previously have, and as far as I can see it wasn’t a criticism of the clueing.
Yes, Ridgeowl @10, ‘as’ is very often clued by ‘when’.
You know how it is? That first glass of wine -” ooh, that was nice” – becomes the emptied bottle; that first chocolate- “just one of the nutty ones” – heads for the empty box… Well, just after midnight I thought I’d have a quick look at Grauniad… So my breakfast entertainment was already done and dusted before I went to sleep.
A very nice quiptic, especially with the accompanying glass (ONE glass) of Laphroaig. FOI was SWAMPY, then W and a look at the clue and wordage for 9A suggested DOWN and…
All good satisfying stuff.
Many thanks to Hectence for the fun, and Pierre for the very comprehensive blog.
Thanks both, very enjoyable. Took a while to convince myself of 4 across until I finally saw the capital I rather than lower case l in Iago.
Thanks to Pierre for a detailed and informative blog, and to Hectence for a tricky but entertaining puzzle.
Like scraggs@12, I appreciated the “pedantry” of muffin@7! An interesting and worthwhile distinction.
Thanks scraggs and Clyde.
Very much liked the surfaces for GRAZED, SEDATED, POLISH and CHEEKIER.
I’m impressed by the contemporary feel of Hectence’s answers and clues, and that they’re not heavy with GK.. We didn’t need to know about Iago or RSC for example in CRISIS.
Some of the wordplay is very ”busy” with insertions and lots of elements in relatively short words, eg 4 in the 6 letter word REJECT. That’s okay, but I’m not a fan of the use of a lot of abbreviations. Just personal preference. I realise it’s standard cryptic fare.
My science quibble was about APHID being defined as ‘fly’. I’ve never considered aphids as flies, I see from Wiki that there are common names for some aphids, eg greenfly and blackfly, but aphids are of the Order Hemiptera (“True Bugs”, I was surprised to learn), whereas flies are of Diptera.
The parsing of TOASTY defeated me, and I missed the “top” of CAPTAIN being the synonym top=cap rather than just a leading letter of some word. Hectence is rather fond of the apparent link word=essential bit of wordplay trick: see CRISIS, TOASTY and ROAMING where it’s combined with a split-the-word clue for extra fiddliness. All entirely legitimate and fun to disentangle, but rather tricky for a Quiptic – this would be quite tough enough for a cryptic, and not a Monday one either.
Knowing there was a pangram helped to get the leading Q for QUARTER OF AN HOUR.
Thanks Hectence and Pierre.
I found this pretty tricky for a quiptic–partly because there were several multipart clues. If anyone comes here thinking this was difficult, you’re not alone! Didn’t parse POLISH or TOASTY (though I may have been distracted by the latter’s relevance to my life–my central heating failed and while it should get fixed in a couple days, it is not nicely warm here at all).
Thanks Hectence and Pierre!
22a – where does AS come from?
I’ve been humiliated, like the English batting lineup, by only solving 3 clues.
I struggled through to completion, but all this word-filleting style of clue I find a bit of a faff – half the answers this week were charades. Evidently it was a ‘steady solve’ for some but I’d call this a tough one!
Steffen@21 – AS stands in for “when”. Not quite an exact equivalent, but close enough – e.g. “When I went outside, I met Zaphod Beebelbrox” / “As I went outside, I met Zaphod Beeblebrox”.
(see also Pierre @13)
(Me@23: Sadly, Chrome’s spellchecker did not pick up on the egregious Beebelbrox; editing time ran out before I spotted it. “SPx5: see me”)
Thank you
A perfect quiptic from Hectence as always, thoroughly enjoyed it.
Thanks to Pierre and Hectence
I was another POL for leftist leader, though a rather tame description in retrospect. Always worth coming here to see the subtleties of the parsings that I completely missed. Thanks both.
Are you for real Steffen? Apart from one notable exception last week (which was funny) every post is the same, too hard, 3 or 4 solved, regardless of it being Quiptic or full Cryptic. I know I’m not the only one who wonders what you’re up to.
Very much for real.
I’m here to learn from the experienced solvers. I am hopeless.
I hope I have not offended anyone.
Hey Steffen, I’m not offended. I’m a seasoned but not expert solver, and I for one am ok with people posting to say they’ve found a crossword difficult. I often do so myself, when that’s been my experience.
Martin @28 I understand your post. Steffen has been coming onto this forum asking for help since, I think, early 2023. Forgive me if I am wrong about that. Over the ensuing two and a half years does he feel that his solving ability has improved at all? It does not seem so. I suppose that my perplexity is that someone who is (to use his own word) so hopeless at something would persist for so long in attempting it. But he is perfectly entitled to carry on trying, I suppose …
Yes, I commend Steffen’s persistence. I would probably have given up by now!
As others have said, the across clues on the first go through were relatively intractable. But I got there in the end, and LOL’d when I saw the lift and separate in my final insertion (ROAMING).
Failed to parse TOASTY, as I missed the when/as component. I even (not very optimistically) searched the net to see if there was a play called “Toasy”
I also thought the comments from some could have been kinder today.
Thanks S&B
Not offended at all Steffen, merely intrigued. I hope I didn’t offend either. For balance, I’m sure solving three or four proper cryptic clues would put you among the highest echelon of people I know in real life.
For Steffen if he’s still here: I found this puzzle significantly too hard for a Quiptic, and I’m a native speaker of (American) English who has been solving British crosswords for nigh on two decades, with a lot more success than failure for the last decade of that! So yes, this was pitched incorrectly for the slot.
(I did finish this one, but with a lot of “you really think this is easy, Hectence?” eye-rolling along the way.)
Another one here who found it challenging, although looking back with the answers it’s hard to see why. I put it partly down to being a bit under the weather – for 21a for example I spent way too long staring at _ _ _ CURES muttering to myself “you know this word” (I did but couldn’t find it). Hard to really blame the setter for that.
Beyond that, I ended up being rused by a few red herrings. As well as the search for a three letter leftist leader for 1a (I almost convinced myself that OAMISH was a type of wax based artwork, from a revered Mao) but we also have to find the right letters to use in 4a and 17d (which I had as *IINRSC and *RULERSC). When I stumble upon a wrong, but plausible, interpretation for a clue, I find it so much harder than if I can’t interpret the clue at all. Maybe another reason why the difficulty level seems to be solver dependent?
Still lots to love. especially GRAZED and MAINTAIN. The cluing for 9a was also fun in a “I can’t believe they put that in a crossword kind of way”. Also agree with paddymelon @18 about the level of GK, it’s so nice to not need to know the 17th century composers or the seemingly infinite breeds of flowering plants. 2d did make me slightly worried that I’d have to find an obscure saints day that fit, so solving that one was a relief
Thanks both to Hectence and Pierre 🙂
Tough but good. Thanks H and P.
@Martin, of course he’s for real. We’re not all geniuses like you.
This is a very difficult quiptic. I’ve been doing cryptics for over 10 years and I can only attempt quiptics, everyman and monday vulcans. Some people just don’t improve.
I’ve looked at the parsing of 5D and still don’t understand it. Can someone do so in a different manner?
I’m another who found this hard for a Quiptic.
Re muffin @7: I’m pro-pedantry. In my household we have a rule that the word “pedantic” is never to be used pejoratively. I think that I had at one point known the graze-browse distinction, but I’d forgotten and was happy to be reminded.
@ Peter 38. “Not right” is WRONG. “Without” splits into WITH (abbreviated to W )+ OUT (i.e. removed) so WRONG is shortened to RONG.
The insertion of AMI leads to ROAMING
Glad to see from the comments that I was not the only one who found this difficult. Thanks for the blog, as there were a couple I couldn’t parse. It all looks much easier when I look at the explanations than it did when I was puzzling over it!
I’m a bit late to the party and doubt anyone will see this now. But on the off chance, can anyone explain where CARDS comes from? I still don’t get it.
Also, I started to learn cryptics around February time. I’m still trying to improve but feel like I’ve hit a plateau. I might be one of those people who just has a limit too. This felt midweek to me. I didn’t recognise the lift and separate parts of clues. For only half a word to be the definition felt like a step too far for a quiptic, but that might just be me.
Hello, KT@42. ‘Card’ is an informal word for someone who’s witty or amusing. ‘He’s a real card, that one.’ It’s a bit old-fashioned, I fancy.
Plateauing is normal, I think, for most activities. Sometimes takes the brain some time to assimilate what’s learnt before it’s ready to move on. Keep persevering and don’t be frustrated is good advice, I think. Fifteensquared is always here to help …
I found this hard and couldn’t finish, but I learnt a lot from it, and derived comfort from other solvers with a similar experience. It’s a very nice and fair puzzle. Thank you for all explanations Pierre. I feel I have improved a lot with the regular practice and this was needed to set a new target.