Guardian Cryptic 27,194 by Arachne

by

The puzzle may be found at https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/cryptic/27194.

The joint First Ladies of Guardian puzzles appear on consecutive days, and both of them abundantly show their skill. Neither was too difficult, but satisfying, and I am lucky enough to have drawn the blog for the last three of Arachne’s cryptics.

Across
1 WARMTH Passion is what rematch regularly exhibited (6)
Alternate letters (‘regularly exhibited’) of ‘WhAt ReMaTcH‘.
5 BLOBBY Spotted leader of batty pressure group (6)
A charade of B (‘leader of Batty’) plus LOBBY (‘pressure group’).
8 BOATFUL Full of wind, disgorging small amount of gravy? (7)
BOA[s]TFUL (‘full of wind’) minus the S (‘disgorging small’).
9 MUDFLAP Spooner’s Environment Agency plan that protects one from splashes (7)
A Spoonerism of FLOOD MAP (‘Environmental Agency plan’ which really needs to coopt the clue’s definition to make sense).
11 SIGN OF THE ZODIAC Frisky echidna, zoo’s gift for Leo? (4,2,3,6)
An anagram (‘frisky’) of ‘echidna zoos gift’, with the question mark justifying the indication by example.
12 ALSO Huge US city in recession, too (4)
A reversal (‘in recession’) of OS (outsize or oversize, ‘huge’) plus LA (‘US city’).
13 ASSAILABLE Cruise in a fur, open to attack (10)
An envelope (‘in’) of SAIL (‘cruise’) in ‘a’ plus SABLE (‘fur’).
17 DEADLY SINS Sly dandies revelling in ways to go to hell (6,4)
An anagram (‘revelling’) of ‘sly dandies’.
18 PRIM Punctilious, detailed 11, 13 or 17? (4)
PRIM[e] (’11, 13 or 17?’ examples of prime numbers – nothing to do with the clues) minus its last letter (‘de-tailed’).
20 SELF-EXAMINATION Finally passes Brownie test in navel-gazing (4-11)
A charade of S (‘finally passeS‘) plus ELF (‘Brownie’) plus EXAMINATION (‘test’). It took a while for the penny to drop here!
23 DIGNITY Grave bearing tiny cross on archaeological site (7)
A charade of DIG (‘archaeological site’) plus NITY, an anagram (‘cross’) of ‘tiny’.
24 IRATELY I pace banks of Liffey in fury (7)
A charade of ‘I’ plus RATE (‘pace’) plus LY (‘banks of LiffeY‘).
25 STAGES Male with extremely erogenous legs (6)
A charade of STAG (‘male’) plus ES (‘extremely ErogenouS‘).
26 SPARSE Far from dense, argues with energy (6)
A charade of SPARS (‘argues’) plus E (‘energy’).
Down
2 ANALGESIA Carmen receiving a single wound, feeling no pain (9)
An envelope (‘receiving’) of NALGESI, an anagram (‘wound’) of ‘a single’ in AA (Automobile Assocciation, ‘carmen’).
3 MY FOOT I don’t believe that legend of Arachne (2,4)
Read ‘legend’ as leg end.
4 HALITOSIS Henry II welcoming return of dipso son in foul pants (9)
A charade of HALITOSI, an envelope (‘welcoming’) of TOS, a reversal (‘return of’) SOT (‘dipso’) in HAL (‘Henry’) plus ‘II’; plus S (‘son’).
5 BOMBE Host served up last of superb Yorkshire pudding (5)
A charade of BOM, a reversal (‘served up’) of MOB (‘host’) plus BE (‘last of superB YorkshirE”- perhaps a little doubtful way of indicating the last letters of two words).
A Bombe
6 OLD WORLD “Un-American” is long-established term to describe Left (3,5)
An envelope (‘to describe’) of L (‘Left’) in OLD (‘long-established’) plus WORD (‘term’).
7 BALTI Curry from Latvia perhaps not finished (5)
BALTI[c] (‘from Latvia perhaps’) minus its last letter (‘not finished’).
8 BASTARDISED England evacuated after British Airways’ spacecraft is tampered with (11)
A charade of BA’S (‘British Airway’s’) plus TARDIS (‘spacecraft’ in Dr Who) plus ED (‘EnglanD evacuated’).
10 POCKET MONEY Child allowance kept economy active (6,5)
An anagram (‘active’) of ‘kept economy’. A choice clue.
14 ANNUITIES Subtly insinuate these are paid every year (9)
An anagram (‘subtly’) of ‘insinuate’.
15 BARMINESS Prohibit bombs, the ultimate in senseless folly (9)
A charade of BAR (‘prohibit’) plus MINES (‘bombs’) plus S (‘the ultimate in senselesS‘).
16 FLEETING Transient supporter turned up to invade pitch (8)
An envelope (‘to invade’) of EET, a reversal (‘turned up’ in a down light) of TEE (‘supporter’) in FLING (‘pitch’).
19 BANANA Bare half-cut granny, one of a bunch (6)
A charade of ‘ba[re]’minus its latter half (‘half cut’) plus NANA (‘granny’).
21 LIGHT Frivolous answer to crossword clue (5)
Double definition.
22 ABYSS Unfathomable depth of baby’s subconscious (5)
A hidden answer in ‘bABYS Subconscious’.
completed grid

55 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 27,194 by Arachne”

  1. Not such a wicked web today from Arachne. Tough but fair, I thought.

    Thanks to PeterO for the yummy dessert pic! But more so for the tricky parsings I couldn’t see, PRIMe numbers in 18a, the AA in 2d ANALGESIA (although I feel like I might have seen the Automobile Association clued as CAR MEN before?), and 3d MY FOOT (loved the breakdown of LEG END!).

    Had not heard of BALTI as a type of curry in 7d, though that was all it could be once I saw BALTIc. I still don’t get 21d LIGHT as a definition for an answer to a crossword clue, maybe someone can enLIGHTen me?

    Lots of favourites including 7a MUDFLAP, 11a SIGN OF THE ZODIAC, 23a DIGNITY, 4d HALITOSIS, 8d BASTARDISED and the naked half cut granny fodder (!) for BANANA at 19d.

    Now that I see all those favourites, I probably should have just said the whole puzzle was a favourable one from a favourite setter! Thanks to the web-weaver for such great entertainment.

  2. I like the way that the 3 down clue is printed:
    I don’t believe that leg-
    end of Arachne (2, 4)
    Not so above, or – now that I check – in the online version.
    2 Down (car-men) could have done with the same kind of manipulation…

    Altogether a pleasing and elegant puzzle apart from the repetition of ful(l) in the clue + solution to 8 across. Thanks to Arachne, also to PeterO, though it’s a bit early in the day, where I am, to contemplate a Bombe, unlike for Julie in Australia.

  3. 10d a perfect clue, I thought. LOI 5d – not a word or an item I have any use for!
    Thanks to Arachne for an elegant puzzle, and to Peter O for the blog.

  4. Several laugh out loud clues, including MUDFLAP, MY FOOT, BASTARDISED and HALITOSIS. And Arachne is particularly good on anagrams (e.g. POCKET MONEY and SIGN OF THE ZODIAC). Many thanks to her and to PeterO.

  5. Strictly speaking, the Tardis is not a spacecraft, it’s a time machine.

    Great crossword, though, thanks PeterO and Arachne

  6. I thought this was an excellent puzzle with many witty and/or well-crafted clues most of which have already been flagged. My LOI was OLD WORLD which very nearly defeated me and which I solved without fully parsing it. Thanks to Arachne and PeterO for a good start to the day.

  7. I’m not usually a fan of Spoonerism’s in crosswords as I think it’s the setter being lazy (or maybe that’s me being bitchy as I find them hard to solve). But I though MUDFLAP was very clever.

    I also like POCKET MONEY – surprise dI’ve not seen that before

    Thanks Arachne and PeterO

  8. Thanks for the blog, PeterO – lucky man!

    I’m so used to saying, ‘Too many favourites to list’ and that holds good again today, really – brilliantly spotted anagrams, well-hidden, along with their indicators, ingenious constructions and sparkling, often hilarious, surfaces throughout.

    But, like others, I have particular admiration today for 10dn – a classic gem.

    Many thanks, Arachne – I loved it.

    Julie @1 – Chambers: ‘light – in a crossword, the word [or sometimes an individual letter in the word] on the diagram that is the answer to a clue’.

  9. Lovely. Arachne can be tricker, but she’s seldom been wittier.

    Favorite today was definitely 4 down. Not just because of the clever definition (“foul pants”!) but because there were so many possible anagram indicators in there (dipso, foul, pants), and no anagrams in sight. Brilliantly devious. And of course the surface is hilarious.

    Also, several very nice clean anagrams today.

    Thanks, Arachne and Peter.

    (I have quibbles about the clue for SELF-EXAMINATION, in that I don’t like it when a component of a compound word is simply defined straightforwardly in the wordplay (here, “test”), since that feels not-cryptic-enough to me. But I seem to be the only person that feels that way, so never mind me.)

  10. Many thanks to setter and blogger.

    DEADLY SINS took far too long for an anagram – always sign of a good one, or perhaps just sloth on my part? As with PeterO, SELF-EXAMINATION gave me some pause for thought. MY FOOT held me up for a while because I wasn’t thinking of Arachne’s foot at all, but I’ll draw a veil in the interests of propriety. Don’t quite get pace=rate in IRATELY, but biffed it anyway. And speaking of biffing, I didn’t spot the Tardis until I got here, so thanks to PeterO for not so much a penny as an anvil dropping.

    As usual with Arachne I enjoyed the surfaces as much as anything else – especially the image conjured by that of HALITOSIS.

    Julie@1: LIGHT in this sense is a blank space in a crossword grid, as opposed to the others which are dark, so the place where the answers go (or just one letter of the answer, so the clue is perhaps a little thin). There was a discussion of this recently enough if memory serves.

  12. Now I am more confused than ever about crossword lights, so I consulted crossword unclued – they cite from D. ST P Barnard’s book “Anatomy of the Crossword”

    Surely, one may well exclaim, to obtain a solution and then to call it by a word which means a clue, savours mightily of Looking-Glass Land. The objection would be a valid one if a puzzle were to require the insertion of only one word, but an essential feature of the crossword is that each horizontal word shares two or more letters with certain vertical words and vice versa. The result of this arrangement is that each word in the pattern not only represents the answer to some verbal clue, but serves also as a literal clue to those other words that it crosses.

  13. Very enjoyable particularly 4 & 10D.

    Stella @5 A time and (relative dimension in) space machine surely?

    Julie @1 I also wasn’t familiar with light meaning the answer to a clue but I think it’s an example of todays world where words don’t seem to have meaning, just context (the ‘light’ is the clue, the answer, the inspiration for getting the answer, the space where you write the answer, etc)!

  16. Alphalpha @10 – I didn’t immediately see pace = rate, either [misled by the verbal use in the clue] but it’s quite clear if you think of them both as nouns [= speed] – doh!

  17. Thanks Arachne, great puzzle!

    Thanks also to PeterO; I was a bit ‘puzzled’ by light meaning the answer as I always thought it just referred to blank spaces in the grid.

    As mrpenney @9 said, the ‘foul pants’ definition for HALITOSIS has to be a classic. I said yesterday that I liked Spoonerisms but this one was better in giving a recognisable Spooner’s phrase. I too admired the clue for POCKET MONEY. I did like the surface of the clue for BLOBBY, and admired many others.

  18. Thanks Arachne, PeterO
    Lots of wit and skill. I did enjoy it, briefly, but I wish I’d had to struggle a bit more. As was commented on Monday for Rufus’s cherry and almond pie anagram for Raymond Chandler (a lovely idea that deserved more protection than ‘writer’) I felt that a lot of the great devices here could have done with some more devious definitions. There are exceptions (foul pants (brilliant!), amount of gravy, grave bearing) but on the whole they were pretty straightforward, with the fun and games being reserved for the surfaces and wordplay.

  21. Thank you Arachne and PeterO.

    Another sticky web from the spider lady. I took ages to get OLD WORLD, so obvious after solving, I could not get the GOP, Grand Old Party, out of my head, but now the Republicans are more Right than Left – the clue is one of my favourites, along with those for ANALGESIA, HALITOSIS, MUDFLAP, POCKET MONEY and PRIM!

  23. Nice one, only really dodgy clue the ‘legend’ one. That’s old hat, and also a bit tricky when you try to get it to actually mean ‘foot’.

    Cheers both.

  24. Thanks both,

    Relatively straightforward but none the less enjoyable for that. Some brilliant anagrams. I’ve always assumed that ‘light’ came from the meaning as a division of a mullioned window. OED says simply, ‘answer to a clue in a crossword puzzle’.

  26. Always worth looking forward to Arachne and today was no exception. Sometimes you look at surfaces and wonder, what does that mean? Not today though. We all have our favourites, and for me the unassuming little clue at 23a, leading to DIGNITY, hit the spot.

  27. Another fine crossword from a favourite setter. Agree that it is unfair to single out favourites, but 2, 3 and 4 were particularly good.

    Thanks to Arachne and PeterO

  28. I remember once being asked for a charades clue for foot and I thought of leg-end. I knew it would come in handy one day! Lovely puzzle that got easier as the crossers went in. Thanks to everyone.

  29. Julie @1 – I can’t find any CARMEN=AA but this one uses the same device for their competitors:

    Picaroon 27133: Carmen is close to perfect for discriminating fellow (6)

  30. LIGHT was LOI and,despite the explanations, I didn’t think much of it. However, the rest of this was pretty good. I had trouble with OLD WORLD and PRIM- Prime numbers never even crossed my mind despite the examples given. LEGEND is a bit of an old chestnut. I remember an album by a band called Legend. The cover of which featured a foot encased in a red leather winklepicker!
    Nice puzzle.
    Thanks Arachne.

  31. I would have thought a “light” in a crossword is the space where the solution is entered, not the solution itself.

  32. On the easier side for an Arachne with the usual smooth surfaces. Many fine clues but HALITOSIS was my favourite for the misdirecting definition (I tried to use both FOUL and PANTS as anagram fodder at some point).
    It’s somewhat ironic that the champion of removing gender bias used Carmen for AA, but obviously Arachne felt the joke was worth it. I agree.

    Great stuff. Thanks, Arachne and PeterO.

  33. Thanks to Arachne and PeterO. I could not parse PRIME and missed AA = car-men and leg-end as FOOT, but managed to finish. Great fun.

  34. ‘The answer to a clue in a crossword’ is the Collins definition in question, so the setter can’t be faulted. I’d thought it meant an unfilled series of white squares, actually, but I’ll stick with the dic as of now.

    It’s a good puzzle. Makes you wonder what it is to have this sort of quality, and also Boatman for instance, whose material (for me) provides a lot of inelegant and sometimes unfathomable entanglements, in the same stable.

  35. Occasionally i come come across a crossword which feels like a chore, making me wonder why i am imposing some masochistic punishment on myself for solving it. Definitely not so today. This was pure joy. This puzzle lifted me, made me feel good, made me smile, made me alive. Thank you Arachne.

    I agree totally with copmus@15

    for what it’s worth, stand out clues for me were DIGNITY, HALITOSIS, BASTARDISED, and especially POCKET MONEY, but it was all good. I missed 5d, maybe i wouldn’t have if it said ‘lasts’ or something similar, not to worry.

    Million thanks Arachne and thank you PeterO

  36. A bit late, but just had to say how much I agree with all the praise for this. Too many excellent clues to single out.

    Thank you very much Arachne & PeterO.

  37. I agree with featherstonehaugh’s sentiments @34. In my view, both Boatman and Tramp could learn a lot about elegant clue-writing from Arachne and Nutmeg.

    Many thanks to both setter and blogger for this one.

  38. Yes, the ‘leg end’ clue is ‘old hat’ @23 [making it ‘a really dodgy clue’?] and ‘a bit of an old chestnut’@30 but I often say that some clues are so good that they deserve a return / reworking for the delight of newer solvers who may not have met them before. This is, for me by far the best yet, since there actually is, of course, a ‘legend of Arachne’, constantly referred to, in blogs and comments – brilliant!

  39. Using ‘legend’ to mean ‘leg-end’ is not brilliant at all; on the contrary, it’s blatant cheating and here represents the single blight on an otherwise excellent puzzle.

  41. Yes, gofirstmate, like an ‘in-deed’, a ‘leg-end’ is a Guardianism, I think. And ‘in-e-leg-ant’! Poor Eileen defends Arachne to the last — and why not! — but these things are indefensible, even in a jolly fine puzzle.

  44. Concur with all the praise.
    An elegant, concise and amusing puzzle.
    Legend device perfectly acceptable in my book.

    Thanks to PeterO & Arachne

  45. I remember hearing Michael Foot, the politician and journalist, being described as a “leg-end in his own lifetime” many years ago, even before he became associated with “the longest suicide note in history” and before I first came across the device in a crossword. It seems fair to me.

  46. A bit of struggle for me because I’ve still got my ‘L’ plates on, but very enjoyable.

    Quick question: could anyone explain how MOB = HOST?

    Many thanks.

  47. Hyman Roth @46: a mob is an unruly crowd; a host may also be a crowd (as in Wordsworth’s “host of golden daffodils”). Not quite synonyms, but close enough for a crossword clue.

  48. Very difficult puzzle. I failed to solve 5, 8, 9 across and 6, 9, 15 down.

    Thanks Arachne and PeterO.

  49. gofirstmate@ 37. “it’s blatant cheating”

    Take it up with the great John Henderson then, who once, in an FT puzzle clued ‘tootsie’ as ‘Nursery legend’.

  51. ‘Leg end’ can indeed be ‘foot’, if you don’t mind a rather clumsy definition Cookie, but ‘legend’ cannot be ‘foot’.

  52. The device ‘indeed’ is often used to indicate ‘de***ed’ for example.

    So the legend is quite acceptable to me although I didn’t get it at first. Neither could I fathom Carmen.

    Thanks Arachne & PeterO

  53. Yes, but the ‘in-deed’ mechanism too is faulty, and in a similar way: ‘indeed’ does not mean ‘in deed’.

    That the Guardian includes these items as a matter of course is one thing, but it’s important to advertise, I feel, why some people dislike them.

  55. Fair enough indeed feathers.

    But the real thing with this sort of device is that once you are wise to them they are too obvious, and so reduce the joy of solving. Araucaria used the ‘in’ trick so much that I always started a solve by looking for any word(s) beginning ‘in’.

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