There seems to be a higher-than-usual proportion of unfamiliar words in this puzzle, but despite that I managed to finish it quite quickly without aids (though a couple of my plausible guesses turned out to be wrong): a tribute to Azed’s fair clueing.
| Across | ||||||||
| 1. | BUTTERFINGERS | Get ready for a boiled egg? One spills a lot (13) You might BUTTER some FINGERS of bread (also called soldiers by some) to dip into your boiled egg |
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| 11. | SPARKE | Some sort of old weapon king sheathed, not required (6) K in SPARE (not required) – “a weapon of some kind”, says Chambers |
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| 12. | OORIE | Chill in Scots moor I experienced lacking plenty of clothing (5) Hidden (“lacking plenty of clothing”) in mOOR I Experienced |
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| 14. | BLISS | Wine (not cha) leading to special ecstasy (5) [CHA]BLIS + S |
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| 15. | RACKETT | Early instrument? Nasty noise I extracted from it (7) RACKET + [I]T – the name of the Rackett (aka the Sausage Bassoon) seems to be unrelated to the various meanings of “racket” |
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| 16. | ROWNDELL | Bubble from poet recreating wonder with lines (8) WONDER* + LL – Spenserian form of “roundel”, meaning a bubble |
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| 19. | GAULTER | Old Frenchman: on more than half his land he digs in clay (7) GAUL + “more than half” of TER[RE] (French “land”) – it’s “a person who digs gault” |
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| 20. | ANGLO-AMERICAN | Struggling along a marine has rounded cape, in mid-Atlantic? (13) C in (ALONG A MARINE)* |
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| 23. | SYNERGY | Working together ultimately jockey often restrained frisky greys (7) [jocke]Y [ofte]N in GREYS* |
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| *28. | RHAGADES | Cracks in the skin (8) The competition word |
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| 30. | ULNARIA | Bones, 50 found in a ruin restored, adult (7) L in (A RUIN)* + A |
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| 31. | LAMDA | Heads for Lord’s as many dedicated amateur players train here (5) First letters of Lord’s As Many Dedicated Amateur. LAMDA is the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, so a trainer of “players” in either the musical or theatrical sense, though I think mainly the latter |
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| 32. | MACLE | Chap going round clubs for a dark spot (little luminance in club) (5) C in MALE; or L[uminance] in MACE (club), with the definition in the middle |
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| 33. | THEIRS | That lot’s those likely to succeed after time (6) T + HEIRS |
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| 34. | DREADLESSNESS | Need lass, wayward, in get-up showing extreme daring (13) (NEED LASS)* in DRESS |
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| Down | ||||||||
| 2. | UPBOW | What fiddler performs in pub, drunk – ouch! (5) PUB* + OW |
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| 3. | TALWEG | WG hit out with late boundary? (6) (WG LATE)* |
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| 4. | TRINGLES | Like tender runners, trimmed fore and aft, requiring rods for support (8) [S]TRINGLES[S] (i.e. like young beans). Tringles are curtain rods |
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| 5. | RESEDA | Pale green reeds growing wild over small acreage (6) A[creage] in REEDS* |
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| 6. | FURL | Roll up as leave cut by half (4) FURL[OUGH] |
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| 7. | ITALA | Early version of the Good Book buried in capital archives (5) Hidden in capITAL Archives – an early Latin version of the bible, also called the Italic Version or Vetus Latina |
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| 8. | NOCTURN | Part of psalter to study when retiring and then go off (7) CON< + TURN (e.g. to “go off” your current route) |
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| 9. | ERECT | Like guardsmen parading before evacuation of cantonment (5) ERE (before) + C[antonmen]T |
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| 10. | RITE | Justice? By the sound of it something regularly observed (4) Homophone of “right” |
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| 11. | SARGASSUM | Weed, a grass that’s unusual in height (9) (A GRASS)* in SUM – a type of seaweed that the Sargasso Sea is named after |
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| 13. | ETERNISES | Goblin on earth amid trees changing places among immortals (9) NIS (“a friendly goblin”) + E[arth] in TREES* |
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| 17. | CLINAMEN | 150 I nominate on new list (8) CL + I NAME + N – it means “inclination” |
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| 18. | MORDRED | Legendary traitor, dead, bloodied, beneath layer of humus (7) MOR (a layer of humus) + D + RED – Morded is a traitor in the legends of King Arthur |
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| 21. | EXALTS | Praises set working, reverse of careless kept in (6) LAX< in SET* |
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| 22. | CUDDIE | Scottish ass regurgitated stuff to stop working (6) CUD + DIE |
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| 24. | NONCE | At odds with Anglicanism for the moment? (5) “NON-CE” |
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| 25. | GRILL | Pump supplying measure of liquid about right (5) R in GILL – pump/grill as in interrogate |
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| 26. | GEARS | What drivers go through, lining up targets without tees (5) Anagram of TARGETS less its Ts |
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| 27. | ALAR | A jaunt abandoned by king finally, involving a flapper? (4) A + LAR[K] – the “flapper” is a wing |
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| 29. | HAZE | Rag offering dances for audience? (4) Homophone of “heys” or “hays”. Chambers defines “hey” as “a country dance”, though strictly speaking it’s more of a dance move or figure, in which dancers weave in and out of each other (as in The Dashing White Sergeant, for example) |
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Fairly straight forward AZED for a competition puzzle, and I rattled this one in in under a hour.
I am intrigued with 1ac though;. to me it has always been a boiled egg with soldiers, not fingers – and looking in all my dictionaries cannot find where AZED gets this from?
As to the word to clue, I looked at this for several days, and couldn’t come up with anything decent for a prize puzzle (maybe a crap clue is possible if I had to clue it for one of my own puzzles).
It will be interesting to read the slip on what others came up with.
Nick
Nick, I agree that soldiers is probably more common, but we used to call them fingers when I was a child, and I only remember hearing them called soldiers much later.
I thought I’d finished this quite quickly last week, but, embarrassingly, when I looked at the grid just now I see that I haven’t answered 18dn. I can’t remember now whether this was because I couldn’t get the answer or I just hadn’t noticed I’d not answered it.
On the easier side for Azed, with nothing really causing much difficulty. Holidays in Tintagel meant 18d went in with little thought beyond the definition and a few crossing letters.
Thanks to Azed and Andrew
I am rather proud that I completed this on a train journey in about 2 hours without recourse to Chambers. And my first one in was 18dn.
It took me ridiculously long to get one across – I was worrying about boiled as an anagrind.
I enjoyed this one. The clues were reasonably friendly, but, as Nick @1 said, RHAGADES seemed an unusually challenging one for competitors to clue, perhaps because recent competition words have been pretty straightforward with more potential in the defining.
As for 1a, some wiki info here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldiers_(food) . The Hancock ads referred to are all here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnLyqBtU_F8 , with a crossword-themed one at 7:17!
Thank you to Azed, and to Andrew for the blog.
Meant to add to my comment above that a Times Quick Cryptic a few weeks ago clued BUTTERFINGERS as Prepare soldiers? One’s clumsy. Meanwhile egg “bread fingers” comfortably beats egg “bread soldiers” on Google, for what it’s worth.
I’m off for my tea now – Findus fish soldiers.
Well, I think Chambers has the last day here not the Internet:
Soldier
12 A narrow strip of bread-and-butter or toast, esp for a child to eat (informal)
There is nothing under finger in Chambers or Collins or ODE.
Must be a ‘Murrican thing.
Nick
Surely dictionaries cover it under “anything shaped like a finger”, or similar. Fish finger and ladyfinger (sponge finger) are in dictionaries because they were marketed as such (I’d guess), whereas bread fingers obviously weren’t.
I’m not sure about the present edition, but under ‘finger’ OED used to have “A short and narrow object or piece of material, e.g. an item of food”. It probably only became a thing when someone dubbed them ‘soldiers’.