Guardian 27,295 – Chifonie

41 comments on “Guardian 27,295 – Chifonie”

1. Re 12, TRIER. I understand TIER for “a bank,” but I do not understand how “take” indicates R.

2. @1. It derives from the ancient medical prescription. Recipe is the Latin vocative of “take” and shortened to R. (Originally RX)

3. Thanks, trenodia. I must be old fashioned; I still use Rx.

4. Being fairly thick – can someone explain how the device ‘in Germany’ works? Enjoyed the puzzle nonetheless. Teatray moment with 3D – very clever.

5. Thanks Chifonie & Andrew (plus trenodia@2).
   I’m not convinced that LIVE = charged, the first seems AC electricity and the second DC.
   Also does SENTIENT = living? I thought it meant thinking. I look forward to being educated by others on this site.

6. Shirl@5
   I think SENTIENT means conscious, so alive, well and capable of thought too.

   I couldn’t cope with Paul yesterday so was pleased to finish this one fairly quickly. Thanks for the explanation of R in TRIER!

7. “Retreat” and “Recited” seemed to make sense to me in the NW. The latter especially I thought was a clever play on words/part homophone (“said”) for re-sited. So all those erroneous guesses held me up at the end, with some rubbing out of the pencil entries required once I saw the light.

   Chargehand@4: I thought TRIER was not a device in 12a, but the definition, I think TRIER is a town in Germany?
   Shirl@5 – when teaching about Buddhism, I do recall having defined “SENTIENT” beings as living beings.

   I must admit, I have come on here recently with a few quibbles about the overly-challenging nature of some of our Guardian puzzles, but I am at the stage in my crossword “journey” (oh how I hate that word; it is so over-used) that I would probably like a little more “spark” in my puzzles than this one provided.

   In saying that, I am not a setter’s bootlace, so still admire the setters behind all our puzzles, for the daily challenge they provide.

   Thanks to Crucible and Andrew.

8. Thanks Andrew. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one underwhelmed. Lots of small things irritated me. Why the ‘a’ in 12a, the ‘the’ in 1d, the ‘of’ in 7d? Why earthenware in 5ac? Could just as well be glass? Is potion the same as tonic? Is quick a synonym of early? Not quite. 24 ac was particularly weak I thought. Disappointing after yesterday.

9. Thanks Chifonie and Andrew.

   I can’t say that I’ve ever used VERACIOUS; Collins shows the main usage was in the nineteenth century, although of course veracity is often used.

   Enjoyable puzzle; the NW corner was the last to drop with DWELT taking far too long in retrospect. I’m not sure why TRIER was clued as somewhere in Germany instead of one making an effort.

   I quite liked the clue for REAR END. I wonder what Paul would have made of that.

10. What is the function of ‘seen’ in 5d?

11. I think R for “take” is perfectly fine. What we think of as the X in Rx actually isn’t an X; it’s a lin across the leg of the R to indicate that it is an abbreviation (for “Recipe”, meaning “take up” or “gather together”, followed by the list of ingredients). That is how medieval scribes indicated abbreviations (they also crossed the tail of a P for “per”, etc) where we would usea period/full stop.

    LII was 3D, which I eventually had to guess at and check; took me a while to parse after that.

    Thanks Chifonie and Andrew.

12. Bah. “a line across” and LOI, of course. Why do I never see typos until the post is up?

13. Thanks to Martin@6 & Julie@7 for comments re SENTIENT. I still think it’s a bit of a stretch!

14. I wonder whether transpiration is really the same as exhalation. I seem to remember learning that transpiration was the movement of water in plants and exhalation being the movement of gas in breathing. Maybe I’m old-fashioned.

15. This one reminded me of the Everymans we’ve had recently. Charmless & clunky, lacking any kind of wit or invention.

16. @7 Julie

    Thanks for the help. And indeed Trier is a town in Germany. I can see it a bit more clearly now. Blame it on old age, wrong glasses, no good at Latin, etc.

17. I thought this was a pretty good crossword and more difficult than usual for Chifonie. Most of the quibbles above seem excessively pedantic, but paradoxically found TRIER unparsable with R for “take”.

18. I also had my doubts about SENTIENT=LIVING. Surely the goal of AI research is to develop something that is sentient, but not living.

19. Thanks for the explanation of R; I wasn’t aware of the original meaning of recipe. Rx was new to me as well in this context though it is similar to its usage in communications as an abbreviation of receive, as in Rx/Tx = receive/transmit. Is this coincidence?

20. Thanks both,

    ‘Recipere’ means ‘receive’ rather than ‘take’, but OED has ‘take’ for R(x). It’s a crosswordism I haven’t come across before.

    Did anyone else initially bung in Oedipus for 25? (Yes, on reflection it was his Dad he killed, and now I’ve got an earworm of Tom Lehrer singing ‘He laarved his mother … ‘)

21. Thanks to Chifonie and Andrew. I enjoyed this puzzle (especially after the difficulties I had yesterday), though I did not catch the R=recipe=”take” or the reverse of “live” for EVILS.

22. This didn’t rock my boat and I usually like Chifonie too many iffy clues. I agree with Jamesg transpiration is the process whereby plants absorb water through their roots. Thanks to Andrew and Chifonie.

23. I didn’t like this much and I found it more difficult than I usually do with this setter. I had RECITED for Idn which didn’t help and there were a couple of others that I missolved. No doubt personal failings were involved but–!
    Thanks Chifonie.

24. A little tougher than Chifonie usually is, and quite a pleasant solve.

    Thanks to Chifonie and Andrew

25. I found this puzzle pleasant enough, but not possessed of the witty, sparkling wordplay that a number of the other Guardian setters (particularly those whose puzzles are featured toward the middle and end of each week) tend to provide. Hard to pick out clear favorites from a list of clues that I found to be OK/good but not great, but I thought the surfaces for DWELT (my FOI) and TORMENTOR were well done. Like many others who have commented above, I had to come here to find out why the first “R” in 12 was clued as “take” (thanks to trenodia @2 for the explanation, and VinnyD @11 for the further edification). My initial answer for 1d was “RELAYED” — I believe it works on both the definition and the parsing — but I was set aright once I solved 11. Thanks to Chifonie and Andrew.

26. Thanks to Chifonie and Andrew.

    Just about understand the R in TRIER now, but what a tortuous way to clue it!

    Like Tyngewick@20 my first entry for 25 was Oedipus, before Orestes came to mind from Greek A-Level many years ago. But surely Orestes might have been GUILTY of classical matricide, but wasn’t the story of it the Oresteia?

27. Hi dantheman @26
    Matricide can mean the murderer, as well as the murder itself. This gives me an opportunity to share a strange experience I had when solving the Maskarade puzzle last week: my first entry was CLYTEMNESTRA and my next shot was at the E clue. The anagram fodder was ROSIE ATE, which led to ORESTEIA, so I immediately thought I knew what the theme was – momentarily totally forgetting that this was the E clue! A weird coincidence, I thought – I’d never seen the word ETAIRIOS before. 🙁

28. Whoops, I’ve forgotten it already! I meant ETAERIOS>

29. I cannot for the life of me parse 5D. If, as the explanation above suggests, it is AD in PRE, I don’t see how the syntax of the clue leads one to put the latter around the former.

30. Well, I enjoyed it. I didn’t find it that easy, startedquickly then slowed down. I liked REAR END.

    Xjpotter@8, chambers suggests a pitcher is usually earthenware, so that works fine for me. And I agree 24a is weak, it’s not even there (I know you mean 24d, don’t worry, I do that all the time).

    this is the first time I’ve seen M for man in 8d. I did not manage to find evidence for that in Oxford, Collins or chambers, but maybe I missed something. M does abbreviate male or Monsieur , but that’s kinda 2 steps.

    Many thanks Chifonie and Also Andrew, I didn’t see ad=puff, and stupidly I missed EVILS.

31. Josh@29 – ‘out’ is used in the sense of outside, so it’s PRE outside of AD.

32. The NW was a real struggle until Mrs W queried RECITED having come up with PORTION as no C R N words made any sense. That just left E I S which remained unsolved although we had come up with EVILS. I’ve never come across the R from recipe device before and it even for crossword land this seems pretty arcane.
    Other than that I’d no beef with this puzzle, so thanks Chifonie and Andrew.

33. WhiteKing @32

    When you get a prescription from your GP, the one bit of his writing you may be able to read is the R at the top of his instructions, which means ‘take’ as in ‘take one tablet four times a day’

    You aren’t alone in not having ‘come across’ it – if I had a pound for every blog commenter who’d said that ……

34. Eileen @28.

    Me too

    Cheers

35. nametab @34

    Wow!

36. What a lot of discussions on R.
    For me, it’s one of those abbreviations that I only know through crosswords.
    Once you see ‘take’, then be aware – it can be R!
    And keep it in mind for the next time.

    More troublesome is the one that Dutch @30 pointed at.
    M is indeed not ‘man’.
    Just like W is not ‘woman’ and E is not ‘Europe’.

    Apart from that, still a nice crossword.
    Although, Xjpotter @8 was quite right.
    Perhaps, not that nice a crossword.

37. This board never ceases to amaze me.

    Above is a perfect example. The comments outline lots of errors and loose cluing.

    However the concensus seems to be that this was a “good puzzle”.

    Why? Or is there a criteria for a “good puzzle” I am unaware of?

    This was another poor puzzle which could have been an average puzzle with the merest hint of editor intervention!

38. Straightforward – though a little less so than the usual Chifonie.
    But I can’t recall ever seeing M as an abbreviation for ‘man’ and that disturbs me.
    Thanks to one and both.

39. Coming rather late to the game as I plow through the archives during this virus thingy, but I suggest that 12across is an error, and that the answer should be THIER, an area or district in North Rhine-Westphalia a homophone (\”take in\”) for TIER (\”bank\”).  Yes, there\’s a city TRIER, but like everyone else around here, the first R flummoxes me.

40. npetrikov: as others have explained, the R is an abbreviation for Recipe  – Latin “take” – as used on medical prescriptions. It’s a common idiom in cryptic clues.

41. Thank you, Andrew–I missed it!

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