I think this is what I’d expected when seeing this was an Engimatist: laughs, groans, lots of general knowledge needed, liberal cluing style, and it was really rather difficult! It was an enjoyable solve, so thanks to Enigmatist
(Sorry for this post being late; it’s been another very busy week for me, so I just wrote this rather hastily, trying to remember how I parsed the clues a week ago.) There were loads of things here that were obscure to me, but probably would be general knowledge for many of you. For me the new words were: THURIO, TONITE (in the explosives sense), BOSS-EYED, LERNEAN, STINGO, LINDUM and NEUTRETTO.
I think my favourite clue was ROUGHEN, although it was nearly my LOI – lovely surface reading and clever construction.
Update – apparently I totally failed to spot the Ninas here – there are 6 hidden elephants if you read across the grid! Thanks to Gaufrid and muffin for pointing that out. They are:
- HATHI (from The Jungle Book)
- HORTON (from two Dr Seuss books)
- DUMBO (from the Disney movie Dumbo)
- NELLIE (from the song Nellie the Elephant)
- ELMER (from Elmer the Patchwork Elephant)
- ARTHUR (
maybeArthur from Babar the Elephant)
Across
1. Dance clubs serially introducing followers of Paddy Clarke? (3-3-3)
CHA-CHA-CHA
C[lubs] before each word of “HA HA HA”, from Roddy Doyle’s novel “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha”
Definition: “Dance”
6. Poor clue’s back to front (4)
THIN
HINT = “clue” with “back to front” (i.e. moving the T from the end to the start)
Definition: “Poor”
8. Refined tincture into which is dipped a second pen (2-6)
CO-AUTHOR
COUTH = “Refined” + OR = “tincture” (tincture of gold) around A
Definition: “a second pen”
9. It could go off with a bang in Hollywood this evening (6)
TONITE
An Americanized spelling of “tonight” is sometimes “tonite”, hence “in Hollywood this evening”
Definition: “It could go off with a bang” – Chambers defines “tonite” as “A blasting explosive made from guncotton and barium nitrate”
10. Chapel in Dumfriesshire bearing name of Roman city (6)
LINDUM
Hidden in “[chape]L IN DUM[friesshire]”
Definition: “name of Roman city” – Lindum Colonia is now Lincoln
11. Out of true love, lady finally managed hugs (4-4)
BOSS-EYED
BOSSED = “managed” around “[lov]E [lad]Y” = “love, lady finally”
Definition: “Out of true” – quite an obscure answer, I think – I don’t think I’ve ever heard “boss-eyed” used
12. “Pasta rings”: line in new Alien (6)
ANELLI
L = “line” in (ALIEN)*
Definition: “Pasta rings”
15. Regret turning over like one reaching North Pole, say (8)
EUROPEAN
RUE = “Regret” reversed + O = “over” + PEA = “like one” (I think – from “like two peas in a pod”, I guess “like one” might just be a PEA?) + N = “north”
Definition: “Pole, say”
16. Allowed bill to add up, so this wine sent back (8)
MUSCATEL
LET = “Allowed” + AC = “bill” + SUM = “to add up”, all reversed
Definition: “wine” – I generally don’t like clues where the definition isn’t at the beginning or end of a clue, but I think when it’s clearly signposted with “this”, as here, it’s fair.
19. The way to work round Emerald Isle sheep (6)
MERINO
ERIN = “Emerald Isle” (both are poetic terms for Ireland) in MO (modus operandi) = “The way to work”
Definition: “sheep”
21. Rabbit initially trapped by African, then catching a dim-witted friend of his (4,4)
BRER BEAR
R[abbit] in BERBER = “African” around (“catching”) A
Definition: “a dim-witted friend of his” (his being Brer Rabbit)
22. Loveless woman of some allure to set about Valentine’s rival (6)
THURIO
H[O]URI = “Loveless woman of some allure” in TO
Definition: “Valentine’s rival” from The Two Gentlemen of Verona
24. Strong liquor street bar had in short supply (6)
STINGO
ST = “street” + INGO[t] = “bar had in short supply”
Definition: “strong liquor”
25, 14. A prominent hole — the suspect … (8,2,3,4)
ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
(A PROMINENT HOLE THE)*
Definition: the whole clue (it’s an &lit)
26, 27. … how should we respond? Not at all (4,7,2)
DON’T MENTION IT
Double definition: “… how should we respond?” (the point of an “elephant in the room” is that you don’t talk about it) and “Not at all” (as a polite reply to someone thanking you)
Down
1. Something Indian women wear during public holidays (5)
CHOLI
Hidden in “[publi]C HOLI[days]”
Definition: Something Indian women wear
2. Someone for young athletes to look up to? Mo’s leaving town (7)
ARUNDEL
A RUN MODEL = “Someone for young athletes to look up to?” without “Mo”
Definition: “town”
3. Water, perhaps, let me think it’s deadly boring (5)
HOHUM
HO = “Water perhaps” (I guess this is from H2O sounding like “H to O”) + HUM = “let me think” Thanks to The sauvian scrabbler for suggesting a better parsing for this: HOH is like an oxygen atom surrounded by two hydrogen atoms, which is clued by “Water perhaps”, and then UM is “let me think”
Definition: “deadly boring” (Chambers has this hyphenated, as I’d expect, rather than as one word here…)
4. Butler cracks enigmatic clue — so not hopeless! (7)
CURABLE
RAB = “Butler” (referring to Rab Butler) in (CLUE)*
Definition: “not hopeless!”
5. Net is cast in a suspicious part of a defensive system (9)
ANTISERUM
(NET IS)* in A RUM = “a suspicious”
Definition: “part of a defensive system”
6. Rebellious set cuffing suspect seen to get nervous (5,2)
TENSE UP
PUT = “set” reversed (from “Rebellious” meaning “uprising”) around (SEEN)*
Definition: “to get nervous””
7. Commonly used as Frankfurter dips? (2,3,4)
IN THE MAIN
Double definition: “Commonly” and “as Frankfurter dips?” – Frankfurt is on the river Main
13. Tutee not excited about nucleus of charged or, possibly, uncharged particle (9)
NEUTRETTO
(TUTEE NOT)* around R (the middle letter of “charged”)
Definition: “uncharged particle”
17. Great disappointment for ice cream lover? Topping embellishment (7)
CORONET
Nothing in cornet (or “O in CORNET”) would be a “great disappointment for ice cream lover”
Definition: “Topping embellishment”
18. Queen’s name included in list for Swampy? (7)
LERNEAN
ER = “Queen” + N = “name” in LEAN = “list”
Definition: “Swampy?” – LERNEAN, according to Chambers, refers to the Lerna, “A swamp near Argos, supposed to be the home of the Hydra killed by Hercules”. The surface reading alludes to this environmental activist
20. Chap last in Tour: “I don’t want any more cycling!” (7)
ROUGHEN
“[tou]R” = “last in Tour” + ENOUGH = “I don’t want any more” with the letters rotated by one, or “cycling”
Definition: “Chap” as a verb (as in “chapped lips”)
22. Personal training rep (very important person) killing Three Coins in a Fountain (5)
TREVI
PT = “Personal training” + REP + VIP = “very important person” without 3 Ps (“killing Three Coins”)
Definition: “Fountain” – the surface reading also refers to the film Three Coins in the Fountain
23. I’d find out which items are odd, perhaps even (2,3)
IF NOT
The odd numbered letters from I[‘d] F[i]N[d] O[u]T
Definition: “perhaps even” (in the context of the clue: i.e. “perhaps even if not odd”)
Thanks Enigmatist and manehi
Several easy ones to get me going, then it went hard. Mostly fair though, although THURIO is both an obscure answer and a pretty obscure wordplay. MUSCATEL could have been written as …”so sent back this wine” to be grammatically better.
I loved the two semi-clued ones at the bottom.
It was pointed out to me (I can’t claim credit) that there are 6 fictional elephants hidden in the across lines. I’ll point them out later if necessary!
btw manehi, it’s LINDUM (as you’ve given int the explanation), not “lindun” as given elsewhere.
Thanks to mhl and to Enigmatist. A tricky one to solve, and to blog. One slip in the solution: 10ac is LINDUM not Lindun
muffin: you just beat me to it in on Lindum in a Pyongyang-style identical-time finish. Had not realised mhl and manehi were the same person, but I am relatively new here.
Sorry, mhl, not manehi!
We’re different people – I think muffin just made a mistake in referring to me as manehi.
Thanks for pointing out the LINDUM typos, which I’ve fixed now, and the Ninas which I completely missed! I’ve added a note about them to the top of the post now.
[Again simultaneous, quenbarrow. No, it was my mistake]
Yes, mhl, ARTHUR is BABAR’s cousin.
A nice mix of the fun and the educational. I too had to be nudged towards looking for the 25/14s but enjoyed searching for them all
Thanks to Enigmatist for the brain stretching (as I’ve said elsewhere this morning, please don’t leave it so long for the next one) and to mhl for the explanations
Another very clever grid construction but a very tough crossword to finish. I did spot the hidden elephants even though two of them needed Google to confirm the hunch. THURIO was last in.
Thanks to Enigmatist and mhl
What can one expect from Enigmatist?!
Emphatically a DNF for me, as I suspect it was for many others. Even after going back to last week’s prize, online, today and Revealing 22a, I then had to google THURIO. I then had to google “Valentine”. OK we did the usual Shakespeare stuff for ‘O’ levels – Macbeth, Hamlet, Henry V, Julius Caesar, etc. etc. Two Gentlemen of Verona certainly wasn’t on the list!
Who else votes for 22a being a tiny bit unfair? I admire Enig. tremendously, I think he’s one of the most challenging setters, I love a real toughie ….. but a challenge too far this time, maybe?
Oh well. Didn’t parse TONITE seeing as I’m not really well into bomb-making stuff (MI5 are you reading this?) And I didn’t quite parse CHA CHA CHA, although I really ought to have! 😐 And quite a lot of look-ups – but you ought to expect that in a Prize – CHOLI (I thought it was a type of curry), LINDUM, ANELLI (honestly, how many different pasta shapes are there?), BRER BEAR (I’ve heard of a few other BRERs), NEUTRETTO (so much for a degree in Physics!), LERNEAN (Normal spelling is “Lernaean”)
OK thanks (qualified!) to Enigmatist, and to mhl for unravelling!
Re HOHUM, I parsed it as water = “HOH”, an Oxygen atom surrounded by two of Hydrogen, with “UM” as let me think.
The sauvian scrabbler @12
Me too – I hadn’t noticed that mhl’s was different.
Laccaria @11
Yes, as I implied @1, I thought THURIO was not very fair.
Too hard for me. I got most of the top half, but couldn’t parse 3 or 4 of them.
Sometimes I see the blog and think I should have stuck with it. But on this occasion I am pleased I gave up, because I was just wasting my time without the general knowledge required.
A few words on NEUTRETTO – I suppose the word ‘possibly’ is enough to indicate that this is an obsolete word? Originally used to designate a hypothetical uncharged Meson (the word ‘Meson’ is also obsolete now), then for a while used as a name for the Muon-Neutrino. Certainly I never heard the word during my time studying physics in the 1960s. There is a Wikipedia article, but only in German or Polish.
Thanks to Enigmatist and mhl. I found this very tough going, but eventually got through it. A few got me going but then the rest was a slow grind, with many guess and parse later and a few which I could not fully parse and had to be checked here. I also had to do lots of dictionary checks and a bit of googling for things not in my dictionary. It has convinced me that I need to invest in a better dictionary than my current Oxford version. That said one of my rare Enigmatist solves and thanks again to setter and mhl for explaining my parsing inadequacies.
I managed to finish this with a little bit of a struggle, but couldn’t parse 15a, 20d or 22d. I’m still not happy with the explanation for the EUROPEAN. I should have seen the ENOUGH in ROUGHEN. Thank you mhl for the explanations. TREVI had me humming the song all day.
I agree with the sauvian scrabbler @12 re the H2O.
Many words I didn’t know, but I thought they were gettable with possibly a bit of research to check: LINDUM, ANELLI, THURIO, STINGO, CHOLI, LERNEAN. I quite like the learning exercise.
Bit of an Italian/Roman theme going too with ANELLI, THURIO (in Verona), TREVI and LINDUM.
I find Enigmatist’s puzzles quite difficult. I think it’s the wordiness of the clues. I’m better at the short, sharp ones. But enjoyable nonetheless.
Thanks to Enigmatist and mhl.
Thanks to Enigmatist and mhl. I considered skipping this prize because I fare so poorly with this setter, but I decided to persevere throughout the week. By Friday I had, to my surprise, solved most of it (I missed the elephant theme) but was defeated by STINGO and CORONET. My best guess for the former was indeed stingo, but I could not parse it and thought that it was beer rather than strong liquor. Elsewhere I did a lot of guessing, then used Google to confirm, but at least I did know THURIO and LERNEAN. Too tough for me.
The sauvian scrabbler: thanks, that’s a much better parsing for HOHUM – I’ve updated the post with your suggestion.
I’m glad I was away for this one. Mhl you deserve a medal for unravelling it. The hidden theme provides some light relief in what looked like a slog to me but will have provided fun for some.
My heart sank when I saw the setter but this was rather easier than most of his puzzles. I think this may have been because of the the two long phrases, both of which went in rather quickly- no I didn’t spot the Ninas and I’ve never heard of most of them- and this gave me an in. CHA CHA CHA went in immediately
I’m not saying this was a walk in the park though. Easy for Enigmatist still = a difficult puzzle and I had to look up a number of obscurities- obscure to me anyway.
Good workout though!
Thanks Enigmatist.
Enjoyable in part, rather too many obscure words which needed google to confirm they existed and what they meant, but were gettable from the clues so fair enough for a prize maybe. However, the totally impenetrable obscurity of 22a left a bit of a bad taste. I didn’t see the elephants… How can one not see six elephants?
I”m impressed that you could write the blog a week after solving the puzzle, mhl, as I find that by then I have forgotten the answers!
Timon and I failed to finish this in our usual Sunday morning session, but I subsequently came up with LINDUM along with a parsing for CO-AUTHOR (which we had inserted without being able to explain it). Timon then came up with THURIO, which I was able to parse. We completely missed the elephants!
[I knew LINDUM from Fantasia Lindum, a cod 17th century album from Amazing Blondel in the early 70s. The suite is here, if anyone is interested in listening.]
[usually a lurker!]
I think 15a was originally EURASIAN (like one = AS I), then the solution was changed but not the clue (?)
essex boy @25
I had EURASIAN for a while too
sorry, scrub that – it doesn’t quite work, does it?
Nearly, though!
Missed the elephants in the room, and had to look up ANELLI, CHOLI, ANTISERUM, NEUTRETTO and LERNEAN. Should have looked up TONITE but I was so glad to get anything that I didn’t bother. Some very sneaky parsing here: I liked TREVI.
THURIO had me baffled so I left him blank. DNF.
PS I had EURASIAN at first too.
Excellent puzzle from the Master. I think JH is a little less formidable as Enigmatist than he is as Nimrod and Elgar – perhaps that’s just me? I’m still not convinced by “like one” for PEA. I interpreted it the same way as MHL but can’t help wondering if there’s more to it than an oblique allusion to peas in a pod.
Didn’t see the hidden elephants as I wasn’t expecting them. This isn’t a Jumbo crossword after all!
I thought this was great, not just because I solved it more easily than some appear to have done. I was delighted straight off by the reference to Paddy Clarke Ha! Ha! Ha!, which is a fantastic book.
I had to google “Valentine’s rival” to get THURIO, but I don’t see what’s unfair about the clue. Didn’t know TONITE as an explosive or LINDUM or CHOLI or LERNEAN either, but all got from parse + lookup.
My physics degree didn’t help with NEUTRETTO either; I had to get that from parse and confirm, too. I like the oxforddictionaries.com entry: “muon neutrino. Now rare.” Who knew that some subatomic particles were being hunted to extinction?
HOH is in fact often used by chemists as the formula for water since it reflects the structure of the water molecule.
Mhl: appreciate being told about the six elephants (which I missed, of course), but surely YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO MENTION THEM! Surprised you’ve never heard BOSS-EYED before. It was, btw, the target of a recent Guardian cluing comp and also the subject of a post on Separated By a Common Language last year.
Hi Tony @32
Yes, CHA CHA CHA and THIN were write-ins for me too, which gave me a misleadingly easy start.
The problem with THURIO is that it is generally accepted that obscure words should have straightforward parsings (Pasquale is the most skilled exponent of this); the parsing for this, based on a implied HOURI, was not straightforward!
Muffin,
Yes, I see what you mean. I’ve heard this expressed (in the context of setting puzzles) as the maxim: “Hard answer, easy clue; hard clue, easy answer”. It was my last in, but not hard if you google “Valentine’s rival”, which of course some don’t like to do. Personally I accept that there are often going to be words I need to get from resources (especially in the fields of mythology or classical music).
…in the dailies, of course; other rules apply to Azed and Mephisto et al
Beaten by THURIO, possibly because I couldn’t convince myself ROUGHEN was right (I was interpreting “I don’t want any more” as “ugh” so couldn’t account for the rest of the parsing).
Still, considering I was expecting a complete drubbing when I saw the setter, I can’t grumble.
Thanks, Enigmatist and mhl.
15 across… EUROPEAN is that even a fair clue? Not convinced with the parsing given above for it too.
Also 22 down TREVI, that’s definitely taking the p’s.
Didn’t solve 3d (HOHUM = boring, perhaps but not deadly boring) and 8a (didn’t know that OR is a tincture). Too many other dodgy clues for me eg ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM to me is something too awkward to mention, not suspect.
Thanks to Enigmatist and mhl. Couldn’t find your laughs, mhl, but plenty of your groans.
Very late to the party today – I had to go out before the blog was posted.
Many thanks, mhl – again I’m impressed that you can produce such a great blog a week after solving the puzzle. I agree entirely with the opening words of your preamble. I initially quailed at the sight of Enigmatist’s name but I have to say that I haven’t enjoyed a Prize puzzle so much for ages – I absolutely loved it.
A Prize puzzle in every sense as far as I was concerned. Some less familiar / unknown words – I was lucky enough to know LINDUM, LERN[a]EAN [from the Hydra] and THURIO [and lovely memories of ‘Three coins in the fountain’] but, with others [CHOLI, NEUTRETTO …], it was a case of following the directions and learning something new. I was familiar with BOSS-EYED but haven’t heard it used for decades.
I was stymied by BRER BEAR – one of the easiest clues, as it turned out. I’d completely forgotten about him and, anyway, I was fixated on ‘African’ being BOER, Doh!
muffin exhorted us the other day to have another look at the completed grid. muffin, you shouldn’t have done it – but I’m so glad you did: it meant that I found the unmentionable elephants myself, rather than having to come here for them – which put loads of icing and innumerable cherries on what I’d already marked down as an excellent puzzle.
Huge thanks to Enigmatist for a challenging and immensely satisfying puzzle.
Re the Ninas – I didn’t get around to checking them out (last Saturday’s Graun long since went in the bin, and today’s blog doesn’t reproduce the grid). So I resorted to going back to the Graun‘s online version and hit Reveal All.
I see that the Ninas are in fact each spanning two lights and collinear with them. I’ve not come across that sort of Nina before – I thought they were usually constructed by reading unchecked letters at right angles to the lights they’re in (like Arachne’s tribute of a few days ago). So this device is new to me.
Anyway, I can see now why obscure words like ANELLI and THURIO crept into this puzzle – it’s to satisfy the Ninas. Grrrrr!!! And even the elephants themselves are rather obscure: I’d heard of Hathi, Dumbo and Nellie, but not the others.
I suppose I ought to be impressed, but I know full well what sort of reception I’d get if I tried that dodge in one of my (amateurish) puzzles – I’d be taken to the cleaners!
Eileen
I’m so glad that you forgive me for that “spoiler”. As I said at the, time, I don’t think that it would have been any help for anyone who hadn’t have finished it!
Quite right on this occasion, muffin and I quite understand your enthusiasm in wanting to share it – but [adopting schoolmarmish tone ] we really shouldn’t comment at all on Prize puzzles until after the closing date. 😉
OK Eileen 🙂
Muffin@33, Tony@34, yes I think that summarises it precisely. Easy wordplay, hard solution, and vice versa.
I recall that I used IAGO in the wordplay in one of my (unpublished) creations, recently. It’s a very useful group of letters! I defined him as “tale-bearer” which is admittedly cryptic unless you have the GK. But I reckon IAGO is a much more familiar character than THURIO, just as Othello is far better known than 2GoV!
Re giving spoilers to the Prize – I seem to recall mentioning one a few weeks ago, but (as John Cleese would have put it) “I think I got away with it…” 🙂
Thanks mhl. Put me down as another who missed the ninas completely and who had to seek confirmation from Google for several derived answers. I had to stare at EUROPEAN for a long time and am still not really happy. I’m not convinced that OR=tincture either. LOI was THURIO after flirting with TRUDIE for a while. I have to confess I Googled Valentine’s rival too but, in spite of Tony’s comment @ 34, it wasn’t much help to me.
Biggles A @ 45
from eChambers:
or2 /ör/ (heraldry)
noun
The tincture gold or yellow, indicated in engraving and chiselling by dots.
OK, so OR = tincture isn’t necessarily the same as tincture = OR, but we are dealing with JH here. Some minds are bidrectional.
Very very hard. I confess to overusing Crossword Solver to get answers suing the cross letters. Didn’t see the ninas. Likes some of the clues I got but found other words unfamiliar or beyond my GK.
Thanks Enigmatist for a fiendishly clever puzzle, and mhl and other posters for an informative blog and discussion.
Not suing!!!! USING!!!
My Captcha answer was nought. Pretty much sums up where my efforts came to with this exercise.
Couldn’t finish this, but when I do the Prize crosswords I rate my effort as if it were an exam, so 28/30 = 93%, A+ and that’s good enough for me. I failed on Boss-eyed (never heard of it) and stingo (a doh when I saw mhl’s explanation – I had bunged in stinko unparsed). Many others were guesses from the crossers and construction of the clue, without knowing the meaning. Favourite(s) was/were the elephant/don’t mention it pair – a laugh out loud moment.
Thanks Enigmatist for the insurmountable challenge, and mlh for the explanations.
Julie@48 – I sympathise over the Captcha, I sometimes wonder whether there’s an arcane link between one’s Captcha ‘score’ and one’s progress in the crossword! (my current answer is 8, FWIW).
Incidentally, and this is one for Gaufrid probably – do we really need the Captcha? I mean – I’m perhaps (dare I say it?) more numerate than some folks, but even I find it a bit of an irritation. Would the site be overrun with bots if it weren’t for this?
Bearing in mind the ‘elephant’ theme, I can’t help thinking of the old joke. You know, the one about the guy standing on Hyde Park Corner tearing up bits of paper and throwing them away. Up comes a policeman: “What’s all this about then?” “Just keeping the elephants away.” “But there aren’t any elephants in Hyde Park.” “There you are – it works!”
Much the same could be said about some Captchas…
My second tussle with the Great Man this weekend after doing the Saturday 24/2 Indy Nimrod first. Of the two I think this was the harder. Managed to finish after a real struggle, though with 7 answers which were new words/terms/names and another 2-3 guesses. More or less worked out, or justified, the answers but missed the parsing of CO-AUTHOR which went in from the def. As for the Nina, well that was just too much to ask.
Off to work again tomorrow morning. A bit of light relief after the weekend Enigmatist / Nimrod double act!
Thanks to mhl and Enigmatist
Laccaria @50
“… do we really need the Captcha? …”
The simple answer is yes, we do. During the last ten years, Akismet (the site’s spam filter) has intercepted more than 4 million spam comments. The number would have been even greater if I hadn’t taken steps a few years ago to reduce the amount of spam reaching the site by blocking countries on the various Project Honeypot lists and by introducing a Captcha.
For example, during August 2014 Akismet intercepted 134,100 spam comments (14,977 on one day alone!). The measures I introduced cut the volume of spam to around 350,000 in both 2016 and 2017, despite an increase in the number of spam sources, though this year isn’t looking so good because there have already been 110,000 interceptions and we are not yet two months into the year.
Spam comments take up server resourses which can lead to slower response times when viewing the site, so I need to take every option available to minimise the number that reach the server. I say every option, but there is one that I am loath to introduce even though it could reduce the amount of spam, that is to require people to register with the site and then login before posting a comment.
Laccaria: I can’t speak for Gaufrid and fifteensquared specifically, but on WordPress sites that I manage you get an enormous amount of bot-generated comment spam. There are tools that can automatically filter out a lot of that, but they still leave a significant burden on the administrator to manually check the rest; requiring a captcha before leaving a comment really helps to cut down that work.
Sorry, Gaufrid, your comment appeared while I was writing that, so sorry for the redundancy….
The captcha’s also a very useful safeguard against submitting comments before deleting the worst bits. I wish my email had it, too.
Great puzzle, with the elephant/don’t mention it clues being the highlight. Sorry not to have spotted the other elephants.
Biggles A,
Admittedly you have to scroll past a lot of “news” stories about the recently passed Valentine’s Day, but eventually you get to Shakespearean refs for “Valentine’s rival”.
For or, my paper Chambers has:
or35 (her.) n. the tincture gold or yellow, indicated in engraving and chiselling by dots.
Since or is an example of a tincture and not vice versa, there’s no need for Simon S’s two-way thinking, is there?
That’s supposed to be a superscript 3, with no 5
[Laccaria,
IAGO is a useful combination? I can only think of Santiago off the top of my head. “Tale-bearer” is a lot more difficult than “Valentine’s rival”, imo. “Shakespearean tale-bearer”, maybe ok.]
Gaufrid @52 and mhl @53. Interesting insight into what goes on behind the scenes. Thank you for that. [Am I still hankering after a life in IT from which I retired some years ago? Thinks hard – no, I’m not. 🙂 ]
My sister was down for the weekend, and our general knowledge / flashes of inspiration complemented each other very well. Apart from THURIO – we thought of wordsearching for the answer but decided that wouldn’t be fair (might have thought differently if there was a decent prize). And it’s ‘only’ Shakespeare!
Tony @ 56
Fair point. Having checked OR, I assumed that tincture applied to all the heraldic colours, and didn’t check any of the others.
However, I’ve now checked my book on heraldry, in which I’ve long had an interest, which states “The metals, colours and furs used in heraldry are known as tinctures.”, so I think my point stands up.
Gaufrid and MHL – thanks for the explanation about captchas. Of course, I understand now.
Tony @58 – actually there are several words in which IAGO, or part of that word, can come up useful, e.g. AGO – also e.g. VIRAGO and DIAGONAL (that last looks good fitted into LAND backwards…) My own usage was rather different. I accept your point about adding the word “Shakespearian” – good idea!
As to THURIO – would it be too cheeky of me to make the odd suggestion? Like saying “Valentine’s rival in Verona” say? Also perhaps “Loveless nymph of paradise…” Anything to make just a bit more tractable, one of the hardest clues ever!
Simon S
My point was that or is a tincture, so tincture can clue for or, but tincture is not (necessarily) or, so to clue tincture (most would say, I think) you would have to put “e.g. or” or similar (DBE, “Definition By Example”). So it’s not symmetrical, which is what I took you to mean.
Laccaria
DIAGONAL! Good one!
Not sure about cluing AGO using “story-teller” with deletion of I. That would be a very tough clue.
VIRAGO would need an indirect anagram to use “story-teller”, wouldn’t it?
Truth to tell, I don’t really know Othello well enough even to have recognised “Shakespearean story-teller”, though I’m sure many do. First 4-letter word I would be considering is probably NARK.
Laccaria, sorry, I was unfair: maybe you could insert R into IAGO as part of a clue for VIRAGO
Simon S and Tony. Thank you.