Guardian 27,446 / Puck

59 comments on “Guardian 27,446 / Puck”

1. We’d finished before the blog was posted so I thought I’d try writing my comments before seeing either the blog or other contributions – and it’s much harder having nothing to bounce off or connect with!
   The 4,6,6 solution remains unparsed, there were several I enjoyed (13,14,26,6,21) and one (2d) where I didn’t like extremely indicating the last two letters of dear. New words were SPIKENARD RHONCHI TEPIDARIUM and the tax meaning of CESS but all were fairly clued and gettable with crossers in. Loi was VETERAN which took much longer than it should given we had VET in puzzle recently.
   Thanks to Puck for giving us an excuse to stay in bed and to Eileen who will no doubt have explained everyone her usual comprehensive style – I’ll read it now.

2. And so the perils of posting before reading the blog are revealed! Of course 2d is fine with CA rather than just C for about. And I realised I hadn’t fully parsed 16,9 – and I doubt I ever would. Thanks for that Eileen, and Hawaii 5-0 (predictive text even comes up with a policeman emoji!) explanation. Back to posting after digesting from now on.

3. Thanks Puck and Eileen

   I didn’t enjoy this as much as most Pucks. I had got to MOUNTAINS before I entered anything, but the next two were write-ins, and the rest then went fairly easily. I didn’t know FIVE-O, but a hint on the Guardian site led me to Google it.

   I know that it’s Guardian policy, but I don’t like O’CLOCK being enumerated as (6)

   Why does Republican give RED in 3d?

4. Thanks for the impeccable blog, Eileen. Extra kudos for spotting the inconsistency in “write in.” I was so pleased at managing (unusually for me) to parse all of Puck’s tortuous wordplay, that I didn’t notice. Particularly impressed by Antwerp! But wasn’t the tepidarium the middle room? Between the hot and the cold?

5. Please don’t comment on the error in the parsing of 10, 12, 24 while I correct it!

6. [I was pleased to know TEPIDARIUM from visits to Roman sites. There’s a particularly good exhibition of a Roman bath-house at Caerleon.]

7. It seems like the NW was written for an American audience. Havent heard of CESS for tax-just thought it was a naff clue-and still do.

   Republican=R and RED is left/communist-American  again

   The combination of Five O for police (American) and OCLOCK as one word is a bad combination for me.I would maybe excuse either of them alone but….

   And extremely dear is shurely DR-but bravely and defensively blogged.

   One more Americanism-Trump appearing in an answer-and a clue!!Only Knut should be allowed to use that wretched word.

   Until I got to the NW I was enjoying it. SPIKENARD and FISSURES etc but like Boatman I think he needed editing.

   On a good day I like both compilers but they both went off piste this week(VETERAN was first in)

   (I’m not filling in for hh)

8. I don’t understand the problem with 29a. Right is the opposite of left and in is the opposite of out. Am I missing something?

9. Incidentally, as a collector of spoof French-English translations (my favourite being “mercredi” = “sugar”) I was very happy to discover a new one. 5-0 égale 22! Wikipédia has 15 different possible etymologies for the expression “Vingt-deux, voilà les flics!”

10. muffin @3: red is the traditional colour of the US Republican party: commentators refer to Red and Blue (Democrat) states with regard to the Electoral College etc.

    Thanks to Eileen for the blog and Puck for the enjoyable challenge.

11. Thanks Puck and Eileen

    I don’t have a problem with 29 either, as I thought of it in the hokey-cokey sense.

    muffin @ 3: RED = Republican as it’s the colour used on maps to denote which states voted that way, vs BLUE for Democrat.

12. Thanks Andrew and Simon. Other way round from the UK then (red more left-wing than blue!)

13. Just seen 13A. Oh dear. Another saga of when is a homophone not a homophone. Solved it. Don’t care.
    After 2 read throughs a only got 4 answers. Going to be a long day

14. Blaise @4 – years ago, I used to use some of my precious summer holiday marking GCSE Latin papers. I wish I had a pound for the number of accounts of the Roman baths I’ve read. The tepidarium was the first room [after the apodyterium  – changing room] where bathers would “spend a little time sitting on benches round the wall in a warm, steamy atmosphere, perspiring gently and preparing for the higher temperatures in the next room. This is the caldarium [hot room].”  [from the Cambridge Latin Course – doggedly memorised and reproduced verbatim, year after year.] 😉

     

     

15. Puck is always great fun and today was no exception. Yes, I agree with the minor gripes about “extremely dear” but it pales into insignificance as I m still laughing about “fissures”. Thanks to Puck, Eileen for the invaluable blog and Blaise for a most informative link 3865 ?

16. Sorry 3856 and no question mark

17. Solved it all apart from TEPIDARIUM which is a DNK as were a few others. Some too convoluted parsings for my liking but maybe I’m just not as good at this as others.

18. I have no problem with ‘extremely dear’ – taking ‘extreme’ as meaning ‘last’.

19. Eileen, you take me back to my school days: Apodyterium- The baring of feet room !

20. Blaise@9: Thanks for the French stuff re 22, but I don’t know why mercredi should be sugar. I am reminded, I think it’s because it’s a sort of French pun involved, of the joke about the Belgian who sets off to see Calais in his car. When he crosses the border into France he sees a large placard with PAS DE CALAIS on it so he turns round and drives home.

    Managed to just about complete this but as usual could not parse everything, so thanks to Eileen for the clear explanations and Puck for the puzzle.

21. compus @7: The term ‘Five-o’ to refer to the police was popularised in the hit TV show ‘The Wire’, which was just as popular here in Britain, so our youth culture adopted it. I’ve actually heard it used more often in British police procedurals than American ones in recent years. It was also mentioned in this old Top Gear segment from 2014.

    I really enjoyed this puzzle, especially the FIVE-O… clue.

    Thanks to all.

22. If you take the p out of parsed you get arsed. Which I cannot be about surfaces and parsing etc. If it fits put it in – then work out why. I enjoyed this. Thanks to Puck and Eileen.

23. I don’t think I’ve ever completed/solved a puzzle like today’s with so many uncertainties left about how and why…

24. Quite new to this cryptic crossword business and can now make a decent attempt at most of them, but to me Puck lives in some parallel universe I have yet to discover. Mad as a bucket of frogs.

25. Very challenging for the Paddingtons this morning. Grateful to Eileen for help with the parsing. Couldn’t have done this without Mr Paddington Bear.

26. Martin @20. If you start to say “merde” and suddenly become aware of the presence of your maiden aunt who’s a stickler for decorum and has promised to will you her vast fortune, you transform it into mer-credi… ‘Nuff said?

27. Lots of fun today. I agree with Rullytully that “right in” worked as a literal opposite of “left out”. FIVE OCLOCK SHADOW was my favourite, I think, it was very satisfying to tease out all the different elements at work, with the deceptive “shower” the cherry on the cake. Also liked Vlad (not that one!)

    Surprised not to see any discussion on “infirm” as Eileen predicted. Personally I’m all for prompts like that as they widen up the possibilities.

    Thanks to Eileen for comprehensive blog and Puck for a midwinter’s dream

28. Finished by midday after all. Good fun in the end.
    Last in- veteran.
    And copmus had it in first.
    Just goes to show how many ways the brain works and crosswords get solved.
    Did anyone else wonder how puck would dare use negress as a synonym for a degenerate? I was so pleased when I worked out the alternative.

29. Thanks to Puck and Eileen for the ones I could not parse. I found this quite tough and my Friday curse struck again for the third week in a row with a DNF. Could not get five o’clock shadow which meant I struggled with the NW and SE. Could not get process even though I guessed credo, and missed rhonchi and failed on abbot through lack of crossers. That said although tough I enjoyed what I did with quite a few new words and this week not going to tempt fate about next week. Thanks again to Puck and Eileen.

30. Thanks to the mischievous and playful Puck and the inimitable Eileen – great puzzle and thorough and detailed explanations of the solutions.
    Whizzed through with lots on the first pass but then stalled.
    Admit to needing to look up a couple of things to fill in 19a SPIKENARD (though I knew the ointment NARD, and 26a TEPIDARIUM (I knew hypocausts but not that bathing set-up).
    Going against some others’ criticisms, I ticked 10,12,24a FIVE O’CLOCK SHADOW and 16a, 9d KEEP A STIFF UPPER LIP. And I did like 20d KASHMIR and 22d IMPALE.
    Thanks to fellow solvers for adding further interest.

31. It took a walk in the snow for me to get the NW corner, especially FIVE OCLOCK SHADOW, but I couldn’t parse it. Lovely puzzle, particularly KASHMIR and ABBOT. Many thanks to Puck and Eileen.

32. Couldn’t remember whether it was a 9 o’clock or 5 o’clock shadow. Tried the former first and check button said no. Somehow it completely escaped me that American slang from a long-dead TV series which I never watched led by process of truncation to a word for police! Ah well, maybe I will get luckier next time.

    A bit of a shame as I quite liked the Pasqualean clues to the obscurities SPIKENARD, TEPIDARIUM and RONCHI.

33. Tough and educational, but quite an entertaining challenge.

    Thanks to Puck and Eileen

34. I for one loved FIVE O’CLOCK SHADOW and KEEP A STIFF UPPER LIP, but I never would have parsed either of them in a million years.  Eileen, you’re impressive!

    I’m puzzled by Simon Peter.  The gospel says that Jesus met two fishermen, Andrew and “Simon called Peter”, which would imply he already went by both names, but elsewhere we read that Jesus gave Simon the name Peter — actually Cephas, which is Aramaic for rock, as Peter is in Greek.

    RAILCAR is supposedly an American term, but I’ve never heard of it.  So I googled it, and it’s a self-propelling train car (not needing an engine) used in the UK and Australia.  So the NW would seem to be less American than some think.

    I’d met the word “cess” in “bad cess to you,” so I googled that and found a link to the Irish Tiimes which gives far more meanings than I’d ever imagined, including “luck,” for the “bad cess” expression.  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/words-we-use-cess-1.1476301

35. Apropos 13 I still remember the school hymn that went I will make you vicious old men. This is the other David, by the way.

36. gsol@15/16  3856 has defeated me. Can you, or anyone explain?

37. A tough puzzle, beautifully and even handedly analysed and appraised by the always delightful, always civilised Eileen, whose blog is the one I enjoy most.
    I sympathise with the holiday marking. I once marked the A level Italian prose and was astonished by the skill of the candidates (mostly brainy public schoolboys), and how they negotiated tricky subordinate clauses requiring the Subjunctive. At the last minute, two huge heaps of scripts were dumped by the postman on the dustbin in the outhouse while I was at work (‘Best place for them,’ a board member unkindly remarked). They came from the two Malta islands and were frighteningly bad. I had to revise my entire marking scheme.

38. I couldn’t agree more with Dutch man. If it fits put it in and work out why afterwards. But you’d expect me to say that, wouldn’t you!

39. Other David again. Unlike my namesake I enjoyed this one. I’m with Tenerifemiller and Dutchman on the question of analysis, and if I had any advice for new David it would be not to worry too much – think laterally and creatively. After a time you can sense when you’ve got the right answer

40. Just picking up on Valentine’s comment – I knew ‘cess’ from Synge’s ‘Playboy of the Western World’  ‘the thousand militia—bad cess to them!—walking idle through the land.’

41. Thanks Eileen for blog, which cleared up several mysteries – particularly explaining FIVE-O as I’d never watched any of the relevant programmes.  By the way, in your comment on 23ac, you’ve overlooked that the clue refers back to 5 12 (i.e. VETERAN O’CLOCK) so that 5 would give the ‘old’ – but the O from 12 then is superfluous.

42. Thanks Puck and Eileen.

    Not quite my jorum of lush but as this is the third time I have tried to post, previous efforts being wiped through my own carelessness, I’m inclined to think that I’m just having on off-day. Liked PAISLEY, CREDO and RHONCHI.

    ulyanova@36: 3856 occurs in Blaise’s@9 link representing “chef” as an indicator of police activity.  The numbers represent the situation in the alphabet of the letters of “chef” and add up to 22 which French miscreants use to warn about, well, police activity.  Apparently.  I wonder if gsol@15/16 is addressing Blaise as “chef”?

43. Thanks for the enlightenment, Eileen@14. My sole knowledge of the subject came from looking up the word in Chambers to check the thing existed. They give “A warm room between the cold and hot rooms of a Roman bath”. I presume their “cold room” is the apodyterium.

44. peterM@41: I think what Eileen indicates is that VETERAN is the definition for OLD-TIMER?

45. peterM @41

    I thought that at first, but Eileen is right. 5 (VETERAN ) is the definition for OLD TIMER; 12 (O CLOCK) is the word play.

46. ulyanova@36,  Like five-o, 22 is the french way of warning that police are nearby. The french word for ‘chief’ is ‘chef’, it’s letters correspond to the numbers 3856 which when added equal 22

47. Failed on this. SPIKENARD completely defeated me despite getting the PIKE bit + the crossers. I didn’t know CESS but I got PROCESS as a guess and I did get CREDO from knowing that RED = Republican but I imagine that wasn’t obvious to many UK solvers.
    Not one of my favorites.
    Thanks Puck.

48. I “reverse-parsed” 19A, not being a fan of Jesus and his doings with women. Got 5 o’clock shadow despite having no clue about the vernacular meaning of “five-o”. The things you learn in crosswordlandia, eh?

49. My thanks to Alphalpha @44 and muffin @45 for your explanation of my explanation [I underlined ‘5’ as the definition]: I’ve been involved with our customary family start-of-the-weekend glass of wine or two. 😉

50. Thank you, Emily @ 46.

51. Thanks to Puck and Eileen. I needed more than the usual amount of help with parsing, especially with the long answers. Yes, Red = Republican is linked to colors for states on an election day map, and my unreliable memory tells me that 5-0 in the Hawaii 5-0 version is somehow liked to that state being the 50th to join the union.

52. Six incomplete today, but I was quite pleased with that result. I was especially pleased to get RHONCHI, (a) as I’d never come across it and (b) because I have a real blind spot with ‘hidden word’ clues.

    Thanks to Puck and Eileen

     

     

53. Well I’m glad the parsing of 6D wasn’t what I initially thought it was.  For a moment I almost spat my red wine out.

54. Lots of ingenuity here, if not quite as tough a challenge as earlier in the week!  Liked the deception in ANTWERP (although with the crossers the write-in was obvious) and OLD-TIMER – good reverse clueing there!  Also liked IMPALE, ABBOT and MOUNTAINS.

    But the downside.  Once I saw the parsing of KEEP A STIFF UPPER LIP, I gave out a deep sigh.  Didn’t we have CANTER -> CANTONESE only a day or two ago?  Sorry, don’t know whether it’s that my version of English (basically, RP) is rhotic or non-rhotic or whatever, but neither of these homophones work for me – sorry!

    Couldn’t quite parse FIVE O’CLOCK SHADOW which is a shame because the definition is brilliant – once you get it!  I thought SHADOW could be the name of a dog – was there one in one of the old TV series – Z-Cars perhaps?  My memory doesn’t go that far back…

    When I got to CREDO I was baffled.  How does RED = Republican?  Perhaps those who fought in the Spanish Civil War befitted that description, but surely not more recent examples?!  A pity, because the lift-and-separate wordplay is clever (for those who allow it – Ximenes doesn’t).  I would have simply clued it “An infirm Communist…” etc, no arguments!

    New word to me, RHONCHI (I’d have got “Bronchi” quicker), but fair enough as a hidden word.  Had vague recollection of SPIKENARD from somewhere but had to look it up to find its meaning.   I don’t think it’s purely biblical in usage.  And TEPIDARIUM hovered on the fringes of my subconscious – the crossers being almost all vowels made it not that easy to unravel!

    Thanks to Puck and Eileen.  I hope my gripes are seen as constructive.

55. Just looked at the other comments – and realise that in the USA political colours (“colors”?) are reversed as compared with what’s usual in the UK – i.e. red for the Republicans and blue for the Democrats.  Never would have spotted that!  If it’s so, why does Drumpf always wear a blue tie?

56. 5/12/24a might have taken you a few minutes to parse, Eileen, but I’m glad that’s all the time I spent on it because I would never have succeeded in parsing it.  FIVE at 10a was actually a guess because although I knew the rhythm of the phrase I didn’t know whether it was five or nine, and the clue didn’t help at all.

    This was not Puck’s best.  I do normally like getting my brain round his quite testing clues, but I found a few of them today a bit unclear.  PROCESS, CALDERA and TEPIDARIUM were guesses.  When I needed a bit of luck I got it with SPIKENARD – the ‘K’ was a great aid to progress at that point.

    I may find that I will have to ease up on my resolve not to look things up while solving – I struggled a bit today.

    Thanks to Puck, and especially to Eileen today for explaining the big mystery of the SHADOW and other little mysteries elsewhere.

57. Finally here, quite late in the day.  I have had a perfectly dreadful day at work today (and I’m still here after 7 pm, on a Friday.  Sigh.).  Puck’s puzzle, and reading Eileen’s blog and the comments above, were good mood lifters.  Having said that, I was positively stumped on the parsing of FIVE O’CLOCK SHADOW, and never would have gotten it without coming here.  For me, the sticking point was with CLOCK = “see”, a UK usage with which I was unfamiliar.  The good part about dwelling on this answer for as long as I did, was that I started having this song go though my head, and surely there are worse things than that.  (Although, TBH, Julian Cope’s cover version is better known to me — and I like that version very much as well.)

    10,12,24 was not my LOI, not by a long shot.  It was just a BIFD that I came back at the end to try to parse, without success.  My LOI, which went in hours after my POI (ha ha!  Acronym for “penultimate one in”), was TEPIDARIUM.  Being raised in the US, my knowledge of the history and day to day culture of Rome probably pales in comparison to the off-hand knowledge of most schoolchildren in the UK.  I should say, my solving instincts got me pretty close: I thought the definition portion of the clue could be “bathroom”, and the answer some type of (_ E _ I _) “-ARIUM” that I had not heard of . . . but then I also considered whether “Bad idea” could the definition, and seeing Tump’s name in the clue made me wonder if the answer could be GENITALISM (if there could be such a word), but I couldn’t get it to parse!  (Ha ha)

    Well, I’m obviously getting punchy.  Time to get back to work.

    Many thanks to Puck for a fun and challenging puzzle (as always!), to Eileen for a clear and thoughtful blog (as always!), and to the other commenters for the enjoyable and often humorous observations (as always!).  Have a good weekend all.

58. When I was doing this puzzle, I had somehow dredged up ‘cess’ from deep memory.  I have now just  seen it in an official directive (written in Hindi) in an Indian state gazette and also found it in a Hindi dictionary, the venerable Hindi Shabda Sagar.  A colonial legacy, I imagine!

59. Doing this crossword some months later, I see that the criticisms of 29 across (write in) overlook the significance of “to us” in the clue: for example, “write in if you have any suggestions”.

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