Apologies for the delay in posting this, but I actually forgot about it..
…having solved it last week, but still having too clues unparsed, I got on with the rest of my life, intending to return to it, and it slipped my mind, so here’s what I have so far, with question marks at 25ac and 9dn.
Apologies, but I’m sure the gaps will be filled within seconds by my esteemed fellow solvers.
| Across | ||
| 1 | DEFASTE | Once discountenanced, end for Murray comes about quickly (7) |
|
DEE (Scots for “die”, so “end for Murray”) comes about FAST (“quickly”) Defaste is old form of the word “defaced” |
||
| 6 | DOBRA | Bit of money required to ?x part of her underwear? (5) |
| DO (“fix”) + BRA (“part of her underwear”)
The dobra is the unit of currency of Sao Tome and Principe. |
||
| 10 | RATE FIXING | Establishing pay for job, I’ll be in organized tax fringe (10, 2 words) |
| I in *(tax fringe) | ||
| 11 | WEAL | Our lot almost entirely prospering up north (4) |
| WEAL(th) (“our lot”, almost entirely) | ||
| 12 | GAGGLE | Joke, leg pulled, creating cackle (6) |
| GAG (“joke”) + *(leg) | ||
| 14 | ACTANT | Is this sort of agent OC turning a contact? (6) |
| *(a cntat) (“a contact” without OC) | ||
| 16 | RACLOIR | This scrapes carriole badly, striking rear (7) |
| *(carriol) (The rear of “carriole” has been struck) | ||
| 17 | E-TYPE | Sporty model yet out of shape, attending gym (5) |
| *(yet) attending PE (“gym”)
Refers to the classic E-Type Jaguar sports car |
||
| 19 | INNOCENTS | Pub with nothing beside lolly for children? (9) |
| INN (“pub”) with O (“nothing”) beside CENTS (“lolly”) | ||
| 21 | APERIENTS | Batting spree anti looseners (9) |
| *(spree anti) | ||
| 24 | CALEB | Type of TV? Third to last as name for reliability (5) |
| CA(b)LE-B (“type of TV” (cable) with it’s third letter moved to last)
Caleb comes from the Hebrew for “dog” and signifies devotion to God, reliability and fidelity. |
||
| 25 | SUBMISS | Under-secretary? No longer compliant (7) |
| SUB (“under”) + MISS (“sceretary”)
Not sure if this parsing is correct. |
||
| 29 | NO-HOPE | Unlikely to win, one trips straddling jump (6) |
| *(one) straddling HOP (“jump”) | ||
| 30 | NEBELS | Harps apparently featured in ?ne Belshazzar (6) |
| Hidden [featured] in “fiNE BELShazzar”
A nebel or bevel is a Jewish instrument that looks a bit like a drum with a lyre atached to it. |
||
| 31 | AGIN | Con acting with arti?ce (4) |
| A (acting) with GIN (“artifice”) | ||
| 32 | CORSETIERE | She initially appears in erotic dancing, before requiring dealer in bodices (10) |
| S(he) [initially] appears in *(erotic) + ERE (“before”) | ||
| 33 | EYOTS | Isolated spots, yet so developed (5) |
| *(yet so) | ||
| 34 | CORONAE | Trumpets? Playing one in central part (7) |
| ON (“playing”) + A (“one”) in CORE (“central part”)
The corona is the trumpet-like part of certain flowers, such as daffodils. |
||
| Down | ||
| 1 | DOWAR | Encampment forming to make peace?The opposite (5) |
| To “do war” is the opposite of to “make peace”.
A dowar (more commonly spelt “duar”) is an Arab encampment. |
||
| 2 | ELECAMPANE | Medicinal sweet: crushed pecan and meal, eastern (10) |
| *(pecan meal) + E (“eastern”) | ||
| 3 | FRATCH | Local spat arising from recipe fed to overweight child (6) |
| R (recipe) fed to FAT (“overweight”) CH (child) | ||
| 4 | STENO | Notes may have been rendered in this (5) |
| *(notes) and &lit. | ||
| 5 | TESTINESS | Being short I’ll be enveloped in check cape? (9) |
| I enveloped in TEST (“check”) + NESS (“cape”) | ||
| 6 | DIALECT | Traditional poem about Guinness, say, in a manner of speaking (7) |
| DIT (“traditional poem”) about ALEC (“Guinness, say”) | ||
| 7 | OXGATE | Zero tax e.g. extorted for portion of old ploughland (6) |
| *(o tax eg) where the O = “zero”
An oxgate was an area of land that an ox could be expected to plough in a year (approximately 13 acres), more commonly known as an “oxgang”. |
||
| 8 | BIGG | Barley making strong-?avoured gallons (4) |
| BIG (“strong-flavoured”) + G (gallons) | ||
| 9 | AGELESS | Worthless stu?, this? It’s garb that never dates (7) |
| (garb) AGELESS
Not sure how to parse this one. |
||
| 13 | LEPTOSPIRA | Spoil a pet badly, fed with last of supper – source of nasty bacteria (10) |
| *(spoil a pet) fed with [last of] (suppe)R
Leptospira is a genus of bacteria, an infection of which can cause some nasty side-effects. |
||
| 15 | PRONUNCIO | Papal legate i/c poor, wretched, including religieuse (9) |
| *(ic poor) including NUN (“religieuse”) | ||
| 18 | VACANCE | Outing in Scotland? See a growth that’s unending (7) |
| v. (“see”) + A CANCE(r) (“growth” that’s unending) | ||
| 20 | NIBBLES | Savoury items made of foreign corn brought in by posh people (7) |
| BLÉ (French for “wheat”, so “foreign corn”) brought in by NIBS (“posh people”) | ||
| 22 | REGEST | Old record, say, featured in intermission (6) |
| E.G. (“say”) featured in REST (“intermission”)
Regest is an old form of register. |
||
| 23 | BIOGEN | Protoplasmal unit I placed upright in container (6) |
| <=EGO (“I”, placed upright) in BIN (“container”) | ||
| 26 | BOXER | Dog, oriental one hostile to foreigners, revolting? (5) |
| Double definition, the second referring to the anti-foreign rebellion by Chinese “boxers” between 1899 and 1901, so-called because of their skills in martial arts. | ||
| 27 | SENTE | Council of elders striking a currency unit in African country (5) |
| SEN(a)TE (“council of elders”, striking A)
A sente is a coin in Lesotho |
||
| 28 | EBRO | River bore surging (4) |
| *(bore) | ||
*anagram
Thanks, loonapick. I think 9d is as follows: “worthless stuff” = garbage. “This”, referring to the clue’s answer, = “ageless”. “Garbage” ageless = “garb”. (I don’t know why you’ve got “worthless stu?” – possibly a misprint in the printed version?). I think you’re right about SUBMISS, but it strikes me as weak as well as sexist. 😉
Oh, in reply to myself, it looks like you’re using a character set my computer doesn’t fully recognise. Eg in 8d my screen is showing “strong-?avoured” and in 6a “?x” for “fix”.
Yes, it does look as if certain pairs of characters – ‘f’ followed by another letter – are being coded by a single character in the character set used for the clues, and these are not being rendered correctly on this website.
As usual, I can remember nothing about solving this last Sunday. I did note that I couldn’t parse 31ac and 20dn so thanks for the explanations, but I’m not sure I parsed 9dn either but didn’t note that down. Often in the white heat of solving I’m so pleased to have got the answer I don’t get round to then parsing all the answers.
I didn’t do the crossword but it looks to me as if ‘sub-miss’, which isn’t in Chambers in this sense, is, since it has a question mark, just a whimsical way of describing an under-secretary.
Wil, I can’t see why a secretary is a ‘Miss’ – nothing in C or Bradford’s sheds any light on it, so I think that is the reason for the question mark. A better clue might have been “Deputy teacher…”
The wordplay in 11ac, I believe, is WE (‘Our lot’) + AL(l) (‘almost entirely’). The ‘up north’ looks like an error to me, but the verbal noun ‘prospering’ could just about serve as the definition for weal[2] on its own.
Secretary = Miss? Am I missing something?
I see Chambers gives a definition of “Miss” as “to address a waitress, female teacher, etc.” so if you squint and the light is bad it could just about mean a secretary.
Apologies for the formatting of the clues.
Thanks Brian for the explanation of AGELESS. I had some preliminary thoughts along those lines but couldn’t quite get there.
DRC – your parsing works better – but I think the up north is right as “weal” or “weel” are used in Scotland to mean “well” which I take to be a synonym for prosperous.
I’d be fine with ‘weel’, which the Scottish National Dictionary indicates can mean ‘in good health’, but neither Chambers nor the SND shows ‘weal’ as an alternative spelling of weel in this sense (weel[3] in Chambers) and although the OED offers an impressive assortment of 27 alternative spellings for ‘well’ (who knew?), ‘weal’ is not among them.
DRC – I’ll bow to your research. As a Scot, I thought I’d seen it spelled both ways, but my aging memory may have failed me here.
Submiss means compliant, not ‘no longer compliant’, so the definition may be trying to dig its way out of sexism by insisting that a ‘miss’ is a ‘secretary no longer’ (that is, the term is from the olden times).
Although ‘submiss’ is also archaic, so take that with a shaker of salt.
“a ‘secretary no longer’ (that is, the term is from the olden times).”
But what reference?
Thanks both.
But Chambers does show WEAL as being the same as WEEL. It doesn’t show it the other way round. I certainly had to check.
These are not crosswords I can do in one sitting, or without help. But the stretch is good.
All the editions of Chambers that I have show ‘weal’ as a variant spelling of weel[1], a whirlpool up north, but not of weel[3], prospering up north.
If I print directly from the PDF in the browser I get the same odd double characters. Now I download it the Acrobat reader and print from that, and the problem disappears.
Nice to read a few more than the usual sparse comments list. As always many thanks to Azed and to loonapick for a clear blog. I still rely on paper so don’t have the problems of you moderns.
No-one else seems to have been bothered by NIBBLES but it set me wondering how many compilers are linguists and how far one’s knowledge of French/German is supposed to stretch. Der/Un/Il etc are commonly expected and my being married to a linguist means my vocabulary is pretty good so “ble” was no obstacle. Nor was RACLOIR, recalling the production of a fondue in a Calais restaurant fifty years ago! But had it been a “German corn” I should have had no idea. Still it does stretch us and that’s surely the whole point.
The discussion about the double letters coming out oddly reminds me of my time as a teenager at a boarding school where we actually had a Printing Society doing letterpress printing. Normally composing type meant assembling a separate piece of metal for each letter (and one or more for each space). However, in most typefaces, the (part that prints as the) top right hand corner of the lower-case letter f overhangs the supporting bit – I am deliberately avoiding the technical terms, which I do not think I actually knew at the time anyway. This allows words like “face” to be shown with part of the letter f above the letter a. However, it meant that you could not follow a single letter f by another “tall” letter without inserting unnecessary space, so the tray of type had separate pieces for each of the combinations ff, fi, fl, ffi, and ffl. On most computer printing systems, the use of these combinations is not strictly necessary, but it still makes a small improvement in the appearance of the printed word if they are used and extended character sets include these combinations for that reason.
I have left it a bit late to come in on this issue, partly because I hoped someone else would explain it more eloquently that I have managed, but hope this is of interest to at least some readers.
… and of course I meant “more eloquently than I have managed”.
Thanks, PB – I found that very interesting, not least because I have always felt the same way about IT problems as I do about crossword clues – I don’t consider them solved unless I have an explanation for them.