Very entertaining, put a smile on my face. Thank you Puck.
| ACROSS | ||
| 8 | FIRE DOOR | Got rid of jumper after a flipping emergency exit (4,4) |
| FIRED (got rid of) then ROO (kangaroo, jumper) all reversed (after a flipping) | ||
| 9 | UNHOOK | Release a foreign film featuring Peter Pan (6) |
| UN (A in French, foreign) then HOOK (film featuring Peter Pan) | ||
| 10 | ASCOTS | One northerner’s neckwear (6) |
| A (one) SCOT’S (northerner’s) – plural of ascot, a type of tie | ||
| 11 | ADMIRERS | Those who very much like being married, sadly single (8) |
| anagram (sadly) of MARRIED then S (single) | ||
| 12 | FORD | Cross over, right through openings of 7 (4) |
| O (over) R (right) inside (trough) first letters (openings) of Fourth Dimension | ||
| 13 | APOSTROPHE | If letters were missing, this could be the fourth character of eight in a string (10) |
| if POST (letters) were missing then ApostROPHE (this) could be the fourth character of eigHt in A ROPE (string) – definition is &lit.
An apostrophe is something that indicates missing characters. It is a shame that the apostrophe in A’ROPHE is second in a string of 7 rather than fourth in a series of 8, but you can’t have everything! |
||
| 15 | ATINGLE | Quivering with delight due to funny tag line (7) |
| anagram (funny) of TAG LINE | ||
| 16 | HOBNAIL | House number in guarantee, a provider of sole security (7) |
| HO (house) then N (number) inside BAIL (guarantee) – secures the sole of a boot | ||
| 18 | RECOMPENSE | Republican 19 reportedly receives green money as payment (10) |
| R (republican) then M PENSE sounds like (reportedly) “M Pence” (Mike Pence, Vice President) contains (receives) ECO (green). |
||
| 19 | VEEP | 5p’s about equivalent to what 12 was once (4) |
| V (5) then PEE (the letter P) reversed (about) – Gerald Ford (12) was once the Vice President (veep) of the United States | ||
| 20 | COMMONER | More usual term for an MP? (8) |
| double definition | ||
| 22 | REMISS | Careless Whisper, heartily covered by Island rock band first (6) |
| whiSper (the heart of, middle letter) inside (covered by) IS (island) following REM (rock band) | ||
| 23 | STANCE | Attitude shown by earliest ancestors (6) |
| found inside earlieST ANCEstors | ||
| 24 | FOLDEROL | Dessert containing large foreign article is a showy but worthless trifle (8) |
| FOOL (dessert) contains L (large) DER (the in German, foreign article) | ||
| DOWN | ||
| 1 | FIRST OF THE MONTH | ‘Now you might feel the pinch‘ (T May?) (5,2,3,5) |
| THE FIRST OF THE (T, first letter of The) then MONTH (may) – from the saying a pinch and a punch for the first of the month | ||
| 2 | SECOND IN COMMAND | Right-hand man who always produces the circular letter (6,2,7) |
| the SECOND IN COMMAND is the letter O (the circular letter) | ||
| 3 | CODSWALLOP | Fish supper without superior beer is rubbish (10) |
| COD (fish) Supper missing UPPER (superior) then WALLOP (beer) | ||
| 4 | DREAM ON | Fellow keeping the Queen up after midnight? That’s highly unlikely! (5,2) |
| DON (fellow) contains (keeping) ER (The Queen) reversed (up) and AM (after midnight) | ||
| 5 | GUAM | Pacific island where American has to stick around (4) |
| A (American) inside (has…around) GUM (to stick) | ||
| 6 | THIRD OF NOVEMBER | V-day? (5,2,8) |
| V is the third letter of noVember | ||
| 7 | FOURTH DIMENSION | Time of month one is under strain (6,9) |
| anagram (strain) OF MONTH I (one) IS UNDER | ||
| 14 | TWO-YEAR-OLD | Thrower of tantrums, perhaps one that’s ridden in 10 Queen Mary Stakes (3-4-3) |
| double definition – a flat race for two-year-old fillies | ||
| 17 | ENGRAFT | Implant essential: need good root alternative for tooth, initially (7) |
| initial letters of Essential Need Good Root Alternative For Tooth | ||
| 21 | NEEP | 10 veg in one pie, cooked before 10 leaves (4) |
| anagram (cooked) of ONE PIE then IO (10) leaves – the definition is A SCOTS VEGETABLE
When solving 10 across I wondered why Puck chose an awkward plural as the solution. Now I know! |
||
Yes, very entertaining – and the 4 linked long entries are quite an achievement.
Re 18a, the correct spelling of the word is RECOMPENSE (S rather than C, as in “compensate”), so “reportedly” is needed to make PENCE into PENSE. It’s an easy spelling mistake to make, though, and a shame that the crossers don’t help.
Thanks Puck and PeeDee.
Thanks PeeDee. A pleasant interlude with inventive clues. It took me a while and crossing letters to realise that 10a could be plural, ascot came readily to mind but I dismissed it.
I think there is a spelling mistake in 18a, the answer should be recompense which explains the ‘reportedly’.
Thanks to Puck and PeeDee. I needed help with parsing, especially with APOSTROPHE, and took all week to figure out NEEP, but I did get it.
Pipped at the post by Puck – just couldn’t see 21d NEEP, though like acd@3, I thought about it all week – however unlike acd, I didn’t get it, so this was a dnf for me. (I kept trying to fit in NOEL to no avail.) A pity to disappoint myself at the end as I really found it a witty and sparkling offering by Pick. Like Quirister and Biggles, I had RECOMPENSE at 18a through the application of “reportedly” as the homophone indicator. My personal favourite was 14d TWO-YEAR OLDS (my great-niece Florence turned 2 on Wednesday! and while she is a dear little girl, she is definitely showing a bit of attitude when she doesn’t get her own way).
BTW, isn’t FOLDEROL at 24a a delightful word?
I solved this quite quickly, by my slow standards, and enjoyed it. Correction: I got all the answers quite quickly, but with questions hanging over too many to feel I’d solved it, but I still enjoyed it. I didn’t spot the ‘scots’ part of NEEP, although I worked out the anagram fodder. But mostly I didn’t pick those using the trick of ‘nth letter in something’ that comes in APOSTROPHE and THIRD OF NOVEMBER. (I confidently had Fifth of November for 6d, assuming this was a reference to V in ‘V for Vendetta’ until I realised that didn’t work.) And I dip my lid to you, PeeDee, and to anyone else who properly parsed APOSTROPHE. It was also a while before I rubbed out ELATING and replaced it with ATINGLE – a far better answer!
And, yes, Julie in Oz, FOLDEROL has a lovely sense of fun to it. Thanks, Puck.
Very little went in on the first pass, but it all unraveled over the course of three sittings. Most clues were gems to be reflected on after solving, my favourite being FIRST OF THE MONTH for the economy of its wordplay.
Never would have guessed that there could be so many anagrams of ‘tag line.’ I toyed with GELATIN and ELATING before stumbling across the right permutation of the letters.
Thanks to Puck for the entertainment and to Pee Dee for the parsing of APOSTROPHE.
I had a lot of fun with this.
It strikes me that there is another way to look at 18a RECOMPENSE (and I’m not talking about C vs. S), and I don’t know which is preferred. You can treat the M as coming from “money”, so the veep is just Pence and the definition part is simply “payment”.
I couldn’t parse the R/ECO/M bit of 18a, or POST in 13a. It took me ages to work out that FOURTH DIMENSION is an anagram of ‘OF MONTH 1 IS UNDER’.
My favourite was NEEP.
Thanks Puck and PeeDee
Much as I admired the construction with the four long down answers starting First to Fourth, I’m not happy with THIRD OF NOVEMBER as an answer. What is special enough about the 3rd of Nov to make it acceptable as a multi-word answer? For instance, FOURTH DIMENSION is a well known phrase and therefore acceptable, but in my opinion SECOND DIMENSION would not have been.
I’d be interested in the views of others.
There’s an error in blog for 7d. It’s an anagram of OF MONTH I (one) IS UNDER.
For 13a, coincidental that H is the eighth character of the alphabet (i.e ‘character of eight in a string of letters’). If only ‘were missing’ were missing, then it would parse 🙂
Thanks to all
Kingsley @9
while it is not a famous date like 5th November, I was fine with THIRD OF NOVEMBER and quite liked it once I worked it out.
What a delightful puzzle!
Like JinA, I’ve always loved FOLDEROL but the highlight of this puzzle was, for me, the wonderful surface of 7dn. It reminded me of one of my favourite jokes: How many women with PMT does it take to change a light bulb?
Like michelle @12, I have no problems with THIRD OF NOVEMBER.
Many thanks to Puck for lots of fun and PeeDee for the blog. [Tiny quibble: in 14dn, ‘perhaps’ belongs to the first definition.]
Oops, an embarrassing spelling error on my part there! I can’t claim that one was a typo. I have no time now but I will fix the blog and grid ASAP.
I liked this puzzle. Got it finished fairly quickly though it took a while to sort out some of the parsings – CODSWALLOP, and the anagram in 7dn being examples. My father (born 1914) used to refer to beer as ‘wallop’.
Thanks for the parsing of 4dn. I had it as DAMON (fellow) holding RE (queen up) and was wondering what the ‘after midnight’ bit was doing.
VEEP was a new word for me and I had to check that there was indeed a vice-president Pence.
Overall, a good first Saturday puzzle to the new year.
Thanks to Puck and to PeeDee.
Well it took me forever and I never did get 4 – stuck on midnight being G. Sigh. And I wholly failed to parse 13, talk about arcane! Still a lot of smiles once pence had dropped. Ha ha. Thank you both.
Very enjoyable, and thanks to PeeDee for parsing APOSTROPHE and the rest of
the blog. Others have said it for me, and I was perfectly happy with 6d as well. Thanks to Puck as well.
Took me quite a long time to get started but but once I got the four long ones things went in quite quickly. I did like RECOMPENSE and,once I’d got it,ASCOTS.
Thanks Puck.
Hi everyone. I’m new to this blog and a relative newcomer to Cruciverbia (a re-entrant to be precise, having given up years ago), so I hope you don’t mind my slightly thick questions from time to time. Firstly, many thanks to all the bloggers for the work they put in – I’m always amazed by their knowledge and their ability to take a clue apart, and obviously thanks to PeeDee for today’s blog. However I am sorry to say I’m still struggling with the wordplay for 13a APOSTROPHE. I did actually get the answer from the crossers and literal definition but as I see it the analysis for the wordplay is as follows:
Start with APOSTROPHE. Take away ‘Letters’ = POST. So we’re now left with AROPHE. If we now take away H = ‘fourth letter of eigHt’ , we’re left with A ROPE = ‘a string’, and the H could be represnted by an apostrophe ie AROP’E. This seems ridiculously convoluted to me, and does not make any sense as the second omission (of the H) is nowhere indicated, and in any case what is A Rophe or an Arophe – i have DuckDuckGoed and found nothing. I’m clearly missing something very obvious but I just can’t see it!
Matematico @19. Paraphrasing the blog, I read it as follows. The fourth character of eigHt in A ROPE gives AROPHE (not a word). If POST (letters) were missing from APOSTROPHE, then we indeed get AROPHE. The whole clue acts as a definition. For example, the word NORTHWARD can be abbreviated to NOR’WARD, where the fourth character of eight is an apostrophe and the letters TH are missing. Hope that helps.
I’ve been doing these online lately since the printer went, so no jottings to refer to. I can’t remember if I ever did work out the parsing of APOSTROPHE, but if I did, I’d forgotten it again by the time I came here, so thanks, Peedee.
I read 18a slightly differently with the definition being simply ‘payment’ and M=money, the ‘as’ just being a link word. I thought the homophone was a bit dodgy, since PENSE isn’t a word. However, I see no one else has seen this as a problem and I’m not sure I did at the time (just relieved to have solved the tricky clue), but I have been having a discussion with others about the propriety of such things on the Guardian blog recently where there’s a comp to clue SNEEZE, with many choosing to make homophones of’EEZE’ and ‘S[N]EEZE’ parts of their attempts.
I think Kingsley @9 makes a good point about the non-dictionary nature of THIRD OF NOVEMBER, although, as he also suggests, the sequence of ordinals in the long down answers is quite pleasing. This one also uses what you might call ‘reverse cluing’, where the idea is that the answer might be a cryptic rendering of something in the clue. 1d and 2d use the same technique, but in no case is there any indication that this is being done; you just have to twig it. I puzzled over “V-day” for a long time before guessing how it worked.
I’d never heard of an ascot, so had to get it by putting all the crossers into a word search and seeing which result seemed to fit the wordplay. Since the answer was involved in a couple of other clues, that made things a bit tricky. Still, I got there in the end and enjoyed the puzzle without really feeling hard done by through those quibbles I’ve raised.
I found this quite tough. I parsed APOSTROPHE but couldn’t make sense of the &lit definition at the time. I like Hovis@20’s example and it brought to mind another one used locally round here (Philadelphia area) – NOR’EAST, more commonly used in the term NOR’EASTER, a regularly occurring winter storm. Amazing clue! I struggled to parse VEEP, seeing it as V (5) P (p) around EE (equivalent to), but I can’t justify the last bit. And I was another ELATING at first, though ATINGLE is obviously better.
I also felt a bit uncomfortable with THIRD OF NOVEMBER for the same reason as Kingsley@9, but I figured it must be a notable date somewhere. Maybe not? A minor quibble, in any case.
First-class puzzle, with a clever ordinal theme. Thanks, Puck and PeeDee (I spelt recompense wrongly at first too!).
[Ha, Tony@21! What a coincidence. I posted before seeing yours. I feel better about my SNEEZE clue now and don’t know why I didn’t think of the example here (18) as a justification for mine, as I must have just solved this puzzle. Short-term memory loss, I guess.]
Re THIRD OF NOVEMBER and dictionaries, I don’t think phrasal answers need dictionary support. They aren’t uncommon, and dictionary support can’t be invoked for such as Enigmatist’s “Last night I dreamed of Manderley again” from last year, and some of Araucaria’s, eg THE OLD VICARAGE GRANTCHESTER and even earlier the one that began “THERE IS A TIDE IN THE FORTUNES OF MEN…”
Hi Hovis @20. Thank you, yes I see it now. I was reading the words
“….. this could be the fourth character of eight in a string” as pointing directly to the H, rather tnan what you get by inserting the H in A ROPE.
A lovely puzzle and, as third November is Yorkshire Lass’s birthday, we especially had no problem with 6d! That and APOSTROPHE were favourites: thought those and the other self-referencing clues were very clever and good fun. Many thanks to Puck and PeeDee.
Hovis@20
In your example TH is the missing 4th character of Northward butin this cae it is the 4th letter of eight which is to be inserted ib A ROPE and POST is missing between the first and second letters of APOSTROPHE. I may be being thick but I can’t make this work except as a very vague & lit.
Thanks to Puck and PeeDee
[@phitonelly, haha, small world! I wondered the same thing when I came here and was reminded of the clue. Then again it was still embargoed then. If it’s any consolation I spent a long time trying and failing to justify VEEP with VEE + P, btw]
@SimonS, I use the term ‘dictionary nature’ loosely (and perhaps wrongly) to mean a phrase like those examples you give which you might find indexed in a reference work of some kind, if not an actual dictionary. Is there a better/more correct term that you know of?
@Irishman, I guess every date is someone’s birthday (and happy birthday to all those reading for whom it’s today!)
Pino @27. You need to separate the cryptic reading and the &lit definition. In the &lit reading (using my example), “if letters (TH) were missing, this (apostrophe) could be the fourth character (after NOR) of eight in a string (the 8 characters NOR’WARD)”. In the cryptic reading “if letters (POST) were missing, this (apostrophe) could be the fourth character of eight (H) in a string (A ROPE).
At last, a proper Saturday crossword!
(that’s what I thought while solving this in a Cambridge cafe with my, who I used to call, PinC – and that’s how I still look at it now)