Guardian Cryptic 28,429 by Matilda

73 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 28,429 by Matilda”

1. Newsflash ! – cryptic actually (slightly) tougher than quiptic this week – both had their individual charms and were appreciated. Thanks, each.

2. Yes I remembered that previous no sweat, PeterO which hepled for that one, but as for the rest my brain was in go-slow. Took ages to remember the old resort trick, and couldn’t think of keyboard at all…. dense! Apart from my Mondayitis, it was a good puzzle, thanks both. Now I’ll have a go at the quiptic.

3. Difficult puzzle. Could not really get into it. Did a bit, then went to solve the Quiptic, and came back to this later. I think that with real life being so miserable at the moment, I prefer easier puzzles.

   Failed MOPTOPS, PAUSE.
   Did not parse PEARL.
   Solved 11ac before 1, did not parse it but saw it was an anagram.
   New: PATELLA.

4. Tougher than usual for a Monday but certainly do-able and a great start to the solving week.

   Loved 14a – thinking about my chord inversions and a fun Spoonerism to-boot!

   Thought 5a was very cheeky and a real giggle. 1a and 11a went in quite quickly so I did get distracted looking for a Beatles theme bit no go…

   Thanks to Matlida and PeterO!

5. I must have been on Matilda’s wavelength, as I found this straightforward, despite comments on the G thread. I picked out the same as MB @4 plus PEARL, SEASIDE RESORT and SENDS UP for the amusing boot wearer.

   Ta Matilda & PeterO

6. Yes, shame about NOISES as ‘disheartened’ may have done the trick nicely. But I am not disheartened by, for me, a near-perfect Monday crossie. I tend to measure in cups of tea; Mondays are often one but this was a definite two!

7. Thanks Matilda and PeterO
   Very nice. Favourites were A TO B and SENDS UP.
   I didn’t parse PEARL either. 16a is quite complicated – guess and then parse for most people, I would think.

8. Although Matilda doesn’t exactly appear rarely, I never remember what I’m in for, and when I’ve finished I always remember having enjoyed a challenge which is, indeed, tougher than the average Monday. I wasn’t helped by having insufficient musical knowledge to identify the B Chords and I haven’t followed Prince Andrew’s sordid story in detail so was unaware of the logic behind the unparsed NO SWEAT.

   Those two aside, this was solvable but I had to work at it and it was a lot of fun with some neat and tricky devices like tooth enamel, endless Jesus raps, work ethics and the construction of NOISES which worked for me despite our blogger’s fair quiblet. I also admired the anagrams for CAN OF WORMS and THE BEATLES.

   Quite a few musical references today, apart from the obvious. I loved Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballe’s BARCELONA, both CAN and the less well known TIBET will be recognised by followers of German alternative rock and we have the classic PEARL’s a singer by Elkie Brooks. Though I always have another cheerful memory inspired by PEARL: when I was at college the delightfully named Penultimate Picture Palace was the offbeat cinema popular with students wanting to see cult classics or edgy avant garde movies. The toilets were imaginatively named Pearl and Dean.

   Thanks Matilda and PeterO

9. I forgot to ask. Why are WISE GUYS specifically US Mafiosi?

10. I got stuck parsing 1a, because I was convinced that “tops” related to the “cuts” part of the clue, and could not figure out what “moptops” had to do with vision, or dioceses, or any other “see” I could think of. I also failed to parse “pearl”, which I’m kicking myself for. The term “brass neck” was new to me, but quite gettable.

11. 1986 Danny De Vito film (no, I didn’t know either – I only found out after completing the crossword)

12. [PostMark @8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxU6LT6DonE ]

13. Lovely start to the week. Tooth enamel, dry princes, green sides – lots of fun clues. Thanks Matilda and PeterO.

14. Thanks Angela @11 – that had entirely passed me by.

15. A great start to the week – I laughed out loud at KEYBOARDS!

16. Great puzzle! Like Postmark @8 I haven’t followed Prince Andrew’s story, and had to look up the B chord. Hadn’t heard of WISE-GUYS. LOI was OUTCOME, which took forever until I realised the construction – silly me. Loved SLAPDASH, SEASIDE RESORT, SENDS UP and others. Many thanks to Matilda for an unusually tough Monday, and to PeterO for the blog.

17. Brilliant crossword, thanks Matilda.

    Love SEASIDE RESORT and SENDS UP and NO SWEAT. LOI was THWARTS because I didn’t spot the ‘enamel’ indicator for tooth but when it clicked I thought it was a brilliant clue. Second to last was KEYBOARDS due to lack of musical knowledge and general problem with Spoonerisms.

    Great blog PeterO

18. Jesus! Not happy that ‘endless’ means taking last and first letters off.

    Agree with Michelle (@3). Probably seemed more difficult because you expect an easy ride on a Monday.

    Always enjoy a spoonerism and this one classier than most

19. I agree that there’s lots of wit and charm in this one, but I do have some reservations: (1) 24a – the non-centrality of ‘ss’ has been widely and wisely dealt with; (2) 19a – I can’t find a dictionary offering the necessary definition of ‘brass’ – ‘top brass’, of course, has the required meaning; (3) 10a and 14a – both need a fairly sophisticated knowledge of musical theory (roughly somewhere between GCSE and A-level): faced with a clue which required a comparable grasp of a topic of which I’m blissfully ignorant – physics, for instance – I would be a tad miffed. (I loved the Spoonerism, though.)

20. Robert @19: I don’t think that the music theory needed in 14a is anywhere near A-Level – major chords and their inversions (you don’t need to know about inversions for this clue but it makes the “permutations” clearer if you do) are taught at Grade 5 Theory so I would put this at the year-before GCSE.

    Likewise, tones and semitones (at least for me) were taught in general music, i.e. before O-Level chioces in the first and second years at secondary school, and are taught as part of any Grade 1 instrument today and in the Music KS3 curriculum.

21. Found this a little harder than I usually do with Matilda, but mostly due to my own failures of imagination (perhaps epitomised by seeing B, D# and F#, thinking “that’ll be a B chord then” on the first scan of the clues and, er, forgetting totally about it when I came back to solve it…)

    On the subject of brass (Robert @ 19), in my conversations with people in the services online they are always “the brass” – and conversations with them rarely feature biscuits. Whether dictionaries have caught up with this, of course…

22. MB @20: you seem to have an up-to-date knowledge of music education but I’m more inclined to agree with Robert.

    In the real world, most people would not know the connection between the 3 notes given unless they were musicians in some guise. (think I was 45 and doing grade 3 before I would have known).

23. Delightfully deft – what a treat for a Monday. Personal faves were THWARTS, PEARL and the Eastbourne disease. Overall solve was slowed down by kitten intervention
    Nicholas Pileggi literally wrote the book on WISE-GUYS
    Ah well, back to the code face

24. Thanks Matilda for an interesting challenge with some quirky clues. I did spot the tooth enamel (original!) but unfortunately because I already had the crossing T from OUTWIT I put it at the end of the word, so THWARTS took longer than it should have.

    Even with a music O Level far away in my past it took a long time to get the B Chords, but I don’t think the clue is unfair: O Level knowledge is expected on many other subjects and nobody complains. For instance, I have learned far more about the periodic table from crosswords and quizzes than I ever did at school.

    Failed to parse PEARL and didn’t know about the WISE GUYS film. Liked the boot wearer, CAN OF WORMS and the near simplicity of SLAPDASH.

25. [Pedro @22: Point taken (I teach piano/theory to a very small number of children; not my main job). I was educated at an Essex grammar school in the 1980s when the music provision was very good and everyone learnt to read music in the first two years of school but I do understand that wasn’t the case across the country even back then when music provision was much better than the utter mess it is now.]

26. Great fun. Time Matilda was promoted to other days.
    I misdirected myself by assuming that the musical clues wouldn’t require musical theory, before realising that they did. NO SWEAT was obvious but having no interest in that particular waste of space, I had no idea why. LOI was PEARL, which my brain doesn’t file with gemstones.
    Thanks to Matilda and PeterO.

27. gladys@24: neat simplicity, of course. Grrrr!

28. Bit thrown at first by having the Monday’spuzzleisnormallyeasier mentality in place, and getting almost panicky when I could only solve a couple on first run through. Then settled back to enjoy the tougher challenge. Defeated by both MOPTOPS and WISE GUYS, however. Lots to admire otherwise…

29. Agree with Auriga @ 26 – it’d be interesting to see what Matilda did if the claws came out. Suspect today’s crossword was published on a Monday due to the setter, not the difficulty (having said this, the rest of the week will be unsolveable, won’t it?)

    FWIW Matilda once had a Guardian crossword published on a Thursday – it sticks in the mind because it had a notable and timely Nina, which is probably why they didn’t wait for the start of the week.

30. Ronald @28: I love your opening line. Absolutely my experience – including the almost panic. Worsened by the expectation that everybody else on here would have breezed through it whilst I was floundering! It did add to both the subsequent solving enjoyment and the eventual accomplishment.

    [MB @12: thanks fo the link which certainly brought back memories. Amusing to read the comments beneath which underpin the nostalgia. Given one post was 13 years ago, I’m sure the poster won’t mind if I repeat the lovely comment: it wasn’t that long ago when UCI was using this. The whole place went bonkers cheering and singing along to it. Baba baba ba ba ba ba baba ba! ]

31. Definitely harder than expected for a Monday. And I found myself thinking once or twice, is this very clever and devious, or does it not quite work? – the main instance being “tooth enamel” for TH in 28a. Ok, “tooth enamel” = the outside of a tooth, and the outside of “tooth” is TH. But isn’t this a bit “A=B and B=C, so A=C”? Does “tooth enamel” by itself really indicate TH, without that intermediate stage? Brilliant or a bit unfair? I’m not sure.

    I did like the OU twit at 22d.

    Thanks Matilda and PeterO.

32. I seemed to solve this one largely upwards, with the NW the last to fall. I got THE BEATLES quite early on but couldn’t think of the 1 definition for a long time.

    I particularly enjoyed the WISE-GUYS, CAN-OF-WORMS and SEASIDE RESORT. Good surfaces APLENTY.

    Thanks Matilda for the fun and PeterO for the blog (especially the ‘green sides’, doh!)

33. [PostMark @8 & 30 and MB @12
    My grandparents were called Pearl and Dean, but to me they were just Grandma and Grandpa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-papapa…

    As sampled on Goldbug’s version of Whole Lotta Love]

34. Well, I got there in the end, but I found this the most difficult puzzle this month. For some reason I wasn’t attuned to the setter’s style this morning – although some solutions went in easily, I had a lot of trouble with others. So much for Easy Monday!

    Thanks to Matilda for the scare (Ms Wormwood or the Empress?) and PeterO for the blog.

35. [Postmark @33: There’s never a “groan” icon when you need one, is there? Last person I knew called Pearl was a right nit.]

36. Defeated by MOPTOPS, WISE-GUYS and THWARTS. Liked SEASIDE RESORT. I always enjoy Spoonerisms but thought B D# F# might be too much for those who never learned music. I was a bit uncertain with several clues and waited for reassurance from the crossers which is never very satisfying. Thanks Matilda and PeterO

37. Very nice puzzle.
    The cryptic grammar in 23 doesn’t work for me. I don’t see how “starting with impenetrable” can be read as “the starting letters of ‘with’ and ‘impenetrable’ “. Even if we accept that it can, then the rest of the clue should at least stick to this rather odd style, which would mean “vacating stare” for SE, rather than “vacant.”

38. [MB @35: I will not Dean to respond to either of you … but will make straight for the coat rack…]

39. Failed on PEARL, which never occurred to me as a gem. On checking Chambers, gem is defined as a precious stone, but subsequently also as ‘a person or thing regarded as extremely admirable or flawless; pearl is described in detail, and is clearly not a stone, but ‘prized as a gem’ is tacked on the end, so I suppose the clue is ok (he said grudgingly).

    I was pleased to get the Spoonerism quite early, despite being almost totally ignorant of chord theory. I thought there were some excellently innovative devices used in this puzzle, with ‘tooth enamel’ possibly the stand out.

    Many thanks to Matilda and PeterO.

40. Thanks for blog and puzzle/
    Although not exactly perfect, it made a nice change for a Monday
    Across clues suggested a music theme if you include NOISES and PEARL(Janis Joplin-and thanks for parse)
    The pros well outdid the cons-good start to the week

41. Great puzzle which took me longer than any of last weeks. Lots of favourites already mentioned and rare to see a reverse anagram on a Monday. I didn’t parse PEARL – or even solve it as it was MrsW who came up with it. It would be good to see more of Matilda – to whom thanks along with PeterO.

42. Gasp… found this tough to finish.

    Would never have solved MOPTOPS or NO SWEAT without all the crossers, which was a bit of a handicap being the first 2 ac clues.

    Struggled a bit to find a sentence whereby APLENTY & abundantly could be interposed, but they’re both adverbs so it must be OK.

    For a Monday, this was something of wolf in sheep’s clothing, but an excellent crossword all the same.

    Many thanks both.

43. I was a bit worried, sitting down on a Monday lunchtime for an easy solve and then finding I wasn’t getting very far very quickly. Thank goodness for 15squared – I find I am not alone!

    It’s a moot point, the theory needed in 14a. To me the clue might as well have been written in Sanskrit, and it was one of my last in. I take the point that many with a performer’s knowledge of music would have taken the hint immediately, but it still seems a bit recherché.

    A hold-up in the NE as I’d forgotten the notorious TV interview at 5a. I had TO SPARE for a while – celebrating his role as a ‘spare’ heir to the throne, and an easy win is made with something to spare.

44. Thanks for the blog , some nice, elegant clues here. As mentioned, heartless would have solved the problem with noises.

    [ Mr PostMark @8 , I well remember the PPP, sixteen films a week, two of them shown every day and a GENUINE fleapit. ]

45. WISE GUYS isn’t just the DeVito film; Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” was adapted from a nonficiton book called “Wiseguy,” and it seems to be in wide use. I don’t see it with a hyphen though. I also have just seen “the brass” for leadership (maybe more in a corporate than military setting).

    Defeated by 1a, 16ac, 17ac; these were hard for me to get with more uncrossed than crossed, as they were all the sort of clue where it’s much easier if I can get the word and work out the parsing from it. Or not work out the parsing, as was the case when I revealed PEARL. Though I should’ve got MOPTOPS from the Beatles, and that’s a clever clue. More checkmarks for 14a, 26a, 9d, 18d.

    Thanks to Matilda and PeterO!

46. [Roz @44: A fond memory is seeing the Rocky Horror Picture Show there for the first time. With no preconception at all of what might happen. One of our party was finishing off a fish and chip dinner in a paper package and was asked by the ticket office “you’re not planning on setting that alight are you?” Perhaps that should have established our expectations. It turned out that precisely that had happened before during the There’s a Light number where, traditionally, the audience spark cigarette lighters into life. Fortunately it had been extinguished by more than one quick thinker with a pint of beer! Now that wouldn’t happen in Vue!]

47. [ You could eat or smoke anything in there. 99p a film but you never got change. One pound Membership card from the shop across the road. Take a plastic bag to sit on ! . ]

48. Half expecting a breezy solve I was surprised at the difficulty level and I ended up revealing several answers that just wouldn’t fall for me, notably KEYBOARDS, SLAPDASH, and SEASIDE RESORT. I can’t complain about any of the cluing as all of it was top-notch. SENDS UP, WISE GUYS, THWARTS, and PATELLA were favourites. Thanks to both.

49. [PostMark &46; Roz @44 & 47: Oxford alumni/ae of a certain age might be interested in catching up with the PPP’s subsequent history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Picture_Palace

    I know it’s a link, Roz. Sorry! That is probably enough Pearl & Dean and PPP or Gaufrid will get cross.]

50. I liked the challenge today too. I failed to notice that SS is not the middle of session. In addition to the disheartened and/or heartless suggestions above, the clue could also have used “sessions” plural to solve the problem.
    Can I take it from the lack of indicator in 1a that Matilda is actually Australian then?

    Robert @19, from Collins online dictionary…
    brass
    5. (functioning as plural) informal
    important or high-ranking officials, esp military officers
    Thanks, Matilda and Peter

51. There’s something infectiously joyous about Matilda’s setting. Sure, the definitions and wordplay were ropey at times, but worth it in pursuit of neat surfaces and more than occasional wink to the solver.

52. Agree with matt w @45: hyphenated WISEGUYS are highly unorthodox and would need the protection of a God-father.

53. Another defeated by MOPTOPS which meant nothing to me and was not at all obvious from the wordplay, even with the link to 11.

    On the other hand, there were some nice clues, and I feel proud of parsing THWARTS (eventually) and getting PEARL from the more intelligible part of the clue (after taking “gem” too literally for quite some time).

54. I was also pleased with PAUSE and could perhaps have been much quicker with KEYBOARDS; my excuse is unfamiliarity with more than four sharps and I would have thought of the chord as the B major triad rather than B chord.

55. Monkey @53, perhaps you should look up pictures of the Monkeys as well as the Beatles if you want to have moptop mean something to you.

56. Quite tough for a Monday but I am not complaining. COD 28a. Anyone remember that robot BRASSNECK in the Dandy in the seventies?

57. Very pleased to find that I have “sophisticated knowledge of music theory” that enabled me to answer 14ac. Anyone (like me) who can get by playing 3 chords on the guitar knows that the chord combinations are ADE, CFG, DGA etc and could work out BD#F# but would avoid playing in that key at all costs. In truth I guessed KEYBOARDS and worked backwards from there as usual.

58. [Andrew T @52: Res-pect!]

    Monkey/jellyroll: Agreed, B major (five sharps!) is a very unusual key – unlike B minor or B flat major – so you kind of have to work it out from first principles. Interestingly though,
    ‘Chopin regarded its scale as the easiest of all to play on the piano, as its black notes fit the natural positions of the fingers well; as a consequence he often assigned it first to beginning piano students, leaving the scale of C major until last because he considered it the hardest of all scales to play completely evenly (because of its complete lack of black notes).’
    (Eigeldinger, Jean-Jacques; Shohet, Naomi (1988). Chopin: Pianist and Teacher – via wiki, ça va de soi)

    Fun fun fun from Matilda (that’s in D#, I gather); thanks to her and PeterO.

59. A superb crossword today. Favourite was 1ac, even with all the crossers I was getting nowhere until I solved 11ac, after that it was obvious but still took a while to parse it.

60. I’m glad that hardly anyone reads the comments after 8:30 pm. My profound explanation for 14ac was incorrect! So, I got the right answer by using the wrong reasoning. Nothing new there. Continuing my incorrect explanation, the three chords in the key of B are B, E & F# not B, D# & F#. However, using Bert Weedon’s “Play in a Day”, one of the first chords you learn is a G. You put your finger on the third fret of the E string to get a G then play this plus the next three open strings. This gives you the notes GBGD or, removing the duplicated G, GBD. Move the whole shape up 4 frets, which is much more difficult for a beginner to play and you get a B chord with the notes B, D# & F#. Phew!

61. I am getting tired of homonyms which are based on poor pronunciation.
    Look at 14 across, for example. Spoonerisms require good rhyming. There is no way that
    “chords” sounds like “boards”!
    And I fail to see the connection (implied by the dots) between 6 and 7 down.

62. Doug@61 Eh? What accent do you have? Boards and chords are irrefutable rhymes in my dialect of American English. How else would you pronounce the two?
    Do you mean connection in surfaces or clues? Because ellipses rarely indicate a connection in the latter, despite how easy it is to infer otherwise.

    Never heard of BRASS CHEEK or the Prince Andrew thing. I got THE BEATLES before MOPTOPS because I sussed out the former was an anagram. Including Puss in Boots in the clue for 20d made me smile.

63. *EDIT: BRASS NECK, not brass cheek

64. Board rhymes with “horde” and chord rhymes with “lord”. I come from Scotland, where the Queen’s English is spoken best!

65. …And of course, all four of those are rhymes in my dialect, heh. All end with -/???d/

    (While I was looking up to be sure vowel it actually was, I found this on the wikipedia page for the cot-caught merger: “Outside North America, another dialect featuring the merger is Scottish English. Like in New England English, the cot–caught merger occurred without the father–bother merger. Therefore, speakers still retain the distinction between /a/ and /?/.” Maybe that’s a clue where the difference lies, heh.)

66. … And 15^2 can’t parse IPA characters, of course. The ??? should be the r-colored open-mid back rounded vowel.

67. OK. You say Potayto, I say Tomahto

68. Doug/Khitty Hawk: many thanks for a fascinating discussion, which I’ve only just seen.

    I think the issue here is not the cot-caught merger, which is a sound shift that Scottish English has participated in. (I’d be interested to hear from Doug as to whether, for him, cot and caught are homophones – I’m guessing that they are, as they are for many American speakers, whereas in RP they definitely aren’t.)

    Rather, the shift which affects board/horde/chord/lord is the horse-hoarse merger (see wiki entry here). I know 15² doesn’t support IPA symbols, but I still think it’s worth quoting from:

    The horse–hoarse merger, or NORTH–FORCE merger, is the merger of the vowels /??/ and /o?/ before historic /r/, which makes word pairs like horse–hoarse, for–four, war–wore, or–oar, morning–mourning pronounced the same… The merger now occurs in most varieties of English, but the phonemes were historically separate. In accents with the merger, horse and hoarse are pronounced [h??(r)s~ho?(r)s], but in accents without the merger, hoarse is pronounced with a higher vowel, usually [hors] in rhotic and [ho?s] in non-rhotic accents.

    (Interestingly, this is quite separate from the rhotic/non-rhotic issue which often divides opinion here – both rhotic and non-rhotic accents may, in their different ways, preserve the horse/hoarse distinction.)

    Accents that have resisted the merger include most Scottish, Caribbean, and older Southern American accents… In the United States, the merger is widespread everywhere but is quite recent in some parts of the country… In the 2006 study, most white participants in only these American cities still resisted the merger: Wilmington, North Carolina; Mobile, Alabama; and Portland, Maine… Black Americans are rapidly undergoing the merger but are also less likely to do so than white Americans, with a little over half of the 2006 study’s black participants maintaining the merger nationwide.

    Finally, I would echo Doug’s conciliatory conclusion @67. When it comes to varieties of accents and dialects, there is no right or wrong, better or worse – just different. And if I may lapse into Gallic rather than Gaelic, vive la différence.

69. essexboy@68 Yeah! That’s why I specified my dialect in my initial post even while I was going “wait- what?” (kind of. There are apparently elements of the New England variety of American English I don’t have, so I’m still a bit ??? at what accent I actually speak, heh). For all I know folks speak differently, some variations I still think about so rarely or only in the abstract that they effectively slap me across the face with a wet fish when I’m reminded they exist. (Maybe setters need to use them more often, heh.) So under the surface-level surprise, there was a lot more “That’s so wild. Tell me more!”

    (In trying to figure out what vowel I actually used, I was intrigued by the latter half of that cot-caught tidbit – that Scottish English doesn’t have the father-bother merger but does have cot-caught.)

    There’s so much fuss over rhoticity affecting rhymes that I don’t really blink twice at a pun that requires ‘flaw’ and ‘floor’ being homophones, even though they aren’t in my dialect, but for others I need to take a step back, roll the vowels over in my mouth a bit, and imagine a way of speaking that would result in that output. It’s wonderful!

70. [Thanks for responding, Khitty Hawk @69 – given the time I posted, I thought no one might see it! I completely agree – language is wonderful, imagining how others might say a word is a fascinating exercise (and, more generally, putting ourselves in others’ shoes is a valuable lesson for life, not just crosswords).

    One example of your ‘wet fish’ moment for me is the father-bother merger. Most UK people would be incredulous at the idea of father and bother being a rhyming pair. But for many Americans (including your good self?) they are. It reminds me of someone complaining to BBC Newswatch last year, because BBC correspondents had failed to follow Kamala Harris’s own instructions to pronounce the first part of her name like ‘comma’. But of course she was speaking to Americans, not Brits. If you try and say Kama like a British ‘comma’, the first ‘a’ ends up sounding like the first ‘o’ in b*ll*cks! 😉 ]

71. essexboy and kittyhawk.
    I had no idea that my gripe would cause so much discussion, obviously from language experts! Interesting.
    I would consider “cot”/ “caught” a better homonym (or rhyme) in a Spoonerism than “board”/”chord”. The vowel sounds would be closer, at least to my Scottish ear. However, I cannot imagine anyone rhyming “father” with “bother”!
    I know nothing about mergers
    So, as they used to say in the “letters to the ed” column, this correspondence should now cease, and we will all continue to speak differently, and also to enjoy the Guardian cryptics.

72. This was fun, and the first I’ve ever finished under “Moscow Rules” — pencil and paper, nothing looked up. I won’t say how long it took…

73. 24a is downright wrong and should not have passed the editor’s unwavering gaze. “heartless”, or using “sessions” (as noted above) would have worked.

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