Everyman 3,896

51 comments on “Everyman 3,896”

1. Well, a DNF for me. I could not figure out 18d, entering DEITATE – the only word that a word finder could produce to fit. For a long time I suspected that ADAPTED was wrong (I had A [Father] TED for ‘a priest’ but wasn’t sure where the DAP/PAD came from). But, no, it was the DOUBLE INDIA – a type of pale ale – that was wrong (DI = 501 – yes, I know that’s not correct roman numbering, but… – and A1, and, er, not sure about the N). Oh well, another week – have another go. Thanks, Everyman and PeterO.

2. Enjoyed that although the last few took me a while and did not manage to parse ADAPTED.

   Had to google Spanish cars in the end before I got DEEP-SEATED.

   My last one was DOUBLE VODKA which took me ages to parse because I was looking for *DI* for five hundred and one in the second word. Liked it once I got it. CHEW THE FAT took a while too because I entered TIGHT-LIPPED instead of TIGHT-FISTED for 12 ac at first although I was pretty sure it was wrong.

   Other favourites were: BRATISLAVA, PIVOTAL, TITTLE-TATTLE and GREAT DANES (good to get the Spoonerism)

   Thanks Everyman and PeterO

3. Did about a third last week, and the rest just now with a few biffs, like book groups (dnk the McEwan book), adapted, double vodka (many decades since I played darts), pivotal (vip = star??), and loi deep-seated (absy no idea of the Spanish acronym!). So, a bit of a scramble, but quite fun ntl, ta P and E.

4. I had “cast” for 21D. Makes no sense of the attack-dogs, I know.
   Thought the anagram at 19D was clever. Who’d a thought that “pudgy” could be anagrind material?

5. Thanks for the blog. grantinfreo@3 VIP = very important person, I suppose it has come to mean film star, pop star etc ?
   Fiona Anne has picked my favourite clues, I thought the clues were generally much neater this week.

6. Thanks for the heads up on ADAPTED. Not sure how ‘P’ = Priest.
   Enjoyable Everyman…

7. Found this to be a slog. DNF’d – beaten by 26ac and had ‘deviant’ for 18d. Also failed to parse 7d and 20ac. This seemed much harder with more tortuous defs than recently.

   Thanks to PeterO and Everyman

8. Thanks PeterO for 1a. NHO the ‘Amsterdam’ book, but still not sure the clue works even as a CD.
   And like Fiona-Anne and grantinfreo had to google Spanish cars to confirm the wordplay for DEEP-SEATED.
   GREAT DANES and GIDDY-UP were the picks of the bunch.,

9. Thanks PeterO for pointing out that DEVIATE can also be a noun, although I would expect most people would think of deviant instead.

   The usual Everyman use of obscure anagrinds. I didn’t much like ‘displaying’ although it does have one sense of spreading out.

   I found this crossword quite hard, although perhaps I was just having an off day. I ticked DEEP-SEATED.

   Thanks Everyman and PeterO.

10. I liked 1a with the cleverly misleading surface suggesting a possible trip from Reading to Amsterdam. (Incidentally, is Amsterdam the worst book ever to win the Booker Prize? It seemed to me to be just a dragged-out short story, the plot being about on the level of one of Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected.)

    I also thought 11d TITTLE TATTLE was good, with the apparent reference to the 1951 election when Attlee’s government came to an end.

    Many thanks Everyman and PeterO.

11. [Lord Jim @10, I found your late post last week and tracked down the references. Very interesting, thank you. ]

12. All those Seats I’ve driven past and I never knew it was an acronym! Obliged to Peter and best wishes of course to all solvers. E

13. Thank you for the explanations. I failed to parse ‘adapted’ and ‘chew the fat’ but wrote them in. As a half-Dane, it was nice there were two clues with ‘Dane’ in it (‘Grenada’ which was rather good) and the Spoonerism which I usually have so much trouble with (Date Grains???) It makes up for some of trauma the Danish football team has been going through following Christian Eriksen’s collapse.

14. @ Lord Jim. Agree with the misdirection in 1a ( but that’s all I had). And thanks for the elucidation regarding Attlee in 11d. Clues that keep on giving (f you have the GK) and solvable (or almost) if you don’t.

15. I thought this was a lot more fun than the last couple. Nothing too tricky or contentious, though took me a long while to parse 26a (got the car; missed the toilet humour). Thanks PeterO and Everyman (good of you to drop by again).

16. I think the Middle Eastern foods are separate dates and grains, both OK, which date grains surely isn’t. I could find nothing about them and suspect they don’t exist. The clue still works fine.

    Paul@15 ‘going’ etc. has unfortunately become a regular in British crosswords.

17. Agree with Ray@7 that this was a slog and just got fed up with it. I wrote whatever seemed to fit to finish it off and hence got two wrong. I am another deviant ho ho and have never heard DEVIATE used a noun and probably never will. Glad to see that others followed the same wrong roads as myself especially TassieTim@1 who put DOUBLE INDIA. I only put India to fit in the 501 and vodka should have been so so obvious. I did later correct it though.
    I’ve been doing the Everyman for probably about 40 years and was thinking of switching to the Indy especially after the comment from the Don last week. I respect his opinion and his words would be well-considered.
    Anyway, thanks to Peter and E.

18. Everyman @12
    I’m happy to be able to provide you with a snippet of info. Thanks for dropping by.
    Wil Ramsome @16
    13D: Yes, of course – sorry if I did not make that clear. Now amended.

19. 1a I don’t get the wordplay in 1a. If “Amsterdam” (a novel I’ve never heard of) stands for “BOOK,” what stands for GROUPS?

    Does anybody pronounce BETA as “beat a”?

    A rectangle isn’t a rhombus unless it’s a square.

    20a was DOUBLE something, so I tried “double toddy,” which sounded like a drink. Check left just the O, and from there I got the rest.

    I thought 24a had to be LADY somebody for a long time, finally got the M from RM.

    I was stuck on15 down because I thought it had to start with LI (51) and was LITTLE-something. When check took out the first L I began to work it out. Anybody else with LITTLE?

    The SW took the longest for me too.

    Never heard of the SEAT car, biffed DEEP-SEATED in from the definition.

    In CHEW THE FAT, “natter” is doing double duty as definition and a component of the anagram.

    BRANDY SNAP seems to be an illustration of the not-quite-equivalence of “biscuit” (UK) and “cookie” (US). A cream=filled cookie such as an oreo is still a cookie, it’s too crisp to be a cake. Anything crisp is a cookie (or a cracker if it isn’t sweet), though bar cookies are not usually crisp. Aha, there’s our ambiguity, because brownies are bars but definitely not cookies.

    PeterO, you’ve got a typo in the blog for TITTLE-TATTLE, you’ve left out one of the T’s in Attlee.

    What’s with M Eastern? Who ever writes it that way? And what are date grains?

20. Unsatisfied with 18. Crank in this sense is a noun while deviate is a verb. Otherwise a typical enjoyable Everyman.

    Thanks PeterO and Everyman.

21. Valentine @19: I’m aware that the British do “fun” things to the pronunciation of words of foreign origin, and it doesn’t surprise me that they don’t pronounce BETA as “bait a” like normal people in the rest of the world. But my first guess, if you’re going to mangle that one, would have been “bet a,” not “beat a.” Hey ho, the British gonna British, I guess.

22. Valentine @19 and mrpenney @21
    Collins gives British and American pronunciation of beta; I cannot speak for the rest of the world.
    Valentine @19
    I put 1A down as a cryptic definition, so that it does not have a wordplay as such; the nearest answer to your question would be the underlined ‘these’ – or if you prefer ‘discussed by these’.
    I put 7D down as an &lit, so that, yes, ‘natter is doing double duty, along with the rest of the clue (with a bit of good will); perhaps I should not have underlined ‘natter’.
    Typo cor4rected in 11D.
    Dewey @20 decimal
    As I suggested in the blog, and Robi @9 pointed out, DEVIATE can be a noun.

23. PeterO does that mean that the British pronunciation of BETA is “beeta” and the US pronunciation (or that of the rest of the world as mrpenney would have it) is “bay-ta”?

24. I pronounce beta as *beeta* – wasn’t aware there was another way of saying it. Tried saying *alpha, beta, gamma* just to check – and yes that is how I say it.

25. Valentine @23 / Fiona @24: yes, the situation is as Valentine describes it – as long as, by ‘normal people in the rest of the world’, mrpenney doesn’t include the (modern) Greeks 😉

26. [Incidentally, the same applies to zeta, eta and theta.]

27. Do the modern Greeks say beeta-eeta-zeeta too?

28. Actually the modern Greeks in that case would say veeta, as in the cheese Vel- of that ilk.

29. Valentine @27/28: yes, in modern Greek –

    β is pronounced ‘veeta’
    ζ is ‘zeeta’
    η is ‘eeta’
    θ is ‘theeta’

30. The ancient Greeks also most likely pronounced the letters as do modern Greeks. Anything else is just the construct of modern scholars. 😉

31. Continental vowels a e i o u are, respectively, ah eh ee oh ooh. So the continental pronunciation of beta should be “bait a,” maybe grading into “bet a.” The Greeks may do it differently.

    Also, the way I phrased my earlier post was “baiting”, so to speak. 🙂

32. [mr penney @31: bait swallowed 😉 Interesting that Greek has undergone the same vowel shift as English, at least in that regard.

    Jon S @30: I wouldn’t be quite so down on modern scholarship. I’m with wiki on this:

    A series of radical sound changes starting in Koine Greek has led to a phonological system in Modern Greek that is significantly different from that of Ancient Greek. Instead of the complex vowel system of Ancient Greek, with its four vowel-height levels, length distinction, and multiple diphthongs, Modern Greek has a simple system of five vowels. This came about through a series of mergers, especially towards /i/ (iotacism).

    As for consonants, β isn’t the only one whose sound has shifted. δ is now pronounced like a voiced ‘th’ in English ‘the’ or ‘than’. And γ isn’t a ‘g’ sound any more. Before front vowels (e and i sounds) it’s like an English ‘y’. Before back vowels (a, o, u sounds) it’s more like the Parisian French ‘r’. Piaf called her Greek lover ‘Sarapo’ – the closest French approximation to σε αγαπώ – je t’aime. ]

33. essexboy @32
    My pre-dinner meze today will include some stuffed grape leaves; the English side of the tin labels them as dolmadakia, and on the Greek side the second d is a delta, but the first, intended to be pronounced much as an English d, is rendered ντ.

34. PeterO @33 – exactly! The English ‘d’ sound is rendered in modern Greek as ντ . (Demis Roussos is spelt Ντέμης )

    The second d in dolmadakia, which is a δ in Greek, is actually pronounced like a voiced English ‘th’ – as in ‘the’. But if it were transliterated dolmathakia, people would probably get the wrong idea and pronounce an unvoiced ‘th’, as in ‘thought’.

35. How come some folks can get real Greek letters into their posts and for the rest of us the algorithm turns them into question marks? There must be a trick to it.

36. [Valentine @35: try typing

    & Omega ;

    but without spaces, for upper case Ω

    & omega ;

    but without spaces, for lower case ω

    …and similarly for all the other letters of the Greek alphabet.

    I’m indebted to Gonzo for posting a link to this page a few months ago, which gives you the above method, and a couple of others for good measure.]

37. [The final punctuation mark in each case is a semicolon, not a colon.]

38. [The most important word in any language, in Greek, is μπηρα.]

39. [Phil @38: Chapeau! It’s normally with an upsilon or an iota in the middle – but it sounds the same, which is the important thing 😉 ]

40. PhilinLivi does that mean that mu-pi is pronounced like English B and the word is beer? Or is something else the most important word in your language?

41. [Valentine @40: in case Phil hasn’t seen your question – you’re quite right. A beta in modern Greek is pronounced ‘v’, so for the ‘b’ sound they use μπ . Bouzouki, for example, is μπουζούκι .

    (Similarly, the ‘d’ sound is no longer conveyed by delta, so they use ντ , as in PeterO’s ντολμαδάκια .)

    I’m pretty certain Phil meant ‘beer’. As I suggested @39, I’ve only ever come across the spellings μπύρα or μπίρα , rather than Phil’s version with an eta, but perhaps he has more experience in the beer department! In any case, the sounds of all three vowels are identical (‘ee’) in modern Greek.]

42. Found the lower half near-impossible. Got it out from cross letters using a wildcard dictionary. 26 across (“deep-seated”) is IMHO impossible for an ordinary mortal to parse. “Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo” is about as obscure as it gets.

    I checked the online Cambridge dictionary — it does *NOT* give “deviate” as a noun; I think that’s pretty conclusive. I got the answer anyway; the “up Greek character” *had* to be “eta” upsidedown

    Couldn’t parse “adapted”; too fiddly.

    In my newspaper (the New Zealand Herald) 11 across was given as ” ’61 Attlee … ” rather than” ’51 Attlee … ” which kind of threw me off.

43. Sorry Rolf but 11a is clearly51 in our Herald.

    Not an easy one. Liked Mary Stuart and deep seated but not great danes- shame on you Spooner.

44. I thought this was one of the most enjoyable and straight forward Everymen of the last year or so. Maybe you just have to be in the right mood for her/his/(or for the woke choose your personal pronoun of the day) brand of wit?!

45. Rolf@42 I think you misread 11 down. It’s clearly 51 in my copy of the Herald. Perhaps it’s the font they use.

46. I think you misread 11 down. Rolf@42 . It’s clearly 51 in my copy of the Herald. Perhaps it’s the font they use.

47. I too struggled with SE corner. Deviate was in with a shrug, Deep seated ditto. Suppose we had better look out for pee = go if it is now a thing in crossword land.

    Like some others I was convinced 11D was Little something.

    An OK crossword let down by some poor clues.

48. The conversation about the greek letters got well and truly over my head, but can anyone explain why in 11 ac ‘four times’ is four x the letter T and not any other?
    Found the same unsolveables as many others, 26ac, 18d for the same reasons. I also had ‘ little ‘ as my first word for 11d
    Unbelievably for me did quite well on most others, despite some very weird justifications for some clues imho eg 7d,5d,13d obscure reasoning as usual with this setter. Liked Grenada, Bratislava, tight fisted

49. Vanessa @48
    ‘time’ indicates T, so four of them is TTTT – ‘times’ as multiply does not come into it.

50. This was more like the Everyman of old. A bit easy and a bit hard, keep up the good work E.
    Thanks to all the 15 Squared parsers too, your work does not go unappreciated.

51. Really liked this one.
    Did it over breke on Jervois Rd and just made it in time.

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