Independent on Sunday 1,651 by Tees

42 comments on “Independent on Sunday 1,651 by Tees”

1. Thanks to wordplay I managed to finish this, even though a few GK deficits were revealed, including for ITHACA, my last in. I didn’t know the ‘location’ of the city in question and thought the ‘Finger Lakes’ might be in Minnesota, not New York State.

   I liked 11/25, for the references to the ‘Midsomer cop’ (could be either Tom or John) in the wordplay and for the ‘Dickensian raven keeper’ def. Another one I wouldn’t have known but for ? Hovis mentioning it a few weeks ago. I think Tees may have said then he’d keep it in mind for the future.

   Thanks to Tees and PeeDee

2. Another fine Sunday puzzle from Tees with lots to enjoy – amongst many good clues, I did like the Dickensian raven keeper

   Thanks to Tees for the continuing entertainment and PeeDee for the blog

3. Some Tees puzzles, I can find impenetrable for quite some time and a dnf is not unusual but today the wavelengths were reasonably well aligned and the puzzle fell. I did resort to checking a map of the Finger Lakes which gave me ITHACA; I’ve heard the name but wouldn’t have been able to place it. NELLIE DEAN came from wordplay but had to be checked and I’ve not heard that nickname for the Devil (I assumed there must be some temptation in Hamlet perpetrated by such a character and that I had forgotten it!)

   LIE IN WAIT came up quite recently, as did TANGELO in a G puzzle so a small amount of deja vu this morning. I was particularly taken with NUMERATOR, TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, MEDELLIN, TANTAMOUNT and DRY CLEANER with COTD going to the delightfully conceived SALVATION.

   Thanks Tees and PeeDee

4. A very enjoyable puzzle, albeit one which I failed to finish courtesy of 7d.

   I’ve never heard of MEDELLIN but it was easy enough to work out from the wordplay followed by a quick Google check.

   SALVATION was my favourite.

   Many thanks to Tees and to PeeDee.

5. In desperation I put OTTAWA at 7D. knowing it was wrong, so DNF. I should have looked up Finger Lakes but thought there was something going on with their ‘kerbs’ (F-R/L-S). Otherwise very enjoyable, so thank you Tees and PeeDee.

6. Quite a few bits of previously unknown GK that I did need to check on although I’d managed to work out most of the required answers from the wordplay.
   TANTAMOUNT made me smile and takes top spot for me.

   Thanks to Tees and to PeeDee for the review.

7. Too heavy on the GK for my liking. Failed in the end by entering an unparsed OTTAWA for 7d.

   WordPlodder @1. I also recalled this but it was copmus, not me, who mentioned it.

8. I was pleased and surprised to dredge up 9a from my O level maths a hundred years ago, and my general knowledge held up pretty well, just failing on Ithaca. I also thought of Ottawa as fitting the crossers, but not the clue. Favourites salvation and tantamount but so much to enjoy, including the mirror placing of tern and tarn. Thanks to Tees and to PeeDee.

9. Thanks PeeDee and commenters.

   I do requests you know, up to a point and where possible. And where allowed. Today’s appears, as Hovis says, as a result of a chat with copmus and others a few weeks back about those who keep ravens.

   Ithaca USA takes its name presumably from the Greek island, with a nod perhaps to its appearance in the works of Homer. According to The Odyssey, Odysseus ruled it, that is, when he wasn’t ignoring his long-suffering wife by fighting wars for Agamemnon, gadding around consorting with witch-goddesses, or dodging Laestrygonian rocks.

10. The Old Gentleman was new to me, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. I sometimes imagine that when words like TANGELO reappear, that setters have set up a secret competition for whose clue is best. Thanks both.

11. Thanks Tees & PeeDee, most enjoyable. I don’t mind a bit of GK in a crossword, and I especially enjoyed the sheer breadth of cultural references in this one – 18th century opera to ITV murder mysteries. Like others, I was defeated by ITHACA – my knowledge of the Finger Lakes doesn’t extend beyond knowing that the largest of them is called Seneca, and that I only know thanks to the Jeopardy scene in Groundhog Day.

    I also know nothing of ravens, and not much more of Dickens, but I do know BARNABY RUDGE as the name of a local hostelry where my friends and I were able to get served under-age back in the day.

    TO THE LIGHTHOUSE leapt off the page at me, and I banged it in even though I didn’t recall it being an unfinished work… should have stopped to count the letters.

    PM @3 – I’m not familiar with THE OLD GENTLEMAN as a nickname for the Devil either, but I did wonder if the clue might be a reference to Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, which I endured for A-level many moons ago – the old man in that story is a tempter, although he is supposed to personify Death rather than the Devil.

12. Thoroughly enjoyable, although I was coincidentally lucky with some of the GK, appearing recently in one guise or another.

    That’s me all caught up with the Indy and Guardian from Thursday to Sunday now so I’m off to the pub to celebrate.

    Thanks Tees and PeeDee

13. A lot of GK, we agree. We managed to parse almost everything but had some trouble putting the bits together! Favourite moment was when I asked ‘well what *is* a frame of snooker like?’ and we both suddenly hit on it!

    Amortise was Alex’s Word of the Day, it’s used a lot more frequently in German!

    Thanks to Tees and PeeDee!

14. All done and dusted without outside help although some entries were a combination of guesswork and “it can’t be anything else”. The euphemism for the devil being a case in point as we hadn’t come acrosss it before.
    Favourites included NUMERATOR, TRIANGULAR and ITHACA.
    Thanks, Tees and PeeDee.

15. Some solvers, especially Times ones, don’t like too much GK, or indeed any (subjective though it is) as it slows them down when they try to knock one out in under 4 minutes. So to speak. But the demise of same is of concern to me: why on earth shouldn’t crosswords have GK in them, or even the occasional impenetrable obscurity? If you can’t solve fast enough where such things appear, read some bloody books.

    Old Times puzzles, right stinkers many of them, were full of literary allusions, as on occasion were Araucaria’s, and Bunthorne’s. Others too as well. Such mighty heroes, now under the earth and regrettably so, I feel almost sure would have agreed with me 🙂

16. I don’t have a problem with some GK when the wordplay gives you a clear chance of arriving at the answer & then checking it out. Enjoyed this puzzle though needed help with a couple to get me over the line. SALVATION, BARNABY RUDGE & TRIANGULAR were my top 3 from some super clues.
    Thanks Tees & PeeDee

17. Tees @15, please don’t misinterpret my comment @7. I like learning a thing or two from a crossword but, not so much, if there’s too much I don’t know – but that’s a reflection on my lack of knowledge not a criticism of the setter. Several years ago, there would have been even more I knew nothing about and, hopefully, in several years time I could well enjoy this very same crossword.

    As for the solve time, I never time myself. If I feel I’ve spent long enough and need to get on with other things, I’ll either pack it in or leave it for later. I find the concept of speed solving somewhat disagreeable as I like to spend time appreciating surface readings and wordplay.

18. Thanks Hovis. Thing is, with me it seems to be unavoidable. They creep in, these ITHACAs , MEDELLINs and NELLIE DEANs almost without me knowing. I’d say it stems from two facts: first, I solved the Grauniad more or less exclusively in what might be called my formative years, with its Araucarias, Bunthornes et al all over it like a cheap suit, and second I have an English degree, which has meant exposure to loads of stuff which I’d have to admit is not necessarily common knowledge. Add to that an obsession with The Iliad and my public (ho ho) is well and truly Friar Tucked.

    (If I may say so, ‘pologies m’lud.)

19. Quite agree, Tees @ 15. Crosswords are a great way to expand one’s knowledge and I’m always delighted to take the opportunity to do so. (Unless it’s football, recent TV or post 1970s pop.)

    Great puzzle. Keep ’em coming.

20. It’s all general knowledge, isn’t it? I mean, general knowledge is just another way of saying you’re engaged with the world. You hang around long enough, keep your ears and eyes open, you pick things up. It’s all grist to the mill, even Midsomer Murders. You don’t have to like these things to know a few superficial facts about them.

    And sometimes general knowledge comes to you in less direct ways – I’ve never knowingly heard the song NELLIE DEAN, but I’ve drunk in the Soho pub that’s named after it a fair few times.

21. GK in a crossword clue can evoke two reactions:
    1. If you solve it straight off because you know it you feel pleased with yourself;
    2. If you solve it after a struggle, maybe consulting reference works such as Brewer or even Google you think “Aha! I’ll remember that for another time!”
    Both are equally satisfying.

22. Thanks Tees. We seem to like GK when we know it and find fault with it when we don’t. C’est la vie. I’ve been to the Finger Lakes so ITHACA was easy but BARNABY RUDGE was impossible. TANTAMOUNT was my favourite. Thanks PeeDee for the blog.

23. What I don’t understand is why (for some people) having to look up words you don’t know in a dictionary is considered fair but having to look up GK you don’t know is considered unfair.

    I can see that once upon a time looking up GK might mean travelling to your local reference library, reference books are expensive and having a comprehensive set in your own home would be beyond most people’s means. But those times are long gone. Perhaps the idea still lingers even though the need for it has disappeared?

24. I’m not anti-GK by any means, certainly a sprinkling adds to a puzzle’s richness. But, the reason I like cryptic crosswords is because they deal with words and their meanings, not facts. I can’t justify this by anything other than ‘it’s what I feel’, but the brain-buzz from decoding and translating is different to that from recalling, and it’s the former that makes me prefer crosswords to quizzes. Sometimes, but not always, GK in a clue can cancel the cryptic buzz. For example in this puzzle, when I saw ‘Dickensian raven keeper’ the clue fell completely flat. On the other hand, I had to work out ITHACA, and then the solution linked vague inklings of Finger Lakes and American towns in a nice way. If the clue can reveal something to you that you didn’t know you knew, that’s great, but it’s a fine line. Where you have stuff in clues like ‘model Jodie’ for KIDD (to take a recent example from the Guardian), that is simply dull.

25. Thanks for that James. If I understand you rightly you are suggesting there is an emotional element to the subject. Having to know and use the meaning of a proper known (general knowledge) invokes a different feeling to knowing and using a common noun (vocabulary). I can see this, and I think I do experience something similar. However, I can’t find a god reason for this, it seems irrational. Perhaps the best answer is that there is no rational reason, it is an irrational feeling, but present nonetheless.

26. Another interesting discourse on GK, it does keep raising its head. Until a few weeks ago I would have been like James and shrugged at Dickensian raven keeper, but as I remembered the relevant discussion here (did you blog that one PeeDee?), I instead filled it in with a smile.

    I suspect the emotional aspect is a similar feeling to that of say being in on the joke and hence included. Too much unknown GK would perhaps lead to a feeling of being excluded, which would naturally spoil one’s enjoyment.

27. And on that, we have no comment from copmus himself.

    Bloody keyboard players. There’s no pleasing them.

28. PeeDee, I wouldn’t say it’s irrational, any more than a black hole is, in that I know there’s a sensible explanation despite not being able to pin it down. I’d say it’s more physical than emotional. In my head, there is a short, straight link between Dickensian raven keeper and Barnaby Rudge. The fact that the link was created, or rather shortened, by the blog a few weeks ago is neither here nor there. There was no brain activity to go from one to the other. For that clue, I was deprived of puzzling. My impression of the brain activity needed to solve a normal cryptic clue is of lots of different connections being made in the background with a pleasurable click as the right parts come together.
    Blah, sorry to have been misleading. I didn’t shrug, I remembered like you, but had a different reaction.

29. Ah sorry James I misunderstood. Rather than the reference being meaningless, it instead deprived you of a satisfactory PDM as the clue was solved without reading further or any analysis. I can see how that could be disappointing.

30. Hi James. There is a direct link in my head between “tangelo” and “fruit”, “tern” and “bird” etc. What I am struggling to get to grips with is how the link between “Barnaby Rudge” and “raven keeper” is different. Actually I didn’t know BR was a raven keeper, but lets assume for the sake of argument I did. What makes knowledge of proper nouns different to meanings of common nouns?

31. Blah @26 – I think you have hit on a good idea about inclusion/exclusion. References to ancient Greece can leave the feeling of a cryptics being a bit of a “club for the privately educated”. Modern TV celebrities and popstars can leave the old and genteel feeling excluded. References to current football players can exclude those who think football is for men, or those who think football a bit too common for a high-brow activity like cryptic puzzles. There are all sorts of ways one can include/exclude.

    Perhaps ordinary “dictionary words” don’t have such a strong social attachment. There isn’t such a feeling of a word being “our sort of thing” as there is with general knowledge. As an example example in James’s comment @24 why Ithica (classical reference) is OK but Jodie Kidd (model, racing driver, TV personality etc) is simply dull. Perhaps the root lies in a feeling of belonging: whether the item of GK being presented belongs in one’s own world, and if it does not then the negative connotations stem from a feeling of the setter excluding one from the puzzle.

32. I’m not sure too many people were ‘deprived of puzzling’ by ‘Dickensian raven-keeper’. In fact you could say that the GK required to meet that definition makes for a tougher solve (yours truly for one didn’t know that Rudge keeps a raven, having not read all the works of the author concerned, until copmus brought the matter up those weeks ago).

    As we were saying passim, or elsewhere, if you know it, you know it, which rule applies in particular to themes, which appear to make things either a write-in or a painful slog.

33. Thanks PeeDee@31 I think you expressed what I was trying to say more eloquently that I did.

    On the subject of themes they do seem to be divisive, (especially on the Grauniad blogs) but I think that’s where the skill of the setter comes in. Take Knut’s offering today, the theme was telegraphed to most who would know of it by a single clue and then by several answers, but (as several commenters stated) zero knowledge of the theme in no way hindered solving. Phi is also a master at this. If solving depends on knowledge of the theme then as Tees@32 says its either too easy or impossible.

    BTW Tees I would also say that when it concerns a single clue,(as it does here) to allow that to spoil the entire crossword would be rather akin to cutting off ones nose despite one’s face. Without the previous discussion I wouldn’t have had a scooby that Rudge had a raven. In fact I rather enjoyed that single clue being a write-in for me, as I smugly patted myself on the back. 🙂

34. Tees @32 – I think what James is getting at, and I partly agree with him, is that ‘Dickensian raven keeper’ could only have one possible correct solution, whereas ‘work’ or ‘city’ or ‘sentimental ballad’ require you to decode the wordplay to narrow the field down a bit even if you’re familiar with the work/city/song in question.

    On the other hand, ‘character in novel’ would have been way too broad… It’s a question of finding that happy middle ground. Not easy, I’m sure. (Though as an aside, one thing I enjoy about your puzzles is the inventive cryptic definitions, so I know it’s something you’re good at.)

    As it happens, since I’ve not read the book and missed the relevant discussion, I still had to rely on the wordplay to get BARNABY RUDGE, so I wasn’t deprived of anything.

35. Tees @32, sure. It was present in my mind for the same reason you wrote the clue in the first place, and you were bound by the terms of the discussion to mention the raven. Lets hope there are more solvers out there in blissful ignorance than in here, otherwise we’re in trouble. I wasn’t meaning to do the clue down, just use it as an example of my point that the game of remembering facts is not a word game, and the reason people do crosswords is because they like word games.
    PeeDee, I don’t think it’s proper nouns per se, I think it’s facts. Where they don’t work in cryptic clues is when they result in the collapse of possibilities. So when I said ‘model Jodie’ was dull, that was because it left nowhere to go but Kidd, not because that area of GK doesn’t suit my taste. The same for the raven keeper. It might have been the same for Ithaca because that was clued with a pretty specific fact, but I happened not to know it. If I had been an Ithaca resident .. well, I suppose I’d have quite enjoyed the namecheck. You may link fruit and tangelo, but given fruit, tangelo is not an inevitability.
    Plenty of people grumble about names as solutions, or part of clues, being clued by ‘man’ or ‘woman’ etc. It’s suggested that surely there are more interesting ways of clueing that particular name. For example, in today’s Knut, there is RON clued by ‘bloke’ and ALF by ‘chap’. Wouldn’t it be more interesting to use ‘Weasley, for example’ and ‘Ramsey, for one’? No! It would be dull. Names are words; given ‘bloke’ we know what sort of word we’re looking for but have to solve the clue. Given Weasley it’s game over, boring. The same goes for other proper nouns. They can be clued by general terms (eg. character for Barnaby Rudge) or a fact. But it’s difficult to cryptically represent a fact, so where the fact is known, the solution is generally obvious. But if the fact isn’t known, what’s the point of putting it in the clue?

36. Thanks for clarifying that James. I see your point about facts having more limited meanings than words in general, so GK clues may be more prone to being a write-in if you know it, very hard if you don’t.

    I am still hoping to get to the bottom of why, in general, obscure facts have a different and more emotive impact on solvers than obscure words. But I see that was not really the point you were making. This will have to wait until a another day.

37. PeeDee, sorry, I rather missed that you had asked a specific question. My wittering was off at a tangent, but perhaps applies to some extent, i.e. that facts are not what people want from a crossword. Words are the currency of crosswords, facts of quizzers. There are fewer words than facts, so relatively speaking, one word is more valuable than a fact. A word is likely to be reusable, whereas a fact is throw-away. So maybe learning an obscure word is seen as an investment, whereas an obscure fact is a waste of time and ROM.

38. I think maybe I am looking for “the” reason that explains why reactions differ. I should be looking for a variety of reasons. Solves are a mixed bunch and it is unlikely that there will be a single explanation that fits all cases. As you say, there will be some people just don’t want to see general knowledge in a cryptic crossword, for them it does not belong in a word puzzle. No further explanation necessary.

39. Which brings us back to ‘what is GK’.

    The point is that there is no baseline for knowledge: we don’t all know the same things, facts or anything else, even up to some point or other, and so I think James’s distinction between boring fact-remembering and really fun word-gaming is subjective and therefore, as a general proposition, false.

    I should have thought this blindingly obvious, but different people know different things, and might know Rudge but not Weasley or Ramsey for example. (They certainly won’t know what the hell the bloke or chap is either, and may not enjoy guessing, which is why names as cryptic parts were banned in the DT daily puzzles.)

    And let’s not forget the most important bit, which is the context of the clue: choosing to have such as a Weasley for RON in some circumstances might improve a clue enormously, regardless of whether anyone knows it or not.

40. As a general proposition it was disproved by allan_c @21 and Tony @22 before it was even expressed.
    And yes, context is all. If you were a literate Argentinian football buff this might be just your cup of tea:
    Old man led by Dickensian raven keeper (6)

41. Nice. You should become a compiler.

42. There’s hardly a post-Brexit shortage

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