Everyman 3,917

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There are some nice clues in this crossword, but also a few that I’m not comfortable with, as will be clear from the blog.

Definitions in crimson, underlined. Indicators (anagram, reversal, homophone etc) in italics. Anagrams indicated like *(this) or (this)*

 

ACROSS
1 THE AVIATOR
Not just any flyer for a movie? (3,7)
It seems that ‘The’ is to be read in two ways, as a simple definite article, and as ‘the particular, the well-known’ as in ‘the Mr Wooster’ in the P.G.Wodehouse story ‘Bertie Changes His Mind’ — and ‘The Aviator’ is a film of 2004 about Howard Hughes
6 TSAR
Russian ruler ‘beats a retreat’ … bottles it (4)
hidden in beaTS A Retreat
9 PEER REVIEW
Employee appraisal at the House of Lords? (4,6)
A sort of CD: I think the definition is just the first two words, but there is a nudge to the other meaning of ‘peer’, a member of the House of Lords
10 ORCA
Repelled a raven, largely predatory beast (4)
(a cro[w])rev. — an orca is a killer whale
12 IN SAFE HANDS
Deaf-ish nans treated, being well looked after (2,4,5)
(Deaf-ish nans)* — I suppose one could have deaf-ish nans, but it does rather cry out ‘anagram!’
15 PEAKIER
More sickly, kind of green, perhaps slalomer’s heading off (7)
pea [s]kier — pea green, skier = perhaps slalomer
16 DEIFIED
Morally improved duke earlier, becoming exalted (7)
edified with its d (the first one, anyway; I think we should have been told) moved to earlier in the word — edified = morally improved, d = duke — and I’m not convinced by exalted = deified, not quite the same thing
17 L S LOWRY
Artist‘s empty landscapes’ sad lines (1,1,5)
l[andscape]s low ry — low = sad, ry = railway = lines
19 DETESTS
Hates seeing sights with son not about (7)
I’m not quite sure about this. The answer is obvious enough — it could hardly be anything else — but I’m quite lost.  Seeing = dates (?? wrong parts of speech) and you replace a (= about) with s (= son) and get into even more of a mess … I’d better stop there, and hope someone explains it [thanks to the many who have pointed out that it’s ‘detects’ (= seeing sights) with its c (circa, about) replaced by s (son). Quite simple really. I know it looks like sour grapes, but I’m not comfortable with detects = seeing sights. nor are some of the people who posted. Or probably, as Paul B points out, it’s detects = sights, with seeing as a link-word, but then, as he says, it’s the wrong way round.]
20 BAKED ALASKA
A sad, a bleak king ordered pudding (5,6)
(a sad a bleak k)* — k = king — another where it cries out ‘anagram!’
23 UNIS
In France, one is where courses take a long time to get through (4)
un is — in France un = one, ‘is’ is just ‘is’, and unis/universities are where courses take some years, or a long time, to get through
24 ASPIRATION
Hoping for an ‘h’ sound (10)
2 defs
25 DREW
Made pencil portrait of Andy (4)
2 defs: according to imdb, Andy Drew is an actor, known for The American Dream (2011) and Middle of Nowhere (2012). Never heard of him, or of the films, but maybe he’s very well-known. And can’t you draw in crayon or things other than pencil? And can’t you draw without making a portrait? If my parsing is correct, which it may well not be, the whole thing seems very weak. [Maybe I’m overthinking this: some suggest that it is just a double definition: Made pencil portrait = drew (although I continue to maintain that this is a bit dodgy), and Drew = Andrew (just a diminutive). I think they’re probably right, and calling up poor old Andy Drew is unnecessary]
26 SCAREDY-CAT
Brand new day, etc, for coward (7-3)
scar *(day etc) — scar = brand
DOWN
1 TIPS
Gratuities regularly shunned; at a push, Everyman will chip in (4)
[a]t [a] p[u]s[h], with I inserted — I = Everyman (one of the least-mentioned regular things in the ‘new’ Everyman; there is always an ‘I’ or a ‘me’ so far as I can see) — and shouldn’t it have been ‘:’ not ‘;’?
2 EVES
Days before, golfer becomes upset (4)
(Seve)rev. — the charismatic Spanish golfer is Severiano Ballesteros (1957-2011), who burst on to the scene in the 70s and was always known as Seve; one of the rare people whose first name is enough (unlike Andy Drew I suspect)
3 VIRGINIA WADE
State broadcast assessed value of Wimbledon champ (8,4)
Virginia “weighed” — Virginia is the US State, weighed = assessed value and it only sounds like ‘weighed’, as indicated by ‘broadcast’ — Virginia Wade won Wimbledon in 1977
4 ADVISOR
Guide daughter to wear a sun-blocker (7)
(a visor) with d inserted — visor = sun-blocker, d = daughter — ‘wear’ in crosswords is used in two ways: A wears BC = BAC (as in someone wearing a coat) and AB wears C = ACB (as in someone wearing a brooch, sort of going round it; not a very good example …)
5 OVERFED
Lover Federer admits was excessively giving? (7)
Hidden in LOVER FEDerer
7 STRINGIEST
Spirited grittiness, tough in the extreme (10)
*(grittiness)
8 RHAPSODISE
To talk with enthusiasm in talk about hard earth is exhausting at first (10)
r(h)ap sod is e[xhausting] — h = hard, rap = talk, sod = earth
11 CHRISTIAN AID
This acid rain alarmed campaigners (9,3)
(This acid rain)*
13 SPELLBOUND
Mesmerized by Alexander Graham’s weight, according to Spooner (10)
‘Bell’s pound’ spoonerised — Alexander Graham is the inventor Alexander Graham Bell
14 TABLE KNIFE
Arrangement of elements: potassium, nickel, iron and silver, in part (5,5)
table K Ni Fe — table as in the Periodic Table, an arrangement of elements; the symbols for potassium, nickel and iron are K, Ni and Fe — a table knife is part of one’s silver service — although what about table knives that don’t have any silver in them?
18 YOLK-SAC
Membrane unusually scaly? OK … (4-3)
*(scaly OK)
19 DOSSIER
File ‘requiring less effort’, fancifully? (7)
One is dossing more (as in a doss-house) here: there is no sense of dossier as ‘more dossy’, but fancifully one could imagine that there might be
21 DISC
Realize, after losing six balls: it’s a record (4)
disc[over] — discover = realize, over = six balls (cricket)
22 CNUT
Commonly, Norseman underestimating tides, primarily? (4)
The ‘primarily’ clue that is an &lit.: first letters of the first four words — poor old Cnut (or Canute, as I knew him for years) gets a bad press: I believe there’s no real evidence that he told the tides to stop, and it’s more likely that he was demonstrating to some sycophants that a mere king wasn’t powerful enough to stop the tides

48 comments on “Everyman 3,917”

  1. I had 19A as a substitution clue. ‘seeing sights’ = DETE[C]TS. ‘Son’ = S. ‘about’ = C
    Thanks for the blog John

  2. For 25A I took Drew to be a short form of Andrew, like Andy is. Last one in was DOSSIER which I knew was right but couldn’t parse.

  3. Agree with Peter Boyce @1+2 on both parsings. You have to be of a certain age to remember VIRGINIA WADE, I would guess (but I am). L S LOWRY occured to me immediately I saw the numeration. If you talk about the family silver, then part of that collection will be TABLE KNI(ves). A pleasant puzzle – thanks, Everyman and John.

  4. Thanks John , I take your point about the obvious anagram indicators but as Everyman is/was meant to be an entry level puzzle I think that’s okay.

    ‘And thank you Peter Boyce @1 for the substitution in DETESTS which I failed parse. Not quite happy about ‘seeing sights’ for ‘detects’ though. Maybe an attempt to be a clever D.

    I would have called BAKED ALASKA a dessert, not a pudding, although I know some use the word interchangeably. The image of a sad and bleak king does seem to go better with pudding than dessert, and certainly not with ‘baked alaska’, so there’s a bit of disguise there.

    I liked THE AVIATOR with the misleading image in the surface of particularly special promotional material for a movie. STRINGIEST my fav.

  5. It would need a QM really though, would it not, to allow for the fact that not all table knives are part of a silver service (as Wil points out).

  6. Peter Boyce@2!
    I parsed DREW as you did.

    DOSSIER: Had the question mark been placed just after ‘effort’, it could have still made it a complete clue, I thought. ‘Fancifully’ adds another dimension (Has John said the same thing in the blog? Then I am explaining the same thing. Sorry.). Some dictionaries list ‘dossy’ as ‘pretentiously fashionable’. So fancifully …

    Thanks, Everyman and John!

  7. I think the mystery of ‘seeing sights’ for the destestable DETESTS clue is solved by seeing ‘seeing’ as a link word that the compiler uses the wrong way around, at least as far as convention (which helps solvers as far as I know) is concerned, in that normally one would have ‘(wordplay) seeing, or sees or whatever, (answer)’ (so ‘wordplay FOR definition’ rather ‘definition FOR wordplay’). However I think that here ‘DETESTS seeing DETECTS with S not C’ is the cryptic, unfortunately.

    That aside, and boring to go on and on about it I suppose, this seems to be another example of Everyperson trying too hard when he or she (if he or she can) possibly ought to be relaxing a bit, and providing some nice, easy, smooth clues for an audience of people who are looking to enjoy a classy and not-too-tricksy puzzle

  9. Favourites: DISC, TABLE KNIFE.

    New: the artist L S LOWRY (well-clued).

    I did not parse: 19ac DETESTS – thanks, Andrew Boyce @ 1

    1ac works fine for me. ‘Not just any flyer’ = The Aviator

    I parsed 25ac as ‘DREW, like Andy, is short for Andrew. I agree with Peter Byce @ 2 on this.

    Thanks, both.

  10. John E @8 – I suppose I had forgotten the Pommy tendency to repeatedly recall past (often very past) triumphs come Wimbledon time. It’s a bit like when the Pommy press stopped talking about the last time an Englishman won Wimbledon and switched to the last time a Briton won it when Andy Murray appeared.
    paddymelon @4 – “pudding” to mean any dessert is very British. My Pommy wife talks about having (e.g.) strawberries for pudding.

  11. Nothing to do with Wimbledon time. The 2021 US Women’s Open Final had a television audience in the millions, and lots of cameras were pointed at Virginia Wade who was a high-profile attendee at that event and gave quite a few interviews about it.

  12. Thanks for the blog, no mention of the rhyming pair yet unless I have missed it, 3 and 11D , I tend to agree about CNUT teaching his courtiers about the limits of kingly powers.
    PEAKIER was my favourite , I like the word peaky , RHAPSODISE would have been good but using TALK twice makes it a bit clumsy.
    ORCA are called killer whales and are in the order of whales but they are really dolphins.

  13. I didn’t solve the puzzle, but on reading the blog I’d imagine that DETESTS is Detects= seeing sights with s=son replacing c=circa(about)

  14. Thanks for the blog John, but I disagree with all the quibbles! (and those of paul b)

    Deification is an example of exaltation, just as TABLE KNIFE is an example of cutlery (commonly referred to as ‘silver’, irrespective of what it’s made of) – no need for question marks.

    On CNUT, the consensus does seem to be that, if it happened at all, Cnut knew he would get his feet wet – but isn’t that exactly what Everyman is alluding to, by starting the &lit with “commonly”? Canute’s ‘underestimating’ is the ‘common’ interpretation, even if it’s wrong.

    On TIPS, the semicolon is right. The second element counterbalances the first; it doesn’t provide an example or an explanation of it.

    paul b @7: I think ‘seeing’ is one of those connecting words that work just as well, perhaps better, when introducing the wordplay element. The definition is what you ‘get’, but the logical build-up is what the solver ‘sees’.

    Overall, I thought this was another well-judged Everyman, with lots of good clues for an audience of people who are looking to enjoy a classy and not-too-tricksy puzzle.

  15. Thanks Everyman and John. Just to add a couple of comments to what has already been said (though on checking updates before posting, I see essexboy has already made a couple of these points while I was typing slowly…)

    PEER REVIEW – the definition of this phrase is not ‘employee appraisal’, but it could whimsically be taken to mean that at the HoL, so I read the whole clue as a cryptic definition.

    CNUT – to be fair to Everyman, I think the clue is hinting at the fact that the legend is commonly misunderstood.

    TABLE KNIFE – eating utensils collectively are often referred to as ‘the silver’ whether they contain any silver or not, so this is fine by me.

    Roz @12 – yes, 8d could have had ‘show enthusiasm’ for the definition. Double talk is a bit clunky.

    baerchen @13 – your parsing looks spot on to me.

  16. In all that, I forgot to say how much I enjoyed this puzzle – lots of good clues. I share PEAKIER as a favourite with Roz.

    And yes, Roz, having got 3d, that helped me get 11d, guessing that it would be the rhyming pair.

  17. I’ve only started doing Everyman and always enjoy them (they’re at my level).

    michelle@9 – a tribute to LS Lowry, with lyrics to sing along to 🙂

    Thanks Everyman & John for the comprehensive blog.

  18. Enjoyed this although didn’t get EVES and didn’t parse DETESTS or DREW.

    Favourites: SCAREDY-CAT, DEIFIED, TABLE KNIFE, RHAPSODISE, L S LOWRY and of course, like others, PEAKIER

    Thanks Everyman and John

  19. If something is a DOSS or DOSSY then, colloquially, it’s easy hence DOSSIER
    I parsed DREW as “pencil portrait” indicating a drawn (rather than painted) portrayal of “Andy”
    And you don’t need to be a tennis fan to know Virginia W as she’s immortalised in the chorus of Half Man Half Biscuit’s song Outbreak of Vitas Gerulaitis

  23. I found this a little more difficult than normal but enjoyable.

    Slightly embarrassing that I spent some time looking for pencil sketches by Andy Warhol before seeing the ‘of Andrew’ in 25. I liked DEIFIED, SPELLBOUND and TABLE KNIFE. To be picky about 3D, Peter Biddlecombe says that one should use ‘definition of wordplay’ rather than the reverse, although I solved the clue OK. I failed to parse DETECTS, but see that it has been elucidated above.

    Thanks Everyman and John.

  24. Robi @23: I read the ‘of’ in 3d as part of ‘assessed value of’ (= ‘weighed’, as in ‘I weighed his arguments carefully’).

  25. eb @21- thanks for that and a bit of The Smurf Song too 😀

    25A this came to me in a wonky way: when I saw ‘Andy’, the cartoon strip ‘Andy Capp’ immediately came to mind, which led to ‘drawing a cartoon’ and then to DREW, which is just as well because I couldn’t parse the clue.

  26. Assumed Andy referred to Andy Murray in the mini-theme of tennis players following on from Virginia Wade & Federer. Wasn’t aware that Drew was another shortened form of Andrew though.

  28. I think Drew for Andrew was a 70s/80s thing at school, it may have died out now, perhaps even Andrew has died out for the school age groups.

  29. The writer/comedian Andrew Hunter Murray is a Drew rather than an Andy – he was the first one who came to my mind when solving this clue. I don’t know of any other current famous(ish) ones. I don’t think Drew Barrymore’s name is short for Andrew.

  30. Rox @28 and others: I suspect we might yet get a few posts from Scottish contributors on DREW which is still an abbreviated form in use North of the border.

  32. I was called Fox once on the FT blog , quite like fox. Good point about the Scottish DREW.
    We had Drew Barr and Drew Gallagher at school and both were from Scottish families.

  33. I’m another of the Drew = Andrew school; Drew Carey hosted the US version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? for many years. Not to be confused with Drew Barrymore, who was so named because it was a family middle name coming from her great-great-grandfather’s surname.

  34. What essexboy@14 said (and Petert@20).

    There was a lot of quibbling in the comments today, and I wonder if it was prompted by John’s somewhat grumpy blog. A quirk of human nature, perhaps?

    I had more than the usual ticks today, with the Spoonerism SPELLBOUND@13d, 14d TABLE KNIFE with its deceptive use of silver (not Ag for once), and the very clever primarily clue, 22d CNUT, at the top of my list.

    Thanks Everyman for the excellent puzzle, and John for the blog.

  35. I’m sorry cellomaniac if you find my blog grumpy. I simply comment when I think a setter has fallen short — it seems that this is something I should do. Sometimes I’m wrong, and it is pointed out why this is so by people who post; I’m sure that they don’t want to see some sort of ‘everything is wonderful’ blog.

    It would be possible for me, and also paul b, to argue with essexboy, but in the interests of harmony I won’t do so. He’s entitled to his opinions.

  36. John please say exactly what you think in the blog. We are grateful for all the effort that must go into each blog and you are entitled to your opinion.

  37. Don’t think you need the esoteric Andy Drew. I think it’s just a double definition since Drew
    is a diminutive of Andrew ( Andy) .

  39. I also thought this wasn’t up to the usual standards for an Everyman (which are usually fairly straightforward, no complaints about that).
    At least it’s back on form this week.

  41. Thanks Wil-john for that. I could indeed argue with that fellow, as while he appears to be sure of what he is talking about, he appears not to know what I am talking about. And so a discussion would probably be pointless, as you seem to have concluded. I am going to follow your lead.

    With regard to DREW, whilst it’s still rather typically contrary IMO, I have to concede that it is used occasionally for Andrew (especially in Scotland), as my mate uses it in that way. He happens to be with someone called Melanie just now, so it won’t be too large a leap to see why the pair of them are referred to among the cognoscenti as ‘Victor’.

  42. John@35, my comment was not intended to be a criticism of your blog. My point was not about the blog itself, but rather about how people react to a blog, and how the blog (upbeat or otherwise) influences subsequent comments on the puzzle. I wasn’t even complaining about the number of quibbles – reading, and occasionally participating in, the spirited arguments over quibbles is part of the fun of this site.

    Perhaps “somewhat grumpy” wasn’t the best choice of words, for which I apologize. I was simply trying to note that it appeared to me that there were a lot of criticisms of Everyman’s cluing in your blog, and wondering whether the commenters who followed with their criticisms were sub-consciously influenced by that.

    I totally agree with Roz@36. I enjoyed reading your comments. I appreciate the effort that goes into the blogs, and I especially like bloggers who, like you, take the time to elaborate on their parsings.

  43. Filled in a bit of time on Boxing Day, as it is here in NZ. Overall I found much of this difficult, but enjoyed some e.g. L,S. Lowry, peer review, The Aviator, aspiration.

  44. Disc was our favourite from this lot. Thanks to Everyman and John and a Merry Christmas from a boiling hot Auckland to you all!

  45. I agree Audrey, more difficult than usual, and therefore a little frustrating which isn’t what I wanted for a sunny Sunday morning. Some great clues, but the poor ones diminish the overall enjoyment. Isn’t it a shame that we don’t get the puzzle at the same time as the rest of the world. It would be nice to participate in the banter, rather than feel like an observer.

  46. I agree with John. Not one of Everyman’s best. Too many contrived clues. We seem to have two Everyman crosswords in the paper today, I hope the second is better.

  48. Agree entirely with Barrie I thought this below par – was hard due to what I considered some poorly constructed clues eg orca, seve and 8d, clunky.
    I liked peer review, aspiration, the aviator and peakier best.
    I am surprised no one else comments on the spooner clues I find them actually all stupid as they almost never mean anything other than gibberish !! I think their inclusion spoils what is otherwise a true brain challenge. Maybe our learned English counterparts like daft comedy using spoonerisms
    The only time I’ve ever thought then clever was Rene in Allo Allo which was simply brilliant From memory a combo of spooner and malaprop.
    Anyway I found this hard —perhaps the 27 deg heat
    If I’m told off for whinging so be it!
    I still enjoyed it

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