Guardian Cryptic 28,610 by Brummie

64 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 28,610 by Brummie”

1. Thanks Brummie and loonapick. My solving experience was much the same as yours, and with the same quibbles, but overall I found this great fun – as well as ST LUCIA and DALEK, I enjoyed the whimsical definitions for BIGAMY and LION TAMER.

   Had a slight problem parsing HALBERD – I had B for ‘tip of blade’ so couldn’t reconcile the stray E. Thanks for putting me right.

2. Thanks, loonapick, very thorough blog.

   Ashamed to say I missed the erroneous it’s in the TRACER BULLET clue.

   Fastest solve for ages, of a setter with whom I habitually struggle.

   Favourite was the LION TAMER described as achair person

   Many thanks, Brummie.

3. Widders @1: re HALBERD, me too. Couldn’t reconcile the E until the blog.

4. Ideal crossword for a day when my only chance for crosswording was over lunch between a morning of floor sanding and an afternoon of floor varnishing. Finished everything in a short time for me! LOI was INDEED where I had a pencilled ‘agreed’ until DeFLECTION made that impossible.

   Fave was DALEK as I’m a sucker for a doctor who reference. I was surprised that SCoUNDreL was equated with dog but I can see how they can be synonymous. I was worried 5a was going to be a cricketer and was relieved to find it wasn’t!

5. Ditto with HALBERD: I had L for the monetary pound, and was muttering about “surely it should be tipS of blade?”

   Enjoyed the image of the Victorian LION-TAMER, and struggled to fit voodoo into ST LUCIA until the light (appropriately) dawned.

6. Thanks Brummie and loonapick. I couldn’t parse LION-TAMER till the blog. Favourites were WAR GAMES for the clever surface and SCOUNDREL.

7. Well we’re all agreed that this was a relatively speedy one. I needed my coffee even more than our blogger having been woken at 4.30 by the irritating sound of a smoke alarm whose battery has clearly begun to fail. With no hope of returning to sleep, it was a very early cuppa and a quick breeze through the puzzle – before nodding off again. So I’m now feeling very fuzzy headed indeed! The speedy experience is neither a boast nor a complaint; it just is what it is. And there was plenty to enjoy with ST LUCIA, TRACER BULLET, HALBERD, DIDDLE, ABRIDGED and DALEK taking the honours. I found 26a a bit grim in every respect bar the impeccable clueing.

   Thanks Brummie and loonapick

8. 22 *(in cold feet)

9. Seems I found it trickier than some.

   I wonder whether it’s coincidental that a DALEK should appear on November 23, the anniversary of Doctor Who’s first appearance. [Incidentally, some people insist that the character is The Doctor, not Doctor Who, but he was called Doctor Who in the credits, listings and even the scripts for many years, and the version played by Peter Cushing in two 60s Dalek films introduces himself as “Doctor Who,” so “Who’s enemy” as definition is fine by me.]

10. I seemed to have this found this tougher than earlier commenters but really enjoyed the challenged. I liked LION TAMER, DALEK, ST LUCIA SCOUNDREL and TRACER BULLET. I also slightly cringed at the damned apostrophe but hey ho and I was another who needed HALBERD explained.

    Ta Brummie & loonapick

11. I also wondered if the juxtaposition of TRASHY and TABLOID was deliberate.

12. I didn’t like the LAMP crossover either (17a and 15d) and the apostrophe (18a) but otherwise all good. Ticks for 2d BIGAMY and 4d DALEK. Thanks to Brummie and loonapick.

13. I’m another for whom Brummie seems to have adjusted his wavelength to mine. DALEK was my favourite. I had to parse HALBERD correctly to be sure of the spelling. I looked in vain for some significance in the two LAMPS (two fan favourites who did not succeed as managers??, Are the trashy tabloids gaslighting us??)

14. 2 reminded me of…
    …an old fellow from Lyme,
    Who married three wives at a time.
    When asked “Why a third?”
    He replied” One’s absurd,
    And bigamy, sir, is a crime.”

15. Got a bit stuck with 4 clues not solved (although I had thought of IDEA, but not parsed it -puzzled why Eat meant the same as Drink!) Had a bath (tmi?) came back to it, and the rest succumbed after a bit of thought (including the proper parsing for IDEA).

16. I wondered if yesterday’s and today’s crosswords were printed on the wrong days as this felt more like a
    Monday one. It was very much a corner by corner one for me, going in anti-clockwise from the SW.Some lovely surfaces and I was misdirected a few times. Thanks Brummie and loonapick for getting my day off to a good start.

17. Thought this rather lacked the wow factor, and slightly spoiled, as already mentioned, by the doubly occurring LAMP. The clever misdirection with ST LUCIA meant the NE corner was last to yield this morning. Ticks for LUTE and ABRIDGED…

18. For me LOOT and LUTE are not homophones but Chambers disagrees.

19. Thanks for the blog, loonapick. Like others, I had exactly the same ticks and reservations as you – I don’t think you have to be a pedant to object to that apostrophe. 😉 )

    I had ticks, too, for LION TAMER, BIGAMY and OLDIE (yes, a bit grim, PM, but it raised a wry smile).

    I’m not usually one to query ‘homophones’ but I did raise an eyebrow at LUTE. (I decided to check the dictionaries – and refresh – before posting and found roughtrade hadmeanwhile got in ahead of me!)

    Thanks to Brummie for a generally fun start to the day.

20. It’s good for setters that pound is both L[SD] and lb. Do both come from livre? Etymology is such a beautiful bricolage, just like biological evolution [which I love pointing out to homophobes, not that one meets many these days].

21. Thanks Brummie and loonapick
    I sometimes say “I wasn’t on the setter’s wavelength”, but this quite the reverse – I saw through all the quirky definitions straight away, though I had the same problem with HALBERD as several above.
    Favourite ST LUCIA.

22. ginf @ 20: Yes, they do.

    Thanks Brummie and loonapick

23. roughtrade @18 and Eileen @ 19. It is with some hesitancy that I broach matters of the homophone, given how such discussions can get out of hand and sometimes downright acrimonious in this parish. I am surprised that Chambers determines that ‘loot’ and ‘lute’ are homophones; I would venture that it does not do so for ‘coot’ and cute’. Perhaps it is easier to diphthongize the ‘u’ after ‘c’ than after ‘l’, but, for example, in Olivier’s famous rendering of Richard III’s opening soliloquy, the line ‘To the lascivious pleasing of a lute’ ends in a ‘lute’ that would definitely rhyme with ‘cute’. His delivery, yes, is consciously mannered in that speech, but I am certain that when I pronounce ‘lute’ on the rare occasions that I have to, the ‘u’ is slightly diphthongized.

24. Unlike PostMark @7, I slept in this morning after a fitful first couple of hours – sleep is tricky as you get older! But I enjoyed the puzzle, did it quite fast for me, but needed help with the parsing. 9a and 26a were write-ins that defeated me. Thank you both.

25. Yes, Simon S @22, so livre is both avoirdupois weight and currency… hmm.

26. Very enjoyable puzzle.

    Favourites: BIGAMY, TABLOID, CAMBODIA, DALEK, SCREECH OWL.

    I did a double take when I saw the word ‘lamp’ in both 15d and 27ac.

    Thanks, both.

27. Thanks loonapick, I had a similar experience to most above, wondered if there was more going on with Lion-tamer than i could see, but appears not. I also wondered if the crossing Lamps were clumsy or deliberate attempts at confusion – they were clued quite differently so perhaps the latter. I thought “BIGAMY could have been a little trickier and more efficient (eg “Double trouble…”) and a shame about that apostrophe but that was a nice surface! Anyway I enjoyed SCOUNDREL and CAMBODIA especially, thanks Brummie.

28. This was quicker than yesterday’s and I’m inclined to think the two were swapped (as JerryG @16).

    Thanks Miche @9 for the Doctor Who history. Always good to see a DALEK. Liked BIGAMY, OLDIE and St LUCIA too.

    The apostrophe is just a typo? Shouldn’t get past the editor but no big deal. We’re all human (unless you’re ROBOTIC 😉 )

    grantinfreo @20 – you may have read it but if not The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention by Guy Deutscher is very enjoyable.

29. Eileen@19, FlatCap@23: an issue arising from the inevitable complaint that the setters’ homophones don’t work is that, in field work in linguistic study, people are typically inaccurate when they report their own phonological performance. Any good linguistics researcher will confirm that people simply don’t hear or identify the actual sounds they produce in fluent speech because their perception is coloured by their idealized conception of the “citation” form of words.

30. Oh and thanks Brummie for taking it easy on us and loonapick for explaining everything.

31. [SC @23: In Norfolk (I believe – perhaps Norfolkians can confirm?) coots can indeed be quite coot. So can moot swans. In fact they can be bootiful.]

32. Very enjoyable but similar quibbles to above. Repetition of lamp (and as crossers!), the (presumably) misprinted it’s…

    Although a speedy solve there were many delightful moments, so praise for ST LUCIA, TABLOID, DEFLECTION, SCOUNDREL and OLDIE.

    HALBERD was my LOI and like others I needed the blog to explain my apparently unparsed E.

    Many thanks to Brummie and loonapick

33. ginf @ 25 I think it’s a case of definition by extension. A pound was,= originally, I think, a pound weight of silver which over time became a pound value.

34. My opinion on homophones is that if you can imagine any speaker of English as a first language (yes even Americans 😉 having the two words as homophones, then they are legitimate. Personally I have never heard the word lute pronounced lyute (like cute). Which doesn’t mean it is wrong to do so of course. But I think if you get too fussy, the use of homophones in a crossword becomes impossible, which I would be sad about.

35. pserve_p2 @29 this is a good point, saying a word in isolation (and self-consciously) is very different from using it in everyday speech.

    Moth @34 and others: I’m puzzled why people keep pointing out whether a word is or is not a homophone. Surely they must realise that there is a variety of English speech in the UK alone (never mind the world) that if the homophone works for the setter, it probably works for others. Does anybody think a homophone must work for every single English speaker? Or do they think that if it doesn’t work for them, it doesn’t work for anyone?

    For the record, I’m from London and LUTE and LOOT rhyme, and since London is the centre of the universe… 😉

36. Moth @34 and pdp11 @35 – I agree with you totally and, as I said, I don’t usually query homophones. I was surprised, though, to see the Chambers entry.

    pserve_p2 @29
    Thanks for that and essexboy @31 – I lived in Norfolk during my teenage years and really loved the dialect. Are you old enough to remember this?

37. Screech owls whinny rather than screech, therefore 13d is a little more cryptic than you think, loonapick.

38. Spooner’s catflap @23 – my apologies for omitting to thank you for your interesting comment, too.

39. Another good one from Brummie. I thought there might be a theme when I solved ST LUCIA and CAMBODIA, which is why I was fooled by the ‘state’ in 2D.

    I particularly liked TABLOID, LION-TAMER and BIGAMY. I wasn’t concerned by the typo in it’s but I normally think of ‘tip’ as a first letter indicator. The repetition of LAMP seemed a bit strange, but as one is in a corner I suppose it was just a consequence of the grid fill.

    It’s getting a bit monotonous but I’ll say again that homophones are unusable in crosswords unless there is a standard, which should be the pronunciation in dictionaries. If you compare loot with lute in Collins, you’ll find the pronunciation is identical. Sometimes setters, like Paul, use pun-ny homophones to raise a smile, and that’s fine; nuff said!

    Thanks Brummie and loonapick.

40. [Eileen @36 – thanks for that; I had a picture of the Bernard Matthews turkey ad in my head when I posted earlier. Many will have fond memories of his Norfolk accent – although perhaps not Jamie Oliver (remember Twizzler-gate?) or the turkeys themselves.]

41. Eileen @36 – thanks for the bootiful trip down memory lane. At the time, I hadn’t heard the Norfolk accent so I didn’t know whether this was an affectation, an attempt by advertisers to create a meme or the way Norfolk folk spoke.

    That ad and LUTE/LOOT reminds me of the Brut advert with Kevin Keegan and Henry Cooper cavorting in the shower. Some may consider it homoerotic today but we were too innocent then.

42. Btw full marks for Wiktionary. It gives both pronunciations of LUTE, and even specifies in which accents it may be considered a homophone of ‘loot’.

43. grantinfreo@20: they all come from the Latin ‘libra’-hence the b in the unit of mass.

44. I’m very relaxed about homophone clues, but I’m finding the loot/lute discussion fascinating. For me (like Moth and others) they sound exactly the same. My accent is generally pretty standard RP, but perhaps I’m slightly more cockney than I thought I was! I certainly do the diphthong in “cute”, “dispute”, “refute” and so on, so perhaps as Spooner’s catflap suggests @23 there’s something about the preceding “l” that makes a difference. Do you diphthong-sayers also do it in “flute” and “Luton” for example?

    (I did one hear Simon Callow pronounce “illustration” as something like “ill you stracey on”, which was definitely a bit over the top.)

45. I’m afraid I found this puzzle rather unpleasingly uneven, with some good clues (I liked ST LUCIA, OLDIE and HALBERD) but some rather weak ones, and surfaces which ranged from the smooth and shiny to the downright clunky. The twin LAMPs are inelegant – though I missed the greengrocers’ apostrophe!

    As for the contentious homophone, I would personally pronounce LUTE with a palatalised L in careful speech but unpalatalised if speaking quickly. And I wouldn’t normally palatalise the L in ‘lutenist’. Inconsistent, or what?

    [essexboy: Shouldn’t the inhabitants of that part of East Anglia be referred to etymologically as Norfolk? (though perhaps not homophonically with the county!]

    Thanks to S&B

46. [Gervase @45: good point. I did hesitate over what to call them, but didn’t want to upset any of the North folk. (I recall there are one or two among the regulars here.) From a parochial East Saxon perspective of course, it’s all a bit grim up Nor.]

47. I think the best way to consider homophones is like synonyms. Many words have multiple senses, so we are only equating one sense of each compared word. In this puzzle, just in the first few clues, we have tab and bill and row, all of which are polysemous. Then when we are matching the correct meaning, we gloss over the fact that even then the words have subtle shades, nuances and associations that makes them not 100% the same, but for the sake of the clue we don’t care. Can’t we do the same with homophones, and put this issue to rest for all but the most contentious cases?

48. Dr W et al – I have some sympathy for people who are genuinely hamstrung by homophone clues when their pronunciation doesn’t match the setter’s, and I think that is the basis of most complaints – it’s a plea for fairness for the solver, not just peevishness. If a clue depends on a particular regional pronunciation, setters should be mindful of that and maybe include an indicator.

    In this instance, though, I think the pronunciations are close enough that the setter is absolved. But then I would say that because my pronunciation of LUTE matches Brummie’s.

    There is a helpful clue in his pseudonym, of course – next time you come across a homophone clue in a Brummie puzzle, just remember to pronounce it with a Birmingham accent and you’ll be fine.

49. Thanks to Brummie and loonapick. Great crossword, comprehensive blog (but pl see Toadfather@8)

    It seems to me that “bootiful” is nearer to the original French source than the more familiar diphthongised version so perhaps there was a point when all pronounced it thusly. My point, insofar as I have one, is that almost any pronunciation would be fair game for a homophone – this makes me take a very elastic approach; I appreciate that many here do not.

    [All this set me off looking for a clip of the lamented Victoria Wood’s treatment of the pronunciation of “Spudulike” but I couldn’t find any – nevertheless I’ve had a few laughs in the search. But we’re way off topic here.]

50. Lord Jim @ 44: I don’t know about diphthong-sayers, but in the local dialect it sounds much more like ‘loo-[glottal stop]-[schwa}n’.

    More generally, I’ve said before and will no doubt say again, if you think of homophones as puns the need for an exact or near-exact match disappears.

51. Alphalpha @ 49 Your mention of Spudulike reminds me of ISIHAC many years and (I think) one of Coren/Rushton/Cryer talking about being in a pharmacist and heading someone asking for ‘anoozle’. Took a while to work out what he meant.

52. W@48 yes the so called homophone clues must be a nightmare for the likes of Brian Sewell and Simon Callow et al. And what about poor old Jonathan Ross? I try to remember I’m not being asked how I say it but how I might hear it said.

    Enjoyed this one – even the matching lamps!

53. Not stressed about lute/loot – mainly because you can never have a homophone that pleases everyone, but also possibly because I found that to be the easiest clue as I had the L and it perfectly matches my pronunciation, which I understood to be fairly standard southern UK and therefore generally follows RP. I’m actually surprised there are so many people who pronounce it in the same way as ‘cute’, as I don’t think I’ve heard that before! I would also not have a /j/ in luge, convoluted, ludicrous, luminary… Would others?

    Found most of this quite straightforward, which is good for me… Thanks Brummie and loonapick!

54. [For those who doubt the persistence of the East Anglian regional accent, last night’s TV included an interview with the boatman at Thorpeness village, praising the bootiful lake he works on.]

55. [Isn’t yod dropping a wonderful thing! It’s clear from the discussion here that palatalisation of L before a long u is on its way out even in British English. And few Brits still pronounce ‘suit’ as /sju:t/ but the glide is still there in ‘pursuit’. Most American dialects no longer glide after T (tune) or N (new) but still retain the palatalisation of C (cute) and M (mute)]

56. Thanks for the blog, prefer Brummie to be a bit more challenging but it was decent overall.

57. Norfolk accent still alive and kicking .. including ‘ he shoe me ‘ for ‘ he showed me ‘ – now that would be an interesting homophone as the pronunciation really is like in the footwear. Straightforward enough solve apart from not getting Diddle as Rook .. crook .. etc

58. Really enjoyed this. I often struggle with Brummie, but not this time. As to homophones, is anyone like me in actually liking the cheeky ones that require a bit of a stretch? (although loot and lute are identical for me, and I was completely unaware of an alternative for the latter. Always good to learn something new though).

59. [Brian Sewell has been mentioned as one who had a particular take on English and how she should be spoke. Here is a link to Have I Got News For You from 1997 when Sewell guested and was mercilessly sent up all the way through – even by himself.]

60. Did this one fairly steadily last night and agree with the initial remarks. Also liked LION-TAMER.
    Thanks Brummie and loonapick.

61. Thanks for the link PM@59. (The material from about 7 mins on is disturbingly topical 20+ years later.)

    The programme’s name includes the word “news” – now I would have that as a homophone of, say, “queues” whereas many, if not all, transpontines would rhyme it with “zoos”. I think Gervase@55 has a point – we are witnessing the evolution of the language (as she is spoke) even as we squeak.

    LovableJim@53: I would have a (somewhat discretionary) /j/ in “convoluted”.

62. [Ta for the HIGNFY link, PM@59, loved it. S’s c @23 mentions Olivier’s mannered delivery. It’s the opposite that I love about more recent styles, so that rather than Juliet declaiming Oooh swear not by the mooon etc, she sounds like what the words mean, i.e. What.. swear by something that changes every night? Don’t be so daft!]

63. Australians, presumably like Americans, say ‘cur-loo’ for ‘curlew’. I feel sorry for the poor birds.

64. I am another one who failed to notice “it’s”. And I only noticed “Who’s” instead of “Whose” after solving the clue. It would have been a lot less cryptic if I had noticed it first.

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