Everyman 3,945

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A pleasant crossword from Everyman. There were several anagrams — no bad thing in a crossword that’s intended to be on the easy side, but some of the fodder was a bit tortuous and didn’t really lend itself to elegant surfaces. I often didn’t get them until I had plenty of crossers.

Definitions in crimson, underlined. Indicators (for anagrams, homophones, first letters, reversals etc) in italics. Anagrams indicated *(like this) or (like this)*. Link-words in green.

 

ACROSS
1 IMMODESTLY
Fifty admitted to Everyman’s average untidy home without shame (10)
I’m mode st(L)y — I’m = Everyman’s (the self-reference that we always see), mode = average (mode, median, mean), sty = untidy home, L = 50 (Roman numerals)
6 ACTS
NT book appearing as true information (not false) (4)
[f]acts — very strange: Lexico (the Oxford dictionaries) and Chambers don’t give f = false, and Collins seems to try not to in that it isn’t in any of its lists, yet it says that F or f is a written abbreviation for words beginning with f, such as ‘female’, ‘feminine’, ‘franc’, ‘false’, and ‘Fahrenheit’. It’s pretty obvious to any normal person that it is an abbreviation as in T/F (true/false) and I wonder why the dictionaries are so reluctant to reflect this usage
9 ABLE SEAMAN
A lamb seen jumping around a sailor (4,6)
(a lamb seen)* round a
10 UNDO
Somewhat run-down ruin (4)
Hidden in rUN-DOwn
11 MAKE IT SNAPPY
Arrive well dressed, look sharp (4,2,6)
make it snappy — make it = arrive, snappy = well dressed
15 HECTARE
Teacher redesigned unit (7)
(Teacher)* — a hectare is a metric unit of area
16 SEEKING
Looking for date with a royal (7)
see king — see = date (as in ‘going out with’), king = a royal
17 PONTIFF
Bishop of Rome and Priest having acceptable disagreement (7)
P on tiff — P = Priest, on = acceptable, tiff = disagreement — Pontiff = Pope
19 MOLIERE
Reconstituted oil eaten by simple Frenchman of note (7)
*(oil) in mere — mere = simple — it seems a bit odd to call Moliere a Frenchman of note, since that suggests that he was a musician; he was a great playwright, so in at least some sense he was a Frenchman of note
20 TRIGGER HAPPY
Fervid Therapy gig PR arranged (7-5)
(Therapy gig PR)*
23 CELL
In speech, betray unit of spies (4)
“sell” — sell = betray
24 WRAPPING UP
Finishing putting on woollens? (8,2)
2 defs
25 SUSS
Find out about small South American (4)
S U(s)S — a sort of reverse syntax: about s is (S US) — s = small, S = South, US = American
26 PEDESTRIAN
Boring hiker? (10)
2 defs — if something is pedestrian it’s boring, and a hiker is a pedestrian
DOWN
1 IMAM
This person’s with mother, looking up to religious leader (4)
I’m (Ma)rev. — this person’s = I’m, Ma = mother
2 MULL
Consider an island (4)
2 defs
3 DISPARAGING
Princess’s father mad: it’s critical (11)
Di’s Pa raging — Di’s = princess’s (referring to Princess Diana), Pa = father, raging = mad
4 SCALENE
Climb 11th and 13th of Four-Thousanders, all with different angles (7)
scale n e — scale = climb, n and e are the 11th and 13th letters of Four-Thousanders, and a scalene triangle is a triangle where all the angles are different; none of the usual dictionaries seem to have four-thousander, but I see from Google that it’s a mountain over 4000 metres, so I suppose the surface just about makes sense; however ‘all with different angles’  seems a bit vague and should mention a triangle I think
5 LEAN-TOS
Some clean to sanitise rudimentary structures (4-3)
Hidden in cLEAN TO Sanitise
7 CINEPHILES
Movie buffs demanding reboot of Chile Pines (10)
*(Chile Pines) — the setter Araucaria, much loved by many, used to set in the Financial Times under the name Cinephile. Since the araucaria is the monkey-puzzle tree, as is the Chile Pine, I always thought that ‘Cinephile’ was a made-up word, but it’s there in Lexico and Collins, which says that the word was first recorded in 1965-70. I wonder if it was helped by Araucaria or just was born, along with other words, like cineaste.
8 SNOWY EGRET
Doddering now, greyest heron (5,5)
*(now, greyest)
12 NEEDLEPOINT
Deletion with pen shaking: it’s a fine art (11)
(Deletion pen)*
13 CHOPSTICKS
Cuts brief intervals in simple piano piece (10)
chops ticks — chops = cuts, ticks = brief intervals
14 SCINTILLAS
Boisterous sit-in calls for scraps (10)
*(sit-in calls)
18 FOR FREE
Liberal offer, including spiritual edification, without charge (3,4)
*(offer) round RE — RE = spiritual edification (arguably)
19 MEAT PIE
Join up with Greek character, we hear, for something to eat (4,3)
“meet pi” — meet = join up with, pi is the Greek character
21 UGLI
In Puglia, peeled sweet fruit (4)
[P]ugli[a]
22 SPIN
Swivel / panic / invented narrative, primarily! (4)
The first letters clue, the clue-as-definition, that is a feature of the Everyman. For the first time that I can remember it is less than smooth in my opinion: the spin of the spin doctor is hardly a swivel, nor is it necessarily a panic

53 comments on “Everyman 3,945”

  1. I agree with your blog in many respects, John: T/F are common in truth tables (from formal logic); the Moliere point; the bizarre surface for SCALENE; the surface for SPIN (so often these ‘primarily’ clues are a delight). But also that it was pleasant. I especially enjoyed DISPARAGING = Di’s Pa raging. Thanks, Everyman and John.

  2. Unbelievably difficult for a so-called entry-level puzzle. The reason seems to be that the synonyms used for clue parts are either not all that accurate, or simply obscure. And then we see the usual weird anagrinds and other indicators that could be a lot simpler, or clearer. Not happy.

  3. Scalene I remember from high school, and if I’ve come across it at all since then I don’t remember. Ugli, otoh, I’ve never come across. Pleasant puzzle, ta both.
    [Speaking of school, we did a Moliere play whose name Icnever remember. It had a bloke who owned and/or trafficked slave girls (me) and a young noble looking for his missing beloved…. in case anyone knows the oeuvre]

  4. Enjoyed this. Made good progress last Sunday morning until I got to my last six. Went out paddling (beautiful day). Come back and did the last six in five minutes.

    Favourites included: IMMODESTLY (was looking for mean for a while), PONTIFF, MOLIERE, MULL, CHOPSTICKS (a long time since I’ve played that), PEDESTRIAN (LOI).

    Thanks Everyman and John

  5. grantinfreo — could your school play have been The Blunderer (L’Étourdi ou les Contretemps)? If so, it’s one of the lesser known Molière plays. Talking of lesser known things, my love of jazz led me straight to snowy egret (the name of one of the groups led by US pianist Myra Melford).

  6. Thanks John … hmm, could well be. I just looked up the plot and it does sound familiar, but it’s been a bit of a while … 1965!

  7. I did Tartuffe for GCE A level French in 1966, but I only know that because I’ve still got my old exam papers!

  8. Statistically speaking, mode and average (1a) are not the same thing. The mode is the most commonly occurring element in a set of data. The list 2,3,3,3,4,7,8,8,9 has mode 3 and average (or mean) about 5.22. The median is the middle element of the (sorted) data set, in this case 4.

  9. Thanks for the blog, I agree with Fiona Anne about favourites.
    A quibble for IMMODESTLY, MODE does not mean average , it is the most frequent item in a sample .

  10. Sorry Doug, I was typing slowly. I like your example. Median is also often used for mean incorrectly, a measure of centre is different to average, they will only be similar for a symmetrical distribution.
    A good example is median and mean salaries for the UK.

  11. Some of these answers wern’t familiar to me. I thought ok its been a week, but still? Then I wnet back to the puzzle and found I hadn’t finished it. Not really sure why, its all fair and fun. I may be on shaky ground here (writing from New Zealand after all), but I was taught the terms mean, median and mode (as defined above) all came under the umbrella “average”, but that average was incorrectly used to mean mean and only mean.
    Thanks John & Everyman.

  12. Just to add to the “average discussion, I’m pretty sure when someone describes the average person in authority as a middle-aged white male, they are referring to the mode not the mean. On the other hand, when average house prices are referred to, its most sensibly the median.

  13. I’m with you, Paul. Mean, mode and median are all measures of central tendency, or types of averages. In common usage, ‘average’ means just ‘mean’ (if you get what I mean).

  15. Easier Everyman compared to recent puzzles.

    I could not parse 1ac (was trying to work it as L in IM + MODEST + Y.

    Thanks, both.

  16. I found this straightforward and a quicker solve than some other recent Everyman puzzles, but I was comfortable with the vocabulary. This one was back to a rhyming pair: TRIGGER HAPPY/MAKE IT SNAPPY.

  17. Love all the geometric and statistical chat here. Not my strength. Happy to get SCALENE from wordplay.

    John E@7. Tartuffe , moi aussi. Just had a look at cheat stuff on line and it doesn’t ring any bells, but then as they say if you can remember the 60s, were you really there?

    CHOPSTICKS definitely familiar. Hiding in the piano room when maths and French were on. Nice charade.

    Really dislike the expression FOR FREE. Favourite was TRIGGER HAPPY for the surface.

  18. @John re 19a – I interpreted ‘of note’ to be a man of letters, as a note is something one can write (tenuous maybe, but I reckon it works).

    22d – I saw that as a triple definition, with the first two unrelated to spin-doctoring (SPIN a swivel chair, in a SPIN). The / (slash) separation led me to read it that way and it becomes less clunky, I believe.

    And thanks!

  19. Nice puzzle; I agree with John’s assessment (mainly 😉 )

    CINEPHILE is from the French, like cinéaste (and cinéma itself for that matter, from cinématographe, coined by the frères Lumière). In French a cinéaste is a film-maker / movie director, equivalent to réalisateur/réalisatrice or metteur en scène, but in English it seems to be used for a keen cinema-goer as well.

    Re the Four-Thousanders – I’m no mountaineer, but I’ve often come across the word Viertausender in Switzerland, where they have a lot of them. Of the famous threesome Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau, M & J both count as 4000-ers, but the Eiger just misses out at 3967m. What it lacks in height it makes up for in awesomeness.

    Re SPIN, I agree with Rob T @18 – the purpose of the oblique strokes is to separate three different possible definitions. On that reading I think the clue works fine.

    Thanks Everyman, and John for a helpful blog.

  20. Don’t agree Rob@18 with your take on SPIN, and also don’t agree with John, with respect.
    Swivel, panic, invented narrative are all on the SPIN trajectory. I get Everyman’s take on this, if you think of spin being in response to something that’s caught a pollie out.
    Besides, it’s marked as a ‘primarily’ clue, it’s supposed to be an entry level crossie, and I don’t think Everyman would have done a triple.

  21. OK, get RobT’s and essexboy’s take on SPIN, but I don’t think so. This could be one of those clues where it can be interpreted variously. If we knew who Everyman was we could ask h/er/im.

  22. pdm @20/21 – I agree that swivel, panic, and invention are all things a politician might do – which actually makes it a nice surface.
    But the three are all different – in particular, spin (= invented narrative) is something polished and prepared, not normally done in a panic. So I’d still go for Rob T’s interpretation. A triple def might normally be tricky, but it’s made easier by also being an acrostic. Clever clue, I’d say.

  23. I found this a pleasant Sunday morning entertainment as I always do.

    In 19a I just thought that “of note” was a bit of a double bluff – we might normally expect it to suggest a composer, but here it just means, well, “of note”.

    I really liked the surface of 3d for its echoes of King Lear.

    Many thanks Everyman and John.

  24. Chambers offers “Loosely, an ordinary or typical value …” Which I think MODE would qualify as

  26. @20 and @22 Interestingly, as a relative beginner I found the triple definition aspect of SPIN made it easier than an average clue – more points of reference to grab hold of. SPIN was my FOI. I’d now like to see more triple definition clues to test my theory!

  27. Enjoyed this as usual, although some pretty loose surfaces.

    As a mathematics graduate of nearly 20 years a go, we would never use the word “average” because it was too ambiguous. The mode, mean and median are all types of average (for want of a better expression). So i was ok with this clue.

    In general day to day life though, we’d take average to be the mean.

  28. [Rob T @26 – you could try these:
    Support runner-up getting a tick (6) Pasquale Quiptic 1124
    Send after a job (4) Crux FT 16147
    Standard stop signal in song (3,4) Puck Guardian 26723
    English composer providing part for violin that’s played by quartets (6) Brendan Guardian 28459

    The main problem with triples is they’re generally not telegraphed as such, so you spend a lot of time trying to decode the clue using the standard ‘one def + one lot of wordplay’ format.

    So… the above might be triples… or then again… 😉 ]

  30. Rob T @26 – or this: Bomb Birdland! (6) . I cannot recall where I came across this one – it is not in the archive on this site so it must have been somewhere else entirely.

  31. I beg to differ EB@22, that SPIN is necessarily something ‘polished and prepared’. I see it, at least down here with our former PM, as something reactive. His propensity for (reactive) spin has just cost him and his party the election. And BJ is doing the same with partygate, although he is much more polished than our former PM. 🙂

  35. Okay I will buy it , I particularly like the example from Paul @12 , Only the median is a measure of centre though if the distribution has any skew. The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution is the most common in the universe and has a lot of skew.

  38. [Yes, Roz @35 – only with a symmetrical distribution do all the measures of central tendency converge. But, as Paul @12’s examples illustrate, in such distributions the ‘best’ measure of central tendency depends on what aspect of the distribution is of interest to you. None of them give the ‘true’ center – which is why they are called measures of central tendency.]

  41. These triple definitions are a source of rivalry amongst setters: Brian Greer in his book (How to do The Times Crossword) gives a clue, that he says is admittedly contrived, with no less than six distinct definitions: ‘Plant sailing vessel on the left to prick salmon in top condition’. Scroll down for the answer.

    No doubt people have done even longer ones.

    PINK (I think: it’s not easy to find the answers in his book)

  43. SPIN: if you take ‘primarily’ away you get a triple def that doesn’t seem to have been worked up, probably because with it, you get the, shall we call it ‘characteristic’, Everyman first letters clue. However, as it uses three different defs, I’m not sure it makes the grade as an ‘all-in-one’, as people on this site often refer to these things. This one a little untidy, in the end.

    For me, once again, the usual shadow of the former puzzle. I did like the idea for 3 Down, if not its execution.

  44. [ MrEssexboy , nothing much in your field from Azed today , 10Ac barely but it is a lovely clue , but then I remembered 7D, Nothing more to say until a week on Tuesday ]

  46. [I have to eat my words about triple defs in entry level puzzles. While it’s the Cryptic, it is Monday and there’s a triple in today’s Anto.]

  47. [EB@45 anyone who completes the daily cryptics fairly regularly can have a decent go at Azed. Don’t be put off by the reputation . 7D is very topical, I will say no more. ]

  50. [Yep RobT@49. When I posted I hadn’t finished the Anto. Funny that should follow the discussion here.]

  51. I enjoyed this and had a couple of LOI moments. I am surprised no one commented on 23 across. I would have thought to betray is to sell out rather than simply to sell.

  52. Nice mediumish difficulty.

    Didn’t parse 1A, if I had I too would have quibbled Mode.

    Didn’t like 14D, wp was too contrived and surface nonsense.

    Nice twist on ‘critical’ in 3D

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