Guardian Cryptic 28,791 by Brummie

67 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 28,791 by Brummie”

1. Just what manehi said.

2. On the gentler side for Brummie, with the top half going in smoothly but the bottom, not so. No real stand-out clues but SALACIOUS (FOI) and REPRESS were nice. Can’t see a theme either.

   Ta Brummie & manehi

3. Yes, SALACIOUS was fun, as were ADVERB, PINCE-NEZ and GOOD IDEA. Rather a lot of anagrams, I thought. Thanks to B & m.

4. Fairly straightforward although some of the wordplays took some time. Particular likes were SALACIOUS for Sid, GOOD IDEA for the surface and DUDGEON for ‘dugout’

5. What a lot of possible anagrams there are for ORCHESTRA. Nice to see the carthorse having a rest. 🙂

   Thanks Brummie and manehi.

6. I don’t know but the theme could be Arthur Conan Doyle. He was prolific and if you look you could find anything.
   He wrote The Adventure of the Golden PINCE-NEZ. He was a friend of BRAM Stoker. He made SKI tourism popular in Switzerland. Wrote about the Marie CELESTE/A. When he died he was found clutching his orCHESTra.
   He said “So all life is a great CHAIN, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.”
   He was involved in AIRCRAFT and a member of Aero Club of the UK. He wrote the Adventure of the Devil’s FOOT.
   He kept us all in SUSPENSE.

   I had no idea he was such a polymath ( so much more than mentioned here) but some of this might be obscure GK. I had some time off work and enjoyed the journey. I also found that he visited a place in the Blue Mountains NSW not so far from here. Been a fun day, even if I’m wrong.

   Favourite clue was GOOD IDEA. It really was.
   Loved Grunge and Sid Vicious in the first two across clues.

7. Tough but enjoyable puzzle.

   I could not parse OF in 4d.

   New: GUDGON; BRAMBLING (bird).

   Liked SALACIOUS, GOOD IDEA, AIRCRAFT (loi).

   Thanks, both.

8. Started very slowly but then it all came together. Nothing too obscure which suits me. I just loved the Sex Pistols reference in 1ac.
   Thanks to Brummie and manehi.

9. Does GOO = grunge? Shouldn’t it be gunge?

   I liked the Stoker choker at 14d, and the clue for NASAL, which topically combined a non-DBE cat and Clive of this parish’s chez-soi.

   Thanks Brummie, manehi, and Sherlock @6 😉

10. Mostly fine, with a few sticky ones. I’ve never heard of a wheeze in this sense — is it a Britishism? And having CELESTE for 17d complicated things further (I couldn’t work out why CE was a state). Pince-nez was new to me. Otherwise a pleasant experience from a compiler that I’ve given up on once or twice in the past.

11. Jeez pdm @6, I see what you meant by sleuthing! I did search pince-nez, but got no further than Poirot or Teddie Roosevelt. Meanwhile, Sid V had me thinking that grunge alluded to some sort of rock-speak. And then I wondered if protract was ever used transitively. And, even with crossers, took a long stare to wake up to orchestra, which is a regular gimme … dim! Ne’er mind, all fun, ta Bnm.

12. I wasn’t sure about g(r)unge either.
    I thought the instrument was a CELESTE, but either I’m wrong (probably) or it’s a valid alternative spelling, and the only CE state is in Brazil, so CA it must be.

    Liked the non-carthorse pit workers and the lift and separate in GUDGEON, also SALACIOUS and PINCE-NEZ.

13. Geoff Down Under @10: a wheeze in that sense is dated schoolboy slang – the kind of thing that turns up in Billy Bunter stories, usually as a “wizard wheeze”.

14. Geoff @10 – you need to get into PG Wodehouse

    “It’s no good trying to kid me, Bertie. You wouldn’t have thought of a wheeze like that in a million years.” (Right Ho, Jeeves)

    Lord Emsworth, peering through his pince-nez, perceived that his brother Galahad had entered the room. (Heavy Weather)

15. [sorry gladys, we crossed]

16. I think essexboy is right about g(r)unge. I liked SALACIOUS and GUDGEON, but found this tougher than some of our more expert solvers did.

17. I also agree with essexboy @8: ‘gunge’ is goo; ‘grunge’ is dirt.

18. Pretty straightforward with lots of anagrams. A pleasant and steady solve.

    Shame about grunge/gunge.

    Thanks Brummie and manehi

19. Chambers app gives grunge as dirt, grime, trash so goo seems reasonable?

20. Chambers app gives grunge as dirt, grime, trash so goo seems reasonable to me.

21. Apologies for double ( now treble) posting!

22. Another Grauniad poster and I, some years ago, were groaning at how we were duped by a particular clue, and he said “I thought after all these years I knew every wheeze, but apparently not”. [ To which I might’ve said something wankily Chomskean about the infinite generativity of language 😉 ]

23. A very pleasant solve. Like crossbar@5 I couldn’t help noticing the old muddled cart-horse!
    Many thanks, both!

24. Wot no theme? paddymelon @6 has an ingenious suggestion but I suspect many of the words in the puzzle could be found in the works of any prolific Victorian/Edwardian author.

    I enjoyed this, and the clues were sound, but like AlanC @2 there were no real standouts for me.

    I agree that GOO is more properly ‘gunge’. It implies stickiness and not dirt.

    Thanks to S&B

25. Thank you all for my wheeze education. ?

26. I wasted a fair bit of time trying to make an anagram out of ‘grunge + e (elderly lead) + a (with a). I think I’d have got there quicker if the clue had used ‘gunge’.
    Good fun. Thanks Brummie and Manehi.

27. Re grunge in 6a – I thought goo would make something grungy, so close enough.

28. LOI JET SKI took ages because I put DAIRY SHED for 13d. Which obviously doesn’t work with “the woman’s”, is singular, and I’m not even sure it’s a thing. Must still be in holiday mode, d’oh!

29. Made good progress until the SW corner became a bit gungy.

    I liked SERFS and REPRESS for the surfaces.

    Thanks Brummie and manehi.

30. Having grumbled a bit about gratuitous obscurity in recent Grauniad puzzles, I think this one is admirable. Just chewy enough, with some lovely surfaces and clever clues. Favourites were ADVERB and SERFS with AIRCRAFT and REPRESS not far behind, but really it was all good.
    Unless they are so prevalent as to be boring (which they certainly aren’t here) I don’t greatly mind a lot of anagrams, especially if they are as clever as some of the ones in here.
    Thanks to Brummie and manehi.

31. paddymelon@6 What put you onto Doyle in the first place?

    Pleasant puzzle, which progressed steadily last night till I had all but 19a and 5d, which I thought must be an anagram of “hard nut, so.” This morning when I finally got SPREAD, I saw that 5d had to have a second S, so moved the anagram marks over one word to “nut so sure.” Sure enough, “hard” can mean STRENUOUS.

    Thanks, Brummie and manehi.

32. I found the first three-quarters of this pleasantly challenging, then hit a wall and resorted to crossword helper app assistance. I realised that in at least four instances, I hadn’t correctly spotted which words were the anagram fodder in the clue. I’d spotted that they were anagrams but I was playing with the wrong words. I’m either not in the zone today, or the setter was particularly mischievous with anagram clues…

    I wouldn’t have completed it anyway, as both CELESTA and GROUNDSEL were new to me.

    Anyway, onwards! I shall consider today part of my ongoing cryptic education 🙂

33. Like AlanC@2, the top went in more quickly than bottom – and overall a generous offering from Brummie. There seem to be lots of anagrams.

    The second meaning of grunge in Chambers is “any unpleasant, nasty substance”, which, with the first already quoted, covers goo for me.

34. Thanks to Brummie for a nice challenge, with a number of lovely surfaces. Thx also to manehi for the blog, i share his choice of favourites.

35. Fiery Jack @28 – snap! on DAIRY SHED – and I was so proud of spotting the SHE-D that I never thought twice that it might be wrong. Molesworth was my way into wheezes. Thanks, Brummie and manehi.

36. Agree with most of the comments here, nice to have one without so many needless obscurities, only slight auiblle was grunge which, as others have said, doesn’t (quite) mean goo.

37. That was “quibble”, not “auiblle” of course!

38. Re 22a. I don’t think that EPs are “outdated”. Still issued- eg search confirms that today Objekt (nho) has issued his first EP in four years..

39. Whizzed through this until I was stumped for some time by the clever misdirection involved in ORCHESTRA. Had spent ages thinking about the extraction from the coal face. Then probably spent almost as much time as the rest of the puzzle took to solve, staring at 19ac with the three crossers in place. Thinking how does Serial work cryptically? Then the SPREAD hit me between the eyes. Very enjoyable, thanks Brummie and Manehi…

40. Thanks for the blog, AlanC missed number 1 by seconds so my comeback this week is retained.
    A lot to like here, ON TOP OF was very neat and I agree a lot of the anagrams were well disguised.
    Like Ronald@39, SPREAD took me far too long.

41. IanSW@38 I agree and this has come up before. A quick look in my playlists confirms I added Recondite’s “Think Twice EP” just a few days ago

    Beautifully constructed clues throughout with all the NHOs easily gettable from the wordplay (EGFTW?) 🙂

42. Roz @40: I’m watching my back 🙂

43. It is 43-1 to you AlanC but the trend is in my favour.

44. Thanks both,

    PDP11@33 – not all goos are unpleasant – gooey chocolate sauce, for example. I don’t think ‘grunge’ works for ‘goo’.

45. 1a was a bit hard to get past since we’ve just lost a dog named Violet, but that said it was a good clue. Nice puzzle, despite the grunge.

46. I didn’t parse GOOD IDEA as thought grunge was a music thingy but = GOO?
    Favourite was ADVERB. Hadn’t heard of GROUNDSEL since reading Watership Down in my youth I think.
    Thanks both

47. Crossbar @ 5 There seem to be 99 two word anagrams of orchestra. A word with most (11) single word anagrams is spear.

48. I had given two links in the form of xxxx dot xxx supporting my last post, but they didn’t appear. I wasn’t clever enough to fool the link limiter? Apologies if they appear subsequently several times.

49. I learned “wheeze” in that sense (like so many other Britishisms) from Harry Potter. When Fred and George open their shop, they call it Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes. No, I’m not *quite* young enough to have grown up on Harry Potter…but I have read the books once or twice.

    I’ve never been one to comment or complain about a grid, and I’m totally not complaining. But this grid shape unambiguously divides the puzzle into a top half (plus a bit on the right) and a bottom half (plus a bit on the left), with only two entries (plus, in this case, the linked clue for GOOD IDEA) connecting the halves. Some people might find that unfair. For me, the top half went in pretty easily, with lots of straight-ahead anagrams; the bottom half was quite a bit chewier. Thanks to Brummie and manehi.

    [P.S.: been a few weeks since I’ve commented; I’ve been doing the puzzles later in the day, if at all, and it’s all already been said by then. That’s one disadvantage to living in the western hemisphere–by the time I get off work, you guys are either safely tucked in bed or well into your cups.]

50. Having nothing better to do I solved this fairly quickly but found it had too many finnicky clues for my liking. The word “state” in a clue makes my blood boil. There are 50 of these in the USA plus hundreds of nations. India also has states without official initials . I assumed one of those must be CE, probably Trump-voting, but then decided a CELESTE could also be a CELESTA and everyone’s heard of the sunshine state.
    Maskerade produced a special which, at least, made those two-letter codes a bit interesting.
    We could be more insular and use our post-codes as a cheapo way of defining a letter-pair, “Where Headingley’s cards go”=LS, say. There were some good clues though so thanks and forgive the moan..

51. Thanks Brummie and Manehi.
    I enjoyed this puzzle. But I’m stumped by essexboy@9:
    what is ‘a non-DBE cat’, please?

52. Got held up a bit having decided on DAIRY SHED instead of DAIRY HERD. Good puzzle; thanks to both.

53. Katherine@51 A DBE is a definition by example, so cat might be clued by pet or should that be Persian? I forget which way it goes. Now I’m confused too.

54. [Sorry Katherine @51, and thanks Petert @53 – the ‘non-DBE cat’ was a rather cryptic reference to a discussion I had with sheffield hatter very late in the day on the Vulcan blog a few days ago.

    (It was sparked off by PeterO’s comment on 26ac KITTEN, and the discussion really gets going with sh’s post @37.)

    Normally DBEs require an indicator such as ‘say’, ‘for one’, or sometimes just a question mark, so PRIME MINISTER could be clued ‘May, say’.

    The problem, as I saw it, is that not all pets are cats, and not all cats are pets – so is a cat an example of a pet, or a pet an example of a cat?

    Today’s clue for NASAL requires you to convert ‘pet’ to ‘cat’ in order for it to be removed from ‘Catalan’s’, and does so without any hint that this might be definition by example. I (for one!) am happy with that. 🙂 ]

55. Dave @47. Presumably spear is equal first with its 11 anagrams.

56. Ah yes, thank you Petert and essexboy. I know ‘definition by example’ (whichever way it’s supposed to work!) so I really should have been able to work out DBE. I’ll put it in my mental list of crossword acronyms.

57. I sort of saw 19a as a triple CD: the same for the first, but then “put on” as in “spread the tablecloth,” followed by “weight” as in “point spread”—which is not quite the same as odds, but has the same effect.

58. Thanks manehi and brummie, very much enjoyed. Idiot question – how is ‘abandoned’ an anagrind? It doesn’t seem to mean moved/replaced/incorrect? Thanks

59. eb@54 It seems to me that we don’t really have a term for when we move from the more general term to the more specific. Cat for pet is dbe, but pet for cat is??? I think the fairness of using examples depends on how obvious they are. Unless you name your pets after great chess players, cat is the only pet in Catalan’s, so that’s fine.

60. Petert – interesting. I think maybe there’s no term for it because general → specific defs are so common that we often don’t even notice that we’re not dealing with synonyms. That not-noticing may be compounded by the way the language works. We can say ‘a brambling is a kind of bird’, but we can equally just say ‘a brambling is a bird’ – and everyone instinctively knows that we’re talking about an example, not a synonym. But we can’t say ‘a bird is a brambling’.

    [In fact I don’t know any language where that doesn’t happen, so maybe it’s not language, maybe it’s the way the brain organises and makes sense of information. Sorry for (b)rambling.]

    [Also, re chess champions – I didn’t know Tal, but doesn’t he look a bit like Kronsteen in From Russia With Love? I wonder if that had anything to do with the casting?]

61. David Ellison @47 @48 Thanks for that interesting little nugget. I felt sure someone (or some bot) somewhere would have worked it out. I started doing some myself, but decided life was too short, fairly quickly 😀

62. Tyngewick@44 – are all reds cardinal or all Spensers poets? If not, why does all gooey stuff have to be grungy? Some is enough.

    In definitions by example, there is an indication, such as a question mark. This seems not to be so in the wordplay.

63. mrpenney@49: the Guardian seems to have a penchant for choosing grids that are almost disconnected halves. They crop up in one style or another fairly often. Unlike you, I am sort of complaining.
    Good puzzle from Brummie, and thanks to PeterO

64. Essexboy Polish does make a case distinction between I am a teacher (instrumental) and I am Peter (nominative) I think Russian chess grandmasters tend to have a sinister look, though Tal was one of the jollier ones.

65. pdp11@62

    Your point to an interesting example of crossword set theory. As a colour, cardinal is contained in red, The set of Spensers overlaps with the set of poets, but it’s hard to think of well known Spensers who aren’t the poet. Goo overlaps somewhat with the set of grungey things, but is pretty much the same as the set of gungey things. But the primary characteristic of grunge is dirtiness while the primary characteristics of goo are being viscous and sticky. It’s a question of degree and, as always, usage differs among individuals and across the globe. In this case, it seems most likely that the setter’s usage is not the supported by the majority or, directly, by dictionary sources, so it is a small slip. It was sufficient to make the solution, which I got, unparseable for me.

    You didn’t mention your position on gooey chocolate sauce.

66. I was another DAIRY SHED for a while. Reassuring to know I was in good company!

67. Tyngewick@65 – I was thinking of the Spenser family with royal connections. As fair as I can tell, there is a convension in wordplay when A=B (i.e. A is given from which the solver is expected to deduce B) that not all A has to be B and not all B has to be A: there just needs to be an overlap under some circumstances. That is why CARDINAL=RED, POET=SPENSER and, as I belatedly saw in the discussion above, PET=CAT. The same logic applies to GRUNGE=GOO.

    I’m not sure where your “primary characteristic” criterion comes from. It’s new to me. In my experience, setters seem to delight in requiring us to find obscure meanings of common words. I’m reminded that recently I came here to check out some wordplay that eluded me. The blogger said WordA=WordB. So, I looked up WordA in Chambers and WordB was about the twentieth meaning! I don’t think the setter knew about your “primary characteristic” rule.

    The majority view is not relevant here but I can see how the aural proximity of GRUNGE and GUNGE is suggestive. As it happens, a quick scan shows about five people objected, fewer approved but the majority didn’t comment.

    It’s possible that Brummie made a slip. It’s also possible he knew the second meaning of GRUNGE just as he knew the fourth meaning of CARDINAL. It’s also possible he wasn’t sure and was happy to see his intuition proved correct upon consulting a dictionary. But regardless of whether it’s a slip or not, the clue follows an established crossword convention and the meaning is backed up by Chambers, which is good enough for me.

    I’m not sure what you’re looking for when asking me to take a “position on gooey chocolate sauce”. If it helps, I made a vegan chocolate cake with a chocolate sauce topping for a family member’s birthday. It went down sufficiently well to have had repeat requests!

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