Guardian Prize 28,829/ Crucible

58 comments on “Guardian Prize 28,829/ Crucible”

1. I enjoyed both the puzzle and the blog – thanks both – but saw no theme. Did like Fair Isle.

   Re: SANGRIA. I think the rhotic-or-not argument is a distraction. The putative homophone seems to pass the substitution test, so is quite fair.

   Since Gaul was as extensive as Eileen describes, why are we (or some of us at least) taught that it was the old name for what is now France?

2. Thanks Eileen. Like you I found most of the answers went straight in and I started to feel vaguely disappointed. I finished up though spending just about as much time on the last two or three as it had taken me to get there. I’d never heard of Betty Trask either, was unsure about 22a, didn’t know that stint was a seabird and took too long to come to terms with gateau even though it couldn’t be anything else. So it wasn’t a walk in the park after all.

3. Cheers Eileen, I had to come here & check a few of these. I didn’t get around to the Spanish tipple. Got the rest but hadn’t heard of the novelist, the seabird or the Dogger Bank so your links are much appreciated.
   Thanks to you and to Crucible.

4. Me@4! Surprised at U for classy. Isn’t it classist …Mitford and all that.
   Enjoyable but a little on the quick side. Now for yesterday’s Nutmeg.

   Thanks Crucible and Eileen

5. Me @4 …oh no already did it

6. I think 9ac was my last in. I suspected it must be REDRESSED early but didn’t know that meaning of ‘dress’, so couldn’t justify it … till I finally looked it up.

   I thought 10ac, ON AIR was brilliant for its surface.

   Didn’t understand “character in arena” in 14ac but got it, with reservations, from the other parts and 14dn. Kicking myself now, of course. Thanks, Eileen.

   “Go round” in 21ac, BATHS, was cleverly deceptive.

   I didn’t know the seabird in 24ac, either, and did wonder why the word was there. Thanks again, Eileen.

   Didn’t know MY = motor yacht in 3d, but once I saw ROME reversed in MY, it had to be.

   TRASK in the wordplay of 22dn seemed vaguely familiar (maybe from TLS crosswords?) and I was pleased to confirm it with search.

   Btw, Eileen, I think you’ve got leakage from your subconscious in describing 20dn in your preamble.

7. Enjoyed this.

   Couldn’t completely parse IN-CROWD or GET AROUND

   Favourites included: THE ARTS, BRAINPOWER, ADJUSTABLE, NATURIST

   Thanks Crucible and Eileen

8. Thanks Eileen.
   I also didn’t know the seabird, and spent a long time trying to work out a cryptic way of spelling it. Nice misdirection.
   BRAINPOWER favourite. Liked the exhortation to be careful of the shower in the boudoir. Another good misdirection with noun/verb ‘mind’.
   Also a tick for WORK-LIFE BALANCE. Great discovery in the fodder, and the additional sense of balancing on a bike. Perhaps also linking to GET AROUND, and GO FOR A SPIN, and the IN-CROWD trendy lycra brigade or MAMILS? 🙂

9. I missed the second definition of seabird in STINT and just thought the S was ‘seabird singular’. I also hadn’t heard of Trask but looked her up after getting TASK.
   Favourites were ADJUSTABLE, Fair Isle is just brilliant, and DRESSMAKER for the deceptive ‘sewer’.
   Whenever I read “Dogger” I always go on with Fisher, German Bight. I used to listen to the shipping forecast on the wireless as a kid, but now it always reminds me of the great Ken Loach film, Kes.

10. Like our esteemed blogger and several others above, 24a STINT was an unfamiliar seabird for me, and I’d never heard of 22d Betty T(r)ASK. I needed the blog to understand HEARTS in THE ARTS (22a). All my favourites have been mentioned except for 17d LIBERATE, so it remains for me only to thank Crucible (for a very likeable puzzle) and Eileen (for her fidelity to the blog while on her holiday in a beautiful part of the UK).

11. That was interesting. I only completed this morning before coming here, as I’d left TASK unfinished as not being able to justify it. Having spent some time finding out about Betty Trask, I did vaguely know about the Betty Trask Prize and Award – some well known books and authors have won it. Apparently none of her own books are in print now, and haven’t been for a while.

12. The STINT, I had encountered before; the romantic novelist, I had not. If it’s not Barbara Cartland then I’m struggling. I don’t have Eileen’s excuse of a week in the Dales but I don’t have clear recollections of this solve; I think I was pleased to sail through most of it which surprised me, given the setter. Though clearly the TASK proved too much in the end.

    Having reacquainted myself with the solutions, IBERIA, DOGGEREL, GET AROUND and the aforementioned STINT are favourites with a podium of two – DRESSMAKER for the splendid image created (!) and PUTTY for its smoothness, surface and misdirection.

    Thanks Crucible and Eileen

13. My experience was very similar to others, it seems. Most answers went in relatively easily, but I was stuck for quite a while in the end with the intersecting seabird and romantic novelist, neither of which I’d heard of. I still feel I should have got STINT faster than I did, even without the seabird, once I decided it was probably another three-way clue like GET AROUND. Ticks for, amongst many nice clues, the deceptive sewer and the neatness of ON AIR. Thanks, Crucible, thanks Eileen.

14. Figured “TASK” had to come from TRASK but she’s not in Wikipedia’s “List of romantic novelists”. She’s in “Category: Women romantic fiction writers” though. Guess which one I checked…

    Got STINT because there’s been a flutter of excitement amongst the local birders for a Temminck’s Stint locally…

15. Only got memory because of the across answers. MY for motor yacht’s a new one on me.

16. Well I did (in Araucaria’s quaint phrase) apply to Google re ‘Trask’ and various arguably less deserving folk were mentioned but no Betty, curiously, so thanks for the pointer (and justification for filling in that last clue). Remiss, too, of Google given her bequest to the Society of Authors and consequent literary awards in her name (Zadie Smith being one notable recipient).
    Thanks again Eileen – also loved PUTTY, and the anagrind in 15d (because of the shift dress).
    PS I too was in a Yorkshire dale (though not The Dales) last week (still mulling over that SW corner, despite being in the NE) – the splendidly named Great Fryupdale (sic).

17. There’s a kind of holiday feel to this, with the two 14s, SANGRIA, IBERIA, BATHS and WORK LIFE BALANCE, but not enough to make a theme. Like others I was aware of the Betty TRASK award, so guessed it was named after a novelist. Is the stress wrong for SANGRIA? Not that I mind. I love a dodgy homophone.

18. [Bill Thorp@16.Hilarious. Fryup Dale. Great Fryup and Little Fryup. Depending on how hungry you are, take your pick of barbecues?
    Tautological as well. From Wiki:
    “The curious name Fryup probably derives from the Old English reconstruction *Frige-hop: Frige was an Anglo-Saxon goddess equated with the Old Norse Frigg; hop denoted a small valley.”]

19. Thanks Crucible and Eileen for explaining it all so beautifully,

    I only got about 80% done with the slight excuse that I was solving on a small phone screen as also on the road (W of Ireland rather than the N of England).

    Not sure if I’m being grumpy or not, but the clues seem to be a mix of the brilliant and the dubious.

    ‘MY’ for yacht — really? I think it might be fair enough to have Betty TRASK as a solution, but when she makes only a ghost appearance, that is asking a lot (my opinion!). I’d also raise an eyebrow at the equivalence of ‘drivel’ and ‘DOGGEREL’ (probably will find it in Chambers now….).

    That said, was really impressed with the anagram for WORK-LIFE BALANCE and yes, PUTTY — the surface reading can even be seen as a melancholic commentary on Rory McIlroy’s recent form – poor play with the putter cost him a chance of the Open title a few weeks back.

20. [Re 22dn: I’ve finally made the link to Betty Trask work – it was giving me such trouble last night.]

21. Thanks Crucible and Eileen. Well I got GATEAU, IBERIA and TASK without an inkling about how to parse them. So I count that as a sort of success, but could do better!

22. Failed to solve 22d – never heard of that writer.

    Did not parse 16ac, 6d.

    22ac – had no idea why HEARTS = team’s.

    New: Beria, Lavrenti (for 20d).

    I liked DRESSMAKER, BATHS, GATEAU, IN-CROWD.

    Thanks, both.

23. Well paddymelon@18 (and anyone else), on the breakfast menu at the Yorkshire Cycle Hub cafe in Great Fryupdale there’s a Little Fryup, a Great Fryup and a Fat Betty – the latter referring to a way marker cross of that name not too far away on the N York Moors (and not a local lass over fond of her black pudding and sausages…)

24. Dr WhatsOn@1 An equally inaccurate description is the use of Flanders as the old name for the area which is now Belgium. Most of eastern and southern Belgium was never in Flanders, while Flanders went a long way into what is now northern France.

25. Dr W @1 (and Togs – just seen your post @24) – looking at ancient Gaul on a map, I’d say ‘France once’/’old name for France’ is close enough as a rough approximation. Think also Asterix the Gaul, Gallic as in ‘Gallic shrug’, and Gauloises, for France/Gaul connections. In modern Greek, France and French are Γα&lambda:λία and Γα&lambda:λικά respectively.

    [Although that reminds me… English Gaul and French Gaule are unrelated, etymologically speaking, to Latin Gallia – despite looking very similar, and being used interchangeably in translation. Gaul(e) comes from a Germanic root *walhaz, meaning foreign/foreigner, and is cognate with the ‘wal’ in Wales, Cornwall, and walnut (‘foreign nut’ – the Romans introduced them).]

    Petert @17 – yes, my bijou problemette with SANGRIA was that it’s stressed on the ‘gree’. To get round it, could we read it as a charade of S + ANGRIA (homophone of ‘angrier’ and also, conveniently, an old name for a region of Germany (= Engern, straddling present-day Niedersachsen and Nordrhein-Westfalen))??
    Alternatively –
    “Drink!” squealed Germaine for all to hear (7)

    Many thanks Crucible and Eileen.

26. es @ 19 MY is the official registration designation for a Motor Yacht, so it’s completely legit.

27. Oops! – the Greek above should be Γαλλία and Γαλλικά

28. A delightful Prize crossword, and not too taxing. I particularly liked PUTTY, WORK-LIFE BALANCE and BATHS.

    TASK was a guess, but quite an easy one to make. In my two dictionaries ‘regd’ appears to be the only valid abbreviation for ‘registered’, but using R (‘registered trademark’) was perhaps only a small liberty to take.

    Thanks to Crucible and Eileen.

29. Enjoyed the challenge, failed on Trask, loved putty.
    NB A stint is not a seabird, it is a wader of the Genus Calidris

30. Thanks, all, for the puzzle, blog and comments. BLTN I have edited the Wikipedia list of romantic novelists to include Trask.

31. eb@25 One of the few things I remember from O-level Latin was that Gaul was divided into three parts. Now you are telling me that Caesar was wrong, and it was five parts!

32. [Petert – I recall from somewhere (1066 and all that, or similar?) that Caesar quartered Gaul into three halves. He called them the weeny, the weedy and the weaky.]

33. eb@32 🙂

34. Cruciblist sort of puzzle.

    Lots of good clues. I particularly liked IN-CROWD for the staff with parts, BRAINPOWER for the surface, and GATEAU for the ‘France once’ [Chambers definition].

    Thanks Crucible and Eileen [was your red apparel made by 15?]

35. Thanks, Robi. 😉

36. Eileen@24 I think STINT is a double definition plus wordplay — “spell” meaning period of work, or shift, then the bird. (Didn’t know those birds, they’re really cute!)

    fair isle separation

    bower boudoir

    TimC@9 I always her “Cromarty, Forth,Tyne, Dogger” in my head, and thoughts of the shipping forecast always take me back to the winter I spent on board a ketch off Poole, listening to the BBC (and hearing the famous Archers for the first time).

    eb@25 Angria is also the name of an imaginary country the Bronte siblings made up stories about.

    Brian@30 What’s BLTN?

37. Oops, I didn’t mean to post my notes to myself.

    I meant to say that I love clues that separate pairs of words that seem to form a unit, like Fair Isle, in ingenious ways — I sort of remember saying something similar once about Ark Royal, though I don’t remember why.

    “Bower” is a common word in ballads for a woman’s bedroom. I keep imagining something made of leafy green branches but I’m guessing it comes from a cognate of German “bauen” for “build.” I’d look it up but I have to leave now.

38. Valentine @36 – yes, that’s the way I took it. I underlined ‘spell’ and ‘seabird’ as the two definitions, then added the wordplay. I’ve amended the blog to make it clearer, I hope.

39. eb @32: it’s exceedingly rare for me to correct a master but the 1066 And All That quote was applied to Britain. The weeny, weedy and weaky being the play on ‘Veni vidi vici’:

    Julius Caesar was therefore compelled to invade Britain again the following year (54 B.C., not 56, owing to the peculiar Roman method of counting), and having defeated the Ancient Britons by unfair means, such as battering-rams, tortoises, hippocausts, centipedes, axes, and bundles, set the memorable Latin sentence, `Veni, Vidi, Vici’, which the Romans, who were all very well educated, construed correctly.

    The Britons, however, who of course still used the old pronunciation, under understanding him to have called them `Weeny, Weedy, and Weaky’, lost heart and gave up the struggle, thinking that he had already divided them All into Three Parts.

40. [PM @39 – my apologies! Or rather mea culpa. And thanks for the reminder of the Romans’ unscrupulous use of centipedes and underfloor heating. The ‘quartered Gaul into three halves’ thing must have come from somewhere else.

    Valentine @37 – thanks, that led me down another rabbit hole! It would appear that ‘bower’, in the boudoir/leafy shelter sense, (not the ‘playing card’ or ‘violinist’ senses) is cognate with German Bauer = birdcage, but not Bauer = farmer, or bauen = to build – although they all may go back to an earlier root meaning dwell/dwelling.]

41. Alan@28, a superscript capital R, with a circle round it (similar to the C-in-a-circle for ‘copyright’),’ precedes or follows a brand name to indicate a registered trade mark.

42. Valentine @36 Better late than never.

43. Petert@31, see here:

    https://www.thoughtco.com/the-five-gauls-116471

44. Valentine@37

    “I love clues that separate pairs of words that seem to form a unit, like Fair Isle, in ingenious ways — I sort of remember saying something similar once about Ark Royal, though I don’t remember why.”

    This is called ‘lift-and-separate‘.

45. Tony @41
    Thanks for pointing that out. The only point I wished to make is that the R-in-a-circle means (and is read as) ‘registered trademark’, not just the word ‘registered’. The clue calls for an abbreviation of the word ‘registered’ – for which R appears to have no authority. But, as I said, a small liberty can surely be taken with this: everybody knows that the superscript R means ‘registered …’.)

46. AlanB@45, could the R be the one (eg) in SRN – State Registered Nurse?

47. Bill @46
    I would say no. It does not seem valid to me to take one word from a phrase that is abbreviated in that way and count its initial letter as a general abbreviation for that word. If we did that we would have M = merit, M = member, B = broadcasting, etc. The list would be endless.

48. Alan B – I totally agree : this point has been made more than once, I think.
    I wondered about R = registered, too, and checked it yesterday evening, before posting the blog and found
    Collins: R or r – abbreviation for registered (trademark)
    Chambers: ® symbol: registered trademark –
    both of which satisfied me, as they identified the context.

49. eb@40 I should add that a woman whose room is a bower is an aristocrat and probably lives in a castle or at least a grand house. A peasant woman doesn’t have a bower, she’s lucky if she has a cottage. I don’t know how far up the social scale you have to go to get to the bowery rank — would a goldsmith’s daughter in the city have one? I doubt it.

50. Alan@45, ah, yes, indeed, “everyone knows that”. Sorry, didn’t mean to patronise you! I agree with your reply to Bill Thorp@46, btw (and with Eileen, of course. I’m sure I myself have said something very similar in these pages more than once.)

51. I thought of the Bowerbird, who makes then decorates a fancy as part of its mating game. Close enough to a boudoir for me.

52. Fancy NEST.

53. Gregin@51,52, in fact, I also thought of the bird’s bower and thought that must be it. I didn’t know about the poetic usage. However, the bower is built by the male to attract females to mate with. Once mated, the female flies off to nest alone elsewhere.

    Mating takes place in the bower, but the female then leaves to raise the babies on her own. She lays her eggs in a saucer-shaped nest which she builds in a tree, well above the ground. The nest is always well away from the bower and is often hard to find. All male bowerbirds mate with more than one female.
    

    (Northern Territory Government’s Nature Notes on the Bowerbird)

    So, NOT a fancy nest!

54. Thanks Crucible for a very satisfying crossword. Even though I didn’t know McIllroy the golfer I figured as much and agree with Eileen about the brilliance of PUTTY. BRAINPOWER among others was a favourite as well. Thanks Eileen for a super blog.

55. Enjoyable puzzle. Got all the answers, although didn’t fully understand two or three of them until explained. Amused by quite a few, including 15d which mugged me into thinking about a wastewater sewer for a while.

56. I bunged in TASK, so thanks to Eileen for finding the correct author (and thanks brian-with-an-eye @30 for correcting Wiki). Not sure if this answer is obscure (not on Wiki until half an hour ago) or obvious (the Betty Trask Prize for first novels by authors under 35). Both, perhaps.

    I almost went wrong with GO FOR A SNIP instead of SPIN when I had yet to solve 14a, but the wordplay seemed unlikely to fit a visit to the barber’s rather than just the bar or a car.

    Struggled with the NE corner, where I had a tentative CACHOU for 7d, but although the answer is a sweet, the wordplay only partly works for ‘French leaves cut’=>CHOU(x) [choux is French for cabbage], and besides, it gave an awkward crossing H in 12a. When I came back to it this morning UNGUENT jumped out at me (not a pleasant experience, I can tell you), making GATEAU obvious too.

    Thanks to Crucible and Eileen.

57. No problem with R for ‘registered’, as I remember sending registered letters, which were distinguished by a label (or handstamp) with R and identification, also crossing blue lines like the tape which was used when the service ofiginated.

58. This is late Eileen but i have been away – agree with your highlights (maybe I had a few more too, but when the highlights cover about half of the clues we probably need another word for them) and thanks particularly for confirmation of “MY” – i will probably never see that outside a crossword! Lots of good things here, liked the def+def+wply and vice-versa, and learned something about GAUL from above and a little extra research. Also Betty T(R)ASK is surely a great example of “giving back” – her own work largely forgotten, as is the lot of most popular authors I expect, but her name lives on and I have certainly enjoyed some of the books boosted by her legacy through her prize. Thanks a lot Crucible.

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