Guardian Cryptic 29,061 by Vlad

80 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29,061 by Vlad”

1. LH side was harder for me.

   I could not parse 17d, 21d.

   New for me : BUSHIDO.

   Thanks, both.

2. Super blog as always manehi. Re recent discussions about how much explanation to give in blogs, I think you’ve absolutely nailed it.

   There are a few US presidents – the strangely split THEODORE Roosevelt, one or other of the BUSHes, and Washington in the clues – but not really enough for a theme, unless I’m missing something.

   Tricky in places (eg BANKNOTE) but very enjoyable, thanks Vlad.

3. I did smile at “cannae pee”.

   By coincidence, I came to the crossword immediately after setting this line of Virgil as homework for my students:

   “At subitae horrifico lapsu de montibus adsunt
   Harpyiae”

   “But suddenly IN ONE FELL SWOOP from the mountains the Harpies are here…”
   So I spotted the anagram almost instantly, despite usually struggling with anagrams.

4. 17d was the only one that I couldn’t parse, and getting 9,23, 1d and 8d fairly quickly wasn’t that much help for the other clues.

5. I convinced myself that BONANNIE (Bonnie round nan) had to be a slang term for money. I wondered if any of the other elements, apart from Washington, would feature on a BANKNOTE. Thanks for the great blog.

6. Was anyone else convinced that the outlaw’s sweetheart in 17d was going to be Marian? That was my last one in and it took a while to parse after having finally got it from the definition and crossers.

   Nice puzzle. Thanks both.

7. Thanks for explaining Silent Treatment manehi. My LOI. Great puzzle. Thanks Vlad. I need some aids to complete but it’s a satisfying process.

8. Finally remembered that an adult female cat is a Queen anD got MIAOU – one of my favourites.

   Tricky as always and took me a while to get started and finally had to reveal NITER – then sighed and didn’t parse a couple

   Other favourites included: BANKNOTE (lovely surface I thought), POTBOILER, RAPIERS, MONSOON

   Thanks Vlad and manehi

9. I don’t really buy “ADOLESCENT” as meaning “school leaver”. It means the stage between childhood and adulthood and when I left school I was a legal adult. I have never seen it used in terms of graduating from school.

10. Getting 9a early on I thought there might be a Shakespearean theme but it didn’t happen.

11. I agree Greg from Oz @9

12. The top half went in so easily I feared this might be a write-in but I ground to a near-halt lower down, and the parsing of NITRE eluded me until I came here. CANOPY was funny, I thought, but I had a flicker of sympathy for the overseas solvers.
    GregfromOz @9. I too was legally an adult when I left school, but undoubtedly ADOLESCENT in terms of physical development and behaviour. I think using it for school-leaver is fine.

13. I’m Mr Grumpy again. I completed without aids, but definite ‘mehs’ over 13/22 and 26.

14. Doh. NITER. Easy to see why I found it difficult.

15. Great puzzle! Hard to fathom at first, but plenty of wonderful clues, as others have mentioned. My faves were POTBOILER and BANKNOTE. Many thanks to V & m.

16. 21d reminds me of that dreadful joke :
    What’s the difference between a rich English man, a poor Irishman and a dead Scotsman ?
    A rich Englishman has a canopy above his head, a poor Irishman has a can of pee under his bed and a dead Scotsman cannae pee at all.

    LJ@6 : Yes, I also had Marian coming into my head.

    I loved bête noir– with the remarkable Franglais aspect to its cluing.

    Thank you Vlad and manehi.

17. I also agree with Greg @9. Very tricky towards the end with the lovely METHINKS, LOI. SILENT TREATMENT was a beaut along with HOME HELP, POTBOILER, SMART ARSE (personal opinion perhaps?) and BANKNOTE. LIke essexboy @2, I was thinking US presidents, but as he says, not enough for a theme.

    Ta Vlad & manehi.

18. Thank you manehi for parsing Vlad’s tricky puzzle! Had to reveal 4d as today is very busy, organising food for a weekend of 55 people! Not too ashamed, as it was particularly convoluted for such a short word.
    Thanks again Vlad and m

19. I thought SILENT TREATMENT was an excellent clue.

    Thanks to Vlad and manehi.

20. Found this tough especially BANKNOTE (I was sure that “nan” had to feature) and RAPIERS. I needed the blog to parse CANOPY and to see why 1d is so good. I think reverse clues like that are great though I prefer it when they don’t go completely over my head!

    Tx manehi and Vlad.

21. Perhaps 10’s cat was French. Un chat or une chatte, though I’m told the latter can be quite rude.

    Tricky puzzle as expected, and good fun.

22. Surely 21D should have some sort of “sounds like” indicator? And agree with the Australians at 9 and 11; when an adolescent could easily be defined as a teenager or a youth, either of which would work fine in the clue, it seems perverse to use “school leaver” which isn’t a synonym. But 1D is very clever.

23. Some nice stuff like METHINKS but I found this a bit disappointing today. The strange split of THEO DORE where usually a split results in 2 fairly common words, the “school leaver” as a definition for ADOLESCENT (agree with GregfromOz @9), the double use of book in POTBOILER and the Knot in BANKNOTE which to me needs a DBE indicator.
    Thanks both.

24. Impaled today: gave up on THEODORE, NITER, METHINKS and BANKNOTE (yes, I was trying to fit NAN into it too). On the other hand, I enjoyed POTBOILER, MIAOU, BUSHIDO and the two big anagrams.

    Who else thought that surely it must be SMART ALEC rather than SMART ARSE?

25. Is the above parsing of 6d missing reference to the word ‘arise’ ..? (‘appear’ could lead to AR, but where would the SE come from?)

26. I know the THEO/DORE kind of split answer is perfectly legitimate (if DORE is a word in its own right, as I’m sure it must be) but I don’t enjoy them.

27. Some good things here including 1d and 26a among others, but:

    13,22 is very poor. Surely there’s a convention that each half of a split answer should be a meaningful word. THEO is at best an abbreviation for the full name, and DORE doesn’t seem to mean anything (unless as a reference to the artist).

    CANOPY is lacking a homophone indicator.

    In 18a the ‘So’ is redundant.

    I also didn’t much like MIAOU (Chambers has MIAOW or MYOW) but I suppose it’s used occasionally.

28. Josquin@25: “arise” is there in the parsing explanation. It’s just that it’s written “ar” [ i with strikethrough ] “se” or “ar” hyphen “i” hyphen “se”. Can’t quite see what deletion of the “i” was typed up, but it’s there.

29. Completed all bar NITER. Annoying end to an otherwise enjoyable puzzle.

    Thanks both

30. Excellent puzzle, tricky in parts.

    LOI for me was THEO…DORE – uncharacteristically clumsy in an otherwise splendid crossword (doré certainly exists as a word, though not, I think, in English).

    Vlad has few rivals in the ability to produce clues with quite complex structures, but with a minimum of words and a perfectly natural surface – ‘when claiming benefit’ for ADOLES is masterful (though I agree that ‘young person’ might have been a better definition).

    Methought METHINKS, BANKNOTE, CANOPY, MIAOU and SILENT TREATMENT stood out, but others would have been tops in lesser puzzles. Missing DBE and homophone indicators? Who cares? Certainly I don’t with work of this quality. I take it as part of a somewhat libertarian style.

    Many thanks to Vlad and manehi

31. Going by the comments, quite a few people seem to have enjoyed the CANOPY clue so I guess I may be in a minority but I thought it was quite unsatisfactory. For one thing, “to Glasgow” gives a more pleasing surface but just doesn’t work grammatically as a homophone indicator – a fair indication surely should be “in Glasgow” or “for Glaswegian” or similar.
    And that aside, it’s not really a good homophone anyway – a Glaswegian saying “cannae pee” doesn’t really sound anything like anyone anywhere would say the word “canopy”.

    But admittedly, homophone clues that rely strongly on accents (whether assuming that everyone shares the setter’s non-rhoticism, or those that try to ape a regional accent not used by the setter) are by far my least favourite clue, and the kind I find least satisfactory by quite some distance, so Vlad was always on a hiding to nothing with this one with me.

32. I assumed CANOPY was “can no pee” i.e. no/not – I think Loonapick blogged something similar recently

    Other than that I wholeheartedly concur with Gervase @30

    Cheers V&M

33. Thanks FLEA. I’d done the puzzle on my phone, and had mistinterpreted the deleted letter i …. (so much for my i-sight ..!!)

34. A bit of a struggle to finish with the SW yielding last.

    Some good clues, including for SILENT TREATMENT and NITER, where I’m ashamed to admit I looked up American mineral water brands at first. I thought there were a few weaknesses though, that others have pointed out – no real homophone indicator for CANOPY, book double-duty in POTBOILER (although I guess a vague definition can be had without book), BANKNOTE where the QM at the end is supposed to be the DBE indicator for KNOT, and THEODORE, where the THEO is either the contraction of the answer or the combining form THEO-. I must say I did query the definition of ADOLESCENT but the WHO, no less, defines this as 10 to 19 years, so I think that’s OK.

    Thanks Vlad and manehi.

35. Superb puzzle, inventive with brilliant surfaces! So many great clues – too many to list them all.

    But top of my (long) list were ADOLESCENT, BETE NOIRE, METHINKS and NITER.

    Huge thanks to Vlad for a corker of a crossword and to manehi for the blog

36. Good romp. Tough, some dodgy stuff, perfect Guardian puzzle.

37. 15D defeated me, as indeed homophones often do. Thank you manehi for the parsing.

38. Robi @34: Thanks for checking the validity of the definition for ADOLESCENT. That absolves Vlad – and any more precise definition would have given the game away too easily.

39. Rather droll from the commenter at 21, the best laugh I had in addressing this puzzle, I must say. I am sure I’ll be hit for an alternative spelling, but my dictionaries seem to prefer either MEOW or MIAOW. I have two cats, so maybe I’ll consult.

    Not too terrible in its construction, but a sense of wading through treacle made this puzzle less fun for me.

40. My understanding is that the convention for ‘Cockney’/h-dropping clues is that all you need is an ‘East End’ indicator, without a separate homophone indicator on top of that. The fact that it’s a soundalike clue is clearly enough implied.

    So can’t we apply the same convention to Glasgow? Incidentally, I think the ‘to Glasgow’ works fine if we interpret it as ‘to an audience of Glaswegians’.

41. P.S. There are many and varied DOREs here (not including Diana).

42. Yes, CANOPY really is poor. Guardian setters have a tendency to use homophones which only work south of the border (e. g. sauce = source), so I appreciate the attempt to reverse this trend. Unfortunately it fails miserably.

43. What’s a DBE indicator please (I have been to FAQs and I couldn’t see it there) ?

44. This was very hard for me, I got only a few before I start having to try letters with the check button.

    I forgot that a granny is a knot.

    Even though I write “center” and “theater,” NITER looks very odd to me.

    Ragged@2 “One fell swoop” isn’t from Virgil, it’s from Shakespeare, though it’s a good rendering of “horrifico lapsu.”

    Lord Jim@6 I thought of Marian, but couldn’t work her in.

    gladys@24 I thought of SMART ALEC too, till “check” left me with SMART-A.

    Thanks to Vlad and manehi.

45. Fiona Anne @43: DBE is ‘definition by example’. In strict Ximenean terms, it is acceptable to use a class term to define a particular example of the class: eg ‘dog’ to define ‘terrier’ but not vice versa without some indication. I have to say it isn’t a convention I find really necessary for solving a clue, and I don’t usually spot the absence of a DBE.

46. Gervase. Thanks.

    As you say didn’t need it to solve BANKNOTE which was my favourite clue.

47. My outlaw’s sweetheart was Bonnie as in Bonnie & Clyde, particularly as I had B?N?????.

48. Re Nicola at 42. I’m really sorry you found cannae pee so offensive. Homophones always seem to raise somebody’s ire. And I can understand that if it’s always “RP” pronunciation that’s being trolled out, it feels like a smug club. But homophones can be great fun, and I found this one so. I never try to look for an exact sound match, but a rough approximation in any accent can often raise a smile, I think. I only wondered whether this clue needed an exclamation mark!

49. Thanks for the blog , I think MIAOU and other versions are just used for tricky bits of the grid , I do not mind these used occasionally. School in the UK ends at year 11 , school leavers are 16 and certainly not adults, so ADOLESCENT is fine.
    METHINKS was clever and BANKNOTE a good construction .

50. Book is not doing double duty in POTBOILER

    Defn: “a book, painting, or recording produced merely to make the writer or artist a living by catering to popular taste.”

51. Enlumined @50: Indeed – a POTBOILER doesn’t have to be a book.

    Potboilers can be catchpenny – another nice word 🙂

52. Oh, yes it is.

53. Either that or the whole of the rest of the clue is, up to ‘which’.

54. BTW Italian cats just say ‘miao’ (and dogs say ‘bau’).

55. If we assert that there is no double duty here, a test could be to snip off the definition part and see if we feel short-changed. We’d have which should pay the bills.

    I’d want my money back.

56. Late to the party today: I had to go out straight after the solve, with no time to respond and there were only a few comments then. I won’t add to the discussion re 13,22, except to say that I was quite disappointed, as I’ve always defended this type of clue, ‘so long as the separate words are words in their own right’, which, in my experience, they always have been, nor the homophone @21.

    Like CanberraGirl @10, I immediately thought of Macduff’s heartrending lament on hearing of Macbeth’s murder of his wife and children – see here:
    https://nosweatshakespeare.com/quotes/famous/one-fell-swoop/
    and agree with Valentine @44 that ragged’s (@3) rendering of ‘horrifico lapsu’ is very apt. What a splendid build-up of tension in that line, leading to the final appearance of the subject in the following one – what you can do with an inflected language!

    Talking of Latin teaching, ‘fell’, as an adjective, always reminds me of this amusing story, apocryphal or not:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_do_not_like_thee,_Doctor_Fell

    My ticks were for the two excellent long anagrams at 9,23 and 8dn, MIAOU, MONSOON, POTBOILER, SILENT TREATMENT, METHINKS (lovely word) and BANKNOTE.

    Many thanks to Vlad and to manehi.

57. 1d is a marvellous clue, but got bogged down in the bottom left due to the unsatisfactory definition of 19 and the novel to me 26. I thought canopy was fine, but a groan rather than a chuckle.

58. Struggled with this and defeated finally by both THEODORE and BETE NOIRE (which was excellent on reflection). Dashed in SMART Alec instead of ARSE for a while, so that stymied BUSHIDO. Couldn’t fathom the clueing for MONSOON, METHINKS or BANKNOTE. Tough, but enjoyable on the whole…

59. …nor could I see why CANOPY deserved its place in the grid…

60. I should quickly add that I wouldn’t knock double duty (inter alia) in a Guardian puzzle, by the way, as it’s pretty much standard practice, with setters doing what their audience expects.

61. Because ‘fell’ as an adjective is archaic, and nowadays only commonly used in the expression at 9,23, this is often mangled into ‘in one foul swoop’.

62. I am late to the ball but I finished with help and to me, it was enjoyable, a couple of clues were so so but once I seen the parsing it was some what clear.

63. I think the homophone in 21 should be rendered as Canna Pee (rather than Cannae pee) and I’ve certainly heard Scots use expressions like that. Not sure if they’d be specifically Glaswegian. Anyway, the homophone works much better like that.
    Good puzzle, but I had to cheat on THEODORE and I also felt that the split was a bit dodgy. MALICE, SILENT TREATMENT and ISOLABLE were my picks.
    Thanks, V and m.

64. Phitonelly @63 – have a look at Alexa just cannae handle the Scottish accent 🙂
    There are two good examples of how Scots say the ‘nae’ in ‘cannae’, at
    1:21 and 2:14. It’s not an exact homophone, but because it’s in an unstressed syllable, in rapid speech it may be heard as closer to a ‘schwa’, which is the sound we use in the 2nd syllable of CANOPY.
    (Apologies to our many Scottish contributors if I have misrepresented them!)

65. I didn’t enjoy this as much as I usually do when it’s a Vlad. At 1d, I got SILENT but not the TREATMENT that followed it, and that led to my leaving an uncompleted SW quadrant. I also guessed BANKNOTE and left a couple of other answers not fully parsed. Otherwise a good puzzle with some clever, well-crafted clues.

    Thanks to manehi for seeing and explaining it all, and to Vlad for a challenging puzzle.

66. Thanks for the link, essexboy (@64) – that clip was hilarious.

67. Thanks, essexboy @64!

    I promised @56 that I wouldn’t comment but I’ve always heard Scots ‘cannae’ as ‘cannay’ or ‘canny’.

    And I’ll admit that – back to Latin teaching again – it’s just an excuse to quote once again from my little book of classic clues:
    “Where Rome couldn’t win, Scots can’t (6)”.

68. How Cannae follow that?

69. Eileen @67 I recall seeing a variant of this years ago, before I took a 25 year break from cryptic crosswords due to time and family constraints. It was, ”Scots unable to battle with elephants (6)”. I think, historically, that Hannibal had no elephants left by the time of Cannae, but it has stuck with me as a beguiling surface even if maybe a historically flawed one.

70. Wow. Tough.

    I thought I was going well as I managed to get 9a 23d/ 10a & 18d.

    Then it all fell apart.

    Well above my pay-grade.

    19a how do you know to put AS “around” other letters? Is there a clue to this?

    12a – I was determined that NOT SURE was an anagram.

    10a – really quite chuffed that I figured this out.

    Did seasoned solvers find this difficult?

71. Steffen – Vlad has a reputation for fiendishness (hence ‘the Impaler’!) I didn’t think today’s was as tough as he can be, but even so I wouldn’t recommend it to a beginner. So well done for MIAOU !

    Re 19a, ‘claiming’ as an inclusion indicator is one of those things you see quite often in crosswords. I think of it as someone ‘claiming a prize/trophy’, reaching out and grabbing it with both hands, hence ‘enclosing’ it within their grasp.

72. Thanks to manehi for the blog and to others who commented.

    Steffen, ‘claims’ in 19ac signifies ‘around’. Keep going, it should get easier with practice.

73. 71 & 72.

    Thank you

74. Thanks to Vlad and manehi; I enjoyed this though looking forward to one of his tougher offerings – like they were in his early days!

    I also enjoyed some of the badinage from my 15² compeers!

75. Coming to this very late, so nobody will notice as usual…
    phitonelly@63 is correct about CANNA PEE as the homophone for CANOPY.
    CANNAE PEE doesn’t work at all, as others have complained.
    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canna#English
    gives
    ‘Etymology 2 Borrowed from Scots cannae.
    Contraction canna (Scotland, Cumbria, Jamaica) Contraction of can not; cannot.
    1966, “The Naked Time”, in Star Trek: The Original Series, season 1, episode 4, spoken by Scotty (James Doohan): “I canna’ change the laws of physics.”‘
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Doohan#Death
    His ashes are hidden under the floor of the International Space Station after being smuggled aboard. What higher authority do we need? 🙂

76. [FrankieG – except he doesn’t say ‘canna’ or ‘cannae’! 😉
    Also – Doohan was Canadian, not Scottish; his parents came from Bangor in Northern Ireland.]

77. Steffen @70
    I think I am a ‘seasoned solver’ ( I go back 8 years with these puzzles). The word ‘tricky’ has been used several times on this page, and I think it’s fair to say (from my experience as well) that Vlad is a trickier setter than most, and I found this puzzle (as expected) trickier than other Guardian cryptics over the last few weeks – but very much like every other Vlad puzzle that I remember.

78. just far too much use of equivalence between a word and its first letter. It always strikes me as a lazy way to build a clue – “I can’t quite make it work so will bung in an extra word for the extra letter that I need.”

79. essexboy@76: I was aware Scotty was not Scottish. His accent was atrocious. As bad as Dick Van Dyke’s cockney. Simon Pegg went even more OTT. 🙂
    It’s worrying that wiktionary seems to be basing a whole etymology on a misquotation. Canna appears in this online Scots dictionary, though:
    https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/can_v1

80. A Glaswegian – I am one – would usually say “Ah canny pee”. “Cannae” has never been a realistic rendering of the Scottish “cannot”.

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