Guardian 29,076 – Vulcan

83 comments on “Guardian 29,076 – Vulcan”

1. Good fun, thank you Vulcan. Hadn’t heard of DEROGATE, but I suppose the adjective must have come from somewhere. Had heard of one of the two Brits. I didn’t parse CUT OFF.

   Thanks for the blog, Andrew.

2. Had the same problem wrt the homophone at 6d as you – dunno where A is from.

   thanks for the blog (and confirming that there’s a Fairy penguin)

3. Re SYCAMORE, I read it as our blogger, sicker + more. Although wasn’t terribly convinced by it.

   Otherwise, an enjoyable start to the week.

   Had to look up Sir Roger.

4. Thanks, Vulcan and Andrew
   SYCAMORE
   Tried sicker+more first. Didn’t sound right.
   Sick of more? Even that doesn’t work.
   As Andrew says, an ‘a’ may be missing in the clue.

5. SYCAMORE

   I’ll mention it for what it’s worth. Someone on the Guardian site thinks the A is the French word à for ‘to’.
   Not convinced myself, as there is no indication of Frenchness.

6. In SYCAMORE maybe a = to

7. Sorry Andrew, I thought this was easier than normal which was perfect for me. Thanks Vulcan and A.

8. I enjoyed this puzzle. Favourites: LIGHTER, SHERPA, REFRACTORY.

   New for me: Sir Roger Casement.

   Thanks, both.

   I now realise that I had not noticed that I forgot about the A in 6d SYCAMORE having parsed it as = sick + more.

9. I found it easier than the typical Vulcan. I just had trouble with the parsing of 7d Elton as the ‘off’ was a distraction. I still can’t see where that works into the cueing. I also over-thought 16d as I hadn’t heard of the person but was trying to find other words to anagram with ‘name’. I didn’t get the double meaning.

10. I found this quicker and easier than the Quiptic, but I didn’t have to explain SYCAMORE, which I couldn’t fully either.

    Thank you to Andrew and Vulcan.

11. “Venerable” seemed an odd choice of adjective in 3d. Is there any more significance to it than just meaning old?
    Small typo in the blog at 22d – should be “sale”
    Thanks to Vulcan and Andrew

12. I’m afraid I’m with JerryG @7 on this one. Usually Vulcan has several clues which I find take as long for me to solve as the rest of the puzzle, but this fell out more easily. SYCAMORE was a puzzle, though.

    LOI was CASEMENT – the word ‘name’ in the clue had me looking for N In a frame. Why not just ‘Sir Roger’s in the frame?’

    Thanks to V and A

13. Gervase@12 For that very reason

14. GDU @1 – Roger Casement might just have objected to being called a ‘Brit’! The house my parents owned had fairy penguins at the bottom of the garden, so I didn’t have to go far through types of penguins. Very smooth, even though I didn’t notice the problem with the SYCAMORE. I particularly liked REFRACTORY. Thanks, Vulcan and Andrew.

15. Nice Monday puzzle, though I don’t really understand 6d either.

    Anyone else try SERAPH for 4d?

    Thanks Vulcan and Andrew.

16. I thought “macabre” has an “a” sound at the end, so “sick a”?

    I am in the quick camp, today, a pb for a Vulcan for me.

    Thanks Andrew and Vulcan

17. Lord Jim @15: That never occurred to me, but it’s not a bad fit for the clue!

18. Probably because it defeated me, I thought 1 across was the best of several well-crafted clues here. Thanks V + A.

19. Lord Jim @15 me too for Seraph. It seems a perfectly good answer to me, especially for a Monday, though the definition is slightly vaguer than Sherpa.

    I’m not a fan of 1a either because “one can lose” is redundant and doesn’t even give a smoother surface. While it is perfectly normal for a clue to deliberately mislead, just adding extra words to the clue for no other reason than to mislead isn’t good style in my opinion.

    Other than those, a standard enjoyable Monday offering.

20. Seemed to find a lot of confirmations coming to mind from the entertainment world. PERI from the punny subtitle of G & S’ Iolanthe – the Peer and the Peri, HOBO from the Canadian TV series “The Littlest Hobo” and STEERAGE from “Titanic”.

    A nice crossword to start off Monday.

    Ellie@9 : “off” is the anagrind for the scrambling of “let”. “ON” is synonymous with working, of course.

    Here’s ELTON, OFF THE GROUND

    https://youtu.be/DtVBCG6ThDk

    Thank you Vulcan and Andrew – the V & A combination !

21. Yup Lord Jim @15 I was one such, I bunged in the first anagram that sort of fit.

    I enjoyed this thanks Vulcan, good Monday fare. And thanks to Andrew too.

22. Lord Jim @15, as quite often, I’m with you – I got quite irritated trying to reconcile SERAPH with STURGEON, which was obviously right! I don’t see SYCAMORE at all – and what on earth does the surface mean?

    Like DuncT @11, I puzzled over ‘venerable’.

    I had a tick for SIMILE.

    Thanks V and A.

23. Thanks Vulcan and Andrew
    SERAPH for me too, and I thought it was rather a good clue!

24. Another who head-scratched at SYCAMORE. A CUT OFF is also a type of shirt, so an even better clue. Slow start at the top but all fell in quite quickly. Agree with your comment @14, TassieTim re Casement, who was executed by the ‘Brits’.

    Ta Vulcan & Andrew.

25. There’s also a Nina of SOS on the left, probably the best known bit of MORSE CODE.

26. Good puzzle. Never heard of Sir Roger or the fairy PERI. Agree about SYCAMORE

    Liked THAMES, SIMILE, STEERAGE, REFRACTORY

    Thanks Vulcan and Andrew

27. Nice start to the week, particularly liked the construction of EXPERIMENTAL. While I think as well that SYCAMORE was a bit iffy, it does remind me of the time at Primary School when the teacher was trying to get his class to identify 10 common trees by their foliage. The slowest/least interested? 9 year old always had to be prompted by the rest of the class when confronted with the sycamore leaf by a collective show of everyone pretending to be noisily sick…

28. …and OFF THE Pitch is, I think, more appropriate to a player getting a red card, rather than OF THE GROUND imho…

29. Similar thoughts on SYCAMORE, but I just bunged it in without trying too hard to justify it. OFF THE GROUND held me up for a while. I doubt that phrase has ever been used in the entire history of football. It’s ‘off the field’ or ‘off the pitch’. The ‘ground’ refers to the entire arena, including the stands and benches.

30. I think 6D is meant to be macabrer (sounds like macabre) so sicker + more.

31. Agree with the above, OFF THE GROUND is not a common expression.

    Players will generally remain in the ground when sent off the pitch.

32. Bamboozled myself by thinking that the answer to 4d was going to be ‘seraph’, which I think would have been a cracking clue, but 9a had to be ‘sturgeon’.

33. Another SERAPH here and also rescued by STURGEON

    THAMES was one of those hidden ones that are harder in the paper than they are online as the line-breaks split the word up. That’s my excuse anyway

    Overall I made a bit of a meal of this – maybe because I was expecting it to be easy?

    Is SYCAMORE pronounced (by some) with minimal emphasis on the A maybe?

    Cheers V&A

34. I know little about the area, but yes like others tried seraph, thinking um … cherubim … seraphim … maybe they guided you to the pearly gates … No uncertainty with Sherpa though.

35. Had no trouble with getting from phrase to SHERPA, but the first anagram I found for dark wool was WOODLARK – obviously not what I was looking for.

    No particular problems today, apart from also having no idea how SYCAMORE works. I liked the fight of the century though I expect it’s not new.

36. A delightful (nice) Monday puzzle.

    THAMES was so well-hidden I failed to see it! I also liked REFRACTORY for the surface and the GRAND SLAM dd. I failed to fit toilet into 7D and to see seraph instead of SHERPA. Apparently (who would know?), the nine orders of angels are: angel, archangel, cherub, domination/dominion, power, principality, seraph, throne, virtue. TILT were fairy penguin and Sir Roger (no place for Moore in there). Perhaps BillB @30 has a good point about sicker?

    Thanks Vulcan and Andrew.

37. I’m another who immediately bunged in SERAPH, like Lord Jim – because THAMES had been a write-in and it seemed an obvious anagram.
    However, a matter of moments later the only Nicola I could think of needed an E as the guide’s third letter.
    Maybe I should switch to using a pencil….
    Many thanks to Vulcan and Andrew

38. Robi @36 reminds us that seraphim are far too elevated to act as guides. That duty is normally given to the lower orders 🙂

39. At 16 down, my over-immersion in matters literary immediately led me to think of Sir Roger De Coverley. the character dreamed up by Joseph Addison in sketches written for the Spectator back in the early 18th century. My first brush with him occurred when he was visited upon us by an English teacher in 4th year, when I am afraid Sir Roger was ill-equipped to capture the attention of teenage boys in Scotland in 1966. Literature also rescued me on this occasion, however, when I remembered Yeats’s ‘The ghost of Roger Casement is beating on the door’.

40. Spooner’s catflat @39 – the same Sir Roger came immediately to my mind, too, first encountered at the same stage in my education. He had a similar underwhelming effect on teenage girls in England in the ’50s.
    We did enjoy learning his dance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iye3JoD5LUo, at about the same age, though.

41. Straightforward fun for a Monday morning. PERI was new to me. AIRY held me up for a bit, TIL Fairy is another name for Little or Blue penguins.

42. I was surprised to find this described by our esteemed blogger as “rather harder than usual”, as I know he is normally a much more fluent solver than me, and I found it ridiculously easy. (Though to be fair, I didn’t have to complete the parsing of SYCAMORE.) This confirms my theory that a lot of the difficulty of a crossword is in the solver’s mind, or state of mind. Tiredness, distraction, low mood, worry – any of these can hinder; moderate consumption of alcohol can help or hinder, unpredictably. (Obviously not suggesting you were pissed, Andrew. 🙂 )

    I’m surprised so many people here went for SERAPH. I started top left with the across clues and STURGEON was an easy solve, so by the time I got to 4d only SHERPA would do.

    Thanks to Vulcan and Andrew.

43. Sheffield Hatter at 42: in my case it’s because, although I work my way down the clues in the order they’re written – as soon as I’ve solved one, I immediately try any of the crosses where I now have a letter. If I succeed, the letters in that answer may help with others lower down. (Therefore I’d bunged in SERAPH before I’d even seen Nicola.) For what it’s worth, I come a cropper quite often…

44. Wellbeck @43. Yes, I sometimes do that, but in this case I didn’t solve 1a (a difficult to see and cunningly hidden answer, I thought) until much later, so I was saved from tripping over my bootlaces.

45. Finally a Vulcan that I enjoyed. It had a much neater, Rufusian feel to it than others I have attempted (and usually abandoned).

46. Thanks both,
    Fast but fun I thought. The old fairy tickled my fancy – which is a phrase I’ve not needed to write before.

47. Spooner’s catflap@39: Sir Roger De Coverley also flashed across my mind before settling on Casement….I’m surprised so many here haven’t heard of the latter as he is a key figure in modern Irish history. Apart from his role in Irish independence, and the grim circumstances of his death, he should be remembered for his work in bringing the atrocities committed in the Congo in the name of Leopold King of the Belgians to wider public attention. I’m not always in favour of bringing down statues but there are exceptions, and he is one of them.

48. sheffield hatter @42 – my defence: I tackle the clues in order, too but when I saw ‘Nicola’ in 9ac, I thought of my daughter rather than Ms Sturgeon and left that one to come back to, hoping that there was wordplay that I might use to spark some interest in crosswords from said daughter – I’ve been trying in vain for years, with all of my children! By the time I returned to the across clues, it was obvious, with all the crossers apparently in place, what 9ac was – but I couldn’t understand why STURGEON wouldn’t fit!

49. For those to whom “peri” was unfamiliar, had they perhaps come across the G&S opera Iolanthe? It’s subtitled “The peer and the peri”.

50. Another one who got to CASEMENT via the Yeats poem, which is intended to be sung to the same tune as The church’s one foundation.

51. Hah! No wonder I had trouble trying to work ‘TESLA’ into 9a; his name’s Nikola, not Nicola.

    I also figured 6d was ‘sicker’ ‘more’ somehow.

52. The continuing saga of non-Rufus setters trying to do a Rufus, and thus not all that easy! Agree also that the SYCAMORE clue is dodgy. Otherwise okay.

53. Thanks for the blog, good puzzle for the Monday tradition , nice variety of neat clues.

54. I had “chumps” for “Thames” which was all I could make with the crossers. A very well hidden hidden definition.

55. The first Sir Roger I thought of was Bannister! I had to look up CASEMENT. HUNDRED YEARS WAR and REFRACTORY were my favourites. We can moan all we want at SYCAMORE, but it couldn’t be anything else, could it?

56. [ Roz @53: I’ve just started working this week at Q/KPR’s Youth Academy – the revolution begins 🙂 ].

57. I agree with Sheffield hatter @42 “ridiculously easy”

    Thanks all the same Vulcan and Andrew

58. [ AlanC @56 very impressive , so it will be your fault when they get relegated in 10 years time ? I have refined a clue for you, nothing personal so no offence, it is just how it works,
    Ground for sad lout (6,4) . ]

59. [Roz @58: lol – I fear you know me well, just choked on my beer].

60. Sicko is given as Macabre in Chambers, under Sick. I also had Seraph at 4d

61. 6d would work if the answer was SYCOMORE (a type of fig tree). The homophone would then be “sicko”, given in Chambers as (adj) “perverted; macabre”. Maybe the more obvious spelling got substituted?

62. Tom_I @61: That is convincing. I think ‘sycomore’ (as the fig tree) appears in the OT, although checking with Chambers it seems that it was also the original spelling for Acer pseudoplatanus

63. Tom_I@61, Gervase@62 and others passim. The change of spelling mentioned (sycomore->sycamore) shows how an O sound (as in “sicko”) becomes a schwar when it’s in the middle of a word, and hence easily changed to be spelt with an A instead. Given the obviousness of the answer, is it necessary for the homophone to be as accurate as some seem to want it to be?

    Personally, I just bunged and shrugged. 🙂

64. Straightforward top to bottom solve with the same eyebrow elevation that everyone else had with SYCAMORE. I was half hoping the setter or editor might have stopped by to explain, but I can’t see anything here yet. Anyway, thanks to setter and blogger, as usual.

65. sh @63: The voice of reason! Not the most successful clue in the puzzle, nevertheless, with a surface that is pure gobbledygook (as Eileen commented @22).

66. I thought THAMES was very cleverly hidden and it was one of the my last ones in. SHERPA had been the first one in and I kept thinking of Paris as the capital. I really enjoyed this. SYCAMORE didn’t bother me so much as I imagined a pronunciation where the a was almost silent, as it sometimes can be in the US South. Thanks to Vulcan and Andrew.

67. Muffin@49: Somewhat more obscure than the G&S, but there is also a song cycle by Robert Schumann translated from the German as Paradise and the Peri. It’s rarely performed, but I’ve heard the odd extract on Radio 3 from time to time.

68. Macabre is pronounced makabra, so = more macabre, so I think the clue is okay. Easier than most Vulcans.

69. Tom@61 and others. Sycomore would be an acceptable answer at 6d but the Guardian Crossword site gives the more obvious SYCAMORE aa correct.

70. Gervase@62: SYCOMORE appears in the King James Version of the Bible in the story of Zacchaeus the tax collector, who was too small to see Jesus over the heads of the crowd and climbed a “sycomore” to get a better view. It was probably the standard spelling at the time.

71. Thanks Andrew and Vulcan! A pretty painless start to the week for me. There were several names and terms I didn’t know (peri, sir Roger, Mr Sturgeon…) but they were figureoutable with crossers and wordplay – although in the case of 18A I wrongly inferred the existence of a “hairy penguin.” 🙂

    Add me to the lists of those who had SERAPH in / are unsure about macabre / wondered if there was something behind including “venerable” in the clue for MORSE CODE.

72. Roz @58. Amusing, but really, tut, tut. ‘Ground’ is doing double duty as anagrind and definition. Long Paddington stare called for.

73. Spooner’s catflap @72
    …unless the whole clue is &lit? AlanC would know.

74. If 13A were a down clue, then the instruction to put nothing on top of the stove would have produced “ohob” instead of HOBO. Since it is across, I suppose the “on top of” in this instance means “in addition to” so the “o” can legitimately follow the hob. Nevertheless, I found it a bit of a stretch.

75. Spooner’s Catflap@72 it is an &Lit , it is not just a ground, it is specifically a ground for yobboes who are unhappy. The whole clue is the wordplay and the whole clue is the defition .

76. ChatGPT suggests for a solution to 6d: Based on these clues, a possible solution could be “Silent Hill.” Silent Hill is a popular horror video game series known for its macabre and dark atmosphere.

77. Thanks both and I was entertained – which is all I ever ask. (THAMES is very good.)

    I thought it a bit of an ask to leap from ‘Sir Roger’ to CASEMENT. He was (it seems) an unfortunate victim of pedantry. (But I seem to recall that the offending ‘comma’ was ‘there’ and ‘not there’ in different versions of the story – in any event it is beyond my wit to descry what difference it makes in either case.)

78. AndrewTyndall@74. I think a HOB is the ‘top of [a] cooker’ rather than a cooker, which would include an oven and possibly a grill too, so ‘on’ correctly identifies the O as going beside HOB.

79. Ditto re Bannister, Devil@55. How did Casement out the oh so atrocious Leopold, Nuntius @47?

80. @73, 75 et passim, and that’s why he choked, I thought …

81. gladys @70: The species of Acer that we call sycamore is not native to the Levant -the tree mentioned in the Bible must be the sycomore fig

82. [It is generally thought that sycamores were introduced to Britain in Tudor times. I can’t say that I’m pleased – our garden has had literally over ten thousand seedlings this year, and we are far from being alone in that!]

83. I’ve always figured CASEMENT for the result of some bestial encounter.

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