Guardian Cryptic 29,167 by Pasquale

106 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29,167 by Pasquale”

1. Thanks Pasquale and manehi
   Too many where either I had never heard of the answer (1. 24a, 9, or 5) or couldn’t see the tricksy parsing for me to find this very enjoyable.
   DALTON favourite, of course.

2. I found this hard, but ultimately enjoyable. I made it even harder by reading Al as AI as in artificial intelligence. SATIRISING was clever.

3. Chewy as a Pasquale often is, but everything fairly clued. Liked TALEBEARER once I figured it out. Thanks both.

4. There were some lovely words in this one – IGUANODONS, ALIENAGE, DIGRAM, NEOLITH, UNAVOWED and UNBOWED just roll so nicely off the tongue.

   Knew DALTON from his law of partial pressures of course.

   Thak you Pasquale and manehi.

5. The usual cakewalking from my least favourite setter. Always a few really good clues, let down by the obscurities.

6. I found this tough but I have to admire some very clever clues. I got Talebearer, Lead Mine and Satirising without parsing. Plague totally defeated me. Never heard of Split Run but it worked for the definition. Thanks Pasquale for a tricky hour and manehi for the blog.

7. Found this oddly unsatisfying for Pasquale. I think it was PLAGUY and ALIENAGE that just felt wrong.
   Thanks to Pasquale and Manehi

8. This felt like pulling teeth but incredibly satisfying to eventually finish after a 2 hour chew. SATIRISING (thanks for parsing) TALEBEARER, and PROFICIENT were clever. My favourite was SPLIT RUN.

   Ta Pasquale & manehi

9. Took me ages to get QUINTS. I put it down to a sketchy knowledge of Shakespeare and a lack of organisation.

10. Thank you for the TALEBEARER parsing which was way over my head. Was delighted to spot SATIRISING without help – very neat. Two new words for me: PLAGUY and QUINTS but the wordplay was clear for both.
    Breaking: Average solver completes a Pasquale puzzle shocker!
    Thanks to Manehi and Pasquale.

11. Tough but enjoyable for the most part. Failed to solve 10/24ac, 22ac.

    New for me: chemist John DALTON; QUINTS = organ stops; PLAGUY; AGLET = tag.

    Thanks, both.

12. Very clever. I spotted SATIRISING eventually, but could not work out TALEBEARER; thanks for the explanation.

13. I think if – which is unlikely – I were to write 9 I would spell it PLAGUEY. Chambers has PLAGUY as archaic.

14. I’m with Petert @2, trying to figure out it was Al or AI in LEAD MINE. As is clear from posting here, there’s no difference in this font. From past pitfalls, including clues with A1 (motorway), I was awake to that and even looked at the print version to see if the font there would help me differentiate. l still don’t get it. Is it meant to be an &lit or a cryptic def?

    Didn’t know either QUINTS or Peter Quince, but I learned a lot about musical intervals, and organ stops along the way.

15. Excellent although I must admit ignorance of PLAGUY?

16. PLAGUY probably is archaic, muffin. Donne uses it in his poem, ‘The Canonization’, and Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, where Ulysses remarks of Achilles that “He is so plaguy proud that the death-tokens of it / Cry ‘No recovery.’”

    The latest instance I can think of is Ishmael on his first night at The Spouter-Inn in Moby-Dick, chapter 3:
    ‘“Landlord! I’ve changed my mind about that harpooneer.—I shan’t sleep with him. I’ll try the bench here.”
    “Just as you please; I’m sorry I can’t spare ye a tablecloth for a mattress, and it’s a plaguy rough board here”—feeling of the knots and notches.

17. Plaguy did ring a faint literary bell, but Quince – quints didn’t, reminding me that, nwst the frequency of MSND ref’s in xwds, esp Bottom, I don’t really know the play well. Alienate, too was obscure, but doable. So, yes, chewy: a few acrosses, a few downs, and slowly the lattice wove together. Enjoyed it, cheers to the Don and manehi.

18. Blimey it was a relief to finish this one! Difficulty that’s rooted in obscurity is my least favourite kind but I really liked TALEBEARER, SATIRISING & TOOK OVER for keeping the cricket theme going

    Cheers P&M

19. Ps: is the low comment count today a sign of the difficulty of this puzzle or people enjoying the sunshine?

20. GinF @17
    ALIENATE is a word I know, but the solution was the unknown (to me) ALEINAGE!

21. Remembered Dalton from school Chem [gravimetric expts in the lab … something about constant ratio of weights pre- and post reaction suggesting molecular structure …?]

22. Thanks muffin, I wrote … age but the forgot to check and re-correct autocorrect (for both of which I’ve just now had to again re-correct…grrr)

23. … then forgot ..

24. Thanks for the blog, I thought this was really good, with SATIRISING and TALEBEARER the outstanding clues.
    John Dalton famous for many things, perhaps mainly his early atomic theory, also for colour-blindness investigations , still called Daltonism , and he was a tutor of James Joule.
    Streets and buildings in Manchester named after him.

25. [Out of interest GinF, what does your autocorrecting? I don’t have it on my laptop (not sure I want it, though!)]

26. At first a bit of panic set in, as I only had COUPON in place on first sweep through, giving a tiny toe hold in the NW corner. But gradually made progress from there. Very impressed by the subtle but rather devious devices in the clueing for both TALEBEARER and SATIRISING. Memories of the play L’Aiglon (when a 12 year old me was cast as Marie Louise) – that helped greatly with 21d. But had to admit defeat with both PLAGUY and SPLIT RUN. Though a double thumbs up for Pasquale’s puzzle this morning, eventually…

27. …and the word IGUANODON a particular favourite word of mine, with its five very self-assured spoken aloud syllables…

28. Tricky for me also – more for the unfriendly grid and the cleverness of some of the clues than for the vocabulary. SATIRISING is particularly ingenious; TALEBEARER rather violates the principle of a straightforward clue for an unusual word. DIGRAM doesn’t appear in the Chambers app, though the answer was obvious enough (I’m familiar with ‘digraph’ as the more usual synonym).

    Good to see DALTON – better known on the Continent for his writings on colour blindness than for his atomic theory (‘colour blind’ is ‘daltonico’ in Italian). John Dalton Street in Manchester, where he taught, is named after him – unusually with his given name as well as his surname.

    Thanks to S&B

29. Very slow going at first, I got there in the end. Fortunately the GK was all known to me.

    6D and 13D went unparsed. I found the “as is” in 6D and the remainder is reasonable in hindsight, but the hidden “tale in” 13D is a step too far for my taste.

30. Call me thick, but what is “I need” doing in 10?

31. Offspinner @30
    Part of the anagram fodder, as given in the blog.

32. The usual vocabulary-stretching from Pasquale.

    I suppose the temptation with PLAGUY was in the ‘a guy’ but of course PLAGUE would have fitted and would not have been an archaic term. I liked TALEBEARER once manehi had explained it, PROFICIENT and SATIRISING for the wordplays, ANXIOUS for the half worried, and UNBOWED for the unfortunate cellist.

    Thanks Pasquale and manehi.

33. Petert @2, paddymelon @14. I found out how to distinguish AI from Al when the font in use makes them look the same, through helping Mrs B, who had just received an email with a new password for her gym club and couldn’t work out if one of the characters was a capital O or a zero… So, what you do is paste the word in question into your favourite text editor and search for one or the other.

34. Failed on 7dn. QUINTS as both parts of the clue fell within the very large set which is my General Ignorance. Came here for an explanation for 13dn TALEBEARER. I saw the hospital executive bearing tale, but wondered if there was more to it – why single out the executive in preference to the digital employee, the rectal examiner, Greta Lear or that rat Alex and many others? Slightly disappointed there wasn’t more to it.
    Overall a nice crossword, albeit with some strange words. Many thanks to Pasquale and to Manehi for the blog

35. Unusually for me, a couple of bungs without parsing (SATIRISING, TALEBEARER), but I did this late and blame it on that.

    As a retired computational linguist, encountered and used BIgram much more often than DIgram, but all is good.

    I got PLAGUY, but it just seems wrong, archaic or not – know what I mean?

36. My stats for Pasquale show wildly variant times for his puzzles. Maybe because it can be so dependent on one’s knowledge of the obscurities. This one very much in the hard category for me, taking 60% longer than average. I don’t know how you could possibly solve 7 down without very specific general knowledge, whereas 9 across at least had some accessible wordplay to fall back on. Thanks to both manehi and Pasquale

37. I knew Peter Quince and thought of him as I read the clue but couldn’t link to stops, ended up bunging in QUINTS unparsed, although i should have known the organ meaning, having been on the team church-minding when the organ was last serviced and the pipes stacked up being checked.

    I also didn’t parse TALEBEARING or SATIRISING, and am looking at them thinking sneaky. Neither did I take as long as others are reporting to complete this, as I was mostly held up by these two, but it was cbewy.

    Thank you to Pasquale and manehi.

38. Blaze@33 – My Chromebook text editor’s font makes upper case “i” and lower case “L” easily distinguishable – I don’t even need to search for them.
    Shame it’s not in general use.
    iatrophobia is the fear of doctors, but Google Latrophobia and you’ll find myriad results, mostly from medical sources.
    The non-word Latrophobia even turned up in the script for an episode of the now-defunct Holby City – which presumably had medical advisors.

39. BF@36 I agree about 7d and confess I googled “Shakespeare peter” and having found Quince I took a punt on QUINTS and Chambers confirmed 🙂

40. In almost all sans-serif fonts, a capital i is slightly wider than a lowercase L. Compare:
    Ill (sick, capitalized) with
    III (the number before IV)…
    and you can maybe see this more clearly. Of course, this is one instance in which the serifs would have helped, and I personally don’t understand why most typeface geeks these days prefer their fonts sans.

    Bodycheetah@39: same here.

41. Tricky puzzle, but some great clues. Thanks for the parsing of satirising, talebearer and the convoluted, lead mine. I thought rising might have been the reaction you got from someone when you made fun of them, but it got my “move-on-and-check-it-on-fifteensquared” mark.

    If I were to write down the top 500 female names that I know, I don’t think Una would make it. (I don’t know if I’d get to 500, but she most probably wouldn’t have been there anyway (before today)).

42. Thanks Pasquale. The NE corner was my undoing and I revealed PLAGUY and QUINTS as no amount of time would have helped me with those two words. I liked much of this including PLAY DOWN, EARLIEST, DIGRAM, REVERE, TRAIN SET, and TOOK OVER. I couldn’t parse SPLIT RUN or the clever TALEBEARER. Thanks manehi for explaining.

43. Matematico@34 In the light of recent events it is important for hospitals to distinguish between TALEBEARERS and whistleblowers.

44. I did wonder what reaction LEAD MINE would have got if it had been an Anto clue. Less than favourable I suspect

45. I think of a two-letter combination such as th as a “digraph,” DIGRAM looks funny to me.

    Talk about tricksy parsing — LEAD MINE was too tricksy for me. Never heard of QUINTS, though I have of Peter Quince. I’ve heard of Guy Fawkes too but didn’t think of him.

    DrW @35 What, besides a large sheep, is a bigram?

    Thanks to Pasquale and manehi.

46. I find most of the praise here irritatingly fulsome.
    And since no one else has dared to mention QUINTS/QUINCE I will.

47. ctrl f shows 12 quinces and 13 quints on this page. Hang on a sec, no it’s 13 quinces and 14 quints. No wait

48. SwissSteve@41 in the UK we had Una Stubbs from Till Death Us Do Part , 60s then through Worzel Gummidge right up to Sherlock , pretty modern , and numerous other things.
    Peter Quince is a name I seem to know for some reason, is he the only Peter in Shakespeare ?
    The major disappointment here was Strangeness being a definition and not S for part of the wordplay.

49. Roz@41:There’s a servant called Peter in R&J…obscure to say the least..

50. @48..sorry..

51. Thanks Nuntius, I must have missed that one . We did R&J at school but i used to just read my physics books.

52. I was one of several to be unable to distinguish between AI and Al, and still cannot see the difference in thickness as explained by Mrpenny @40. Was also thrown by plaguy (ugh!), but I still enjoyed this challenge.

53. i’m surprised by the Al confusion. Surely in the context of the clue it had to be the chemical symbol for aluminium, hence it was an L?

54. IlIl this is capital i then lower case L , repeated . This is on a Chromebook. Of course I do not know how it appears on screens for other people. For me the capital i is fatter and shorter. However , I would not be able to tell which one it is in isolation .
    Could they not do capital i like a T but a bar top and bottom ?

55. Yes Muffin , obvious from the context and in the paper obvious from the typeface.

56. Re the typeface – there’s an interesting thread on Ikea’s multiple typeface changes. I was chasing down a memory that they went to sans serif to save money in printing – apparently an urban legend. There current NoTo (no tofu) is named after the little squares that are used for unrecognizable characters online – they wanted maximal language capability. I’m always in favor of serif – much as in numbers I always cross a 7 and strike through a zero to disambiguate.

57. I do the crosswords in order (so that I can enjoy the blogs in sequence), and I lurk until I have caught up. Today is the first one I can comment on, and fittingly I have a very accurate personal shout out: 4d UNBOWED is about “a deficient cellist”.

    Thanks, Pasquale, for reminding me that I need to practise more (and for the tricky but fun puzzle). And thanks, manehi, for the much-needed blog – lots of TILTs today.

58. SwissSteve@47 – and not one had anything to say about the duff homonym. I know it’s a regional thing but however I try I cannot make them sound alike on any dialect.?

59. nuntius @49 … and another servant called Peter in The Taming of the Shrew, who appears briefly in Act IV scene i. Even more obscure.

60. Spooner’s @59: From a quick internet search (not deeply researched by me and confirmed) there may also be minor characters called Peter in Measure for Measure (a friar) and King John (Peter of Pomfret). Perhaps a name Shakespeare used when he couldn’t think of anything better. Not that there is anything wrong with the name of a saint of course…(!)

61. In the wiki entry for King John Peter of Pomfret is described as a prophet..

62. Nuntius@60 or maybe it was just a safe option.

63. Alas, nuntius, you have exposed the embarrassing fact that, amid a knowledge of Shakespeare’s work which is otherwise extensive and detailed, King John is a black spot for me. Of all the plays, it is the one that I don’t believe I ever read, and although I once saw it performed at The Other Place in Stratford, that must have been around 35 years ago. Of the role played by Peter of Pomfret I have no recollection whatsoever. Friar Peter, however, does ring a bell, yes.

64. Petert@62: very good..
    Spooner’s@63: Well, you are not alone. I’ve seen or read most of Shakespeare’s plays over the years, but not King John. ..It seems that Peter of Pomfret was also mad, and John didn’t like his prophecies. Am not sure what happened to him, but I can guess that it wasn’t very nice. After all, we all know that King John was a very bad and wicked King indeed…

65. jeceris@58 I was trying it out in my best King’s Aussie, and was quite surprised at how there was no living way I could make quints and quince sound different from each other. Even if I try to strongly enunciate the t, without forcing a new syllable on the way to s, I can’t make it sound any different from my transition from n to c.

66. Steve G @65
    I’m with you on that homophone.

67. SwissSteve@41. UNA was my mother’s given name, so 18d was a write in for me once I had the U from ANXIOUS.

    A lot of the rest was too clever by half for me (or “fair”, as some commenters would have it), and once again my lack of recall of the names of characters in Midsummer Night’s Dream let me down.

    It’s noticeable that Pasquale uses obscure words like PLAGUY and ALIENAGE when he really doesn’t have to. This may seem fair to some, clever to others, and enjoyable to at least one here, but to me it seems like a deliberate attempt to PLAGUE and ALIENATE a large proportion of potential solvers.

    Speaking of fair or not, I have to say that the reverse hidden clues (where the indication that part of the solution is hidden in the clue is actually in the solution) for TALE BEARER and SATIRISING are a step too far for me. I don’t have a “do not attempt” list, unlike some who comment here, but clues like these might tempt me to start one.

    Thanks anyway. And thanks too for manehi’s efforts on the blog.

68. SH @67
    You have summed up my thoughts on this puzzle. “Self-indulgent” springs to mind. I might add Pasquale to my “don’t bother with” list, though he has done some good Quiptics recently.

69. Worst result of the week for me – only third done. Not much fun. I got QUINTS but really not a homophone here in Ireland.

70. Alastair @69
    I am genuinely puzzled about how QUINCE and QUINTS could be pronounced differently (and I do frequently complain about “homophones”). Could you elucidate, please?

71. btw Peter Quince was easy for me as my daughter played him in her girls’ school staging of the play!

72. This was indeed tricky. Pasquale is a brilliant setter, but I thought this one lacked a bit of elegance in the surfaces. Nothing unfair or dodgy here though, SATIRISING and TALEBEARER both very clever.

73. Re 7d QUINTS, I would argue that whether quints and Quince can be pronounced differently in some accents is immaterial. They are close enough to constitute acceptable aural wordplay. Pasquale did not use the word homophone (or homonym) in his organically dreamlike clue. (Having said that, I share muffin’s puzzlement @70.)

74. Usual slog but I am keen to try to figure out the first part of 16d….without looking at answers.

    I think the second word is OVER, but for the life of me I can’t see how to solve the first word.

75. ai – AIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAI
    al – AlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAlAl

76. Nearly there Steffen – Excessively ( pause ) Keen to START with …… your OVER is correct.

77. Hand over?

78. @70 It does come down to native accent and the in/ability to hear certain sounds. You might think eg tents and tense sound the same, others would disagree. In my mind the T is much more heavily stressed.

79. muffin@70: Does it come down to t stopping: a pratice I personally find mildly irritating, though I know it is natural for many people. So for me there is a very subtle difference in that quints has a t sound and quince does not. Having said that, I think I’d prounce quint as “kint”.

80. Alastair@69 – For QUINCE the International Phonetic Alphabet gives KWINS
    For QUINT it’s KWINT, so for QUINTS it’s KWINTS. I don’t see how anyone, !rish or not could pronounce them the same.
    Or is the T silent?

81. I managed to complete without aids, but this was Pasquale in his irritating form for me.

82. Wow, this was hard! I couldn’t parse TALEBEARER or SATIRISING (thanks manehi for revealing their ingenuity) and had to assume the existence of the words AGLET, QUINT and ALIENAGE as well as the dodgy spelling of PLAGUY – but I made it, so I’m happy. My tea-tray, however, has a massive dent in it: I’d got down to six clues left before deducing that the College was in fact my Alma Mater! Thanks Pasquale.

83. FrankieG @80
    Yes, but it’s QUINTS, not QUINT.

84. Just to add that I rather enjoyed the puzzle, though it was by no means a write-in and took me some time. There were three I couldn’t get. I especially liked TALEBEARER, DALTON (as others have noted, famed for his contribution to atomic theory and lending his name to colour blindness), and PLAGUY, though the last still looks as if it shouldn’t be spelled like that. Anyway, my thanks to Pasquale and manehi.

85. 6d – where does RISING come from in the clue?

86. Steffen @85 – “it as” needs to be read backwards in a Down clue, therefore it is “rising”. One of too many too clever-clever words imvho.

87. Steffen @85 – it doesn’t it’s a reverse clue, so the instructions are included in the answer and IT AS rises to become SATI plus RISING – and lots of us said we didn’t parse that one, if you read earlier on in the comments.

88. The idea of a puzzle is for the constructor to do battle with the solver and ultimately lose. My sense is that Pasquale has yet to master the second part.

89. Valentine@45 you’re probably long gone from this conversation, but for the record, Wikipedia says this:

    A bigram or diagram is a sequence of two adjacent elements from a string of tokens, which are typically letters, syllables or words. A bigram is an n-gram for n=2.

90. I never heard of a TALEBEARER but I could guess DIGRAM. SATIRISING too clever for me.
    I always seem to be bringing up the rear in these posts…. unless I get if first again.
    Thanks both

91. I thought satirising might be a reference to satyrs, who’d presumably find ‘it’ a lot of fun (if they were real, that is).

92. muffin@83 – so you do think KWINS = KWINTS and the T is silent?

93. A tricky couple of hours. Time for bed. Not a fan of TALEBEARER

94. I gave up and revealed 6dn, and was none the wiser when I saw the answer.

95. QUINTS/QUINCE We had a lengthy discussion about the MINTS/MINCE distinction last year, backed up by linguistic science, when our dear, and much missed, Essexboy was here. Since then there’s been a lot of discussion damping down the homophone fire. As a reformed homophone purist, I’ll go along with cellomaniac @73.

    I’m still stuck on the parsing of LEAD MINE. Is it a clue as definition? A semi &lit? I get the breakdown but it doesn’t make sense to me. I need? as Offspinner asked @30.
    muffin@50 and Roz@53 have said AL/AI is resolved by the context, but you’d have to have got the answer first to be sure, and I didn’t. It’s the context I don’t get.

96. Jay@88 I am sorry I have to disagree, I take the Torquemada view, sometimes the setter should aim to give the solver a severe beating, we never get this in the Guardian anymore..

    PDM@95 it started earlier with PRINTS/PRINCE , I certainly say them differently and I can feel my tongue in a different place if I say them slowly. You introduced the idea of recorded sonograms which would settle the matter. I too have adopted the same position as Cellomaniac and I never get involved anymore.

97. For LEAD MINE – I need source of METAL – tells me the AL is aluminium ( a metal ) , it does also look different in the paper.
    The clue is now all wordplay giving the answer. The clue is now a comment on the answer, I am looking in the WRONG place.

98. pm@95 I think the definition of lead mine is “it’s a metal mine but not Aluminium”. So what else could it be? (aside from the other 116 elemental metals or half a gazillion alloys). I was as frustrated with this definition as I was with the female name Una, which I later found out is someone on this blog’s mum’s name.

99. SS@ 98 There are only 93 other elemental metals and you don’t mine for alloys fool!

100. Thank you Roz@96,97. Yes, the tongue test is best, but as you’d know, literate people are often more influenced by orthography and aren’t necessarily aware of what’s going on physically. It’s a great thing that sonograms can be turned into smiley faces or similar so that deaf children can learn how to approximate sounds by moving the parts of the mouth and vocal tract, until they get it close enough.

     SS@99. I thought that may have been the intention of the clue, but I’m not going there, too many scientists here, and I’m bound to be wrong. But it seems that aluminium can be both a metal and an alloy. Here in Oz we mine bauxite for the aluminium to be extracted.

101. Once again for the people at the back: “aural wordplay” clues do not need to be exact homophones in every accent. No-one ever said they did. Just close enough for an aural resemblance. They’re puns. Getting upset about “homophone” clues is like shouting at clouds.

102. Rob T LOL. I may be in the peanut gallery (does that translate?) but I hear you loud and clear.

103. PDM @100 great point about deaf children which I did not know.
     Apologies if you do not want this science lesson.
     Most metals are mined as ores such as bauxite for aluminium, this is a compound containig oxygen etc. They are then refined to give the pure metal which is an element such as aluminium . Most metals in use are alloys to improve properties such as strength . Bronze is the earliest from copper and tin, steel is iron and carbon etc. Aluminium alloys contain various other metals making it much stronger for use in planes etc.

104. [Roz@103. Always happy to have a science lesson to make up for my misspent youth at boarding school. My memories of science were testing some acid on my school tunic, which my impoverished parents had to replace, (the bursary didn’t pay for that) and hiding in the physics lab to escape walking to Church in the Australian summer. The physics lab cupboards smelt a lot better than the ones in the chemistry lab. 🙂 ]

105. Great excitement in our street as our next door neighbour appears today in Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people on the planet in the world of AI. Definitely not a reference to the metal with an atomic number 13 this time…

106. I liked the way the two solutions-as-clues were symmetrical. (TALEBEARER and SATIRISNG).

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