Guardian Cryptic 29,186 by Sphinx

118 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29,186 by Sphinx”

1. Sphinx is Steve Pemberton

2. Took me a while to get going. Not sure about WHIRR. Lived in Lancashire for 25 years, and they didn’t pronounce where like that in my part.
   Thanks to Sphinx and loonapick

3. There’s also a fish called a callop, apparently. I couldn’t work out why it was tailless.

   Only two thirds finished this. Never heard of TUBAL or TASSIES (apart from residents of Tasmania). Couldn’t parse five, including COMPRESSOR, never having watched Friends.

4. N in SASSOON is Nitrogen not Neon which is Ne.
   I got COMPRESSOR but Ross = Friend I would never have got, never having watched Friends.
   No doubt the people who don’t understand what a pun is will complain about WHIRR but as a born and bred Lancastrian I enjoyed it. I also enjoyed AFROS and HORNS.

5. TimC @4

   I don’t know where neon came from. I know that N = nitrogen but for some reason typed neon??

6. Thanks, Sphinx and loonapick!
   Great puzzle and a detailed and neat blog.

   ARRAIGN
   I must be missing something.
   The ‘to answer’ is hanging loose.
   ‘call (we only have ‘called’ in the clue) to answer a criminal charge’ or ‘charge’ could be the def.
   (Is ARRAIGN used as a noun as well?)

7. Although escalopes are often served panées (cooked in a coating of breadcrumbs) they don’t have to be. But it’s understandable confusion. Back in the seventies one of our favourite local restaurants in the 20th arrondissement of Paris was called L’Escalope Normande. It was run by two very nice ladies from, of course, Normandy. We’d jokingly say “Let’s go see what the salopes normandes have on the menu tonight” (salope = slut, slag, or bitch depending on the context).

8. Fairly tricky in parts; enjoyed AFROS and SVELTEST; thought COMPRESSOR was a bit close to ‘pressure’ in the clue. Thanks to S & l.

9. This was tough and enjoyable.

   Favourites: BACCHANALE, HORNS, CARVING.

   New for me: pronunciation of where = whirr in Lancashire; TASSIE = cup; MUSS = upset/disorder; jack = small white bowl in the game of bowls; POLLACK fish (for 32ac).

   I could not parse 1ac COMP = school + RE = religious education + rev of SSOR? I did not see why Ross = ‘friend’ – I never watched that TV show so it did not spring to mind.

   Thanks, both.

10. Loonapick, the well spotted nina ‘Greg, please give Steve all five points’ will refer to Channel 4’s Taskmaster (hosted by Greg Davies, though I didn’t know Steve Pemberton had been on).

11. Nice spot on the “O, Greg…” line. Perhaps it’s something to do with the TV show Taskmaster? The host, Greg Davies, dispenses five points as his top marks for each task. I also imagine that it’s more likely to be “please give Steve all five points” rather than “Steve Viall”. This is all moot, though, as I don’t know of a Steve on the programme, let alone why the award or otherwise of top marks would be desired or contentious. Can anyone shed any further light?

12. Ah, Pavement got in earlier. Thanks for the Steve Pemberton link! Should have read Tim C @1.

13. I completed this last night and went to sleep thinking what the hell, does ‘Greg, please give Steve all five points’ refer to, so thanks to pavement and Dringerland for the enlightenment. I liked ESCALLOPED and PRESS-GANGS.

    Ta Sphinx & loonapick.

14. Thanks loonapick for spotting a bigger Nina than I had seen, I assume the message is from Steve/Sphinx: “Greg please give Steve all five points” in connection with the next Taskmaster series, as he is not in this one. Anyway I thought it was good fun with my favourite “RETAILER” for the number of possible ways of fathoming the wordplay.
    KVa@6 the def could be “called to answer…” but the tense doesn’t match and that leaves called doing double duty, so I am a bit puzzled too. And I thought there was a lot of PRESSing going on at the top. But thanks Sphinx for the fun.

15. It’s technically information that shouldn’t be floating around freely yet, but Steve Pemberton is a contestant on the next series of Taskmaster, which is doing its studio filming this week.

16. The scatalogical, Viz-like clue to 27 made me guffaw.

17. KVa @5. I struggled with ARRAIGN. I think there’s a mismatch in voice, as in passive or active. I can’t justify called as doing double duty with homophone and verb. To arraign is to order someone to answer a criminal charge. There’s a sense of the passive there with called to.

18. AlanC@13 apologies as you beat me to it. And yes, Medtner@16, I enjoyed that one too: couldn’t fit ELVIS in there and KING eventually failed with crossers.

19. When I saw Sphinx I immediately thought of Inside No 9: but didn’t realise this was a return visit. Mostly enjoyed this, though I found the SE quite tricky in places… I couldn’t understand WHIRR (though it could only be that). I liked SVELTEST, AFROS and ANCHOVIES. With thanks to Sphinx (hope to see you again without such a long wait) and loonapick.

20. I liked the WHIRR: the H in WHERE and WHIRR in Lancashire would not be pronounced.

    Thanks SPHINX: FORCE, BEARING and SIDE kept me on my toes – not the usual interpretations I was expecting.

    Thanks also loonapick – don’t know how you spotted the nina.

21. Medtner @16 and Gazzh @18, I wasn’t aware of that term, so yes funny.

22. So Anonymous TaskmasterFan @15, does that account for all the PRESSes in the clue and grid, as in PRESS release? The last Sphinx was apparently on the same day or the day before of the No 9 episode it referred to.

23. Presumably it’s a coincidence that much of the UK will be experiencing the (one hopes relatively mild) effects of 23 today?

24. Sorry Gazzh @ 14. Missed your reply to KVa re ARRAIGN. I concur, and about the PRESSing at the top.

25. As (a) a Brummie and (b) a fan of dreadful homophones I rather liked WHIRR. I have argued before that “homophone” should be taken as “sounds amusingly somewhat similar to” rather than “sounds exactly the same as”; but I remember Cilla Black repeatedly describing departing contestants on Blind Date as “urr” (i.e. our) Algernon or whatever.
    There were a lot of delightful clues in this – I particularly liked COMPRESSOR, SASSOON, RETAILER, BACCHANALE, IMPOSTOR, TASSIES and CHELSEA – and the Nina, which I completely missed, is brilliant, though personally I’m not a great fan of Taskmaster.
    But.
    ARRAIGN simply doesn’t work. The homophone is fine, but as several people have pointed out, the grammar is all over the place.
    ESCALLOPED surely refers to the shape, not the breadcrumbs.
    And 29a is too loose – the wordplay offers SLACK and BLANK with at least as much accuracy as BLASÉ. As a result of which I ground to a halt in that corner.
    Almost all of it was good fun, though. Thanks to Sphinx – please don’t wait another six years – and Loonapick.

26. Fairly smooth sailing I thought – WHIRR was good enough for me. Didn’t know that spelling of POLLACK, nor that ELAN = drive, so spent a little while wondering where LANE went. IMPOSTOR was cracking. Shame that ‘playing’ and ‘to play’ were both used as anagrinds, especially in consecutive clues.

    Didn’t & never would have spotted the Nina – but I’m a fan of both Steve Pemberton & Taskmaster, so that’ll be fun… I like to think it’s for some sort of task to ask the TM for points in the most surprising way.

    Thanks Sphinx & loonapick

27. I thought the “with” for SVELTEST was a bit clumsy – loonapick’s “of” in the blog reads much better to me. Maybe I was just disappointed that Putin wasn’t a lift and separate insertion indicator

    But apart from that I thought this was excellent with SASSOON, OPOSSUM, and BACCHANALE among the many ticks

    Cheers L&S

    ps: If you make someone “answer a criminal charge” you ARRAIGN them?

28. I don’t think TWIG=get: ‘twig’ takes no object but ‘get’ requires one (“Eventually she twigged it”[???]). And BLASE=apathetic doesn’t work for me, either.
    If you want to check out the “whirr” for “where” pronunciation, just tune in to Winifred Robinson on BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours — er… is she from Lancashire?

29. Really? Is this crossword all about a TV comedian having his little in joke about his own appearance(s) in TV game shows? Oh, well… hmmm.

30. Looks like it pserve_p2. Hugh must twig to his humour.

31. Bacchanal doesn’t have an E – in Chambers, at least – and the culinary escalope is ‘a boneless slice of meat, cut thin and often beaten out still thinner’. Two misspellings and a misdefinition.

32. BACCHANALE

    Quite refreshing to find a word that’s not in Chambers 🙂

33. paddymelon @ 22, I think that’s just coincidence. It’s far more likely, as Amoeba @ 26 suggests, that there’s some sort of task going on here. the timing is too precise to suggest otherwise.

    (and hello to anyone from r/Taskmaster reading this – you all know the reason why this really shouldn’t be being discussed there *at all* yet)

34. NeilH@25: W(H)ERE = W(H)IRR in Brummie, yes, I can hear it, but not in Lancs surely? (I grew up in the East Midlands & had Lancs grandparents, and those H’s simply don’t exist north of the Watford Gap.)

35. A “minor actor”? Pshaw! From League of Gentleman to Inside No. 9 via Psychoville, Killing Eve, Happy Valley, Whitechapel and many others. The man’s a superstar.

    Can’t wait to see him on Taskmaster – should be a blast.

    Oh, and the crossword? A good deal more polished than the first Sphinx.

36. Scollopax@31: A bacchanale is a piece of music depicting a bacchanal. Escollope and escallope seem to be rare variants (Merriam-Webster has the first, I’m sure the second is to be found somewhere.)

37. I found this hard and could not parse at least nine of the answers, let alone find a NINA or know anything about Taskmaster or Steve Pemberton etc. etc.
    But I finished in the end with only one reveal – CHELSEA. I always forget the use of side as a football team. Ah well, better luck tomorrow. Thanks L and S

38. Hmm…a curate’s egg for me this morning. Several ticks including GHETTOES, CHELSEA, & HEAD, together with a few queries already mentioned.

    Surely BACCHANALE (if it really can be spelled with an E) is a piece depicting boozy scenes rather than the activity itself.

    Can’t imagine ever wanting to say something was the SVELTEST of a group but, hey-ho, its a crossword.

    Many thanks for the excellent blog, loonapick.

39. SinCam@37: You can certainly be forgiven for not making the link side = football team = CHELSEA 😉
    (Villa fan as well as Brummie…)

40. Mixed bag-something different-some okay
    But WHERE in Lancashire has to be MERSEYSIDE or nearabouts to sound like WHIRR-a missed opportunity I reckon.
    Ross for friend was a bit off piste for me
    Rotten clue for OPOSSUM
    Overall quite fun!

41. I agree with Amoeba and AnonymousTaskmasterFan. The nina will be revealed in a future Taskmaster series, the first task of an episode where the contestant has to bring in an object to impress Greg. We could be waiting months to see this.

42. Mitz @ 35

    Steve Viall is the minor actor to whom I was referring as I missed theTasknaster reference, not having ever watched the show.

43. *the Taskmaster

44. pserve.p2: Eventually she twigged! The it inferred.
    WHERE/ WHIRR sounds more Liverpudlian than Lancs generlly tome, but it was my favourite clue, after I eventually swapped PAWS to SWAP. I thought I had it the right way round because bullies ultimately started 8 Even though I was thinking PRESS would go nicely there if it wasn’t for the S, it took me ages to realise it was the wrong way round.
    I also had BACCHANAL sitting there for a while before I got the final lrtter by solving EWER. I had been thiking of elan-=drive earlier , but had forgotten that when bacchanalia occured tome. I think it’ age making me twp.
    I have watched a few Friends episodes but failed to understand why anybody should find it funny. I found Ross the most annoying of the characters , so remembered him.
    We used to cach Pollack when mackerel fishing in the ’60s. We used them to bait lobster pots because nobody wanted them.
    Thanks to both.

45. I’m a fan of Steve Pemberton and a fan of Taskmaster. I think this crossword was genius (pace a few of the rough edges described above).
    Hope you get the 5 points Steve!

46. @Loonapick – My faux outrage clearly wasn’t faux enough!

47. How did I forget to mention ‘Friend’ for Ross – that’s brilliant.

48. I managed to cross with 16 comments while typing, at least one of whch mentioned my Liverpudlian WHERE. Should I apologise?

49. I was trying to parse WHIRR as RR = Red Rose = Lancashire… WH short for where, I for IN, but it felt weak. As a Lancastrian (actual Lancaster itself) I’m not sure of the homophone, but it’s just a bit of fun after all.

50. Re Where, a *pun* on WHIRR, Sphinx/Steve Pemberton is from Lancashire.

51. A premise ridiculous as it is obscure for a puzzle surely.

52. I too found the callop fish swimming in the Murray-Darling, GDU @3, but yes it does have a tail, so escalloped was a bung and shrug.

53. Thanks for the blog, I really liked this although I am struggling to think of anything in the whole wide world that i care less about than Ninas.
    I found the wordplay very neat and imaginative, GHETTOES and SASSOON are good examples. I too was hoping that Putin was Playtex leading to a w insertion , but not to be. Pollack is very similar to cod but far more sustainable , so worth trying.
    For WHIRR I thought of Lancashire traditionly including Liverpool ( plus Bolton Bury etc } so fine for me.

54. [ AlanC@13 , bad luck today, I was Number 1 in the FT so it is now 33-8, we have lost our logarithmic ratio. If you prefer base 32 we could call it 11-8 ? ]

55. As a schoolgirl in Rochdale I changed my name from Sarah to Sally because of the pronunciation of the first syllable to rhyme with whirr; 10 or so miles away in Ashton-under-Lyne, from which we’d moved, it rhymed with where.

    I really wasn’t on Sphinx’s wavelength – found this hard going. I like Steve Pemberton, having seen him in other things, but I’ve never watched Inside No. 9 or Taskmaster, so even if I’d spotted the NINA it would have meant nothing to me regrettably.

56. Thanks catflap on the G for the link to the TV show associated with Sphinx’s 2017 puzzle. BBC iplayer doesn’t reach the antipodes or I’d have watched it (encouraged by Van Winkle warning that the so-called dark comedy was more like jet black 🙂 )

57. I liked this on the whole: Steve/Sphinx isn’t a bad setter. ESCALLOPED is sneaky – everyone (well, me, anyway) looking at the SCALLOP and
    missing the POLLACK swimming backwards. ROSS=friend is either blindingly obvious or totally unknown, depending on whether you’re a watcher or not. I think WHIRR might work on Merseyside: not sure about the rest of Lancashire (which Merseyside isn’t technically in…)

    Missed the Nina completely, of course.

58. EM @49… “I’m not sure of the homophone”. It’s OK, you don’t have to be sure of the homophone, because it’s not a homophone, it’s a pun. Also there is no one Lancashire dialect and I’m sure your “Lancastrian” accent would be different to my “Prestonian” one. I believe there’s a difference in the accent between Preston and blegburn (Blackburn) which are 10 miles apart.

59. Sarah @55, in my granddad’s village, Banks in west lancs, water was warrter; in Hesketh Bank a few miles away it was wehter.

60. [ginf @56 I’ve seen the ‘Inside No 9’ episode Sphinx (on ‘BBC First’ streaming – Fetch, Foxtel etc) in Aus. Either that or get round geo-blocking with a VPN – don’t you love how t’internet has made the world available. Not a bad way of wasting an hour or two and quite inventive at times.]

61. ginf @59, and sometimes in Preston it was watter with a short ‘a’.

62. I have to say I feel a little like SinCam@37 about this puzzle. Quite a lot of unparsed solutions and I didn’t see the Nina (and unfamiliar with that TV show anyway), so even the discussion in the blog is a bit lost on me. That’s okay, I still liked solving it and enjoyed 17d IMPOSTOR in particular. Also nice to see Tassie Tim referenced in 21d. Thanks to Sphinx and loonapick.

63. Great puzzle, very enjoyable, thanks, Sphinx and Loonapick. I probably wouldn’t have noticed the Nina if it hadn’t been pointed out.

    TimC @58 – the basis of the pun is two words sounding alike, ie a homophone. Saying it’s a pun isn’t sufficient to describe how the clue works – there are other types of pun.

64. Utter garbage!

65. Widdersbel @63 Chambers – Pun: “To play on words alike or nearly alike in sound but different in meaning”

    What are the other types? Genuine interest rather than quibble 🙂

66. Strange mix of fairly easy and less straightforward clues. Looks like Sphinx might have set the clues in order because the last Down ones were somewhat trivial.

    Roz @53, you may not care for NINAs but it’s sometimes the reason that setters get out of bed in the morning. There’s a similar reason for themes, which again provide setters with some inspiration to fill an empty grid.

    I thought RESIT was well-hidden, RETAILER had the drug dealer, and IMPOSTOR had interesting wordplay.

    Thanks Sphinx and loonapick.

67. I thought this was refreshing though I think there were three clues that used the device of giving the anagrist and then taking one letter out and that felt like too many.

    I thought SVELTEST was superb. Pretty hard to think those up.

    I would even put in a good word for ARRAIGN: from the judge’s point of view would her answer to receiving a charge from the CPS not be to arraign the relevant individual?

    Mind you these days I’m aware of the dangers of overthinking things especially in the Guardian. I was recently given a collection of puzzles as a birthday present and cheerfully sat down to a Picaroon. Much head scratching later it dawned on me that a considerable number of the clues had been deliberately compiled defectively such that the unclued element of the answer was a British prime minister. In short it was a puzzle that came with special instructions. I dug it out on this website and there they were the special instructions! The Guardian people had just blithely entered the puzzle in their collection completely bald!

68. bodycheetah @65 – many puns are based on multiple meanings of a word rather than the sound, eg: “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.” There are others – Wikipedia lists five different categories of puns, and that may not be exhaustive.

    Anyway, the distinction isn’t really helpful – whether you call this type of clue a pun or a homophone, it still won’t work for some people (because whatever you call it, the wordplay is still based on words sounding alike).

69. I disagree with the grumps. I have never heard of Steve Pemberton, Taskmaster, No. 9, nor Sphinx’ previous appearance, yet I found this a perfectly enjoyable Wednesday puzzle without any of that context, which was not necessary in any way to solve anything and therefore just a nice bonus for those in the know.

70. An earworm for WHIRR rhyming with WHERE and even CARE…
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handle_with_Care_(song)
    …by The Traveling Wilburys – 1988. George Harrison never lost his Scouse accent. And The Big O sings the chorus.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o4s1KVJaVA

71. Originally I had PAWS in 6a, which made 6dn start with S, or “Bullies ultimately.” Check button eliminated PAWS, so it had to be SWAP, and that eventually fixed things.

    I thought a BACCHANALE was drunken revelry, not its musical depiction.

    I liked the lift and separate cleverness of “podcast” in IMPOSTOR. But some of the other clues, such as NICHE or TUBAL (is that a word?), seem annoyingly simple-minded.

    I knew TASSIE from the lovely Scottish song, “The Silver Tassie.” Here’s a link (sorry it’s so long, I’d click on the link button if I could find it) https://www.google.com/search?q=silver+tassie+song+redpath&sca_esv=568775834&hotel_occupancy=2&ei=HhkUZdGpGpWfptQPuuiZgAs&ved=0ahUKEwjRsKLi3sqBAxWVj4kEHTp0BrAQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=silver+tassie+song+redpath&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiGnNpbHZlciB0YXNzaWUgc29uZyByZWRwYXRoMgUQIRigAUjZIFDqBliCFXABeACQAQCYAYsBoAGzB6oBAzAuOLgBA8gBAPgBAcICCBAuGIAEGLADwgIHEAAYHhiwA8ICCxAAGIoFGIYDGLADwgIGEAAYFhgewgIIEAAYigUYhgPCAgUQIRirAsICCBAhGBYYHhgd4gMEGAEgQYgGAZAGBA&sclient=gws-wiz-serp.

    I have to leave without reading all the comments, but will be back to finish them. For now,

    Thanks to Sphinx/Steve and to loonapick.

72. I finished this feeling quite uncertain about ARRAIGN and ESCALLOPED. I have learned over the years that almost always when I think the setter has made a mistake, it is just me not thinking clearly. In these two cases, though, there seems to be a lot of support here for my reaction.

    I missed the Nina, of course, but I really like Amoeba@26’s conjecture. I’m a big fan of Taskmaster, having seen all the UK shows as well as those from NZ and Oz. This could be a very good ploy, depending of course on the exact wording of the challenge.

73. Tim C@58 Isn’t it also the case that a pun based on a poor homophone tends to be a poor pun and elicit a groan? Same difference kind of thing?

74. I enjoyed this, despite missing all the meta-references. My only observation was that I hadn’t heard of Sphinx as a setter, but all is clear now.

    Liked BOWLS, STOVEPIPE, IMPOSTOR.

    As a lapsed Lancastrian my Yorkshire friends say I pronounce WHERE as WHIRR but I’m sure they’re exaggerating 🙂

    Cheers both!

75. Thanks Sphinx and loonapick
    Very mixed bag for me. I had ticks for ANCHOVIES, PRESS GANGS, TWIGS, and, CHELSEA, but I had question marks of various sorts against no less than 12 clues.
    I’ve never seen “ghettos” spelled “ghettoes”, and Google corrects the spelling. SLACK is just as good as BLASE. “Dos” for AFROS? I thought there might be something clever with (f)air, but that would entail double duty. TUBAL seems to be an adjective applied solely to the Fallopian tubes, so cylindrical is very loose. CARVING is ambiguous – CRAVING works as well.

76. ….should that be “no fewer”?

77. What Jacob@69 said. Nice one, Sphinx, and thanks loonapick for the helpful blog.

    All the contentious discussion of the proper definition of homophones and puns could be alleviated by adopting the phrase “aural wordplay”. I leave it to the discussants to argue whether “aural” is a (somewhat naughty) homophone or pun.

78. Thanks Sphinx for a well constructed crossword. I didn’t think to look for a nina and even if I found it the meaning would be lost on me. That, however, did not detract from my enjoyment of this with CARVING, ANCHOVIES, ESCALLOPED, OPOSSUM, BACCHANALE, and IMPOSTOR being among my favourites. I couldn’t parse SASSOON. Thanks loonapick for the blog.

79. [Roz @53: If a theme or nina compromises the quality of the clues then I understand your objections. I don’t think that was the case here. I recall a pangram/nina awhile ago by Julius in the FT where the all the letters of the alphabet went around the perimeter in order and not a single clue was bad. I thought that was simply brilliant.]

80. Help, please end my misery. I still can’t see the Nina, after staring at the grid for too long.

81. [TS @79: Correction: The pangram/nina was in crossword No. 11,449 in the Indy set by Knut, the name Julius uses in that publication.]

82. [Roz @54: I finished this at 0035 and found the dreaded Nina; must be worth half a logarithm, whatever that is].

83. Annie:

    Look at the even numbered columns in the grid. The phrase “Greg please give Steve all five points” appears, one word in each column. The meaning is explained by pavement and Dringerland @10 and 11.

84. muffin @ 75: If CRAVING works, how is the ‘artist returning’?

85. Annie @80: look down every other column and you’ll see each word starting with Greg and then please starting at the top of the next one.

86. Oh dear. I’m lost in awe of you all. I completed a few clues and then nothing for ages and ages, until I finally gave up. This one was not for me 🙁

87. Muffin @76 definitely fewer . Think scientifically, continuous values use less, discrete or quantised values use fewer. The carbon atom has less mass than the oxygen atom , it has fewer protons , neutrons and electrons.

    Tony@79, if you read my post I did not object to the puzzle at all or even the Nina, I simply do not care about Ninas or pangrams or most themes.

88. [ AlanC@82 starting so early is really not cricket. I never start the FT until after my swim and the Guardian is for my journey home after work. I will need to check the rules carefully to see if you need further points deductions.
    The Yesterday channel is currently showing Sounds of the 60s/70s , some great early footage including Cream – Sunshine of your Love. ]

89. Did think that Sphinx was not a setter I was familiar with. Couldn’t believe how stymied I was by having inserted Shorn instead of HORNS at 13d. Thought 22ac rather similar, in that I wasn’t sure at first if Craving or CARVING was what was required. Lots of misdirection, but got there, with loi AFROS…

90. …though wasn’t that impressed with COMPRESSOR being the answer to 1ac, with the word PRESSure in the clueing. Took me a while before I inserted it with a shrug…

91. muffin and Roz, then there are other issues about qualifiers … e.g. for numbers, which are great or small, not high or low …

92. [Roz @87: Of course I read your post. How else could I comment on it? I interpreted your statement “struggling to think of anything in the whole wide world that i care less about than Ninas” as a thinly veiled objection. I apologise if I misread you.]

93. Enjoyed this one and mis-parsed a couple. As possibly already said; WHIRR is hard to pronounce other that as WHERE unless maybe for the Scotch (same as Scots by the way). 60+ years living in Lancashire and WHERE is same as WERE.
    Saw that Greg show once. Ugh!
    Thanks both.

94. [ Tony@92, you do not need to apologise. You are entitled to your views, including your views on my views. I do not object to Ninas, it would be like objecting to gravity, I just refuse to care about them. I think that view should be expressed on here, even from a minority of one]

95. My dad is Lancastrian and I can tell you WHERE/WHIRR works perfectly well. Think Peter Kay, Jane Horrocks, Freddie Flintoff rather than Merseyside.

96. I found this pretty good on the whole. But ARRAIGN doesn’t work. If answer were changed to bring, it would. Apart from that, it’s all fine as far as I can see.
    Not sure why you have a problem with AFRO = do, muffin. Short for hair-do, or as they say in Lancashire, Urdu 😉 .
    Thanks, Sphinx and loonapick (and good luck to the former!)

97. Harder than the Times puzzle today. I didn’t parse Sassoon because I’m not a Yank.

98. phitonelly @98
    Is “do” really used as short for “hair-do”? I’ve never heard it, though I haven’t heard “hair-do” very often, either!

99. I wonder whether there isn’t another (perhaps deliberately misspelled) Taskmaster reference at 13d – Alex Horne also being a presenter.

    Or perhaps I am overthinking.

100. muffin @100,
     e.g. Wiktionary:
     do (noun) – (informal) Clipping of hairdo.
     I’ve seen it used in puzzles in this sense before now. I’m pretty familiar with it, but the abbreviation may be regional perhaps?

101. I enjoyed this and like yesterday’s Qaos, solved both faster than Vulcan’s Monday Cryptic and the Quiptic.

     Interesting number of comments mentioning dissatisfaction with various solutions, but as an observation, we often have a lot of questioning of cluing from someone new or rarely seen who uses different ways of indicating clues from the regular setters and that querying settles down as we all get used to that new setter.

     Also hats off to Sphinx getting the Ninas in: having set puzzles before for Christmas fun, I’ve just set a puzzle (for geocaching) that hid a lot of numbers in a specific order and found it much harder. It’s not that easy to do.

     Thank you to Sphinx and loonapick.

102. muffin @100: Hairdo is fairly common in the US, “do”, not so much. I have heard hairstyles like the bouffant called “up-do’s” before. Don’t be shocked if you see a clue like “bouffant skyward on nameless Oxford professor (2-2)

103. Thank you both. I’d NEVER have spotted it.

104. Hermano @96: there is no need to be offended by the “dodgy” since it was used to make the anagram of “goes t[o] the”, not for the definition of GHETTOES, just as Loonapick pointed out in the blog.

105. ‘Trace of sewage’, ‘slice of cucumber’, ‘girl’, ‘her’ – max. one of those per crossword please. And preferably not in the same one as a ‘note’. Sorry, feeling grumpy.

106. [Roz @88: I’d rather you didn’t mention my least favourite sport. Bizarrely, I was talking to an old timer in my swimming pool yesterday about music and he mentioned that he played in the same band at school as Ginger Baker].

107. I’m delighted to see Sphinx resurrected: I thought that, like the original (put paid to when Oedipus guessed its riddle), he’d gone for good.

     Not at all easy with some very obscure words and GK – like others I couldn’t parse the ROSS part of COMPRESSOR, SASS in SASSOON, or MUSS in OPOSSUM. I hadn’t heard of TUBAL (sounds like it might be a Shakespearian character) but at least TASSIES rang a bell – vaguely.

     CARVING was very good, I like these unusual wordplays. And HEAD – simple wordplay – the surface evokes images of Jean Valjean (although at least he lived on after his misdeed…) I wondered if there was a theme around Les Mis, but evidently not.

     Didn’t spot the nina and wouldn’t have understood it if I had. I seem to recall, in Sphinx’s first offering, there was an unusual diagonal nina pertinent to the theme.

     Thanks to Sphinx (hope to see you as a regular) and loonapick.

108. Roz@95
     You’re not alone in not caring about Ninas, though I might be mildly chuffed were I ever to spot one.

109. Am I the only one bothered that the clue for AFROS requires misspelling SOL, the fifth note of the scale? And unnecessarily, too, since the clue could just as easily said “Returning staccato note” or “short note” or “interrupted note” or some such. I had WHIRL for 7 for a long time, since I knew 14 had to end -LOS…

110. DavidT@107 : I have no idea what might connect the words you list for them to be limited.
     “Hair-do” very commonly said all my life.
     BTW does anyone else only see last 2 digits of the number of the post?

111. Widdersbel @63, bodycheetah @65, Nick @73, sorry for not replying sooner. I’d gone to bed. I think there is a difference between ‘homophone’ (C2016 – ‘a word that is pronounced the same as another…’) and ‘pun’ (as bodycheetah quotes ‘To play on words alike or nearly alike in sound but different in meaning’). There is a difference between “same” and “alike or nearly alike”. Yes, puns can be homophones, but that’s not necessarily the case. So there is I believe a distinction and the use of “pun” (as argued by Rob T in other threads) may put an end to the endless “but I don’t pronounce it like that” stuff, the response being “it doesn’t matter, it’s a pun and therefore doesn’t have to sound exactly the same”.
     I think that there’s good reasons why (as Rob T has also pointed out) Ximenes called these sorts of clues puns.

     Nick, I think one of the attributes of a good pun is that it should elicit a groan! 🙂 (“Lets search for some classical composers and play Haydn seek”… oh but I don’t pronounce…….argh)

     Cellomaniac @77, I prefer pun as it’s less of a mouthful than aural wordplay, although aural wordplay is a great description. I’m not one for prolixity, despite this post.

112. TimC@113, your comment is good, but it actually makes my case for aural wordplay. It is precisely because homophones and puns can be different things, and the differences generate so much silly but heated argument, that aural wordplay, which encompasses both, is the term that we should use to eliminate all such arguments.

     The other reason I like the term aural wordplay is that it is in itself a form of aural wordplay, which is kind of self-reverentially amusing.

113. A caveat to the aural/oral wordplay debate is that, except for RP speakers (unless otherwise indicated) or Chambers users, there is a sliding scale of divergence in different dialects of English, and sometimes the variation comes to a tipping point where a reader/speaker just can’t ”hear” it because of their first language. Also highly literate people, as no doubt are many Guardian readers , are not necessarily as keenly attuned to phonology as they are to orthography.

     I don’t mind people saying, ”I don’t say it like that”. I don’t necessarily see that as denying the plausibility of the clue. It may be an affirmation of their own dialect, and an exhortation to the rest of us to remember that there are others, or just a bit of fun. They have the right to express this. I always enjoy the contributions and often learn something interesting, even if sometimes, as a trained linguist, competent in articulatory and auditory phonetics, I may disagree, or not hear what others say/hear. That’s one of the things I enjoy about the global fifteen squared community, and this place to happily and politely say what’s on your mind.

     As Cellomaniac has alluded to, even the words aural and oral, as in of hearing and speech, have several different pronunciations, and the word aural as in of an aura, different again.

     Hopefully, this will be seen as me saying “My! Peace!” 🙂

114. And finally, many Guardian solvers may be able to switch between dialects , either consciously or unconsciously. Please let everyone have a voice. 🙂

115. The Nina completely escaped me, of course. A few too many regionalisms for me to parse this fully; I reckon I might have done better with the classical riddles of the Sphinx. Thanks to loonapick for the explanations; hopefully it won’t be another 6 years before we see this setter again.

116. A good cop-out for setters using homophones is for them to use an indicator such as ‘some say’. Then there’s no argument, so long as some people somewhere do indeed say the word in the way described.

     Hmm yes I think BIRD is pronounced BOARD in Newcastle, but only by some of the people there. People like Biffa Bacon. So that’s an option for me.

117. I’m from Wigan, which was in Lancashire when I was born, and I pronounce whirr and where the same.

118. I’m always apprehensive when tackling a puzzle by a “new” setter, in case I can’t get on his/her wavelength. Despite my doubts (which persisted for quite a while), I managed to complete it and understand all the wordplay (except POLLAC). I got the WHERE/WHIRR aural wordplay when thinking of David Lloyd’s commenting on cricket. Thanks, Sphinx (even if I’ve never heard of you!)

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