Guardian Cryptic 29,485 by Philistine

91 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29,485 by Philistine”

1. I agree. At Philistine’s “easier end” ….. But definitely a cracker. Unlike yourself, MARK ANTONY was parsed, and entered first so that MUDDY THE WATERS followed next… At that point it was clear that a fun solve beckoned…
   My only complaint is the same as loonapick, yet I fear repeating it lest others complain at my honest criticism
   And I too appreciate the odd SPOT clue type…
   Philistine always delivers
   Many thanks

2. (in all the years I’ve commented here, I’ve never been first before!)

3. Loonapick. Thanks for your blog, and totally agree with your preamble. Missed kant in MARK ANTONY. Thanks for that.
   I would imagine that HACK-AND-SLASH is a bit of black humour amongst surgeons, as is Philistine. Without working out the wordplay properly, and having got the def at the wrong end, I was wondering what items on the menu in hotels were hack and slash. Sputum and wee? Yuk!! (might not translate but it works in Ozlingo)
   I did S-POT the S-pan.

4. Thanks Loonapick. I parsed 2d slightly differently: all in French, says (“DIT”) about the (“LE”) plus aunt “TANTE”.

5. I had 2d as (all in French) Dit (says) about le (the) tante. But now see it doesn’t work because of the quote marks

6. One of the most approachable Philistines I can recall doing with very little requiring a second look: MARK ANTONY down the West together with MUDDY THE WATERS and the little corner in the NE. I was beaten by SPOT, though. ASTIGMATISM, MISDIRECTED, MELODEON, DILETTANTE, YOUNG and ASSORTMENT were my faves.

   I parsed DILETTANTE differently – I had DIT = ‘says’ around LE followed by TANTE, all In French. Probably my COTD.

   Thanks Philistine and loonapick

7. Thanks Philistine and loonapick
   Yes, a quick solve until staring at 24a and 23d for ages. Should have got PAPERS more quickly, but didn’t understand SPOT until I read the preamble here.
   I worked out 4d from the fodder, but had no idea what it referred to.
   Favourite MARK ANTONY.

8. I agree with cryptor @4, otherwise if we’re starting to have homopunophones in French, then I’m out of here. Thanks to Philistine and Loonapick

9. It would appear that I have parsed DILETTANTE incorrectly – I won’t have a chance to update the blog for a while though.

10. Agree with cryptor@4 and PostMark@6 about the parsing of DILETTANTE. Brilliant! Wonderful misdirection with ”says”. I had a protest ready until I saw it wasn’t aural wordplay.

11. I really enjoyed this – favourite clue the nutshells, and also had trouble with maron. Didn’t get the spice girls one so ended up revealing but got everything else out. Re hack and slash, it refers specifically to games involving combat with close up weapons such as swords, daggers etc., often in a historical or fantasy type setting. A video game with guns is sometimes called a shooter. Despite my somewhat advanced age I spend quite a lot of time playing video games – I find them more entertaining than tv. Thanks Philistine and Loonapick.

12. I’m glad cryptor et al have come up with a better parsing for DILETTANTE as I was struggling to make the pun work. I wás grateful for the nudge in the wordplay for MARK ANTONY.

13. Didn’t SPOT the S-pan but a lot to like here. Favourites were MUDDY THE WATERS, LITTLE BY LITTLE and ALTIMETER which is one of those clues that come to a setter very rarely.

    pdm @3, I have a feeling (given my bilingual background 😉 ) that sputum and wee’s equivalence to hack and slash is not necessarily just Ozlingo.

14. Favourites: DILETTANTE, MUDDY THE WATERS, MARK ANTONY.

    New for me: MELODEON; HACK AND SLASH video games.

    I needed some help from google for GK for the names of the Spice Girls (for 25ac) and the video games in 4d.

    I could not parse 23ac – I was stuck wondering why SPOT = span.

    I parsed 2d in the same way as cryptor@4 and PostMark@6 – LE in DIT = in French, says (dit) about the (le) + TANTE = aunt. Great clue!

    Thanks, both.

15. New here and a beginner. This was about my level. Which other cryptics (not Quick or Quiptyic) are similar difficulty or slightly above? I’m just trying them all blindly. Find this site useful for the few I can’t fully parse.

16. Enjoyed this but thought 18 was very hard (eventually got there after running through energy companies…). I had loonapick’s original parsing for DILETTANTE, but agree the other one is possibly better. The wordplay device for SPOT I’ve not seen before but did eventually click and I think it’s fine (much fairer than one-word lift&separate definitions I think)

17. noblejoble@15
    If you are doing the puzzles online, you can access the archive of Everyman puzzles. I would recommend going back to 2014 or so when they were more beginner-friendly.
    This link gets you to one of them:
    https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/everyman/3539
    after that just change the number at the end to work back through the puzzles
    https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/everyman/3538
    https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/everyman/3537
    https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/everyman/3536
    etc

    And you will also be able to access the blogs for those puzzles at fifteensquared.

18. The trouble with all the “completely in French” parsings of DILETTANTE is that being female, she should be LA rather than LE TANTE. I can’t talk: I couldn’t parse it at all. I think it’s supposed to be a sound alike, which doesn’t sound alike to me.

    I suppose LE=the in French even if the result is painfully ungrammatical – perhaps PostMark is right after all.

19. gladys@18
    I get what you are saying but I also think that with the DILETTANTE clue, each word/component is taken separately (DIT, LE, TANTE) and the setter did not intend to create a grammatically correct French phrase.
    It never occurred to me that it was a soundalike clue of ‘de la tante’ = about the aunt, in French – in which case it is way off!

20. I can’t decide which parsing for 2d is more likely. The homophone is very approximate and there is too much French in the other parsing, even if it is very basic French.
    I was fortunate with 25, since I actually play one, so once I saw odeon, it was obvious. For most it would be relatively obscure. It is a variety of accordion that is usually the mainstay of the music for Morris sides.

21. Came here because, for the life of me, I couldn’t work how ‘span’ meant SPOT in 23D. Thanks for the explanation, which made me smile.

22. Nice puzzle.

    Please could someone explain the span/spot solution? I can’t see it at all and the Playtex reference is of no help to me!

23. ravenrider@20
    so far both versions of the parsing are all French, so I don’t see why you say that one version has “too much French” compared to the other 😉
    I think it is fair as a clue either way even though I am not keen on the soundalike version.
    We often have foreign language articles in clues/solutions (un, der, das, la, le, el, il and so on). TANTE has been used before – I seem to remember it appeared as an answer recently. DIT might be a bit harder for non-French speakers but it is still basic French. Which means that most solvers probably could have parsed 2/3 components of the answer.
    Tbh I solved the clue from the crossers and parsed it afterwards.

    Shoogled@23
    S = small + Pan = pot -> SPOT = location
    I think this type of clue is called ‘lift and separate’

24. Shoogled@23
    Sorry, I did not explain 23d SPOT = SPAN very well in my post above.
    In the clue, don’t think of it as the word SPAN, think of it as S + PAN which can then lead to S + POT because POT is a synonym of PAN, regardless of whether it is small and the definition is location.

25. shoogled @22 I think Playtex is shorthand for “lift and separate” i.e. separate the single word span to s and pan.

26. Ravenrider @20 – there are few folk lovers here, I can’t play the MELODEON, but I can name a number of players and loved John Spiers during lockdown.

    noblejoble @15 – I’ll take my answer to General Chat here.

    Lovely Philistine, one of my favourite setters, who didn’t disappoint. And yay, it’s double Philistine day ( he sets as Goliath in the FT). I parsed DILETTANTE all in French too.

    Thank you to loonapick and Philistine

27. Surprisingly quick, fully parsed solve last night with only HACK AND SLASH new. Elegantly clued with MUDDY THE WATERS and MARK ANTONY going straight in, remaining my favourites throughout. Parsed DILETTANTE as others above.

    Ta Philistine & loonapick.

28. DILETTANTE: I parsed this as loonapick did. The alternative proposed by cryptor@4 and Postmark@6 doesn’t work for me because ‘le tante’ is grammatically incorrect. It’s ’La Tante’, feminine. At least by treating it all as a homophone with the indicator ‘says’, the setter can almost get away with an approximate le/la sound. I didn’t like the clue because of this confusion. I see gladys@18 has raised the same problem.
    However, I loved the rest of the puzzle. Favourite was MUDDY THE WATERS.
    I also liked MARK ANTONY, YOUNG, EVEN SONG, ASTIGMATISM, NUTSHELLS.
    I couldn’t parse SPOT.
    HACK AND SLASH was new and I appreciate the black humour.
    Lovely puzzle and blog. Thanks Philistine and loonapick.

29. Even with all crossers, needed help for loi melodeon … just braindim (and dnk the Spice Girls’ names; my nieces, now in their 30s, were into them as kids). Otherwise, yes, a cruise from the Phil, ta him and Loona.

30. I did like le French homophone. If you say it quick, I suppose the first e in dilletante becomes a schwa and could sneak through malgré being the wrong gender. Whatev, it was fun anyway.

31. Re – 7, 8 (evensong)
    These clues where one word is split across two separate spaces always make me a bit
    uneasy, because I don’t quite get it… are we just to imagine the setter couldn’t make
    a clue which e.g. in this case would have enumerated to (4,4) rather than (8)?
    What’s the official line on this?

32. Good fun from Philistine.

    I’m firmly with the DI(LE)T-TANTE set. The complaint that it is ungrammatical is specious – it is simply a charade using three French words. Since when did all the words in a charade have to have the same grammatical function in the wordplay as in the surface? Great clue.

    Thanks to S&B

33. Yes, very enjoyable fare.

    I don’t think there is any problem with LE TANTE; as Cryptor @4 said it’s DIT around LE, and then TANTE, so no need to read it as LE TANTE (I see Gervase @32 has said something similar while I was typing). I liked the wordplays of MUDDY THE WATERS, LITTLE BY LITTLE, ASSORTMENT and OPAL. The TRACE was well-hidden, and good anagrams for MISDIRECTED and HACK-AND-SLASH.

    MJ @31; it’s considered to be quite OK to split an answer into two entries as long as each part is a word in its own right.

    Thanks Philistine and loonapick (especially for SPOTting S PAN)

34. MJ @31: I don’t know whether this device is permitted by all publishers of cryptics, but in the Guardian at least it is considered permissible provided that both parts of the solution are valid words in their own right

35. Another quality puzzle from this setter, with (as usual) some wit here and there to go with the evident skill. LITTLE-BY-LITTLE was my first in, and I moved upwards from there. I had to work harder to get MARK ANTONY because I just could not think of KANT for a while. ‘Hiddens’ are a particular weakness of mine, and TRACE was, deservedly, my last in. I saw DILETTANTE, rightly or wrongly, the way PostMark (@6) and others did.

    Thanks to setter and blogger.

36. MJ@31: Philistine has a bit of a habit of using this trick – to his credit he always makes sure the word splits into two perfectly valid 4 letter entries. I think it is something he enjoys as further word play, in the same way that others include a theme. However, I do think these clues work best when the wordplay splits across the two words (e.g. cluing it as “evens” + “ong”) as that ties the whole together more in my mind.

    Re “dilettante” – I am with Michelle @19. I think there is good precedent in that clues often contain “article” or “one” which becomes “a” or “an” without regard to whether the following word agrees with it grammatically (e.g. “One getting fit in Irish town” would be “an” + “trim”)

37. A slower solve for me than others are reporting, but all good. Loved 1,5: took a few crossers to get it and kicked myself when I did. STREWN was also a favourite when the penny dropped as to the parsing. NUTSHELLS a highlight too. Overall a puzzle which was gentle enough to be solvable, and challenging enough to stretch me a bit, which makes it a good one in my book.

38. Thanks for people’s thoughts on my query about split answers, I can stop worrying
    about it now 🙂

    Great puzzle today

39. Very slow start but speeded up very satisfactorily. My only quibble is that musician is just too vague especially for long dead ones.
    Thanks both.

40. Michelle@19 and others re DILETTANTE. Fair enough, I concede, the article doesn’t necessarily need to relate to the noun. (I just cringed when I saw it.)

41. It’s like birthday and Christmas in one, with Goliath in the FT (slightly chewier than this one but still not too difficult – and lots of fun).

    I’m firmly with michelle @19 and Gervase @32 et al re DILETTANTE.

    Re splitting words over two entries: it seems to me that it’s only fairly recently that this has raised objections. It’s been a feature of crosswords as long as I’ve been doing them and perfectly acceptable, so long as both parts are real words. In fact, I’ve always thought it was rather clever.

    My favourites today were MUDDY THE WATERS, ASTIGMATISM< MELODEON, MARK ANTONY, DILETTANTE and EPHEMERAL.

    Many thanks to Philistine and loonapick.

42. I agree with crypto@4 re the parsing of dilettante.

    Mike@5 – I believe you can ignore all punctuation in cryptic clues.

    SueM48@28 – Taking each word separately, ‘the’ in French could be any of ‘le’, ‘la’ or ‘les’. Here it’s ‘le’.

    ‘De la tante’ doesn’t sound anything like dilettante. Besides, ‘de la tante’ means ‘of the aunt’ not ‘about the aunt’, which would be ‘au sujet de la tante’ or somesuch.

43. Whenever I see Philistine’s name appear alongside a Guardian Cryptic I find myself smiling and muttering “Ah, good…” to myself. However tricky or straightforward it turns out to be. MUDDY THE WATERS the pick for me today, loi was RELAUNCH. This gave me so much pleasure. Nothing further to say…

44. Alistair@39
    Muddy Waters is long dead and possibly not that well known nowadays. The only thing I know about him is that he wrote a song called ‘Rollin’ Stone’, which a certain Mick Jagger (a much better known musician today) used as the name for his new group.

45. Thanks for the blog , great set of clues and I always like multiple entries in clue order.
    RELAUNCH and STREWN set the tone with neat addition and subtraction.
    I thought HACK-AND-SLASH was just the AlanC version of golf.
    I was suspicious throughout but had to wait until the very end for the Playtex clue .

46. [Roz @45: I’ll think of you when I’m doing that very thing at Richmond GC tomorrow morning 😉 ]

47. Andy in Durham@44: I think you will find it was Brian Jones who named the group. I loved MUDDY THE WATERS – I could see how it worked but it took me a little while to think of the (very famous) musician in question. And with MELODEON, I wanted to enter MELATRON at first, but it wouldn’t parse (and anyway, it’s Mellotron). All in all, a lovely solve – thanks, Philistine and loonapick.

48. I went with the DE LA TANTE homophone, but then I have never studied French, and DIT therefore didn’t occur to me.

    I object in general to clues that assume the solver is conversant in French, but this one, I admit, was fairly basic. [Similar things have happened over here. The word TIA has long been a staple of American-style crosswords (there’s a need for as many three letter words as possible–thus ETE and EAU from French also often figure). Used to be that TIA was usually clued as “___ Maria (liqueur)”, which requires knowledge of mixology but no knowledge of Spanish. Recently, though, I’ve seen clues like “Hermana de la madre,” which to me is pushing it a bit, even though (again) that’s pretty basic Spanish. But enough about aunts for one day.]

49. Another fine crossword and a blues singer as well… Good stuff. Thanks Phil for smiles and loon for a careful blog.

50. I must be the only person who still pronounces DILETTANTE the ‘correct’ way, ie. as Italian, with the final e sounded. Nothing like ‘de la tante’!

51. LOI was 4.
    As I am aged > 12, I can relate far more to AlanC definition than that of Philistine.

    Many thanks all.

52. Conrad@50: You are not alone; and I think Americans still pronounce it the “correct” way (?) A good puzzle, though as others have said: it was on the easy side for Philistine.

53. BigC @51: I’m of an age to have grown up playing video games, and I turn 50 next month.

54. nuntius @52: I have never heard the word pronounced as in Italian, and the online Merriam-Webster (the go-to American dictionary, as quoted below) does not even give it as an option:

    dilettante
    noun
    dil·​et·​tante ˈdi-lə-ˌtänt -ˌtant; ˌdi-lə-ˈtänt, -ˈtant

    Admittedly, America is a land with many dialects, and I’m not familiar with all of them. (I’m a Midwesterner with strong mid-Atlantic influences.)

55. Conrad, nuntius, mrpenney et al: I’m another who pronounces DILLETTANTE with four syllables (though not quite as Italian when speaking English 🙂 ). Wiktionary gives the only British pronunciation with four syllables and the American one with usually only three

56. An excellent puzzle with lots of delightful surfaces.

    I originally parsed 2D as a would-be homophone, and was very unhappy with it as it’s not remotely close in my pronunciation, not even for crosswordland’s tolerances. (Of course, that may say something about my peculiar dialect of English.) Anyway, I am much happier with the revised parsing, and annoyed at myself for not spotting it.

57. Still don’t think laterally enough, spent ages over BRAZIL COVERAGE, convinced it must relate to the country, I wondered if it referred to a name for an Amazon rainforest or something! Philistine 1 Hoofit 0
    Had to reveal DILLETANTE too, I had heard of the word but had no idea what it meant. Philistine 2 Hoofit 0, final score…
    Lesson learnt, on to tomorrow, thanks both.

58. Conrad @50: Conversely, I am one of the few who pronounces forte “correctly”, i.e. like “fort”. Common English pronunciation seems to imply that the French source ended in é, which it did not.

59. Jacob @58: The ‘correct’ pronunciation depends on the meaning. ‘Forte’ meaning one’s particular strength or speciality comes from French and ‘should’ be pronounced ‘fort’. As a musical direction it is Italian and therefore ‘forté’. But the latter has generally won out.

60. Wossgoinon? A lovely puzzle but shouldn’t it have been the Sunday Quiptic?

    Thanks to Philistine and Loonapick.

61. Well, I also pronounce “forte” as “fort” when it means “strong point” or the like, but now come to think of it, why is that meaning of it spelled with an e? Wouldn’t it just be fort? I don’t think “forte” means “strength” in French. Maybe it does, I dunno.

    Thanks for the puzzle, Philistine and loonapick..

62. Loved every minute! Too late at night here in Australia to add anything to the discussion, but just to say that I found this such an enjoyable puzzle. I’d like to offer my thanks to Philistine for such a treat and to loonapick for the blog.

63. mrpenney@54: I’ve just checked dictionary.com (a US site) and that has it with four syllables. In any event, I was aware that most/many people pronounce it as suggested by the clue. PS I was watching an economics prog on YouTube a few days back and hyperbole was prounced as “hyper-bowl” (!) I doubt many other people pronounce it like that, but would be interested to know.

64. Conrad @50: you’re not the only one. Indeed, I’ve not heard it pronounced as anything other than ‘dilettan-te’.
    Gervase @59: well, blow me down. I was unaware of that.

65. I enjoyed that and found it a little easier than usual Philistine puzzles. Not that I’m complaining – first read of the clues yielded very little and I had to start from the bottom up. I’d also parsed DI(LE)T TANTE as others have mentioned. Really liked NUTSHELLS, ASTIGMATISM and EPHEMERAL. All great clues.

    Gervase@59 if your strength is that you own a hotel group, then would that be your forté? 😉

66. [Further to the pronunciation of ‘forte’, I have checked it in my big Italian dictionary (Zingarelli – not a bilingual one). As a noun, it can mean ‘personal speciality’ also in Italian, where it is pronounced with two syllables, of course. So those of us who utter it in this way (and I count myself here) can adduce this in justification 🙂 ]

67. [AlanC@46 , instead of spoiling a good walk you could just put the little white balls in your pockets and put them in the holes as you walk past . No need to hit them with sticks or even carry the sticks with you . ]

68. @Gervase, another pseudo-Gallicism is ‘rationale’ which, if the OED is to be believed, used to be pronounced ray-shun-AIL-ee…. However I feel that sticking to that now would be a pedantic step too far.

69. In clue 2 it’s obvious that Philistine means a word that sounds like “de la tante” in French, otherwise “about the aunt” would not be in inverted commas. For the other explanation “says” would have to be included in the inverted commas.
    My Chambers dictionary says that “forte” pronounced “fort” is now only used to mean the upper part of a sword. For the meaning of “the thing in which one excels” it is now pronounced the same as the Italian musical term “forte” meaning loud.

70. DM @ 69 First rule of crossword solving: ignore all punctuation.

71. Thanks Philistine. I found this on the gentle end of the Philistine spectrum. Easy can be very good, however, and I had many favourites including STREWN, ASTIGMATISM, EVENSONG, DEPENDENCE, E COLI, and OPAL. (As Eileen @41 recommended, check out Goliath in today’s FT — a bit more challenging but still user-friendly.) I parsed DILETTANTE as three French words; I often wonder about the fairness of using foreign words beyond articles and conjunctions but my guess is that most cryptic fans know enough French and Latin to get by. I failed to parse the clever SPOT; thanks loonapick for the blog.

72. Shanne@26 and Eileen@41, Yay indeed. Philistine and Goliath on the same day is like a double-scoop ice cream cone. Is it grammatical to say that he is my two favourite setter? 😉

    Roz@45, I know you were just ribbing AlanC’s golf game, but I actually parsed 4d HACK AND SLASH that way, not being a video gamer (and long ago being an occasional H&S golfer).

73. [Roz @67: have you been taking golfing tips from a certain ex-President?]

74. Michelle @ 17
    Thanks for 2014 everyman suggestion. Will follow your advice although finding the last week’s various cryptics and prize largely do-able too. Although sometimes slow or stumped.

75. Cellomaniac@72 I genuinely thought it referred to golf and I did wonder if it should be hack-and-slice , the AlanC connection was a gift too good to turn down. I would never have thought of video games.
    MrPostMark @73 , I think the ex-POTUS does hit the ball with the sticks but he is not very good at counting.

76. Nice to see Mr Morganfield’s appearance at 1ac. One of the many great departed musicians I saw at the 1979 Ally Pally Jazz Festival.

77. Fine puzzle. ALTIMETER with its extended definition is a peach.
    Have to agree with Tilloubill@60 though – not overly challenging. Hoping for an Enigmatist or a full strength Vlad sometime soon.
    Thanks, Phil and loonapick.

78. My wife was looking over my shoulder as I was solving this morning. When I said “That looks like HACK AND SLASH, but I’ve no idea what game that is”, she said “golf, surely?”.

79. A dilettante whose forte is the pianoforte. How many syllables?

80. I pronounce the final E on all of these, but my Italian is much more recent than my French.

81. The forte (one syllable) of the sword is the reinforced upper part where one catches one’s opponent’s sword in a parry, giving it the connotation of capability in adversity.

    The lower half of the sword is, of course, the foible.

82. How about furore?

83. … curare?

    Our French teacher had us practising the acute via
    Le bébé a tué un éléphant avec son épée

84. shanne@26 – John Spiers was in the much missed Bellowheads, with John Boden amongst many other musically brilliant lunatics. Saw them a couple of times at the old Towersey Festival – the crowd broke the dance floor one year jumping to their music.

85. I really enjoyed all the bipartisan support for the semi-homophone vs. 3 French words explanations (with my dual nationality I plumped for DI-LE-T-TANTE) but with all the argy-bargy about whether the answer is pronounced with 3 or 4 syllables it just occurred to me that there’s a third explanation: DI-LE-T and a homophone of AUNTIE.
    Seriously though, I’m off to youtube to watch the amazing earworm built from the fodder of 1,5 and the 22s

86. [I see that quite a number of commenters below the blog have not caught on to the very good habit of enclosing anything that doesn’t relate to a particular clue or solution in square brackets. This helps anyone who is catching up, so that they don’t have to read about musicians who are not MUDDY WATERS, for example, unless they want to.]

    So, for example, if my comment is about how I parsed DILETTANTE in the way that Loonapick has acknowledged @9 must be correct, as a pun would not work, I would not put square brackets around.

    [However, if I want to pick up on what Gervase wrote @59 abvout the pronounciation of “forte”, it is helpful to others who are not interested to use square brackets. I agree that Chambers identifies the word as coming from the French, but it looks to me like it must have been an adjective applied to a female sword, or a part of a sword that takes feminine endings. Through lengthy use the adjective became a noun, I guess, or the sword part was dropped, and then the E became pronounced, even though it has no accent. The noun “fort” in French – meaning strong point both as a military position and as a personal strength – has no E on the end. ]

    Thanks to Philistine and Loonapick.

87. [Me @ 85. As Myles na gCopaleen once wrote “Do you want jam on it?”]

88. Thanks for reminding me, sheffield hatter @86. I’ve added the square brackets…

89. [Blaise@88. Thanks for reading and taking action. I doubt that anyone else will be back today.]

90. [sheffield hatter@89: I’m here! having snoozed off over it after a hard day’s, er, philosophizing in the US but no offense to Philistine] as this was an excellent puzzle! Parsed DILETTANTE as a non-homophone for my FOI–the quotation marks were for only the surface I thought. For what it’s worth as an American I don’t think I’ve ever heard it with four syllables. That and EVENSONG were my clues of the day.

    [I play videogames a bit more than many 50-year-olds but “hack and slash” applied to games seems to be around forty years old so I think it’s fair game. The oldest occurrence I can find in English was a horrid anti-Catholic poem from 1678 where it was meant most literally.]

91. [Wolf@84 Bellowhead are touring this autumn, sadly minus Paul Sartin, not at festivals, I’ve seen them a few times too. And Spiers and Boden were at various festivals this summer as a duo. Plus John Spiers is now part of Gigspanner, a duo with Peter Knight and a duo with Jackie Oates, all worth seeing. It was the last Towersey this year ]

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