Quick Cryptic 46 by Carpathian

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This week’s Guardian Quick Cryptic, an 11 x 11 crossword designed to teach cryptic crosswords, which can be found here

Carpathian sets this week’s Quick Cryptic, one of the two setters who has compiled most of the puzzles in this series, often seen as a Quiptic setter for the Guardian. Today we see anagrams with all the letters present, plus charades, reversals and insertions, which require the solver to work out the word to manipulate, so can be less accessible, all of which we’ve seen many tiimes before.

The whole point of these crosswords is support and encouragement of new solvers, so special rules for these crosswords apply – see here – those rules include not posting solving times.

Following a number of comments we now hide the answers and the wordplay descriptions too.   To find that hidden information, click on “Details” and it will pop up, or you can choose to reveal everything using the “Expand All” button.  The definition is in bold and underlined, the indicator is in red.

There is a summary of the tricks used in the first six months here and a Guardian Crossword blog called the ultimate beginner’s guide has tips which may be useful for some solvers.

Fifteen Squared uses several abbreviations and jargon tricks, there’s a full list here, of which I’ve used the following in this blog:

  • underlining the definition in the clue – this is either at the beginning or end of the clue
  • indicators are in red – adding later and some of these are split.
  • CAPITALS to indicate which bits are part of the answer, e.g. some haVE ALtered meat, Get A Good,
  • anagram *(SENATOR) shows letters in clue being used, see clue below – in this crossword, there is a subtraction of one of the letters before it is rearranged.
  • anagrind the anagram indicator (arranged)
  • charades – the description below only gives the example of words being added together, but charades can be more complicated, adding abbreviations or single letters to another word.  Examples previously used in this series are: Son ridicules loose overgarments (6) S (son) + MOCKS (ridicules), Get rid of dead pine (5) D(dead) + ITCH (pine) – D ITCH, and early on DR (doctor) + IVE (I have) to give DRIVE .
  • reversals are indicated with a < symbol so DOG< becomes GOD.
  • CAD or clue as definition– where the whole clue gives the definition, sometimes called an &lit.
  • DBE or defintion by example – e.g. where a dog might be clued as a setter – often using a question mark, maybe, possibly or e.g. to show that this is an example rather than a definition.
  • surface – the meaning from reading the clue – so often cryptic clues use an English that could only be found in a cryptic crossword, but a smooth surface is a clue that has a meaning in English, which can be pointed or misleading.

TODAY’S TRICKS – from the crossword site – which can be found at here – because the clues have moved on from the clue descriptions below, I am now adding more to the descriptions above.

Clues begin or end with a definition of the answer. The rest is one of these:

  1. Anagram An anagram of the answer and a hint that there’s an anagram
    ‘Senator arranged crime (7)’ gives TREASON
  2. Charade A combination of synonyms
    ‘Qualify to get drink for ID (8)’ gives PASSPORT (pass + port)
  3. Double definition Both halves are definitions!
    ‘Search scrub (5)’ gives SCOUR
  4. Reversal The answer backwards, and a hint that we’re reversing
    ‘Deity’s pet coming back (3)’ gives GOD
  5. Insertion One thing inside another makes the answer
    ‘In favour of republican entering Post Office (3)’ gives PRO

ACROSS
 Click on “details” to see the solutions
1
Ill-fated actors dress badly (4-7)
STAR-CROSSED
anagram of (ACTORS DRESSED)* with anagrind of “badly” with a reference to Romeo and Juliet from the prologue of the Shakespearean play: “A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;”
7
Further delayed alert broadcast (5)
LATER
anagram of (ALERT)* with anagrind of “broadcast” as in scattered (for seed)
8
Regarding top summary (5)
RECAP
charade of RE (regarding) + CAP (top)
9
Notices involving public relations binges (6)
SPREES
insertion (involving) SEES (notices) around (involving) PR (public relations) to give S PR EES
11
Domesticated animals walk backwards (4)
PETS
reversal of (backwards) STEP < (walk)
12
Flipping crazy mother (3)
DAM
reversal (flipping) MAD < (crazy) – DAM for mother is often used to describe breeding lines nowadays, but is also Shakespearean.
14
Small pot range (4)
SPAN
charade of S (small) and PAN (pot)
15
Blue graduate embraced by inexperienced player (6)
COBALT
insertion in (embraced by)  BA (graduate) inserted into (embraced by) COLT (inexperience player) to give CO BA LT – comes from the meaning of young horse and equates to someone new to a field. 
18
Tiara remodelled into dish (5)
RAITA
anagram of (TIARA)* with anagrind of “remodelled into” to give the cucumber and yogurt salad/dressing found in Indian cuisine.
19
Strips back for some rest (5)
SLEEP
reversal (back) of PEELS < (strips) – this one the grammar suggests that the strips are reversed FOR some rest to instruct the solver which way round the solution works.
20
Snake and fraudster making jacket (11)
WINDCHEATER
charade of WIND (snake – as in a mountain path) + CHEATER (fraudster)
DOWN
1 Department marketing primarily seasonal beers (5)
SALES
charade of S (primarily Seasonal) + ALES (beers) – the primarily tells us to use the first letter of Seasonal 
2
Dispute change involving leader of committee (11)
ALTERCATION
insertion (involving) ALTERATION (change) with insertion (involving) of C (leader of Committee) – again, leader here tells the solver to use the first letter of Committee
3
Worried about five getting cut (6)
CARVED
insertion (about) CARED (worried) about V (five – in Roman numerals) to give CAR V ED – we have met Roman numerals being used in this series before, but not for a while. They are definitely worth learning as they turn up a lot – I, V, X, L, C, D, M – and devious tricks like changing the starting letter of a word from D to L (dived to lived, or vice versa) by division/multiplication by 10.
4
Meanie therefore in the ascendant (4)
OGRE
reversal of (in the ascendant – going up in a down clue) of ERGO < (therefore) – we’ve seen the OGRE/ERGO reversal a few times in this series. It does occasionally turn up in the full fat cryptics too.
5
Spook moving centre stage (6,5)
SECRET AGENT
anagram (CENTRE STAGE)* with anagrind of “moving” – SPOOK in the sense of spy, according to the OED, is American usage and dates back to the 1940s.
6
Cons catching quiet fools (5)
DOPES
insertion (catching) of DOES (cons) around P (quiet in musical terminology). We’ve come across P for piano (quiet) and F for forte (loud/strong) before in this series, but again these are used a lot. Cons meaning does as in – he does/cons the old lady out of her rent.
10
South American starting to carry bag (3)
SAC
charade of  S (South) + A (American) + C (starting to Carry) – another initial letter indicator here, to show that we only use the C from carrying. S and A are standard abbreviations, S for south with the other cardinal directions and A for American appearing in many American organisations.
13
Rodent eating second pudding (6)
MOUSSE
insertion (eating) of MOUSE (rodent) around (eating) S (second) where S is the SI (scientific) unit for time.
14
Street next to green is kind of yellow (5)
STRAW
charade of– ST (abbreviation for street – from maps) + RAW (green) as in: he is new / green / raw to this. 
16
Turned over plant again for drinker (5)
TOPER
reversal (turned over) of REPOT < (plant again) for the a word for drinker that may not be well known – although it’s been around meaning a habitual drinker since the late 1600s in English.
17
Not of the clergy, I dipped into French lake (4)
LAIC
insertion (dipped into) of I (from the clue) into LAC (French for lake) to give LA I C – this is the adjective relating to the laity in Church circles, which also gives rise to the verb laicise also known as defrocking.

 

38 comments on “Quick Cryptic 46 by Carpathian”

  1. Plenty of smiles from me. I particularly liked the long down clues (ALTERCATION and especially SECRET AGENT)

    Thanks Carpathian and Shanne

  2. My talkthrough solve showing how I approached this unexpectedly tough puzzle is available at https://youtu.be/H2XgnYw4XPM … it should give tips and tactics for anyone who is struggling.

    I had intentions of sending today’s puzzle to a friend who visited last weekend and expressed an interest in trying cryptics but there’s no point. This one would put him off for life as there was just too much misdirection and language you only see in Crosswordland. I’ll wait until next week.

  4. Haven’t done one of these for a while, but this one seems too hard for its intended solvers. The quiptics slowly became more difficult; let’s hope the quick cryptics don’t go the same way.

  5. Very tricky for a QC, including a few unfamiliar words. Laic and Toper in particular. Some lovely stuff in there too, Mousse was a particular favourite.

    Managed to parse everything and get it done but definitely on the harder end for this series.

  6. QQ: how legit is it to separate and indicator from the word it applies to?

    Putting a pedants hat on the following seems to indicate “T”
    South American starting To carry bag

    Whereas this seems more legit (especially. In a QC)
    South American starts Carrying a bag

  7. Quite difficult but I completed it. Couldn’t parse DOPES before coming here, or ALTERCATION. I spent a while trying to think of different kinds of snake for 20a and in the end got WINDCHEATER largely from the definition.

  8. DaveKeene @8 – I missed that blogging, thinking about how to explain something I wasn’t sure was going to make sense. Yes, starts would have been better than starting to.

    Steffen @4 and others – you can see from my explanations expanding that I wasn’t sure how easy this was – but I don’t always find Carpathian that easy as a setter. For the Quick Cryptic her pitching doesn’t feel as accurate to me as Picaroon’s and/or Pasquale’s for the Quiptic. It’s also hard to know how much is wavelength – I don’t always find Carpathian’s Quiptics that accessible, found*/find Picaroon and Pasquale work at the level they aim at, personally never found Rufus easy (and Vulcan when full of cryptic clues I can struggle with). But lots of solvers commented that last week’s Maskarade was a step up, and I didn’t notice any extra challenge.

    (* I’m not sure we’re going to see Picaroon setting for the Guardian for some time as he’s taken a job as assistant crossword editor in another daily paper.)

  9. I was intrigued by the intro to this blog post, so had a go at this QC. It certainly seems at the hard end of the scale, with COBALT, DOPES and TOPER being tricky due to relying on less obvious synonyms/interpretations.

    DaveKeene@8, I guess “(the) starting to” {word} should be interpreted as “(the) start of” {word}. Personally I’m not enamoured by it. In other words, the “to” is actually part of the indicator here.

    “Starts” {word} isn’t cryptically grammatical for the first letter of {word}, though Guardian crosswords are pretty loose about such things. Note that “starts to” {multiple words} is grammatical but would indicate the initial letters of several consecutive words – or the first few letters of the subsequent word.

  11. I found this one challenging and enjoyable but am dubious as to whether it fits the QC category. If this was the first one I’d ever attempted I’d be very disheartened by the complexity. Still, some very nice clues to chew over. Thank you Shanne.

  13. Whew! This took me a long time and was tough after my confidence was boosted last week. It was a hard challenge but I eventually got there. I had no idea that an inexperienced player is called a COLT. Also ignorant of LAÏC which I had to look up as a synonym although I got LAC and knew that I had to insert an I. Really glad of the explanations Thankyou but also thanks to Carpathian for a serious challenge.

  14. Morning, I did find this more challenging than so of the others, but I do quite like that. As someone who has been at the beginner level for some time, I’m thinking of these as the early rungs on a step ladder up to the cryptics. I think this might be at the top of the range, but that means I’m challenged more over the weeks and have the opportunity to learn how to navigate some of the obstacles that make a full cryptic so tricky.

    Many thanks to everyone blogging and commenting on this site. Its such a helpful resource and really helped me a great deal in understanding and learning cryptics.

  15. This is hard for a quick cryptic. I’ve got DUPES in 6D and had no idea it was wrong. COBALT as blue is a bit of a stretch, as is COLT as inexperienced. DAM as mother only really exists in crosswordland.

  16. Peter @17 – COBALT blue is a paint colour in watercolours, acrylics and oils. I was taught to use cobalt blue, burnt sienna and yellow ochre as all I needed to paint English landscapes. It’s the blue in Chinese pottery. The other standard blue is ultramarine – a darker blue. I also own cerulean blue for painting that colour of midsummer sky.

    DAM really does exist in breeding, you see dam and sire used in the records, dogs, horses – anything with a pedigree.

    The problem with DUPES is that you’ve gone for cons or fools = dupes – but I can’t make DUES make fools or cons, whereas I can parse DOES as cons.

  17. “What, all my pretty chickens and their DAM at one fell swoop?” Macbeth, V.iii.

    COLT for inexperienced player is common in sport, often as a youth team which isn’t tied to a specific age group, especially in rugby and cricket.

    New to me: RAITA.

  19. Definitely one of the tougher quick cryptics. I’ve learnt two new words: dam and toper. I thought the only foreign words would be translations of simple English words such as: a, the, one, etc. Lake is a bit more complex to translate.

  20. Took me a while to get on to Carpathian’s wavelength, but it was well worth persevering. Some new uses of indicators for me (broadcast and about). Loved OGRE and MOUSSE. Definitely on the more challenging side.

    Thanks Shanne for the explanations and Carpathian for the work out.

  21. Robin @21: that’s been one of my bugbears for years: the assumption that we all speak French. (French is overwhelmingly the most popular second language to study in Britain, I know, but here in the USA it’s a fairly distant second to Spanish, and even in Britain not everyone takes French these days. (My own school offered Spanish, French, Latin, German, and Japanese; the German teacher was famously an easy grader, and I needed an easy A somewhere on my schedule, so I chose that. So no, I don’t speak French, thanks!)) That having been said, lac occurs in many place names that appear on English-language maps–Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, springs to mind, for example–so that one could be forgiven in a regular crossword. But this is the easy one! If you can’t find the word in the short version of an English dictionary, it shouldn’t appear in this series.

    Overall, I agree with everyone that this puzzle was too tough for this slot.

    LAIC, being a short word that’s half vowels, comes up a lot in American-style crosswords (i.e., not cryptic, every letter checked), so keep it in mind if you ever try our flavor of puzzle. LAICAL is also a valid word that means exactly the same thing, interestingly enough.

  22. Perhaps controversially I didn’t think this was too hard for the quick cryptic but it certainly was more challenging than others we’ve had. The parsing of 6d I didn’t understand until reading the blog as I’d forgotten the usage of ‘doing’ someone out of something as a synonym for conning someone. I hadn’t heard of LAIC as a word but do know ‘laity’ but could still remember LAC for lake from my O-level French years.
    Really liked SECRET AGENT.
    Thanks Shanne for the blog and Carpathian for the puzzle.

  23. Really enjoyed this although it was the hardest yet for me, it took a while but I got there and understood all the parsing which is very satisfying. There are a number of comments about ‘DAM’ which I have to point out (as you have Shanne) is in really regular use particularly in the horse world.

  24. I agree it was on the tough end for a QC – I think partly because many of the synonyms for wordplay were not obvious – Eg snake for WIND; young player for COLT. I know they fit a bit better into the surfaces but it added a non-QC-friendly step or two to get to unlocking the answer.

    My biggest problem was with 14a – I think that SCAN fits just as well as SPAN with the clueing. SPAN is a better fit as a synonym for range, but CAN is a type of pot, and there’s no crossers to rule it out.

  25. FinalPunch @ 26 … but isn’t that the point? ‘scan’ doesn’t work as a synonym for ‘range’, at least not that I can see from a thesaurus, so can’t be the solution?

  26. Shanne@10 In 10D, I agree that “starting to carry” looks clumsy, but it is not wrong, as “starting” can have a nounal sense (see Chambers) and that is what is being used here. This provides that the expression “starting to” has the same meaning as “start of”.

    On the other hand “starts to carry” would be wrong, because “starts” in the nounal form it must take for the cryptic grammar to work correctly would indicate more than one “start” – and that could not, therefore, identify just the first letter of “carry”. There is a case to be made that it would probably indicate the first two letters.

    It would have been better if the clue were to have used “beginning to”.

  27. I enjoyed the puzzle as a whole, thank you, but I think DOES for CONS is truly horrible. Particularly since it’s never used in speech in the present tense. Well, can’t say Never, but….

  28. Agree with others that it is quite a bit above (what I perceive to be) the QC range. Not sure any new solver had a pleasurable time with that. Shame as the puzzle itself was pretty good. Although I was being lazy and put DUPES instead of DOPES from the definition and crossers.

    A lot of stuff in there that’s common in crossword land but rarely turns up in everyday conversation. So I guess there’s plenty to be learnt from it even if you didn’t complete it.

  29. Cronester@27 – I think that I’d use both words in situations that are very close to each other; maybe not a direct synonym but certainly in the broad sense of ‘within the purview of’. It would be a bit clunky to say ‘across the scan of our product line’, for example, but the clear meaning would be the same as ‘across the range’. I’ve definitely seen more tendentious cryptic definitions.

    Span is clearly a *better* answer, but I’d have been happier seeing the P as one of the crossers.

  33. Definitely the most difficult so far. I didn’t get RAW or DOES as these two uses of the words simply failed to occur to me, though I did manage the answers.
    Not such fun this week, and a sense of relief at finishing it rather than pleasure.

  34. Definite uptick in difficulty!

    I thought COBALT was a delightful clue and answer though! And WINDCHEATER, actually – but these certainly tested the terms that the Quick Cryptic was set up in!

  35. I also found this very hard, mainly due to the large number of words I’d never heard of: LAIC, RAITA, DAM, DOES (for cons), COLT, WINDCHEATER (windBREAKER on the otherhand I had heard). TOPER I had heard before, but only from doing crosswords.

    Thanks Shanne and Carpathian.

  36. I love these quick cryptics – this was the most difficult yet I think but really enjoyable nonetheless.

  38. Shane@18: fortunately I lost the toss at home and DUPES was kept out of 6D: My rationale for cons / dues was a progression from “pros and cons” to “benefits and dues” (search hits mainly US it transpired). That doesn’t seem any worse than the actual answer; sympathy for Peter@17.

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