Guardian 29,699 / Anto

91 comments on “Guardian 29,699 / Anto”

1. Thanks Anto and Eileen
   I think he has just misspelled a “chap’s name” for EMMET – EMMOTT or similar? I too wasn’t impressed by “little” for LOW in 19d
   Favourite LOI GALLOPS.

2. Thankyou both. Isn’t Emmet just a chap’s name?

3. EMMET is a man’s name, as in the actor J Emmet Walsh, so Chap is the definition

4. Thanks all: I’ve never heard of the name – not even the actor!

5. In 1A Eileen, you’ve mixed up the CHA and (tea). I enjoyed this, thanks Anto and this is another example of why Anto is better suited to this slot rather than the quiptic slot. I found last Sunday’s quiptic by Anto harder than this. Thanks Eileen for the blog. Emmet lived next door to Hyacinth in ‘Keeping Up Appearances’.

6. LIBRA. I don’t think that “begin” on its own is sufficient to indicate “take the first letters of everything that follows”. “Beginnings of…” or “Starts to…” would be fine.
   Also, OFF crossing with OFF felt a tad awkward.
   Otherwise some nice touches I thought.
   Thanks to Anto and Eileen

7. Thanks, Larry @5 – Doh!

8. Agree with SueB@2. Emmet is just a regular man’s name. There was an Emmet in “Keeping up Appearances”.
   I reckon the “E for Europe” is E Number = Europe Number in food additive classification.
   Eileen, you have thanked AntoN rather than Anto ! Meanwhile ( from me ) thank you Anto and Eileen.

9. Without trying to sound at all dismissive, I felt this was fairly run of the mill until I arrived at the last two to be fitted into the puzzle, of course not to be tripped up by 13ac it had to be BANANA SKIN, and loi PALINDROMES, which took me therefore all of the available crossers to see. These last two clues were my pick of the day by some margin. Many thanks Anto and Eileen this morning…
   PALINDROMES I always think is such a strange word for what it represents. As if it should be something to do with flying or even those camel like creatures with a single hump. Ridiculous of me, I realise…

10. I think that Anto is becoming housetrained. Just keep him away from the Quiptic!

11. Eileen@4: Oh come on! He had two lines as the apothecary in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet — stunning acting, unforgettable!

12. I’m not the greatest fan of Anto (nicely put, Shirl @10), but liked this one, not least for the splendidly dismissive definition of THERE’S NO I IN TEAM and the pointed one for XIMENES.
    That gentleman did much to advance the technique of cryptic crosswords, but IMHO an awful lot of his rules are irritatingly arbitrary. The observation by Jay @6 offers a case in point. I have no doubt that “begin” on its own “is not sufficient” “because Ximenes said so” – at page 50 of The Art of the Crossword we read “Beginnings, middles and ends of words are apt to be treated very loosely. ‘Cylinder-head’ may fairly indicate C or ‘masthead’ M; but why should ‘redhead’ indicate R?” To which I testily respond “Why on earth shouldn’t it?” Ximenes goes on to insist that “‘a happy ending’ doesn’t, to me, mean ‘the last letter of happy'”. My response is the same.
    And the Clue Clinic site allows “beginning of” but not “begin”. But the indicator is in fact transparently clear, and I found the clue straightforward and, with a neat surface and a gentle misdirection with the meaning of “sign”, quite satisfying.
    If we’re going to be picky, Eileen is of course absolutely right to point out apropos STATES that although E has a lot of meanings including European, “Europe” isn’t among them (good try, Flea @8, but Chambers disagrees with you). Though I doubt that anyone was stumped by the clue as a result.

    Anyway, many thanks to Anto for a pleasant start to the morning and to Eileen for the customarily excellent blog.

13. Re. XIMENES, I think that the apostrophe and the phrase “source of” are to be taken together to form “source of rigid compilers’ code” as the definition for this clue.

14. I didn’t get Emmet Till I came here.

15. For 21D I thought of the tourists and the sublime cartoonist/inventor, but then found that he spelled it differently. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowland_Emett

16. Very nice — no quibbles and no head scratches. I haven’t heard of THERE’S NO I IN TEAM but it reminds me of the “motivational” days I once was forced to attend. Crawling around on the floor and bleating like sheep was one exercise that remains etched in my memory.

17. Sorry the link doesn’t seem to work. It was of course The Bob Dylan song.

18. pserve_p2 @13 – you’re right, of course. I amended the blog immediately but my comment to that effect seems to have got lost!

19. And according to Wikipedia the unfortunate lad who encountered a number of people who went on to support Donald Trump spelt his name EMMETT.

20. Great fun from Anto. Completed quicker than his Sunday Quiptic. Please keep this setter in this spot.

    I do watch a bit of American Sport where there are a few famous EMMETs

    Favourite today AFTERMATH

    Thanks Eileen and Anto

21. Re 18. It will wound/scar you for life.

22. I think of Emmet as Hyacinth Bucket’s son in Keeping Up Appearances. I noticed that, although less cosy, half of CANNES GETS could also be cages, a housing of sorts.

    I was on track for a 20-minute solve here, but things slowed down dramatically. I held out, didn’t resort to the thesaurus and got there in the end. I spotted PALINDROMES and SAW OFF very late in the day. I also continued a recent habit of taking an age to enter the first thing I’d thought of, THERE’S NO I IN TEAM in this case.

    Thanks Anto and Eileen

23. E=Europe in the abbreviation for the Council of Europe – CE in Chambers but the organisation seems to prefer CoE. That was good enough for me. I came here to see if there was more to 21d than the chap’s name but apparently not. I do remember M. Emmet Walsh from Blood Simple, among other things, but it’s quite an obscure name.
    Thanks to Anto for an enjoyable puzzle and to Eileen for another interesting blog.

24. Geoff DU @16: I wish you hadn’t, but you’ve reminded me of some of that tedious motivational nonsense one seemed required to attend. We were once invited to stand on our chairs and shout “I am aliiiive!” I left, and was vilified for doing so… wrong attitude apparently.

25. Thanks Anto and Eileen!
    Nice puzzle. Great blog.
    My faves: THERE IS NO I IN TEAM & OUT OF TUNE.

    LIBRA
    Seems to work. Begin A, B, C D & E.

    BETEL NUT
    Agree with Eileen that ‘when high’ seems redundant in the cryptic reading.

26. There’s Doc Brown in Back to the Future, too – though he spelt his EMMETT with two Ts.

    Glad I’m not the only one who can’t make much sense of INFLOW, and AER LINGUS took ages because the first word was so obviously AIR. The clue for LIBRA could do with some punctuation. But I enjoyed the rest – the mad family, the French armchair, the sneaky trick and the motivational guff… Anto has a gift for making hackneyed clue types amusing with some inventive vocabulary. I liked PALINDROMES and THERE THERE too – and I think we now know (if it wasn’t already obvious) what Anto thinks of XIMENES and his rules.

    Thanks Anto and Eileen.

27. I hate clues which define a person’s name as man, woman, chap etc.

    How ironic that XIMENES was one of the answers, given such an exemplar of how not to write crossword clues like that for LIBRA (NeilH @12, go and read Ximenes again (page 25 in my version, not page 50)) and understand why he says what he does about beginnings, middles and endings).

28. A 15yo Emmett with two tees, Emmett Till, is part of US civil rights history, he was murdered in 1955.

    Already mentioned of course, I now see.

29. Tim C @27 – Hurrah! I am now totally convinced that Emmet (variously spelt – and the actor is apparently M, not J Emmet Walsh) is, in fact, a name (that of Mrs Bouquet’s neighbour, rather than son) but was surprised that no one had yet raised the perennial objection to defining names as ‘man, woman, chap etc.’ !

30. 😃

31. I very much enjoyed this and thought there were a lot of inventive and witty clues, particularly the slight dig at the “rigid compilers’ code”. And whatever Mr Ximenes may have said, I was fine with “Begin” in 5d as an imperative: “Begin these words”.

    Many thanks Anto and Eileen.

32. [Started the @28 post when Shanne @10 was the latest, after first searching “Till”, thinking He’ll no doubt be mentioned. He hadn’t been; but then events chez ginf intervened and I lost track, and posted without re-searching. Hey ho]

33. Both Emmett Till and Emmett Grogan (author of Ringolevio) occurred to me, but unfortunately both use two Ts. Didn’t stop me solving that clue pretty rapidly, though, as I only found out about the double Ts when checking later. XIMENES is a bit of an insiders-only clue, isn’t it? I have been solving long enough to have come across the name, but I pity the poor newbies. On those rules, I am with Neil@12, I guess – there do need to be some limits to what can be done in clue writing (e.g. to allow indirect anagrams would clearly rapidly lead to chaos), but I’m happy to be a little relaxed about them. Neil’s examples are good. Thanks, Anto and Eileen

34. I came here for the parsing of INFLOW. My Oxford Thesaurus has low=little as in a low fence but IMHO the clue should have read supportS and not have had the ‘for’ in the place it was put. I did like the good charade for OFFICER MATERIAL, the anagram for TNIIT, the surface for AFTERMATH, the well-hidden UTERI, the half of Cannes gets for NESTS, and the sneaky PALINDROMES, where I spent ages trying to think of synonyms for radar. I’m another (although not necessarily XIMENEan) who didn’t like the ‘begin’ to indicate the first letters.

    Thanks Anto and Eileen.

35. So a) emmet is the lead character in the Lego movie, as anyone with children should know, but
    B) still dont get ximenes. Its not a word in the dictionary.

36. Neil @35 – see here for the legendary XIMENES:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrick_Somerset_Macnutt

    …also here: http://www.crossword.org.uk/ximenes.htm

37. I’m totally missing something.
    Can someone please explain XIMENES? (In simple terms an Australian might understand?)

    Thanks to Anto for the adventure and Eileen for the debrief.

38. 19d. I parsed this as IN (home) FLOW (force) and can see no reason for “little support for”. When we measure the flow of water, we are actually measuring the force at which it flows. I see it as a double definition with verbal diarrhoea.

    I enjoyed this puzzle. It is my first full solve and parse of a Guardian offering since my return to these puzzles around a month ago. Slowly improving as I adapt to the variety setters. Much easier if you only have one setting the traps.

39. Thanks Eileen@36.
    Total ignorance on my part.

40. Thanks A&E.

    Second recent occasion of my finding an Anto Quiptic on the difficult side, immediately followed by a pretty manageable Anto Cryptic. I think the only unadvisable quiptic words today were XIMENES and BETEL NUT. Otherwise, a fairly consistent and reasonable challenge.

    Said it before, but there’s surely a word for what I call meta-definitions such as 10d, that describe the kind of word you’re looking for? It’s not labelled at all here, and I don’t think calling it a CD or DD is accurate.

41. Another two-T Emmett, the one who came to my mind, was Emmett Kelly, the “sad clown.” His link is a mile long, but try googling him.

    Thanks, Anto and as ever Eileen.

42. To complement the links posted by Eileen @36, here you can read the full text of Ximenes On The Art Of The Crossword

43. I didn’t mind “wound” meaning “scar” in 18A, taking the broader meaning of “do damage to”.
    And I enjoyed the mix of clues in the puzzle. Having recently read “Two Girls On One Knee” (highly recommend to cryptic fans), I am aware of Ximenes and his rules. 🙂
    Thanks Anto and Eileen!

44. Jay @42 – many thanks for that. 🙂

45. I agree with TassieTim@33 re XIMENES. I too have been doing crosswords long enough to have come across the name before, but only from following this blog. There are plenty of solvers out there put off by this sort of cliquish stuff, newbies and occasional solvers. References to the names of other solvers, past and present, fall in the same category.
    Geoff@37 – don’t let it bother you. 😉

    Rant over.

46. I remain unenlightened as to who XIMENES is. The only reference I found with the googles is to a Spanish inquisitor, and I was not expecting that.

47. Ace @46 it’s been covered quite exhaustively in the comments.

48. Ace
    Yes, in particular follow the link that Eileen gave @36

49. I really liked OUT OF TUNE because the surface was so misdirecting (of me!).

    But I was in two minds about PATIENT. On the one hand, it is perfectly fine. On the other, a XIMINEan might argue it’s a bit sloppy: many sick people are not patients and many patients are not sick (think checkups). The definition is receiver of health care; in linguistics, it is the entity that is the receiving end of a verb (as opposed to agent). I’m not complaining here, that would be way too nit-picky, but I wonder what other people think.

50. Tachi@40 I think think meta clues are a special case of definition by example.

51. Tachi@40 I’ll defer to Petert, but I like clues like this because they keep your feet on the ground. The answer is staring you in the face, in plain English, but it can take a while to spot as you’re so busy looking for the named devices and clue types.

52. @Ace – use this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrick_Somerset_Macnutt

53. I put SCAB at first for wound, thinking it was just AB for abductor. Worked it out once I got palindromes though!
    Loi OUT OF TUNE, spent ages trying to make it say out of puff, and thinking that wasn’t cryptic enough!
    Liked AFTERMATH a lot!

54. Jay@42: many thanks for the link to Ximenes – interesting coincidence to read his paragraph on the difficulty of producing a clue for CLENCH when Anto has addressed that particular problem today.

    To return to that word CLENCH. I said it was a horrible word to clue. Why? Because it has no anagram, and its letters can’t be fooled about with in any obvious way; nor can it be “hidden’’ (see later).

    Ximenes used a reference to Sir Len Hutton to get the “LEN” – it’s been some time since you could do that.

55. bingy @52 – I gave that link @36.
    I took it that Ace @46 was being facetious (‘not expecting the Spanish Inquisition’), having claimed to have followed ‘the googles’. 😉

56. Torquemada , Ximenes and Azed ( Deza ) are the only three setters of the main Observer crossword , nearly 100 years . All from the Spanish Inquisition , hence there is just one rule for crosswords .

57. Thanks for the blog , I thought this was really good with many nice little touches such as PALINDROMES – sums are not set as a test on Erasmus – highly delighted that the Erasmus scheme will soon return .
    THERES NO I IN TEAM has a standard response – yes but there is a U in chump ( less polite versions available ) . Fortunately I am now banned from all training days .

58. I agree with the sentiment that XIMENES as an answer is a little too inside-baseball to be completely cricket.

    For Emmet with one T, I think of Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas, which was part of my childhood. And Eileen @29, I’m usually among the ones objecting to “chap” meaning “one of the zillions of names for a man”, so consider thar objection duly registered.

59. There is no “I” in team, but there are five in individual brilliance.

60. I too came here for a parsing of 19 – has anyone yet got a definitive parsing? For me it was this that gave pause (and I used a crossword solver to find Ximenes – not really the done thing I know)

61. [20a reminded me of Fulham F.C.’s supporters’ chant ‘There’s only one F in Fulham!’]

62. 21d may also be a reference to Robert Emmet, a famous early Irish Republican who led a rebellion in 1803. As I think Anto hails from Dublin.

63. Ian Brad @62
    “Famous” is a rather subjective term!

64. I thought this was good. PALINDROMES was nicely done, I liked SAW OFF, and BANANA SKIN raised a smile. Monday level difficulty, but that’s fine given the random nature of the Quiptic and Everyman being off in the hills.

65. muffin @63 Well, Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone are well-known figures here in Balfour Towers, perhaps in part because of my immersion in the writings of Yeats and Joyce. That said, I never thought for a moment that it was to the Irish Republican that Anto was alluding. I think that, for anyone from Dublin, tagging Emmet as a ‘chap’ would be considered exceedingly insulting.

66. Thanks Anto, I enjoyed that with LOW CUT, PATIENT, BANANA SKIN, XIMENES (the clue would work without ‘rigid’ but we all know how Anto really feels), OUT OF TUNE, and PALINDROMES among my top picks. Thanks Eileen for the blog.

67. Thanks Anto and Eileen. I must say I’m not really convinced that “chap” is the defn for EMMET. Beyond smoothing the surface what role would “contributes” then play in the cryptic part? Maybe Anto does after all have the Cornish tourist in mind. The latter can fairly be reckoned as a “chap [who] contributes” to the local economy.

68. Balfour @65
    I have heard of Wolfe Tone, but I always thought it was a pseudonym – it (as “wolf tone”) describes a horrible misplaying on a stringed instrument!

69. [Roz @57: There’s a company in the US (despair.com) that sells ‘demotivational’ posters & products. The opening sentence on its website reads: ‘No industry has inflicted more suffering than the Motivational industry’. I think you would enjoy their sense of humour.]

70. I am managing to solve, or nearly solve, a crytic a day… unheard of. I didn’t get inflow. I am so pleased to be making progress. Thank you to Anto and Eileen.

71. [ Tony@69 sounds like just the thing for me . We once had a day called Managing Change , I collect all loose coins in jars , I took them in along with some money bags and spent the day counting out the different coins into bags to take to the bank . Recently I got totally banned which suits me perfectly . ]

72. [Roz @71: That’s a great story. I once posted a ‘demotivator’ on our conference room bulletin board that was a photo of hands joined together with a title called ‘Meetings’; under the title was the phrase ‘None of us is as dumb as all of us.’ Most people never noticed!]

73. Maybe it’s a UK usage to have “saw off” mean defeated? Or are we missing something?
    (And apropos of the great clown Emmett Kelly, Ms. Pianola was taken to the circus as a small child and burst into frightened tears when he came up to her. He moved on to a more receptive audience.)

74. Rowland Emmet, cartoonist for Punch was a bit of a chap.

75. pianola @ 73

    It’s the transitive use of the visual meaning of ‘saw’: “I saw off a bear that tried to attack me”, for instance.

76. pianola @73
    Yes, common usage in the UK, as in “Alcaraz saw off Sinner in the final of the Italian Open tennis”.
    [Ms. Pianola meeting the clown reminds me of the master of wit and repartee story, which I had better not post here!]

77. TimC @ 27 – I’m sure you didn’t intend your comment to come across as offensively patronising, so I’ll respond on that basis.
    Ximenes makes a lot of good points. He complains about “tail of lion” cluing ION (how can the tail be three quarters of the beast?). He complains about middles that aren’t (“IVE isn’t the heart of the Universe”). And (the complaint which everyone save novice setters and at one time, I believe, Gordius in the Guardian, goes along with) he detests indirect anagrams (although apparently he used a fair number of them himself in his early puzzles). But his rules about what indicators of the first letter of a word he will accept and what indicators he won’t seem to me to be utterly arbitrary.
    One of Ximenes’ best points is his insistence that
    “… the fact remains that solvers, whether they know why or not, are often left, through no fault of their own, wondering whether an answer is right when they have put it in”
    He then goes on to say that
    “I maintain that unless certain musts and must-nots are established, this is bound to happen”.
    But Anto’s clue for LIBRA, even though it uses an indicator for the initial letters which brings Ximeneans out in hives, allows me to be 100% sure that I’ve got the right answer. And for that reason, in my book, it’s a good clue.

78. Thanks Eileen.
    Chap EMMET(T). When searching for EMMET on Onelook , I accidentally typed 2 t’s and the first definition that came up was name often associated with masculinity. However, I couldn’t find the source dictionary. Urban Dictionary had several entries with that meaning. Synonyms include dude, cool guy, hot male, and pimp. No hints about the etymology though.

79. As someone who’s complained about Anto quite often in the past, I like to give him his due. I had a few quibbles with this puzzle (all already mentioned), but all quite minor. And there were quite a few ingenious, witty clues. I particularly liked 2dn (OUT OF TUNE) and 10dn (PALINDROMES).

80. 21d made me think of Emmet Robinson, the Yorkshire bowler until I checked and found he was spelt “Emmott”. He was the author of several remarks later attributed to Fred Trueman includig this one –
    Posh amateur batsman in a fancy cap, on being bowled, “Good ball Robinson”.
    Robinson, ” Aye, and it were wasted on thee”.

81. Rarely post here because I’m usually several days late, but as I’m more or less on time, I just wanted to say I really liked 7D UTERI. Easy enough to spot I thought, but I just loved the oblique allusion to our commonality.

82. Like many, I loved OUT OF TUNE and PALINDROMES. [Muffin@68- at the risk of sounding defensive, a wolf tone is not down to misplaying, there’s not much a player can do about it, rather it’s an instrumental issue, an ‘argument’ at a certain pitch between the resonance of the instrument and the bowed string causing the note to ‘howl’. As I’m sure you know some of the world’s finest cellos are blighted with terrible wolf notes.]

83. Tony@72 , that is brilliant . I just might have seen two of these . One say STUBBORNNESS and was a present for me . The other says TEAMS , lots of hands and subheading – Together we can do the work of one – . I will check the small print today .

84. Could someone please pronounce XIMENES?

85. simonc: I believe he pronounced it in an Anglicised way, roughly “Zim in ease”.

86. Lord Jim@85

    Many thanks. Hope it doesn’t provoke any more controversy.

87. The cartoonist “chap” apparently spelt his name EMETT. Also very well known in his day for his whimsical kinetic sculptures, and a widely exhibited railway layout called “Emettland”.

88. I didn’t realize it until simonc asked, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard “Ximenes” pronounced. In my mind, I hear it with a long I in the first syllable, as opposed to the short I in Lord Jim’s answer, but that’s based on no actual knowledge (and is certainly not how the original Greek word would have been pronounced).

    Lord Jim sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, unlike me, so definitely don’t go with me on this!

89. [Roz @83: Along those lines is Teamwork. Under a picture of an avalanche are the words, ‘A few harmless flakes working together can unleash an avalanche of destruction’.]

90. I had PUFF in 2d, and as often happens in this situation I was never able to see the correct answer, even after getting THERE THERE and using plenty of Tippex. (I also had an incorrect PUFF in a recent Brendan – that one should have been TOFF. Hope it’s not going to become a habit!)

    Thanks to Anto and Eileen.

    And thanks to NeilH passim for some very sound comments on Ximenes.

91. I really enjoyed this puzzle, and was able to complete it

    I also liked 2d OUT OF TUNE. Delightful pdm with “no air left”

    4d we also use the term “math” in Canada. Will a setter ever use that reference instead of US every time?

    16d BETEL NUT, could the (whimsical) definition be extended to “when high on this narcotic stuff?”?

    13a BANANA SKIN, 10d PALINDROMES and 15d KICKED OFF were all clever and fun

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