The Guardian Sunday cryptic crossword – found online here
Hopefully an uncontentious Quiptic, because I’ve got to disappear.
Carpathian is an experienced clear setter and this puzzle uses a good variety of clue types, with nothing too exciting in vocabulary. It took me a few clues to get into the mindset.
Adding in later, now I’m back from church parade at the Christingle service – and I was hurling this together before I went, various bits and pieces below.
| ACROSS | ||
| 1 | DISPENSATION |
Nation pissed off authority (12)
|
| anagram of (NATION PISSED)* with an anagrind of “off” | ||
| 9 | LATTE |
Delayed imbibing last bit of hot drink(5)
|
| insertion – (imbibing) – LATE (delayed) with T (last bit of hoT) inserted (imbibed) | ||
| 10 | DECEITFUL |
Deft clue I arranged to be misleading (9)
|
| anagram of (DEFT CLUE I)* with anagrind of “arranged” | ||
| 11 | MONSTER |
Big first day back (almost) (7)
|
| charade of MON (first day) + STERn (back – almost)
to try and head off the arguments, it depends on diaries, calendars and/or religion as to whether Monday or Sunday is the first day. Monday is definitely the start of the traditional working week and in Christian traditon the seventh day is the Sabbath Day, the difference comes because in Judaism, Saturday is the Sabbath. |
||
| 12 | ENLARGE |
Make bigger part of integral network in retrospect (7)
|
| reverse hidden (part of ….. in retrospect) in intEGRAL NEtwork < | ||
| 13 | ENTHUSIASM |
Sushi meant to be chewed up with zeal (10)
|
| anagram of (SUSHI MEANT)* with an anagrind of “chewed up” | ||
| 15 | EPEE |
Missing odd pieces of neoprene weapon (4)
|
| alternate letters (missing odd pieces – so only the even letters) of nEoPrEnE for the fencing sword that often appears in crosswords as it’s a useful letter sequence | ||
| 18 | FARE |
Announced reasonable ticket price (4)
|
| soundalike of (announced) “fair” (reasonable) | ||
| 19 | APPRENTICE |
Programme rejigged at first to attract one learning the ropes (10)
|
| charade of APP (programme) + R (rejigged at first) + ENTICE (to attract) | ||
| 22 | RITUALS |
In revolutionary prison uniform a lag originally wears for ceremonies (7)
|
| insertion of (wears) U A L (the first letters of Uniform A Lag – originally) into RITS (STIR< = prison reversed = revolutionary) | ||
| 24 | CHORTLE |
Time left during task for a laugh (7)
|
| insertion (during) of T (time) + L (left) into CHORE (task) | ||
| 25 | GRENADIER |
Explosive containing iodine beginning to rattle soldier (9)
|
| insertion of (containing) I (iodine) into GRENADE (explosive) + R (beginning to Rattle) | ||
| 26 | IMBED |
Lodge one married posh girl from the East (5)
|
| charade of I (one) + M (married from genealogy) + BED (= DEB posh girl < from the East)
Debutantes or DEBs, young upper class girls, were traditionally presented to society at the Queen Charlotte Ball (founded in 1788) part of the Season, a whirl of society events intended to try and marry off these young ladies advantageously. Debs have not been presented to the Queen in person for some time; that stopped in 1958. Men who were regarded as eligible mates were Debs Delights – the sort of society portrayed in the Jeeves and Wooster stories. Apparently the Queen Charlotte Ball still lingers on as a traditional thing in some circles. |
||
| 27 | CHAISE LONGUE |
Clearing house moving and removing right piece of furniture (6,6)
|
| anagram (moving) of (CLEArING HOUSE)* without the R (removing Right) – it’s a style of sofa that I link to the same Georgian debutantes – usually with a raised area on one end of the sofa – the wiki link I found is in French so I’m not linking. | ||
| DOWN | ||
| 1 | DETONATOR |
Turned around holding working bomb part (9)
|
| insertion of ON (working) into (holding) DETATOR = ROTATED (turned around) | ||
| 2 | SPECTRUM |
Rainbow tattoo initially strange below small muscle (8)
|
| charade of T (Tattoo initially) + RUM (strange) under (below) S (small) PEC (muscle – usually pecs and not singularised, but liberties are taken in crosswords) | ||
| 3 | EIDER |
About to pass up duck (5)
|
| reverse charade of RE (about) DIE (pass) all reversed – up in a down clue – for this amazing duck – I have linked to the RSPB because that includes the call, which is worth listening to. Eiderdowns were traditionally made using the down from eider ducks. | ||
| 4 | SUCCESSOR |
Flower holding small, small volume you and I raised for person who follows (9)
|
| Insertion in ROSE (flower) holding S (small) + CC (small volume – a cubic centimetre) + US (you and I) = RO S SE CC US – and that is all reversed (raised in a down clue) to give SUCCESSOR | ||
| 5 | TRIFLE |
Toy with small amount of dessert (6)
|
| triple definition – toy with, small amount and dessert all mean TRIFLE | ||
| 6 | OFFER |
Proposal from former queen (5)
|
| charade of OFF (from) ER (former queen – Elizabeth Regina referring to Elizabeth II) | ||
| 7 | FLAMBE |
Iron covering meat served with blazing alcohol (6)
|
| insertion into FE (iron – chemical symbol from the Latin ferrum) around (covering) LAMB (meat) | ||
| 8 | ALLEGE |
Profess everything for example before end of June (6)
|
| charade of ALL (everything) + EG (for example) + E (end of junE) | ||
| 14 | IMPASSIVE |
Unflappable setter’s repeatedly embracing graduate (9)
|
| charade of I’M (setter’s) + I’VE (setter’s) around (embracing) PASS (graduate) to give IM PASS IVE – playing with the two apostrophe uses – the first is (omission) setter is = I am, the second is setter has (possessive) so I’ve. | ||
| 16 | PRINTABLE |
Press release popular board finds fit to publish (9)
|
| charade of PR (Press Release) + IN (popular) + TABLE (board) | ||
| 17 | ANNOYING |
Irritating engineer in agony pierced by tip of needle (8)
|
| anagram of (IN AGONY)* with an anagrind of “engineer” to give AN OYING + insertion (pierced by) N (tip of Needle) | ||
| 18 | FORAGE |
In favour of period to rummage (6)
|
| charade of FOR (in favour) + AGE (period) | ||
| 20 | EMENDS |
Earl fixes edits (6)
|
| charade of E (earl) + MENDS (fixes) | ||
| 21 | WASABI |
Pungent paste used to be on top of all baked Indonesian starters (6)
|
| charade of WAS (used to be) + (on top of) A B I (starters of All Baked Indonesia) | ||
| 23 | TEETH |
Goatee that catches parts of comb (5)
|
| hidden in (catches) goaTEE THat | ||
| 24 | CARGO |
Transport work freight (5)
|
| charade of CAR (transport) + GO (work) |
Thanks Carpathian for an exemplary quiptic as ever, and Shanne for a detailed blog – as ever! I particularly liked CHAISE LONGUE – despite it being an anagram, I had difficulty figuring it out even with almost all crossers. (I’m more used to the beach version of it). EIDER was a jorum, and I’ve never seen this spelling of IMBED, so thought it might have been a mistake – before looking it up in the dictionary
Thanks Shanne and Carpathian. An excellent Quiptic – my only quibbles being that I don’t like obscure alternative spellings and this has two – we normally spell programme program where computers are concerned (19A), and as Layman says, it’s usually embed not imbed.
No complaints. A perfect Quiptic!
I found it a mix of clunky and nice surfaces. In the end I had a good number of ticks, namely: DISPENSATION, DECEITFUL, CHORTLE, FLAMBÉ and TRIFLE.
Given the clear clueing noted by Shanne, I had no issues with parsing. My spelling is terrible, so I only noticed the unusual spelling of IMBED when I read the comments above.
Thanks Carpathian for an enjoyable puzzle and thanks Shanne for the thorough blog (I loved the commentary on deb and CHAISE LONGUE)
A perfect puzzle for the Quiptic slot. Thank you Carpathian and Shanne!
I particularly enjoyed the elaborate but fair constructions: SPECTRUM, SUCCESSOR, IMPASSIVE etc.
Lounge not LONGUE caused a minor hold up in SE corner. Victoria Wood’s brilliant “World of Sasherelle” sketch from an audience with helped with SPECTRUM…good fun puzzle and felt just right for a Quiptic based on solving time.
Thank you Carpathian and Shanne.
Thanks Shanne and Carpathian!
Chewy enough for this improver and needed a reveal – and this blog – for SPECTRUM.
I still find charades built from synonyms or one example of many (eg ROSE for “flower”) difficult. Do more experienced solvers build the answer from the charade or use it as way to make sense of the word after the fact – e.g., “It could be this. Ah yes, I see how that fits the wordplay.”
Pauly @7 – I worked SUCCESSOR back from seeing the word would fit the crossers and definition, then had to work out how it parsed.
In answer to your question, it varies: sometimes I see the word that will fit and work backwards, but other times I’ve not known the word, but have been able to work it out from the cluing and then checked it’s a word – usually called a jorum on this site. (And if I’m just solving, not blogging, I am often grateful someone else has done the work parsing it).
Pauly@7: I often solve clues that way round, and did so for RITUALS and SUCCESSOR among others. Frankly I don’t care whether I was supposed to work them out from the parsing before, rather than after, the flash of inspiration – I do both.
Found the top half of this much easier than the bottom, and like Layman@1 it took ages to see CHAISE LONGUE. I liked DISPENSATION for the surface and the clever I’M / I’VE in IMPASSIVE.
Lovely puzzle. I first thought of sambal for 21 down, for the Indonesian in the clue, but then realised “used to be” = was so realsied it is wasabi. Emends and imbed for my last ones.
Thanks Carpathian for the puzzle and Shanne for the usual informative blog
Thanks Shanne @8 and Gladys @9
Thanks Carpathian and Shanne
Carpathian sets the best Quiptics, and has also been appearing in the main slot more often. More power to her bow!
Spot on for a Quiptic: relatively easy for the moderately experienced, but with enough to chew on to keep one entertained, smooth surfaces, and a good range of types; and from Pauly@7’s comments, nicely judged for those a bit earlier into the game.
Muffin@12 – seconded!
The NW didn’t immediately yield (apart from FOI FLAMBÉ) , but the NE went straight in, as then did the rest of it straightforwardly working round clockwise, with SPECTRUM being LOI.
A few of my older Welsh relatives refer to the item of furniture quite firmly as a “CHAISE LOUNGE” (try this in a solid Swansea accent). I had one in mind as being the undercarriage in the portrait of Madame Récamier, but another look shows that it is a double-ended “Directoire” sofa, rather than a single-ended and half-backed Chaise Longue.
Pauly@7 (et al.) – I find that with charades (perhaps my favourite type of clue), often a few bits go in, which then – often with a few crossers – make the whole answer snap in, followed by a bit of back-parsing to complete the job. But whatever works!
Many thanks to Carpathian and Shanne.
Thanks Shanne and Carpathian. Excellent Quiptic overall. Made some initial inroads around the grid mostly with the anagrams and the top half fell out relatively easily. Bottom half seemed chewier and took a bit longer. However, all fairly clued I thought, and very enjoyable. Re: program v programme: in the UK my experience (and I was a software engineer for 40 years) was that we used these interchangeably.
Excellent Quiptic with a blog to match. Thanks to C & S.
In my 30 years in IT, we wrote programs and watched TV programmes after work
Crispy @16
Right at the very beginning I wrote programmes (on the BBC B!), but soon I made the distinction that you have here. I think it was US influence.
[Me @17
Actually, I think the first program(me) I wrote was on a Sinclair Spectrum. Anyone remember those?]
[muffin@18: indeed I do remember the Spectrum.
The first program I wrote was on punch cards, in Algol 60. Trent Polytechnic, as was, allowed us to bring our cards in once a day down from school to have programs run overnight on their ICL (I think) machine.
The first microcomputer I used for programming was a Commodore PET. I actually got my first academic paper out of that, on using it to analyse SEM stereo-pair images. ]
DTS
I’m starting to suspect that you are even older than me! (I’m 73)
Thanks Shanne for clarifying this. I have three bones of contention with the crossword I am afraid.
25A. A grenade is not an explosive. It contains explosive. This clue just does not work.
19A. An app is not a programme. Since the earliest days the US program has been used for computer programs; programme is saved for the TV, conferences etc. This is just a sloppy error from the Grauniad.
4D. ‘You and I’ does not make ‘us’. It makes ‘we’. The former a subject, the latter the object. I wasted ages on this!
And I can’t see these, hard as I look, but I’m sure I should!
6D. ‘Off’ is a synonym for ‘from’? The closest I can get is “take the book off/from the shelf” but they have subtly different meanings I feel. Or the illiterate borrow something off somebody rather than from, but I’m sure Carpathian didn’t mean this.
14D ‘embrace’ as a synonym for ‘pass’ – I must be being stupid here. AI is not helping me either!
Thanks all!
DerekTheSheep#19 Similar for me. Punched cards to an ICL mainframe. Mine though was Coventry (Lanchester) Polytechnic as was 🙂. We could occasionally use a teletype machine (luxury) LOL 😂.
JaMaMn#21 Nope programme was definitely used in the UK as well as program.
Thank you Carpathian for an excellently pitched quiptic and thanks Shanne for the extensive, blog.
As an improving solver I found the clues had a good range of difficulty. Nowhere near parsing SUCCESSOR as nho CC for small volume and had not twigged that the whole clue needed to be reversed. Plus I’d got hooked on it being WE instead of US.
Similar story in CARGO where I was determined to make ON or OP fit for WORK as not seen GO before, but got there in the end.
Enjoyed IMPASSIVE and SPECTRUM (just about remembered that RUM = STRANGE but still don’t know why)
Thanks again.
DTS @13 When in the late 1970s, I was working and living in the US, I would give myself ‘lazy days’ when I used to watch TV game shows to try to get a grip on the culture, as it were. Among these was ‘The Price is Right’, hosted expertly by Bob Barber, in which, if the prizes included the item of furniture at 27 across, it was always announced as a CHAISE LOUNGE. I used to tighten my fists and want to throw something at the screen. I did not realise that it had a more local provenance. My late mother-in-law came from Swansea, but I never heard her refer to the 27a.
JaMaMn#21 ‘pass’ is the synonym for ‘graduate’. Embracing was there to indicate the insertion.
JaMaNn@21 – In IMPASSIVE, the “PASS” stands in for “graduate”, both as verbs. You may well say that they are not exactly the same things of course; but that’s the logic.
[muffin: I win (I think) at 69! ]
[cronester: I had the “luxury” of typing in my PhD thesis (in 1981-1982) using a TTY terminal, one of those with the round grey buttons. This was using the Cambridge mainframe as an early generation word-processor, where formatting commands were in a sort-of typesetting mark-up language invented in the Cambridge ComLabs; I forget what it was called. It did stuff like making symbols by overlapping normal characters with offsets : a “)” and a “/” to make a gamma for example. The TTY terminal was in a small windowless room in the Oxford Materials Dept., so it was a pretty early use of using the net for remote working. The final output was on a dual-headed IBM golfball typewriter hooked up to the mainframe. Somebody (not me, thank goodness) had to stand by it to keep feeding it sheets of A4.]
JaMaNn @21 – firstly, we don’t set these puzzles, we are volunteers trying to explain the puzzles so others can understand what is going on, and we have no say whatsoever about how the Guardian sets their puzzles, so yelling at us is expending your ire in the wrong direction.
25A. A grenade is not an explosive. It contains explosive. This clue just does not work. – I know a grenade contains explosive, but you’ll read about someone dropping a grenade into the conversation, meaning an explosive remark – a metaphorical use, and I think that’s the case here. To be honest, I’d quibble about the use of grenade and grenadier, because that’s the origin of a grenadier – a soldier who used grenades.
19A. An app is not a programme. Since the earliest days the US program has been used for computer programs; programme is saved for the TV, conferences etc. This is just a sloppy error from the Grauniad. – In my Chambers, the dictionary entry is for PROGRAMME with PROGRAM as an alternative, (brackets – mainly in N. America and computing). I distinguish between computing use and non-computing use by using different spellings, but there is dictionary support. (And who remembers spelling kilogrammes? I’m a little younger than muffin and DerektheSheep, but I also had to code Fortran on cards at university – Imperial in my case – but there were more sophisticated computers around than the big mainframe. The guy who did a lot of computing with us was big into molecular orbital theory and modelling.)
4D. ‘You and I’ does not make ‘us’. It makes ‘we’. The former a subject, the latter the object. I wasted ages on this! – there is going to be dialect justification for that one – Geordie uses us instead of me and we, for example – and it won’t be the only dialect. We haven’t seen it for a while, but we used to see “un” clued as one occasionally – and it is an equivalence in some dialects.
And I can’t see these, hard as I look, but I’m sure I should!
6D. ‘Off’ is a synonym for ‘from’? The closest I can get is “take the book off/from the shelf” but they have subtly different meanings I feel. Or the illiterate borrow something off somebody rather than from, but I’m sure Carpathian didn’t mean this. the fish on the quay came from/off the boat just there, caught this morning. I’ve just alighted off/from the train.
14D ‘embrace’ as a synonym for ‘pass’ – I must be being stupid here. AI is not helping me either! sorry – I missed out the brackets for “graduate” after pass there
Wallsio @23 – RUM for odd is just English English – the second definition for rum in Chambers (the edition I own) gives: queer, droll, odd, strange – he was a rum cove is the sort of thing you’d see Bertie Wooster say. The first definition is based on the alcohol.
Thecronester@22: My first was in System 4 ICL Usercode, written out on coding sheets sent to the Punch Room to be punched onto cards for submission to a mainframe that occupied much of a large warehouse – but I’m blowed if I can remember if it was a program or a programme back then. It did eventually settle down to being a program. Nice to see some other early-ish programmers here.
Shanne @28 many thanks for the added explanation. Hopefully this conversation will make it more forthcoming when I need it in future!
Thank you, Shanne!
A perfect puzzle. Enjoyed it.
I couldn’t parse some of the clues: IMBED, SPECTRUM, RITUALS.
I definitely needed an explanation about DEB as Debutante, RUM for strange and STIR for prison. And thanks for the explanation about enderdowns.
And thanks Carpathian for an enjoyable puzzle!
LunaLo @31 I should have had DEB in my list too as I’m yet to come across that, so thanks for the reminder
Hi Shanne
I’m really sorry if you read any suggestion in my post that either there was ire, or worse that it might possibly have been directed at you. I would have imagined that by thanking you, but making objection to the crossword which is published by the Guardian, that it would be clear that you were the object of my appreciation not ire! Sorry that that was even remotely unclear. For the avoidance of doubt I am extremely grateful to you and your co-contributors here for untangling the fiendish puzzles set before us by the compilers. (When did they become setters?)
Thanks for clearing up that pass wasn’t about making a pass, which was the closest I could come to embrace…
I note your staunch defence of the compiler on the other points but I’m not convinced!