When I logged on last Saturday, before attempting the puzzle, Google informed me that March 14th was Pi Day, so I was feeling rather trepidatious as I opened my paper, knowing the fondness of some of our setters for themed puzzles.
Mercifully, nothing mathematical here but what turned out to be an interesting and absorbing puzzle from Tramp, one of my favourite setters. It was good that it was a Prize puzzle, allowing for opportunities to set it aside from time to time and come back with fresh eyes, as I found it quite a challenge – an ideal Prize puzzle in fact. There was lots of wily misdirection, leading to many ‘ahas’ and groans, some ingenious and intricate constructions, cannily concealed definitions and a rueful grin at the surface of 18dn, following my Paul blog in the previous week. Much to my chagrin, the parsing of 4dn held out for longer than it should have. I shan’t be surprised at complaints re the enumeration of 21ac but I don’t see how else it could have been clued and, in fact, the construction is quite straightforward.
My favourites were 14ac MAMMOGRAM, 16ac CORRECTING FLUID, 19ac PEN-PUSHER, 22ac LUMBAGO, 8dn DETERMINER and 15dn MEDALLISTS.
I think I (more or less) got there in the end – there are just a couple of places where I’d be glad of confirmation. Many thanks, as ever, to Tramp.
Definitions are underlined in the clues.
Across
9 Tuchel on playing over one side of pitch (9)
TOUCHLINE
An anagram (playing) of TUCHEL ON round I (one)
10 Eat in bar filling beer out of case (5)
ERODE
ROD (bar) in [b]EE[r], without its ‘case’ – definition better as ‘eat into’
11 One tells Romeo to come back for coffee first (7)
RELATER
R (Romeo – NATO alphabet) + ‘back for’ (last letter of [coffe]E, first, then LATER (to come) – I think!
12 Admissions with nurse getting samples (7)
ENTRIES
EN (Enrolled Nurse) + TRIES (samples)
13 Forces American to accept idiot (5)
UNITS
US (American) round NIT (idiot)
14 Scan, mark and tick in school going over stuff (9)
MAMMOGRAM
M (MARK) + MO[ment] (tick) in a reversal (going over) of GAM (school of whales etc) + RAM (stuff) – as well as GAM, it’s worth making a note of ‘pod’, also a word for a school of whales and dolphins, quite often found in crosswords
16 Sort out clothing for catholic girlfriend: something to cover boobs in work? (10,5)
CORRECTING FLUID
An anagram (sort) of OUT + ‘clothing for’ C[atholi]C + GIRL FRIEND
19 Life around north: show one with boring job (3-6)
PEN-PUSHER
PEP (life) round N (north) + USHER (show – to one’s seat, for instance)
21 Doctor from department parking by hospital on single line (5)
DPHIL
D (department) + P (parking) + H (hospital) + I (single) + L (line) – there may be objections, as always, to the enumeration but these are the rules, which are not laid down by Tramp
22 Release album: sound issue with disc, perhaps? (7)
LUMBAGO
An anagram (release) of ALBUM + GO (sound??): my immediate thought was of how we might have said at school, ‘Has the bell gone/sounded?’ and found, in Chambers,'(of eg a bell or gun) to sound’; then, lower down, I found ‘go’ informally as an adjective, ‘ready; in perfect condition’ and, under ‘sound’, ‘in good condition’; I think either works for me – how about you?
23 Cut chicken to eat roast; they have skins on top (7)
TIMPANI
TIMI[d (chicken, cut) round PAN (roast – as in to criticise)
24 Man that could be a hunk (5)
PIECE
Double definition, the first as a chess piece
25 Set off with Tom after thrills (4-5)
KICK-START
KICKS (thrills) + TART (tom – slang for prostitute, which I learned a while ago, from crosswords)
Down
1 Parting shot to provoke interrupted by Republican mug (7,3)
STIRRUP CUP
STIR UP (provoke) round R (Republican) + CUP (mug)
2 No end to deception? Bank more responsible (8)
GUILTIER
GUIL[e] (deception) + TIER (bank)
3 Model that’s short inspired with sexy pictures (6)
PHOTOS
POS[e] (model, short) round HOT (sexy)
4 Newspaper plugging a column (4)
PIER
I or, rather, ‘i’ – newspaper – in PER (a)
5 Any, perhaps put off by Tramp’s ribaldry, initially? (10)
DETERMINER
DETER (put off) + MINE (Tramp’s) + R[ibaldry]
6 Singer of core piece in heavy metal on tour (4,4)
MEAT LOAF
An anagram (on tour) of OF [he]A[vy] (core piece of) + METAL
7 More sentimental movie occasionally entertained by promiscuous type (6)
GOOIER
[m]O[v]I[e] in GOER (promiscuous type)
8 Fix gates having lost a sheep (4)
TEGS
An anagram (fix) of G[a]TES minus a – for a sheep in its second year
14 They shot once in game with forwards (10)
MATCHLOCKS
MATCH (game) + LOCKS (forwards, in Rugby)
15 They might have finished second drink, primarily restricted by menus? (10)
MEDALLISTS
D[rink] primarily, in MEAL LISTS (menus)
17 Use team with changes to draw in league matches (8)
EMULATES
An anagram (changes) of USE TEAM round (to draw in) L (league)
18 Have erred cracking Paul cryptic leading to confusion (8)
UPHEAVAL
An anagram (erred) of HAVE in an anagram (cryptic) of PAUL
20 Figure in a dress? (6)
NUMBER
Double definition, the second as in ‘a little black number’
21 Clear religious person is bored by mass (6)
DEMIST
M (mass) in DEIST (religious person)
22 They kiss with small tablet, shortly getting erect (4)
LIPS
A reversal (getting erect, in a down clue) of S (small) + PIL[l] (tablet, shortly)
23 Lorry driver finally going for food (4)
TUCK
T[r]UCK (lorry) minus [drive]r
I agree with your parsing, including RELATER (tough for me to see at first) and LUMBAGO (I was thinking of the auditory option).
Me too for ‘go’ as in ‘the bell will go/sound’ Loi was 9ac, many decades since kicking for touch as rugby fullback in my youth. In 10ac, Eileen, I took the ‘in’ as a link word. And for tom meaning prostitute I immediately thought Oh yeah, standard term in The Bill (but I could be back-confabulatiing 🙂 ). Anyway, nice puzzle, and a blog with full health clearance!
Thanks Eileen. Hard. I filled in all the squares but had to come here for full explanations of rather too many. Still don’t follow the connection of i and newspaper and not sure what you mean by the enumeration of 21a. I just thought it might have been fairer if it had been annotated (1,4).
Like a lot of people (I suspect), I initially put Correction Fluid rather than Correcting Fluid (not worrying too much about the nitty gritty of the anagram) only to get stuck later on. Correction Fluid is the correct term according to online retailers but we’ll let Tramp off given the clue’s ingenious surface.
PS 1d was loi-but-one; immediately thought ‘Now what’s it called when fox hunters have that nip before the off?’, but needed all crossers to remember ‘stirrup’.
4D parsing was a struggle (even though I did guess the answer based on the def), and still is a struggle.
At the risk of sounding dumb, why does NEWSPAPER=I ?
Still not getting it!
Shafar@6
Wiki:
The i Paper, known as i until December 2024,[6] is a British national newspaper published in London by Daily Mail and General Trust and distributed across the United Kingdom.
I is clued as newspaper quite often. Worth remembering this.
LUMBAGO
I was thinking ‘The cat goes meow’ (This is similar to the bell example in the blog and so I go for the first option
mentioned by Eileen. That’s sound to me).
Liked RELATER, STIRRUP CUP, MEDALLISTS and DEMIST.
Thanks Eileen for the great blog.
Thanks Tramp for the nice puzzle.
Enjoyed this.
Regarding DEIST, Chambers has for deism: belief in the existence of God without acceptance of any religion or message revealed by God to man. So by that definition a deist is arguably the least “religious” of believers – so the clue is not exactly wrong, but maybe pushing it a little.
Thanks T&E
Ah well, I only missed on one. Given I couldn’t justify either ‘relator’ or ‘relater’ for what turned out to be RELATER it was a 50% chance and the coin came down wrong way up. There were another three I couldn’t parse (PEN_PUSHER, MAMMOGRAM, and the ‘go’ part of LUMBAGO (although I did wonder about “It’s a go” ~= “it’s sound”) but they didn’t have two possible answers for their definitions. But I did see how PIER worked, and I enjoyed the exercise, so thanks, Tramp, and thanks to Eileen for explaining how it all worked.
Managed all but PIER. Forgot about the a=per convention. RELATER I thought had something to do with LATTE with an alternate spelling and didn’t quite parse MEAT LOAF, but all the explanations are clear. RELATER and DETERMINER are clunky words which I can’t imagine ever using! Thanks for the enjoyable puzzle and the necessary explanations in the blog.
We can count on Tramp for an enjoyable puzzle. Favourites 13a UNITS (surface), 22a LUMBAGO (ditto), 7d GOOIER (great word), 15d MEDALLISTS (“menus” = MEAL LISTS), 20d NUMBER (nice concise clue)
Couldn’t solve 11a (RECITER? REFUTER? ROASTER? I thought of RELATER but couldn’t parse it (but “latte” has two T’s!) — yours looks good Eileen) or 2d GUILTIER. Small kicks to self — should have had them
4d PIER, Eileen, I was chuffed to finally catch “a” = PER (as well as 24a “Man” = PIECE!)
Fun fact, 16a CORRECTING FLUID, known as Liquid Paper, invented by the mother of Michael Nesmith of The Monkees
22a LUMBAGO, Since you ask, I think I thought of “sound” = GO as in an alarm. It was a week ago so I don’t remember for sure! 🙂
Thank you both for a great puzzle and blog
Thanks Tramp for a challenging but ultimately satisfying prize. I needed a word finder for ENTRIES, MAMMOGRAM, and MEAT LOAF and I couldn’t parse RELATER but I enjoyed all else with my favourites being CORRECTING FLUID (great surface), PHOTO, UPHEAVEL, and TUCK. Thanks Eileen for the blog.
Frost @4: Correction Fluid is the common term but Chambers gives CORRECTING FLUID as an alternative so Tramp (as always) is on solid ground.
Great Prize, required a couple of sittings.
Like Frost@4, CORRECTion FLUID caused a hiccup for the clue it affected – DETERMINER – which was also tricksy. Both were goodies IMO. (SZJoe@10 determiner is a [modern?] standard term in grammar; like many such terms, one is more likely to come across it while learning a foreign language rather than one’s own.)
Other faves were MAMMOGRAM for the fiendish parsing, MEATLOAF for the well-disguised fodder, STIRRUP CUP for parting shot, LIPS for the Paulism, and DPHIL for yet another reminder that solutions don’t have to be words, something which always trips me up even when the setter has generously provided a paint-by-numbers parsing such as here.
I couldn’t parse TART = Tom though, so that was a TILT.
Thanks to Eileen and Tramp – and to Dr.WhatsOn@8 for the thoughts on DEIST; I agree with you. It turns out to be the difference between a deist and a theist, something which has never occurred to me before!
Thanks for the blog , this was perfect for a Saturday , good to see the setter turning up the difficulty . I have too many clues circled to list but good to see canoeist Gunther Tuchel get a mention for TOUCHLINE . Chambers93 has DPHIL as a one word abbreviation , I am a MADPHIL .
A good point from Dr.WhatsOn@8 , Kurt Vonnegut invented the religion – The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent – which explains itself .
Mig@11 and Tony@13 , in the UK we all seem to say Tippex the main brand ( Tipp-Ex ) , Chambers93 gives this as CORRECTING FLUID ,
When students ask if there is any I tell them no since – I have only ever made one mistake …
I found this very difficult and it took several tries but I did finally complete it but with several unparsed.
My last one in was TUCK which took me embarrassingly long to solve – a real PDM.
Like others I had CORRECTION FLUID at first which held me up.
Favourites were: STIRRUP CUP (one of my FOIs – made me smile), PEN PUSHER, PIER (pleased for once to remember a = per), TIMPANI, MEDALLISTS
Thanks Tramp and Eileen
Very nice to see a blog from Eileen again. Thank you.
I found some clues difficult to parse, but there were some super ones here too. MEDALLISTS was my favourite.
Morning Eileen, thanks for the excellent blog: you’re on form as is Tramp with an excellent puzzle. The difficulty and misdirection notches really turned up for a Prize which is always appreciated here. Some lovely surfaces and neat use of classic crossword favourites (a for per, gam for school) and the new (for me
too) use of sound for go in LUMBAGO.
Like many here, RELATER was the last one in for me and needed to come here for parsing.
Thanks both, and for the explanation of ‘I’ meaning newspaper – I had always assumed it was I for Indepedent along the lines of FT that appears every so on.
I finished this one just yesterday – phew! The only one I struggled to parse was MAMMOGRAM.
Thanks to Mig @ 11 for the fun fact and Roz @ 16 for the chuckle!
Great xw, Tramp, and thanks, Eileen.
Thought of HOKIER or ROSIER for 7D but idiotically rejected any word containing OOI as impossible. The parsing brings back memories of the Eric Idle character in the famous Monty Python sketch. Thanks Eileen for parsing the several I couldn’t. I had ‘does it go’ equalling ‘is it sound’ but no word for word replacement came to mind.
All filled in but with an embarrassing number of ?s.
I’m an admirer of Tramp but felt some of the necessary parsings here just a little too contrived to be enjoyable.
Brava, Eileen, for unravelling these.
A difficult solve for me but I got there in the end. I liked the girlfriend covering boobs at work for CORRECTING FLUID, the model inspired with sexy pictures for PHOTOS, and the Paul cryptic with two anagrinds for UPHEAVAL.
Thanks Tramp and Eileen
Well, I finished it. But the parsing of about half of the across clues were just beyond me. The down clues seemed much friendlier!
Thanks a lot, Eileen, for the super blog and comments. Thanks to others for the kind words.
“Go” as in “what time did the alarm go?”
Neil
Roz@16 that must have been a really big mistake if you used up all the Tippex to fix it 🙂
Thanks Tramp and Eileen. Finished on Wednesday, but I came here for the parsing of several solutions all already mentioned above. Aren’t we all now curious to know what Roz’s only mistake was? (typographically speaking) Sorry mig, we crossed!
I thought this was great as a prize crossword.
Misdirection of ‘lead’ for heavy metal in MEAT LOAF fooled me for a while. GOOIER is an accessible word with no consonants in the middle. LUMBAGO and RELATER being super-chewy.
Thanks Eileen – good to see you back in the blogging chair, and thanks to Tramp for a good puzzle, and also for dropping in.
Plenty of head-scratching, but everything went in eventually, with a few bits of parsing to resolve by visiting this site, such as Tom for TART; it could have been Tramp I suppose, but all are terms I am a bit squeamish about appearing in a Guardian crossword. Also 5D, a neat construction for DETERMINER, a grammatical term I wasn’t familiar with but perhaps should be. TEGS and GAM would have been unfamiliar too, but for previous crossword appearances.
Highlights for me: CORRECTING FLUID (for the naughty, seaside postcard definition) and PIER (for combining crossword classics a = PER with newspaper = I).
Roz @16: In the US we refer to correction fluid as ‘White-Out’, the main brand sold here. Everyone had a bottle when everyone had a typewriter but that’s no longer the case.
SimpleS @20: I believe ‘I’ for Independent is valid; often solvers will say ‘GIFT’ crosswords meaning Guardian-, Independent, and the Financial Times.
There are two main brands of CORRECTING FLUID in the US, and I’ve heard both names used generically: Liquid Paper and White-Out (spelled without the H on the bottle). But of course, the substance is now obsolete, so I assume kids these days don’t even have a name for it.
My last one in for this puzzle was MEAT LOAF, but looking back I can’t see why. Both LUMBAGO and RELATER were trickier clues. Mr. Loaf was, I may remind you, one of those who tragically (in the hubris sense) died of Covid after having denounced vaccines, so I may not have been thinking of him.
Definitely Tippex here in a little bottle , the students still use it , especially for lab work which must be done by hand .
My one mistake – I once thought I had done something wrong but in the end it turned out I hadn’t .
Roz@35 😁
Very late to the forum today – a funny thing happened on my way to it, you might say. I can’t say I recall this puzzle as being particularly testing, and I’m surprised that experienced solvers seem to have had difficulties with RELATER and the Tippex clue – just go with the anagram fodder. I do remember staring at 21a for around 10 minutes after I had wrapped up everything else: a five-letter word D–H–L? I arrived at it after simply submitting to the instructions in the clue, which I should just have done earlier, really. Ironically, I am a DPhil, but I thought that it was a bit niche. Does any university other than Oxford prefer that to PhD?
Roz@35 That’s a classic! There are many variations, with various attributions. I encountered it in John Lazarus’ play VILLAGE OF IDIOTS, where the Rabbi says “I, too, made a mistake once. I thought I was wrong about something, but I wasn’t!” I guess the Rabbi didn’t need Tippex either (for the puzzle reference)
Balfour @37 I found RELATER difficult because STIRRUP CUP was a nho and a late entry. GUILTIER was late from going round the grid from NE on the second pass. All meaning I was looking for a word like ER**T*R, I also felt LATER could be derived from ‘come back’ making ‘back for coffee’ seem less sound.
Rich@39…and I couldn’t get past “come back for coffee” = RE-LATTE. It was obviously wrong, but my brain wouldn’t let go of it
Once again a bit late to the blog, even after two weeks off. We really don’t have much original to say since, as usual, other contributers seem to have covered all bases, but it is worth writing if only to welcome Eileen back to the fold.
Yes, it was a very testing but super puzzle, for which our first pass yielded nothing at all, but Mr Tuchel kicked us off once we realised to separate ‘one’ from ‘side’. Steady progress was then made mainly by spotting the disguised anagrams together with a few moments of inspiration before putting the last ‘piece’ in place!
However, we did have seven answers still to reconcile and, as with Eileen and others, RELATER and LUMBAGO left us uncertain. Too many excellent clues to name, but thanks to Tramp and Eileen for their stalwart work.
Balfour#37
I had the same question about DPhil so I looked it up. There’s a website that says that it’s used by Oxford and occasionally Sussex and York. Surprising in a way that it should be Oxford that uses the English Doctor of Philosophy and the rest that use the Latin Philosophiae Doctor and if PhD why MA (Master of Arts) not AM (Artium Magister)?
Late to the party — catching up patchworkily from six days out of town.
A few parsings/assemblings, notably MAMMOGRAM, were too convoluted for me, but many were fun.
I’ve never heard of a DETERMINER as a grammatical class, it’s apparently a new idea. Don’t think I’ll need it. Nouns, verbs, adjectives et al will probably suffice.
Thanks to Tramp and (hooray!) Eileen.
I still feel a delighted surprise when I see your name as blogger, Eileen. The novelty may not wear off right away.