Independent 7,468 by Dac

16 comments on “Independent 7,468 by Dac”

1. Thank you, Simon. Always a pleasure to solve a Dac as well, and this was no exception. Took me around quarter of an hour to do the majority, and then nearly twice as long to finish the SW corner. MIA MIA and TRAVERTIN were gettable from the wordplay, but I needed the check button and a dictionary to confirm the former.

   I needed your explanation for GUTTER: if I once more fail to see ‘G’ clued as ‘midnight’, I am going to thrash myself with a birch twig, so help me.

   IREFUL I wasn’t so keen on (it’s in the SOED but wouldn’t be my first choice of synonym for ‘angry’); but DARLING and MONOTONIC were very good.

2. I agree with your comments, Simon, very good puzzle. I also had to check TRAVERTIN and MIA-MIA, I thught the latter was something like ??S-MIA for a wee while. IREFUL threw me for a bit as I tried to find some version of FILL UP, TOP UP,… with and E to subtract. I must be getting old when a TANNER is an obsolete coin. I suppose it is technically!

3. Thanks for the blog, Simon, and Dac for the puzzle, which was excellent, not too hard, I found. Favourites, like others have mentioned, CORNISH, MONOTONIC, RAILROAD. I too worked TRAVERTIN out from the friendly wordplay, verifying after.

4. Funnily enough, it was the NE corner that caused me the most problems. I always have a blind spot for corn as a type of cereal – I’ll work my way through wheat, maize, barley, oats, rye etc but never think of corn. I actually had to get the more difficult cocksure before I finally cottoned on to the answer. I quite liked 22 down and 16 down made me think of the Hans Christian Andersen story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.

5. I was puzzled by 10A. As far as I know, ‘testate’ means having a will, which, despite being in the right general are, does not quite jibe with ‘deceased person’s property’. ‘Estate’ does, of course, but leaves the initial ‘t’ hanging. Any ideas?

6. Good point, Peter0. I had to check, but dictionary.com does give “testate” as a noun, meaning “a person who dies testate”, so a deceased person.

7. Thanks for the blog, Simon.

   And thanks Dac for an enjoyable puzzle that started off easy enough for me, but I came unstuck in the SW corner, 25A and 18D (having exhausted what I knew of Oz vocab, I was starting to think Latin, based on the checked letters!).

   10A: I have the same comment as PeterO@5: “testate” is an adjective, or it could be the noun for the person who leaves an estate. The wordplay doesn’t comfortably accommodate either. Or else, there is missing wordplay for the initial “t”.

   P.S. K’sD yesterday – I can guess what number two is, though, compared to other euphemisms and contrary to my expectations, the origin of these 2 seems rather bland, considering the subject matter!

   P.P.S. Because I (and perhaps a few others I imagine) am in a significantly different time zone, I don’t see some of the later posts until my next morning, by which time it’s too late/futile for me to respond, as the active life of that particular blog is over by then.

8. My@7 crossed with Simon@6 (while composing, one doesn’t see any new postings in the meantime). Agree with your @6, but still doesn’t answer PeterO’s and my comment: Using the noun form, “…deceased person’s property…” would give “testate’s estate”.

9. I reckon I’d buy “property mostly revealed by it” as the definition, unless people have better suggestions.

10. The first T in testament is actually covered by “it” which is contracted to ‘t (Collins and Chambers)

11. &Lit, I should have added.

12. So the clue should be interpreted as MEN in ESTATE (preceded) by (i)T?

    I don’t find the contraction of it to ‘t very satisfactory despite the fact that it appears in Collins and Chambers. But ‘t’s not for me to disagree with those august references.

13. Dac is very good at the Ximenean style, as it is called, and I very much liked today’s offering. Super stuff.

14. Some tough stuff in here I thought, but all of it lovely as ever from Dac. One minor correction – 13A is (SNACK HOT RICE)*

15. Some nice stuff, my take on testament has already been confirmed by Eimi anyway. Took too long on airings as it was darkish and misread top as too, I need to get a large print version of the indy it seems. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it! My turn tomorrow, just hope it isn’t Nestor after some of his recent crosswords or you might have to wait awhile!

16. Many very good clues here (especially liked 8D and 16D – very clever), but:

    – 5A: As already pointed out at https://idothei.wordpress.com/2015/08/05/i-cryptic-crossword-1400-dac/, 5A needed amending because of the reference to “last year” (Alistair Darling was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2007 to 2010)[good misdirection though putting just “chancellor”; initially made me think of the/a German chancellor]

    – 10A: Aside from the fact that I find the surface reading clumsy, I’m still not sure how this parses. I’m thinking it’s either TESTA-MEN-T(E) with MOSTLY indicating that the noun TESTATE (i.e. a deceased person) gets shortened to TESTAT, although if that’s the case MOSTLY is in the wrong position in the sentence to indicate this shortening of TESTATE. And that makes the definiton “property [mostly] revealed by it?” — “mostly” doesn’t belong in the definition, and why is there a question mark? Or else it parses as T-ESTA-MEN-T(E) with ESTATE being “deceased person’s property mostly”, but in that case (as has been pointed out already), you’ve then got a T left over at the beginning (which as far as I can tell isn’t clued for). Can anyone put me right?

    – 12A: Not sure why “fully” appears in the clue – seems redundant to me. Is it?

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