Guardian 25,989 by Arachne

49 comments on “Guardian 25,989 by Arachne”

1. Brilliant. Thank-you Spider-woman and UY.

   Exceptional crossie again – ‘Go Cherie’ indeed.

   Just realised I had 9d wrong tense (more haste etc).

2. Thanks, UY and Arachne, the SUPER-DUPER. Nice to see the trademark STRAYER.

   The strangest clue for me was HYPERSONIC – I spent too long trying to work out how I was going to get rid of the “redundant” HY and replace it with SU…. doh!

3. What an amazing puzzle. Thanks so much A and the entire blog team.

   Ticked 27a early on for its evocative surface but then stared at so many for so long it’s a wonder the paper didn’t catch fire. 7d prolly the longest. Must add to my QM checklist – when all else fails remember who the setter is – A’s old trick of using the female option when most of us are stuck in the old-fashioned male default – serves us right I s’pose.

   15d another good one but twigged reasonably early there – thanks for the TB link on that one UY – my ultimate musical hero. Of course that’ll be Ralph Sharon on piano – nobody else can tinkle like that. How ever could he have dropped him?

4. A very clever puzzle indeed. I was stuck in the SW for quite a while, even though the answers turned out to be quite simple. The breakthrough came when I separated ‘quiet time’.

   The Tony Bennett and the B-list clue caused me the most trouble, but they were also the wittiest.

5. This puzzle was a great challenge and took me a bit longer than I expected.

   I could not parse 25d, 27a (I thought it was half each of ‘mild’ & ‘ten’ and could not see the point of ‘navy cut’), 26a (well-hidden!), 22d, 3d and now I realise that I did not fully parse 14a.

   I liked 6d, 7d, 11a, 24a, 21d, 18d, 17a, 28a, 2d, 4d.

   New word for me today was CODON, and after reading this blog COD = false and BLISTER = annoying person.

   Thanks, Uncle Yap.

6. 6d
   Its Berkshire Hunt by the way

   Possibly the most distasteful clue I have ever seen

7. Thanks Uncle Yap and Arachne
   So many great clues, but SUPER DUPER takes the biscuit, and HYPERSONIC must be one of the longest hidden words yet.
   A couple I failed to parse – UNMAN and MUSSEL – and I had to look up the equivalence of “beetle” with PROTRUDE.
   I always expect a great puzzle when I see Arachne’s name at the top, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed this morning.

8. Thanks, UY [and NeilW 😉 ]

   I used to think that Arachne couldn’t get much better – but she keeps proving me wrong. This was just one gem after another, with wonderful wit, variety of wordplay and misdirection, producing a 11ac whole.

   I think I have more clues with ticks against them than without – but I think GAUCHERIE tops them all.

   Bravissima, Arachne – and huge thanks for giving cuch a brilliant start to the day.

9. Top drawer stuff from our Spider Lady.

   TAUNTS is such a clever device.

   All in, but a number unparsed, so thanks NeilW & Uncle Yap.

   KENNELS mad me laugh, as did the “physician heal thyself” reference, but the plum was “Go Cherie”. (Kicked myself for only thinking of Tony.)

   Every now and then I think I must by now have seen all possible devices, and then a clever setter delights me again.

   Bravi, Arachne.

10. Fabulous puzzle as spidery as usual. Nice to see some molecular biology to educate the literati.

    Thanks UY, especially for the parsing of UNMAN and MUSSEL.

    I especially loved SUPER-DUPER, SPECULA, HYPHENATE and the priceless GAUCHERIE

11. It was a good puzzle, but one that I had to struggle with to finish. Partly the grid (I’ve gone on about it enough times to have annoyed the crap out of everyone about it, so I’ll say no more…) and partly the pretty fiendish clueing.

    I too was another entering SUPERSONIC, because I couldn’t understand what was going on. But plenty of stuff to savour – thank you to the setter. And to UY for the blog.

    Steve at no 6: it’s ‘it’s’, by the way. Distasteful is in the eye of the beholder and all that.

12. …….. oh, and TAUNTS

13. K’s D @11 re 6d; perfectly put, couldn’t agree more.

14. Steve @ 6 – Chambers says Berkeley.

15. Oh lovely Arachne, you do know how to cheer up a dull morning. Thank you for the great fun – I put dots where Eileen puts ticks, but would agree with her that there are very few clues unmarked today. GAUCHERIE wins top prize but an early ‘smiler’ was 20d.

16. You can habe berks in The guardian, it’s okay. And is’t GO for GAU, plus the resty, if you hadn’r meant that.

17. Thanks to UY for the blog. You explained several cases where I had the right answer without understanding why e.g. Ban Ki-Moon!!!

18. Kathryn’s Dad @ 11

    I think if anyone calls a moron (a medical condition) a c**t (a term for part of the female anatomy generally used as an aggressive and unpleasant insult) it is genuinely distasteful. Not in the eye of the beholder.

    Maybe too PC for you.

    Apologies for missing the apostrophe.

    Edited by Admin

19. Okay Syteve, but not sure ‘Berk’ carries tyhe same ‘aggression’ really!. I’m sure i t has been used in sitcoms etxc.

20. Arachne’s my favourite setter. Whenever I see her name, I know I’m about to be entertained, informed and educated. And if I never quite manage to finish her crosswords, or parse all the solutions, that’s perfectly all right.
    I’m a 51-year-old bloke, so the biggest chuckle today was for 10a. Other chuckles were less rueful.
    Thanks Arachne, and thanks Uncle Yap and NeilW for the excellent blog. s

21. Thanks UY and Arachne.

    I went out mid-morning with 26a unsolved and returned just now to see the answer at once.

    A very good puzzle as many have said.

    I was not aware of the rhyming slang origin of ‘berk’ so its connections were unknown to me.

    I had to check beetle = protrude, codon = gentic info source, and specula though they were clearly correct.

    I particularly liked 12a, 14a, 16a, 26a, 29a, 1d, 4d, 7d, 9d, 18d and 25d among the bevy of clever clues.

22. Steve at no 18. I’ve never done PC and I don’t usually do individual spats on 225, but the only reason c**t has come into this discussion is because of UY’s explanation of the clue. The surface itself has no unpleasant or aggressive implications. I’m sure 99 people out of 100 would use the word BERK harmlessly without ever being aware of its origin. That’s language for you.

    I presume from your comments that you don’t like ‘nuts’, ‘crazy’ or similar words as anagrinds either. Like I said, it’s just language.

    Edited by Admin

23. This was brilliant! Thoroughly enjoyed it throughout, even though I needed to come here for 16, 17 and 18, and the correction of a couple of my errors. Favourites all over the place.

    One (tiny) thing, if I may: I had PROTRUDE, but decided it couldn’t be (didn’t get the beetle meaning) because of the word “in” in the clue, from which I assumed P and T would appear adjacent and within the anagram. Would have thought “with” would have been better? But I’m learning!

24. Why is the word “overlooked” in 6?
    k d @ 22 I agree completely about berk. I’ve used the word loads of times without realising its origin,and nobody has ever pulled me up over it.

25. Thanks Uncle Yap, superb! I’m not surprised you got in some outside help to blog this one.

    Quite shocked to learn the derivation of berk, it sounds so mild. I wonder who I might have inadvertently offended over the years? Cherie Blair eluded me completely.

26. @Billyk

    I asked myself the same question and it took ages before the penny dropped. “Regularly overlooked” means that the regular (even numbered) letters in “our town” should be ignored (overlooked). Doh! She’s a sly one that Arachne.

27. Perhaps, amidst the attacks on Steve for expressing an opinion, it’s time for a reminder that the word used by UY in 6d is offensive and never used in polite company. Its use in a publicly available blog concerns me far more than the sniping at Steve’s comment which in my view is perfectly justified, as is his opinion.

28. Steve
    @18. “moron (a medical condition)” is grammatically inept. And the word you are thinking of is ‘cretin’.
    @6. There is nothing distasteful about the clue.

    Uncle Yap. Your commentary on MORONS is either distasteful to the point of being wilfully outrageous, or plain ignorant. If you just wanted, gratuitously, to show off your knowledge of the origin of ‘berk’ then see ‘c**t’ in the on-line Collins. If you really think the three words are synonymous see ‘rhyming slang’ in Wiki as well.

    It’s such a pity that all this nonsense should be attached to Arachne’s superlative puzzle.

    On the Guardian site it is suggested that you are both … well … 6ds.

    Edited by Admin

29. rhotician @ 28. I couldn’t agree more with your comment to UY.
    Everyone knows what a berk is. Providing its derivation is irrelevant and superfluous.
    The word used has no place on 225.

30. @MickInEly

    Thank you. Doh, indeed. I took regularly to mean every second letter starting from the first so I got my “orons.”

31. Ridiculous. Words are just words. We are human beings, our anatomical parts are what makes us physically human. To say that any such part, or the name of it, is offensive is therefore to say that the whole is offensive. So human beings are offensive?

    Sentences on the other hand can be seriously insulting, but that requires the wit and intelligence to create such effectively. Morons, being stupid, can’t do that, so they pick on words to abuse. We, being intelligent, should not become sensitive little flowers and pander to them. We should reclaim words to be just that, words.

    Seriously hard crossword, btw.

32. I have only just got around to doing this puzzle, and I thought it was an absolute belter. It took me longer than I’d planned for but I stuck with it and was pleased to finish it without recourse to aids, although UNMAN was my LOI and went in with a shrug because it couldn’t have been anything else, but I couldn’t parse it.

    I was held up in the SE corner for a while because I had put in MINX at 27ac which fitted the wordplay, but was obviously a much looser fit for the definition. I was also held up by the GAUCHERIE/BREAK crossers.

    As far as the “controversy” about 6dn is concerned I’m in complete agreement with K’s D@22 and rhotician@28. I have always used “berk” and “moron” to mean idiot, despite the origins of the former.

33. Blimey.

    So late to the party today that I only dropped by to thank Arachne for a wonderfully witty, challenging and enjoyable puzzle, and whoever was on duty for the blog for explaining (as UncleYap has done) the parse for UNMAN which utterly eluded me.

    Even though I was aware of the origin of ‘Berk’ I doubted that it would be explained so frankly here. Well done Uncle Yap! Totally brilliant clue.

34. Just dropping back in to apologise if my earlier comments have taken the discussion off track. I stand by what I’ve said, but more importantly, this is a crossword website, and this was an excellent crossword by Arachne. We should be enjoying that most of all.

35. Mitz, There was no need to explain the origin of ‘berk’ to anyone who knew it and nothing to be said for revealing it to those who did not.
    It was not well done. “It was badly done, indeed!”

36. Well, UY didn’t actually have to drop it in, but he did, and thus joins a long list of the great and good who have done just that, including Chaucer (‘queynte’ it was back then, which later prompted lots of puns by Elizabethan writers on ‘quaint’) and James Joyce. As to Berkshire, Berkeley or Burlington, they’re all used in rhyming slang depending on where you happen to be on the planet. But getting upset about it, goodness me, only a totally King Cnut would do so shurely? I was unfazed.

    In Polish street slang, SUPA DUPA I’m reliably informed replaces wodne dupa (I think, but not quite sure about that) for ‘nice arse’. I think we have one or two fans of the Slavic tongue around here.

37. Arachne gave us a fabulous puzzle, though I didn’t solve all of it.When I do manage all of an arachne , I’ll consider myself at base camp 2.Thanks UY for the explanations.

38. Thanks Arachne for a brilliant puzzle and UY for the parsing. Just in from fabulous Glyndebourne and finished the last clues. Gaucherie was superb and we are suitably educatred on science clues!

39. Wouldn’t normally bother to contribute at this late hour, but this was a beautiful example of wit and creativity from Arachne (as is the norm).
    Couldn’t parse UNMAN.
    Thanks UY

40. Superlative puzzle from Arachne. Best of the year in my opinion!

    Persevered and finished although I had to come here to see parsing of UNMAN.

    I also think 2d should be entered in the “Clue of the Century” competition. (Although I probably wont be around to see the result. 😉 )

    Also lots of fun again re solvers “offended” by clues. See my late comments yesterday.

    Thanks to UY and triple thanks to Arachne

41. Chaucer, Joyce and “Uncle” Yap. Hmmm.

42. I am quite amused at the passion aroused by my very clinical explanation of the etymology of “Berk” which I did not know 24 hours ago. So hurray for Chambers which continues to enlighten this non-native. Anyway, to save the blushes, I have re-written the said word as c**t.

43. I came over to the Guardian on recommendation today (sadly I don’t usually have time for it). I was not disappointed. A beautiful puzzle that had me grinning at practically every clue as they steadily went in. Thanks Arachne and thanks too to UY for the dissection (which I required in places).

44. Uncle Yap – I was fascinated to learn the derivation of berk, so please don’t be put of explaining similar words should they crop up in the future.

45. @rho #28

    ‘“moron (a medical condition)” is grammatically inept.’

    According to all the main dictionaries the current meaning is “a stupid person” and the word is no longer used in the medical/psychological field, probably for that very reason.

    People who use language precisely would have called that issue semantic, not grammatical, but sloppy usage, mainly by ignorant pedants (not including your good self in that of course), has led to most dictionaries tagging “and sometimes also phonology and semantics” onto their descriptions of that previously well-defined word.

46. Good morning all, and apologies for not being able to comment earlier. Thanks, belatedly, to Uncle Yap for his excellent and painstaking blog of my puzzle. As today’s thread refers to a different puzzle I’ll keep this short. Surely the crux of the matter is the distinction between meaning and derivation. The meaning of ‘berk’ these days is well known, and the word has been used in sitcoms such as Only Fools and Horses; it was even to be heard in The Goons as early as the 1950s. The derivation of the word is not so well known, and, whilst fascinating to all who love words, is not relevant to its present day usage. There is a lovely bird called a wheatear, but as far as I know it does not have wheat in its ears, or eat ears of wheat. ‘Nuff said.

47. JS @45: I had a feeling that I was using the wrong word so thanks for reminding me of the distinction. Semantics, grammar, etymology and pronunciation. The better dictionaries are terrific value.

    I also appreciate the irony that so many of us, here and in the other place, misuse and/or abuse words,
    the very things we seek to celebrate.

48. Someone once told me that opinions are like arseholes.

49. Only just got round to solving this, and it was a work of pure cruciverbal genius. Brilliant, with bells and whistles on. A masterpiece of misdirection that avoided any sense of complication and was highly original and inventive. Hats off to the Spiderwoman for a masterclass in the modern cryptic crossword.

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