Guardian 26,007 by Gordius

50 comments on “Guardian 26,007 by Gordius”

1. 2d is distinctly tasteless.

   EMI is a record label, ‘musical?’ indeed.

   [Aston] VILLA is a football team.

   Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) is a plant species in the genus Foeniculum (treated as the sole species in the genus by most botanists).

   Nigella is a genus of about 14 species of annual plants in the family Ranunculaceae, native to southern Europe, north Africa, south and southwest Asia. Common names applied to members of this genus are nigella, devil-in-a-bush or love in a mist.

   Goodness knows how that gem got through.

   No idea about European corn.

   And one of the worst available grids too.

2. aston villa (eleven)

3. Ble is French for wheat.

   I actually quite enjoyed this!

4. Thanks, UY.

   Late to this after driving through half the night. I’m with Muffyword in that I thought this was one of Gordius’s better ones. I was held up by putting “racket” for RAPPER and failed on FROM, entering “prim”. Both times, the correct solution was far better than my feeble effort. 🙁

   EMIRATE is becoming a bit of an old chestnut.

   sidey @1, fennel-flower is “a ranunculaceous plant of the genus Nigella” according to Chambers – I thought this was quite a nice clue!

5. I did this as 4 small puzzles: first completed was SW, last NE. I liked 4d, 13a, 16/20, 3d, 22a, and favourite was 11a FROM.

   New word for me today was RIPARIAN.

   I could not parse 23d, 12 (the Nigella bit), 26a (the Aston VILLA bit), 21d the BLE bit) , 2d (the BIN bit – I think this is weird, and I agree with Sidey@1 that it is also tasteless).

   Thanks for the blog, Uncle Yap. I agree that EMI = ‘musical’ was a bit of a stretch.

6. Enjoyed this. Very jocular puzzle I thought, a lot of clues depending more on double meanings than on normal wordplay, without being straight DDs.

   I don’t have a problem with 2d on account of the loss of life. It tends to be accidents which bring liners’ names to our attention and Costa Concordia sounds more like a placename unless you recall the exact news item, so there’s that going for it; Titanic would have been too obvious as would eg QE2 (unless it was maybe disguised as quantitative easing). But I didn’t think play on words worked all that well – unless I’m missing some connection between COPE and BIN.

   All the other “jokes” were fine and worked well I thought. Naughty overtones in 3d – or weren’t we supposed to notice that?

7. Oh yeah – thanks for the blog Uncle Y.

8. Thanks Uncle Yap and Gordius
   I enjoyed this, though I failed on MEGAN (good clue, but too many possible words fitted the pattern for me to work through).
   I particularly liked CARNAL and ETHICS. “Just William” was televised quite recently, so Violet Elizabeth Bott isn’t as obscure as she might have been.

9. Not my favourite crossword but EMIRATE is better than it’s credited for above, I think: EMI being a record label, an EMI RATE could fancifully be a score given by them presumably for musical qualities. I like this tendency of Gordius’s to ask the solver to view the wordplay in the answer as a whole, rather than broken into bits, much in evidence here. Thus a DOG M.A. is a master of hounds (so not really a charade at all), R.E. does not mean ‘bible’ but an R.E. FORM might be a bible class, R.I.P. ARIAN is a prayer for a deceased heretic (if Gordius had said ‘the deceased’, it could be just a charade – but as it stands it can’t). To me it feels (tenuously, no doubt) like a kind of exuberance crossword setters were supposed to show back in the day but have forgotten.

   I don’t see BIN/COPE and I don’t know why a RAPPER is a player of *loud* music; I suspect people tend to find any music they don’t like loud and rap isn’t to Gordius’s taste. And what a rubbish grid. The Grauniad have standard ones, don’t they? Can’t they retire this one?

10. Thanks to UY for the blog. I had VILLA from VI and (ALL round) but failed to see where 11 came in.

    I do not like clues like 24: (part 1) turns (part 2). I quite quickly spotted CAMUS/SUMAC but had to wait for a crossing answer to decide just which one to put in.

11. Thanks UY and Gordius

    The usual mixture of cleverness and iffiness of one sort or another.

    I was held up for a time in the NW quarter but got there in the end.

    I missed the direct link between Fennel and Nigella and thought the ‘NN’ might be ‘Ns’ names like Nigella.

    I ‘failed’ on 8a – I missed ‘Megan’ and plumped for ‘Bevan’ (B + Evan).

    I liked 9a, 15d (the anagram was surprising) and 23d.

12. Thanks, UY.

    I found this tougher than most Gordius puzzles; like tupu I was held up in the NW quadrant for quite a while. Grid didn’t help, of course. Some good clues, though: I liked 10a, 15d, 18d, 21d, 23d.

    Like sidey @1 I was puzzled by 12a, associating FENNEL with Foeniculum spp; I have never come across love-in-a-mist referred to as ‘fennel-flower’. ‘Player of loud music’ = RAPPER? ‘Deli product’ = HORS D’OEUVRES?

    And like JollySwagman, I thought 3d rather salacious for this setter (‘roger’ in ‘duct’, indeed) – I spotted this possible double definition parsing before realising that it was a straightforward container clue.

13. Thanks, UY.
    Surely Violet E (whom I think quite well-known enough for this (I’ll thcweam and thcweam until I’m thick. I can, you know)) would have said Ethicth?

14. Thanks Gordius and Uncle Yap.

    Liked HORS D’OEUVRES very much and there were plenty of nicely constructed clues (MARMOSET and CARNAL stood out for me), but like some others I wasn’t satisfied with EMIRATE, found BIN LINER dodgy on at least two levels, thought RAPPER didn’t really make sense and in the end was too grumpy to enjoy the rather clever VILLA.

15. Awful right from 1 acros where the ‘double-duty’ is so naff!! Then ‘names’ again two clues later, oh deat. And i too found the ship reference a bit much . And BLE??! Come ON! Then the grid is SO shocking.

    Thank you to Uncle Yap
    Rowly.

16. I’m glad that I wasn’t the only one to go for BEVAN at 8a – thanks tupu for making me feel better. Down to earth once again after two good days solving the Times. Crosswords have a way of enforcing humility.

17. Thanks for clarifications of 17 & 26.
    I chose wrong bit of ‘rail’ at 9 to give BULLINESS, which approximately fits definition, but isn’t really a word’
    I agree a RAPPER isn’t necessarily loud. and wasn’t happy about BIN LINER, either.

18. I’m not sure that this works any better, but I interpreted 2dn as the Costa Concordia was a liner, but isn’t any more – it’s “bin liner” (been?).
    Actually that’s fairly dreadful, isn’t it?

19. People often complain about grids – I have to admit that this leaves me baffled. What are the pet hates that make a grid bad, and conversely what do people feel makes a grid pleasing?

20. Thanks Gordius and Uncle Yap.

    I particularly liked the ironic HORS DOEUVRES as part of a mini French theme in the SW corner. Many a comedian used to come out with horse doovers as part of a French sketch. I have actually seen the rogue ultimate S on menus in France! (Almost as annoying as pannini’s!!)

    Last in was MEGAN, which produced a groan.

    Giovanna x

21. In 3d, why does Roger = R rather than, say, OK? Romeo would have been better: and would have fitted the solution!

    And I know I’m in a minority here but I don’t care for the induct device of running separate words to get her.

22. Hi George @16 and Muffin @18

    It’s been said before that a problem with Gordius is that it is sometimes hard to know how far he’s willing to go with his clues. So one is sometimes willing to let inertia step in (as I did on Bevan and in trying to parse ‘fennel’) earlier than one might with a more rigorous setter. At the same time, I have to admit that his clues quite often turn out to be better than one thinks they are at first.

23. David Mop @ 21
    Interesting point – it makes me think that the “salacious meaning” (of Roger) was decidedly intentional.

24. Excellent comment by Mr A Writinghawk @9. I think the point about “a kind of exuberance crossword setters were supposed to show back in the day but have forgotten” is right.

    A witty puzzle, but a bad blog (it’s ok to miss all the jokes, NOT ok to write that first paragraph. The ‘obscurity’ complaint also seems wrongheaded – see comments 8 and 13 above for instance).

    I’ve followed this site for a while. Gordius, who I always find amusing and rewarding, seems to attract a surprising number of mistaken complaints. It gives the impression of a lot of bad workmen blaming their tools.

25. Poor Rowland – he suffers so much solving Gordius puzzles each week so that he can come on here and point out to us the technical imperfections the rest of us have missed, thus saving Paul B the job.

    Myself, I know which setters I don’t like and I just don’t do their puzzles. Works well for me.

    There is of course no 1 across – presumably the double duty he is referring to is “name” in 8 across – which is such an extraordinarily elegant clue that you have to question the blanket rule by which dogmatists outlaw such clues.

    I have often felt that double duty on the wordplay/def overlap like that should be an allowable construction. It usually works best in longer clues and there are some short ones where it does just seem like a fudge but, for reasons that are maybe hard to define, 8a here seems to me to be one which works very well.

    Splitting a clue in two parts (with or without a linkword) to isolate a definition and a wordplay is after all just an arbitrary convention that we have all become accustomed to – nothing more – so why not allow some others?

    As for blé – that’s French for wheat – don’t folk learn these things at school any more. Where’s the problem?

26. very enjoyable. but what is the connection between bin and cope? i still can’t parse this clue.

27. @xjp – I think muffin’s interpretation @#18 is the intended one.

28. Jolly Swgaman, you are funny too!!

    I think you are joking anyway, but I don’t miond if you en joy a puzzle when I don’t — it’s okay if you think I am stuffy! I just like to have all the bits equal the answer part, not to confuse, becaue that’s isn’t really fair. Not to me anyway. Okay?

    Thanks
    Rowly (going now to the beer garden).

29. PS I did not know BLE, so maybe I’ am the only one!!

30. Perhaps he used “cope with” instead of “salvage”? I saw it as straightforward and rather clever.

31. Who’d be a crossword setter?

32. Well, I thought it was pretty good, although the top left corner was a struggle. I do agree that the grid is pretty poor as there are so few links between the four corners, so it’s barely a ‘crossword’.

    Thanks to UY and Gordius.

33. I thought “untoward” was “away” & that was me on the rocks…. not sure I get 2D despite the best efforts of folks here & elsewhere to twist a parse.
    oh well.

34. Mitz @14: The problem with this grid is that each corner is almost totally isolated (intersecting each neighbouring corner in a single character), so as drofle (@32) rightly says, it’s ‘barely a crossword’. Good grids have more connectivity so it’s easier to make progress, getting help with the difficult clues by solving the ones you find easier.

    On reflection I think BIN LINER is taken to mean to ‘discard’ (Chambers) a cruise ship in your fleet as a way of ‘coping with’ the fact that it has run aground and been smashed up on the rocks. Weak, but better than anything else going, I think. ‘Deal with’ would have been a bit better.

35. I quite enjoyed this puzzle and the grid didn’t put me off. The NW corner took the longest to solve. I entered the LINER part of 2dn quite early on but decided to wait on the final checker before I completed the clue. The corner was only opened up when I finally remembered lug=sail. Once I had DELUGE I saw BURLINESS and FENNEL, which in turn gave me the excellent CARNAL (no sense of humour?), VERSIFY, MEDICATED, and finally the not-so-excellent BIN LINER with a shrug. At 21dn I’d forgotten that “ble” is French for wheat, but USABLE had to be the answer from the definition.

36. I’ve been here since ’78 and I still took ages to twig blé 🙁

37. Re sad old Swaggers, I’d say that on the contrary, it’s curious how many IDs can come on, especially in Guardian threads, whenever anyone (and there are several of us, as today’s comments prove) says anything about crosswording fairness. Are all those IDs you, Jolly Trolly? No? Well there you go. So please, please try to keep it in your pants, there’s a nice chap. Sorry about the cricket.

    Thanks Gordius for your usual provocative romp, and to UY for his well-penned blog.

38. Usual Gordius curate’s egg.

    Finished it but I didn’t really enjoy this one. I’m not sure why!

    Still don’t see what “cope” is doing in 2d and although I did French for 5 years at school, worked on a six month project in Paris/Poole and have spent many months on holiday in the country I have never come across “ble”. Luckily as it was Gordius I didn’t spend too much time worrying about complete parsing.

    Thanks to UY and Gordius.

    I’ve a premonition that tomorrow will be Pasquale. (We have to pay for last week 🙂 )

39. And provocative it was.
    Enjoyable and amusing but nowhere near perfect.
    But then Gordius probably doesn’t want to be.

    My PinC, for example, was convinced that ‘vouch’ needed ‘for’ (in the clue) to be an alternative for ‘verify’. She also found 2d somewhat tasteless, I agree Gordius could have chosen another liner. And she wasn’t sure whether ‘lines’ = ‘track’ (plural = singular). But just like the ‘Bible class’, ‘liable to miss the bus’, ’11’, ‘musical score’ and even the amusing homophone in our first entry (23d) were all a bit loose, they were nonetheless defendable and acceptable.

    As others made clear, I thought ‘Player of loud music’ is certainly not right to define RAPPER (22ac). The music is not always loud and moreover a rapper is not a player. He (or she) just uses his (or her) voice.

    We made one mistake: 24ac (CAMUS).
    We entered DUMAS. How on earth should one know (when far away from resources) that sumac is a bush and samud is not.
    But we knew that blé was French for wheat.

    An ‘entertaining’ puzzle that took more time than necessary because of the Boatman-like ( 🙂 ) grid.

    Thanks UY.

40. I still can’t get the reason for the answer ‘villa’ – which I knew it must be – from ‘6 round all = 11’. It doesn’t relate to the answer from 11 down, ‘from’ or the number 11. Am I being dim?

41. Alan Rogers @40

    Here is the part of the SOED

    eleven

    …..

    5 A set of eleven; a thing having a set of eleven as an essential or distinguishing feature; spec. a team of eleven at soccer, hockey, or cricket. m18.

    …..

    Aston Villa are an “eleven”

42. Sil @39: He couldn’t have chosen another liner (as I realise having understood the clue), because why would you bin it if it was still perfectly seaworthy?

    Still, whether it was in poor taste I leave others to judge. I have no complaints, but perhaps it just shouldn’t have been in-clue-did.

43. Sorry, Mr A Writinghawk, but from a cryptic point of view Gordius could have chosen any disaster vessel to make the clue work. So perhaps he should have chosen one that’s not so fresh in people’s mind. Why not the Titanic, for example?

    I still agree with my PinC that the combination of this particular liner with plastic bags (filled, on some (other) occasions with lifeless bodies) should ideally have been avoided.
    On the other hand, I am not as sensitive as she sometimes is. 🙂

44. @39 I said that we made one mistake.
    The bush/writer at 24ac.

    Apparently, I didn’t read UY’s blog well enough because, when I saw the solution of this puzzle on the Guardian site, I thought “what the heck is this?”.

    I really thought 24ac had to be the writer and not the bush.
    ‘Bush turns’ ‘writer’ is much better than ‘Bush’ ‘turns writer’.
    In the grid both are possible, so a bad bad clue.

45. Another Bringloe hissy fit. He obviously needs to see someone about this problem.

    “please try to keep it in your pants, there’s a nice chap”

    that’s allowable here is it? – or just for Bringloe – the saddo who can’t get a gig on the Guardian – so he trolls it. Bizarre logic there.

    We all know your French is no good Bringles but this one’s obvious enough:

    Qui s’excuse s’accuse – or try methinks he doth protest too much.

    Sadly for you your odious style shows through in all your various contributions way too obviously – and BTW I only ever use the one username myself – no axes to grind – although I do have to admit that rudeness from snotty-nosed kiddies like you does grate a bit with some of us oldies.

    Nothing sad about me Bringloe – no frustrated career ambitions here sonny – plenty of dosh – plenty of time to enjoy life – happy as Larry – especially after my cricket team just gave the Aussies a pasting – but then it would be typical of you in your feeblemindedness to jump to the conclusion that residence in a place denotes support for the local team.

    Still – mustn’t distract you – you’ll no doubt be wanting to preserve your intellectual energies for some prog-rock drumming practice.

46. @SIl #39

    Vouch can be used thusly (example for Collins):

    Those scientists who carried out the study vouch that a fat-free diet lowers the libido, especially among men.

    where “verify” will fit in its place.

    I cannot vouch for the veracity (or otherwise) of the statment itself. 🙂 🙂 🙂

47. Re my own post @44: I shouldn’t write comments after midnight.
    I still think 24ac is a bad clue. It is ambiguous and having a ‘writer’ as definition is just as plausible as the other way around.
    Where I went wrong, of course, was in saying that “in the grid both are possible” which is not true.
    In that sense, having ?U?A?, this clue is OK (but unsatisfying, IMO).

    BTW, Jolly S and Paul B, why don’t you exchange email addresses?
    🙂
    Perhaps, some may find this mini-war amusing but for me that is only the case when it is really about the content of crosswords.
    Posts like @45 (which is merely about throwing mud at each other in a rather uncivilised way) I find a waste of space, to say the least.

48. No war on my part – just find myself on the receiving end of endless trolling from the venomous B-list setter, just like RCW used to. Exactly what a setter is doing trolling other setters’ puzzle is of course something of a mystery – doubly so since he now says that he would like to set for the Guardian and yet a brief summary of his comments to date, removing the supercilious sneering etc, would be “The Guardian crossword editor is incompetent.”

    I should have stuck to my previous policy of ignoring him – as most others do.

    Anyway – noted that you have a problem with my post at #45 but no problem with:

    “please try to keep it in your pants, there’s a nice chap”

    from Bringloe so it’s fairly clear where you stand.

49. JS, I said “Posts like @45”, taking yours as a very clear example of how we should not behave at Fifteensquared (IMO).

    According to your last lines, you apparently feel the need to put me on one particular side of the ‘conflict’.

    Don’t get me wrong, I think Paul B’s regular overreaction to your posts are also very inappropriate.

    Where we perhaps differ is that I respect his knowledge of crosswords very much. I do not always agree with him but I try to understand what he means and why he says what he says (about crosswords, I hasten to say, not the trollogisms!). On top of that, I do like the quality of his puzzles and I can assure you I am not the only one. Neo and Tees B-list setters (as you put it)? Don’t think so.

    Please, don’t make me part of this Us & Them game.

    I just think it’s time to stop all these personal attacks launched in a public space that’s not meant for this kind of nonsense – indeed, from both sides.

    Or just have a pint together! 🙂

50. @Sil

    A-list and B-list are terms derived from the celebrity world . B-list actors are not incompetent actors – they are actors who have not achieved the necessary renown to become A-list.

    🙂

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