Guardian 26,040 / Paul

36 comments on “Guardian 26,040 / Paul”

1. Thanks to Paul. I enjoyed solving this and thanks Eileen for the explanations of some of the parsing I was not sure about or could not fathom e.g. DRY-EYED.

   I liked a lot of the clues and had a good laugh at EDELWEISS. My last arrival was SEANCE and that made me smile, as did your association Eileen of late arrivals with ISIHAC, my favourite Radio 4 comedy programme.

2. Thanks to Eileen for the blog and to Paul for another fine piece of entertainment. The many instances of “leading up the garden [path]” gave me a few nice “d’oh!” moments.

   I share the concern about “ye”=”solver”, especially as Paul could have used “solvers” in the clue with no harm (and maybe some improvement) to the surface reading.

   I thought 14d was a bit weak, but I don’t see any reasonable objection to the wording of 4d – if you add the implicit “that” after “see” then it makes perfect sense.

3. Thanks Paul and Eileen. I thought that this was a relatively easy puzzle for a Friday, but quite enjoyable.

   I liked 6d, 16d, 25a, 22a, 28a & 1a and my favourites were 1d SEANCE & 5d MINCEMEAT.

   New word for me was STRATHSPEY, solvable through the clever wordplay of the clue.

4. Thanks Eileen for a pithily put blog and Paul for a very enjoyable puzzle

   Some very good misdirection as Eileen says.

   I particularly liked 18a, 27a, 4d, 16d and 17d (it took a long moment to see
   re-sort).

5. Thanks, Eileen

   Enjoyable puzzle from Paul with some fine constructions and misdirections, though the surfaces aren’t all up to his best standard. However, 10a has an excellent surface and is my COD. I couldn’t parse CELLULITIS because I was fixated on ‘break up’ as an anagrind: one of his best decoys in a crossword with so many.

   I was also puzzled by the singular YE in 28a. Apart from dialect usage (and the OED quotes Thomas Hardy), this seems to date from the period when the nominative/oblique ye/you forms were still current but second person plural forms started to be used to address single individuals as a mark of respect, as in the French tu/vous distinction (in standard English the language was subsequently re-democratised by abandoning the familiar ‘thou’ in favour of the old plural form for everyone).

   Eileen’s aside on 4d probably refers to my dislike of ‘has’ being abbreviated to ‘apostrophe s’ when it indicates possession. But here the abbreviated ‘has’ is an auxiliary verb, so what’s the problem?

6. Thanks Eileen. As you say, there were lots of neat tricks here, and one foxed me at the end as I considered ‘corrugated’ and CIRCULATED and couldn’t see the why the latter was right. Otherwise it was simply good steady fun, thanks Paul.

7. Yes, enjoyable puzzle with lots of misdirections, as Eileen says.

   Thanks Eileen; I didn’t see the ‘shortly’ as fodder in 17.

   Didn’t know STRATHSPEY, although as Michelle @3 said, it was gettable from the wordplay. Interesting to see SWEETHEART as an answer rather than the device to add an ‘e,’ with a really good surface. Not sure that I can make sense of the surface for 18, however.

8. Not too difficult but splendid, thank you Paul. Thanks to Eileen too for the explanations including the YE in DRY EYED.

   Michelle@3 and Robi@7 may wish to note that if a clue says ‘Scottish dance’ 9 times out of 10 it will turn out to be the good old STRATHSPEY.

9. crypticsue: I’m not sure about “9 times out of 10” for STRATHSPEY: I’d guess it was more often REEL, or perhaps FLING (and occasionally CEILIDH).

10. Andrew@9 – you are, of course, correct, but the STRATHSPEY has turned up at least once a month if not more frequently – not necessarily in the Graun but then I am tragic enough to do all 6 cryptics every day.

11. ….. Andrew @9, ‘nine times out of 10’ maybe relating to length of answer?? 😉

12. Thanks Eileen and Paul. Both terrific as usual. I was itching to point out the multitude of misdirections but there they all were, neatly listed!

    Failed to parse CELLULITIS.

    14 a bit weak, but with the joy that is 22, 16, 19 etc who is complaining.

13. Wonderful Paul puzzle as ever – loved all the misdirections. SEANCE was also last in for me. 16 and 19 my favourites. Thanks also to Eileen for her clear blog.

14. Another solid puzzle from Paul, and a great blog – thanks, both.

    Loved the bluff on APOSTLE.

15. First of all, thanks very much to Paul and Eileen – lovely stuff from both of you as always.

    I’m a man of my word – I promised to report back either way: Brummie has just emailed me to confirm that the ICHOR Nina from Wednesday was a pure, unadulterated, 3 billion to 1 against coincidence. Rowly, PaulB, rhotician – I humbly concede that you were right.

    Brummie does add, however, that “perhaps I was responsible, at an unconscious level, for the insertion of the Nina, thus beating those 3 billion to one odds you quote!”

    And who am I to argue with that?

16. Thank you for some much-needed explanations, Eileen. As you say, lots of misdirections.

    In 12a, please could you (or someone) explain why TAXI is “one of these”

17. Hi Frances

    Re 12ac: it’s a bit cryptic – if you were half-cut [drunk] before 11.00, you might need to take a taxi. [One of those story-telling clues I keep going on about. ;-)]

    Hi Mitz – thanks for that. 😉

18. Thanks, Eileen. I’d never have thought of that!

19. Some lovely eye-watering images in a few clues as usual.

    Good fun.

    Thanks Paul, blogger and posters.

20. I love this puzzle, the irony being that I had time enough to finish it because I was having to sit with my leg elevated because of CELLULITIS!!

21. Thanks Eileen. We couldn’t parse 3d so were very glad that you had sorted that one out in your blog. Your concerns about YE in 26ac completely passed us by as we were quite happy with It being singular.

    We are not sure that this one had as many smiley moments as we sometimes have with Paul but it had some devilish clueing as you mentioned in your preamble.

    A fitting end to the week – thanks Paul!

22. There had to be one, Maureen. Get better soon.

23. How nice of Mitz to come back: congratulations on your honesty, sir! Or madam, of course. It was a lovely coincidence nonetheless, with the puzzle paying tribute to itself, maybe?

    Here, I was intrigued by what must be the ‘imperatival’ usage of ‘wind’. I read through a thread in another place just the other day in which people were saying that this practice is frowned upon by people who solve The Listener. Does anyone know if this is correct?

24. Yes, this was a very enjoyable crossword.
    Even if I found some clues under par (14ac, 15d).
    Also not sure about 12ac (TAXI). I could have asked the same question as Frances did @16 but then not being happy with the reply @17. “one of these?” – what is “these” referring to? TAXI is singular!

    Once more many thanks for the blog, Eileen.
    And these misdirections? Well spotted!

    In fact, I think we may call it a kind of theme today.
    There were at least 8 clues in which a well known indicator wasn’t the indicator.
    Paul must have woven this deliberately (and cleverly) into his crossword.

    10ac: “Openers in” – not initial letters but anagram fodder
    11ac: “curtailed” – not deleting the last letter but anagram fodder
    11ac: “it’s reported” – not a homophone indicator but the definition
    22ac: “we hear” – not not a homophone indicator but part of the anagram fodder
    1d: “welcoming” – not a container indicator but just there for the surface of a cd
    7d: “shelters” – not a container indicator but the definition
    16d: “topless” – not deleting the first letter but an anagram fodder
    17d: “shortly” – not deleting the last letter but the anagram fodder
    19d: “maybe” – not an anagram indicator but an anagram fodder

    One may add the use of “before” in 26ac and “perhaps” in 5d (which is not an anagram indicator here (even though there is an angram of ‘team’ going on) but an indication that we have a reverse device).

    All this can not be a coincidence.
    This is outstanding cluing!

25. What fun it is to be so cleverly misled. Thanks Paul.

26. Mitz, you’re a gentleman. Your scholarship let you down. The odds are “only” 6 million to one. Remarkable but not incredible. Actually what annoyed me was Margana getting me to look for a bloody nina that turned out to be a word I didn’t know. And I’ve already forgotten it.

27. rhotician @26: Of course, that’s assuming equal probability for each letter. If you use the relative frequencies of each letter in the English language, the odds drop another order of magnitude — to around 800,000 to one.

28. Keeper @27: I’ve never been great with arithmetic. I was lucky to be able to do a decent approximation in my head by raising 100/4 to the power 5, treating 1k as a thousand and adding a fifth (and halving it). So thanks for doing it properly. I must say I’m surprised that the effect is an order of magnitude difference.

29. Fantastic puzzle, I loved the theme of “trickery played on inveterate puzzlers”.

    Thanks to Paul and Eileen.

    I didn’t get the Scottish dance, but that didn’t bother me once I got SEANCE.

30. At the risk of flogging a dead horse, I’m going to stick with my original arithmetic. 0.06966 (I) x 0.02782 (C) x 0.06094 (H) x 0.07507 (O) x 0.05987 (R) = 5.307 x 10^-07. The reciprocal of that is ~1,884,002. That is the probability of the five letters I, C, H, O and R appearing together in any order. For them to appear in the right order to spell the word, the answer must be multiplied by 120 (there are 120 different ways to arrange 5 distinct digits) giving ~226,080,199. The final step was multiplying by 15 as the word appeared specifically in the middle column of 15, giving 3,391,202,982.

    If anyone can spot a flaw in this reasoning then I will shut up and stop going on about it!

31. I think you misunderstand the meaning, in logic, of ‘any’ and you misuse the relationship between probability and possibility.

    If the frequency of the letter I in English is 6.966% then the chance of it appearing in square (5,8) in this grid is 6.966%.
    Likewise the chance of C appearing in square (7,8) is 2.782%. And so on for H,O and R.
    I assume that the multiplication of the five frequencies results in a probability of 1 in ~1,884,002.
    We need to divide by 2 because the word could start in (3,8). Job done. No need to multiply by 120 or 15.

    The chance of ICHOR appearing in the middle column is less than one in a million. Slim admittedly, but not incredible.

32. No, you’re wrong (just as you were right about the fluke) and I’ll lay you my statistics A level to back me up. There is every need to multiply by 120, otherwise we could have had, for example, CHOIR and none of this would have happened. The multiplying by 15 was facetious of me and only half serious, but the chances of this particular five letter word (taking the figures for letter frequency from Wiki as given) cropping up randomly anywhere in a crossword grid (your dividing by two is a red herring) is 226,080,199 to 1.

33. Mitz @32

    See Mitz @30:’If anyone can spot a flaw in this reasoning then I will shut up and stop going on about it!’

    I think it’s perhaps time this dead horse was allowed a decent burial – it’s clogging up my inbox [along with the golfing argument from the Rufus puzzle]! Why don’t you two continue this by email? I’m sure Gaufrid will supply addresses, if you both agree.

34. Mitz – but it wasn’t CHOIR it was ICHOR. Next time anyone uses this grid the chance of ICHOR appearing in the middle column will still be less than one in a million, as will the chance of CHOIR appearing there.

    Eileen – Apologies. I think I’ve given the horse a scrupulous post-mortem and I will trouble you no further.
    I would agree qualifications at noon in Sheffield with a stake of winner’s expenses but Moaljodad still has family responsibilities.

35. …and sincere apologies from me too, Eileen – didn’t realise this would keep bothering you.

    rho – will be very happy to shake your hand in Sheffield – I’m sure we can be quite civilised about the whole thing in person!

    [Blimey, the captcha on this message is a bit stiff: six + ? = 15…]

36. Hi Mitz and rhotician

    Just a bit of fun, really. [Yes, bloggers get emails of all comments on their blog.]

    See you both in Sheffield, perhaps. 😉

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