Guardian 26,051 by Paul

by

I woke up early to finish this crossword off, and in my sleep-drugged state finished yesterday’s Arachne instead which I had opened in my browser last night. A happy mistake – Arachne was really on fire yesterday. Anyway, here’s today’s Paul, a fine melange with some tricky corners.

Across
1 DIGITALIS Though analogue isn’t a poisoner ___ ? (9)
Analogue isn’t, but DIGITAL IS. A bit cheeky of Paul to put the definition in the middle of the wordplay, but we’ll let him off this time. 
6 WHOOP Question surgery — and cry (5)
WHO? + OP
9 See 12
10 See 17
11 MASQUERADE Pretence created to trap dinosaur, half taken aback (10)
SQU(ARE)< ('a person of boringly traditional opinions') in MADE
12,9 FAIR TRADE Cast adrift are legal dealings (4,5)
(ADRIFT ARE)* 
14 REAPPLY Gather work is put to use again (7)
REAP + PLY 
15 SUNBEAM Ray — setter needing support (7)
SUN + BEAM 
17,10 QUENTIN TARANTINO In Iraq, a nut not requiring ten rounds, shooting American? (7,9)
(IN IRAQ A NUT NOT + TEN)*
19 ORIFICE Hole that’s round when poking food (7)
O + (IF in RICE) 
20 ETCH Century featuring in the unlikely score (4)
C in THE* 
22 TWEET TWEET Message after message, chat’s chat? (5,5)
The chat of the chat, that is.
25 ORTHODOXY Conventional theory or empty theory about carrier shouldered by strong worker (9)
OR + T(heor)Y about (HOD + OX)
26 DATED Old-fashioned saw (5)
d.d. 
27 TWEAK Temperature requiring delicate adjustment (5)
T + WEAK 
28 TEDDY BEAR Evidence of grief about current boyfriend’s first bedtime companion (5,4)
TEAR about EDDY + B(oyfriend)
Down
1 DATUM Food processor a cut above, that’s a fact (5)
D.A. above TUM 
2 GLASSWARE In middle of Aegean, girl overcoming fighting vessels etc? (9)
(LASS + WAR) in (ae)GE(an) 
3 THE MUPPETS Animal and friends that are felt up, among those friendly creatures? (3,7)
UP in THEM PETS for the cult felt friends.
4 LITURGY Service — something dreaded about it (7)
IT in LURGY 
5 STRIDES On board ship, tourist’s opening travel bags (7)
T(ourist) + RIDE in S.S.
6,24 WINDSOCK House virtually collapsing, knackered roofs, one lifted in the breeze (8)
WINDSO(r) C(ollapsing) K(nackered). I stared at this one for ages.
7 OUIJA Board’s Franco-German affirmations? (5)
OUI + JA 
8 PROGRAMME Schedule for a little mass (9)
PRO + GRAMME
13 UNBIRTHDAY One of 364 celebrated in Hardy, but after editing (10)
(IN HARDY BUT)*. They are celebrated not in Hardy but in Carroll, of course. 
14 ROQUEFORT French product — nonsense to conceal, as they say, what for (9)
(QUE + FOR) in ROT 
16 EPICENTRE Focus of ground-breaking classic course, abridged (9)
EPIC + ENTRÉ(e) 
18 NEWBOLT Poet Henry’s contemporary having to flee (7)
NEW + BOLT, for the poet mainly remembered for the injunction to ‘Play up, play up, and play the game!’
19 ONE-EYED Polyphemus was so like Porphyrion, Agrius or Tityus, they say? (3-4)
Polyphemus was the Titan who was so beastly to Odysseus and his mates when they wandered into his cave. The others giants mentioned, while they have two eyes, have only one I.
21 CUTIE Percentage — that is a lovely thing (5)
CUT + I.E.
23 TUDOR Mary possibly died in defeat after uprising (5)
D in (ROUT)< for the notoriously bloody queen.
24 See 6

53 comments on “Guardian 26,051 by Paul”

  1. Thanks Paul and writinghawk
    Several I needed help with the parsing, but also lots that made me smile (for example DIGITALIS, LITURGY and TEDDY BEAR).
    However Paul has produced one of my most hated misuses of a technical term – EPICENTRE is NOT the “focus” of an earthquake; it is the point on the Earth’s surface directly ABOVE the focus. So often “epicentre” is used to mean “absolute centre” when it is nothing of the sort.
    Rant over!

  2. This heinous crime quite passed me by. My sympathies, but could one defend the hapless Paul by suggesting that while the epicentre is not the focus of the earthquake, it is the focus of the “ground-breaking” considering that the “ground” is “the solid surface of the earth” (Chambers)?

  3. Thanks Writinghawk, and if you’re new to this job, welcome. Being usually on Paul’s wavelength I got 1a at once, and didn’t have trouble thereafter: but it was all good right down to the final TEDDY BEAR.

  4. Good point, writinghawk, and he might get away with it if “focus” were not also a technical term for the “centre” of the earthquake (i.e. underground).

  5. Thoroughly enjoyed this puzzle – some excellent and challenging clues and no schoolboy humour. It took me quite a while to complete without aids, but gave a sense of quiet satisfaction, so, many thanks Paul.

  6. Thanks, Writinghawk, for a fine blog. Got off to a flyer with this one, but the last third took me ages. Some clever trickery from Paul today: TWEET TWEET and ROQUEFORT were particularly well-constructed. Might have seen OUIJA before, though …

    EPICENTRE has had the same criticism before (might have been from muffin, I can’t remember). Works for me, but then I’m not a geologist. Clueing LESS as FEWER has me reaching for the green ink.

  7. Much ta for the parsing of 19A. It seemed the only possible answer from the crossers but I couldn’t suss the wordplay. I eventually decided it must be a cryptic definition, which (sort of) works as well.

  8. Nice stuff, with some top-notch components (‘food processor’ for TUM, ‘animal and friends that are felt’ for MUPPETS, ‘focus of ground-breaking’ for EPICENTRE). Last in for me was MASQUERADE. Always good to have a smattering of the Three Cs (Classics, Cricket – Newbolt’s famous line adorns the frieze outside Lord’s near the junction of Wellington and St John’s Wood Roads – and Christianity – a bit of a stretch, but Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is a good read, even if Heretics is his best work in that genre). Thanks to setter and blogger.

  9. George @ 5 – Maybe one day Paul could join forces with Tim Moorey to produce a smut-themed puzzle. To mark a Benny Hill anniversary perhaps?

  10. Our local paper (Courier Mail, Queensland, Australia) has discontinued the publication of the guardian crossword (quelle domage) so we are forced to do the daily online. It keeps us more in sync with this blog so probably a good thing. Paul is always challenging but this time I had none on the first run through until unbirthday because of the anagram and then managed to get most of the rest. All good stuff in true Paul style. thanks for the confirmations.

  11. Eileen and I (we’re trying out making joint comments as our views on puzzles coincide more often than not) would like to say that as usual we thoroughly enjoyed this great Paul puzzle. Another very ‘dotty’ day – I’d give special mention to ‘Tweet Tweet’.

    Thanks to Paul for another great start to the day and to Writinghawk for the explanations.

  13. I liked 7d, 23d, 6a, 16d, 26a, 27a and my favourites were 19d ONE-EYED, 14d ROQUEFORT, 2d GLASSWARE & 20a ETCH (last in).

    New for me were Henry NEWBOLT, LURGY.

    I couldn’t parse 6/24d, 11a.

    Thanks Paul and Writinghawk.

  14. Poor old Newbolt. I always forget that he didn’t write The dream of Gerontius. It must be galling to be a poet whose jingoistic doggerel is eclipsed by your approximate contemporary and namesake for whom poetry was a sideline.

  15. ‘Play up, play up’ will still be being dragged out in TV series and films set in colonial times long after ‘Praise to the Holiest in the heights’ has been forgotten, I fear.

  16. Thanks for post, Writinghawk, and to Paul for the puzzle – it was a very enjoyable test today, I thought. I just wanted to put in a word for the excellent 26a (DATED), a very satisfying double definition – I thought of lots of synonyms for “saw” but “seeing someone” / “dating someone” completely escaped me until some time after putting in the answer 🙂

  17. Thanks for the explanation of the wordplay of many of the entries I got right but didn’t understand why. In 5d, though, it is the primary definition I don’t get (perhaps being on the wrong side of the Atlantic): why are STRIDES “bags”?

  18. RogerBear: “bags” is rather dated slang for trousers, as in “Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?” (from Jeeves and Wooster)

  19. Ah yes, ‘strides’ was unfamiliar to me too – I guessed that it meant trousers but had to look it up to confirm. (Especially in Australia, according to Chambers.) I meant to add a note to that effect but it slipped my mind when I came to write the blog. MHL’s memorable Wodehouse quote is from The code of the Woosters. Aficionados will recall that Spode was s.a. in f.b. because he had started a Moseleyite group he wanted to call the ‘black shirts’, but the shops having no black shirts left in stock, he had had to settle for black shorts.

  21. @Keen strides’ we would say at school about anyone’s new trousers, good bad or indifferent!!

    What a funny puzzle today, very good, and very weel-written.

    R

  22. Took me an age to get going on this, but worth the struggle.

    Thanks Writinghawk; no doubt muffin @1 is correct, but Collins gives for epicentre: ‘2.(informal) the absolute centre of something ? the epicentre of world sprinting,’ so maybe loosely it can be the focus (although not perhaps in the ground-breaking earthquake. 🙁 ) Anyway, I shan’t be loosing sleep over it.

    Oh no, setter=sun, I was looking for an I, me or dog in the answer.

    I failed to parse WINDSOCK, but loved LITURGY.

  23. Writinghawk@19

    Please translate as I do not understand your language: ” Aficionados will recall that Spode was s.a. in f.b….. “

  24. Thanks Paul and Writinghawk.

    Only got a minute. Great fun today.

    Re: “strides” – the most memorable usage came in one of the old Fosters adverts starring Paul Hogan. He’s at the ballet taking it all in from one of the boxes – suddenly a male dancer grande jetes across the stage making Hogan spill his pint. “Strewth! There’s a bloke down there with no strides on!”

  25. Wonderful stuff, new to Guardian blog, first time I’ve done a Paul cryptic, loved it. “Strides” pretty common, perhaps now a little dated, here in Australia.

    @10 Anna, you have just suffered the fate cryptic solvers in Adelaide had several months ago when your sister paper here, The Advertiser, suddenly stopped printing Indy cryptics. Now I also do them on line and have quickly come to appreciate the contemporaneity.

    Thanks to Paul and Writinghawk.

  26. Lovely lovely stuff from Paul, which Ive come to expect now. Didnt manage to parse WINDSOCK, but glad to see I wasnt the only one who struggled there!

    Special mention for THE MUPPETS, brilliantly clued as “Animal and friends that are felt” and smoothed wonderfully into the surface with “up”. Moments like that make all the struggling worthwhile!

  28. Thanks, all. Bags was known to me (I am of that generation and went to that kind of school). But Strides was entirely new.

  29. As others have done, I should perhaps have thanked Writinghawk for the blog, and echoed the welcome. Perhaps I didn’t think to do so because I have frequently appreciated the blogs provided by Writinghawk for the idotheI site, and the comments posted there too. Anyway, belatedly but sincerely, thank you.

  30. Maybe I was just on Paul’s wavelength this evening because I found this to be one of his easier ones with every clue fully parsed. I also thoroughly enjoyed it despite, rather than because of, the lack of smut.

    The SE corner was the last to fall when I solved SUNBEAM, ORIFICE, UNBIRTHDAY and EPICENTRE, in that order. As a layman I didn’t have a problem with the definition of the latter.

  31. Anyone else remember a strip in Private Eye about a naive Australian in London called Barry McKenzie? I seem to recall that he was forever chundering down his strides: which is where I first (and possibly last) came across the usage. Lots of other fun today, too, even if 7d seemed like a very old friend.

  33. Hi DP @ 31
    Yes I do – “chunder on the wall-to-wall” was an expression that has never left me.
    Was it written by Barry Humphries?

  37. Yes! I suppose it was the wonderful inventiveness of the expressions (along with the vulgarity) that made them so memorable. I’ve noticed, though, that some contributors to this thread get upset by vulgarity, so perhaps best to draw a line……

  38. Marvellous stuff.
    Precise [ah well,’epicentre’….], cheeky, light-hearted and clever.
    We thought 19d (ONE-EYED) was priceless, as was 3d (THE MUPPETS).

    Once more a Paul that was relatively easy but very very enjoyable.

  39. The usual entertaining puzzle from Paul.

    I managed to solve and parse this in a much more reasonable time than yesterday’s Arachne.

    I believe there is a mini Bazza McKenzie theme going on here. (Indispensable study material when I was at Uni)

    Contenders are 10,12,17,19A and 5,19, 21D. There are others but I wont go into details here as it may offend the more sensitive posters/readers on here. (You know who you are! 😉 )

    Thanks to the visiting Writinghawk and Paul

  40. muffin @27 – ‘informal’ is exactly what the usage is.

    Words that have a technical meaning are not owned by the technical experts. If a word has a different meaning in general use then this other meaning is not ‘incorrect’, just a different meaning when used in a different context. ‘Informal’ refers to the context, not the validity of the definition.

    One can argue that Paul is being deliberately misleading by using words out of context, but then isn’t this what cryptic crosswords are all about?

  42. PeeDee @ 40
    I can’t agree. The use of “epicentre” to mean “centre” is simply incorrect, as it ISN’T the “centre”!

  43. Neither does an ‘electric atmosphere’ contain electricity. What defines the meaning is the usage. When enough people use a word to mean something then its gets into the dictionary and takes on a new meaning. One may well not like the new usage, but there it is.

  45. Hi muffin, I know what you are getting at and I get riled by what seems to me to be lazy usage of words.

    However, I think a huge chunk of my own everyday English isn’t technically ‘true’, I use words in all sort of ways that have deviated from the their technical or original meanings. Context is what matters, when I speak a word to my children it will have a different meaning than when I use it in a technical document.

    There is no official English lexicon (unlike say French) and I think any meaning/usage recorded in a dictionary is fair game for Paul. Otherwise it just boils down to peoples prejudice, one person believes that the word ‘fish’ can only be used to mean a gill breathing water creature (or whatever)and another believes it can be used to mean a generic swimming animal with vaguely fish-like appearance. Neither is the one-and-only true meaning, just different uses of a word in different contexts.

    To state that ‘a whale is a fish’ is certainly not true, but only in the context of one particular definition of ‘fish’. There may be other definitions of ‘fish’ and in those contexts the sentence may have quite different meanings and truth values. Alluding to one context/meaning on the surface and then substituting another is what cryptic crosswords are all about.

    Sorry this comment has turned into a bit of an essay!

  46. Hi PeeDee
    You do make a lot of sense, but I do like to have things right!

    Anyway, in the immortal words of E.L.Wisty:
    “The whale is not a fish – it’s an insect and it lives on bananas”

  47. What’s wrong with 16dn is that the epicentre and focus of an earthquake are different things. And ‘ground-breaking’
    is a crosswordy description of an earthquake.

    But Muffin is not just criticizing the clue.
    “The use of ‘epicentre’ to mean ‘centre’ is simply incorrect”. So English speakers and writers are wrong.
    “I would have preferred Collins to say ‘incorrect’ rather than ‘informal’.” So Collins, and other sources which
    say ‘figurative’ or similar, are also wrong.

    Arachne’s use of ‘sue’ was criticized. And some people suggested that some dictionary definitions of ‘prosecute’ are wrong.
    I think they are wrong. And so is Muffin.

  49. Sorry Muffin. We crossed. If you had got in earlier I needn’t have bothered. Or I could have been less pontiffical, figuratively speaking.

  50. We’ve crossed again. No. I’m saying that using epicentre, figuratively, to mean the location of special interest or importance is OK. (That can of course lead hyperbolic abuse.)

  51. Just to add more fodder to the focus/epicentre discussion, what about taking focus as “a centre of interest or attention”? When an earthquake is covered in the news, most of the attention, or focus, is on the epicentre rather than on the, er, focus. Oh, well. So much for trying to clarify things…

  53. Simon @52: Took me a while at the time, too. If you look closely you’ll see I put in a link explaining all.

Comments are closed.