Guardian 26,728 / Otterden

58 comments on “Guardian 26,728 / Otterden”

1. Thanks Otterden and Eileen
   I enjoyed this more than some of Otterden’s, though I had to enter CALLOW without seeing the parsing.

   If you take “ruinous” pots out of sPeculaTOrS you get SECULAR directly.

   You have questioned the other ones I was going to mention, Eileen – 22a,and 19d.

2. …though that makes the “in a state” redundant for 1a?

3. Thanks muffin @1 – that’s better! [and @2 – yes! 😉 ]

4. Hi Eileen
   Your correction is still indicating the wrong S to be removed 🙂

5. When we used to enter the swimming pool by jumping up and wrapping ourselves into a compact bundle, knees folded against chest and arms wrapped around knees, we used to call it a cannonball. The idea was to soak everyone in the vicinity: it certainly made a big splash…

6. I know, muffin – I was in the process of amending it when you posted!

7. Thanks, blaise – that makes sense.

8. This was really disappointing: humourless, forced and technically deficient. How the anagram fodder in 1dn can be anything other than “try to use” defeats me. It’s almost as if Otterden is trying to provoke hedgehoggy into another rant about loose clueing and defective grammar …

   22ac seemed pretty unsatisfactory too – a very odd usage of “cannonball”.

   Thanks, Eileen.

9. I don’t want to be too negative, because Otterden does try to do things differently, but I agree that this seemed untidy in places. CALLOW was last in – the geographical definition was new to me to, as was GRADUAND(s), and ILEOSTOMY may have been.

   Thanks to Eileen and Otterden

10. Thanks Eileen and Otterden

    Re: 24ac. ‘A User’ is often employed to indicate someone on drugs as in ‘a regular drug user’

11. I liked this! Maybe it’s because I’m not as experienced as you guys are, but it does make me feel quite proficient when I can write a few in on the first look, and then a few more on the second! We used to CANNONBALL into the swimming pool on holiday – but only when my Mam wasn’t looking!! I don’t have a problem with 24D either: a person on drugs is known as a USER, no?? CALLOW I had to check in Chambers for the definition, but that was the only one today! Thanks Otterden & Eileen – there’s at least one happy solver today!

12. Hi DafyddT @10

    Yes – and it often crops up in crosswords. The problem is that the cryptic grammar doesn’t work – what exactly is the definition?

13. Re 24d – could the reveller be the user, ie &lit?

14. I did wonder about that, Euston – but it doesn’t really work for me.

15. Thanks Eileen – at times I thought this was better than some of Otterden’s previous puzzles, but there are still plenty of his trademark annoyances, as you’ve mentioned.

    The capitalisation of The Bat in 28a is technically correct, but it ruins the surface reading, and also (at least for me) makes the answer completely obvious.

    2d just seems lazy – does anyone know the “alluvial flat” meaning?

    The exclamation mark in 5d seems just to mean “look how clever I am”. You could perhaps have added that the graduands are people who are about to have their degrees conferred on them.

    I didn’t mind the extra “to” in 1d too much: I think it can be read as TRY [added] to USE

16. Hi beery hiker @9

    You probably don’t want to know this but ‘graduate’ is at heart a transitive verb – first definition in SOED: ‘to admit to a University degree’ and the ‘nd’ ending is the Latin gerundive, ‘[requiring] to be’ [cf Amanda – ‘to be loved’], so a graduand is one requiring or about to be graduated – or graduate. You’re only a graduand between getting your degree exam results and the moment your degree is conferred, so you don’t hear it very often – although I do still remember having a good time at our Graduands’ Ball, the night before our Graduation!
    Incidentally, this clue is not quite so good as I made out – a degree assembly is a congregation, not a conference: I wasn’t thinking straight.

17. Hi Andrew

    We crossed – and I originally made a similar comment about the exclamation mark and then deleted it. 😉

18. Hi again Andrew [this puzzle is taking up more of my day than I intended – my apologies for taking up nearly half the comments space: my internet connection keeps coming and going!]

    Re the last sentence of my comment @16 – yes, you’re right about confer-ence, of course!

19. I forgot to ask. In what context is “land” = “deposit” (19d)?

20. Eileen @16 – thanks for that – at least I have learned something this morning!

21. Thanks Otterden ad Eileen.

    I found this enjoyable and not homourless, e.g. 1d, it is ‘dodgy’, isn’t it, a CONNONBALL certainly makes a big splash in the swimming pool (see blaise @5) and CONFERENCE!

    My old 1964 COD gives CALLOW (Irish a. & n.) low-lying, often flooded, meadow. I see it is thought to be from Greek and Latin words meaning ‘bald’; such land is often just covered in grass.

22. Hi muffin @19

    I wondered, too, but if you think of ‘land’ as a transitive verb, it does work: people on a boat could be landed / deposited on the shore. [I now see that Chambers has land = deposit.]

23. A graduand may be waiting for a conference in the sense that a degree is ‘conferred’ .

24. Sorry, missed 15 ! Love and peace. Wot, no Hoggy?

25. Thank you, Eileen. I shared your initial response to “graduands” & still feel that it’s a very good clue; I thought that “conference” referred to the act of conferring that takes place before a degree is awarded, i.e. before the ceremony (may be wrong, though!). I do agree with you about 24d & will need a lot of convincing before I can accept that “on drugs” means “user”, rather than “using”.

    That said, I found much to like in this puzzle – notably 11 & 22ac & 25d. My favourite clue was 28ac, even though it took me an age to solve & necessitated my consulting my husband for the name of the cricketer! Thank you very much for the challenge, Otterden.

26. Thanks Otterden and Eileen.

    I thought this was an improvement over some previous Otterden puzzles. ‘To trolleybus’ is, I think, a bridge too far, and ‘on’ in a down clue conventionally means on top of, I believe. I, too, was perplexed at Roman Catholic being a ‘humanitarian charity’ but Eileen has sorted that one out. I think Otterden could have used the vernacular ‘try and use’ in 1d, which would have given clearer wordplay. Similarly, ‘Reveller half cut, one on drugs’ would, I think, have been more satisfactory in 24. The &lit interpretation is a bit of a stretch, as Eileen points out.

    I smiled at the young lady taking her clothes off and I liked SERMONISER.

27. Thanks Eileen @22
    Pace Chambers, I’m not convinced!

28. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy this but it did seem rather too easy and I did doubt some answers that seemed too obvious-e.g.STRAUSS.
    No doubt I’d be whinging if it was too difficult so-
    Thanks Otterden.

29. re muffin @19/27 and eileen @22. I was dubious about “land” too, but there’s at least one precedent, in The Hunting of the Snark

    “Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,
    As he landed his crew with care;
    Supporting each man on the top of the tide
    By a finger entwined in his hair.

30. I enjoyed this. All the answers were unambiguous and readily gettable, I can’t see what the problem is. I wasn’t aware that crosswords had a grammar. If the clues lead to an enjoyable solve then the setter can write whatever he or she wants as far as I am concerned. Thanks Otterden.

31. This went fairly smoothly except for the last few entries. I forgot that I hadn’t parsed GAVOTTE, but I’m not sure I would have seen it anyway. The second definition of CALLOW was new to me. I agree with some of the reservations expressed above (the redundant “in a state” in 1a, TROLLEYBUS, the “to” in 1d) but overall I still enjoyed it. STRAUSS was probably my favourite too, though I only had the vaguest recollection that he is a cricketer, and didn’t know that he is specifically a batsman. Yes, the capitalisation made it easier, but it gave those of us who don’t follow cricket a chance of solving it without trawling through lists of cricketers.

    Eileen @18
    I finally came across a site which includes a definition of CONFERENCE as “The act of conferring, as of an academic degree”, so I’m now happy with that clue.

    Thanks to Otterden and Eileen.

32. Yes, there was some rather loose clueing here and there but I enjoyed the puzzle. I think that 24a definition is definitely ‘on drugs’, which seems fine to me. Favourites were AIDE, GAVOTTE, TROLLEYBUS and SODOM. Thanks to Otterden and Eileen.

33. Thanks to Otterden and Eileen. Lots of items new to me here: QUADRAGESIMA; ILEOSTOMY; GRADUANDS; CALLOW (as “alluvial flat”); LANDAU (as convertible), but they were accessible from the clues. As with some responses above, CANNONBALL brings back memories of big summer splashes. I usually have far mopre trouble with this setter, so this puzzle was a pleasant surprise.

34. LANDAU was a good clue, and I was pleased to be able to spell QUADRAGESIMA correctly, first time. Failed though on CANNONBALL – didn’t know the swimming pool lark, nor C & B’s first names – and hence NOYES, not knowing the poet. CALLOW is just taking the mick, and I bet the setter himself didn’t know the alluvial flat thing till he did his research. Nevertheless possibly less annoying than some of his other offerings.

35. Hi Trailman

    I bet you know ‘The Highwayman’, though.

36. NOYES has appeared 8 times before in the Guardian since the start of the archive – these are the previous clues:

    22768 Crispa A poet’s shillyshallying?
    23118 Araucaria Can’t Alfred make up his mind?
    23649 Araucaria The poet can’t decide
    23679 Brummie English poet’s two conflicting responses
    24181 Orlando Contradictory answers given by poet
    24761 Araucaria Couldn’t Alfred make up his mind?
    25879 Paul Vacillating poet?
    26084 Brendan Poet who might have written ‘Do I contradict myself?’

    So to give Otterden some credit, at least he avoided the No/Yes

37. … sorry, I should of course have credited Eileen for remembering the no/yes. I have a spreadsheet containing all of the Guardian clues and solutions, which makes this sort of thing easy!

    Noyes is mentioned in one more clue, from an Araubetical 25484:

    W – From “Sherwood in the twilight” (Noyes) wild arum came (4,5)

38. ‘I have a spreadsheet containing all of the Guardian clues and solutions, which makes this sort of thing easy! Wow, beery. 😉

39. We have discussed the findings a lot more on the Guardian comments page. Surprisingly little manual effort was involved, the vast majority were extracted automatically using a program that downloaded the files from the Guardian site. ClaireS (a.k.a. MsGeek) did something very similar independently, and as far as we checked, our totals matched.

    For the record, these are the most popular solutions:

    EXTRA 49 occurrences,
    ISLE 41,
    USED 38,
    ECHO 36,
    STYE 35,
    EDGE and STUD 34,
    STUN 33,
    ADDRESS, ANON, ARCH, BLUE and ISSUE 32,
    ERATO and IDLE 31,
    NIECE 30,
    ESTATE, IDEAL and OUNCE 29,
    ARENA, ETERNAL, EVENT, IRIS and OVERT 28,
    ACHE, ADIEU, ADONIS, DREAM, EDITOR, ERROR and TASTE 27,
    ONSET, ONUS, RATIO, STAY and UNIT 26,
    ALIBI, EMMA, INSTANCE, ISIS, OMEN, SCAR, STAG, STRAIN, TREASON and UTTER 25.

    All of which suggests that short words with helpful crossers are very difficult to avoid.

40. Re #1, ‘in a state’ is therefore superfluous, right?

    So, Lay speculators losing pots ruinously. Mind you, that could lead to SECULAR or ECULARS!

41. Thank you, Eileen.

    My last post on this setter was a little on the negative side so, all my gripes and dislikes having already been posted, I’ll leave it at that.

    Nice weekend, all.

42. Hello Eileen @35, I’m afraid not. Just got home, googled it, and it looks great fun though.
    Beery Hiker @39 – surprised not to see ETNA or ANTE, they seem to crop up more than they should.

43. Trailman @42 – for the record ETNA is on 16, and ANTE 15, so well out of the running

44. Thanks for the blog Eileen, I needed your help today with HARD SELL – it’s funny how the simple ones can be the hardest to spot sometimes. Thanks to Otterden too.

    A curious mixture of quite easy (SECULAR, RELIC, TROLLEYBUS, BALM and several others going in straight away) and the head-scratching. I didn’t know the alluvial flat part for CALLOW, so failed on that, and also QUADRAGESIMA although I guessed that it started QUADRAG and looked it up in the dictionary. GRADUANDS and ILEOSTOMY were also new but the latter was gettable, for me, from being likely to end in TOMY and remembering ILEUM from biology at school. I did like LANDAU.

    Eileen @38 – Once BeeryHiker and I realised we could code the entry of clues and solutions from the Guardian into a spreadsheet or database (mine’s a MySQL database) it became a fun (honest!) exercise for both of us. As he said, it was a mostly automatic process though there were many errors in the data (mainly linking of grouped clues). Maintaining it is completely automatic and the work of seconds. It’s very interesting to see the different ways the same words have been clued over time and also which words have never appeared before (in the archive at least). GAVOTTE today and TOP yesterday for example.

45. I am failing to see the differences between many of Otterden’s staggering incompetencies and the inspired creativity attributed to other setters when they don’t get things quite right? Why all the haterz?

46. Tongue in cheek Eileen does the dreadfully in 25 a refer to the clue.
    Thank you Eileen and Otterden

47. Hi ClaireS @44

    You gathered, bless you, that my ‘wow’ was a disguised ‘why?’. You’ve convinced me that there is a fascination in these things! You and beery hiker must be mathematicians / statiticians – I should have known that. But I’m truly grateful to him for confirming my recollection of past cluings of NOYES – a real gift to crossword setters!

48. [beery hiker 37

    I printed that Araubetical 25,484 which features “Noyes” in the W clue, since I couldn’t solve it naked, as it were, and my interest was piqued.
    Tough in parts, and great fun (they always were)]

49. It seems one of Otterden’s subliminal styles is to imply nouns read in apposition as a definition derived from surface readings that are verb constructions. Hence the verbal [to take customers for a ride] in 11a implies the nounal [something that takes customers for a ride], and the verbal [on drugs] of 24d indicates the nounal [someone on drugs]. A bit clunky perhaps, but somehow I see it as an Otterden thing.

    Learnt a new meaning for CALLOW
    Thanks to Eileen amd Otterden.

50. Yes but, just very quickly

    Store bully upset customers taken for ride in this?

    or

    Reveller half-cut? One on drugs

    would be better, wouldn’t you say, all without losing the essential flavour Otterden wanted to impart?

51. Thanks, Paul B – that’ll do me nicely. But why didn’t he do it?

52. Why the pussyfooting?

    This was another poor puzzle from Otterden.

    But obviously not in the opinion of our esteemed ed! 😉

    Thanks to Eileen and Otterden

53. I agree with Paul B. Surely, either “in a state” or “ruinously” is superfluous (1a). If you strike either one, the clue works quite well.

54. Eileen @51 – presumably the reason Otterden did not write the clue as Paul B suggests is the same reason that not all novelists write novels in the style you like, or all poets write poems in the style you like, or all composers compose etc…

    For me the real question is why do people expect all setters to conform to a particular style?

55. Well no, it’s possible that it was left as is to account for the ambiguity I mentioned (possible answers being two, secular or eculars). Needless to say, bringing back the first anag-ind opens another can of worms, namely whether or not the second (ruinously) is then required: if ‘speculators in a state’ can lead to secularpots, then you only really need the first.

    Howver, if the word ‘after’ is retained … ! It’s a bit clumsy, but I’m not sure it can otherwise be faulted.

56. Thanks all
    I often wonder exactly what you experts expect from a cryptic crossword.
    I learn today that amongst all the others you expect to be warmed,,..I do tend to have other means for that function!

57. Thanks Otterden and Eileen

    I’m with Peedee (and a couple of others in the minority) here and thought that this was very good, unambiguous and did have humour.

    This guy gets called a smarta*se for using a rarely used definition for CALLOW – I’ve seen Pasquale pack half a dozen or so words that are more obscure. Rufus will often throw in a common word with a definition that is rarely used or even known by many !!! What gives here ?

    Sure, he has his quirks with so called ‘loose clues’- the esteemed A made a legend out of doing similar tricks. Our own HH takes the ‘loose clue knife’ out regularly to Boatman, Qaos and Puck.
    It all comes down to setter style – funny how different setters are set on for it though – I wonder if Otterden has never been forgiven for the initial couple of his Guardian puzzles that did have some ‘clangers’ in them!

    Anyway, I enjoyed it and completed it much faster than normal, learnt a few new things including the comedy duo as my last one in at 22a.

58. Thanks Eileen and Otterden.

    I don’t usually manage to get on this setter’s wavelength.

    This puzzle was an exception and I completed with relative ease – taking time to look up the unusual definitions.

    I can find little to quibble at in the clues other than the ‘to’ in 1dn – ‘try and use’ might have been better but I’m not the author who should be granted appropriate privileges.

    At the end of the day, all answers were individually solvable with only a couple of weakish ones – MEANS TEST and HARD SELL – but that is being really picky.

    Vive la differance I say (all rights to complain about Rufus reserved!) ?

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