Guardian 26,458 / Paul

41 comments on “Guardian 26,458 / Paul”

1. Thanks Paul and Eileen
   Quite easy for a Paul, I thought. I liked UPPER HOUSE and ATHEIST.

2. Thanks Paul and Eileen

   I gave up on 9/21a, 25a, 27a, 16d, 17d and needed help to parse 4d and 5d.

   New word for me was THURIBLE.

   Of the ones I solved, my favourites were 18a, 3d, 11a.

3. Very enjoyable – thanks as ever to Paul and Eileen. Favourites were TRAFFIC (yes, rather Rufusian), ITALICISED and BLACKHEATH.

4. Thanks Paul and Eileen.

   Favourites were ORESTES, INEBRIATE, ON AVERAGE, CAPRI and FORMIDABLE.

   CAPRI fooled me and I needed help in parsing INEBRIATE, AMBER and ETHEREAL.

5. Thanks Paul and Eileen.
   I wondered if Paul was tempted to use a different clue for 1d 🙂
   Lovely solve but I got stuck for ages on 20d, why I don’t know.

6. Nothing very Pauline in this crossword, but there is a fortuitous (?) UM following the B in TITBIT.

7. Thanks Paul and Eileen

   Eccles45 @5

   Cyclops (shock and amazement) had a slightly different take on TITBIT in #529.

   18A INTELLIGENCE also parses as ‘in’ plus [meetin]G plus (clientele)*.

8. A fairly standard Paul, still enjoyable and mostly fairly straightforward. Last in was FULSOME. Liked ITALICISED.
   Thanks to Paul and Eileen

9. Enjoyable and straightforward which suited the poor old grey matter today.

   Thaks to Paul and Eileen too.

10. Thanks Paul and Eileen. I was reminded of my young brother coming back from Benediction one Sunday afternoon when we were still altar boys! He proudly told our parents that he had, for the first time, been asked to be ‘thuribilist’. What a wonderfully flexible language we have.

11. 4d and 5d both made me laugh out loud. Inebriate was nice, too.

12. Sorry, do we use the same language? What is straight forward about a clue (5d) which requires you to first solve for a non-existant phrase which then becomes anagram fodder? And how is it straight forward when even the blogger queries an equivalence (17d)? You people have dropped back into experts bragging mode again haven’t you? I thought we’d cured you of that!

13. I had a bit of trouble with ON AVERAGE too and it is amusing now Eileen has sorted the parsing for me. I liked this but I am a Paul fan. Much to enjoy-FULSOME,ATHEIST and several more. I wonder what the morrow will bring?
    Thanks Paul.

14. I have to agree completely with Derek L. I put in 5d but couldn’t see why; and think the explanation given is a bit convoluted. I realized 17d must be ethereal but raised my eyebrows at “late” = “twilight”. At this time of year twilight is very early!

    Overall, though, a very enjoyable puzzle and just the right level of difficulty for me.

15. Thanks for the comments. I’ve been out since shortly after posting the blog, on our walking group’s New Year walk in the lovely South Leicestershire countryside, on a beautifully sunny morning, followed by an excellent pub lunch, so I’m feeling nicely mellow[ed].

    Hi PeterO @7 – your reading of 18ac may well be the correct one. Thanks for the link. Paul is on best behaviour this week: in Monday’s Indy, as Punk, he clued BOOB as ‘Error that may come up?’

    Hi Derek @12 [and JohnM @14] – it was the puzzle as a whole that I described as ‘pretty straightforward’ and I admitted that 5dn had got me thinking. When I finally saw it, like Peter @13, I was amused. NAVE RAGE is, admittedly, a non-existent phrase but so, once, was ‘road rage’, which we soon learned to understand and accept, and I was tickled by the analogy. As for ‘twilight’, I wasn’t really quibbling at the definition: how could I, as one, regrettably, now in what are often described as my ‘twilight years’. I know your dislike of Chambers, so I offer you Collins’ definition: ‘of or relating to the final phase of a particular era’. [I regret now including the question mark.]

16. Ah, it’s not so much Chambers that I dislike, as the presumption that it can never be wrong. Only God can never be wrong! If people treated it as the fallible work of man that all works have to be I wouldn’t have a problem. But I might still have a preference for other dictionaries!

17. Hi Derek

    When I said that I thought it was quite easy for a Paul, I meant that it didn’t take as long to enter all the correct words as usual. Admittedly some of the parsing had to be worked out after the crossword was completed, but I too was amused by the concept of “nave rage”.

    I do agree about Chambers…………….but let’s not start the topic of incorrect usages being justified as correct by dictionaries again.

18. Thanks Paul and Eileen – very enjoyable with trademark humour and deftness

    Derek Lazenby @ 16: what’s ‘God”?

19. Thanks all
    I couldn’t parse ‘ on average’. I liked 27ac and 3d.

20. DL@16 If all your comments are based on such an unsubstantited concept I shall ignore all your future contributions.

21. Simon, umm? Whatever Chambers says?

    RCW, I thought you already did!

22. Derek @12
    I’ve just looked at the clue again. The “non-existent phrase” doesn’t become anagram fodder; it’s just written under the O (for “love”).

23. As someone who sings in an Anglo-Catholic church (bass clef, not 9ac) , I loved thurible being an anagram of bile and hurt, plus the concept of nave rage. Churches are not always beacons of peace and brotherly (or sisterly) love – try reading Barbara Pym for flavour.

    Spent ages trying to remove “r” from a word for idealistic in 11ac.

    Thanks Paul and Eileen.

24. I parsed 18ac slightly differently:

    IN + anagram of [meetin]G CLIENTELE

    Just took the IN from a different part of the clue, is all.

25. Thanks, slipstream @24. See comments 7 and 15. 😉

26. I, too, am a Paul fan and I did get “on average”. But I was not able to parse it and now I see the suggested parsing, this must rank as one of the most recondite clues I have ever seen in a Guardian crossword! Why not apse rage? Thanks anyway, Paul and Elaine!

27. Hi Geoff – oops, sorry, Jeff @26 😉

    I find myself increasingly eager to defend this clue, after my initial problems with it this morning!

    “Why not apse rage?”

    As all cruciverbalists surely learned, very early on in their career, an apse is a ‘recess’, at the East end of a church, while the nave is the central part of the church, where the congregation sits, as suggested in the clue.

    Eileen

28. Eileen@27,

    I might ask, “why should they rage where they sit?”, but I shan’t. I concede!

29. 5d prompts my usual complaint. The wordplay here is witty, but it is a comment on the solution, not a means of reaching it.

30. Fair comment, David @29. I arrived at the answer because it was the only one that would fit. And, come to think of it, the definition’s rather odd. I think I’ll retract the first part of my comment @27.

    [But I do still like the ‘road rage’ analogy – I liked Marienkaefer’s contribution @23!]

31. Thanks Eileen. The nave is of course the bit in the middle down which brides walk – not the aisle (s) which are down the sides. Don’t get me going on the Narthex …

32. Thank you Eileen @30. I am very happy to be in entire agreement with you.

33. Hi marienkaefer

    [“Don’t get me going on the Narthex..”

    OK, I promise I won’t. I’d never heard the term until our vicar took most of us, I think, aback when he used it in his prayer of dedication for the-bit-at-the-back-of-the-church-where-we’d-taken-some-pews-out-to-accommodate-a-kitchen-and-a-toilet-for-disabled-people-and-some-meeting-space.]

34. Well, I have seen ‘nave rage’. Perhaps it’s not seen in the UK where people have the habit to queue and are patient. In several churches I have been in, in various countries, the people elbow and push to get to the communion rail.

35. I enjoyed this but wouldn’t have described it as “easy” or “straightforward”.

    However it seems this has been discussed.

    Most amusing comment is surely Derek @16

    …Only God can never be wrong! …

    Surely that would only be an “infallible God” as some aren’t apparently. Those that exist that is! 😉 (Bloggers are of course excluded from this comment)

    Thanks to Eileen and Paul

36. Eileen

    Yup. Narthex. In our case the area just inside the door (ladies’ toilet, umbrella stand etc), then you move into a hall area (coffee, Sunday School) and then the church itself …

37. I think David Mop’s comment @29 on 5d is invalid. Any tricky, good and original wordplay will leave some solvers trying to come up with possible answers and then looking back at the clue to see if the wordplay works. Clues are not meant to be simple sequences of instructions leading straight to the answers. Solving should require intuitive leaps. I’ve seen this criticism of David Mop’s before; I think it’s simply illogical. There is surely no sense in which the wordplay in these clues is any more a “comment” on the answer than it is in any other clues. Personally I found 5d’s wordplay a perfectly effective “means of reaching the solution”, so that assertion is certainly false too. What worries me is that this criticism seems to be brought out only in response to good, inventive wordplay, never to bad clueing.

    I agree with Eileen that the definition in 5d is odd. Presumably that’s why I arrived at the answer via the wordplay.

38. as usual I am late to the game, but I will add my two (fill in your favorite coinage…) because Eileen is a favorite blogger, as well as Paul being one of my favorite setters. Thanks to both, as ever.
    I totally missed TRAFFIC, which kept me from 2-4 down. Annoyed at myself. The rest of the grid was not easy but enjoyable. Especially enjoyed seeing thurible again so soon–was it Guardian or FT just a few days ago? I was glad these old grey cells could remember it!

    Thanks again.

39. ilene @38, thurible was in the Guardian Prize Crossword, 26,274, June 7, by Paul in the clue at 16d.

40. Herb @37 I agree with you up to a point about intuitive leaps, and also with those who have pointed out to me the pleasures of iterative loops of definition/wordplay/crossers. But this is an ordinary Guardian Cryptic, not a Genius puzzle. While I respect your opinion I give more weight in this context to Wikipedia’s comment:

    Torquemada’s puzzles were extremely obscure and difficult, and later setters reacted against this tendency by developing a standard for fair clues, ones that can be solved, at least in principle, by deduction, without needing leaps of faith or insights into the setter’s thought processes.

41. loved ‘nave rage’

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