Guardian 26,505 by Chifonie

68 comments on “Guardian 26,505 by Chifonie”

1. Thanks Chifonie and PeterO. I enjoyed this, it turned out to be a good workout, harder than the average for this setter as you say PeterO. What I liked was the fine range of cryptic devices. COD for me was 9a; my LOI was 22a: a very well concealed hidden answer!

2. So much to enjoy here from this talented setter.

   1ac is pure delight, likewise ‘penfriend’.

   And I agree with Cotranesax (Noel?) that OPAQUE was pleasingly well concealed.

3. Thanks Chifonie and PeterO
   I enjoyed this too. At one point I had a completed puzzle except for an entirely blank NW (I had TOGETHER but couldn’t think of what might come before it); ROOSTER was the breakthrough, then the rest went in easily enough.

   I liked RESIDE and “penfriend” for COB. I wasn’t clear why “draw” = “tie”, and, despite PeterO’s “drawstring”, I’m still not sure that it works.

4. muffin @3
   For tie=draw think sports and games when the score is level at the end of the match.

5. Thanks Gaufrid – I see it now.

6. ……….although in cricket, “tie” and “draw” are not the same!

7. Quite good. The grid is almost in two halves.

   9a ‘penfriend’ is a cryptic definition for COB, unindicated, I thought it should have been, andd BLED is defined obliquely to say the least; 22a why ‘revealed’ in the past tense?; 2d ‘soft’ for B is at one remove, and the more familiar ‘black’ would have worked just as well; 3d ‘for’ is redundant; 6d tense of def is wrong; 19d again C for ‘Tories’ is at one remove really; 20d I’ve not seen d = director before anywhere.

   ‘Live on the edge’ I really liked.

8. A really good cryptic with variety and originality. I too liked 9a penfriend. 6d was very well constructed- yes they can! Thank you PeterO for help parsing a couple.

9. Very enjoyable. Couldn’t parse RELATION or COBBLED.

   HH@7 . . .

   9a is fair – why should a cryptic definition be indicated? BLED is fine.
   22a Because the present tense wouldn’t work.
   2d Don’t see the problem here.
   3d Yes, I guess so.
   6d Tense is correct: “can be alternated” = rotatable.
   19d Everyone knows C is used for Tories.
   20d D = director as in MD = managing director.

   Thanks to Chifonie and PeterO.

   (PS. Good that the Captcha doesn’t include any DIFFERENTIATION)

10. @hh

    I’m going to question quite a lot of what you said, but should note first that you haven’t actually been unduly critical – you said you thought this was “quite good”. I agree, although I think it was a bit easy; I was hoping for a real challenge today and I regard Chifonie as by far the easiest Guardian setter.

    9a Yes, it might have been easier if he’d indicated the cryptic definiton of “cob” and this is a surprising and weird stretching of the language, but Chifonie is the easiest Guardian setter, so the occasional challenge isn’t unwelcome surely. (Actually, adding indicators where they’re unnecessary can sometimes be very confusing for the solver.) “Bled” is also defined a bit obliquely, but I think you might have erred in taking the parts separately. What we need is “Cob bled” = “penfriend suffered anguish”, not “cob” = “penfriend” and “suffered anguish” = bled. Also it’s probably worth emphasising the clue requires bleeding (I thought probably metaphorically – hearts bleeding etc.) to be an instance of anguish (the DBE rule). Looking for exact, separate, synonyms instead of clues that correctly indicate solutions (or parts of them) can go horribly wrong, for setters and solvers alike.

    22a You often misuse the word “tense”. This is the past participle, but not in the past tense. The idea is that the phrase is “revealed”, meaning shown to be something else by having its outer coating removed. I would agree that this is inelegant and confusing, but changing the tense would not improve it. Changing the tense would mean changing it to “having been revealed” (past) “to be revealed” (future) etc. It has nothing to do with the defect in question.

    2d B is an abbreviation for soft; you may wish to ban it as obscure (unlikely) but it is not at one remove, any more than “R” is at one remove from “take” or “R” from “king” etc. Using black would indeed make the clue easier. And I was thinking, why on earth would you want to make this clue by Chifonie, of all people, easier?

    3d Actually “for” is not redundant. Again you may be making the mistake of analysing the parts separately. The usage in question is e.g. “this’ll do me very nicely”, meaning “this is certainly enough for me”. So “is enough for flesh and blood” means “does kin”. It’s quite neat, and an example of Chifonie being more sophisticated than usual. He’s not as much of a doddle as I used to think.

    6d Again, there is no problem with the tense. What you are reacting to is presumably the use of a verbal construction instead of an adjectival phrase to define an adjective. This is controversial for some people, and it doesn’t seem to work here – I agree with you that there is a problem – but changing the tense wouldn’t make any difference. Some setters, for what it’s worth, go by the rule that you can “define” a noun with an adjectival or verbal phrase (so “can be alternated” might “define” something that can be alternated – service ends in tennis?) but otherwise the part of speech has to be the same in the clue as in the solution. What you probably meant to say is “part of speech is wrong”. This is, however, very remote from what you did say.

    19d I’m not sure here. C certainly can stand for the singular, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it stand for the party, The Conservatives, too. What is true is that setters usually use the singular – but that is not logically relevant; it might just make the clue slightly more original.

    20d d=director is one of the most common abbreviations in crossword setting.

    Some of your comments relate to genuinely questionable setting, but nearly all of them are in some way misleading. I realise this is partly because you want to be brief, but you see how long it can take to clarify things you have said? OK, perhaps I could have been a bit more succinct, but I think it is worth responding to your points fairly carefully because you do leave a lot of loose ends that usually don’t ever get tied up.

11. Thanks PeterO and Chifonie

    An enjoyable puzzle with some very clever clues in addition to the odd write-in.

    Favourites were 9a, 2d, and 6d and I also liked opaque.

12. Thanks Chifonie & PeterO.

    Like muffin @3, I ended up with a blank NW quadrant, with the same TOGETHER already solved [not helped by me/my forgetting that soft could be ‘B’ as well as ‘P.’] I loved ‘penfriend’ – I don’t understand HH’s objection. A COB could be a pen friend; cryptic is what the crossword is. 😉 I agree with Herb @10 that DOES means ‘is enough for.’

13. Thanks Chifonie and PeterO.

    I enjoyed the puzzle and found the clues elegant. Like others, I had TOGETHER alone at first, then finally got COBBLED and had to parse backwards. RESIDE was good.

    2d, for B, ‘soft’ couldn’t be replaced by ‘black’, SABLE = black, at least poetically.

14. I agree with blogger and others that this was a little more difficult than the norm for Chifonie. Like Muffin I wasn’t wildly enthusiastic about TIE DOWN. I for one am with Herb @10 and his essay – HH’s criticisms do appear more strident than necessary because of their brevity (and sometimes their inaccuracy!).

    Thanks to setter and blogger.

15. Thanks Chifonie and PeterO. Failed in the top half, probably not helped by not getting COBBLED TOGETHER, but it doesn’t really seem to fit “ill-considered” to me, but hey ho.

    DOESKIN raised a smile.

16. Well it would otherwise be a very long post – as yous is Herb 😀

    There are some opinions in your responses too. I don’t think you make a cast-iron case anywhere, but I like to read how you see it. I’m staying with what I said, that’s my view.

17. Thanks Chifonie and PeterO

    I didn’t find this one harder than normal, although there was a slightly different feel to it that I can’t put my finger on.

    Also ended up in the NW with SABLE and the very neat COBBLED TOGETHER as the last couple in.

    Generally find the precise, crisp clueing of this setter a pleasure even though they are not as hard as most of the other Guardian setters.

18. This getting silly
    Yesterday we had GLUTEN-FREE in the ad next the crossword in the paper
    Today we have MARIGOLD!

19. beermagnet @18
    I thought it unlikely that rubber gloves would be advertised next to the crossword, so I checked – you’re right, though it is the hotel rather than the gloves!

20. I don’t see how ‘revealed’ is a past participle btw. It is the past tense of a verb. And if ‘to be dense’ is ‘revealed’ the order is totally wrong and cannot produce that meaning. It’s just a poor cryptic grammar.

21. Thanks to PeterO for the blog.

    I have only one criticism: 1d should have included an indicator that we’re looking for a foreign word.

    On 24a I spent quite a long time trying to remember an aspect of A-level maths! Eventually I got there then checked the anagram fodder. 🙂

22. chas @21, that got me thinking, ROOSTER, a foreign word, but then I realised I am a New Zealander, surely not that foreign? But we do call hens chookies.

23. I have a friend called Jickie. She says ‘choice’ and ‘ay’ a lot.

24. chas, here you are “Dawn and the Rooster’s Crow” in the “Return of the King” by J.R.R Tolkien.

25. Not one of Chifonie’s easiest, but still mostly straightforward, and for me this was one of his better ones. Last in was STOCKS, largely because I wasn’t convinced it parsed, but that’s probably just a lack of plant knowledge.

    Thanks to Chifonie and PeterO

26. Chas, there might be an error there, it was somebody writing about the book, they could have been American. My grandsons have our old copies now so I cannot check.

27. Cookie @26
    It’s not a chapter title in my edition.

    I didn’t think that “rooster” was a foreign word, but I did raise an eyebrow at “chicken” = “rooster” – a rooster is an adult male fowl (“Chambers gives “domestic cock”), and I wouldn’t describe an adult male as a “chicken”.

28. P.S. was anyone else surprised by the spelling CROSIER? I habitually spell all words that I think could have an S or a Z with the S, but I had only come across the Z spelling here. However, Chambers gives “crozier – see crosier”.

29. Muffin, here anyway, “chicken” is generic (could be either sex of that particular species), with rooster specifically male and chicken specifically female. So a rooster is a male chicken.

    Either way, it’s a good English word of old English stock, so I can’t see complaining that it’s foreign.

    The one arguably foreign word here is “hacienda.” Maybe chas had a typo there? I’d say hacienda would be fair game in the U.S., though of course we absorb Spanish words faster over here. (If I recall correctly, the U.S. has something like the world’s third- or fourth-largest Spanish-speaking population, counting native speakers only.)

30. And muffin @28: yes, same here.

31. Sorry for the triple post: I was distracted: meant to say that rooster is male, hen is female, and chicken is generic.

32. muffin, thanks. I think mrpenney would say ROOSTER should be known by English speakers.
    The OCED gives CROSIER as the usual spelling, and the on line crossword won’t accept Z.

33. mrpenney @29

    “Muffin, here anyway, “chicken” is generic (could be either sex of that particular species), with rooster specifically male and chicken specifically female. So a rooster is a male chicken.”

    Either this is self-contradictory, or I don’t see what you are driving at.

    I think we would use “fowl” to specify a “chicken” of either sex. As I said, though, it was just a raised eyebrow; I didn’t feel moved to comment on it.

    chas’s “1d” would need to be a misprint for “18” for him to be commenting on HACIENDA. I wonder if he was? I thought that it was fine anyway – it has been incorporated into English, like “chateau”. “Hacienda” is in Chambers.

34. sorry mrpenney, we crossed.

35. Sorry, mrpenney – we crossed.

36. I thought this was quite an easy solve for the most part. I got stuck in the NE corner largely because I stupidly put in OLIVES instead of ARARAT for reasons which now seem, to say the least, odd. Once I realised it didn’t work things clicked into place. LOI TIE DOWN.
    Thanks Chifonie.

37. Thanks Chifonie and PeterO

    I like Chifonie: hardly ever a redundant word, and elegant clueing. 24ac is a magnificent anagram. Glad others found the NW difficult too: I got “together” very quickly.

    HH – I don’t understand what is wrong with “b” for soft. Surely the joy of crosswords is that soft can be p or b, and b can be soft or black? Soft works better here because of the reference to fur.

38. I’ve always understood chicken to be the bird regardless of sex, rooster to be the male and hen to be the female. And I’ve never thought of rooster as a foreign word.

39. My Chambers has ROOSTER defined as “a domestic cock” and doesn’t say anything about it being country-specific in usage or origin.

40. Andy B @39, the OCED gives ‘rooster. esp. N Amer., Austral. etc. a domestic cock.’

41. ROOSTER and HACIENDA are both fine for me. English uses both. I go with John Appleton on chickens.

    My problem with soft for B is that the crosswordese defaults to ‘black’. Soft usually prompts P for piano, and so, especially where black works just as well, I can’t see why the waters need to be muddied here.

42. HH – it is not muddying, it is diversity: surely that is the joy of crosswords?

43. Well, I’ve said why I think it’s a little unfair above. It (potentially) misleads by being unclear, not by being devious or clever.

44. There is nothing unfair about not using the expected crossword cliche

45. SABLE is of course the heraldic term for black, derived from the black fur. It’s possible that Chifonie didn’t wish to have “black” in the clue – it might have been thought to be doing double duty, which I know folk aren’t always keen on, or Chifonie may have thought “black fur” suggested the answer too quickly. I expect this is what Marienkaefer refers to @37.

    I have to confess that when I first tried to parse the clue, “SAPLE” suggested itself, but that was enough for me to see where I was going wrong. Not a bad clue in my book.

46. Cookie@40 – “esp” is not the same as exclusively. I remember when I was first becoming aware of pop music in the early to mid sixties, the Rolling Stones released Little Red Rooster, and I certainly already knew what a rooster was.

47. Hedgehoppy you really are a pain in the proverbial. They are crossword puzzles for God’s sake not exercises in English grammar.

48. Andy B @46, yes, I know, but I went through quite a lot of English literature on the web and could not find ROOSTER anywhere.

49. PS, just occurred to me, perhaps Americans don’t like to use the word cock. We had friends called Pecker, they wanted to move to Canada, but had second thoughts.

50. Cookie, yes–“cock” is usually only used in America in contexts in which it’s obvious we’re talking about fowl rather than male anatomy. (Cockfighting, for example, or pat phrases such as “the cock of the walk,” or of course the Gamecocks. ) And even then, it evokes a snicker from most of us.

    There was a guy on my favorite baseball team (the Chicago White Sox) a couple years ago whose last name was Putz. Poor guy. (Sure, the word is only vulgar in Yiddish—it’s merely rude in normal American slang—but even so.)

51. What I’d like to know is how “trades” gives STOCKS. Stocks are traded but they’re not trades in themselves.

52. jaceris @51
    It’s “trades in”, not just “trades”. My grocer trades in canned beans, so he stocks canned beans.

53. …………like the rep who “travelled in ladies’ underwear”.

54. I liked 9A.

    Otherwise this was just the usual “quiptic” Chifonie puzzle.

    There seems to be a lot of debate over not much 🙂

    Thanks to PeterO and Chifonie

55. Can I disagree with the general sentiment here?

    I really didn’t like this puzzle. I thought that it was far too easy yet there were too many clues that were loose (rooster = chicken (not on any farm I’ve been on), decaying = old, “soldier’s” instead of “soldier” (as written it’s not a double definition), … I did like penfriend = cob though.

    However none of this would have mattered if it weren’t for the awful grid. It’s effectively 4 relatively simple minigrids – I know that I solved each corner fully before getting any purchase in the next (except obviously for 9a & 24a). My order was NW, SW, NE, & SE. Once I got one clue in each corner the rest were almost write-ins, yet they gave pretty much no help with the other corners.

56. I forgot to add my twopenn’orth to the B=soft debate.

    I know that we accept H for hard and B for soft in cryptics. I’ve always assumed this comes from the pencil HB grading system. In this sytem the H stands for “hard” and the B stands for “black”. Even though the softer the graphite is the blacker the mark it leaves is the B does stand for “black”.

    So our tradition of accepting b for “soft” is at best based on a misunderstanding at worst just plain wrong.

    Perhaps that’s what HH means when he says “‘soft’ for B is at one remove”.

    Clever chap that HH 😉

57. I’m a little worried about myself — did the fifteen letter anagram for DIFFERENTIATION en passant, and I am not a mathematician. That can’t be normal. Maybe I should take a break from this for a while . . .

    My only miss in this puzzle was the B for “soft” in SABLE (a confession, not a complaint.)

    Thanks Chifonie and PeterO.

58. Thanks all
    I misread the Tories as an anagram so failed to parse it.
    9 across I solved easily but without understanding!!
    Enjoyable and just the right level for me.

59. Note to setter: I am definitely old but certainly not decaying!

60. engineerb @55

    Certainly you can disagree – and so can I, to you examples of looseness. I think that chicken is gender-neutral (except that there are far more hens than cocks kept around), so I think defining ROOSTER by “chicken’ is OK. While I would echo RCWhiting’s sentiment @59, I think there are enough uses of OLD to justify the definition ‘decaying’. I read the ‘s in 5D as “is” (note that I did not include it in the definiton), snd it seems to me to be a suitable link between the clue’s two definitions.

61. And in the world of pencils, H is clearly hard and B is clearly soft. Goodnight all!

62. Marienkaefer @61

    Nobody is disputing your statement but you seem to be missing the point.

    In the “world of pencils”

    H stands for “hard”
    B stands for “black”

    It’s quite clear 😉

63. What a load of b*#*#cks ! ‘Herb’ get a life!! Or smoke some of your namesake and keep your tedious anal observations to yourself! Fantastically enjoyable crossword thankyou chifonie!!

64. shaar @63

    “Whoooooooooooooooooosh….”

    Did you not hear something flying over your head? 🙂

65. shaar @63 – I won’t defend everything Herb says but I understand why he felt compelled to write it – there are far worse offenders when it comes to posting tedium (and I am probably one of them). Herb’s comment was a specific reply to a specific comment and makes sense in context. If you think comments are long and tedious, you don’t have to read them.

    I have some sympathy for engineerb @55 too – I can’t say I’m Chifonie’s greatest fan, but although this was fairly easy, there were a few that made me think, therefore one of his better ones.

66. Brendan(nto) – I do hope you were being sarcastic in referring to hh as a “clever chap” as I’ve noted occasions when he has described quite straightforward clues or words as “really hard” or “very obscure” when they are certainly not so. I don’t get the impression that he is a particularly able solver. I may be wrong, of course, but I’m learning that it is healthier to ignore his comments rather than vainly wish they’d go away!
    The crossword – did enjoy COBBLED TOGETHER but surprised no-one else mentioned that 8dn could equally well have been STARKE as STERNE….
    Great blog, as ever, PeterO and many thanks to Chifonie.

67. well said Brendan – we crossed

68. @shaar
    God you’re cool. You’ve heard of cannabis and everything. And you say things like “get a life”. Wish I did have a life like yours, doing cool stuff like going online to comment on crosswords at three in the morning.

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