A sound Quiptic from Anto this morning, with some nicely chosen anagrams to ease beginners and those still a little drowsy into the puzzle.
Abbreviations
cd cryptic definition
dd double definition
cad clue as definition
(xxxx)* anagram
anagrind = anagram indicator
[x] letter(s) removed
definitions are underlined
Across
1 Unsettle the frail old dictator
ADOLF HITLER
(THE FRAIL OLD)*
9 Old stink journalist dug up
EXHUMED
A charade of EX, HUM and ED.
10 Perfect time to get down
PLUMAGE
A charade of PLUM and AGE.
11 He’s smart to keep true line in dangerous surroundings
BRIGHT LAD
An insertion of RIGHT and L in BAD.
12 The idiot dumping child for her
HEIDI
[T]HE IDI[OT] The instruction to remove TOT is ‘dumping’.
13 French polish made partly from melanin
ELAN
Hidden in mELANin.
14 What the following numbers show (4,6)
WORD LENGTH
A slightly left-field clue: the numbers after the clue, shown as (4,6) in this case, indicate the WORD LENGTH or enumeration.
16 Criminal said much to show ability to acquire gold
MIDAS TOUCH
(SAID MUCH TO)* and referencing the King Midas fable.
19 Twice a year is enough for father
PAPA
A duplication of PA for per annum or ‘a year’.
21 Sample is lacking the second time? That’s a shocker
TASER
TAS[T]ER
22 Step up can be nasty when moving right to left
INCREMENT
The setter is inviting you to take the L out of INCLEMENT and replace it with an R, but I think the instructions actually tell you to do the opposite (which you can’t, clearly).
24 Return once more with artist to where river is falling
NIAGARA
A charade of AGAIN reversed and RA for ‘artist’. The reversal indicator is ‘return’.
25 Love talking about trivial stories
IDOLISE
A homophone (‘talking about’) of IDLE LIES.
26 Give men lean stew for supper
EVENING MEAL
(GIVE MEN LEAN)*
Down
1 Aristocratic young couple needed to maintain the succession
AN HEIR AND A SPARE
A cd. A phrase used of, for example, our Royal Family, where primogeniture means that the first-born succeeds to the throne (and since the Succession to the Crown Act 2013, this can even be – yes – a girl). So just in case something untoward happened to the first child, it was considered prudent to have another one. In modern times, where infant mortality is less of an issue, this means that we end up with lost souls like Harry Wales and paedophile-befriending clowns like Randy Andy.
2 Sexual attraction starts to overawe one meeting personal hero
OOMPH
The initial letters of the last five words of the clue.
3 Work of art showing priest in dog collar
FIDELIO
An insertion of ELI for the biblical ‘priest’ in FIDO, for a universal ‘dog’. The insertion indicator, rather cleverly, is ‘in dog collar’. It’s Beethoven’s only opera, if you didn’t know.
4 Hung over, forgets name and gets delayed
IMPEDED
IMPE[N]DED
5 Chuckles afterwards about awkward hug
LAUGHTER
An insertion of (HUG)* in LATER. The anagrind is ‘awkward’ and the insertion indicator is ‘about’.
6 Interpretation matters in books, for example
READING MATERIAL
A charade of READING (‘what is your interpretation/reading of the situation?’) and MATERIAL.
7 One just starting to make extremely nice web income
NEWBIE
The outside letters (‘extremely’) of the last three words of the clue.
8 Female alien is hot; a thing that gets you going!
FETISH
A charade of F, ET, IS and H.
15 Mean ruse perhaps needed to get online access
USERNAME
(MEAN RUSE)*
16 Type of ritual practised before start of congress?
MATING
A cd, with the ‘congress’ being of the sexual kind.
17 Nice friend goes after old engineer for paperwork
ORIGAMI
A charade of O, RIG and AMI for the French word for ‘friend’. If your friend was from Nice, he’d be your AMI, wouldn’t he?
18 Carry empty grip on your bike
CYCLING
A charade of CY for the outside letters of ‘carry’ and CLING.
20 Woman compiling three articles
ANTHEA
Exactly what it says on the tin: the ‘three articles’ are AN, THE and A.
23 Call up first lady to get outside approval
EVOKE
An insertion (‘to get outside’) of OK in EVE.
Many thanks to Anto for this morning’s Quiptic.
That was fun. Thank you for the parsing of IMPEDED; I was to contrated on the after effects of alcohol to see IMPENDED. I think the clue does work for INCREMENT though I too first had INCLEMENT. The problem is that L/R is not a crosser so that the ambuguity cannot be resolved. Thank you to Anto for a nice puzzle to start the week and to Pierre for the explanations.
Thanks both. Did this before today’s Cryptic and, as usual, found the Quiptic harder. Or was this because I was still waking up?
Thanks for the clear and helpful blog. Personally (and I see I differ from the blogger and Beobachterin) I found “increment” unambiguous. The def’n is “step up” and that can be nasty if the r is changed to an l. I don’t think it can be read in reverse.
I didn’t get the homophone of “idolise” but then I pronounce words correctly and don’t slur them!
Thanks Anto, and also Pierre (what, no link to a bird with beautiful plumage?)
I’m with TheZed @3 on both INCREMENT and IDOLISE, and with Shirl @2 about the relative difficulty (though I did them the other way around). Not quite sure why I found this a little chewier, as when the pennies did start to drop, the clues were clear enough in retrospect. I wasn’t helped by bunging in CLUE LENGTH at 14a, with insufficient thought. I also had AN HEIR AND A S_A_E for quite a long time – the phrase is vaguely familiar… Thanks, Anto and Pierre – and TheZed for the bird link.
Mrs ginf was a bit of a royalist so 1d went straight in, a good start in a quick solve, a cuppa each for this and the quip, which I did first and found a bit chewier. No prob with inclement and yes raised a brow at idolise, but approximate homophones don’t raise my blood pressure much. [One or two things in speech do elicit twinges, eg haitch, double conditionals (I would’ve loved to have been there..) and the absolute compulsion to precede every ‘way’ by ‘in which’…hey ho].
Thanks both.
Another good one from Anto and I’m also of the opinion that this was slightly trickier than the Cryptic. In 16ac it feels slightly like “to” is doing double duty, or that “show” should grammatically be “shows” but at the expense of the surface so it’s probably just about allowable.
I’m also with TheZed@3 and TassieTim@4 that the clue asked for INCREMENT is unambiguous and just points out that changing the correct answer R to L gives another word meaning nasty.
Thanks Anto and Pierre.
As a relative beginner I’m getting the hang of this. Thought there were some great examples of clue types – 12a 16a 19a 21a and vast majority of down clues. Maybe too many anagrams but that suits me atm. Actually my favourite was 14a (word length) - clever; suited my joy in lateral thinking. Thanks all. I’m a convert and off to risk the cryptic.
Found this slightly harder than today’s Cryptic.
LIked: HEIDI, NIAGARA, INCLEMENT, EVOKE
Thanks B+S
whoops, I meant to type INCREMENT!
Welcome, Carol, if this is your first comment (on one of my blogs, anyway). I did wonder when writing up WORD LENGTH if it would be a stretch too far for newer solvers, but mention of your joy in lateral thinking reassures me that not all beginners fear cryptic definitions.
Having looked afresh at INCREMENT, I can see now that the clue works perfectly well as written. Objection overruled.
I think this was Anto’s best effort to date, with lots of clever surfaces and just the right amount of misdirection for a Quiptic. Had to go to google to confirm the phrase for the aristocratic young couple, but otherwise smooth sailing. Cryptic definitions with no wordplay are my least favorite clue type, but I’m with Carol Lowry @7 in citing WORD LENGTH as my cotd. Thanks to Anto and Pierre.
Thanks Anto and Pierre
One of Anto’s best – very enjoyable. Favourite was LAUGHTER.
No-one has mentioned that 25 can also be spelled IDOLIZE, and there’s nothing to indicate which is required. I always spell these words with an S, as some can’t have a Z, so it saves having to remeber which those are.
Very enjoyable. Thanks to Pierre for the parsing of IMPEDED (I, too, was stuck in the mind-set of ‘hung over’ being related to alcohol, though the fact that it was two words should possibly have been a hint otherwise) and for EXHUMED (I did not know ‘hum’ meant stink, but I suspected when the crossers made the answer obvious).
Thanks to Anto for the fun!
Good puzzle, thanks Anto. And thanks Pierre, and hope you enjoyed the dead parrot.
I think the clue for MIDAS TOUCH is fine. The definition is “ability to acquire gold,” and the “to” has nothing to do with it.
Has anybody ever heard of “clement weather”?
ginf @5 I find “I would have loved to have been there” annoying too, but I’d call that a “double perfect,” since there’s only one “would.” An actual (annoying) double conditional, which I hear all the time, is “if you would have brought the bread, we could have made sandwiches.”
I forgot to add a comment on “evening meal.” It took me a while to catch on that that is actually the name of the meal, rather than a descriptive phrase somebody happened to come up with. You see “evening meal” advertised, rather than dinner or supper. It’s a British usage I haven’t ever seen over here.
Definitely a crossword day. Managed to do the cryptic with some help from the dictionary – first time to complete a cryptic without using the reveal button or fifteen squared. Was on a role so decided to tackle this one. Found it a bit harder – but with quite a lot of dictionary help managed to finish it too. Am very happy – now back to yesterday’s everyman. Thanks to Anto and Pierre – lots of lovely clues helping me on my recently started cryptic crossword journey.
Quality from Anto today, just on the right side of Quiptic but much to like, such as Fidelio, Fetish and Newbie
Another relative newcomer to cryptics, though like to think I’m getting increasingly comfortable with them. But I found today’s quiptic rather challenging, and ended up giving up with a half empty grid. “Word length” actually wasn’t an issue for me – it was one of my first in. Struggled with the charades and cds more than anything. Perhaps I’m just not in the right frame of mind today!
Thanks Valentine @1; hmmm, not a grammarian’s bootlace, but I’d have thought that the ‘have’s are conditional whereas the ‘would’s are subjunctive..but, as I said, I wouldn’t be surprised to be wrong…
..Valentine @14 I meant..
Started quickly, slowed up, finished quickly. PLUMAGE and ORIGAMI were the stand-out clues for me. Wasn’t really convinced by the cd’s or by READING MATERIAL.
Thanks Pierre@10. I am getting hooked. I managed todays G cryptic too. Then I read the comments on 15^2….blimey folk really go on don’t they!! In fairness I learn a great deal from the comments but the banter can be as amusing as the puzzle.
Managed the cryptic (mostly) as well as the quiptic today! Except when I was checking fifteensquared I accidentally clicked on the answers to the quiptic and was spoiled for PLUMAGE. Whoops.
For 25a, I didn’t get the homophone (the ‘l’ in the middle of ‘idle lies’ is geminated, dammit!). I somehow tripped into it by mashing up ‘O’ for love, ‘IDLE’ for trivial, and ‘S’ for stories… which I now see leaves out the ‘I’, in addition to making the straight part do double-duty as part of the clue. Whoops again.
I was pleased that we had a substitution clue this time (22a). I find those tricky, since you have to come up with the clued original word and the indicated piece to swap out in addition to the actual answer. They’re a bit like the homophone clues that way, but aren’t used as often. 4d isn’t quite the same thing, but figuring out ‘hung over=impended’ is tricky enough to feel like it.
Today’s Britishism: hum=stink (UK informal, according to Cambridge Dictionary online). I guessed that the association was going to come from ‘stink=fuss’ (ex: making a stink over something) => “fuss=busy” (ex: fussing over something or other) => ‘busy’=’hum’ (ex: a busy factory is humming), but nope; turns out the synonymy is with the literal meaning of stink.
muffin@12 I just assume that wherever USers write ‘-ize’, the British spell it ‘-ise’.
Valentine@14 the Online Etymology Dictionary has ‘clement weather’ existing since the 1620s. I think there’s a legitimate linguistic term for these words that only exist/remain as stems in derived forms; a delve into wikipedia brings up ‘cranberry morpheme‘, ‘unpaired word‘, and ‘orphaned word‘.
grantinfreo@5 Eh? What’s so weird about “I would have loved to have been there”? It’s a conditional perfect that expresses a counterfactual; (if I’m dredging up my English grammar correctly). How else would you express the result of a hypothetical change to a thing that already occurred?
*sigh* I wrote up a long comment, but it looks like it’s in moderation because I linked to some wikipedia articles. I really need to anticipate that before I go hog-wild on the hypertext.
Khitty Hawk @24
Because spam often contains multiple links to other sites, any comment containing three or more links is placed in the moderation queue. I have now approved your comment.
Gaufrid@25 Thanks. Yeah, I poked around the 15^2 website and found the explanation. I probably should have inferred from the minimal use of links in the comments, but I’ll be better aware going forward.