Guardian 26,130 / Puck

41 comments on “Guardian 26,130 / Puck”

1. Thanks Eileen and Puck
   I found this rather disappointing. I disagree about the surfaces, Eileen – quite a few I thought made no sense at all. There were also lots of easy anagrams, though I confess I had electronic help with APPLE POLISHER as it was a new term for me as well.

   Is there a superfluous anagram indicator in 2d MAKING pie I’d most BANANAS…..?

2. Thanks Eileen. Re 16, I think it’s [S]PRINTABLE ie. ‘can be speedily run’ with the first off.

3. I forgot to mention that the Sopwith Camel was the biplane flown by Biggles and, of course, Snoopy.

4. Thanks Eileen.
   I’m with muffin in finding this puzzle a little disappointing. I agree that there are some very good clues, but I found some of the surfaces clunky, and I wasn’t impressed with the use of ‘rasps’ at 23a – does the word exist in the sense of a fruit except as an abbreviation for raspberries?
   By the way Eileen, in your blog you have omitted the parsing of the ‘a’ in 15d, I think it is indicated by ‘one’ in the clue.

5. Thanks, Geirge. Careless omission corrected now.

   Chambers has RASP as a separate entry – ‘now informal and Scottish’: I can vouch for the latter – my husband used to use it.

6. Sorry, George!

7. Thanks Eileen – and to Puck for a great workout, including the brilliant 16D, which had me for ages, with the crossletters there and the misleafing numbers, trying to make Heston-like uncivilised food combinations.

8. ‘misleading’

9. Re Comment #2

   I am just wondering in what context we would use ‘sprintable’.

   We can run , we can run fast, we can sprint.

   A machine can run, it can run [or be run] fast but I don’t think we can say it is ‘sprintable’.

   Can we say a track is sprintable because it is pucca and another track is not sprintable because it has potholes or other impediments?

   In sum, is the word ‘sprintable’ OK?

10. Rishi @9…..

    Not saying it’s a word but you could imagine a conversation as follows:

    Q – can I get to the station before the train leaves?
    A – well, it’s just about sprintable.

11. Thanks, Aoxomoxoa.

12. Enjoyed this but not too difficult. ETHOS / LIMES unaccountably held me up at the end. Agree with the comments re eg RASPS but lots of fun and good surfaces too

13. Nice fruity puzzle.

    Thanks Eileen; I parsed PRINTABLE as you with the ‘be’ just a joining word for the sake of the surface. The ‘an’ in 13 seems to be redundant with the clue making sense without it. Perhaps just there to mislead the IRONing=evening out. Like molonglo@7 I was duped by the prime numbers, which was a great clue.

    APPLE-POLISHER is given in Oxford as N.Amer informal. I liked the LADDERING=making a run, the buxom brides and ENIGMATIC.

14. So, there’s this old custom–long dead, and even when alive, more honored in the breach than the observance–of schoolchildren who wished to curry favor bringing “an apple for teacher.” An apple-polisher is taking that to extremes.

    I had no idea it was an Americanism.

15. Re Eileen @5; RASP=raspberry is in Collins as well as Chambers, so I don’t think we can complain.

16. Thank you Puck and Eileen.
    I hadn’t realised that rasps are Scottish. The Strawbs, however, are English.

17. Thanks for the blog, Eileen. My dear late father-in-law grew what he called rasps and loved eating them. He was from Yorkshire.

18. In Salford, then in Lancashire, we called them rasps too. Not that we saw many of them. Ee it were tuff. I’m half Irish, and I remember being puzzled on our first trips there after the war by the delicious dish rasp pancakes not being even slightly pink until I found out that rasp referred to the grating of the potatoes. The pancakes are now called boxty so no more confusion. I’m old. Rambling is permitted if not encouraged.
    Enjoyable crossword, not too hard after yesterday’s. Thanks Puck and Eileen.

19. Is the word ling ever used in real life? Eileen – I know you’re a cook: have you ever eaten one?

20. Lovely puzzle. I liked the CANNING PERSON and the EVENING OUT especially.
    In 3, I thought the definition was SPIRIT FOUND IN A SET, so SWEET is there to avoid the double duty. Whether double duty is to be avoided, though, is another debate.

    Muffin @1: the whole phrase MAKING BANANAS is probably the anagrind. It’s hard to see how to reorder the clue to use BANANAS alone, and that, no doubt, was non-negotiable, being a theme element. However, the surface seems to make little sense even with this.

    Thanks, Puck, for the laughs, and, Eileen, for the blog.

21. Hi marienkaefer @19

    LING [along with gar and ide et al] is a fish I’ve only ever come across in crosswords – where it can also be ‘heather’, of course. 😉

22. Thanks for the blog, Eileen. Helped me to understand a few clues I’d not managed to parse properly, e.g. TANGELO.

    I agree with some other comments that I found some of the clueing a bit iffy, e.g. the definition ‘good for a night out’ for STEAM IRON, but it may be that I’m not getting 100% of what’s going on, so that may be an unfair comment.

    I think ‘set’ is needed in 3d, as it’s part of the definition – ethos is a shared value system among a group, i.e. ‘spirit found in a set’.

    Hello to everyone, by the way. Haven’t managed to post here for a couple of years. Glad to see the blog still going strong, and hope this finds everyone well.

23. I mislead my self for a while by inventing the term ‘ lapel polisher ‘ which I rather like. Good image, don’t you think?

24. Welcome back, otter @22!

    I’m not surprised you had problems with the definition of 13ac if you read it as ‘good for a night out’! 😉

    I agree with you and phitonelly @20 about 3dn: thanks, both.

    Nice one, MartinD!

25. Thanks Eileen and Puck

    I quite enjoyed the clues in this puzzle (pace some of the critics). I ticked 13a, 25a, 26a and 16d. I also liked 16a but see I did not parse it quite correctly.

    I always associate 26a with Louis Armstrong.

26. Hi tupu

    I’m not sure we’ve come up with the ‘correct’ parsing of 16ac. 😉

    I’ve no particular brief to hold for Fats Domino’s version of 26ac: it simply came up first on Google but I see now that Satchmo’s version pre-dates it.

27. PRIMITIVE is sublime, given that he could make 4 in this crossword edible…although it is what someone here recently described as a “clue which leads FROM the answer, rather than TO it”…but luckily the definition was straightforward.

    “…good for an evening out” is the sort of definition that makes life a joy to live!

28. I enjoyed this one after such a hard (but excellent) week of crosswords. Hubby has just finished using the 13a to even out his trousers ahead of an evening out and I’ve just used (most of) 8d part 2 to 20a. So off to the pub for some fruity cocktails!

29. This was a pleasant enough Friday evening solve, and to be honest I pay so little attention to surface readings most of the time that I had no quibbles about them while I was completing the puzzle.

    I saw 16ac as (S)PRINTABLE and the question mark at the end of the clue indicates to me that it is meant jocularly, so I don’t think we should be too bothered by whether or not the word can be used in the real world, although Aoxomoxoa’s example @10 is pretty good. RASPS was my LOI after I couldn’t think of an alternative.

30. Eileen

    I rather hoped your reply would be “I sat down the other day and enjoyed my ling with a cup of cha”.

31. Thanks all
    especially Andy in @29. I do find the surfaces quite superficial (pun intended). The first part of solving is to ignore the surface and work through it to find and distinguish the definition from the cryptic.

32. Thanks Eileen and Puck.

    In 17d is it not a triple definition?

    Surprise – dropping this – stunning woman.

33. Thanks for the blog, Eileen. Nits aside, this was a lot of fun. I agree with deWaverley @27: 16d was quite sweet. Thanks, Puck.

    Bracoman @32: I took it as a dd (as Eileen has it), with the clue referring to the phrase “to drop a bombshell”, i.e., to make a surprise announcement. “Dropping this” by itself strikes me as an inadequate definition for “bombshell.” To your point, “a big surprise” is a sufficient definition, making “dropping this” somewhat superfluous, but I think it’s there to smooth the surface.

34. Well what has Puck done to upset some of you?

    I found this another excellent puzzle from him. All the surfaces are are good and some of the clues are excellent. In fact I think 13A is a contender for clue of the year!

    16A is very clear as is the parsing. SPRINTABLE (nothing at all wrong with that) less it’s first. Obvious isn’t it? I think Eileen that your parsing was a little convoluted and actually doesn’t work! Finally a PDF is the format of choice if one wants people to print something in a consistent way! Brilliant clue!

    My first pass yielded only about 5 answers! (Not helped by the fact that I forgot the down clues from the top row?????!!!! However everything soon fell into place.

    Not too difficult but a nice end to the week.

    Thanks to Eileen and Puck

35. Thanks to Puck and Eileen. Enjoyed the workout. APPLE POLISHER was not new to me; I was one in
    Grade School in the 40’s. However, RASPS and EATER were new terms for me. FYI: in 1956
    Blueberry Hill by Louis Armstrong reached #29 while the Fats Domino version reached #2.

    Cheers…

36. Back rather late after an evening at the Linbury Studio, with whales, kinda. 16A, I want to say, is pretty much unsolvable. I had to wait for the crossers big time on that one, so defend it as you may, I was flummoxed. An okay puzzle, but not the best we get from Guardian.

37. I don’t see why there is such outrage about 16A?

    Every clue has a definition part and some wordplay to help us find the answer. Sometimes we guess a word from the definition and work backwards through the wordplay to confirm the answer. Sometimes we have to use the wordplay to build candidates and get there that way. Other times our spooky subconscious just throws the answer into our head!!!!

    Setters often like to try and make one of these methods harder for us! They often use misdirection, which is OK in my book. Others like Pasquale, Gordius et al will often use some totally obscure word that only a 1920’s Classics don at Cambridge would be familiar with! I personally hate this as I think it’s lazy and totally scuppers one of our ways in. Although the usual suspects on here don’t even raise an eyebrow when this happens with their “favourites”!!!

    !6A is fair! It’s pretty obvious where the def is. Even if one didn’t know what A PDF was one could look it up. (If you see the Wikipedia entry you will eventually find the phrase “.. which eventually became the de facto standard for printable documents on the web…”). How kind is that?

    So as clues go I think this was solvable by everybody.

    Where is the problem?

38. Coming late to this, I got the wrong answer from the 10ac anagram – HOTSPOT, instead of POTSHOT. It made sense – hot can mean critical, and spot can mean remark (in the sense of notice).
    No wonder the Apple Polisher, of which I’d never heard, escaped me.
    Thanks Puck and Eileen.

39. Nice to have a couple of maths references neatly tucked in, I thought.

    Some good smilers: STEAM IRON being such for me.

    Thanks all.

40. Oh, even-ing. [holds head in hands in shame]

41. Yep: 200m would be sprintable, but not a mile.

    Oddly 16a was one of the few write-ins for me.

    otter: it’s horrible when that happens isn’t it?

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