Guardian 26,520 / Chifonie

43 comments on “Guardian 26,520 / Chifonie”

1. Thanks Chifonie and Eileen
   I do like an unexpected anagram, and GIFT HORSE = FORESIGHT was just such.
   16d starting C?M had me working with the wrong river for a while.
   There were some things I didn’t like. DUNCE = ILLITERATE – not necessarily (in either direction!) VAGRANT = DOSSER – ditto. “Player” = E is very loose (I didn’t see it, in fact), as is HEAT = excitement and “cheat” = “trickster” in 24d.

2. Oh, and why is SPEND = WASTE?

3. Thanks, Eileen.

   Needed your explanations for CAMPANILE (I was up the CAM, too) and EVENT. Otherwise I found it straightforward.

4. Hi muffin

   I was dubious about spend = waste but Chambers and SOED both have it [Collins doesn’t].

   I’m uneasy with DOSSER and ILLITERATE, too, but heat = excitement works for me and I don’t see anything wrong with cheat = trickster. EVENT took a minute or two to see but I think it’s fair enough: we’re well used to seeing the bridge players in crosswords – although, admittedly, usually as ‘partners’ or ‘rivals / competitors’, rather than simply players.

5. Took a bit of time to get into this (and the surprise that it wasn’t Rufus!) but very enjoyable. Favourites were FORESIGHT, TEAR and EMPATHETIC. Nicely clued all round, although I agree with muffin’s comment about DUNCE and ILLITERATE – I thought that VAGRANT = DOSSER was OK, and HEAT = excitement (as in “If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen”). Thanks to Chifonie and Eileen.

6. Thanks Eileen and Chifonie

   This got harder after some write-ins but was generally good fun. Was not much taken with ‘spend’ and ‘spent’ in 4d and 28 though they might also be seen as forming a neat pair – in 4 spend is a component of the clue and in 28 spent is a component of the answer.

7. Hi Eileen and drofle
   I wasn’t intending to say the “heat” isn’t excitement; the looseness is that excitement could be a lot of things other than heat, and the trickster could be a lot of things other than cheat; two “loosenesses” making this not a good clue, in my opinion.

8. Curses! I wrote in MEDALLION (online), not noticing that it changed my previous answer to YETL. This ultimately left me with 15A as R_D_C_I which, having checked all the crossers to be correct, I gave up on.

   Thanks for the crossword and the blog.

9. Thanks Chifonie and Eileen.

   I enjoy the Monday puzzles being able to do them now in a reasonable time (with the help of ‘check’).

   I, too, got stuck in the mud while punting, and translated MEDAILLON into English to start with.
   Favourites were TEAR, FORESIGHT, RONDO and CAMPANILE.

   muffin is filling in for Hoggy!

10. Aoxomoxoa @ 8: I did the same initially with MEDALLION/MEDAILLON – I thought it was the former – but things got untangled when I saw YETI afterwards.

11. I’m yet another who thought, all this time, that he was eating medallions of beef, instead of medaillons. Live and learn. Maybe a YETL is a yenta from a shetl?

    In the U.S. we have a common cookie called a ginger snap. Is this the same biscuit (cookie, biscuit—same thing) as a ginger nut?

12. Shtetl. Sorry. I can’t spell.

13. [Cookie @9
    I don’t know whether the take that as a compliment!]

14. I’m curious — wouldn’t you think that Medaillon should have an indicator saying that it’s French? Recipes for “beef medallions” are common, and the French spelling is increasingly rare (in my experience). I know it’s in Chambers, and technically it’s completely fine, but do you think it’s consistent with the goal of an easy Monday crossword?

    Maybe I’m just over-sensitive because I wrote in Medallion early, and then took a humiliatingly long time to see Yeti and Radical.

15. Thanks Chifonie & Eileen.

    I thought MEDAILLON was a bit unnecessary as MEDALLION would have been a lot better known to most people, I would have thought [and that would have given numerous possibilities with ?E?L for 12.]

    Overall, entertaining start to the week. mrpenney @11, I believe that GINGER NUT means something quite different over the pond (?) 😉

16. [Talking of words becoming rarer, there was a fascinating paper in Nature a few years ago tracking the regularization of irregular verbs. The less frequently an irregular verb is used, the more likely it is to become regular; the half-life of the irregular form scales as the square root of its frequency. See http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7163/edsumm/e071011-01.html. Crosswords are doing valuable work in keeping rare words alive!]

17. I was MEDALLION too, for a while.

    Quite nice to see a lesser-known composer, RODRIGO, but really not nice at all to see ILLITERATE defined as ‘dunce’. That’s wrong on so many levels, and in the Guardian too.

18. [muffin @13, thought you might react, let’s say you are keeping his place warm?]

19. I was hoping that MEDAILLON was a Graunism rather than my own erudition, sadly not.

    Pleasant start to the week, though.

20. [Trailman @17, one of my favourite composers, coincidentally there is the opera RODRIGO by Handel.]

21. Mrpenney @11
    Thanks for that – lovely!!

22. Finished it but why is ‘do’ tonic ?

23. phil elston – the first note of the musical scale is called either ‘Do(h)’ or (the) ‘Tonic’.

24. phil @22
    Do re mi

25. Thanks to Eileen for the blog.

    I am another who started with MEDALLION then had to amend it once I had spotted YETI.

    Phil@22 musical notation Do, Ray (Re?), Me (Mi?) etc. I have seen this called the tonic Sol-Fa system.

26. Phil Elston @ 2: ‘Tonic’ is the key note of a scale, as in ‘Do, a deer, a female deer…’

27. All pretty straightforward, as one would expect on a Monday. Last in was EVENT because it took me a while to think of bridge. No problems with MEDAILLON because RADICAL was already in before I looked at it…

    Thanks to Eileen and Chifonie

28. Pleasant romp. As luck would have it, I’d already filled in 15a RADICAL so was obliged to get the right version of Medaillon.
    21d is indeed &lit, as in classic sonata form, the recapitulation would normally start in the tonic key.

29. I didn’t think this as good as Rufus usually is on a Monday. Some nice clues -CAMPANILE, FORESIGHT but I didn’t like EVENT or OVERSPENT. I did get MEDAILLON but mainly because I had YETI in first!
    Perhaps I’m being a bit unfair.
    Thanks anyway Chifonie

30. Thanks, Eileen.

    Pleasant glide into the week’s puzzles.

    I had YETI and RADICAL before tackling 8d, so I had no problem with MEDAILLON (this flowery way of describing a round piece of meat is unmistakably French, after all), but I was another who started 16d up the CAM without a paddle, and wondered how PANILE = ‘ostentatious’ (must have been thinking of the S&B event next month).

    1a works somewhat better if you take the definition as ‘spoke’ (=CONVERSED) and consider the ‘to’ as a linker word (to ‘skilled’ [put] ‘prisoner’ first) .

    logophile @16: Thanks for the link to the Nature abstract. The counter-examples to the regularisation of ‘irregular’ verbs (more properly ‘strong verbs’ – they just followed different conjugation rules) are the forms ‘dove’ (for ‘dived’) and ‘snuck’ (for ‘sneaked’), both originally from some US dialects.

31. [Gervase @16 — yes, the authors mention the “snuck” phenomenon but say it is considerably rarer than verbs going in the other direction.

    In case you haven’t seen it, the same people put together Google’s NGram viewer, where you can look at the relative frequencies of words and phrases over time. https://books.google.com/ngrams%5D

32. 8 down is well foxy, since both spelynges are possible from the anagram.

33. Thanks all
    Despite Eileen’s view I thought this was much superior to the usual Monday fare.
    I couldn’t finish the NE because of the yeti medallion clash!

34. mrpenney @11

    No-one seems to have picked up on your question about ginger nuts: yes, they are more or less the same as the ginger snaps you know. I think that the latter term is also used in England, but I seem to recall a rather different confection also going under that name: constructed rather like cannoli, they are thin ginger wafers formed into a tube while still hot from the oven, generally dipped in chocolate at one end and filled with whipped cream or some more elaborate custard cream.

35. [PeterO @ 34
    I know the things you describe as “brandy snaps” rather than “ginger snaps”.]

36. Regarding 1d – interesting that adopt can mean take on or take in. It makes for ambiguity until you’ve got the answer.
    Thanks to Eileen & Chifonie

37. This was pleasant enough for “easy” Monday.

    Nothing much more to add that hasn’t been said already except to express the totally opposite view of Peter Aspinwall @ 29.

    I personally thought this was infinitely better than the normal Rufus. It had some pretty good clues (as does a Rufus), it had some minor niggles (as does a Rufus), it was easy and so satisfied the alleged Grauniad “easy” Monady policy! (as is a Rufus). However it totally outshone the usual Rufus fare in that it was a cryptic puzzle that resembled the puzzles that appear on Tuesday to Saturday and not the strange concoction of DDs and CDs that Rufus gives us. Much more suitable for a beginner who wants to start solving the puzzles on the non-Mondays. (IMHO of course! )

    Of course I might be totally misunderstanding the reasons for the “easy” Monday policy. 😉

    Thanks to Eileen and Chifonie

38. Yes, I thought medallion first but quickly remembered it was medaillon in French cuisine and this was necessary to preserve my yeti. All fine with me.

    Lovely puzzle thank you so much Chifonie. Fair with just a little stretch, just lovely.

39. Having been spanked by several of the compilers in recent weeks it was a nice feeling to complete today. Ok not hard but some interesting clues. Didn’t like dunce but didn’t become foiled by medaillon although I had seine in as the river Nile for a bit! Thanks Eillen & Chifonie

40. Thanks Chifonie and Eileen

    MEDALLION was my first in, YETI was my second and MEDAILLON was my third.

    I like this setter – he’s usually fairly straightforward but his clues are always unambiguous to me. Especially like his misdirection with some of his definitions – e.g. ‘Licking’ – ROUT.

    Didn’t parse EMPATHETIC – no good reason and in retrospect wasn’t all that hard.

    A nice start to the week with enough time to get the Tramp puzzle from last week done as well!

41. I agree with logophile that a hint at French (“continental” perhaps) would have been nice for MEDAILLON, and with Trailman that “illiterate = dunce” is quite unfair to the many perfectly intelligent people who through no fault of their own lack reading skills.

42. Medallion had me messed up good and proper, I was even scanning the hotel menu to make sure I’d spelt it right. Curses. Thanks Eileen. See you soon.

43. logophile@16
    Thanks for those sites. I’ve been lurking on the edge of this very helpful conversation for a while but it’s the strong verbs that impel me to write. I notice in my reading that ‘shear’ has become a weak (regular) verb in UK and US, but here in Australia where we talk about sheep a lot it’s still ‘shore’ and ‘shorn’.

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