Occasions in the crossword calendar
If you have read anything written here about the Times national crossword championship, or paid even the slightest attention to it over the last decade, Saturday’s winner will come as scant surprise.
timescrosswords (@timescrosswords)Congratulations to ten Times Crossword champion Mark Goodliffe
October 22, 2016
And, also from the Times crosswords Twitter account, @timescrosswords, an intriguing possibility for today:
timescrosswords (@timescrosswords)Look out on Monday for a live Facebook broadcast at 4pm - I'll be going through the clues for the day's main cryptic puzzle
October 22, 2016
I’m going to be there and be squared – wherever “there” is.
The news in clues
If you haven’t yet solved Radian’s Independent puzzle of last week, you can find it here. It had at its core one of those pairs of clues that refer to each other ...
16d Port holds baggage abandoned by 20 originally (8)
[ paraphrase of ‘holds baggage’ minus (‘abandoned by’) the first letter of 20d ]
[ HAS THINGS minus H ]
20d/15ac Dragoons win and hold ground he lost at 16 (6,9)
[ anagram (‘ground’) of DRAGOONS, WIN and HOLD ]
... and which, once unpicked, recall that it was HAROLD GODWINSON who lost at HASTINGS. Other clues referred to “20”, not always to HAROLD but certainly so in a gruesome depiction of his blue blood.
A 950th anniversary, such as the Battle of Hastings (also the topic of, among others, a splendid Times Two concise puzzle), feels a little like Adrian Mole’s declared age of 13¾, but perhaps it’s worth getting in some decent celebrations now in case 2066 is a world without enough keen historical re-enactors, or indeed one that itself resembles a medieval battleground.
Latter patter
In the Telegraph Toughie, MynoT is getting technical:
25ac Mark policeman getting series recast (8)
[ abbrev. for a police rank + anagram (‘recast’) of SERIES ]
[ DI + ERESIS ]
Ah, yes: the DIERESIS, or DIÆRESIS, or as the Guardian prefers it, via Collins, DIAERESIS, a word that tempts us to adorn it with itself.
In this paper, we find it in BRONTË, but not in NAIVE; in NOËL Coward but never in NOEL Edmonds. In general, it seems to be present here in names of people who themselves used diaereses, but never as a warning about how to pronounce the second of some pair of vowels.
Not so at the New Yorker, where there is no danger of readers reading NAÏVE as sounding like “knave”; likewise COÖPERATE and even REËLECT, due to a ruling in the magazine’s youth that CO-OPERATE and RE-ELECT would apparently look ridiculous.
According to one of the New Yorker’s proof-readers, the style editor Hobie Weekes tipped off a colleague in 1978 that he had resolved to stop infuriating the readers with diaereses ...
... in the elevator, he told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then he died.
The subject of our next challenge is a word that, as recently as 227 years ago, was seen to sport an diaeresis:
Reader, how would you clue POEM?
Clueing competition
Thanks for your clues for NO-MARK. My favourites of the real-life Marks were Owen (ComedyPseudonym’s “Failure of Gary, Howard, Jason and Robbie”); Phillips (Ousgg’s “Worthless, like Anne’s marital status”) Twain (GeoScanner’s “Forgotten Never the Twain?”) and Thatcher (TinyTinyMouse’s “As Maggie had to tell her son, the worthless shit”); the successor of the last also enabling Hectorthebat’s “Ketamine found in messed-up Norma (not Major)”.
I laughed often, especially at ID2155366’s “Lemon pudding?”, Peshwari’s “Ship for pixies is reportedly trash”, Alberyalbery’s “Unproductive doctor lies back in grass” and Robinjohnson’s “Insignificant, like Germany since adopting Euro”.
The runners-up are Chrisbeee’s acrostic “Person to whom ‘charisma’ or ‘work’ apply last of all” and Thebrasselephant’s triple(?)-definition “Zero”; the winner is AriadneOliver’s charming “Love fool”.
Kludos to AriadneOliver; please leave this fortnight’s entries and your pick of the broadsheet cryptics below.
Clue of the fortnight
Nominated by Schroduck, the setter known locally as Brummie is on form as Cyclops in Private Eye with a clue ...
10ac Encouragement to tennis player, having balls (7)
[ what one might shout to the world number six ]
[ ‘GO, NADAL!’ ]
... for a word that you might not know you knew. And for clarity, that’s Rafael, not Raphaël.
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