Guardian 23912/Araucaria
Posted by ilancaron on 2nd November 2006
Solving time: 1h+
Ah, Araucaria. The most Ximenean of the crowd in terms of wordplay but absolutely a horror when it comes to meaningful surfaces.
Today’s theme is putting out fires. As per usual, there are new words and phrases to learn and lookup (not in that order!): 9A, 24A (spelling), 21D, 22A…
Across
| 1 | CUS+TOM+ER – charade with three familiar cryptic idioms: abbrev for copper (the metal not the policeman or money), tomcat and the current queen. The definition is a bit indirect since there are lots of other things in the market. |
| 9 | AN(ALEC)TS – Alec is a boy’s name inside our hard-working crossword workers. A classic case of wordplay being solvable given the crossing letters leading to learning a new word meaning a collection of phrases. |
| 10 | GOS+SIP – apparently a charade of GOS (from goshawk: “hawk a little” thanks to r.pc.) + SIP (drink). And it’s what many of us do to get through the day. GOS isn’t in any dictionary that I consulted (don’t have Chambers): interestingly GOSS means “to spit” which is a synonym of a meaning of “hawk”, but this would create overlap in the wordplay. |
| 12 | P(RE+EMIN)ENCE – Tracy Emin has cropped up elsewhere in a recent puzzle – a sign of the times when Tracy refers to her and not Spencer nor Dick. Again not my favorite surface reading. |
| 19 | K+R+ON+A – charade starting with the classic crossword abbrevs for kings. Not so sure what “standard” adds to the clue: other than KRONA is a standard coin in Sweden. |
| 27 | DRY RISER – anag(“derry is r”): need to solve 4D and 8D beforehand (related to putting out fires). Another case of the wordplay being tractable and resulting in a new phrase (for me). A DRY RISER is a kind of fire extinguishing installation in tall buildings. |
Down
| 4 | EX+TIN+GU(I)SHER – Good example of clean wordplay and contrived surface reading. But helped establish the theme. Note that the definition anthropomorphizes the extinguisher: “I put out”. |
| 7, 8 | HO(SE PI)PE – theme related: wordplay is clean and refers to the “fire alarm” in 16D. HOPE contains anag(“pies”). |
| 11 | ENGINE DRIVER – theme-related cryptic definition. |
| 14 | BREAKS+PEAR – Now this was esoteric – turns out that Nicholas Breakspear was the only English pope as Adrian IV in the 12th century. Not sure about the Hadrian spelling – but then again being pedantic about spelling wasn’t a mediaeval forte: perhaps the setter felt he needed to mislead in the direction of the emperor to make it even harder. |
| 16 | FI(RE AL+A)RM – The key to the theme (I needed to solve this first to get going). Yet another instance of clean wordplay with a rough surface. |
| 21, 18 | CIDER WITH ROSIE – Never read nor heard of it. Oh well. Wordplay is OK and I struggled to the answer through inspired guesswork and finally checking here. . Definition is “Lee’s volume”, “drink” is cider and the tea is “rosie”: cockney rhyming slang derived from “Gypsy Rosie Lee” (thanks to PeterB for edifying me). |
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