Guardian 23,954/Quantum - CD hits a sour note
Posted by loonapick on December 20th, 2006
Solving time - 10 minutes - would have been under 5 if I’d realised what what was going on in the middle “column” of the grid.
I started well with this one - easy clues, straightforward words, an over-reliance on clues where you have to remove parts of words in order to get anagram fodder, but generally OK. Then I came across a couple of clues that made me 23dn, and when I finally worked out 4d and 19dn, my lasting impression of the crossword was tainted.
ACROSS
9 - RECTO (Hidden)
11 - PENPUSHER - I assume the scratching refers to the olden days of quills?
12 - KEBAB - Nice wordplay
13 - BRISTOL - I’ve seen “Bristol fashion” come up a lot in recent crosswords, so got this immediately.
18 - SEN - a far eastern small value coin and South, East, North
25 - CURTAIN - C(U-RT)AIN where U = “universal” and “RT” = right, and CAIN is the murderer.
DOWN
3 - NON-U - Nu is a greek letter roughly equivalent to “N”. Also worth looking out for a host of other Greek characters which pop up regularly - ETA, MU, PI, CHI, PHI etc
4 and 19 - NICHOLAS NICKLEBY - Just not fair! Once you have all of the checked letters, it is fairly obvious, but I just can’t accept “CD” as a definition or indicator for Charles Dickens. I even checked to see if this was a valid abbreviation for him, but was unable to find anything.
7 - STABLE - “Good man” ALWAYS leads to ST (short for “saint”)
16 TITAN - TITIAN (Venetian artist) with the I (”one”) uplifted i.e.taken away
21 ANACONDA - A(N-AC-ON)DA - “Ada” holds “N A/C on”. What would setters do without people like Ada, Eve, Hal, Al or Ed?
23 - CRINGE - “ring” in “CE” (Church of England)
26 - RANK - double definition, but both from the same root, which I think many editors would find unacceptable.
28 - IFFY - “sniffy”without its first and second letters.
December 20th, 2006 at 11:27 am
Wrt NN, I too needed most of the crossings before I got it but… I think the setter gave fair warning by emphasizing “initially” — which basically meant to me that it wouldn’t be an acronym that I was familiar with (e.g. compact disc or certificate of deposit): i.e. if it were either of those two, qualifying with “initially” wouldn’t have been necessary.
December 20th, 2006 at 11:51 am
Could have been Clare Danes just as ‘fairly’, then! Not much fun, this one.
December 20th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
I’m with loonapick on this one. CD is just not an acceptable ‘clue’, otherwise the initials of all manners of people, places and things become valid. I wonder how many solvers instantly got the meaning in isolation, without having needed the cross-checking letters? I suspect very few if any and, for me, a clue becomes unfair if it cannot be solved as a clue in its own right.
December 20th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Hang on everyone, Clare Danes hasn’t had much output that belongs in a library.
December 20th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
Clare Danes probably hasn’t. But what about Colin Dexter, creator of Inspector Morse?
December 20th, 2006 at 3:05 pm
But that’s what the crossing letters are there for. I think it’s a fair balance with enough info being supplied by both sides of the equation (SI and DD). Bottom-line is that we all disocvered NN eventually without recourse to googling I bet. At some point NICKLEBY becomes pretty unavoidable.
December 20th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
Yeah, but … it’s a yeah but.