A puzzle with many nice clues – I especially liked 14ac, 3dn, 8dn, and 19dn. Thanks to Brummie
| ACROSS | ||
| 1 | PROSIT |
Cheers one who’d expect to be paid to be an MP? (6)
|
| definition: PROSIT and ‘Cheers’ are used as drinking toasts
PRO (professional [not amateur], “one who’d expect to be paid”) + SIT=to take a seat in Parliament=”to be an MP” |
||
| 5 | GOSSAMER |
Light material suffering more snags if not new (8)
|
| anagram/”suffering” of (more snags)* minus the n for “new” | ||
| 9 | HARMLESS |
Safe getting hot as Venus in the Louvre (8)
|
| H (hot) + ARMLESS (the Venus de Milo sculpture in the Louvre is missing its arms) | ||
| 10 | REFUTE |
Official Aussie pick-up counter (6)
|
| REF (referee, an “Official” in a sports match) + UTE=Australian term for a ‘utility vehicle’ i.e. a “pick-up” truck | ||
| 11 | CREPUSCULOUS |
Putting two lots of uranium into affected corpuscles is dim! (12)
|
| definition: like the twilight, dim
anagram/”affected” of (corpuscles)*, with two lots of U (chemical symbol for uranium) inside |
||
| 13 | MARL |
Marine fish in abandoned clay (4)
|
| definition: an earthy material containing clay
MARL-[in]=”Marine fish”, with “in” removed/abandoned |
||
| 14 | ELLIPTIC |
Oval’s pitch initially breaking up till ice melted (8)
|
| initial letter of P-[itch] breaking into anagram/”melted” of (till ice)*
for the surface reading, The Oval is the name of a cricket pitch |
||
| 17 | SCENARIO |
Opera section with city situation (8)
|
| SCENA = a type of scene in an opera; plus RIO=”city” in Brazil | ||
| 18 | SASH |
Frame in which beauty pageant winner appears? (4)
|
| double definition: a sash can be the frame of a type of window; or a winner’s sash may be awarded at a beauty pageant | ||
| 20 | PREFABRICATE |
A fibre carpet used to make flatpack kit, say (12)
|
| anagram/”used” of (a fibre carpet)* | ||
| 23 | CORONA |
Wow, performing with a cigar! (6)
|
| definition: CORONA is used to describe a certain longer size/shape of cigar
COR=exclamation of surprise=”Wow” + ON=”performing” + A (from surface) |
||
| 24 | INVEIGLE |
Very into fancy lingerie but right off sweet-talk (8)
|
| V (very) inside anagram/”fancy” of (lingerie)* minus the r for ‘right’ | ||
| 25 | PERTNESS |
Expert: ‘Nessie is mostly brass’ (8)
|
| definition: “brass” as in ‘cheekiness’
most of the letters from [Ex]-PERT NESS-[ie] |
||
| 26 | LARYNX |
Cat circling a rocking lead vocalist’s equipment (6)
|
| LYNX=”Cat” around: A (from surface) + lead letter from R-[ocking] | ||
| DOWN | ||
| 2 | REAM |
Fancy knocking off leader for paper? (4)
|
| [d]-REAM=”Fancy” without its leading letter | ||
| 3 | SEMICOLON |
Mark’s house settlement’s not finished (9)
|
| definition: a punctuation mark
SEMI (semi-detached “house”) + COLON-[y]=”settlement” not finished |
||
| 4 | THEBES |
Lulu’s half escaping depression in the old city (6)
|
| THE B-[LU]-ES=”depression” minus half of LU-lu | ||
| 5 | GESTURE POLITICS |
Cynically proposing futile measures – a ‘two-fingered salute’ way of governing? (7,8)
|
| GESTURE e.g. “a two-fingered salute”; plus POLITICS=”way of governing” | ||
| 6 | STRICTLY |
Lyricist dancing – time for one very popular show (8)
|
| definition: Strictly Come Dancing is a popular UK TV show; “very” might also be an additional definition for STRICTLY
anagram/”dancing” of (Lyricist)*, with T for “time” replacing an I for “one” |
||
| 7 | AWFUL |
Foul’s legal – linesman’s heading off (5)
|
| [L]-AWFUL=”legal” minus the heading of L-[inesman] | ||
| 8 | ENTHUSIASM |
Sushi: meant to be prepared with relish (10)
|
| anagram/”prepared” of (Sushi meant)* | ||
| 12 | MASCARPONE |
End cut off cob stuffed with Parmesan cheese (10)
|
| anagram/”stuffed” of (co-[b] Parmesan)* | ||
| 15 | POSTERIOR |
Notice soldiers pinching one’s bottom (9)
|
| POSTER=”Notice” + OR (other ranks, “soldiers”); around/pinching I=”one” | ||
| 16 | CRIBBAGE |
Church head one books into rave for a game (8)
|
| head letter of C-[hurch]; plus I=”one” plus B and B (for ‘book’, twice) all inside RAGE=”rave” | ||
| 19 | MARVEL |
Wonder if a motorhome’s possessed by a Spice girl? (6)
|
| definition: “Wonder” and MARVEL as nouns (something wondrous)
A (from surface) + RV (recreational vehicle, “motorhome”); contained inside/”possessed by” MEL (Mel C and Mel B were two of the Spice Girls) |
||
| 21 | FLOUT |
US state not allowed to mock (5)
|
| FL (Florida, “US state”) + OUT=”not allowed” | ||
| 22 | FLAN |
Nut-covered Latin dish (4)
|
| FAN (e.g. a sports fan / a sports nut), around L (Latin) |
I thought this was quite benign for Brummie and I really enjoyed the variety of interesting words. I thought MASCARPONE was the pick of the bunch with ticks for HARMLESS, CREPUSCULOUS, SCENARIO, PREFABRICATE and THEBES which I only parsed with a smile as I tried to fall asleep. I did wonder if the nice STRICTLY would travel across the pond and I thought GESTURE POLITICS was typically topical.
Ta Brummie & manehi.
Got the answer – eventually – but did not spot the anagram indicator in 12d; fell into the trap of thinking it meant the letters CO went inside the solution. Thanks for the parsing, manehi, and thanks for the very accomplished (and fiendish in places) crossword, Brummie.
Nice puzzle. Anyone else write in Scoff for 21d until the crossers steered them in the right direction? Thanks all
Favourite: HARMLESS.
I could not parse 3d (I never think of SEMI = semi-detached “house” or 4d and I failed to solve 13ac MARL.
Thank you Brummie and manehi.
It took me an age to see FLAN.
HARMLESS and PROSIT were delightful.
DNF, though no complaints once answers revealed. Wavelength issues! Thanks both.
First one in was GOSSAMER, last one in after quite a bit of head scratching was the MARLin one. In between a thoroughly enjoyable solve. Many thanks today Brummie and Manehi…
Liked HARMLESS, ELLIPTIC, INVEIGLE, STRICTLY and MARVEL.
Thanks Brummie and manehi.
I was another who read “stuffed” as an inclusion indicator, rather than an anagram indicator, leaving me puzzles by MASCARPONE. I liked STRICTLY and HARMLESS and the puzzle as a whole.
A very enjoyable puzzle, with lots of interesting words and devices.
I particularly liked PROSIT, CREPUSCULOUS (I’m more familiar with crepuscular but they’re both lovely words), PREFABICATED, INVEIGLE, SEMICOLON, STRICTLY, ENTHUSIASM and MASCARPONE.
Thanks, both.
Was still staring dumbly at mascarpone, trying to stuff some type of parmesan into an endless loaf or horse, when I came here — talk about dim! And the last four in the NW took an age, until pro sit clunked into place, then the others. But I enjoyed it all, thx Brum and manehi.
Boy was this hard. Got there eventually, after spending ages and with some Google help for INVEIGLE. Couldn’t parse MARVEL or MARL. Yes there were many anagrams, but those were some of the most difficult anagrams I’ve seen. Many words were unknown to me. Lots of likes: SEMICOLON, PROSIT, HARMLESS, THEBES, POSTERIOR. Thanks Brummie and manehi!
Hmm, not alone I now see. Sorry, should’ve read first and been slightly less emphatic 🙂
DNF because of PROSIT, as I’ve only ever heard the German variant PROST.
Ovals are not elliptic (this always annoys me), and I don’t think the clue can be referring to the cricket ground as the answer is adjectival. However Chambers allows the “loose” equivalence.
Took a while to get going but once I had some momentum it flowed in. Not sure if it was tough or just hadn’t quite woken up.
The unknown MARL took and age. SEMICOLON and MASCARPONE favourite today.
Thanks Manehi and Brummie.
I also went astray with the parsing of MASCARPONE, but in a different way. I spent ages trying to make cob = mare or pony and then not being able to make that work with an anagram of parmesan. Had to come here to sort it out.
I also failed to get Marl and don’t think I would have in a month of Sundays.
Good fun, though, so thanks to manehi for the enlightenment and to Brummie for the fun.
POC@14 “Ovals are not elliptic” is inaccurate. All ellipses are oval but all ovals are not necessarily elliptic.The ellipse is a precise mathematical shape and always has two axes of symmetry; an oval is less precise.
An excellent crossword, thanks both.
MARL was my last one in. I felt pretty dim about that, but it didn’t take that long and it looks like it caused trouble for others.
I guessed what was going on with Venus straight away, but didn’t write anything in for a while. I keep doing this and need to work on that transition time.
I didn’t know this definition of FLOUT, but had learnt the appropriate meaning of PERT from a recent puzzle. SCENA was new to me.
Favourites include REFUTE, HARMLESS, LARYNX and THEBES.
I agree with Layman @12 that the anagrams were quite challenging, although I enjoyed untangling them.
Thanks Brummie and manehi
This one was up there for the hardest midweek I’ve managed to complete, although the parsing of 13a escaped me despite the definition being clear enough.
Thanks to Brummie & manehi.
Thanks all – a wonderful experience.
I’m another that doesn’t like OVAL as a definition for ELLIPTIC. I think of an oval as being like the outlinr of an egg, and so not elliptical. Admittedly language changes, and former errors become accepted usage.
The grid has black squares giving HHHH, a pleasing nod to my alter ego Handy Hubby the Household Hero.
Tough going for me, although enjoyable to finish. MARL was my LOI and a good clue. I liked the SEMICOLON mark, the good anagram for ENTHUSIASM, the Parmesan/MASCARPONE cheese, and the naughty soldiers pinching one’s POSTERIOR.
Thanks Brummie and manehi.
Thanks for the blog , excellent set of clues . THEBES and LARYNX very neat , I like POSTERIOR using soldiers not the demeaning men . CRIBBAGE my favourite card game and the students love it . In botany , ELLIPTIC leaves are often oval .
I would prefer SEMICOLON to be clued using its symbol .
Kelvassos@3 , I had scoff also but when I came to put the Downs in the letters I had in the grid made me think again .
For fans of Brummie , he sets as Cyclops in Private Eye every fortnight . Very interesting puzzles and great blogs on here .
[ AlanC entrenched at Number 1 , the Arsenal of the crossword blog . You must be very pleased to see a London team succeed . ]
THEBES was my favorite by some distance.
Re. oval vs. elliptic, I think this has to go on the (long) list of words that have a lay meaning that is not technically correct to the expert.
Several words new or nearly new to me. Never heard of MARL nor SCENA. I knew of prost but not prosit and crepuscular but not crepusculous, but got there anyway.
[Yay Gunners, my N8 fam are glowing]
Vaguely scanning for a theme I noticed ENTHUSIASM FLAN down the rhs, which definitely feels like something from The Thick Of It.
Mikeb@17: I disagree. Ovals are literally egg-shaped (see Chambers), and are therefore not elliptic.
I’m amazed that no one else tried LACY for 13a MARL. I had that right up until I was about to finish with 3d SEMICOLON…but, what? Not done yet! I was ready to give up when the answer appeared. Nice surprise to end with, and a fine puzzle
Favourites 11a CREPUSCULOUS (great word), 23a CORONA (evoking the late great George Burns), 24a INVEIGLE (excellent surface), 25a PERTNESS (nicely hidden), 8d ENTHUSIASM (anagram and surface)
Didn’t know the show STRICTLY, but it was easy to check once the answer was clear. The title derives from Baz Luhrmann’s wonderful flick STRICTLY BALLROOM
Bit like the endian war in Gulliver …
Thanks both,
Jacob @26: experts agree an ellipse is a special case of an oval. So defining ‘elliptic ‘ by ‘oval’ is like defining ‘tiger’ by ‘cat’, which is fine. The other way round would require a definition by example indicator. It’s only the semi-expert who would insist the clue is defective.
POC@29: While Oval doubtless derives from Ova, Ovoid would be a better synonym for egg-shaped. Oval is now a vague term used for many different shapes, including elliptic and egg-shaped. Even an athletics track with two straights connecting two semi-circles would usually be called oval. And the various international cricket grounds called The Oval are not egg-shaped.
Nice puzzle, but tricky in places.
I’m not bothered by cluing ELLIPTIC by oval since I would guess many more in the general population think they are the same than those who don’t. However I wonder why in situations like this setters don’t use a weasel-word or two to head off objections.
I tried CALY for 13a, as I vaguely remembered a fish with a name something like that; which let me a bit scuppered for what turned out to be SEMICOLON. I then (just as vaguely) remembered there was a word for a sort of clay… MAWL? MAUL? Ah yes (finally) MARL. I still didn’t get the parsing till I came here.
Oval / ELLIPTICal: I don’t have a big problem with this. I think one has to accept common usage over strict specialised-field-specific terminology. Some while back I was given a bit of a hard time for being, as a materials scientist, picky about a clue equating hardness and toughness; and rightly so, too.
Just don’t, please don’t, conflate power and energy. It’s bad enough with even the higher-end papers being mostly unable to tell the difference between a kW and a kWh, without it creeping in to crosswordland.
CotD – GESTURE POLITICS, which took some time to click but was very pleasing when it did.
Lots else to like, of course.
Thanks Brummie & manehi.
I learnt what Australians mean by a UTE.
Always something new to learn from crosswords.
Derek@35 , I have no problem with words from Physics being used differently in everyday language or crosswords . Many started in normal use before being tightly defined in Physics , others have crossed from Physics into normal usage . Trying to stop this is like copying Cnut . I do object when words with a specialist meaning in Physics , and no everyday usage , are misused or badly defined by dictionaries . Chambers is often guilty of this , Collins is much better .
I fell into the traps set by Brummie, with 13a obviously being an obscure fish, anagram of CLAY, and at 12d ‘cob’ clearly indicating a loaf, a horse or a stone jetty. I’m glad I didn’t think of SCOFF for 21d, as it’s pretty convincing.
I nearly led myself astray with a possible MISS for the beauty pageant winner, but I couldn’t make it into a ‘frame’. 🤔🙄
Otherwise, remarkably straightforward and enjoyable.
Thanks to Brummie and Manehi.
Whenever I see the line “I found this quite easy for a Brummie/Vlad/Paul etc”, I’m reminded of the Tony Hancock phrase “A bit of a bighead”.
Words have power!
I think we have to accept that specialist terms are often used loosely by the lay public. As a chemist I am fully aware that there are many compounds described as salts and that alcohol is a generic term for any member of a whole homologous series. That doesn’t mean that I’m so pedantic at the dinner table as to say ‘could you pass the sodium chloride, please’ or ‘no ethanol for me; I’m driving’. In the same way, ‘oval’ is a catch-all term that includes, but is not limited to, ellipses. As for the egg connection, some eggs are spherical (caviar, anyone?), which I would say is a special case of an ellipse (the limiting case as the distance between the foci approaches zero).
I’ll get my hat…, while waiting for someone better versed in geometry to correct me. Goodness, what fun!
Much fun, just failed on MARL and MASCARPONE.
Used to play CRIBBAGE with my grandad for hours when I was young. Great game.
He didn’t believe me that it is impossible to have a hand with 19 points. He spent hours trying to find one and of course, never did.
Thanks both.
HYD@41 , I tell my students they can have three wishes if they score 19 in a single hand .
[Roz@25: ecstatic]
Roz at #37, when I taught Applied Mathematics ‘the moment of a couple’ sometimes raised a few eyebrows.
Thanks to Brummie and manehi for their wonderful efforts.
Mostly fun, but lots I’d never heard of: marl; crepusculous vs crepuscular {which my I see my browser spell-check rejects}; scena in an opera; corona as a cigar; and never come across a usage of pertness that equates to brass
[Wittgenstein@44: the couple may well be having a moment, but if the shaft is seized and can’t move, would it be a case of all torque and no action? ]
Mig @30: I tried LACY
[Roz@37. I admit that I use Collins for the same reasons although I see that almost everyone seems to be using Chambers as their reference dictionary. Is there a specific reason ??
A puzzle of 4 quadrants for me! NE went in OK, slowed down in the SE, struggled in the SW and had to reveal a couple in the NW. Pretty happy overall, as a newish cryptic solver!
1A I am familiar with PROST, but not PROSIT. [My spell checker is telling me prosit is wrong as I type this!] My son worked in a bar called Prost in DC for a few years.
4D I had the correct parsing of B[lu]ES, but couldn’t see the beginning bit… never thought it might the THEBLUES not simply BLUES. Doh! If I’d had the T or the E maybe I would have got there… But I had to reveal it.
13A NHO MARL, so that was a reveal.
Also NHO GESTURE POLITICS, although finally got it from the crossers.
LOI was HARMLESS – so obvious, and yet not!
[SiB@48: I had thought it was because Chambers was the official dictionary for Scrabble; but now I have looked it up, I find that that’s not so.
(wikipedia).
In the US and Canada, there’s an official Scrabble Dictionary (the NASPA Word List), whereas in the UK it’s the “Collins Scrabble Words 2024 edition” – an entity distinct from the Collins Dictionary itself.
Well, that’s something new I learnt today. Ain’t life a hoot?]
“Marine fish” = MARLIN is about as restricted as “boy=ERIC”!
[I think the Guardian said, some time ago (30+years?), that Chambers was their dictionary of reference. Not sure I agree with their choice.}
Simon@48 could be various reasons , my Chambers93 has 300000 definitions , my Collins ( won as a Guardian prize ) around 200000 . Chambers has more Scottish words and more archaic words . Also Ximenes specified Chambers for his puzzles followed by Azed and now Gemelo . I think Chambers is the most comprehensive single-volume .
[ Wittgenstein@44 be careful not to say – What does a couple produce ?
For telescope design I have to discuss diffraction effects with the students and refer to Airy discs , I have to concentrate and say it carefully . ]
Jazz aficionados will be familiar with Monk’s Crepuscule with Nellie.
This was pretty good I thought. Not sure about FLOUT for “mock” as opposed to “violate” or “disobey”, but it couldn’t be anything else & no doubt it is in Chambers.
Was playing CRIBBAGE at the weekend so that was One for His Nob.
JC @55 – For some unaccountable reason, “one for his nobs” sends my 11 year old grandson into hysterics
DTS@50 and Roz@52 thanks for the clarifications.
Enjoyed the puzzle. Last night I filled in the top half, the bottom being still empty. Got the rest this morning.
Nho CREPUSCULOUS,or GESTURE POLITICS, though the meanings were clear. Got THEBES from the definition, couldn’t parse it.
Thanks, Brumie and manehi.
Haha! AI dreamt that there is a fish called KAOL, which we had instead of MARL (KAOLIN – IN)…
Thanks Brummie, see you next Wednesday.
Lots of trickiness I thought. Advanced slowly from east to west and across the south. Then hit a real wall with NW corner needing some help from my wife. I was convinced for ages that ’stuffed’ in 12d was an insertion indicator not an anagrind. NHO of 1a and 4D was my last in once a penny had proverbially dropped. 11a and 14a were my first in, lovely anagrams. Thanks manehi and Brummie.