Anto is this week’s setter, with a sound Quiptic to test out newer solvers and entertain others.
Abbreviations
cd cryptic definition
dd double definition
cad clue as definition
(xxxx)* anagram
anagrind = anagram indicator
[x] letter(s) removed
definitions are underlined
Across
1 E.g. Red Cross wanting information for marketing firm
AD AGENCY
I want to make something of GEN being ‘information’ but I think this is just a charade of AD for ‘information’ and AGENCY as being an example of what the Red Cross is.
Edit: as our first three commenters point out, this is in fact A[I]D AGENCY, with the removal of the the I being ‘wanting information’. My bad.
5 Has a go at finding these birds
SNIPES
A dd. Many birds have invariable plurals, and do not add S: a flock of teal, a group of wigeon. And I’d personally say a flock of snipe (or a wisp of snipe, if you’re into collective nouns); but the alternative is not wrong, so we’ll crack on with the Obligatory Pierre Bird Link. Snipe are waders with short legs and long, straight bills. Their zig-zag flight made it notoriously difficult to hunt, which resulted in the verb ‘to snipe’ and gives us the related noun ‘sniper’ for a hidden gunman. My picture shows the Common Snipe.
9 Silly farce about elderly relative getting bouquet
FRAGRANCE
An insertion of GRAN in (FARCE)* The insertion indicator is ‘about’ and the anagrind is ‘silly’.
11 More extensive work involved designing employment rules initially
WIDER
The initial letters of the third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh words of the clue.
12 Summer is what new TV shows look forward to!
SECOND SEASON
A dd. If asked to list the seasons, most folk would say spring, summer, autumn, winter. So fair play to the clue.
15 Complains about empty threats by workers group
TUTS
A charade of TU for Trade Union and TS for the outside letters of ‘threats’.
16 Establishes repository for daily sources of astronomical data
STAR CHARTS
An insertion of CHAR in STARTS. The insertion indicator is ‘repository for’.
18 Instrument on parading ground
GRAND PIANO
(ON PARADING)* with ‘ground’ as the anagrind.
19 Test current means of transport
TAXI
A charade of TAX and I, the SI symbol for ‘current’ (after the French intensité du courant). Ohm’s Law, for those who haven’t done science for a while, says that I = V/R.
21 New mutiny on a reshuffle is imminent
ANY MINUTE NOW
(NEW MUTINY ON A)* with ‘reshuffle’ as the anagrind.
24 Icon that is featured on outside of journal
IMAGE
An insertion of MAG in IE for id est. The insertion indicator is ‘featured on outside of’.
25 Reverse part of extremity revealed consistently
EVERY TIME
Hidden reversed in extrEMITY REVEealed.
26 Philosophy advocating a stripped-down life?
NUDISM
A cd.
27 If necessary move slowly after a knock
AT A PINCH
A charade of A, TAP and INCH.
Down
1 How Nato spells out start of attack regularly falls flat
ALFA
The even letters of fAlLs FlAt. The start of ‘attack’ is A, which in the NATO alphabet is ALFA. You also see ALPHA (in crosswords at any rate), but Anto’s solution is strictly correct, because not all languages use PH to represent the F sound. While we’re on the subject, J is actually JULIETT. But you’ll find JULIET in crosswordland.
2 Unfortunately it’s essential to medical assessment
ALAS
Hidden in medicAL ASsessment.
3 Student lacks head for income-generating activity
EARNER
[L]EARNER
4 Excitedly tout candidate showing focus on achievement
CAN DO ATTITUDE
(TOUT CANDIDATE)* with ‘excitedly’ as the anagrind.
6 Capital hotel invested in fresh food store
NEW DELHI
An insertion of H for the NATO alphabet ‘hotel’ in NEW DELI. The insertion indicator is ‘invested in’.
7 Kind of crossing that’s slow and boring
PEDESTRIAN
A dd.
8 Healthy and fit? It may be one’s best feature
STRONG SUIT
A charade of STRONG and SUIT.
10 Misplaced utterances end long difficult trial
ENDURANCE TEST
(UTTERANCES END)* with ‘misplaced’ as the anagrind.
13 Men-only race showing lack of progress
STAGNATION
A charade of STAG and NATION.
14 Stable worker, one unlikely to get flustered
STEADY HAND
A charade of STEADY and HAND.
17 A doctor’s concealing soft spot for lovers
ADMIRERS
An insertion of MIRE in A DRS. The insertion indicator is ‘concealing’.
20 Pay for father to take on big city university
PONY UP
An insertion of NY and U in POP. The insertion indicator is ‘to take on’. PONY UP is slang for having to pay for, often with a sense of not wanting to.
22 Predator consumes only half of live ones
LION
A charade of LI[VE] ON[ES]
23 Ran into hospital to get drug
METH
A charade of MET and H.
Many thanks to Anto for this week’s puzzle.
1 ac- Red Cross is an AID AGENCY . Wanting information (I) = AD AGENCY
For 1across I assumed information was I and if you insert it you can make AID AGENCY, eg the Red Cross.
I had 1a as Aid Agency less I (wanting information )
A nice gentle Sunday morning workout -very enjoyable.
Thanks Anto and Pierre
Need to learn to type with more than two fingers!
Of course, thank you for that elucidation. I will amend the blog.
Comment #5
Anto’s quiptics have become really enjoyable. My favourites are SECOND SEASON, STRONG SUIT and TAXI. Thanks Anto and Pierre!
This took me longer than the last couple of Quiptics. Daily for CHAR will be new to some but is standard crossword fare in a good clue. I was slightly put off by ALFA but Pierre has explained. I was a bit slow to grasp a good little EARNER too.
Thanks Anto and Pierre.
Another enjoyable puzzle with some lovely anagrams such as GRAND PIANO, ANY MINUTE NOW, CAN DO ATTITUDE and ENDURANCE TEST. I also liked SECOND SEASON, AT A PINCH and ALFA. Thanks for explaining the origins of sniper.
Ta Anto & Pierre.
I’ve been working backwards through the archive of old Quiptics and having recently done some very tricky older Anto puzzles where experienced solvers sometimes get into debates about how to parse the clues, my heart sank when I saw he was setting today. However, I was pleasantly surprised by a puzzle that I found challenging but achievable as an improving solver. Thanks Anto and Pierre!
Thank you for the blog.
Where does CHAR come from? I can’t get that it means ‘daily’…
Steffen@10, char or charwoman was an old term for someone who cleaned and helped around the house, and daily help or daily was similarly a term for someone who came in every day to do so.
I failed to parse 1A, I decided Red Cross was as you used to see in the movies, put a big Red Cross on a calendar to mark a day. So I had aday around gen and was looking for a C somewhere in the clue.
Nice and straightforward, as a Quiptic should be. Nothing here to frighten the horses. Thanks both. Like Pierre, I didn’t parse AD AGENCY, but I’m definitely getting better at the ‘why’ as well as the ‘what’.
Good level of Quiptic. Like Eoink#11 I was thinking Red Cross as A DAY (crossing it off on the calendar because it was special) with GEN for information but couldn’t make the C work! So thanks to everyone for pointing out the more simple and elegant wordplay – my doh moment for this puzzle. Lots to like with the neat charades and anagrams. Thanks Pierre for the explanations, and to Anto for the challenge.
Thanks Anto and Pierre
A DNF – never heard PONY UP, and couldn’t put it together.
Clever hidden for EVERY TIME.
I seem to recall that when Anto first appeared on the scene there was much gnashing of teeth from commentators, complaining of his unorthodox style. Either Anto has tamed his quirkiness or we have become accustomed to it, or perhaps a combination of the two. In any event, he is now well-liked by most of us, both in his Quiptic and his regular Cryptic guises. So far, no one has SNIPED at this puzzle, no one has TUTTED any clues, and no one has said “I guess he’ll do IN A PINCH”.
Thanks, Anto for the excellent Quiptic. (In short, there’s meth in your mad.)
And thanks Pierre for the engaging blog and the great snipe shot.
Thanks Anto and Pierre. The daily CHAR equivalence needed extra time for me, and I did not know the etymology of sniper. Good stuff!
Cellomaniac @15: I think it’s more that he’s gotten less quirky. Notably, he’s set a lot fewer of those crazy backwards clues, where instead of “take a word that means X and manipulate it to get the answer that means Y,” he says “the answer means X, and if you manipulate it, you get Y.” Those clues really get a lot of people’s goats, including mine, to the point where Anto might as well have become a goatherd.
Separately, I wish to point out that one can biologically become a grandmother in one’s thirties, and it wasn’t so long ago that grandmothers in their forties were common. So a GRAN is not necessarily elderly.
mrpenny@17, interesting point about GRAN. I have a friend who became a grandmother at age 34. (She was 16 when she had a daughter, and her daughter was 18 when she had her first-born.)
Here are two other thoughts:
1. A 40-year-old grandmother would be considered elderly by her grandchild, unless …
2. … she married a much older man and adopted his child (from his first marriage) who was older than she, in which case that person’s child – her grandchild – could conceivably also be older than she.
Thank you Eoink
I think this was a level up from recent quiptics but I think it fits the brief very nicely. I failed to parse a couple but I like that this was all language and phrases and no obscure knowledge at all. Don’t think I know the phrase PONY UP but got it from the clue. NHO of char for daily but got it from the crossers so all fair. A great mix of clue types and some very easy to get you started. Really enjoyable.
‘Snipes’ came up in another crossword very recently. Although snipe is a plural there are many species so snipes might refer to the family of birds as well as an alternative for more than one.
Lovely Quiptic and great blog, thanks Anto and Pierre. I’m with the commenter who liked all the clever anagrams! I’m very shocked, however, that I couldn’t see ALAS for yonks. Tut.
This flew in but I hadn’t come across CHAR to mean “daily” – I assume from “daily task/chore”, which I’ve found? If so I need to add this to my cryptic lexical bank.
Enjoyed NUDISM (as it were) once it clicked.
Thanks Anto and Pierre for the blog.
I often struggle to get on Anto’s wavelength, but this was an enjoyable solve for me.
On another note, the pedant in me can’t help pointing out that I = V/R (or equivalently R = V/I) isn’t actually Ohm’s law. It’s a very common misconception (even in Physics classrooms!), but Ohm’s law actually states that R (resistance) is constant, making voltage and current directly proportional. Lots of electrical components don’t follow Ohm’s law, such as batteries, diodes and thermistors, but you can still apply R = V/I to these “non-ohmic” materials as this is the definition of resistance (static resistance to be precise). The first lesson I ever taught was on Ohm’s law, so despite actually being a Maths teacher this particular Physics topic has always stuck with me!
Is anyone able to expand on the definition of 13d for me? Is it as simple as Stag=men only and nation = race? Because both of those seem like relatively problematic definitions (I don’t think I’ve ever been on a stag do that was strictly men’s only). I feel like I’m missing something with that clue but the lack of comment by Pierre/everyone else suggests I’m overthinking it.
I’ll echo the sentiment of ‘either Anto is getting fairer as a setter, or I’m getting used to his ways’. Either way, a really nice puzzle, with only CHAR (and possibly STAG/NATION, depending on if I’ve missed something) tripping me up. Thanks both Anto and Pierre 🙂
I don’t think there is anything to overcomplicate STAGNATION, TheMaskedGecko. STAG for ‘men only’ is pretty standard: STAG DO/MEN ONLY DO, STAG PARTY/MEN ONLY PARTY, and so on. It’s a long time since I went on any of those, but most of the ones I see staggering around city centres on the rare occasion when I’m sharing the pavement with them seem to be Y-chromosome only.
Anto did have a very rocky start as a Quiptic setter. I blogged his very first one, more than ten years ago, which was really not fit for publication – see here. That was an issue for the then editor, not necessarily the setter. He is now well established in the Quiptic slot and more often than not produces a puzzle that matches the brief, so fair play to him.
Thanks Pierre. Looking into it further, Chambers does have it, so I can’t complain. “intended for men only, especially in being pornographic • a stag film”. It’s new to me but to be fair Google N-grams gives “stag film” a bimodal distribution with pretty big peaks in 1974 and again in 1996, before dropping into obscurity by 2011 so maybe its just before my time.
Nation = race also passes the Chambers test (“2 a race of people of common descent… not necessarily bound by defined territorial limits of a state”). I think it tripped me up because I was too hung up on the nation state definition and in that context it feels pretty unpleasant (i.e. equating British Ethnicity with British nationality seems off to me). Wikipedia has about 100 ‘stateless nations’ listed, so I guess today is a day for learning
Re. 20: I presumed this wasn’t an insertion of two separate items, “NY” and “U,” into POP, but an insertion of one item, “NYU” (the standard abbreviation for New York University).
You could look at it that way, ProfNeil. Either parsing works.
This was a great Quiptic for a newbie. I always struggle with the LOIs. Usually about 4. 9A FRAGRANCE was a favourite, as was 3D EARNER & 15A TUTS, which reminded me of my Gran.
Thanks Anto & Pierre.
A bit of perspective from someone who enjoys doing quiptics, but probably won’t progress to cryptics. I had to give up on this one, and I’d done pretty well on the previous 4 quiptics. I found many of the synonyms used in the word plays rather obscure – they simply didn’t occcur to me; and I hadn’t come across some of the anagrinds before. I’m dubious about race=nation in 13. Anyway, hats off to those who found this easy. I’ll continue enjoying the ones I can do.