i Cryptic Crossword 3127 Kairos
February 15, 2021
How well you got on with today’s offering I suspect may depend on how well versed you are in crosswordese. We had R for take, AI for sloth, NESS for head, ONE for joke (does anybody actually ever say that?) just for starters. A couple of potential unknowns elsewhere, 1ac in particular, meant you also had to put a little trust in the wordplay. All of which is to say that I fairly ripped through this, having been solving these things for a while, but I suspect newer solvers may have had a far more uncomfortable time solving this. An enjoyable, not too challenging solve therefore here, but let me know how you got on.
COD? I’ll go with 1ac = “Frenchwoman taking credit for daughter’s handiwork (7)”.
All of which should leave you plenty of time to solve yesterday’s Guest Puzzle by exit if you haven’t done so already. It comes highly recommended. 🙂
To November 2016 for all the answers and parsing of the clues:
http://www.fifteensquared.net/2016/11/20/independent-on-sunday-1396-by-kairos/
batarde
Saboteur
flashling
jonofwales
Cornick
sprouthater
uiytjhgmj
Hmmmm, a DNF for me. Managed several but with no idea why. I guess I just need more practice. Is ZO fair? It’s not in Bradford’s. I threw in Green Bill at 20ac so no chance of finishing. However, I did enjoy the ones I managed 🙂
Ah, but Bradford’s does have it! It’s under “Oxen”, and given as “Z(h)o”. It almost always is a zho too, especially in Scrabble; Chambers refers zo seekers to zho. As to whether it’s fair … maybe, maybe not, but an obscure beastie in a variant spelling is unlikely to be a crowd pleaser.
I think a few days away from crossword-solving has done me good because, like Jon, I whizzed through this, albeit without understanding some of the wordplay.
Unfortunately I’ve just discovered that I got 20ac wrong (I put BELL instead of SEAL), so technically a DNF. Ah well, never mind.
Some lovely clues but also rather too heavy on the Crosswordese as you say, including a few abbreviations I didn’t know. Which leaves me wondering who the target audience might be. Experienced solvers in a hurry, I suppose.
Great seal and typewriter both have what to me are very unsatisfactory clues, and I had no idea (and still don’t – and don’t want to) about the RIP part of 6. Otherwise I liked this a lot, especially 1a, 1d and 15.
Please will someone explain AI for sloth? I am baffled!!
Crosswordese again. It’s the name for a two-toed (or three-toad?) sloth. Funny little word probably better known in Scrabble circles than zoological ones.
A three-toed sloth is sometimes called an ai. As Cornick commented, this crossword has a number of crosswords terms which you sort of get used to, but which some might say lead to slightly cliquey cluing.
https://www.britannica.com/animal/three-toed-sloth
Croswordese
A puzzle of two halves for me, the LHS going in quite readily, the RHS taking a bit longer.
I sort of parsed TYPEWRITER, but it seemed unsatisfactory and I wondered what I was missing. Nothing, it seems. A typo in the online version repeated 19a’s clue for 23a, which at first I thought was going to be something clever, but which I later concluded was just a mistake. Last in was, of course, PARR.
Yes, distinctly crosswordy, and unusually yakkish. Done in jig time, with eyebrows raised and the feeling that there would be complaints. Pretty well justified ones on a Monday, I should say.
hmm, conversely to Saboteur, I had the RHS in pretty quick, plus a few at the top & bottom of the left, leaving the middle of the LHS to take the longest. 13 did seem eminently unsatisfactory, and yeah ‘Great Seal’ was bunged in as a bit of a guess, but otherwise everything went in fine, and I was happy with the crosswordese. (Zo – with all its variant spellings, which also include dzo – and ai, are surely as much Scrabble words?)
Weird crossword coinkidink: I don’t suppose any of you were in the charity Zoom call on Friday night, with John Henderson (the Guardian’s ‘Paul’) and Dave Gorman (‘Bluth’)? It involved group setting a puzzle themed around the band Madness (which obviously found its way into the grid). We ended up with – in the bottom-left across slot of the grid – the word “reefers”. :-O
Ah – I’d have enjoyed that, never mind. Will the crossword become available anywhere do you know?
I would imagine so, but don’t know the details yet. Will report back in due course as I learn anything.
👍
As promised: https://www.johnhalpern.co.uk/celebrity-create-a-crossword-with-dave-gorman
Pardon my typo in the previous post – John *Halpern*, of course. I have terrible trouble with, er, what are those words people use to refer to themselves? Names! That’s it.
His email says “Do share it with friends!” so it’s definitely OK for me to put that link here.
Thanks for all your comments, I feel enlightened! Regarding “zo”….. perhaps I should have said Bradford’s doesn’t have it listed under “hybrid” (apart from Zho). It’s a bit too much of a leap to look under “oxen” 🙂
I thought this was delightful. I really enjoyed it, and managed to parse everything. Chambers helped with Zo, but I had come across it before in that guise and sort of remembered it. Lovely surface readings, and no quibbles at all.
I am in the enviable position of being retired and I therefore perhaps have more free time to spend on solving puzzles than those who have serious commitments – (although were we not in lockdown I would actually be out and about doing a little voluntary work, and I look forward to resuming this asap)
I have noticed a few comments over the past months by seasoned contributors who hint that they would maybe have finished puzzles, rather than getting a DNF, had they been able to devote more time to doing so. May I humbly encourage you to persevere a little longer? Very often it yields a pleasant sense of achievement – although, I confess, not 100% of the time.
I am, of course, merely a novice in these things.
Best wishes to all
Made heavy weather of clues that were very straightforward on solving: 1d and 5a for example. Didn’t have too much trouble with zo or with ai – perhaps because of many Attenborough programmes. Got 13d remembering Mark Twain as first writer to use a typewriter ( as learned in interview with Tom Hanks who is a collector) all finished in about our usual time but had great deal instead of seal!
As an aside, we were very excited to read a reply to our first post so thanks for that. Entertaining crossword, blog and posts. Thanks all.
That’s an interesting little bit of trivia re Twain, typewriters and Tom (Hanks). I shall store that gem away!!