Thursday, January 13, 2011 (DT 26369)

Daily Telegraph Puzzle Number DT 26369
Publication Date in The Daily Telegraph Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Setter Shamus
Link to Full Review Big Dave's Crossword Blog [DT 26369]
Big Dave's Review Written By Gazza
Big Dave's Rating
Difficulty - ***	Enjoyment - ***
Falcon's Performance ████████████████████

Introduction

Gazza judges today's puzzle to be relatively easy. However, probably due to a generous dose of British geography, I found it to be a bit more challenging - and had to pop open the Tool Chest fairly early. I also failed to notice that the puzzle is a pangram.

You may have detected a change in the table above, where I have replaced the star rating for my performance with a bar chart. As an illustration of how it works, today I was able to solve 24 of 32 clues before resorting to electronic assistance - thus the bar shows 75%. The intent of this metric is to give readers a North American benchmark against which to compare their performance. Since I first introduced this feature, I have made several tweaks in an effort to make it more meaningful.

For a couple of weeks now, I have been attempting to find an online dictionary source for all of the abbreviations used in puzzles. I believe that today is the first day that I have been unsuccessful in achieving this, in that I was not able to find a dictionary entry listing N as an abbreviation for "name". I'm not suggesting that the abbreviation is inappropriate or incorrect, I am merely making an observation. I am sure that this abbreviation can likely be found in the field of genealogy, if nowhere else. Moreover, I am confident that it would be found in the 'big red book' (The Chambers Dictionary, 11th edition" which is the 'bible' for the DT puzzles. My search took me to Oxford Dictionaries Online, Search Chambers, Encarta, Collins English Dictionary and The American Heritage Dictionary (both at TheFreeDictionary.com). Even the Acronym tab at TheFreeDictionary.com (which can be usually be relied on to deliver almost any abbreviation one could possibly imagine) does not have it - despite listing fifty other possibilities.

Today's Glossary

Selected abbreviations, people, places, words and expressions appearing in today's puzzle

Appearing in Clues:

City of London (not to be confused with London) - a small area within Greater London, United Kingdom which is the historic core of London around which the modern conurbation grew and has held city status since time immemorial.

The City’s boundaries have remained almost unchanged since the Middle Ages, and it is now only a tiny part of the metropolis of London, though remains a notable part of Central London. It is often referred to as the City (often written on maps as "City") or the Square Mile, as it is just over one square mile in area. These terms are also often used as metonyms for the United Kingdom's financial services industry, which has historically been based here.

Home Counties - the English counties surrounding London, into which London has extended. They comprise chiefly Essex, Kent, Surrey, and Hertfordshire.

South East - in popular British parlance, a vaguely defined region consisting of London and surrounding areas, located in the south-eastern portion of England.

Officially, South East England is one of the nine regions of England, designated in 1994. It comprises counties situated to the south and west of London, but does not include London. As Wikipedia observes, "Before the creation of the current region, the idea that London was not in the south-east of England would have seemed ridiculous."

Staffordshire Potteries - generic term for the industrial area encompassing the six towns (Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton and Longton) that now make up Stoke on Trent in Staffordshire, England.

The Staffordshire Potteries became a centre of ceramic production in the 17th century due to the local availability of clay, salt, lead and coal. Hundreds of companies produced decorative or industrial ceramic items.

Appearing in Solutions:

dean - noun 2

• the head of a university faculty or department or of a medical school.
• (in a college or university, especially Oxford or Cambridge) a senior member of a college, with disciplinary and advisory functions. 

EC (Eastern Central) postcode area (also known as the London EC postcode area) - a group of postcode districts in central London, England which includes almost all of the City of London and parts of several other London Boroughs.

fly a kite - phrase informal [possibly chiefly British] try something out to test public opinion.  Not to be confused with go fly a kite, [in imperative] North American informal go away.

Kate Moss - English model, notorious for her high-profile relationships and party lifestyle.

jade² - noun archaic

• 1 a bad-tempered or disreputable woman.

• 2 an old or worn-out horse.

pi² - adjective British informal short for pious.

Roedean School - an independent girls' school in Roedean village on the outskirts of Brighton, East Sussex in the United Kingdom.

[Note: An independent school is what has traditionally been known as a public school in Britain, and would be called a private school in North America.]

Terylene - noun British trademark an artificial textile fibre made from a polyester, used to make light, crease-resistant clothing, bed linen, and sails. Origin: (1940s) formed by inversion of (polyeth)ylene ter(ephthalate).
Abbreviations & Symbols:

E² - abbreviation 10 European.

L² - abbreviation [5^th entry] British (on a motor vehicle) learner driver.

N - abbreviation name [no source found]

OBE - abbreviation Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

Order of the British Empire - (in the UK) an order of knighthood instituted in 1917 and divided into five classes, each with military and civilian divisions . The classes are : Knight or Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE), Knight or Dame Commander (KBE/ DBE), Commander (CBE), Officer (OBE), and Member (MBE). The two highest classes entail the awarding of a knighthood.

p³ - [American Heritage Dictionary] abbreviation 1. piano² adverb & adjective Music in a soft or quiet tone (used chiefly as a direction).

R² - abbreviation [13th entry] Cricket [not to mention baseball] (on scorecards) run(s).

Commentary on Today's Puzzle

This commentary should be read in conjunction with the review at Big Dave's Crossword Blog, to which a link is provided in the table above.

8d   Indulge in aerial activity and test public opinion? (3,1,4)

Fly a kite (meaning 'to try something out to test public opinion') may be primarily a British expression, although I found no specific reference to that effect. The equivalent phrase in North America would likely be launch a trial balloon. The dismissive North American expression go fly a kite means 'go away', 'get lost', 'take a long walk off a short pier', or any number of more vulgar suggestions.

21d   Do a stretch of rowing, we hear? Great (7)

Here we have - as is often the case - a homophone clue that relies on British pronunciation. However, I have concocted two theories as to how the clue is intended to work. By the way, the solution is AWESOME (great) which we need to know is pronounced somewhat differently in Britain than in North America. The British pronunciation is sort of OH-sem as compared to the North American AW-sem (listen here: awesome).

Theory #1 - To "do a stretch of rowing" would be to 'oar some' which I have a hard time believing sounds very much like awesome. However, the setter (Shamus) does drop by Big Dave's blog to say "In the Midlands and South East, we pronounce “oar” and “awe” in similar ways". I therefore have to presume that awesome would be pronounced OR-sem.

Theory #2 - This was my initial theory and one that I eventually concluded is too much of a stretch. To "do a stretch of rowing" would be to ROW SOME. A bit (stretch) of this is OWSOME, which would seem to provide a pretty good match to the British pronunciation of awesome (at least as presented at TheFreeDictionary.com). The difficulty with this idea is that "stretch" would have to do double duty - being part of the definition as well as a truncation (well, actually the opposite of truncation - which would be ... decapitation?) indicator.

23d   Withdraw City journalist in the Home Counties (6)

Together with 19a and 28a, this clue makes the puzzle a formidable test of British place names and geography. The "City" (or, more fully, the City of London - which is not to be confused with London) refers to an small area in the historic core of London. The postcode (British equivalent of Canadian postal code or U.S. zip code) for this area is EC. The Home Counties are the counties surrounding London in the region of England popularly - but not officially (as elaborated on in Today's Glossary) - known as the South East.

Now that we have the background, we can solve the clue. The definition is "withdraw" for which the solution is SECEDE. The wordplay is {EC (City) + ED (journalist)} contained in (in) SE (the Home Counties).

Signing off for today - Falcon