Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - DT 26739

Puzzle at a Glance

Daily Telegraph Puzzle Number DT 26739
Publication Date in The Daily Telegraph Monday, December 19, 2011
Setter Rufus
Link to Full Review Big Dave's Crossword Blog [DT 26739]
Big Dave's Review Written By Libellule
Big Dave's Rating
Difficulty - ★	Enjoyment - ★★★
Falcon's Performance ┌────┬────┬────┬────┬────┬────┬────┐ ███████████████████████████████████ └────┴────┴────┴────┴────┴────┴────┘ Legend: █ - solved without assistance █ - incorrect prior to use of puzzle solving tools █ - solved with assistance from puzzle solving tools █ - solved with aid of checking letters provided by puzzle solving tools █ - unsolved or incorrect prior to visiting Big Dave's blog █ - reviewed by Falcon for Big Dave's blog
Notes The National Post has skipped DT 26738 which was published in The Daily Telegraph on Saturday, December 17, 2011

Introduction

Seasons Greeting! This puzzle appeared in the UK during the week leading up to Christmas. All in all, it was not a very difficult puzzle. However, there is a party game with which I am not familiar and a couple of other clues where the wordplay escaped me.

Notes on Today's Puzzle

This commentary is intended to serve as a supplement to the review of this puzzle found at Big Dave's Crossword Blog, to which a link is provided in the table above.

10a   Suitable present for a lady? It depends on the listener (7)

I can only surmise that the second part of the clue may allude to the fact that the solution would sound like "hearing" ('earing) to a Cockney.

11a   Seasoning duck with orange, perhaps (7)

In cricket, a duck^[5] is a batsman’s score of nought • he was out for a duck. In cryptic crossword puzzles, duck more often than not indicates O as the letter "O" looks like the number "0".

12a   Riddle involves a Kipling poem, in a way (4)

"If—"^[7] is a poem written in 1895 by British Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling. It begins:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

and finishes:

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

13a   One small bird and an enormous one (5)

In Britain, a tit^[5] (also called a titmouse) is a small songbird that searches acrobatically for insects among foliage and branches. In North America, this bird is known as a chickadee^[5] . Libellule lists several species of tit in his hint. [family Paridae: three genera, especially Parus, and numerous species]

30a   Feel ill after parties and leave the port (3,4)

I expect that party^[5] is used in the clue in the sense of a group of people taking part in a particular activity or trip (the visiting party will be asked to conform to safety procedures whilst on site) with set^[5] in the solution having the somewhat similar meaning of a group of people with common interests or occupations or of similar social status (it was a fashionable haunt of the literary set).

31a   Party game using bouncy castle perhaps? (4,3,6)

Pass the parcel^[5] is a [previously unknown-to-me] children’s game in which a parcel is passed around to the accompaniment of music, the child holding the parcel when the music stops being allowed to unwrap a layer • the last party I went to, I ate too much jelly and was sick during pass the parcel.

In Britain, jelly is a gelatin dessert^[7] (which we would call jello on this side of the pond). My curiosity was piqued when I saw that Oxford indicates that jelly^[5] is the US name for jam. However, as I was to discover, this is - at best - only half the story. Wikipedia provides a fuller explanation:

The terms jam and jelly are used in different parts of the English-speaking world in different ways. In the United States, both jam and jelly are sometimes popularly referred to as "jelly", whereas in the United Kingdom, Canada, India and Australia, the two terms are more strictly differentiated. In Australia and South Africa, the term "jam" is more popularly used as a generic term for both jam and jelly.

To further confuse the issue, the term "jelly" is also used in the UK, South Africa, Australia, India and New Zealand to refer to a gelatin dessert, known in North America as jello, derived from the brand name Jell-O.^[7]

A more detailed explanation of the pass the parcel^[7] game is provided by Wikipedia. I have linked to an older version of the article as more recent versions^[7] have been vandalised - seemingly by a fan of Celtic [a football (soccer) club based in Glasgow, Scotland].

2d   Ruth is out with flu, that’s upsetting (7)

In this clue, "is out with" acts as a compound indicator, showing that the wordplay is both an anagram (out) and a charade (is ... with). In order to obtain the correct solution, one must perform the operations in the proper sequence. While the wordplay might have been:

• an anagram (is out) of  RUTH* + (with) FLU

in fact, it is actually:

• an anagram (out) of {RUTH + (is ... with) FLU}

6d   Sweet bird’s note cut short (4)

Twee^[5] is a British expression denoting excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental (although the film’s a bit twee, it’s watchable).

8d   Heavenly sight delights shepherds (3,3,2,5)

In North America, we are familiar with the bit of weather lore^[7] that begins "Red sky at night, sailor's delight ...". However, in Great Britain and Ireland, this saying is applied to a different occupation "Red sky at night, shepherd's delight ...".

9d   Everything’s OK if you’re Cratchit’s nephew (4,4,5)

Bob Cratchit^[7] is a fictional character who is the abused, underpaid clerk of Ebenezer Scrooge in the Charles Dickens story A Christmas Carol.

Bob's your uncle^[7] is an expression commonly used mainly in Britain and Commonwealth nations. Typically, someone says it to conclude a set of simple instructions to mean, "And there you have it", or "You're all set".

From  an older version of the Wikipedia article, one learns: 

In some places in Britain, "Bob's your uncle" is also a way of saying "that's great!" or "you've got it made!" and is used as an expression of jubilation at good fortune. It is used thus in the [1951 British] film Scrooge^[7]  [starring Alastair Sim], a version of the classic Dickens story A Christmas Carol [the name under which the film was released in North America], where a reformed Ebenezer Scrooge confronts his housekeeper, Mrs Dilber, on Christmas morning. He gives her a guinea (£1.05 in that era, and equivalent to about $100 today) as a Christmas present, and announces he will significantly raise her salary. In a burst of excitement the housekeeper responds, “Bob’s yer uncle! Merry Christmas, Mr Scrooge, in keeping with the situation!”. However, this may be an anachronism, as A Christmas Carol was first published by Dickens in 1843 and ... the expression (in the later film) was not in use at that time.

21d   Pull out bird (7)

My first entry here was SCRATCH - to pull out or withdraw (from a competition). When I couldn't make "bird" work with that, I found another possibility - STRETCH (to lengthen) - but still could not figure out the bird (until Libellule set me on the right track). Bird^[5]  is British slang for a prison sentence - to do bird meaning to serve time (in prison). As with many bizarre British expressions, it derives from rhyming slang (birdlime rhyming with 'time'). Birdlime^[5]  is a sticky substance spread on to twigs to trap small birds.

22d   Puts off bedtime to see carol singers at university (5,2)

Waits is an archaic term for street singers of Christmas carols. In Britain, up^[5] means at or to a university, especially Oxford or Cambridge • they were up at Cambridge about the same time.

27d   Where barristers get refreshers? (4)

Oxford Dictionaries Online, in discussing the origin of the word inn^[5], states "In Middle English the word was used to translate Latin hospitium (see hospice), denoting a house of residence for students: this sense is preserved in the names of some buildings formerly used for this purpose, notably Gray's Inn and Lincoln's Inn, two of the Inns of Court." In the UK, an Inn of Court^[5] is each of the four legal societies having the exclusive right of admitting people to the English bar as well as any of the sets of buildings in London occupied by the Inns of Court.

Key to Reference Sources: 

^[1]   - The Chambers Dictionary, 11th Edition
^[2]   - Search Chambers - (Chambers 21st Century Dictionary)
^[3]   - TheFreeDictionary.com (American Heritage Dictionary)
^[4]   - TheFreeDictionary.com (Collins English Dictionary)
^[5]   - Oxford Dictionaries (Oxford Dictionary of English)
^[6]   - Oxford Dictionaries (Oxford American Dictionary)
^[7]   - Wikipedia
^[8]   - Reverso Online Dictionary (Collins French-English Dictionary)
^[9]   - Infoplease (Random House Unabridged Dictionary)
^[10] - CollinsDictionary.com (Collins English Dictionary)

Signing off for today - Falcon