Wednesday, February 14, 2018 — DT 28572

Puzzle at a Glance

Puzzle Number in The Daily Telegraph DT 28572
Publication Date in The Daily Telegraph Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Setter Unknown
Link to Full Review Big Dave's Crossword Blog [DT 28572]
Big Dave's Crossword Blog Review Written By Mr Kitty
BD Rating
Difficulty - ★★★★	Enjoyment - ★★★★
Falcon's Experience ┌────┬────┬────┬────┬────┬────┬────┐ ███████████████████████████████████ └────┴────┴────┴────┴────┴────┴────┘ 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 █ - solved but without fully parsing the clue █ - unsolved or incorrect prior to visiting Big Dave's Crossword Blog █ - solved with aid of checking letters provided by solutions from Big Dave's Crossword Blog █ - reviewed by Falcon for Big Dave's Crossword Blog █ - yet to be solved

Introduction

In an interesting fluke of timing, this puzzle which appeared in the UK on Halloween shows up in Canada on Valentine's Day.

On the day this puzzle was published in Britain, the English were bemoaning the introduction of the American custom of Halloween and reminiscing about Fireworks Night (also known as Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night) (show explanation ) which takes place a few days later on November 5. A Scottish commenter replies that "We have always celebrated Halloween in Scotland".

Guy Fawkes^[5] (1570–1606) was an English conspirator. He was hanged for his part in the Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605. The occasion is commemorated annually on Bonfire Night with fireworks, bonfires, and the burning of a guy^*.

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^* Guy^[5] is a British term for a figure representing Guy Fawkes, burnt on a bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night, and often displayed by children begging for money for fireworks.

In the UK, November 5th is known as Bonfire Night^[5], on which bonfires and fireworks are lit in memory of the Gunpowder Plot^*, traditionally including the burning of an effigy of Guy Fawkes.

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^* The Gunpowder Plot^[5,7] was a conspiracy by a small group of Catholic extremists to blow up James I and his Parliament during the State Opening of Parliament on November 5, 1605 by detonating 36 barrels of gunpowder hidden beneath the House of Lords. The explosives were discovered during a search of Parliament at about midnight on November 4th.

hide explanation

As for other matters, in a comment in the thread arising from Comment #34 on Big Dave's Crossword Blog, BusyLizzie (a British expat living in the US) writes "We are probably too excited re Mr Mueller’s actions to concentrate". On October 31, 2017, The New York Times reported "The first charges in the investigation by Robert Mueller into Russian ties to the Trump campaign did not implicate the president but “collectively amounted to a political body blow”".

I invite you to leave a comment to let us know how you fared with the puzzle.

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.

Primary indications (definitions) are marked with a solid underline in the clue; subsidiary indications (be they wordplay or other) are marked with a dashed underline in semi-all-in-one (semi-&lit.) clues. All-in-one (&lit.) clues and cryptic definitions are marked with a dotted underline. Explicit link words and phrases are enclosed in forward slashes (/link/) and implicit links are shown as double forward slashes (//).

Across

1a   Track // restoration of Sacre Coeur (10)

Scratching the Surface
The Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Paris[7], commonly known as Sacré-Cœur Basilica and often simply Sacré-Cœur, is a Roman Catholic church and minor basilica, dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in Paris, France. A popular landmark, the basilica is located at the summit of the butte Montmartre, the highest point in the city.

6a   Dairy product // formed the wrong way (4)

Edam^[5] is a round Dutch cheese, typically pale yellow with a red wax coating.

10a   Puzzle // remnant (5)

11a   Actor, // terrible at reading (9)

A tragedian^[5] is an actor who specializes in tragic roles.

12a   Smart clothes also /showing/ status (8)

13a   Bay // allowed to trail in (5)

15a   Work // in secret a reporter sent back (7)

17a   Remarkably easy, he having bagged fifty /as/ batter? (7)

Does this clue really work?
A person bats their eyelashes, but I can find no evidence that suggests that eyelashes themselves can be said to bat? Thus are eyelashes not battees rather than batters.

If they only knew!
The Brits, usually quick to pounce on any incursion by US English, appeared to be oblivious to the fact that bat[5] meaning to flutter (one's eyelashes or eyelids), typically in a flirtatious manner, is originally a US expression, from dialect and US bat 'to wink, blink', variant of obsolete bate 'to flutter'.

19a   Buried in waste, America // put off (7)

21a   Plan // talk ending in discussion (7)

22a   Person flying // towards brink, backwards (5)

24a   Short interval // in game, no time seemingly for comeback? (8)

In music, a semitone^[3] is an interval equal to a half tone in the standard diatonic scale. In North America^*, a semitone is also known as a half step or halftone.

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^* Although Oxford Dictionaries characterizes semitone^[5] as a British term, that does not appear to be the case. While semitone does seem to be the only term used in Britain, other dictionaries indicate that all three terms (semitone^[3,4,10,11], half step^{[3,4,5,10,11]} and halftone^{[3,4,5,10,11]}) are used in North America.

Another way to look at it, a semitone^[12] is the difference in pitch between any two immediately adjacent keys on the piano.

27a   Faint design // ends on hot pipe, boarding cosy old ship (9)

Ark^[5] is an archaic name for a ship or boat. The best known example is undoubtedly Noah's ark^[5], the ship in which Noah, his family, and the animals were saved from the Flood, according to the biblical account (Gen. 6-8).

28a   Dance // beat has energy (5)

29a   River and powdered lava /in/ eruption (4)

30a   Man soon set to build -- // builder! (10)

Down

1d   Tear // grass (4)

2d   For a start, satisfaction in cryptic clues not // infinite (9)

3d   Chicken // wearing hat? (5)

Mr Kitty calls this a "male chicken" — however, one who is definitely not so male as he once was.

4d   University books on drink, // free (7)

In Crosswordland, the phrase "religious books" — or, as in this clue, merely the word "books" — is commonly used to clue either the Old Testament (OT) or the New Testament (NT). Today, as is frequently the case, the clue provides no indication whether the reference is to the former or the latter.

5d   Under lid of sparkly piano, view // shiny disc (7)

"piano" = P (show explanation )

Piano^[3,5] (abbreviation p^[5]), is a musical direction meaning either (as an adjective) soft or quiet or (as an adverb) softly or quietly.

hide explanation

Spangle^[10] is another term for sequin.

7d   Exercise // a bit on this? (5)

Before discussing the parsing of the clue as presented above, let's look at how I arrived at this parsing.

When I solved the puzzle, I saw this clue as a simple cryptic definition:

• Exercise a bit on this? (5)

in which exercise^[10] is being used in the sense of to put into use or employ. Thus one would use a bit on a drill in order to bore a hole in some material such as wood or metal. The expectation of the setter. of course, would be that the solver will go astray thinking of some sort of exercise apparatus such as a trampoline, for instance.

In his review, Mr Kitty points out something that had not occurred to me. That is, that the word "exercise" could be a 'precise definition' for DRILL (actually in more than one context; e.g., a military or academic training exercise).

He goes on to suggest that the phrase "a bit on this" is 'cryptic elaboration' (a term he credits to yours truly). This gave me pause to reconsider my parsing of the clue. However, as humbled as I am to see him pick up an idea from my blog, and after due consideration, I don't see how this explanation applies in the case of this clue. When I speak of cryptic elaboration, I am referring to a situation where the 'precise definition' is often anything but precise but instead is very broad and the cryptic elaboration serves to limit the range of possibilities. For example, in DT 28560 (by shear coincidence a puzzle reviewed by Mr Kitty on Big Dave's Crossword Blog) the following clue appeared:

•  26d   Heroic exploit, whichever way you look at it (4)

The 'precise definition' is "heroic exploit". Given the numeration, this could give rise to at least two solutions, DEED or FEAT. The 'cryptic elaboration' is "whichever way you look at it" which indicates that the solution is a palindrome thereby immediately eliminating one of the two obvious choices. The part of the clue that I have called 'cryptic elaboration' does not provide a second independent route to the solution (as the wordplay would do in most other types of clues). Rather it provides additional information (elaboration) related to the 'precise definition'.

This situation is not present in today's clue. If we take "exercise" to be a precise definition of DRILL, it is being used in an entirely different sense (i.e., a military or academic training exercise) from what Mr Kitty labels the "cryptic elaboration" which relates to a tool for boring holes.

However, as I write this, I realize that were one to make a tiny adjustment to Mr Kitty's analysis of the clue, the clue could actually be seen to be a double definition (which I believe is the best explanation of all):

• Exercise // a bit on this? (5)

This is a construct that I have seen on occasion where a definition is cryptically phrased in the form of a question. In plain English, the latter part of this clue could be expressed as "something to which one would attach a bit".

So the first part of the clue is a precise definition of a training exercise and the second part is a cryptic definition of a tool for boring holes.

Here we have different people seeing the clue in different ways — or even one person seeing the clue in multiple ways. In my experience, it is not unusual for there to sometimes be more than one valid interpretation for a clue.

8d   Insignificant worker, // one keeping going round the clock? (6,4)

9d   Tenant perhaps /offering/ regular payment to save face (8)

14d   Engine's stable capacity? (10)

Although I have marked this clue as a cryptic definition, one could almost consider this to be a cryptic definition consisting of a 'precise definition' and 'cryptic elaboration' (see discussion at 7d) which one might mark as:

• Engine's stable capacity? (10)

In this case, the precise definition would be "engine's ... capacity" and the cryptic elaboration would be provided by the word "stable" (which points us in the direction of HORSEPOWER versus some other measure of engine capacity such as LITRE).

After some deliberation, I chose to mark the clue as a simple cryptic definition rather than a 'precise definition' wrapped around 'cryptic elaboration', for the reason cited by Mr Kitty in his review, namely "cryptic convention does not allow for the definition to be split as that [latter] interpretation would require".

16d   Flower at the bottom of a fresh // hole (8)

Flower is used in the whimsical cryptic crossword sense of something that flows — in other words, a river.

The River Ure^[7] is a stream in North Yorkshire, England, approximately 74 miles (119 km) long from its source to the point where it changes name to the River Ouse.

18d   Copy name and numbers /in/ range (9)

The Apennines^[5] are a mountain range running 1,400 km (880 miles) down the length of Italy, from the north-west to the southern tip of the peninsula.

20d   Two notes barely sufficient /for/ singer (7)

In music, the term descant^[5] denotes an independent treble melody sung or played above a basic melody ⇒ A soaring girl soprano descant adds another heavenly layer to the already rich texture.

Just as the terms bass, tenor, alto and soprano can refer to the singers who perform these respective voice parts, it would seem that descant can mean the singer who performs the descant part^[7]. However, according to Wikipedia, this connotation was current in the late medieval period.

21d   Family after shoe, // orange leathery thing (7)

23d   Flower, // third of fourteen in a large bunch (5)

Lotus^[2] is the name of several species of water lily.

• a species of water lily sacred to the ancient Egyptians and often depicted in Egyptian art
• either of two species of water lily belonging to a separate genus, widely cultivated as ornamental plants, one native to Asia, with pink flowers and traditionally associated with Buddhism and Hinduism, and the other native to southern USA, with yellow flowers

The lotus of Greek mythology was not a water lily but the fruit of the jujube shrub, used by the ancient Greeks to make bread and wine, consumption of which was thought to produce a state of blissful and dreamy forgetfulness.

25d   Transport minister’s first // item that’s revered (5)

26d   Sad // wife hugged by professor (4)

A don^[10] is a member of the teaching staff at a university or college, especially at Oxford or Cambridge.

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)
^[11] - TheFreeDictionary.com (Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary)
^[12] - CollinsDictionary.com (Webster’s New World College Dictionary)
^[13] - MacmillanDictionary.com (Macmillan Dictionary)

Signing off for today — Falcon