Notes for Gemelo 3

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Observer barred puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible, by email.

Gemelo 3 Plain

Difficulty rating: (4 / 5)

Based on the first three Gemelo puzzles, I will certainly have to recalibrate the difficulty meter. This one was, I thought, the trickiest of the trio, with the NW corner involving several challenging clues. After the setter’s self-imposed constraints of the previous puzzle, it was good to see him being able to freely deploy the alphabet in both clues and answers, and to include the odd anagram and ‘hidden’; as previously, there were relatively few unfamiliar words or phrases in the grid, but a number of wordplays that needed plenty of teasing out. An unusual feature of the grid was the presence of two fully-checked six-letter entries, something I can’t recall ever having seen before in a plain puzzle.

I have selected what I thought were the most interesting/challenging clues for comment, but if there are any others which you would like me to cover just let me know.

Incidentally, I see that the results of the first Azed comp in its new form have been published. I submitted what I thought was my best entry for a ‘plain’ comp for several years, but that isn’t saying much, so perhaps it should have come as no surprise to see my name conspicuous by its absence from the list. I thought that the published clues made interesting reading.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to look at clue 21a, “Hand over newspaper with extremely elusive tennis score (7)”. A three-letter slang term for a hand (on similar lines to ‘flipper’) contains (‘over’) the two-letter abbreviation for a newspaper with a distinctive ‘light salmon’ hue (a bit of a theme emerging here) and the outermost characters (‘extremely’) of ‘elusive’.

If there were any doubt over the authorship of the puzzle, this clue alone would have proved conclusively that it was not the work of Azed. Firstly, we have the use of ‘over’ to indicate containment. I see this quite often in puzzles, and the Listener editors allow it, presumably based on the sense given by Chambers of ‘from side to side of’. It’s not an indicator that Azed ever uses, and I can’t think of a real-life example where ‘A over B’ indicates the containment of B by A.

Secondly, we have one of Azed’s bêtes noires, the use of ‘extremely’ for letter selection. In the slip for 1186, he wrote, “I have noticed a growing tendency among crossword setters to use “extremely” to indicate the first and last letters of the following (or preceding) word, but can see no justification for it. ‘Extremely’ means ‘in an extreme way; very’ and I can’t equate that with an instruction to the solver to take the extreme letters of a word.”

That’s not to say that these indicators should not be used by setters – they will be allowed by many editors, and since they appear regularly in puzzles one could reasonably argue that irrespective of their soundness they are part of the cruciverbal lingua franca and no less fair to solvers than, say, ‘artist’ for RA. Personally, I need to feel that there is at least some justification for the use of a particular indicator, and therefore I won’t use either of these ones myself, but it is very much a matter of individual choice. 

Across

9a When we have sheets of paper and pen, hiding tablet (6, 2 words)
If this was your first one in, kudos! The only UK newspaper with a one-letter name (‘paper’) is followed by  a word meaning ‘[to] pen’ which contains the single letter representing the sort of tablet that your parents certainly wouldn’t buy for you to take to university. The answer is (3,3), and the definition is sneaky.

11a Intersection I found in opening year (7)
The letter I (from the clue) is found inside a five-letter word for an opening (of the sort that might be ‘yawning’ in purple prose) followed by the single-letter abbreviation of the Latin word for ‘year’.

12a Pit yielding foot bones (4)
The anatomical term for a pit or depression (the Roman word for a ditch) surrenders (‘yielding’) the single-letter abbreviation for ‘foot’.

16a End of ebony table trimmed for conference venue (5)
The last letter (‘end’) of ‘ebony’ and a five-letter ‘table’ with religious connotations missing its last letter (‘trimmed’) combine to produce the name of a Crimean resort which was catapulted to fame by Stalin in February 1945.

17a Lazy lump following Sabbath by mistake (8)
A three-letter word for a lump (or a lofted tennis shot) follows the usual abbreviation for ‘Sabbath’ [🦇RIP Ozzy🦇], with a four-letter word for a mistake of the schoolboy kind being tacked onto the end.

18a Order to undo softening effect of water, as it were? (6)
The last four letters of the answer form a word which means ‘to soften by boiling or soaking’, while the first two are a prefix ‘Indicating a reversal of process’, hence the word as a whole might fancifully (‘as it were?’) mean ‘to undo  [the] softening effect of water’.

34a Pitch extremely high, formerly missing opening to throw (6)
A (1-2) term for ‘the highest pitch of anything’ precedes a word meaning ‘formerly’, deprived of (‘missing’) its first letter (‘opening’).

35a First – but not second – brand by Open University swiftly dismissed (12, 4 words)
A (6-2-4) adjective meaning ‘supreme’ or ‘unsurpassed’ (‘first’) without the word SECOND (‘but not second’) and a four-letter word meaning ‘[to] brand’ (eg with a hot iron) follow the abbreviation for ‘Open University’, thus producing the (3,2,4,3) answer. The enumeration here tells us that we cannot expect Gemelo to let us know when an answer includes an apostrophe; if hyphens and accents are ignored in enumerations, it seems reasonable that apostrophes should be treated similarly, although Azed was never sure whether to mention them or not.

Down

1d Musical film’s John and Edward (6)
This one is pretty devious – having got the last two letters from ‘Edward’, I guessed the ‘musical film’ but struggled to work out how the rest of the wordplay worked, until I realized that the definition was just ‘musical’ and “film’s John” equates to the surname of the titular character in a ‘neo-noir action thriller film series’ (Wikipedia’s words). The name seems appropriate, since I suspect that the films would get on mine.

2d Outdated operation bypasses cover over kidneys (5)
One of the hardest clues in the puzzle, where a three-letter obsolete (‘outdated’) word for ‘use’ or ‘operation’ is removed from (‘bypasses’) an eight-letter word meaning ‘to again provide cover against risk for’ (ie ‘cover over’). This name for the kidneys was used in medical circles well into the eighteenth century. As Sir John Floyer wrote in his essay on the art of feeling the pulse – and improving the technique using his special pulse-watch, available now on Amazon – “The Pulse of the ????? (or of the serous Constitution) is naturally profundus, ’tis compar’d to Hair dip’d in Water.” 

4d Cry about bleak part of London (7)
A three-letter word for the cry of a cat or a gull is reversed (‘about’) ahead of one spelling of a word for the bleak, a small fish.

6d Lend a little to overturn highway (7)
A three-letter word meaning ‘[to] advance’ or ‘[to] lend’, the letter A (from the clue), and an informal word for a small amount are all reversed (‘to overturn’), the result being the sort of highway that is free of potholes but is limited to electric traffic (so only a bit like the M6toll).

8d Stoned through drinking a pop (6)
My favourite clue in the puzzle, a two-letter word for ‘through’ contains (‘drinking’) a word meaning ‘a pop’, as in ‘raffle tickets two quid a pop’. Chambers confirms that the definition is entirely valid.

13d Antelope, for example, consuming inner bark from the base (7)
A three-letter word meaning ‘for example’ contains (‘consuming’) a reversal (‘from the base’) of a word for inner bark which could also have been indicated by ‘fish’ or ‘musical instrument’.

15d I never crack up and stay youthful the longest? (7)
A (3,4) phrase which would seem to come to the same thing as ‘[to] stay youthful the longest’ leads directly to the answer.

22d Opposition caught old men’s blunder (7, 2 words)
The first part of the answer is a four-letter homophone (‘caught’) of a word meaning ‘opposition’ or ‘enemy’, while the second part is the three-letter plural of a two-letter word often indicated in cryptics by ‘father’ or ‘old man’. The latter word is, in fact,  a homophone for the ‘old man’ word, but ‘Opposition caught old man’s blunder’ wouldn’t work because an indicator (here ‘caught’) can operate on the text preceding it or the text following it, but not both. For the wordplay to be sound the clue would have to be something like ‘Opposition old man caught blunder’, but there’s no obvious way to shuffle the words to produce a meaningful surface reading.

27d African rhino in Leicester city centre? (5)
Since I used to work in an office in the centre of Leicester, I know what the postcode for that area is, although those outside the UK might not. The number part which follows the two letters needs to be turned into the corresponding word, the result being an African monetary unit (‘African rhino’).

29d Wild revelry raising temperature for Beastie Boys? (4)
A four-letter word for ‘wild revelry’ has the usual abbreviation for time moved upwards (‘raising’) to produce the sort of performing unit exemplified by the Beastie Boys or, for those of a certain age, The Bachelors.

(definitions are underlined)