Notes for Gemelo 6

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 6 Plain

Solver difficulty rating

3.5 based on 39 votes (voting is now closed)

Please give your own G-rating for this Gemelo puzzle by clicking on the relevant star above, with one star representing a very straightforward solve by your own standards (Gentle) and five stars indicating a seriously tough one (Ghastly). If you accidentally select the wrong star, you can change your vote by simply clicking on a different one. Each solver will be using their own yardstick, but by reflecting the average solver rating for the preceding puzzles I hope to be able to give a good feel for the relative perceived difficulty of the latest offering. Note that hovering over the ‘graph’ icon will show you the full breakdown of votes for the current puzzle.

The overwhelming view was that last week’s Oscar-themed puzzle was considerably less demanding than the previous week’s ‘plain’, its rating of 3.5 being well down on G5’s 4.2. The great majority of scores were 3’s and 4’s, with the odd 5 and the occasional 2 (G5 didn’t get any of them!). I agree completely with your assessment, and I gave it a 3-star rating compared to the previous week’s 4.

I think I’m starting to get attuned to the Gruffalo’s style – answers that are mainly familiar, definitions that are well-disguised and often oblique, and wordplays that are cunningly constructed. The clues themselves generally make good sense and have entertaining surface readings. Perhaps because I have eliminated link words from my own clues, I do feel that Gelato makes rather too much use of the word ‘of’ to connect definitions to wordplays. There are four clues in this puzzle (1a, 34a, 16d and 18d) in which the device has been employed to enhance the surface reading, and I feel that’s at least three too many; I appreciate that ‘of’ has several relevant meanings, such as ‘derived from’, but as Azed observed in the Slip for comp 1,728, “One thing that did strike me about the clues submitted was the unusually large number which included ‘of’ as a linking word between the definition and the cryptic part. I can see the justification for this, exploiting the dictionary definitions ‘proceeding or derived from; made from’ etc, but I’ve always felt unhappy about it and I notice that careful clue-writers tend to avoid it.”

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to look at clue 20a, “Newspapers barely used long story from the east (7)”. The word USED (from the clue) deprived of its first and last letters (‘barely’) and the name of a long story written by Homer (during quiet periods at the nuclear power plant, I presume) are reversed (‘from the east’) to produce a word answering to ‘newspapers’. The point of interest here is the use of the word ‘barely’ to indicate the deletion of the first and last letters of a word.  Adverbial indicators are something of an elephant in the cruciverbal room, accepted to varying degrees but never openly discussed. Adverbs are often seen as anagram indicators, eg ‘randomly’, and here it seems reasonable for solvers to infer a word such as ‘arranged’. With an intermittent selection indicator such as ‘regularly’, we can probably be expected to add ‘selected’. But when it comes to a truncation indicator such as ‘endlessly’, what could we add that would produce an expression amounting to ‘with the end removed’? This does seem to me very close to the borders of acceptability. I would suggest that the same could be said of ‘barely’, were it not for the fact that the ‘nakedly’ sense of the word is shown by Chambers as ‘obsolete’; this for me pushes it over the boundary.

Across

1a Keep bar of wine and broth, unusually (10)
A four-letter fortified wine is followed by a ‘now rare‘ six-letter word for a strong broth made of meat, fowl, etc, boiled and strained, of which ‘beef tea’ is a well-known form (for football fans with long memories, it is also the surname of a manager who had a great deal of success with Wolves, although rather less with  Birmingham City). The definition is sneaky – both words are nouns, the first being used attributively, so the answer is a bar to entering the keep.

10a Forward independent abridged novel about Cupid (7)
A two-letter interjection meaning ‘forward[!]’, the usual abbreviation for ‘independent’, and a five-letter word for a novel (which could perhaps be à clef or policier) missing its last letter (‘abridged’) are reversed (‘about’).

13a Inventor of dish losing face, admitting horror of main and the rest (8, 2 words)
We’re not talking about Delia Smith or Caesar Cardini here, rather the German microbiologist who invented the shallow glass dish with an overlapping cover which is used for growing cultures of bacteria. His surname, without its first letter (‘losing face’) contains (‘admitting’) a four-letter whale or sea-monster (‘horror of the main’). Be careful not to biff the other, and more familiar, Latin phrase with similar form and meaning.

23a Are speakers backing voting system to allocate fairly? (7)
A five-letter verb meaning ‘to speak’, which can have the sense of ‘are speakers’ when it is in the plural form of the present tense (as in ‘they are speakers’ as an alternative for ‘they speak’), follows (‘backing’) the two-letter abbreviation for a voting system which rewards parties in proportion to the total votes which they receive.

25a Cat to give up fish on reflection (8)
A five-letter word meaning ‘to give up’ (or ‘to send back’) and a three-letter fish resembling a pike are reversed (‘on reflection’). The ‘cat’ is the sort that might have been ‘hep’ back in the day.

30a Scent opportunity, primarily music with an American guitar? (8)
The wordplay is a charade of the first letter (‘primarily’) of ‘opportunity’, a three-letter type of music, the letters AN (from the clue) and the two-letter American spelling of a slang term for a guitar. I really only selected this clue so I could blow the dust off one of my better efforts, “Term for Hendrix, penned by American, avoided by Clapton? (5)”.

33a Producers of Grease painting that’s disappointing (7)
A three-letter word for a painting executed in a specific medium is followed by an interjection  which can mean “that’s disappointing”, particularly when preceded by ‘Aw’.

34a Spoilt sort of English Heritage group with enthusiast in attendance (10, 2 words)
The usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘English’ and a two-letter abbreviation for the name of another, larger ‘[English] heritage group’ containing a three-letter word for an enthusiast (‘with enthusiast in’) are followed by a four-letter word for the total number of people attending a game (‘attendance’). The answer is (6,4).

Down

2d Damp men breaking free (5)
The two-letter abbreviation used to indicate those members of the armed services who do not hold commissions (‘men’) is contained by (‘breaking’) a verb which is often, as here, indicated in cryptics by ‘free’.

4d Nitrogen found in profitable strip of baked clay? (6)
The chemical symbol for nitrogen is contained by (‘found in’) a word meaning ‘profitable’ or ‘useful’. The ‘strip’ in the somewhat oblique definition is a verb.

5d Tap indicators after initially letting out Katrine, say (4)
The letters which you would find on taps in English-speaking countries (the one on the right coming first) follow (‘after’) the first letters (‘initially’) of ‘letting out’. The answer refers to a geographical feature, one example of which (to be found in the Trossachs) is called Katrine.

7d Crush possible rule for letters getting written up (6, 2 words)
There is a definite whiff of Azed to this clue, where a (2,4) expression which the letters of properties might include in the information supplied to potential tenants is reversed (‘written up’) to produce the (4,2) answer.

9d Egg taken from kiwi bird (12, 2 words)
This is a neat one, a five-letter word for the egg of a lobster or crayfish (who knew?) being taken from another name for the kiwi fruit.

15d Stewing skinless fruit (6)
A word for ‘stewing in a closed pan’ must be stripped of its first and last letters (‘skinless’) to produce the answer.

16d Indian side of Pakistan right to ignore borders (6)
The three-letter abbreviation given by Chambers for ‘Pakistan’ is followed by a five-letter word meaning ‘adhering to what is right’ from which the first and last letters have been lost (‘to ignore borders’). The answer is the name of a side dish which is very likely to be found on the menu of an Indian restaurant in the UK.

22d ‘Vile, formerly’? ‘Viol, formerly’ recalled a good deal more (6)
When it comes to musical instruments in cryptic crosswords, solvers need to know about the KIT (a small pocket violin), the LUR or LURE (a long curved Bronze Age trumpet) and the viol ‘formerly used in Shetland’ which appears here, of which there are three spellings, although only two of these are of any use to setters. In this instance, it is the two-letter version which is reversed (‘recalled’) and followed by a word meaning ‘a good deal more’, specifically in a sentence such as “I couldn’t get over it – there must have been 100 éclairs and then ????”.

(definitions are underlined)