Notes for Gemelo 8

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 8 Plain

Solver difficulty rating

4.5 based on 53 votes (voting is now closed)

The G-rating for Gemelo 7 was the same as for its two immediate predecessors, and I certainly would have struggled to spilt the three of them difficulty-wise.

I will be interested to see what you make of this week’s puzzle. To my taste, there were far too many clues where I found myself working backwards from the answer to the wordplay; on several occasions, after decrypting the latter, rather than thinking “Of course” I was saying to myself “Hmmm”. I appreciate that when many of the words in the grid are in everyday use it is perfectly reasonable for the setter to make the cryptic aspects of the clue – both definitions and wordplays – tricky, but it should still be possible to get the answer from the wordplay without performing too many mental contortions.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to look at a clue from Gemelo 7, “Custard apple, say, almost immediately out of fashion (5)” for ANONA. This raises a question which has often troubled me, and has prompted me to avoid the names of genera in my own puzzles wherever possible. ANONA is given by Chambers as ‘a tropical genus of dicotyledons, including custard apple, sweet-sop, and other edible fruits’, with GENUS being defined as ‘a taxonomic group of lower rank than a family, consisting of closely related species’. There’s no doubt that custard apples and sweet-sops belong to the group ANONA, but are they examples of ANONA? I don’t think they are, and I have never felt confident enough to use a definition which relies on something like this, but at the same time I think that we have to cut setters some slack in this area. When a solver looks up ANONA in Chambers and finds the definition given above, they will be in no doubt that they have the right answer.

Across

11a Fastidiousness, removing jacket with each drink (6, 2 words)
A six-letter word for ‘fastidiousness’ or ‘critical subtlety’ is deprived of its first and last letters (‘removing jacket’) and followed by the usual abbreviation for ‘each’, the result being the (3,3) answer.

12a Started dropping Australian after Stokes was out (5)
A five-letter word meaning ‘started’ (as a deer might have done from cover) without (‘dropping’) the single-letter abbreviation for ‘Australian’ follows (‘after’) the abbreviation for the CGS unit of kinematic viscosity (resistance to flow under the force of gravity), the stokes (not ‘Stokes’).

13a Plane returning empty, the craft perhaps fixed course (8)
A reversal (‘returning’) of three components – the word THE (from the clue) lacking its middle letter (empty), a three-letter word which (according to Chambers) shares a sense of ‘occupation’ with ‘craft’, and a three-letter word for the sort of fixed course someone with an occupation might get stuck in. The ‘perhaps’ makes me think that the setter himself may not have been entirely convinced about the ‘craft’ word, one of those situations where the various meanings of a pair of words are close to overlapping but it is hard to think of a sentence in which they would be truly interchangeable.

15a Question for Buddhist controlling study of the sacred language (6)
A four-letter word for ‘a nonsensical, logically unanswerable question given to students as a subject for meditation’ (‘question for Buddhist’) containing (‘controlling’) one of the two-letter abbreviations for the sort of ‘study of the sacred’ which constitutes a school subject. There are a lot of languages to choose from, but the one here belongs to two countries in East Asia.

17a Facetiously, one location where indicator is three feet back (3)
The three-letter abbreviation for the name of a particular British Crown Dependency whose symbol features three feet (associated with the motto “Whithersoever you throw it, it will stand”) is reversed (‘back’). It strikes me that ‘indicator’ is a bit of a stretch for ‘symbol’, and that the symbol includes three feet, but not just the feet.

18a Ponder newspaper article (8)
A (4,4) phrasal verb meaning ‘ponder’ shares its letters with a word meaning ‘a newspaper article begun on the front page and continued overleaf’. There isn’t enough distance between the two etymologically for my liking.

24a Increasingly highly valued letter-opener previously sent to palace? (6)
The wordplay requires us to imagine how one might have begun a letter to the old Queen (‘letter-opener previously sent to palace?’) had one chosen to address her by her cipher rather than her name (Brenda, if you’re a Private Eye reader).

25a Native American companion for Paul going west with Chinese (8)
The five-letter ‘companion for Paul’ is reversed (‘going west’) and followed by a word for the native Chinese people. My first thought on the companion was ‘Art’, but it turns out to be the name of a saint who accompanied Paul the Apostle on his second missionary journey (although  it seems that Paul refers to him by a different name in his letters to the Corinthians and the Thessalonians). A correspondent suggests a certain resemblance between this ‘companion for Paul’ and last week’s ‘Woody’ for STRODE.

Down

1d Black ice: two vessels getting close to disaster following a line (12)
The usual abbreviation for ‘black’ is followed by a four-letter word for a piece of ice prepared for sporting activity and two words (three letters and four letters) for the kind of vessel that would sail the seas (the former these days only seen in a compounded form describing a vessel which would have engaged in hostilities, with the Portuguese form thereof still posing a threat to bathers). The answer is a word coined by Adlai Stevenson. In January 1956, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said in a Life magazine interview when describing how the Eisenhower administration had kept the peace during several international conflicts that “You have to take chances for peace, just as you must take chances in war. Some say that we were brought to the verge of war. Of course we were brought to the verge of war. The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art. If you cannot master it, you inevitably get into war. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.” The following month, in a speech in Hartford CT, Democratic presidential candidate Stevenson observed, “We hear the Secretary of State boasting of his ????????????—the art of bringing us to the edge of the abyss.”

2d While happy with capital of Turkey, what about visiting Cyprus? (8)
A four-letter plural given by Chambers for the four-letter ‘standard monetary unit of Turkey’ (‘capital of Turkey’) and the usual two-letter interjection answering to ‘what[?]’ are reversed (‘about’) inside (‘visiting’, not an insertion indicator that I like) the IVR code for Cyprus. Adverbs can be difficult to define without resorting to another word with a ‘-ly’ ending, but I’m not sure that ‘while’ plus an adjective means the same as the corresponding adverb, with one relating to a state and the other to an event.

3d Produce young fish in container, that which may have caught them up (6)
A three-letter word for a container (a straw or rush basket) for fish, or for the 10 stone of fish contained therein, precedes the reversal (‘up’) of a word for something in which fish are often caught (‘that which may have caught them’).

4d Former president spending money – and very high note! (3)
There are an awful lot of former presidents (and one or two awful current ones), but here it is the surname of the president of South Africa between 1994 and 1999 which must lose (‘spending’) the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘money’ and the consecutive letters AND (from the clue).

5d I love your heart, regularly lost before the day starts (6)
Alternate letters (‘regularly lost’) from YOUR HEART follow the two letter abbreviation for the Latin phrase meaning ‘before the day’ (ie ‘before the day starts’, although that ‘repositioning’ indicator ‘starts’ sits rather uncomfortably at the end of the wordplay).

8d Preserve element of rule – first, don’t mention it to Klopp or Postecoglou? (12, 2 words)
Here we must assemble the components of the wordplay around the usual abbreviation for ‘rule’. Before it (‘first’) comes a German interjection with many senses including ‘please’ and “you’re welcome” (ie “don’t mention it to [former Liverpool manager Jurgen] Klopp”. After it are the word OR (from the clue) and the nickname of the Australian who has recently been appointed as the manager of Nottingham Forest (‘Postecoglou?’).

13d Skin designs earlier covering over armadillos (6)
An old five-letter spelling for the sort of skin designs that might be applied in a parlour with a name such as ‘Permanent Mistakes’ or ‘Pigment of Your Imagination’ contains (‘covering’) the usual cricketing abbreviation for ‘over’.

27d Spoil market without trouble (3)
It would be very easy to biff the wrong answer here, but the right word for ‘[to] spoil]’ is produced by taking a three-letter word meaning ‘trouble’ (as in “what troubles you?”) from the end of a six-letter word meaning ‘[to] market’.

(definitions are underlined)