Notes for Gemelo 9

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 9 Plain

Solver difficulty rating

2.6 based on 48 votes (voting is now closed)

My thanks to everyone who voted on last week’s puzzle. The difficulty rating averaged out at a whopping 4.5 – just two solvers classed the puzzle as a 3, with the remainder being 4’s and 5’s (the latter being in a significant majority). You rated it as the most difficult Gemelo puzzle so far, and I concur – it was also harder than any plain Azed that I can remember. I wouldn’t disagree with those who suggested that the level of difficulty was greater than the enjoyment that resulted from solving the clues.

I suspect that today’s puzzle will have come as a relief to those who felt that the difficulty of Gemelo’s offerings might be on an inexorable upward trajectory, with the ‘constraint’ of each word in a clue having the same length as the answer probably helping to keep things in check. It was very clever, but once we had admired the setter’s skill all we were left to do was to solve a plain puzzle containing clues which were inevitably, given the restriction, in general a little pedestrian. I read a comment on a forum recently where a solver bemoaned the recent dearth of ‘specials’, and suggested that the puzzle had ‘morphed into just another Mephisto…with a monthly clue writing competition’ (this was before there wasn’t a competition in September!). The regular appearance of ‘specials’ has over many years helped Ximenes and Azed to stand out from the rest, but it is now over six months since the last one.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to look at clue 33a, “Pretend comrade spawned animals without measure (another measure) (7)”. The wordplay has a three-letter word for ‘a swarm of young, esp of fishes just spawned’ (ie ‘spawned animals’) containing the names of two two-letter measures used by typesetters, the smaller preceding the larger; the answer is a relatively new addition to Chambers. The point of interest is the containment indicator ‘without’, which as a preposition meaning ‘outside’ is shown by Chambers as being ‘archaic’. Some editors (though not by any means all) take the view that while obsolete and archaic words must be flagged in some way when used as answers they can be used in wordplay without any such indication, but this makes no sense to me; I think that the solver should be able to expect any word or phrase not explicitly flagged in a clue to be part of  the current English language, at least as far as Chambers is concerned. In the current clue, there were plenty of alternatives to ‘without’, such as ‘housing’ or ‘keeping’. I believe there is a lot more scope for discretion when it comes to words with other classifications – I have no problem, for instance, with ‘wee’ (Scot), ‘bust’ (to demote, N Am) or ‘damsel’ (poetic).

Across

7a Year away from tabu hurt (4)
The single-letter abbreviation of the Latin word for ‘year’ is taken away from a word relatively new to Chambers meaning ‘forbidden under Islamic religious law’. Physiotherapists will tell you that ‘hurt’ is not the same as the answer here, but it can be.

12a Achieve “sincere regards” audibly (7)
The answer is made up of a four-letter word meaning ‘sincere’ and a homophone (‘audibly’) for a four-letter word meaning ‘regards’ (verb). The clue in isolation is ambiguous when it comes to the penultimate letter of the answer, but the crosser from 8d eliminates any doubt.

13a Naked belly – hello Islam! (5)
A five-letter informal word for a belly, deprived of its outermost letters (‘naked’), precedes a two-letter interjection which, depending on delivery, can express a wide range of emotions, one of these being surprise (‘hello[!]’). ‘Islam’ has a sense of ‘the followers of [Islam] considered as a group’, which makes it a very sound definition of the answer.

14a Parking boorish, unusual balloon (7)
A charade of the usual abbreviation for ‘parking’ and a word meaning ‘boorish’ leads to a verb shown by Chambers as ‘rare’.

18a Dutch brave about drink (5)
The usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘Dutch’ is followed by the reversal (‘about’) of a verb meaning ‘[to] brave’.

22a Motoring society’s engaging language recalled anti-tank machines (8)
The two-letter abbreviation for a British ‘motoring society’ contains (‘engaging’) the reversal (‘recalled’) of a language of the Malayo-Polynesian family and the two-letter abbreviation for ‘anti-tank’.

26a Brief sense about North Tokyo title? (5)
The sort of sense that is also an adult male voice is shorn of its last letter (‘brief’) and put around (‘about’) the usual abbreviation for ‘North’.

28a Western courage shortly slowing villain (7)
A five-letter word for courage which has lost its last letter (‘shortly’) is reversed (‘western’) ahead of a three-letter abbreviation from the world of classical music for an Italian term meaning ‘with diminishing speed’ (ie ‘slowing’). I’m not keen on ‘western’ as a reversal indicator – Chambers gives a sense of ‘towards the west’, but the OED confirms that this is really ‘lying towards the west’, which certainly carries no suggestion of movement in a westerly direction.

31a Retired setter’s advance payment system’s folding (7)
The aggregation of a two-letter word for “setter’s” (as in ‘setter is’), a single-letter abbreviation for ‘advance’ and the four-letter name of a payment system inextricably linked with social security payments is reversed (‘retired’). The definition is perhaps on the minimalist side, but perfectly fair.

Down

2d Birdie, moggie twitch within Dundee (6)
A three-letter ‘moggie’ of a specific sex and a Scots word for a twitch or a tug combine to produce the answer.

4d Clan were dead, with line lost (4)
The five-letter past tense of a verb with a euphemistic sense of ‘to be dead’ surrenders the usual abbreviation for ‘line’ (‘with line lost’).

5d Greedy people losing weight lastly accept having record health (6)
A six-letter informal word for people with large appetites (and not just for krill) loses the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘weight’ and is followed by the final letter of ‘accept’ (‘lastly accept’). ‘Record’ in the definition is perhaps a bit of a stretch, but any six-letter alternative that I can think of would share its last three letters with the answer.

9d Wind over wing from Ohio (4)
That familiar two-letter bit of commercial jargon meaning ‘concerning’ (ie ‘over’) precedes the US (hence ‘from Ohio’) term for a wing of a building that gives it a particular shape. The ‘wind’ in the definition is a verb.

11d Before midday, bustle united Tinder (6)
A charade of a two-letter abbreviation for ‘before midday’, a three-letter word for ‘bustle’ or ‘fuss’, and the single-letter abbreviation for ‘united’ furnishes an answer which has nothing to do with a dating site and everything to do with kindling – this will not please those (myself included) who do not like to see words being deceptively given an initial capital letter to which they are not entitled in the cryptic reading of the clue.

15d Resident’s furiously delivered invective following Victorian socialist (9)
This is to my mind the neatest clue in the puzzle. A four-letter word for ‘furiously delivered invective’ follows an Australian informal term (‘Victorian’) for a socialist of a relatively extreme kind. 

27d Lagos notes who’ll claim Jesus wasn’t godly, being upset (5)
The word for a follower of Arius (or Areios) of Alexandria, a fourth-century presbyter, is reversed (‘being upset’). Arius was a controversial figure, and the support for his ideas forced Constantine the Great to convene the Council of Nicaea (AD 325), where all but two of the 318 bishops there present concluded that he was wrong, the result being that he and the dissenting pair were banished. His doctrine survived him and led to much strife between East and West; although virtually suppressed in the Roman Empire by Theodosius I and Valentinian II, it persisted in some areas and was revived in England by Samuel Clarke and William Whiston.

29d Fish head from fair cuts mass from mine (4)
The first letter of (‘head from’) ‘fair’ is inserted into (‘cuts’) the sort of naturally occurring mineral aggregate that might be extracted from a mine.

(definitions are underlined)