Notes for Gemelo 26
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 26
This puzzle is available at https://cdn.slowdownwiseup.co.uk/media/documents/obs.GEMELO.20260308.pdf.
Solver difficulty rating
2.5 based on 34 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). Note that hovering over the ‘graph’ icon will show you the full breakdown of votes for the current puzzle. Last week’s puzzle received an average rating of 2.3, which I think reflected the fact that, unlike the previous week’s constrained puzzle themed around the letter A, there were some straightforward toeholds (via ‘hiddens’ and anagrams) to provide help with the harder clues.
I thought Gemelo 26 was an excellent puzzle, featuring a good range of clue types and a mix of difficulties that offered plenty of ways in to the grid. The clueing was innovative without, for the most part at least, demanding too many mental leaps from the solver. The surface readings in general were very good, and there was plenty of legitimate misdirection to enjoy.
Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to look not at a clue from this puzzle, but one from the latest Guardian Genius puzzle that I saw recently on one of the help forums: “Part of car sounds like exhaust (4)”. The original poster was unsure as to whether the answer was TIRE (sounds like ‘tyre’) or TYRE (sounds like ‘tire’), the second letter being unchecked in the grid. I have noticed that even reasonably experienced solvers can struggle with homophones where both words involved are the same length such as “Reportedly, female servant is carried out (4)” for MADE. There should be no ambiguity here, as the homophone indicator can apply only to the female servant, but in any event the difference between the two possible answers means that a crossing entry will confirm which one is correct. Where the potential answers differ only by an unchecked letter (a relatively rare occurrence), in the interests of ‘solver satisfaction’ I would strongly advise asking yourself whether a homophone is the right tool for the job.
But back to that Genius clue. “Obviously”, I said to myself, “the answer is TYRE, which ‘sounds like [tire]'”. And if the clue had read “Part of car that sounds like exhaust”, I would have thought no more about it – we would be looking for “A word for a part of a car that sounds like a word meaning ‘exhaust'”. As it stands, though, the clue is simply a statement, and I think you could therefore legitimately read it as “A word for a part of a car sounds like this word meaning ‘exhaust'”, the answer being TIRE. I’ve little doubt that the intended answer was indeed TYRE, but the clue leaves room for doubt – if a setter does decide to opt for the homophone clue in a situation like this, they need to ensure that it is absolutely watertight.
Across
1a Centre-forward netting with vigour in a league match that’s decisive (8, 2 words)
The two-letter abbreviation for ‘centre-forward’ containing (‘netting’) a two-letter word meaning (among many other things) ‘with vigour’ is followed by the letters IN A (from the clue) and the usual abbreviation for ‘league’. The answer is (3,5).
6a Storm shield remaining incomplete (4)
A five-letter word from ancient history for ‘a small light shield or buckler’ is deprived of its last letter (‘incomplete’). The shield gave its name (with an ‘-st’ tacked on the end) to the sort of Greek soldier who carried one – it’s a long time since I read Xenophon’s Anabasis at school, but I’m pretty sure that there were quite a lot of them among his 10,000. The word ‘remaining’ seems somewhat redundant, and would I suspect have been removed by many editors in their quest for brevity.
9a Mary sheared pet lamb in place of amusement (6)
The word MARY (from the clue) without its outer letters (‘sheared’) precedes a word for a lamb abandoned by its mother and brought up by hand, or a pet lamb. The place of amusement is the sort likely to be found in profusion at UK seaside holiday resorts.
10a Clay later packed into court properties (6)
The second name taken by Cassius Clay when he changed his name in 1964 (ie ‘Clay later’) is contained by (‘packed into’) a word for a court, abbreviated from a ten-letter word referring to its shape and often associated with Oxbridge colleges.
11a In winter, say, bank secured over 500 rupees through close examination (9)
A reversal of a three-letter word meaning ‘secured’ followed by the Roman numeral representing 500 and the single-letter abbreviation for ‘rupees’ are contained by (‘through’) a four-letter word for a close examination (usually seen as a verb, either in connection with de-lumping something like flour or figuratively with regard to going through, say, a large pile of papers).
18a Prime Minister’s not opening private office (3)
It’s surprising how many Prime Ministers produce a real word when the first letter is dropped from their surname (ie ‘not opening’) – RUSS, AY, LAIR, HATCHER, EATH – but we have to go back to the 1950s to find the one for whom things all went wrong as a result of his ‘handling’ of the Suez crisis.
19a Stop tossing around one of 50 poisons? (9)
An anagram (‘tossing’) of STOP contains (‘around’) the five-letter name of one of the 50 currently in the process of being made great again, this example being home to Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote and the destination of Roger Miller in King of the Road.
26a May’s constituents in time for work (7)
A neat little clue, where “May’s constituents” are its first letter AND its last three, leading to the (3-4) answer, although I can’t help feeling that with the apostrophe where it is the result should actually be the (3-3) singular form. I would have preferred “Constituents of May’s”.
27a Genetic element that’s first removed from sheep (5)
The first letter of ‘that’ (ie “that’s first”) is removed from a six-letter word for the meat of a sheep or, jocularly, a sheep itself.
33a Cult attracting men, primarily, about man’s way of doing things? (8)
An &lit, though perhaps not one from the Premier League. A reversal (‘about’) of the first letters (‘primarily’) of ‘Cult attracting men’ is followed by a three-letter word meaning “[that] man’s” and a two-letter abbreviation for a Latin phrase meaning ‘method of working’, often applied to the trademark technique of a particular criminal. The whole clue stands as an indication of the answer.
Down
1d Jackal, perhaps seizing day, arrived with artillery, shooting without warning (12, 2 words)
A five-letter generic term for an animal from a large group including jackals containing (‘seizing’) the usual abbreviation for ‘day’ is followed by a four-letter word meaning ‘arrived’ and the two-letter abbreviation usually signalled cryptically by ‘artillery’ or ‘gunners’. The answer is (6,6), and while I don’t think that the definition is strictly accurate (‘one gets shot without warning’ would probably be closer), the second definition in Chambers leaves plenty of room for interpretation. UK solvers of a certain age may be put in mind of Jonathan Routh among others.
5d Service form saving opponent of children’s disease (5)
A seven-letter word for ‘the form of service or regular ritual of a church, strictly that used in the celebration of the Eucharist’ loses (‘saving’) the two-letter word which describes the player chosen in a children’s game to oppose the others (“You’re ??”). The word may or may not have been coined by the Goons, but it was certainly turned into a household name by them, almost invariably in its ‘dreaded’ form.
8d Fancy steak and onion ruined with heat not on (12, 4 words)
An anagram (‘ruined’) of STEAK ONION and HEAT after the letters ON have been removed (‘not on’) produces the (4,1,5,2) answer.
11d Mary’s mother dropping second name for college position (6)
I would expect the crossword setter for the Church Times to know the name of Jesus’s maternal grandmother, and there, unsurprisingly, he had the advantage of me; it seems that she isn’t mentioned in the canonical books of the New Testament, but her name (and that of her husband, Joachim) starts to appear in writings from around 150 AD. Anyway, the (2,4) name by which she is often known has the second instance of the abbreviation for ‘name’ replaced by the usual abbreviation for ‘college’ (ie ‘dropping second name for college’).
12d Fail – lacking literary style – Open University (4)
The letters OPEN (from the clue) without (‘lacking’) a three-letter word for ‘literary style’ precedes the three-letter abbreviation for a private university based in the city of Cambridge, but not the one where a short post-lunch punt journey might reveal that there was still honey for tea.
17d Alexandre Manette possibly involved with threat to king (6)
A charade of a two-letter word meaning (inter alia) ‘involved with’ and a four-letter term from chess for a (terminal) threat to a king produces a word for a person of whom Alexandre Manette was one of a great many examples, perhaps rather too many for cruciverbal comfort. In Dickens’s oft-spoonerized novel about London and Paris, he spent 18 years in the Bastille as ‘Prisoner 105, North Tower’, where he took up shoemaking in order to cope with his solitary confinement.
24d Spending limit supported by partner once (5)
A three-letter word for a limit which is not to be exceeded combines with a two-letter word often indicated by ‘former partner’.
25d Straw man initially underpinning load of drag artists? (5)
The first letter of ‘man’ (‘man initially’) follows (‘underpinning’) the kind of load that a group of fishermen expert in the use of drag nets might accumulate.
(definitions are underlined)
Also my first Gemelo (following my first Azed last week)! I did need a few hints and found those above very helpful – thank you, as ever Dr Clue. Definitely a slightly different feel to Azed – synonyms in the wordplay were often more obscure I found.
Very impressed by 33a (solved without reading your explanation, I should add)!
Northern did seem a stretch to me too, but I did get it once I stopped messing around trying to make it work as an anagram.
“Load of drag artists” sees a bit daft to me – I’d have got there much quicker with just “load”… perhaps that’s the point though!
Oh and between Azed and Gemelo I did… the Guardian Genius. Didn’t even occur to me to consider TIRE as the solution over TYRE, but I do take the point. Have to say of all three my favourite was the Grauniad – quite a fan of extra/missing letter gimmicks, especially when they reveal an instruction / hint. Each to their own…
I like gimmicks where the solver has to change the clue in some way before it can be solved. These gimmicks open up a whole range of possibilities for clueing in a completely new way a word that has been clued many times before, but the trick is to build the clues around the gimmick; I see a lot of (say) ‘extra letter’ clues where the setter has clearly written a bunch of clues and then tried to work out how to accommodate the extra letters, which is a great opportunity wasted.
My personal gimmick of choice is the misprinted letter which has to be corrected prior to solving, where the incorrect and correct letters both contribute in some way to the thematic aspect of the puzzle. They can be tricky to write, and limiting yourself to the definition part of the clue is probably too much of a constraint.
I’m entirely comfortable with ‘extra letter in clue’ and ‘missing letter in clue’ gimmicks, as well as more esoteric ones like ‘two letters swapped in a word’. I’ve used all of these. I’m generally less enthusiastic about the ‘extra word in clue’ gimmick, particularly if the extra word contributes only its first or last letter to a message, although I’ll use it if I need to. Again, I see too many clues where the extra word has simply been retrospectively slotted in.
The gimmicks I really don’t like are ‘wordplay delivers an extra letter’ and ‘wordplay delivers the answer missing a letter’. They are very easy to work with, but difficult to exploit in an interesting way. They often result in the solver getting the answer from the definition and crossers, and then working back to the wordplay. They also tend to have the greatest potential for ambiguity, and they never feature in my puzzles. If I had the chance to ban ten things from crosswords, you probably wouldn’t see those two again.
Hi Doc, can you recommend a puzzle that employs your gimmick of choice … “the misprinted letter which has to be corrected prior to solving, where the incorrect and correct letters both contribute in some way to the thematic aspect of the puzzle” ? I’d be interested to see how it’s done.
Hi Jay.
This Inquisitor puzzle of mine from last year is an example:
https://clueclinic.com/wp-content/uploads/Dyno-Rod-by-Triton-Puzzle.pdf
The solution is available on fifteensquared.net (it was IQ 1928).
Interesting! In this case every additional letter included in the wordplay of an across clue had a corresponding down clue from which the same letter was missing. This helped to ensure one had the correct parsing (especially in the down clues). The relationship between paired clues was also of significance in uncovering the theme. I felt it was very deftly executed on the whole, and it was a Guardian debut for the setter.
One final question… Any idea how one pronounces Gemelo? As it’s said in Spanish?
Hi Anon, there’s an Observer video with Azed and Gemelo and he pronounces his name the Spanish way with a soft ‘h’ sound, rather then the hard ‘g’.
I’ll try and link it… https://youtu.be/JpcMqY71UVE?si=Ua094bsUURy4ZTG_
I asked him the question at last night’s Listener dinner, and he said that while he himself pronounces it in the Spanish style he is quite happy for people to call him hard-g ‘Gemmerlow’ or soft-g ‘Jemmerlow’. So you can take your pick!
Thank you both – that’s a lovely video!
Did he question your G-rating of “ghastly”? 😄 (I think “gnarly” would be fairer.)
No, he didn’t, but I take your (implied) point that ‘ghastly’ might suggest an assessment of quality rather than difficulty. I have changed the word to ‘gnarly’ (thank you) for the current notes 🙂.
Something I did learn, though, is that the clue writing competition will very probably resume under Gemelo’s stewardship in the not-too-distant future, perhaps this summer.
I was joshing of course, but thank you!
And thanks for the info on the competition’s revival. Amazing to me that Gemelo will be able to find time to judge it on top of all his other roles, but great news, obviously.
😉
I think it is fair to say that he is a person of extraordinary energy, whose periods of sleep are seemingly confined to hours outside the usual twenty-four. Of course being a twin there could be more than one of him at work… 👯♂️
That sounds far more interesting than the puzzles I regularly see where the wordplays simply lead to the answer +/- one letter and those letters spell out a message. Not that I find the gimmick unacceptable, it’s just that it offers setters an easy option which in its basic form can be very dull.
Welcome to the Gemelo club! There’s always the danger of an emphasis on the surface reading (or simply a desire to mislead!) resulting in a suboptimal cryptic reading. I felt that ‘load of drag artists?’, specifically the ‘artists’, risked provoking a ‘Hmm’ rather than than an ‘Ah!’.
Getting into pedants corner here, am I the only one who finds the definition @ 11A badly worded? Surely, it should read “Bank say, in winter,” as the answer is an example of a ‘bank’, and not, as the clue suggests, an example of ‘in winter’ via the “In winter, say, bank” as given?
The example here is the qualifying ‘in winter’, because although we tend to associate 11a’s with that season they can occur at other times of the year; 11a is a type of bank (as confirmed by Chambers), so it can be indicated simply by ‘bank’. What wouldn’t be acceptable would be the answer at 11a being used without qualification to indicate BANK, of which it would be a definition by example (all 11a’s are banks, but not all banks are 11a’s). Similarly, ‘model’ would be fine for MAQUETTE, but any qualification would need to be along the lines of ‘in wax, say, model’, because not all maquettes are made in wax.
The notes on Gemelo 26 were indispensable to me getting over the line on my first attempt at a Gemelo. They helped me re-think my answer to 11a (which turned out to be wrong and had brought the NE corner to a solving halt). The notes on the Greek shield were helpful in internet searches. And despite being Scottish, I’d never heard of the Scots name for that game bird, (although the parsing is simple when you look at the answer). So, thank you for the guidance.
Hi Spadework, and welcome to the blog
I’m glad you found the notes helpful. This was a good puzzle for your first attempt, I’d say, featuring as it did plenty of Gemelo’s trickery, but also offering some relatively straightforward ways in. I hope you stick with it, because Gemelo is starting to settle in now.
In 7d could you explain the role that ‘Healthier’ plays in the clue? Ta.
It’s the first definition of the answer, indicating the comparative form of the four-letter adjective which Chambers gives as ‘(of food and drink) low in calories, alcoholic content, etc’. I suspect the word is rarely seen ‘in the wild’, but that applies to quite a lot of regularly-formed comparatives, superlatives and plurals found in crosswords. Hope that helps!
Yes it does, thanks. I was thinking of a comparative of the first three letters which of course doesn’t work. It would have been clearer had I looked at the paper version of Chambers, rather than the app, as the four-letter word is just above the answer.
I recall one of us saying he liked to ‘ease into’ Gemelo with Everyman. FYI, Everyman 4,143 went up (the URL works) late Sun./early Mon. in the UK. So about 1 week early! No Gemelo yet.
Twas me that posted the TYRE/TIRE question on that thread, so thanks for pre-empting me asking for your views on it. I was appreciative of the comments on there, but remained unconvinced. To me the best way of avoiding the sounds like ambiguity, as you say, is to have the ‘sounds like’ indicator at the start or end of the clue. I think I can also see how the addition of “that” adds direction to the indicator by referring back to “part of car”.
Don Manley in his crossword manual quotes 3 examples of what he calls Pun clues. Of the 3, 2 of them have the indicator in the middle. One (“Shakespeare in speech? It should be precluded” Bard/BARRED) leads to words of different lengths and so the correct answer would be evident. The other clue (“Such a range of food is said to be satisfactory” FARE/fair) to me seems to be ambiguous or have I missed something?
A further wrinkle with TYRE/TIRE, is that “tire” is also defined as “a metal hoop that binds a wheel” and an obsolete/N American spelling of “tyre”.
In the “Such a range of food is said to be satisfactory” clue, the ‘such’ serves a similar purpose to the ‘that’ missing from the TIRE clue, as it puts the ‘focus’ firmly on the range of food and marks it out as referring to the answer. If you read it as ‘A range of food such as this…’ (or say it out loud with emphasis on the ‘such’) it perhaps becomes clearer.
I am not a fan of 1:1 (single word-single word) homophones/puns, particularly if the two words are of the same length, and avoid them in my own puzzles. If solvers cannot decide between two answers to a clue, and the correct choice depends upon a semantic nicety, then regardless of whether the clue is technically unambiguous it is still a poor clue and will not be well received. The TYRE clue fails pretty much every test – words same length, one letter difference, key letter unchecked, ambiguous phrasing – and should have been picked up by the editor.
Much more approachable than usual, though I struggled to realise that ‘Northern’ in a DOWN Clue entails a reversal!
The definition at 23D is a bit loose, and I still don’t understand the “Maybe down to wear” at 29D – any suggestions please?
29D turns out to be a DD. I was rather doubtful about down’s being involved in such things, though I know only what I’ve seen in a few pictures, and I suppose even a cruciverbalist is allowed to be speculative. The Wikipedia article on the stuff does mention particular examples of its being used in some ceremonial contexts.
Hi MP. As Iain says, it’s a DD and you’ve probably got it by now. If not, Ch gives the three classes of items that can be used to construct the ‘other’ def. Look at the third class, and spare a thought for the poor little chicken.
I agree with you re ‘Northern’. I’d have preferred another direction that is appropriate for the clue.
I think the ‘Northern’ clue is one of those where cryptic accuracy has been sacrificed on the altar of a good surface reading. While Chambers gives ‘northern’ as ‘towards the north’, I don’t believe this would ever be used to describe something moving or pointing in a northerly direction, and the OED supports that view; when it carries a suggestion of a direction of movement, that would be in a southerly direction, ie from the north. Something like ‘northbound’ would have been fine.
I’m not uncomfortable with ‘being number one lover’ as the def in 33d, which seems a reasonable, if oblique, way of indicating a tricky word. I think that the Chambers definition of the ‘down to wear’ at 29d – ‘a garland or wreath, esp of flowers, shells or feathers’ – makes Gemelo’s definition fair enough when the ‘maybe’ is taken into account.
Thanks to all for clarifying the DD @ 29D – I didn’t know that such a garland could consist of feathers, as my old Chambers (grrr…) just mentions it as being Hawaiian – so I assumed flowers.
I suggest that 16d’s “Northern part of” means more or less just that. The four words following it make a single 15-letter string in which the part is to be found. Let’s first rotate the string a quarter clockwise, to make it vertical as required, and scan down from the top — and we see nothing that makes any sense. What to do? There is only one way in which it can be transformed further while retaining its identity and verticality, and that’s by reversing it, which we can do with a half rotation. We then scan it again from the top, and lo: within it there’s a word which clearly matches the definition and length specified in the remaining part of the clue. We have solved it. There are three unused letters at the top of the string, and four at the lower end. So it’s marginally at the northern end of the string. More in the northern part than the southern, so let’s call it that.
I don’t know how I missed that 😮
My first awareness of the poison came courtesy of Alan Sherman inflicting it on Leonard Skinner in his song “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh” back in the early sixties.
I’m not sure I ever knew what that word in the song was!
Although a real PE teacher of the same name was the main inspiration behind the band name Lynyrd Skynyrd, it has been suggested by at least one original band member that it was also a nod to the Leonard Skinner in the song.