Notes for Gemelo 30

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 30 Plain

This puzzle is available at https://content-api.slowdownwiseup.co.uk/api/mobile/v1/puzzle-data/fe077ba5-9912-4369-94fe-08acd0cd9e76/file/puzzle.pdf.

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 (Gnarly). Note that hovering over the ‘graph’ icon will show you the full breakdown of votes for the current puzzle. Your average difficulty rating for G29 was 2.6 (43 votes), which was almost a full point down on the (tough, in my view) G28, and confirmed my view that this fine puzzle was pitched at the right level for a barred ‘plain’.

This was another excellent puzzle, with some very nice surfaces and plenty of clever misdirection; I will be interested to see how you rate it toughness-wise in comparison to G29 (2.6) and G28 (3.5). Incidentally, the subject of undesirable repetition came up in regard to last week’s Azed puzzle, where, for instance, JE and STENO were repeated, the former in wordplays and the latter in answers; the word ‘dropping’ appears, somewhat unusually, in three separate clues in today’s puzzle, but in each instance the word has a different significance as far as the cryptic reading of the clue is concerned, and hence there is no issue whatsoever.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to look at clues 33a, “Engineers welcoming – after changing bit – Avon Gorge (6)”, and 7d, “Wait outside possibly reading The Woman in White? (5)”. In the first of these,  the familiar two-letter abbreviation indicated by ‘engineers’ contains (‘welcoming’) the word AVON (from the clue) with one letter changed; in the second, a four-letter word meaning ‘wait’ (almost invariably, except in Scotland, followed by “one’s time”) contains (‘outside’) a single letter indicated by ‘possibly reading’. What these clues have in common are the sort of neat touches that help to elevate a puzzle above the mundane – the ‘changing bit’ indicates a 0 being changed to a 1, or vice versa, while the ‘possibly reading’ refers to the Three R’s, reading, writing and arithmetic (in the words of Ralph Wiggum, “Me fail English? That’s unpossible”). Do these constructions stand up to close analysis? Suffice to say that in my view neither is close to being unfair, but both add a little extra to the crossword – I feel sure that Azed would approve.

Across

1a Slate size of incorporated jam sandwiches (8)
The three-letter abbreviation for ‘incorporated’ is ‘sandwiched’ by a five-letter verb meaning ‘squeeze’ or ‘jam’. I didn’t remember (or had never encountered) the particular size of slate required here, but I was helped by knowing that ‘queens’ were big ones.  My first Latin master drummed into us that every common noun ending in ‘-as’ (eg ‘veritas’, ‘libertas’, the ‘a’ being long, as in ‘class’) was of the feminine gender, via the memorable tag line  “all -ases are feminine”, and it seems that the same can be said of nearly all Welsh slate sizes, which include ‘wide countesses’ and ‘broad ladies’.

10a Founder of US state directed towards flag (6)
The four-letter surname of a famous Quaker who founded a US province (now one of the 50 states) is followed by a two-letter word meaning ‘directed towards’. King Charles II owed the founder’s late father (Admiral William) a few quid, a debt which he discharged by transferring in 1681 a little patch of land in North America to the chap here, who at a stroke became the world’s largest private, non-royal landowner. The recipient initially wanted to call his territory ‘New Wales’, with the Latin word for ‘forests’ being a possible alternative. The king didn’t think much of ‘New Wales’, and decided on the Latin word, prefixed, in honour of the founder’s father, with the Admiral’s surname. He could not be prevailed upon to omit this prefix, much to the chagrin of the son, a modest man who reasonably enough assumed that people would think he had named his modest 45,000 or so square miles after himself.

12a Join network, needing preliminary acceptance (7)
A four-letter word for a network of the anatomical kind follows the commercial abbreviation for ‘acceptance’ (ie ‘needing preliminary acceptance’).

14a Long story short, they’re found in skeletons (4)
The long story which must be made ‘short’ by the removal of its last letter is any such tale on the lines of Homer’s epic about the siege of Troy.

28a Otter’s dropping fish; keeping cool (7)
The sort of five-letter fish which might be proverbially used to variously catch a mackerel, a herring or a whale (lordy!) contains (‘keeping’) a two-letter word for ‘cool’ in its sense of ‘fashionable’.

31a Husbands no longer extend warning about daughter (7)
A two-letter word meaning ‘extend’ (as in ‘the path extends from the gateway to the front door’) is followed by a four-letter ‘warning’ containing the usual abbreviation for ‘daughter’. The required sense of the answer is shown by Chambers as ‘archaic’, hence the ‘no longer’.

32a New means of expression, having lost first stone (6)
The usual abbreviation for ‘new’ precedes a six-letter word for a means of expression or an opening through which something such as a gas can escape, deprived of its initial letter (‘having lost first’).

34a Mock Constantine’s grass (4)
A double-definition clue, where ‘mock’ seems perhaps a little mild for the slang word meaning ‘to treat with contempt’, while ‘Constantine’ is a place rather than a person.

Down

5d Watch faceless fairy, ready to come in? (8, 2 words)
A six-letter word for a watch or watchman (as well as a period of watch duty, take your pick) without its first letter (‘faceless’) combines with a three-letter French word for a fairy to produce the (5,3) answer. ‘Ready’ in the definition has the sense of ‘ready money’.

6d Right idiots, rolling drunk (6)
The two-letter informal word meaning ‘[all] right’ and a four-letter word for the sort of idiots that a nurse used to go round schools looking for are reversed (‘rolling’).

13d Birdbrain lacking help from wings? (4)
A clever &lit, which has a seven-letter word for a person ‘lacking intelligence or sense’ losing (‘lacking’) a familiar three-letter word for ‘help’ from its outside, the result being a creature with the brain of a bird which doesn’t receive much help from its wings when it comes to getting off the ground.

15d What connects, briefly, French physicist & French novelist? (9)
Another &lit of sorts, perhaps rather less neat than 13d. The surname of the French physicist after whom the SI unit of electric current is named, missing its last letter (‘briefly’), is followed by the patronyme de plume  of the French author also known as Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil.

18d Stroke, roughly, tailless rats (8)
A five-letter word for a characteristic feature or (less commonly) a stroke is followed by a (2,2) phrase meaning ‘roughly’ or ‘approximately’, from which the last letter has been removed (‘tailless’).

19d Disciple dropping ad revenue for property owner (8, 2 words)
An eight-letter word for a disciple has the consecutive letters AD moved downwards (‘dropping’) in order to produce the (4,4) solution.

25d Screechers dropping resistance with no loud cries (5)
A (4,4) term for a particular group of screechers (perhaps ‘hooters’ would be fairer to their vocal skills) loses (‘dropping’) the usual abbreviation for ‘resistance’ and the consecutive letters NO (from the clue).

27d What might happen when sleeping with Italian, in brief (5)
A three-letter abbreviation for a phenomenon which accompanies particular phases of sleep (‘What might happen when sleeping’) and the usual abbreviation for the sort of ‘Italian’ that used to be very popular with gin combine to produce the answer. I did idly wonder how this inventive clue might be modified to indicate the plural of the solution here, but quickly thought better of it.

(definitions are underlined)