Notes for Gemelo 32

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 32

This puzzle is available at https://content-api.slowdownwiseup.co.uk/api/mobile/v1/puzzle-data/d245187e-bd90-4fb4-a969-8bf2cd7acd4d/file/puzzle.pdf.

The notes for solvers read: “The Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended. One answer is an abbreviation.“

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. It was no surprise to me that you rated the bifacial Gemelo 31 as his toughest puzzle yet, the overall rating of 4.8 deriving from 34 votes for ‘5’ and 7 votes for ‘4’; no-one assessed it as ‘3’ or below.

This week’s puzzle was a cruciverbal horse of a very different colour, and I suspect that in consequence we will see the biggest gap in difficulty ratings yet between any pair of consecutive Gemelos. It struck me as being serviceable, but distinctly lacking in inspiration (as witnessed by 25a and 35a among others). As correspondent Jim points out, the enumeration for 1d should read ’12, 2 words’.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to look at clue 31a, “Dessert eaten by visitor tonight (7)”. A very straightforward ‘hidden’ clue where the answer, an Italian frozen dessert, is contained by the words ‘visitor tonight’. Nothing to see here? Well, it might appear that any valid containment/insertion indicator could be used in such a clue, but I don’t believe this is so. In the relevant section of The Setting Room, we suggest that in ‘hidden’ clues “many Container and Contents Indicators can be used; the important thing is to select those which describe a steady state rather than a single action, so ‘held by’ is good, but ‘grabbed by’ is not. The clue “Man held by cha-cha partner (4)” works nicely for CHAP, while “Man grabbed by cha-cha partner (4)” doesn’t – for as long as the CHA-CHA PARTNER has existed, the CHAP has been (held) there.” Similarly, ‘eaten by’ indicates a single action, and therefore isn’t – strictly speaking – valid, while ‘inside’ (or, perhaps, ‘enjoyed by’) would describe a persistent state.

Across 

4a Like RIP TORN at chippie! (9)
A film buff like Gemelo would have liked the idea of the American actor (Elmore Rual) ‘Rip’ Torn deceptively straddling the definition and wordplay, but since the cryptic reading requires his first name to appear in capitals, there was little alternative but to put his surname in capitals too – whilst adding unwarranted capitals to a word is considered acceptable, deceptively removing them, eg writing ‘nice’ when you mean ‘Nice’, is not allowed). The wordplay involves an anagram (‘torn’) of AT CHIPPIE.

11a How one may stand a book about e.g. Wilde, Oscar (6)
The letter A (from the clue) and the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘book’ contain (‘about’) the ‘Wilde’ who was a pop star in the 1980s before launching a parallel career as a garden designer, in which role she was responsible (together with Richard Lucas) for the ‘Cumbrian Fellside Garden’ that won a Gold award at the 2005 Chelsea Flower Show. The whole lot is followed by the letter corresponding to ‘Oscar’ in the Police Alphabet. I’m not sure whether one can actually ‘stand ??????’, but the definition of the answer in Chambers suggests that it’s possible, so no problem there. The word itself is one of those for which a number of etymologies have been proposed, none of them convincing; the earliest example recorded by OED shows the expression as ‘in kenebowe’.

14a Antique grey amulet with either half removed (4)
An eight-letter word for ‘an African charm, amulet or spell’ has either its first or second half removed (they are the same) to produce a word shown by Chambers as ‘obsolete’, hence the ‘antique’.

15a Country club admitting Gemelo? It doesn’t fly (4)
The two-letter abbreviation for ‘European Union’ contains (‘admitting’) the two-letter pronoun used objectively by Gemelo, the result being an alternative spelling of a creature that doesn’t fly but, as Michael Parkinson found out to his cost, does bite. I think that ‘Country club’ is perhaps a slight stretch, but crosswords would be pretty dull if setters weren’t allowed a bit of licence now and then.

19a Performer returned rubbish Chaplin prop? (7)
A reversal (‘returned’) of a three-letter word for ‘rubbish’ or ‘nonsense’ and the sort of thing typically carried by Charlie Chaplin.

25a Sympathiser who might drop bread into water? (10)
The ‘bread’ that might be dropped into the water is of the pecuniary sort, and would be expected to bring good luck, at least to the next person who raised the bucket.

29a Asian coppers with mass appeal after scrapping external post (4)
An eight-letter word meaning ‘with mass appeal’ has the letters POST removed from the outside (ie ‘after scrapping external post’). The coppers are from Afghanistan.

34a Clamp that is trapping fairly soft bone (6)
There’s an Italian theme to this wordplay, where the two-letter abbreviation of the Latin phrase meaning ‘that is’ contains (‘trapping’) the two-letter abbreviation of the musical term meaning ‘moderately soft’ and the two-letter anatomical term for a bone, a word taken directly from Latin. Looking up ‘clamp’ in Chambers will confirm the accuracy of the definition.

35a Small computers other than Kindle products? (9)
A three-letter word meaning ‘other than’ is followed by a (1-5) term for the sorts of thing that might be read on a Kindle.

Down

3d Golf club faction under discussion (5)
A homophone (‘under discussion’) for a word meaning ‘a faction’ or ‘an exclusive group of people’ yields something that would have been in your bag along with your niblick and your spoon (not to mention your baffy and your bulger). I could accept ‘in discussion’ to indicate the homophone, but ‘under discussion’ is surely an example of the surface reading being improved to the fatal detriment of the cryptic interpretation.

4d In high definition this organ would be picked up (3)
When placed inside the two-letter abbreviation for ‘high definition’ the answer would produce a five-letter word meaning ‘picked up’

6d Where mausoleum is beneath brown terracotta figure (7)
The four-letter name of a place in India which is the site of a mausoleum (‘where mausoleum is’) follows (‘beneath’) a crossword regular meaning ‘brown’ . There are a great many mausoleums in the world, and therefore I would have liked to see some sort of qualification, such as ‘magnificent’, to indicate that this is not just a mausoleum, it’s the Taj Mahal.

7d Detective beginning to grill wife when husband eats from trough? (7)
A mega-charade of the two-letter abbreviation for the sort of detective exemplified by Magnum, the first letter of (‘beginning to’) ‘grill’, the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘wife’, a two-letter word meaning ‘when’, and the usual abbreviation for ‘husband’. Phew!

17d Italian football team picked up extremely famous person with no ethics (9)
The four-letter name of the Italian football team whose roll of honour is probably headed by Francesco Totti (aka ‘Er Bimbo di Oro‘) is reversed (‘picked up’) ahead of a (1-4) adjective applied to a celebrity of the most prominent kind.

27d Russian measure supplanting volt at first (4)
A five-letter Russian measure of length is deprived of (‘supplanting’) the usual abbreviation for ‘volt’. These days, ‘supplant’ invariably carries a sense of forcible replacement, but Chambers gives ‘oust’ as a synonym; the OED suggests that in reality the ‘expulsion-only’ meanings are ‘obsolete’, ‘rare’, or both.

28d Retired actor ignoring his three performers (4)
A seven-letter archaic (‘retired’) term for an actor loses (‘ignoring’) the consecutive letters HIS (from the clue).

(definitions are underlined)