Notes for Gemelo 35

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 35 ‘Bonus Shares’

This puzzle is available at https://content-api.slowdownwiseup.co.uk/api/mobile/v1/puzzle-data/75daa67a-c6ec-4356-bc5f-99ab59de5e7a/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. Last week’s plain puzzle scored an average rating of 3.0, roughly half a point up on its immediate predecessor; that seemed to me a very good assessment of its difficulty.

I feel confident that regular correspondent RJHe, having expressed a degree of disappointment that last week’s puzzle was not a ‘special’, will have enjoyed this one. I’m not sure that the names which Gemelo comes up with for his novelties are the snappiest, but the concept here is simple – the clues for pairs of entries (in either order) are run together, with a word on the boundary between them being shared. This made for an entertaining challenge, and I will be interested to see how you rate it difficulty-wise. Following the notes on a few clues I have included a checklist of the shared words and order in which the answers are produced. When solving the puzzle, it’s fair to assume that most of the clues will have a definition at either end and that few, if any, will have both definitions in the middle spanning the join. The two words revealed by the initial letters of the shared words should send you straight to the Big Red Book in one of its forms.

Incidentally, I don’t think I was aware that Gemelo had been an actuary. I had quite a few actuaries for colleagues some years ago in a financial services business, and apart from their client work they were also responsible for the actuarial processes surrounding the company’s own pension scheme; around revaluation time, I always felt that they looked at the staff in a slightly different way from usual, rather as an undertaker might seem to be taking a particular (and perhaps slightly  unwelcome) intertest in one’s height and girth.

Setters’ Corner: This week’s point of interest concerns the clue for 8/21d, specifically the use of ‘irritated’ for ATE. I must confess that I had never seen a problem with ‘irritated’ or ‘worried’ for ATE until I had a clue containing the latter rejected by an editor. His point was that the ‘worry’ sense of ‘eat’ when applied to the past was only valid in the past continuous – so, as well as “I wonder what’s eating him” (in the present), we could say “I thought something was eating her” (in the past), but “I wonder what ate her” has a very different meaning, such that any worry would have been distinctly transient. After the usual brief bout of righteous indignation (“How dare anyone challenge one of my clues?”), I understood what he was saying, and I couldn’t disagree. So ‘worried’ for ATE has been deleted from my mental list of valid synonyms.

Across

12/32 Masses ejected rams, reversing uncovered van of conservationists following recurrent sheep infection (5/5)
A reversal of a four letter word for ‘rams’ in the ovine sense is followed by the word ‘van’ missing its outer letters (‘uncovered’); a two-letter abbreviation for Europe’s largest conservation charity (‘conservationists’) follows a reversal (‘recurrent’) of a three-letter word for a viral infection of sheep also known as ‘scabby mouth’ (yeuch!)

15/26a Female reveller rejected European, old woman leading pained cry for accord (6/6)
A four-letter native of a particular Northern European country is reversed (‘rejected’) after the two-letter term applied colloquially to a middle-aged or elderly woman, or to ‘the old woman’ herself;  a four-letter word answering to ‘leading’ is followed by a two-letter exclamation often indicated in cryptics by ‘that hurts’.

18/23a Tongue scrape saving American seed, initially not appearing wise to (4/4, 2 words)
A five-letter word meaning ‘to scrape’ or rub out is missing (‘saving’) the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘American’; a five-letter US word for an edible pine seed (complete with tilde on its middle letter) is deprived of its first letter (‘initially not appearing’), the answer being (2,2).

19/20a Colder, damper male engaged in sport, with current breaking salt water of Paris – I’ll move gate down under (8)
A two-letter word for a male contained by (‘engaged in’) the two-letter abbreviation for the 15-man rugby code precedes the usual symbol representing electric current contained by (‘breaking’) a three-letter French (‘of Paris’) word for a [large body of] salt water; the letters of PARIS ILL are rearranged (‘move’).

Down

1/9d Russian heir sadly reaches wits’ end in discomfort, ousting leader after Macedonia weighed up tyrant (12/12)
An anagram (‘sadly’) of REACHES WITS and the last letter of (‘end in’) ‘discomfort’ produces one of eight alternative spellings offered by Chambers; an eight-letter word for ‘discomfort’ or (more often) extreme suffering, without its first letter (‘ousting leader’), follows a reversal (‘up’) of the IVR code for Macedonia and a three-letter word meaning ‘weighed’, as in “The burden of responsibility weighed uncomfortably on his shoulders”.

2/24d Composition from native national, extremely expert about Chinese Twist? (6/6)
A three-letter word for a native (such as could be ‘of the soil’) combines with the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘National’ in multi-letter acronyms and the first and last letters of ‘expert’ (‘extremely’, which I’m starting to feel Gemelo keeps including just to wind me up!); a three-letter word for an expert is reversed (‘about’) ahead of a word for a member of the native Chinese people, ‘Twist?’ being a literary definition by example.

3/17d Mixed up, lie cod and fish south, and drive naked to north stars (8/8)
An anagram (‘mixed’) of UP LIE COD; the words ‘fish’, ‘south’  and ‘drive’ without their outer letters (‘naked’) are reversed (‘to north’).

7/25d Ed’s gloomy, likewise grievous, when switching base to take up defensive position, perhaps one nearly new (5/5, 2 words)
A Spenserian word for ‘grievous’ (‘likewise grievous’ ie “Ed’s grievous”) has the single letter symbol for the base of natural logarithms replaced by (‘switching to’) the single-letter abbreviation of the Latin word for ‘take’, used on medical prescriptions; the five-letter word for something exemplified by ‘one’ (or any other Arabic numeral between 0 and 9) lacking its last letter (‘nearly’) precedes the usual abbreviation for ‘new’, the answer being (3,2).

(definitions are underlined)

Shared letters:

33a precedes 10a, the shared word being ‘Oscar’; 12/32 – van; 13/31 – European; 14/28 – round; 15/26 – leading; 23/18 – American; 19/20 – Paris.

9d precedes 1d, the shared word being ‘discomfort’; 24/2 – expert; 3/17 – fish; 27/4 – inmate; 30/5 – nerve; 6/22 – inclined; 7/25 – take; 8/21 irritated; 29/11 – obscure; 14/16 – nuclear.