Yahoo News Crossword roundup: a stable genius, or a git?
The news in clues
There’s topical and there’s expeditious. The publication date for Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury was brought forward after cease-and-desist letters from its snowflake subject; at the same time, Knut was compiling an Independent puzzle that incorporated the book’s content as well as Trump’s reaction to it. So it is that the first two across entries read ...
1ac Bannon denying the First Lady is ‘clever, steadfast’ (6)
[ first name of Bannon without (‘denying’) Biblical first woman (‘the First Lady’) + synonym for ‘clever’ ]
[ STEVE - EVE + ABLE ]
[ ST + ABLE ]
4ac Unusually sanguine; not an extraordinary intellect (6)
[ anagram (‘unusually’) of SANGUINE without (‘not’) AN (‘an’) ]
[ GENIUSAN - AN ]
... STABLE GENIUS – and the rest of the puzzle is equally worthy of your time. Here’s a charming tweet from Knut’s colleague Eccles:
Knut does it again with a great topical puzzle. Some going to produce this so quickly. https://t.co/EvAXCOkelY
— EcclesCrosswords (@EcclesCrossword) January 15, 2018
I’d like to create a Twitter list of setters and solvers, from the big guns such as @crypticpaul to ones that might otherwise get missed (such as @crudecryptics). If you know of (or possess) any accounts that discuss puzzles a decent amount of the time, please mention them below.
Latter patter
Here’s Philistine (Meet the Setter) in the Guardian:
18ac A contemptible fool swallowed shake (7)
[ A (‘A’) + term for ‘contemptible fool’ + synonym for ‘swallowed’ ]
[ A + GIT + ATE ]
Nothing to AGITATE Trump here, it’s just a striking image of a numpty with a smoothie. Actually, though, is “numpty” the same as “git”? Not quite. Git is that little bit ruder – the extent to which it’s ruder having been a topic of parliamentary debate. Here’s Labour MP Brian Sedgemore in 1984:
Last week in the House I referred from a sedentary position to the undersecretary of state for trade and industry as a supercilious git.
“From a sedentary position” is Commons code for hurling abuse, and Sedgemore (who seems to have in fact called Peter Tapsell a “snivelling little git”) goes on to bemoan the Speaker for having omitted the “git” contribution in the public record, adding ...
... but you were undone by the squealers from the Guardian who, if they are not shopping people who are leaking secrets from the Foreign Office, are shopping their most loyal readers.
When his heckle was omitted from Hansard, Sedgemore undertook some impressively diligent research, including Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, Colloquialisms and Catchphrases, Solecisms and Catachreses, Nicknames, Vulgarisms and Americanisms as Have Been Naturalised, concluding:
I think, seriously, that we should be allowed to use plain words and plain English and, in particular, cockney phrases in the House.
“Git” is indeed used by cockneys, but it was once “get”, and Scotland is also important in the shift of meaning from something you get, to a child, to an illegitimate child, to a term of abuse. Whether it is unparliamentary language is down to the Speaker of the time, but it is certainly ruder than some of the other words to which a Speaker has taken objection: coward, rat, hooligan, swine, and the subject of our next challenge. Reader, how would you clue GUTTERSNIPE?
Cluing competition
Thanks for your clues for BLIGHTY. First of all, let’s talk about Dunnart’s astonishing “x ÷ ☐ + 44”. It took me a long time to get this, even knowing the answer and with an explanation in front of me. I had presumed for a while that the “☐” indicated a missing character, like when someone messages me with a “]]>💡
