ACROSS
2 - Well, examine the butler's place (6) - {PAN}{TRY}
7 - Man has a drop of alcohol in the fizzy drink (4) - {SOD}{A}
9 - Cure the man in Alabama (4) - {HE}{AL}
10 - Wearing apparel for the dead (6,7) - BURIAL GARMENT [E]
12 - Cavity stopper (7) - SEALANT [E]
13 - Sling mud at the poet holding a press conference (7) - {A{SPERS*}E} AE Houseman is the poet
15 - The Finnic language (4) - SAMI [E]
17 - Complain to the girl about this kind of leather (5) - {G}{ROAN}
18 - He will finally dye the hair on the neck (4) - {MAN}{E}
19 - Crossed out the long-term mistake due to the result of crossbreeding (7) - MONGREL
23 - Regardless of certain onside decisions (13) - INCONSIDERATE*
27 - Party is at the yard units, overheard (4) - FETE(~feet)
28 - Princess left out the dilemma in Austen novel (4) -
29 - Charm Elizabeth roaming in the garden out at midnight (6) - {E}{NDEAR(-g)*}
DOWN
1 - Make a mess of the hairstyle in front of the beautician primarily for the French (6) - {BOB}{B}{LE}
2 - Maintaining security for a student in a long trip is demanding (10) - {PATROL{L}ING*}
3 - Leaders now observe virtual attacks on the ‘super' star (4) - {N}{O}{V}{A}
4 - So called the doctor finally for one man (4) - {R}{AN}{G}
5 - First give the man initially enough of Indian butter (4) - {G}{HE}{E}
6 - Fan of the devotee (8) - PARTISAN [DD]
8 - Wire cutters on both sides of the backyards protect the supporter climbing up (5) -{B{ARB<-}S}
11 - Side following the Lama leader (7) - {LATER}{A}{L}
13 - Not at all calm, gangster is ready to fight (7) - {AL}{ARMED}
14 - Half of them are workers who later spread the cheese (10) - {
16 - Distressed to diagnose an illness (8) - AGONISED*
20 - Boredom for example isn't a genuine reason (5) -
22 - A watery discharge (5) - RHEUM [E]
24 - Announce this kind of cut for the company (4) - CREW [DD]
25 - Portrait of one prisoner (4) - {I}{CON}
26 - Scoring advantage is a bit easy for the director general in England (4) - {E}{DG}{E}
Hi
ReplyDeleteI don’t want to sound PARTISAN, but INCONSIDERATE* MONGREL*(-t) MANNERS do not ENDEAR. I AGONISED* full of ENNUI about the SODA, EM-MEN-TALER* and GHEE in the PANTRY. AL-ARMED , I-CON, FETE (~feet), LATER-A-L , E-DG-E, G-ROAN and (-dil)EMMA were nice, but SAMI required Google-check. IMO, CREW was the best. I think RHEUM could have been better clued, with good word play on he and rum.
Was 8 d too verbose to clue B-ARB<-S and is the def Wire or wire cutter correct ?
Deepak, a delightful cross cartoon for across clue.
ReplyDeleteYou got to admit that it was a better than average offering from NJ today. Are things improving after all?
ReplyDeleteKishore,
ReplyDeleteDon't count your chickens before they are hatched!!
Kishore,
ReplyDeleteBarb cannot be wire by itself, NJ I presume is referring to the Barbs in the Barbed wire.
I wish to keep my mouth shut. Since neither Deepak nor Kishore had any comment on 27ac., may I invite them or anyone else to say aloud FETE (I am not using the accent marks as we don't put them anyway in the grid) and FEET and report back here.
ReplyDeleteThank you.
CV: If we open our mouth and pronounce it, what will happen to our FATE. Probably NJ meant it the way quite a few Indians pronounce French words like IMPASSE, FACADE, SAUTE etc. The correct pronunciation gets us only raised eyebrows at an imagined FAUX PAS. A haberdasher (I was away yesterday, so I mixing both days' clues) in Bangalore going by the name of KHANATE is invariably pronounced as KHANATAY by most people as in SAVATE, whereas it rhymes with SULTANATE.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I preferred mouthshut.com since I did not want to arg on words like torque, tongue, ..
Deepak 847:
ReplyDeleteOne winter night in August,
When the larks sang in their eggs,
A barefoot boy with shoes on,
Stood kneeling on his legs.
Beautiful nonsense poem from XJ Kennedy, where every line is pure rot (well maybe, one isn't)
For the full poem POEM
Agree with CVasi about 27A. Sad that the setter continues to give solvers new reasons to eschew her puzzles.
ReplyDeleteIf you think this puzzle ain't no good, well, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Who knows how many more to come!!!
ReplyDeleteFETE and FEET are very close homophones. Oughta be excused.
Do you all agree that indian butter is ghee?
ReplyDeleteFETE and FEET are very close homophones...
ReplyDeleteFor most of us this is probably true. But in reality, Kishore summed it up in his 09.05 post.
FETE is an anagram of FEET and are poles apart as homophones.
ReplyDeleteFETE and FATE are homophones
I knows not wot to do, except recollect a Kannada-English phrase:
ReplyDeleteWhose father knot what goes ? (Yaara appana ganTu yenu hogatte ?)
Are we being FATE-elistic ?
ReplyDeleteSubbu 942: I CLARIFY that clarified butter is ghee, but Indian butter could be RAM.
ReplyDeleteBhavan and Deepak, I checked a couple of online dictionaries. Seems like the word has variable pronunciations.
ReplyDeleteOne even gives the British pronunciation as FEET and US pronunciation as FAYTE. I think the actual French pronunciation goes something like FET or FETAUH
Subbu, Indian butter in liquid for is Ghee. So I think it's all right.
ReplyDelete15A could also be MARI
ReplyDeleteToday's CW did make me 17A
I agree with CV on Fete being a typical NJism
VJ Ghee is a lot more than liquid butter. It is clarified. You cannot refreeze ghee to make it butter.
ReplyDeleteIndians also use butter and have separate names for it in various languages. I do not think that butter can be equated to Indian butter
Suresh is absolutely right. Since the process is irreversible, the two are separate products.
ReplyDeleteThe north Indian surname Neghi is pronounced as ney-ghee, is a rose by two other names, ney in Tamil (and Malayalam) and ghee in Hindi (and some others).
Chaarvaaka Darshan :
ReplyDeleteYaavat Jeevet, Sukham Jeevet
Rinam Kritva, Ghritam Pibet
which loosely translated means:
As long as you live, live happily
Beg, borrow or steal, but relish ghee
Hi everyone, joining the discussion late. On seeing the byline, left on work early.
ReplyDeleteKishore 10:34 on Neghi: May I cite a couple of more samples? The name Kanyakumari wherein Kanya and Kumari both mean 'virgin', and the word Mahila for 'woman' in Hindi and a few other Indian languages is made of two parts Mahi and iLa, both meaning 'Earth'.
Don't ask me why, as a rare coincidence, both the above-referred words are in dedication to the fairer gender.
CV: Wow, you put them through a software. I only put them in my mouth (only feet, not fete).
ReplyDeleteThe above comment of Kishore was on my post:
ReplyDeleteSolvers always have differences over homophone clues.
In a country like the UK where there are so many dialects even common English words are pronounced in different ways and often there are disputes over homophone clues.
It was to emphasise this point that I raised the issue.
Just now I put feet and fête through a text to speech sw and their pronunciation are distinct.
Richard: My /short summary// on this :
ReplyDelete/The reason is because// long back /some unknown person// introduced tautologies, /first innovating// /free gifts//. As an /added bonus// there was /over-exaggeration//.
This, of course, is different from parallelism, where the same thing is said twice in slightly different ways:
Deceit is their sole intention, their delight is to mislead
—Psalms 62
I think I'd have to disagree with you all on both counts (ghee as well as fete)
ReplyDeleteButter when clarified by melting, yields Ghee. This is predominantly an Indian thingy and hence calling it "Indian butter" wouldn't be wrong IMO.
Pronunciation of "fete" doesn't seem objective. It's pronounced in many different ways and "feet" happens to be one of the common pronunciations here and elsewhere. Hence I think we should accept this as valid homophone.
I remember some one here ( LNS ?) who knows Mandarin, where yi stands for one or one hundred million, depending on how you pronounce it. Can someone clarify the issue (not the butter)
ReplyDeleteA Yi zhe-zhe(s) in advance.
There's no way I am going to pronounce FETE as FEET and look like a country bumpkin, all my english speaking friends will laugh at me!
ReplyDeleteAnd what about circumlocution.
ReplyDeleteHere I am citing a sentence from Thomas Hardy in The Woodlanders (It is one of my favourites since 1960s.) Some 99 per cent of it is in my memory but for exactness I managed to find it on the Internet:
Her face, upturned from the microscope, was so sweet, sincere, and self-forgetful in its aspect that the susceptible Fitzpiers more than wished to annihilate the lineal yard which separated it from his own.
Now, what does he want to do?
Obdurately Osculate
ReplyDeleteBriefly XXX
Typing the last two letters with the wrong hand KILL
Typing in slang with one typo SMOOTH
In Hindi, the magnetic chumbak's chumban
Keeping It Short and Simple/Sweet KISS
CV sir's and Col's expert opinions on ghee awaited
ReplyDeleteIn Tamil filmi language
ReplyDeleteIch thaa, ich thaa
Cryptically:
ReplyDeletePalestinian Liberation Organisation in midst of slang defeats smooches (3-5)or(8)
CV 1236: I almost thought you said 'Ich bin ein Berliner'
ReplyDeletesubramaniam
ReplyDeleteI didn't follow the talk on Indian butter/ghee.
Since you have specifically asked me to give my opinion...
In any Indian language we have distinct terms for butter and ghee. 'Bhenney' and 'thuppa' in Kannada, for instance.
So I think they are distinct products.
Butter is 'butter' and ghee is 'clarified butter'.
After we make thuppa from bhenney we call only for thuppa, not bhenney!
I think there's a Purandara Dasa song which has a line as to which of this is in which.
Ghee may be an Indian term but by substituting 'Indian' for 'clarified' in 'clarified butter' does not seem to be a good idea to define GHEE.
Thanks CV Sir
ReplyDeleteMaybe Indian milk product would have been better butter
ReplyDeleteSome days ago after visiting DNA I made an observation that on that day and for some weeks earlier the paper was publishing the solution grid as a crossword to be solved and the solvable grid as the solved grid of prev. day. To make sure that I was not making any mistake in a senior moment I invited a friend or two here to confirm whether I was right but no-one responded.
ReplyDeleteBe that as it may, I revisited DNA crossword today.
One clue is: Short of Mercedes (4)
Now, is there a mixup of idioms here? We may say "He was short of accusing me of theft" or "The short for abbreviation is abbr."
Is "Short of Mercedes" for Merc correct?
I have seen Merc being used as short form for Mercedes.
ReplyDeleteI stay far away from Ghee & Butter is all that I can say!!!
ReplyDeleteI think it should be "....short for Mercedes."
ReplyDeleteKishore: I don't know chinese.
ReplyDeleteCV: You're probably thinking of 'bhagyadalakshmi baramma'
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete