The official bored-at-work cryptic crossword pass it on thread.

Oundle is a semi-famous public school

Ay = forever in Scots

cryptic crosswords giveth and taketh away. one minute you're feeling smug for having heard of lysistrata, the next it's all "i have never even HEARD OF that"

aha lysistrata, thanks

is "wick" some sort of obscure term for a thousand or something? wrt 6a

(yes i am still doing this goddamnit)

11d is one of those that makes perfect sense but i could have stared at that clue for a million years and never decoded it

Very little space for food — I thrash wildly about (5,7)

^^utterly baffled why this is what it has to be

I HAVE FINISHED IT!!!!!!!!!!!!

Congrats!

indefinite number = n
repeated = twice
1000 = k
amateur = ham

other is anagram of "i thrash" with "bread" (food) in the middle

yeah i worked out the latter one, i'd got 30a slightly wrong. good clue! as opposed to "twickenham" which is just tortuous kmt

Both of the above are well into the "would never guess from the clue, can only find words that fit the letters and justify it from there" category for me. The anagram part of the bread one was obvious from the start but with 5 unknown letters missing I didn't get it until right near the end.

it was the second to last one i got - basically got it because the ___d_h ending is so rare, it pretty much had to be a t in there, and hey presto "breadth" and oh right HAIRS.

happy enough with brier but it's ye're language i spose

congrats lex, finishing a prize araucaria is not to be sniffed at. started this morning, did not shun the help of this thread and i've got three and a half of the bastards to go.

Increased production and went in to eat. (7)

I'll give you the checked letters, and see if you're as amused by their use of 'went' as I was!

S_E_D_P

haha, but how is that one word?

like i've never even seen it hyphenated

I've never seen it as one word either, but found it actually exists. A request to increase production (usually without an increase in pay) is a....

I quit experiment after difficult chores entailing many instruments (10)

Easy answer, but why am I not getting how 'I quit' works in this?

Tral = trial (experiment) minus I.

(the letter I has quit the word trial, in case that wasn't clear)

Ah, thanks! I think I suck the worst at the ones where I have to think of a synonym and then remove a letter. My mind doesn't work that way for some reason.

today i liked

The policeman in Perpignan releasing me before the end of Absolutely Fabulous (9)

very much

Nice. I'm doing Sunday's Everyman, and the clue is: Father Christmas, very large, captured by artist in California City. (5,4)

Is very large OS for oversized and artist RA for Royal Academician? Because holy hell...

did anyone try the Xmas FT? 52 paired clues, alphabetically ordered answers with 2 of each letter, one each of the clues not fully defined with those clues having a common theme. You then have to fit in the answers jigsaw-style. Killed a lot of time over Xmas, still didn't finish it!

xp yes, Dan, that looks right.

RA is one of those ones like cricket abbreviations I've never seen in my life.

fairly common I find. they're with all the cricketers, sailors, university graduates and other f'ing ranks, poring with interest over the periodic table in that big geometrically chequered house in the setter's mind.

i do sometimes feel like applying the rules of cryptic crosswords to vaguely contemporary stuff like, idk, nicki minaj references

I don't know if this exactly follows the rules, but:

Rapper's picnic: Kim, in a jazz group, appearing. (5,5)

Coming to realize that my education is lacking in the likes of Shakespeare, Dickens etc. Do most people know that "Southey and his friends" were the Lake Poets?

Example: Sailor-neighbors of Chaucer's wife? One might consider them tubby. (4,5)

Actually my teenage son, attending a classics-based charter school, is getting more of these references than I do.

yeah I think UK cryptics assume a certain knowledge of this kind of thing.

lol the Chaucer one.

yeah a lot of crosswords assume certain kinds of erudite knowledge and "literature" wd be part of that

betraying my lack of such knowledge, but solution please!

Chaucer's wife = BATH
Sailors = SALTS

"Find in a tub" = "tubby" = "BATH SALTS"

Bath salts. The trifecta of Chaucer ref, antiquated sailor ref and groaner pun was just lol... okay... I have a lot to learn.

I needed a new screen name anyhoo.

first word is a wifely character in Chaucer, second is a slang word for sailors

whole thing is something you might add to a bath

xxp

thx, I get it! good clue!

god knows why certain things come up so much in cryptics. as soon as i see "sailor" i'm gonna think "salt", "tar", "RN"...it seems odd to have so much nauticality so commonly used

you forgot AB

esp Rufus in the Gdn on Mondays, he's notorious for his nautical refs

That recent Araucaria with the Winter's Tale theme was rather beyond me in that respect. My work newsletter does a bumper Christmas issue with a crossword every year and the latest one had a Dickens theme, which was a bit daunting at first, but thankfully it only needed a knowledge of titles, not characters or plots.

That seems a fairer way to do it to me, but then my education is also pretty lacking when it comes to these things. Not really that my school didn't do those things, just that I never found the classics we did do interesting enough to get around to the others in my spare time. I've sort of meant to catch up on the complete works of Shakespeare one day but the entire concept of the Great Victorian Novel still fills me with dread tbh

(I quite liked that Chaucer one, though the second sentence seemed unnecessary)

but the second sentence is the definition part, without that there is no def.

I think my point stands though, that several of you are getting all that without any of the cross-letters, and even if i have I have them I'm often wtf.

god knows why certain things come up so much in cryptics. as soon as i see "sailor" i'm gonna think "salt", "tar", "RN"...

i think i went about two decades without seeing "tar" used to refer to a sailor before i started doing cryptics. WHY is "RN" a sailor?

i totally want to modernise cryptic crosswords.

RN = Royal Navy

i think when you get to araucaria levels of general knowledge/reference you're within your rights to use an encyclopedia or the net, and it doesn't really "spoil" the game. the crossword as central nexus of reference hunting is kinda Finnegans Wake-y and inviting you to chase down meta-texts imo

obv a lot of these conventions date back to a time when everybody who bought a broadsheet had a grammar school education and had had the Classics rammed into them whether they liked it or not

like T.S. Eliot pretending that the plain reader shd pick up all his allusions

but the second sentence is the definition part, without that there is no def.

I suppose. To me both sentences read as equally punny definitions of the whole, and the wordplay/lateral thinking signal "?" would make a further definition unnecessary. Or am I thinking of "!"?

(Also the second sentence is only any help with the "Bath" part and not the "salts", but yes, that's beside the point.)

the second sentence clues "bath salts" as a whole, there isn't a meta-reference to them in the first sentence