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

ok I started fearlessly filling in answers and now I'm coming along pretty well, but yeah wtf at that second T I'd be interested to know if anyone has ever seen or heard that used

*first, rather

A box containing tar, carried by shepherds for anointing sores on sheep.

took some tracking down, have never come across this word in the wild as far as i remember

https://www.wordnik.com/words/tar-box

sources and a 19th century usage linked here

Yes but it doesn't mean 'shepherd', unless it's through even more obscure and unsourced synecdoche.

90% of the theme answers are shit

Is this a musical judgement?

The Cs annoyed me w/their references to sportsmen of decades ago

(admittedly the 80s = my era of pretending to be interested in sport for playground conversation, so I got that one, but still, 50 year old cricket references, grr)

I've got all but two clues now, I think I ultimately agree with lex but there is something very satisfying about fucking storming through it once you start chucking answers into the grid. Some horrible clues here tho yeah

a lot of what you'd loosely term general knowledge in this lot, which is a foul imo

and altho i've grown up taking it for granted i pretty much agree with lex and spacecadet, the cricket stuff is actively exclusionary in 2016

oh fuck that shit for sure, although I can imagine people saying the same thing about the "expressions I know cause I've heard granny say them" eg "never-never" as a synonym no one uses anymore for a term no one uses anymore, but I quite like them (and it's not like the centenarian retired civil servants who set these are capable of speaking any other language)

it's where the fresh blood comes in on from that puzzles me

I liked this puzzle, and I think some of the shoe-horned clues are inevitable when setting an A-Z jigsaw

that is fair enough I SUPPOSE but they should still be executed for putting definitions in the undefined clues

oh yes hanging's too good for them!

can someone explain "four pennies" to me now? My best guess is that "4p porridge" was a meme a few years ago due to Anne Jenkin

king = george rex = GR
porridge = OATS

GROAT - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groat_(coin)

(also, a tanner = 6p in old money)

morelike GROAN

(I forgot "could provide" as a reverse-clue thingy)

got the tanner thing obv, even tho unlike the setter I live in the time when George is not the King

oh yeah it is def v satisfying filling them all into the grid, working out which ones can go in first, etc, and I felt vaguely triumphant when I half-cheated/half-guessed some of the last few and suddenly worked out how the apparently inscrutable clue fitted together - yes, that is the usual joy of crosswords, but there were some particularly inscrutably surfaced clues here, for better or for worse

also either I was lucky or the grid was quite kindly and cleverly put together, in that I started filling in when I had maybe only half the answers worked out and tentatively filled in several spots which might also have fitted not-yet-solved ones and yet I didn't have to backtrack at all, so that was nice

but still, 3 clue types which are not my favourites: cricket + lots of wacky reverse clues (no real reason why I don't like these except that I'm bad at spotting them) + "undefined" clues which sort of are defined and you lose track of which words are clue and which are spurious definition and which are both or neither

one I've just remembered not liking/not getting: the unthemed U, a double def where the answer doesn't fit the 1st half of the clue grammatically, and the second half doesn't seem great either

maybe I am just a parts of speech pedant and/or reading it wrong

That was one I got pretty quickly but went "nah it can't be that surely" then saw that it had to be when I was jigsawing

"expressions I know cause I've heard granny say them" eg "never-never" as a synonym no one uses anymore for a term no one uses anymore

how did this one even work?

the 50-year-old idioms/synonyms and cultural references only pensioners would get bug me more, and there are so many of them. feels like the actual current world of slang and linguistic evolution is completely untapped and i'm actually wondering, like NV, whether anyone involved has any idea of how to keep this going as an art form?

also, a lot of the time when an answer is outside your frame of reference it's still satisfying to see how it works and learn something new - enigmatist crosswords are always good for this - but this was both difficult and unsatisfying. seeing how the 4p porridge thing and never-never work are just like, oh, i don't give a shit about these.

Perhaps this one is a bit more to people's taste: https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/prize/27082 Saturday's prize, which has a good thematic element but is very tough IMO.

found the HP abbreviation more problematic than never-never tbh, although the latter is indeed more a thing my granny might have said (or more likely some 70s/80s sitcom) rather than something I'd say

I might just be ignorant and/or brought up terribly middle class tho seeing as a quick google for "hire purchase" includes "(HP)" in most of the first several results

I've def seen HP used (maybe in GCSE history tho tbf, that's genuinely where I first encountered the phrase hire-purchased)

xp I started that one, it is indeed fiendish - might be out of practice tho as I hadn't done any in ages until I saw this thread bumped

HP and "never-never" are within my actual memory but I'm provincial working class oldster which explains a lot

oh also I've been doing it on the app & didn't see there are special instructions ffs xp

also 20-odd years ago I did debt chasing for the Inland Revenue and hire purchase was a thing we needed to know about on vehicles and factory plant etc

xp yeah that would certainly make it more difficult! I failed to understand the instructions properly to begin with until the other half managed to set me straight, after which we made some progress...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08h7trr

(whoops, was expecting facebook-style embed to happen)

The Riddle of the Sphinx
Inside No. 9, Series 3

Nina thinks Professor Squires has all the answers when actually, neither has a clue what the future holds. With deadly intent, they commence a battle of wits to solve the puzzle and reveal the guardian of their fate.

in other news, finished my first Everyman in about 6 months the other day, No 3670.

nearly fell off my chair when I saw the 50 Cent reference in the Sphinx crossword

quiet round here lately! My very own hand-crafted clue:

Substitute for one getting married results in a busy area? (8, 4)

Rats I meant this one (not a clue)

Wound, sounds like rapt attention (4)

gaze? as in graze rhymes with it

Nope!

*shrugs*

I'm busy but can someone do something with Isambard/Islamabad, thx

Hmm I'm either too clever or wrong and I know which one it usually is

Answer is coil

answer to my clue above is "standing room"

Ha

idg the coil one at all, all I got is that wound = coiled

Wrapped at tension but I mean idk

"not further defined" is bad enough, "a letter must be added" twists the knife. bullshit, not fun.

Hah I've printed it off & will have a crack maybe Boxing Day but my initial reaction to these is always jfc

I've started it, it's not so bad. As ever the special instructions are confusingly worded so they sound more complicated than they are - basically each set contains two complete clues, definition and all, and you have to add a letter to one of the solutions to form a new word. Does that make sense?

what's this about now?

saturday's guardian holiday crossword.

it's not on the site because it has two grids. i can post it if you're interested.

is this it? https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/2017/dec/24/jumbo-everyman-christmas-crossword

no. two identical 15x15 grids with special instructions