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

I've got all but two of the theme clues, can't explain two of them, never heard of one of them.

> I've got all but two of the theme clues, can't explain two of them, never heard of one of them

Xenia???

i liked this:

V Leading vocalist with a poor single (8)

have about 15 answers, have filled in exactly 1.

Yeah we got almost all of them before putting any in, but it came together fairly quickly after that. Forgot about xenia, is probably like the G, not famous but the only thing the setter could fit in the grid by that point. The F is the more well known one that I'd never heard of.

are all the theme answers from the '80s? i haven't had a chance to really properly pore over it but I expected a few more to leap out at me...

I actually looked up Xenia and dismissed it on the grounds of being too obscure even for cryptic crosswords, haha

They're mostly eighties but not all.

is F a fictional [theme] from a film? i don't understand the porridge bit.

i liked B, bit of dickens in there...

This has been quite enjoyable - have about three-quarters done, about ready to start fitting them in to see if that helps reveal the rest. E (non-theme) seems a bit cruel for the time of year

xp F is irl afaict, I think I figured out the porridge part with a bit of googling but not 100% sure

they do that thing that I hate tho (and complain about every bank holiday) of unnecessarily throwing in definitions to the "undefined" thematic clues, which makes a mockery of the whole conceit 😡

It's the setter showing off innit, doubly insufferably in the case of 'savoyard castle'. What was the porridge then, I couldn't get that even with googling.

the w clue annoyed me so much too

re porridge, I'm not confident - the explanation I landed on doesn't really explain the king part, for one - but I'll go into it more in a day or so when ppl are ready for spoilers

i had one too many for F. n is a proper [theme] n + 1 is a fictional [theme]

I'm intrigued! I had an irl one that didn't fit any part of the clue and an irl one that kinda maybe sorta in parts

spoiler: this is wrong - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052809/

disappointed i didn't get the king part (have googled and it makes sense). but there's a bit of overlap with the rest of the clue so it didn't really matter (but it did).

thoroughly disliked this crossword, both extremely difficult and unsatisfying. the quarter of it i've managed to do, anyway. i think i'm actually getting progressively worse at cryptics though, and my patience for reference points only pensioners understand has worn thin

the second V is maybe the worst cryptic crossword clue i've ever seen. both Ws are annoying for separate reasons. have no idea how to parse the first I. if what I have for the first T is correct it's a term that literally only exists on the internet in relation to this crossword. 90% of the theme answers are shit.

also i have literally no ideas on how to get the second F, none at all

Oh yeah I never returned to that - looking now I haven't got the second V or either T, and my reasoning for F is shaky as F

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.