Well, that’s what I’m going to see tomorrow, which is going to make the rest of the weekend a bit of a juggling act. The weather, after a week when every day brought warnings of thunderstorms and tornados from Metservice, and lots of sunshine (with some courteously overnight showers) from the weather itself, has put the garden into a state of riot, and we’re having to fight back the verdancy, and harvest the beans we were meant to pick at Christmas. So that’s Sunday gone.

The film is Glass Onion, a follow-up to the wonderful Knives Out (with its unexpected use of projectile vomiting as a means of delivering the solution). The new one is clearly partly a homage to The Last of Sheila, and Sondheim himself makes a cameo appearance (as does Angela Lansbury: the next film in the series may find it hard to attract cameos). So that, and the chance to do a recce of the Christmas shops, takes Saturday out of consideration, and here’s the blog on Friday as a result.

The puzzle is one produced after the passing of one of our many cats, and is called In Memoriam – II.  I suppose I shall have to dig out the first one in due course. You can, of course, get a hint from the Cats page, but where’s the fun in that? Likewise, steer away from the blog at fifteensquared until you’ve had a go.

A quick follow-up to the comment from last time: ‘blaggard’ is clearly a phonetic spelling of the word, and it’s a comment on the slovenly pronunciation that has developed of the original. There again, English really struggles with clusters of consonants. We tend to pile them up and ignore some of them (Knightsbridge has the record at six, I think). There’s a regular puzzle type that asks you to come up with common English words given only the strange concatenation of letters lurking within them. It even inspired an article by the great James Thurber (Do You Want To Make Something Out Of It? from a 1951 New Yorker), which reveals that -SGR- can build to ‘grosgrain’.

I’m currently working through the book Why is This a Question? by Paul Anthony Jones of the Haggard Hawks website, and can heartily recommend it.

As for forthcoming puzzles – no fewer than six before the next update:

Pedro with a Times Quick (28 November)

Phi’s Friday slot (2 December)

Inquisitor (3 December)

Kcit with a Telegraph Toughie (8 December)

Pedro with another Times Quick (9 December) (look for a double reference)

Phi’s Friday slot (9 December)

Things quieten after that, which will allow me to get the annual Apex puzzle out, and also to prepare the unpublished puzzle I plan for Christmas Eve.

Well, it happens to us all, doesn’t it? But I’m thinking more of how antiquity of language is indicated in dictionaries.

For a clue I was writing this week, I was looking at two potential synonyms. Chambers helpfully marked one as ‘archaic’ and the other as ‘obsolete’. Was that the same thing? Flipping through the dictionary while checking this week’s puzzle for the site I also came across ‘rare’ and ‘historical’. What do each of these terms imply?

I guess this won’t be resolvable, and it may ultimately come down to the individual lexicographers who have worked on Chambers over the years. I recall (and I’m not claiming correctly…) an entry for PARLANCE that said “obsolete except in the phrase ‘common parlance'”. So the word is uncommon, except in a phrase where it is prefaced by the word ‘common’? I imagine linguists and other academic wordsmiths find things like that uproarious after a fourth or fifth beer.

My own classification – based on what I’ve seen over the years – would be:

RARE: pretty straightforward – the word is not dead yet, but you won’t see it often. 

ARCHAIC: a word that hasn’t been used regularly for quite some time, but it hasn’t got the message yet. ‘Varlet’ feels like a good example for this category: you wouldn’t generally set about calling someone a ‘varlet’ these days, except in some form of exaggeration – but you know what is meant. There are degrees of archaism: ‘varlet’ is quite near the surface, but it may well sink and sink until it drops into the next category of

OBSOLETE: here we’re looking particularly at our friend Mr Spenser, whose coinages crop up with ‘(obsolete)’ all the time unless Chambers has actually named him as the culprit directly. Even here, most of them don’t look totally beyond interpretation, but would you really spell them that way? 

Further back and you’re in territories where Chambers ventures rarely – the earliest versions of English where any resemblance to the contemporary language appears only as glints and glimmers.

HISTORICAL: this seems to be used when a word has a specific relevance to an historical event or object. You know the sort of thing: GANDERPACK is these days used as the common name of the Greater Antilles Lesser Spotted Dogfish, but back in the eighteenth century it was the drinking-cup of Prince Oswald the Gibberer (historical).

There’s clearly a continuum for rare, through archaic, to obsolete, but calling out a word’s location thereon is tricky, and I do find the occasional word I grew up with rather insultingly being described as ‘archaic’. And it also varies from country to country – I have a desk calendar called ‘Forgotten English’ (good fun, I recommend it) which throws up some unexpected things deemed lost to the USA – ‘simper’ appeared last week. I wonder what Americans do instead.

The puzzle this week (which includes words with all four headings, I think) is an Enigmatic Variations puzzle from 2009.  As for appearances in the press, I have a Times daily puzzle next Tuesday (14 November). As of this date, that is all I know of outside the regular Friday outings in the Independent.

 
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We seem to have ended up with five Advent calendars: ink, tea, beer, toiletries and charms for a bracelet. The season appears to be becoming more interesting than its immediate successor.

But it’s a good reminder that one of the main crossword seasons is approaching. I completed the Independent crossword for Christmas week a few days ago, while the BBC Music Magazine one was sent off some time ago. I have the annual Apex puzzle to prepare, and something planned for the site over Christmas that will also take a fair bit of preparation (it’s proven too big for any other outlet). The last posting dates for Christmas are up: the last Listener entry I can expect to arrive is only a couple of weeks away (even assuming UK has operational postage services in the run-up to Christmas).

Which means things are a bit busy, as the day-to-day stuff also needs attention, so I’ll not stay long today. It’s the BBC Music Magazine that sees a new puzzle this time round.  As for puzzles before the next update: the Independent Friday appearances continue, joined by a Telegraph Toughie on November 3rd, and a Church Times puzzle on November 11th.

Some time in the 1950s (I think), The Spectator ran one of its literary competitions. Entrants had to write the opening paragraph of a novel in the style of Graham Greene – though I imagine the subject was not Greene-friendly (a crisis of faith in a Buddhist, perhaps).

Greene entered pseudonymously – and placed third.  I’ve also noted victims of impressionists such as Tommy Cooper and Groucho Marx deliver a joke along similar lines – an impersonate Cooper/Marx contest in which the man himself places third.

Style. It’s an odd thing. In these instances. it’s sort of noticing someone else wearing your clothes better than you do. But I’ve often wondered whether style is as identifiable as many claim. I don’t deliberately change my style between outlets – at least, I don’t notice if I do. There again, I have had a sequence of editors at one outlet where the interventions ranged from minimal through to exasperated major rewrites – yet this was me writing the same sort of clues as always, and them trying to ensure a consistent house style.

I’ve recently mentioned the setter Pangakupu who has started appearing in The Guardian. ‘Pangakupu’ is the Maori word for ‘crossword’ – well, technically it’s just the words for ‘puzzle’ and ‘word’ joined together, so it covers all word puzzles. There have been numerous suggestions that Pangakupu = Phi, and the most recent appearance of Pangakupu led to a comment on one solving blog that there was a lot of commonality with Phi’s style; on another blog the claim was that there was nothing in common.

Well, they can’t both be right, can they? 

So: yes, Pangakupu = Phi (if you check back, you’ll see I never actually denied the claim).  I didn’t wangle my way on to The Guardian roster to test the style issue specifically, but once there it seemed an attractive experiment.  In similar vein, Robert Simpson, the composer and BBC producer, used to run a programme called The Innocent Ear. Less familiar pieces were played with the announcement at the end, at which point there was expected to be a number of till-then-contented listeners exclaiming: “But that’s X! I don’t like X!” So herewith ends the current series of The Innocent Solver.

It does mean I can alert you to the next appearance of Pangakupu on Tuesday 18 October, with the usual Friday Independent following. The following week is somewhat more hectic, with an Enigmatic Variations from Kcit on Sunday 23rd, a Times Quick Cryptic from Pedro on Monday 24th, with the usual Friday Independent following. You might also want to guess whether the anonymous Times Jumbo on Saturday 29th is by me: I couldn’t possibly comment.

The puzzle this time round is an old Independent daily from December 2008. It’s a grid I came up with, and I use it very occasionally, as it’s an absolute beast to fill. (I was terribly pleased when one attempt ended up with two 15-letter entries both ending in an I in the south-east corner. But that’s not this one.)