Alan Connor cannot keep stumm about his pick of the best cryptic clues
The news in clues
When the actually true Truth about Hillsborough was confirmed last year, the newspaper editor who had defamed the dead found himself considerably less employable. With the ethics of Fleet Street almost literally in the dock, there was a contemporary-yet-retro feel to a Saturday Independent clue from Tyrus as recommended by reader Gleety…
11ac PaperKelvinruined (4)
… for the answer SUNK– as in SUNK COSTS, et cetera.
Latter patter
The voice given to Jewish emigrés in Hollywood seems to have taken some Yiddish vocabulary into everyday parts of American – and thereby global – English; a stark example is the programme handed out to those watching 1927's The Jazz Singer, which explained terms seen in the intertitles such as SHIKSA.
SHIKSA itself is via Hebrew (sheqeṣ, a detested thing); many of the most strikingly Yiddish-sounding words also start with that SH, then move straight on to a T. Apart from SHTOOK, meaning trouble, I can give you no English words beginning SHT and/or SCHT that are not Yiddish, via old German forms where SCHT is a much less remarkable way of starting a sound.
A few are inevitably unused by most goyim: the hat known as a shtreimel (streimel, a stripe), the small synagogue known as a shtibl (stüberl, small room) and the similarly small Jewish towns known as shtetls (and, indeed as shtetlach and shtetlakh; stadt, town). The more familiar include keeping SCHTUM (stumm, silent – rendered SHTOOM in the OED and STUMM in the Guardian) and the word clued by Otterden ...
6d Supportsincludehospitalattention-seeking devices (7)
... SHTICKS, in a prize puzzle for which the annotated solution is now available. And then there's the splendid, near-onomatopoeic (according to personal preference) term which is the subject of our next challenge.
Apparently from stupfen (to nudge, jog), the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang gives this 1974 citation, from one D (presumably crime writer Donald) Westlake …
He'd go on home … shtup the wife … then shlep on back here.
… while the New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English goes with a different spelling, from Lenny Bruce in 1965:
It was funny, because when we first got married, I had never slept with a woman before. I had schtupped plenty of women, but I had never slept with one.
Used, it would seem, primarily by men – perhaps reflecting the "to fill someone up with food" sense noted by Ronald L Eisenberg's Dictionary of Jewish Terms – how rude is this phrase? Adrienne Gusoff in her guide Dirty Yiddish tells us that while far from polite, "it's not a word that's going to get your mouth washed out with soap".
With that in mind, reader: how would you clue SHTUP?
Clueing competition
Thanks for your clues for HUMONGOUS. Middlebro drew attention to the orthographical oddness of the word with "Is it a spelling mistake? OMG, the beginning of human common sense mixed up big-time!" while steveran conveyed a surreal-style '90s standup jumping the shark in "Massive duck no good for alternative comic".
ColonelMustard scoops the audacity award for Gus Caesar's barely acceptable cameo in "'Remember Caesar thou art mortal' – A monumental declamation!".
The runners-up are mbush's short story "Great. Messy snog, humour failure, then runs off!" and Tedgar's headline-like "Big stink over aid organisation aligning with America"; the winner is jonemm who avowedly got away with the "use an obscure toponym" gambit when "Hongu" plays so neatly with the rest of "In Hongu, sumo wrestling is massive".
Kudos to Jon – please leave this fortnight's entries and your pick of the broadsheet cryptics below.
Clue of the Fortnight
The double definition is a thing of beauty and every so often we are blessed with a triple- or even a quadruple-definition clue. But the quintuple is even more rarely seen and requires such a deft touch to pull off that all hats were raised to Arachne in last Thursday's Guardian...
24ac Blueswallowfeathersfellfrom above (4)
… who gave us five clues for DOWN in one across clue. Hip hip hip hip hip hooray!