Alan Connor finds trademarks becoming generic in his pick of the week's best – and most addictive – cryptic clues
The news in clues
Following Araucaria's clue which almost indicated TESCO but didn't quite, Tramp went for a double in Friday's Guardian, with the clues …
3d Labelling, at the bottom, horse for beef (5)
19ac Horse not appearing, note, injust the main course? (3-7)
… for GROAN and NON-STARTER bringing the horsemeat debacle to your shop shelves and straight to your table. Tramp explained how the former came to be at solvers' blog Fifteen Squared:
The clue for GROAN was quite serendipitous – my initial effort contained "Squealer" in the clue but the brilliant Tyrus, after test-solving the puzzle, suggested that a "squeal" is not really a "moan" and so I went back to the metaphorical drawing board. When I realised "groan" is synonymous with "beef" I saw potential for another horsemeat-scandal clue.
"Each helping each", as Sir Buckstone put it in PG Wodehouse's Summer Moonshine – and incidentally, your help is still needed in solving the Wodehouse clue "No see here, it's a sort of church with a chapter". Please pitch in!
There was another allusion to a piece of topical deceit in Thursday's Telegraph…
21d Antipathyunderpressure is something Lance Armstrong became familiar with (6)
… which wittily revealed the ODIUM in PODIUM. Just when Armstrong was recovering from the cryptic assault by Scorpion in December.
Cluing coincidence
A couple of weeks ago, I was unfamiliar with the word MORGANATIC, defined by Collins as:
of or designating a marriage between a person of high rank and a person of low rank, by which the latter is not elevated to the higher rank and any issue have no rights to the succession of the higher party's titles, property, etc
A double appearance in crosswords has lodged the adjective in my mind: Thursday's Times had …
7d Remarkablygood, aromanticsort of marriage (10)
… an upbeat surface reading for MORGANATIC, while there was a more sinister sense to...
11ac Aratcomingouton an unequal social footing (10)
… the MORGANATIC clue in Shed's prize puzzle, for which the annotated solution is now available.
Meanwhile, the setter known locally as Paul took two different approaches in two different guises to similar terms this week: as Punk in Monday's Independent, we had …
10ac Domestic choredoneat home, accessingcorner (9)
… for HOOVERING, while as Paul in Thursday's Guardian, it was a different sense …
21ac Eatmore thanyouduringdance (6,2)
of the verb for HOOVERUP. Brand names were once frowned upon in crosswords, but proprietary terms do have a habit of becoming generic.
"Granola", for example, is listed in Oxford as a "cancelled trade-mark", and the same dictionary tells us that a Manchester chemist won a 1903 High Court case, in which it was argued that "tabloid" is "not a fancy or invented word capable of registration", and therefore could not remain the property of Wellcome. "Tabloid" would of course go on to include a different meaning, taking on the associations of probity, responsibility and reasonableness that it earned through describing the newspaper industry.
Our cluing challenge this week concerns a brand name the origins of which are described in Humberto Fernandez's book Heroin: Its History, Pharmacology, and Treatment:
Heroin was introduced under its own brand name as a cough suppressant by the forty-eight-year-old German chemical-pharmaceutical company Farbenfabriken vorm. Friedrich Bayer and Company in 1898 … It was widely advertised as a general cure for common ailments of the day, and its use was unrestrained. The year following its introduction, Bayer and Company introduced a less harmful analgesic, acetylsalicylic acid, or aspirin as it is known commercially, and marketed it under the brand name Bayer Aspirin. Ironically, this new analgesic was available only by prescription when it was introduced.
Also used figuratively, and having definitively lost its leading capital A, reader: how would you clue ASPIRIN?
Cluing competition
Thanks for your clues for REBUKT. Even if you disagree with Swift about poetic licence, it's an ugly collection of letters, and I enjoyed especially the clues that signalled its unconventional spelling, such as Middlebro's "Swiftly disapprov'd, brother duke correct'd and reprimand'd", HipsterPriest's "Argue against taking vitamin and criticis'd" and especially kolf's "Swiftly bollock't – or not" and wellywearer2's terse "Bollockt?".
wellywearer2 also paid tribute to our weekly awarding of prestige in "Taking first: "Riddle-y expression betokening upbraided". Kudos to …" and steveran gave some welcome hand-holding on how to construct the past participle in "Swift condemnation means it's time for Ed to be blamed".
The runners-up are Asinjon's "Short admonished as Swift objected" and gleety's "King in defeat is put to shame"; the winner, with its allusion to the poet featured in many people's all-time favourite clue, is ixioned's "Rupert Brooke perhaps no poorer being criticised thus in verse". Kudos to ixioned – please leave this week's entries and your pick of the broadsheet cryptics below.
Clue of the week
For me, the key that unlocked the baroque, multi-themed puzzle by Araucaria on Wednesday was the favourite drink of one of the protagonists …
13d Thirsty? Swallowonedrink (3,7)
… Bond's DRYMARTINI. Cheers!