Alan Connor finds Kermit turned into a prison simpleton in his pick of the best – and most interesting – cryptic clues
The news in clues
As the Financial Conduct Authority works its way through the banks and financial-services firms who rigged interest rates, the unstoppably topical Micawber spotted the potential for Telegraph Toughie anagram fun in the London Interbank Offered Rate ...
14d Ramp upLibor dishonestly– caughtexaggerating (10)
... and gave an appropriately muscular clue for HYPERBOLIC. Meanwhile in the Independent, our old friend the food industry was back, as Tyrus suggested ...
21d Meat producthorse? Lookinto it (6)
... that your bologna sausage, or baloney, or more specifically POLONY might be made of more than pork.
Latter patter
In the Guardian, Paul continued his apparent mission to reflect the whole of the world in crossword form, with a puzzle that featured cameos from Hardy and Henry, Porphyrion, Agrius and Tityus, the Aegean sea and ...
3d Animal and friends that are feltup, amongthosefriendly creatures? (3,7)
... the race of beings who originally sold Wilkins Coffee, THE MUPPETS. Why are THE MUPPETS so called? It seems obvious enough: they're mainly operated by hand, which makes them like glove puppets, and their arms can be manipulated by strings, which makes them a little like marionettes.
So, a classic portmanteau formation from marionette-plus-puppet? That was what Muppet god Jim Henson told people, until he said that he'd made it up (the explanation and the word):
It was really just a term we made up. For a long time I would tell people it was a combination of marionettes and puppets but, basically, it was really just a word that we coined. We have done very few things connected with marionettes.
Even if we dismiss "marionette" - a word itself derived from a word denoting an image of the Virgin Mary – it would be a stretch to accept that the similarity to "puppet" - a word originally meaning doll – is coincidence. Whatever its genesis, the "Kermit, Grover etc" sense was merely the first meaning of MUPPET. To fishermen, say, a MUPPET is a squid-shaped lure. To the inhabitants of Guy Ritchie films and their suggestible enthusiasts, it is an ineffectual or naive person, which has an affinity with MUPPET's meaning in that wellspring of vocabulary, Her Majesty's Prisons, as defined in Oxford:
Brit. Prison slang (derogatory). A prisoner with psychiatric problems; a vulnerable inmate liable to be bullied or harassed by others.
As a 1998 Independent piece on prison bullies begins, "Their favourite targets are the fraggles, the nonces and the muppets." NONCE is one of those words for which the funnest etymology – an acronym for "not on normal courtyard exercise" – is the least plausible. FRAGGLE is a surprise in this context, and has presumably faded with the show whence it comes.
Lexicographers have long recognised that they ignore jails at their peril: Noel Ersine's 1933 collection Underworld and Prison Slang includes the slippery MACKEREL, the painful sounding GILLIGAN'S HITCH and a simple-minded cousin of the MUPPET who is the subject of our next challenge. Reader, how would you clue DINGBAT?
Clueing competition
Thanks for your clues for SKIT, a word that let comedy aficionados demonstrate their chops, including yungylek's "Likeliness Kitson might screen comedy show?", jonemm's "Silly knights in tin hats, like something out of Monty Python" and MaleficOpus's justifiably long "Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, possibly the internet's keenest spoof, starts to make a comeback".
Royal portraiture was also evoked more than once: cleanly in mojoseeker's "King is in place for sketch" and less so in JollySwagman's "Sketch Swedish king having sex".
The audacity award goes to benmoreassynt2 for the variant spelling of "burlesque" in "Burlesk: it contains it", or possibly to Shashikant Sahasrabudhe's intricate surface "Turn and mwah good bye to two sons in the middle of street".
The runners-up are GeoScanner's bulgakovian "Stanislavski: theatre's hidden joke" and gleety's topical "Laddish epithet for woman not right or funny"; the winner is SwamiPete's plausible, economic "Apres-ski: time for entertainment!"
Kudos to Pete - please leave this week's entries and your pick of the broadsheet cryptics below.
Clue of the Week
It took some staring at this Times clue...
10ac It's not asurething (8,7)
... before seeing that the DEFINITEARTICLE was assuredly the item.