When we went camping, my dad would say as we started the drive, "we're off like a turd of hurdles". Once camp was set up, he would direct us to "fart up a stire".
Been looking forward to this all morning. I have now solved my first ever crossword thanks to this channel. It was a beginner crossword, thank you for giving me the confidence to try.
UK English certainly has "detrain" meaning to get off a train, so "train" meaning the opposite makes at least some logical sense. It's also in ODE as an old verb meaning travel by train.
Simon and Mark Thank you so much for everything you do on this channel. I started watching during lockdown and have been solving variant sudokus on the discord channel since then. This year I decided to attempt to understand Cryptic crosswords. I still only try very basic and easy ones, but there has been a definite improvement through the year and these videos have contributed greatly to that. You have given me hours of frustration, but many, many more hours of fun. Best wishes to you and for the channel in 2025
here to say i love simon's tangents, especially when he sings them :) edit: only know the word 'odium' from reading brandon sanderson. the vocabulary necessary for these is astonishing.
I have only been doing cryptics for a few months and this was first time I got through a Times one without any reveals or check words. To hear it was the 3rd hardest of the year has made my 2024. Thanks for all the help this channel has provided.
Love your solves Simon! And realising even someone as expert as you can hit a bump in the road is really heartening for those of us just beginning our cryptic crossword journey. Looking forward to seeing more videos from you in 2025.
Wonderful. I've been refreshing since lunchtime. Thank you both for such a wonderful channel, and particularly for the Crossword solves, which are the juiciest morsel.
Wonderfully entertaining as well as educational. What a gifted communicator. You deserve all of your success! I got about three quarters of the clues in a couple of hours. Thanks for explaining the ones that baffled me!
Solved my first ever cryptic crossword without help! Admittedly it was the quick cryptic and it was the combined brains of myself, my wife and my dad! But if Simon found it tricky, I'll take some pride in the achievement! Relied on my dad for the boat quarters clue! Thanks Simon and Mark! Your inspiration and tutelage are much appreciated!!
Thank you as always, Simon, for posting the weekly cryptic crossword masterclass! I’m in the States where these are seen very infrequently, but I’ve been trying the Guardian’s puzzles since they’re available without a paywall. I haven’t solved one without assistance yet, but I’m understanding more each week, thanks to you and Mark!
Thanks so much as always for these videos, Simon! Because of you and Mark, I - a Canadian - regularly solve (with an error sometimes) the Times crossword! Your working through each clue and explaining what you’re thinking are super helpful for my insight into what I should be looking for in a specific clue. Absolutely love your content!
Cheers Simon. Another great solve. thank you for all the solves this year. My cryptic solving skills have gotten so much better thanks to thesevideos and your clear explanations of the clues. Looking forward to many more Friday Cryptics in 2025
Hi Simon, just a quick one - Taoiseach is more pronounced like 'Tea-shock' - think of it like a very shocking cup of tea! 😝 these vids always make my friday!
It's surprising how often an uncommon word or phrase appears in two or more crosswords at around the same time. I always wonder if it's the same setter doing different puzzles, or if it's just the frequency illusion - AKA the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
You can tell these videos are helping, Simon, because for once I was actually shouting the answer at you when you said I was probably shouting the answer at you!
Can you make a video just going over the common synonyms that you see I think it would be so good as a reference video people can go to if they’re doing a cryptic crossword??
Come for "short synonym for conservative in disgrace" at 2:50, stay for the idle musing on "pervert in Bay Area" at 13:30. These videos have me rolling, Simon. Thank you!
In 10 A, it seems to think that the term hatch references the way you shade a drawing in art class with progressively overlapping hatch marks 17A could also be understrapper
Isn't the *only* time to get on a train when it is fully stopped? I was thinking more in the athletic sense of training... unless you're into isometric exercises it is difficult to do any athletic training when fully stopped.
@@kevinmartin7760 no, the station is the stop, and that is what is full. If you arrive at the station and the platforms are full, you'd find it hard to get on the train. I wasn't sure about "stop" and "station" being synonymous, but then I remembered that the on-board announcements often say "the next station stop will be "
Spoonersims do seem hard to solve but they also seem fun to make :) Spooner's suggestion for dealing with water may not be enough to result in this? (3,5)
Two points about DOUREST: * if a clue has "extremely" followed by an adjective as the definition, it's at least "very", if not "extremely" likely that the answer ends in EST. Doubly so when you have the ending as E_T from checked letters. The S should have been put in and thought about. * if thinking about something like "public support" is leading nowhere, it's time to try a different grouping of words. Thinking of "support" alone could have pretty easily led to REST and then the realisation about what "snubbed" actually meant.
I'm sorry, I literally snorted beverage out of my nose when Simon said, 'you'll only see the more common abbreviations in the Times cryptic'. And I grew up on a hobby farm with horses, moved out to literal rodeo country where I've spent the rest of my life, and I've never heard the word pasturn before. Pretty sure we just call it a hitching post.
PASTERN as the answer was famously misdefined by Samuel Johnson in his dictionary as "the knee of a horse". It's a different part, but he was close enough for "bay area" when "bay" = a kind of horse.
@ I’m no expert on horses, but I don’t think that meaning is marked as obsolete in dictionaries. There’s a technical alternative (phalanx), but that seems like shin and tibia in human anatomy.
I did solve this puzzle without aids, but it was absolutely brutal. Fortunately, I saw tricky literals like bay area and hatch almost instantly, once I had a candidate answer from the wordplay. Otherwise, it would have taken all night - as it was, it was 62 minutes. If Simon and I were solving together, we could have whipped it off, because we each saw different answers quickly.
Training isn't common usage because it's such a commonly used word in its regular meaning. But if you had to take people off a broken down train you would be detaining them. And during a train strike you might say right I'm bussing it to work tomorrow. So training in this sense means to get on a train, which you would struggle to do at London Bridge in rush hour because it's a full stop.
Wouldn't the opposite of "detrain" be "entrain" in that case? I couldn't find in a dictionary the word "train" used with that definition, but I could find "entrain" as an antonym for "detrain"...
One thing I don't understand about these crosswords is that if you're expected to know the highfalutin and obscure terms and their synonyms, why are those words never part of the clues?
One reason is that the clues are usually intended to deceive you by suggesting something that doesn't help. That's very difficult to do with words that you don't understand.
It's a slightly annoying trait of Simon:s not to read far enough into dictionary entries. I couldn't help thinking of Dr Johnson, who when asked by a woman why in his dictionary he had defined pastern as 'the knee of a horse' (it's actually just above the hoof) replied "Ignorance, madam - sheer ignorance'.
Funnily enough, I got 4-down almost immediately because I’d clued that word almost the exact same way in one of my puzzles: “Spooner’s bird could have a job on the side (9)”. If only the rest of the puzzle were that simple… haha
I was just thinking of putting fo'c'sle into a puzzle just because of how silly a word it is, guess I'd better wait a while for it to drop out of everyone's memory first.
Incidentally, it's usually spelled with two apostrophes even though it's an abbreviation of "forecastle" and so by all rights should be spelled fo'c's'le.
As a Scot, I often have difficulty with alleged homophones that sound, to a non-English person, not even remotely alike. However, to suggest that loch and lock are homophones is just ridiculous. I've never understood why people who can quite easily say Johann Sebastian Bach cannot get their tongues around "loch". Very enjoyable puzzle otherwise.
Homophones often frustrate me, because I find them to be very accent dependent. That said, this is probably the first time I've had an issue with one of these videos. As a Scot, I take issue with you claiming lock and loch sound exactly the same :P
It's pretty much time-honoured to gripe about homophone accuracy haha. I always find myself scrunching my face and nitpicking 😅 Edit: what's the difference in sounds of loch and lock?
I read FULL STOP as "Period/where one might find" as in, I would find a FULL STOP at the end of a sentence. And 'sentence' as in prison term, so it may be difficult to find training at the end of a prison sentence. Question marks always indicate something peculiar. Probably my explanation.
I suspect, like all regulars of the masterclass, that we are becoming aware that Simon delivers the same explanation/ methodology each time. As the vast majority are seasoned watchers, there is really no need to say that m can be the abbreviation for male and certainly there is no need to open the dictionary. Newcomers to cryptics wishing to learn would not pick the Friday Times as their start point, but might appreciate a slower explained go at the Quick Cryptic instead.
I can't talk for everyone, but I'm a newcomer and I appreciate the full explanation on the crossword and then watching Simon race to finish the quick one.
@@CrackingTheCryptic There is always someone losing their gruntle. I think most of us are perfectly happy for you to continue with these Friday sessions.
My late father’s favourite insult was “Dr Spooner would describe him as a Shining Wit”
When we went camping, my dad would say as we started the drive, "we're off like a turd of hurdles". Once camp was set up, he would direct us to "fart up a stire".
Been looking forward to this all morning. I have now solved my first ever crossword thanks to this channel. It was a beginner crossword, thank you for giving me the confidence to try.
Great work 🎉
Nice one!
It is a brilliant feeling. Congratulations.
Well done: it won't be your last! 😺
The correct way to look at full stop is to think of a train station crowded with people. Train as a verb is given in dictionaries as a US usage.
UK English certainly has "detrain" meaning to get off a train, so "train" meaning the opposite makes at least some logical sense. It's also in ODE as an old verb meaning travel by train.
Simon didn’t notice the presence of QUICK CRYPTIC inside the Quick Cryptic! I thought that was a delightfully clever touch
Simon and Mark
Thank you so much for everything you do on this channel. I started watching during lockdown and have been solving variant sudokus on the discord channel since then. This year I decided to attempt to understand Cryptic crosswords. I still only try very basic and easy ones, but there has been a definite improvement through the year and these videos have contributed greatly to that. You have given me hours of frustration, but many, many more hours of fun. Best wishes to you and for the channel in 2025
here to say i love simon's tangents, especially when he sings them :)
edit: only know the word 'odium' from reading brandon sanderson. the vocabulary necessary for these is astonishing.
I have only been doing cryptics for a few months and this was first time I got through a Times one without any reveals or check words. To hear it was the 3rd hardest of the year has made my 2024. Thanks for all the help this channel has provided.
Love your solves Simon! And realising even someone as expert as you can hit a bump in the road is really heartening for those of us just beginning our cryptic crossword journey. Looking forward to seeing more videos from you in 2025.
Wonderful. I've been refreshing since lunchtime. Thank you both for such a wonderful channel, and particularly for the Crossword solves, which are the juiciest morsel.
Wonderfully entertaining as well as educational. What a gifted communicator. You deserve all of your success! I got about three quarters of the clues in a couple of hours. Thanks for explaining the ones that baffled me!
I have taken to cryptic crosswords specifically due to these videos and have begun sharing them with my son who’s almost 10. Great stuff.
Solved my first ever cryptic crossword without help! Admittedly it was the quick cryptic and it was the combined brains of myself, my wife and my dad! But if Simon found it tricky, I'll take some pride in the achievement!
Relied on my dad for the boat quarters clue!
Thanks Simon and Mark! Your inspiration and tutelage are much appreciated!!
Thank you to you and Mark for the many hours fun, entertaining and educational content this year. All the best for 2025!
This video notification is the only reason I know it's Friday today
Thank you as always, Simon, for posting the weekly cryptic crossword masterclass! I’m in the States where these are seen very infrequently, but I’ve been trying the Guardian’s puzzles since they’re available without a paywall. I haven’t solved one without assistance yet, but I’m understanding more each week, thanks to you and Mark!
As always, lovely way to spend an hour. Certainly 'never been lonely this christmas' for Simon.
10:33 well that’s a new series for us. Simon’s cover poses.
Thanks so much as always for these videos, Simon! Because of you and Mark, I - a Canadian - regularly solve (with an error sometimes) the Times crossword! Your working through each clue and explaining what you’re thinking are super helpful for my insight into what I should be looking for in a specific clue. Absolutely love your content!
Yes, Simon, I will in fact believe how many times you've modelled 😂
I always love watching the difficult ones ❤
Very good learning for us, Simon. Pl keep going.
Thank you Simon!
Cheers Simon. Another great solve. thank you for all the solves this year. My cryptic solving skills have gotten so much better thanks to thesevideos and your clear explanations of the clues. Looking forward to many more Friday Cryptics in 2025
Thank you Simon for another very entertaining solve!
What a great puzzle and what an entertaining solve!
Great work Simon! Really enjoyed your videos this year and you have got me well into the crossword bug.
Hi Simon, just a quick one - Taoiseach is more pronounced like 'Tea-shock' - think of it like a very shocking cup of tea! 😝 these vids always make my friday!
although you did a lot better than most British folk I know!!
Loved the Cuick Qryptic ❤
Can confirm 8 down has been used before. I have been doing some of the Times Jumbo Crosswords with my mother over Christmas and it appeared there.
It's surprising how often an uncommon word or phrase appears in two or more crosswords at around the same time. I always wonder if it's the same setter doing different puzzles, or if it's just the frequency illusion - AKA the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
Glad to see one clue was as clear as Mud (1970s Glam rock band).
That's neat, that's neat, that's neat, that's neat.
so good to see that even you can struggle at times!
last masterclass of 2024. So looking forward to all these in 2025!
"Is that Mud?" That's right, that's right, that's right, that's right...
You can tell these videos are helping, Simon, because for once I was actually shouting the answer at you when you said I was probably shouting the answer at you!
Can you make a video just going over the common synonyms that you see I think it would be so good as a reference video people can go to if they’re doing a cryptic crossword??
Approach = Avenue
Exposed = venu
It was a great video
Very much wanted to put in 'underwriter' for 17A but not enough letters.
Come for "short synonym for conservative in disgrace" at 2:50, stay for the idle musing on "pervert in Bay Area" at 13:30. These videos have me rolling, Simon. Thank you!
In 10 A, it seems to think that the term hatch references the way you shade a drawing in art class with progressively overlapping hatch marks
17A could also be understrapper
One might find “training” (as in “getting on a train”) difficult at a full (train) stop.
Isn't the *only* time to get on a train when it is fully stopped?
I was thinking more in the athletic sense of training... unless you're into isometric exercises it is difficult to do any athletic training when fully stopped.
@@kevinmartin7760 no, the station is the stop, and that is what is full. If you arrive at the station and the platforms are full, you'd find it hard to get on the train.
I wasn't sure about "stop" and "station" being synonymous, but then I remembered that the on-board announcements often say "the next station stop will be "
@@kevinmartin7760 A "full stop" in the sense of a crowded station - lots of people wanting to get on.
Spoonersims do seem hard to solve but they also seem fun to make :)
Spooner's suggestion for dealing with water may not be enough to result in this? (3,5)
Was joking with a friend coming up Spoonerisms, he started to Spoonerise "A bit of shopping" but had to quickly stop himself
Two points about DOUREST:
* if a clue has "extremely" followed by an adjective as the definition, it's at least "very", if not "extremely" likely that the answer ends in EST. Doubly so when you have the ending as E_T from checked letters. The S should have been put in and thought about.
* if thinking about something like "public support" is leading nowhere, it's time to try a different grouping of words. Thinking of "support" alone could have pretty easily led to REST and then the realisation about what "snubbed" actually meant.
I might've favored "most stubborn" over "extremely stubborn" because "extremely" doesn't inherently suggest superlative degree
I'm sorry, I literally snorted beverage out of my nose when Simon said, 'you'll only see the more common abbreviations in the Times cryptic'.
And I grew up on a hobby farm with horses, moved out to literal rodeo country where I've spent the rest of my life, and I've never heard the word pasturn before. Pretty sure we just call it a hitching post.
PASTERN as the answer was famously misdefined by Samuel Johnson in his dictionary as "the knee of a horse". It's a different part, but he was close enough for "bay area" when "bay" = a kind of horse.
I was also confused until I read the second, obsolete def. which is part of a horse's foot, so literally an area of a horse (bay).
@ I’m no expert on horses, but I don’t think that meaning is marked as obsolete in dictionaries. There’s a technical alternative (phalanx), but that seems like shin and tibia in human anatomy.
In Simon's edition of Chambers it was marked "(obs)", unless that was for the first definition of horse rope
I did solve this puzzle without aids, but it was absolutely brutal. Fortunately, I saw tricky literals like bay area and hatch almost instantly, once I had a candidate answer from the wordplay. Otherwise, it would have taken all night - as it was, it was 62 minutes. If Simon and I were solving together, we could have whipped it off, because we each saw different answers quickly.
Training isn't common usage because it's such a commonly used word in its regular meaning. But if you had to take people off a broken down train you would be detaining them. And during a train strike you might say right I'm bussing it to work tomorrow. So training in this sense means to get on a train, which you would struggle to do at London Bridge in rush hour because it's a full stop.
Detraining. Bloody autocorrect is worse than Alexa.
Wouldn't the opposite of "detrain" be "entrain" in that case? I couldn't find in a dictionary the word "train" used with that definition, but I could find "entrain" as an antonym for "detrain"...
Cross hatching is when you shade in a pencil drawing.
One thing I don't understand about these crosswords is that if you're expected to know the highfalutin and obscure terms and their synonyms, why are those words never part of the clues?
You're not.
One reason is that the clues are usually intended to deceive you by suggesting something that doesn't help. That's very difficult to do with words that you don't understand.
"Lock" and "loch" only sound the same if you say "loch" incorrectly 😉
Love the solve, as usual, though!
Simon didn't read far enough into the definition of pastern, which also means a part of the horse itself, which is how "Bay Area" is the definition.
It's a slightly annoying trait of Simon:s not to read far enough into dictionary entries. I couldn't help thinking of Dr Johnson, who when asked by a woman why in his dictionary he had defined pastern as 'the knee of a horse' (it's actually just above the hoof) replied "Ignorance, madam - sheer ignorance'.
Some folks will never lose a toes and then again some folks'll...
Funnily enough, I got 4-down almost immediately because I’d clued that word almost the exact same way in one of my puzzles: “Spooner’s bird could have a job on the side (9)”. If only the rest of the puzzle were that simple… haha
I was just thinking of putting fo'c'sle into a puzzle just because of how silly a word it is, guess I'd better wait a while for it to drop out of everyone's memory first.
Incidentally, it's usually spelled with two apostrophes even though it's an abbreviation of "forecastle" and so by all rights should be spelled fo'c's'le.
That was brilliant any mistakes put down to Christmas brain, I feel like mine has given up the ghost
Many thanks for all the videos, and have a Happy New Year!
...but i cannot accept that "loch" and "lock" "sound exactly the same"!
As a Scot, I often have difficulty with alleged homophones that sound, to a non-English person, not even remotely alike. However, to suggest that loch and lock are homophones is just ridiculous. I've never understood why people who can quite easily say Johann Sebastian Bach cannot get their tongues around "loch".
Very enjoyable puzzle otherwise.
in 28 across Support = rest
Homophones often frustrate me, because I find them to be very accent dependent. That said, this is probably the first time I've had an issue with one of these videos. As a Scot, I take issue with you claiming lock and loch sound exactly the same :P
It's pretty much time-honoured to gripe about homophone accuracy haha. I always find myself scrunching my face and nitpicking 😅
Edit: what's the difference in sounds of loch and lock?
Taoiseach, pronounced tee-shuk😊
Maybe public = our? As in public funds = our money.
That Azure typo was painful!
I love these solves, Simon, but if loch and lock sound the same then you're pronouncing loch wrong!
In final clue i thought D-OUR-EST as in Democrat and "our esteem" ( public support) shortened!?
Ingenious idea, but shortenings of words in wordplay are almost always by a single letter.
I read FULL STOP as "Period/where one might find" as in, I would find a FULL STOP at the end of a sentence. And 'sentence' as in prison term, so it may be difficult to find training at the end of a prison sentence. Question marks always indicate something peculiar. Probably my explanation.
If they expected you to come up with "sentence" and then reinterpret it as meaning something different, that would be classed as unfair.
Nice solves but I really do think a few seconds quickly scanning your answers should be part of your routine.
I suspect, like all regulars of the masterclass, that we are becoming aware that Simon delivers the same explanation/ methodology each time. As the vast majority are seasoned watchers, there is really no need to say that m can be the abbreviation for male and certainly there is no need to open the dictionary. Newcomers to cryptics wishing to learn would not pick the Friday Times as their start point, but might appreciate a slower explained go at the Quick Cryptic instead.
I can't talk for everyone, but I'm a newcomer and I appreciate the full explanation on the crossword and then watching Simon race to finish the quick one.
I've had to give up, it's too painful to watch. Please ask Mark to do the crossword stuff...
No one’s forcing you to watch. Please allow Simon to continue entertaining the rest of us! 😊
@PotmosHetoimos Simon is better at the hard sudokus, Mark is better at the crosswords. It's no criticism just simple fact.
@@Swisswavey "It's too painful to watch" isn't a simple fact.
Ouch. That told me. My apologies. I can only try to do better.
@@CrackingTheCryptic There is always someone losing their gruntle. I think most of us are perfectly happy for you to continue with these Friday sessions.
Another lovely San Francisco song, by French Maxime Le Forestier
ruclips.net/video/9-XkBwoiAog/видео.htmlsi=df3OwlvJ97bYhyb5