Paper Monitor
12:31 UK time, Thursday, 18 March 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
At some point in the last two or three decades - around the time computers arrived at Fleet Street - it stopped being entirely fair to mock the Guardian for its spelling mistakes.
The legend of the typo-prone Grauniad sticks with us, though, if the Times' crossword setters are anything to go by. Today's cryptic solutions include, for 8 down, a word clued†as follows:
Like Guardian article, utterly misspelt? (8)
Paper Monitor initially thought this side-swipe might be revenge for , in which the Guardian ungallantly pilloried the Times for a massively mild misspelling which gave its fashion editor's name as "Lisa Armstong".
A more likely explanation is that compilers of crosswords - that very physical part of the daily rag - will take any opportunity to celebrate the glory days of pre-spellcheck hot-metal printing, typos and all.
The current solution to the Saturday Times' fiendish Listener crossword reveals that 12 of the answers were to be entered with the following letters omitted: - a reference to the characters that got printed when a newspaper's old-school Linotype type-setter pressed down on the first two columns of his keyboard, and a phrase which entered printers' lore. Paper Monitor did not complete that grid. It may not surprise you to read that it's not unknown for the Listener crossword to receive zero correct entries.
†Like most cryptic clues, this is made up of two indicators - some wordplay and a definition.
• In the wordplay, "article" gives you "A" (the indefinite article, as opposed to the definite article "the"); which you then add to "utterly" and make an anagram ("A" + "UTTERLY" misspelt").
• The definition is "Like Guardian" - that is, "in the manner of a guardian".
In both cases, the answer is TUTELARY.
The 
