24415

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Sorry for delay – I’d forgotten to get a sub for today and the effect was cmpounded by a power cut here which has just ended. I’ll get a report up as soon as I can.

Solving time: 8:59

Across
1 H = his, (n)IBS H(is n)IBS – “is not the first” signals deletion of “is + N = “not the first” – Hibs is the nickname of Edinburgh club Hibernian FC – wordplay amended after jacckt’s comment
3 ENTHUSI = (us in the)*,AST = sat* – “buff” is the def. – supposedly derived from fans of New York fires and firefighters, who (the firemen, not the fans) wore buff uniforms
10 C.(O=old, RON=man)E.,T = “last to sporT”
11 MULLI(O)N’ – a mullion is a bar between panes = lights, in a window
13 ROUTES = “roots”
14 PUPPETRY – CD based on glove puppets as a possible type
17 FLAGPOLE – CD with meanings of “staff” and “standards” which need changing from the surface.
18 HOB(N)O,B- “borough initially”
21 EVEN = flat, IN G=Gateshead, PRIM=prudish, ROSE=woman – G = “Gateshead” is a notorious source of debate between Ximeneans and Libertarians – I’m with the Ximeneans but only just – if the argument is that a gate doesn’t have a head, are we happy with all the other uses of “head” in cryptic clues? It can be a fine line.
23 CORSICA – sic = this, in C.O., R.A. which I guess can be read as Commanding Officer, Royal Artillery = “artillery commander”
24 HAND = labourer, SAW = dictum
25 D,E = notes, ROGATORY = “seeking information” – I remembered Rogation Days , but had forgotten their purpose – asking forgiveness – thinking of “inter-rogation” would have made it clearer, but I didn’t.
26 LYNX = “one with exceptionally good sight”, and = “links”, with “articulate” = pronounce indicating the homophone
 
Down
1 HECK = “irritated cry”, LER = rev. of (re=about, L = Liberal)
2 BARR(A, CUD = chewy substance)A – Barra being anothere Hebridean island to remember
4 NOT IN G = “what a symphony in F, for example, is”
5 HOME’S (ref. Sir Alec Douglas-Home),PUN – Home (pronounced Hume) was the only British PM to have played first class cricket, and the last member of the House of Lords to become Prime Minister – he renounced his peerage, using the same legislation as Tony Benn to do so, and stood in a bye-election to get into the Commons. Private Eye’s “Bailie Vass”.
6 SELF-EMPLOYMENT – Def and CD
7 ALI(A)S(on)
8 T(h)E,NANCY – wasted time here assuming that “husbandless” applied to the lasy in question, and trying to think of a name with an H in it. Nancy and Sikes are characters in Oliver Twist.
9 U(N,ENTER=join)PRISING
16 F.(LAG=criminal,RAN=published)T.
17 FLEECED – I guess you can see Biblical Jacob as “fleeced” in a couple of ways – smooth-skinned as opposed to his hairy brother Esau, or in the goatskins in which he was clothed by Rebecca to disguise him as Esau.
19 BEESWAX – crafrter deception here – “Polish composer” must be split into the def and composer for (Arnold) Bax. Inside is a reversal of W + SEE = notice
20 ARCH = chief, E(nginee)R – Tell in the clue is = William Tell, of course
22 ERROR – reverse hidden in “Forfar or Renfrew” – so we start and end in Scotland.

25 comments on “24415”

  1. Was anyone else enticed into putting NOMANCY at 8d. It seems to have all the right ingredients for a good &lit clue – ‘NO MAN’, ‘NANCY’, and it means divining the destinies of people by the letters in their names. I bravely tried to shoehorn it into the wordplay without success – until I got MULLION.

    Nick

    1. As a word, nomancy is not in Chambers, Collins, or ODE. I can only find it in the OED. On that basis, it’s far too obscure. There’s also nothing in the clue about it except that it’s something people do. Unless Bill Sikes was into fortune-telling, that’s far too vague, even with the leeway often granted to &lits.

      husbandless = “NO MAN” – it shouldn’t, as husbandless really matches “with no man” (or with no h=husband as in the real wordplay). And to get CY from Nancy, we’ve strayed from “No man” to “No nan”! “Husbandless” can’t mean this (and would be doing double duty), and there’s nothing else in the clue to indicate it. (If Ny. is an abbreviation for Nancy, it’s not in any English dictionaries)

      If you find yourself trying to fit wordplay that doesn’t want to fit, it’s best to give up until and unless your putative answer matches all the checking letters.

    1. Typo fixed – thanks. The sheep works too (and I meant to mention it, honest), though you need Chambers to validate “Jacob” as opposed to “Jacob sheep”.
  3. Easier than yesterday and all very straightforward. About 25 minutes to solve.

    As you would expect I’m a little uneasy about Gateshead=G but it caused me no problems. I’ve seen it before, discussed it endlessly with other crossword nuts and really just accept it, although it can be a good way of starting an argument in some quarters.

  4. After 45 minutes I gave up with 1ac and 3ac still unsolved and resorted to aids.

    I have absolutely no idea why I never considered the meaning of “buff” required here as I am very familiar with it, however, I insisted to the bitter end on reading “in the buff” together and kept looking for a word referring to nudity. Full marks to the setter for beating me on this one.

    After the controversy on Friday I am not pleased about another obscure soccer reference except I suppose I am grateful that the setter at least made it clear in which field of interest the answer might lie and therefore there was no point in my wasting too much time on it. Having used a solver and eliminated all its suggestions I realised we were probably into another soccer nickname and having heard of Hibernian (thanks to interminable lists of results on TV in the 1950s) I tried HIBS on Wikipedia.

    Seeing “H” as an abbreviation for “his” which is not given in any of the usual dictionaries including the SOED reminds me that there is allegedly a list of acceptable single letter abbreviations that may turn up in Times puzzles. Does anyone have this or know where it can be found?

    1. H as abbreviation for “his” was too imaginative on my part – if it’s not in the dictionaries (or just possibly derivable from something really obvious in real life), it’s wrong – and I forgot to check it. I’ve now rethought the wordplay and found an explanation that doesn’t need it.

      The list is for use by the setters, and I think it should stay that way – most of the abbreviations used are straightforwardly guessable from the words, and they’re all or very nearly all confirmable from dictionaries of sensible size. And the list is subject to change – so I don’t want to have people expecting everything to be on a list that’s out of date.

    2. I’m not sure I would have had a problem with H = His, after all we use HM = His Majesty and there’s always HMV, but I thought I would mention it in the hope of laying hands on the list. However I fully understand your reluctance to publish it and then have people here arguing over every exception.
      1. That’s a good excuse for my original mistake, but getting single words from longer abbreviations is a route to far too many abbreviations – how about V = voice, O = orchestra, or M = machines? (HMV, LSO, IBM)
        1. I should have made it clear that I also had H = His as my explanation of the clue and that was what made me think of questioning its validity before I read the blog and found you originally agreed with it.

          Actually the H abbreviation I can never fully understand appears today too in 8dn, H = Husband. Of the three usual dictionaries plus the SOED only Collins has it but I’m never sure in what circumstances apart from crossword clues one would use it.

          W = wife is in three of the four, the exception being the Concise OED.

  5. 12.40 solving time. Took a while to fathom out 8 even though I knew Nancy was going to be there. Misled by the definition and ‘the husbandless’. Also led astray by the clever ‘Polish composer’.
    I suppose the reference in 5 to Foreign Secretary rather than Prime Minister was fair enough in that otherwise it could have been a bit easy. Given Peter’s comment above maybe just be grateful it wasn’t clued as ‘old cricketer’ !!
  6. About 25 minutes and fairly straightforward, despite a healthy sprinkling of things I didn’t know. One such was HIBS, which I arrived at via ‘His Nibs’ removing ‘is’ and the ‘n’, as in “is not the first to leave” from the clue. I don’t remember seeing ‘h’=his before. Other things I didn’t know: Barra, since neither Jimbo or McText alerted me to it’s existence yesterday, BARRACKER, and the name of Mr. Sikes mistress. COD nom’s to LYNX, my last entry, CORSICA and the deceptive ENTHUSIAST. First in: ALIAS. Regards everyone.
  7. A curate’s egg with, possibly too many CDs and easy clues and some very good clues with difficult wordplay. I enjoyed noting, lynx and tenancy. I raced through this after breakfast but could not get the beeswax-lynx intersection despite being well aware that I was looking for a polish, not a Polish composer. Finally I got lynx and the intersecting X gave me beeswax.

    Hibs, unenterprising and archer were solved on definition only but I worked out the wordplay afterwards

    I think the setter is just being very precise in clueing Home as Foreign Secretary rather than PM. When he was Foreign Secretary he was (Lord) Home; when he was PM he was Douglas-Home.


  8. No trouble with this, except that it took me just ages to find the answer to 3ac. My fixation with naturism gets in the way again :-))
    Of course, I didn’t believe all Peter’s guff about the NY Fire Dept, who would, so I went and looked it up in the OED. It turns out that he is quite right, and not only that, but there are no less than 12 separate entries for “buff” and heaven only knows how many distinct meanings. Quite a word!
    1. Chambers Slang Dictionary confirms this too and adds that the followers were actually called “The Buffs”.
      1. That’s the trouble with word origins – there are so many verifiably weird ones that unverified stories like “Port Out, Starboard Home” seem perfectly reasonable by comparison, and people believe them.
    1. Yes, I wondered about that. It’s not a subject I know much about but I thought in such charts its usually just “m” for “married”.
  10. Couldn’t get HIBS for the life of me, very slow progress on this one, mostly worked from the bottom up. But still a fail.
  11. I have no quibbles with this, but in practice I did find it a bit unsatisfactory in that I think there were only about 2 clues (8dn and 23ac) where I actually went through the wordplay to get the answer; the rest were solved by definition alone.
  13. Completely defeated by HIBS; wordplay, definition and all. I did like the cheekiness of NOTING, ENTHUSIAST & many more. I’m not sure where I stand on Gateshead, either, but I’ve also seen it before and it fitted in with the general insouciant air of the puzzle.

    Sorry to put the kibosh on your weather with my arcadian posting yesterday. If it’s any consolation, I’m back in Perth and gearing up for those over 40 degree days which are just around the corner.

  14. I was misled for a while with 24a where I had HACKSAW. It’s a reasonable fit, as a labourer could be considered a HACK. Obviously HANDSAW is better.

    I’m still a bit confused by the wordplay. The ending of “labourer’s” seems to give us an extra S. I could only resolve it by reading “labourer’s” as “labourer has”. Is this correct?

    1. It seems the clearest way for the cryptic reading to make sense. You could see it another way – if (for instance) a stair carpet is a carpet belonging to the stair(s), a “hand saw” could be a saw belonging to a hand, or “hand’s saw”. (“stair carpet” is just the first example I thought of – I can see one from where I’m typing this).

      Whenever you see ‘s, it’s worth considering all three possible meanings – possessive, abbrev. for is, and abbrev. for has.

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