24637

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 9:11

Difficulty seemed to increase a bit today – I was slow to start, then got shifting, then slowed down for the last few. Clues I solved on first look (often with help from checking letters) have underlined numbers. 23, 2 and 3 went in without full wordplay understanding.

Across
1 OP.=opus=work,A,QUE(ry) – I probably spent as much time convincing myself that the wordplay made sense as finding the answer, as I thought of lines = ll., and then tried to convince myself that “doubt” could clue QUELL. The lines are of course Ry.= railway
5 PROF=academic,(h)OUND = bully, no leader
9 ANO(1)N,TED = yob – I know you don’t like this Jimbo, but the letters of complaint need to go to Collins dictionaries – COD doesn’t have ted=teddy boy, or anything more offensive than “member of a subculture” for teddy boy
10 SHEIKH = “shake” – I suspect the -kh indicates that the original sound wasn’t just a K, but if so, English pronunciation doesn’t preserve it
11 JUST A SWELL = “nothing more than a dandy” – pretty straightforward unless you put your money on “TO” being the middle word of the answer
13 A.(I’D)A. – “Carmen?” = “car men” = AA
14 SHO(u)T – “go” (=attempt) is the very short definition
15 ROT,IS,SERIE(s) – a rotisserie is a restaurant specialising in roasted meat, as well as the roasting gismo that comes as part of posh cookers
18 B(RIG)ANDAGE = “the practice of a robber” – very nicely done clue
20 COT,E – “cote” as shelter doesn’t have to be attached to “dove”
21 PLUM(b) – another one where wordplay pondering wasted some time, this time trying to make sense of PLUM(p)
23 FIR(m),STAIDER=more sedate
25 BROOKE = “brook” = tolerate. Never heard of him? “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.”
26 VIRGINAL – 2 defs. The instrument is often in the plural, as ODE confirms, but Concise Oxford only mentions the singular
28 POSEIDON = poisoned*
29 ON HAND – 2 defs – a slightly trickier double def than 26 as there’s a choice of possible positions for the change from the first def to the second
 
Down
2 PEN(P=piano),USHER=court official
3 QUI(N=some number)TE,T(ame)
4 (l)EFT – in zoology, “eft” is one stage in the life of the newt, but in old English and dialect, it’s just “newt”. But see keriothe’s sharp-eyed comment below.
5 PAD=accommodation,RE=about
6 O.B. = old boy,SOLE,SCENT=trail
7 OVER=across,AGE – overage is excess or surplus as well as “too old” – today’s new word meaning for me
8 NUKED – U.K. in end*
12 SPRINGFIELD – Dusty the singer and capital of Illinois
16 TWA = T.W.A. – two/twa defs, joined by a Scottish airport
17 IN(THEM,A1)N
19 GAM(BOG)E – in Collins, gamboge is a yellow colour as well as the Concise Oxford’s resin. Ducks and drakes is a game that may be known to non-British solvers by a different name
20 CEILIDH – a Scots/Irish party with dancing. Reversal of i.e., in anag. of ‘child’. If in doubt on spellings of Gaelic words, you can usually rely on the checking letters to give enough help. Some, like Taoiseach, seem to be particular favourites of the Times setters
22 L,ARGO = Largo = very slow movement – I got to play this one once – a joy for the heavy brass, as you play seven chords at the beginning, then do nothing until playing the same chords at the end.
24 today’s omitted explanation
27 RIO(t)

52 comments on “24637”

  1. A pleasant surprise. Several words unknown to me(EFT, OVERAGE, COTE, GAMBOGE); had a stab at them from the wordplay but unconvinced that they were right until seeing Peter’s blog. Stumped on 25ac: heard of Rupert Brooke – but couldn’t get Rupert Bear out of my head.
  2. Yeh, a nice puzzle that took up 16 minutes of breakfast. Only real hesitation was over PLUM (21ac) — not seeing “inadequate” as a deletion indicator until later.
  3. Very happy to come to the end at 21 min. Many (particularly in the NW) went in on instinct and were only justified after stopping the clock. While pleased to finish in a respectable time, I did not feel any great sense of achievement, so no COD.
  4. 15 minutes today, then another 10 to get BROOKE. The SW corner was somewhat resistant, trying to get PLUM to make sense and squeezing out GAMBOGE, but the Rupert clue was the first one to catch my eye, and inevitably I though of “bear”. I think that’s why I struggled through the alphabet with it, light dawning only when I considered the third space and got to K.
    I managed “pound” for bully in 5a, which fortunately doesn’t matter. Didn’t know today’s meaning of OVERAGE, either.
    Did anyone else notice the three EI combinations today?
    CoD to SPRINGFIELD, but only because of the immortal Dusty. Isn’t there supposed to be one in virtually every American state?
  5. Made rather a meal of this excellent offering, stumbling home in 74 minutes, with 11ac last in. Fell for the old ‘quartet’ trap at 3 ac (R-ather L-ame, ‘initially’ – I know, not much of an excuse) and only got that after the penny dropped about the singer of the ‘63 hit “I Only Want to Be with You”, which I once had on vinyl, along with some childhood oddities including the Barron Knights. Anyone remember them?
    1. I remember some cheesy stuff like “Get down Shep”, but after a quick listen on Youtube, I think I prefer the older stuff. Try this one, which seemed at first like a bit of barbershop or male voice choir, but then decided it was something else. Give yourself a pat on the back if you can identify the song being parodied, without reading the comments.
      1. I loved the link to the flashback! but weren’t they actually parodying the Jim Reeves version, that was (incomprehensibly) in the UK charts for a while back then?

        I don’t usually have time to do the main puzzle, but I need to get in some practice for Cheltenham, so you may see me here again soon. This one took me about 25 min: last to go in was SHOT, because I couldn’t see the connection to “go” – duh!

  6. 40 minutes with the last 10 spent on 9ac and the two 5s. Problems at 9 were caused by having QUARTET at 3dn. I had considered QUINTET but couldn’t see how it worked so I plumped for the alternative thinking the RT was clued by “Rather Tame initially”.

    Never heard of GAMBOGE, BRIGANDAGE, ROTISSERIE as an eating place nor of VIRGINAL, the instrument, in the singular but it’s a sign of a good puzzle that these were all solvable by alternative routes and I’m pleased that I didn’t need any aids today.

    I liked 13ac al though this use of ‘Carmen’ has come up before, I think both with reference to AA and RAC.

  7. No problems here and another 20 minute stroll. A lot of it seemed a bit old chestnut at the time.

    I wont rant on yet again about yob=ted or the alternative pronunciation of SHEIKH (to rhyme with week), both of which have featured extensively here before. Unfortunately, no real gems to balance out the odd groans.

    1. eh? How can “shake” rhyme with “week”? If that’s a regular feature of Times crosswords, I haven’t noticed it.
  8. There are people who pronounce SHEIKH to rhyme with “week”. There’s even an old song – The Sheikh of Araby as I recall?
    1. Maybe so, but the clue has it as “shake”, so I can’t see anything to rant about in this case. Or do you think “tremble” indicates something else?
      1. I am with you on shake/sheikh. To object to this on the grounds that some people (very few indeed, I would suggest) pronounce “sheikh” with “week” seems to me to be carrying homophone-phobia to absurd limits. Many words are pronounced in different ways by different speakers. It is simply a question of picking the one that fits the wordplay, “tremble” making crystal clear which that is in this case.
        1. Nobody wants to take things to absurd lengths and with the greatest respect you have absolutely no idea how many people pronounce it one way or the other. What you mean is “in my circle of acquaintance it is pronounced in a certain way”.

          The issue is that there are two accepted pronunciations and the setter should cover that by making the clue for example “Ruler making some tremble when speaking” as against “one tremble”

          1. I don’t understand why there should such a requirement when a word has two pronunciations. We have no such requirement when it has multiple meanings.
          2. Well, I must confess, Jimbo, that I haven’t conducted a nation-wide poll, but were such a poll to be conducted, I would be prepared to wager a substantial sum that it would reveal “sheikh” rhyming with “shake” to be overwhelmingly the most common pronunciation nowadays, whether inside or outside my cIrcle of acquaintance. I take your perfectly fair point that the setter could easily have covered himself/herself against your objection by rewording the clue along the lines you suggest, and no doubt would have been prudent to do so. Personally, I don’t mind on occasion being expected to choose between two or more possible pronunciations of a word, provided the wordplay makes clear which one is required, as 10ac did. After all, we are regularly required to choose between multiple meanings of words (not quite the same thing, I know, but all in the same cryptic spirit, I would contend). However, I accept that this is always going to be a matter of personal taste on which universal agreement is unlikely. Vive la difference (I would put in the acute accent if I knew how to do so).
            1. A very fair assessment Mike. All I would add is that this blog could get very repetitive, particularly in a run of essentially easy puzzles such as we have at the moment, without these little diversions.
              1. Not wanting to become embroiled in the wider argument I remember this very point about ‘sheikh’ coming up here before and on that occasion, as is my wont, I referred to the old song in which it is most definitely pronounced to rhyme with ‘week’.

                I also remember that the SOED gives both pronunciations. In my CD-ROM version the first sounds like ‘shake’ and is spoken by a man, whereas the second which sounds like ‘sheek’ is spoken by a woman. Does order of of presentation and/or the gender of the speaker have any bearing on anything, I wonder?

                As long as I get the right answer fairly quickly I’m not too bothered about homophones.

          3. Somebody may have already said this, but I would bet vast amounts of someone else’s money that virtually the entire population of the US pronounces the word to rhyme with ‘week’. Granted, this is a British puzzle, and if the British were unanimous on the ‘shake’ pronunciation, then I’d say tant pis for us Yanks. (I had actually thought they were unanimous, until dorsetjimbo enlightened me when this word appeared in a puzzle a few months ago.)
              1. I note that a) Merriam-Webster is now part of Britannica, b) every rhyme they give for ‘sheikh’ is a rhyme for ‘shake’. And yet I’ve never heard any American pronounce it ‘shake’; my bet stands.
                2. I don’t think M-W being owned by Britannica is significant. It’s still a recognisably American dictionary if you test it by looking up British stuff. My guess on the rhymes is that they simply base them on the first pronunciation where there’s more than one.
  9. 20m, middle-of-the road sort of puzzle.
    I was unsure of 21ac because I must confess I didn’t realise that “plumb” in the “tuckered out” sense was spelled like this.
    I also have a query about 4dn, because I don’t see how “left” can mean “remained”. “Remaining”, yes. “Remained”, no. Am I missing something?
    1. I don’t think you are – “remaining when lake vanishes” seems a better way of following “Pond creature”.
  10. Well, I guess one man’s pun is another’s homophone: “making one tremble when speaking” for me means “say it to sound like shake”, except some people don’t. No big deal, just a passing observation.
    1. Sorry, cross-posted my change from “pun” to sounds-like. But when the first comment (on ‘ted’) relates to the way today’s clue works (in a way that I remember well from previous puzzles and comments) and the second doesn’t, the second is hard to understand.
  11. Took a while to get going, though when I did things seemed to progress fairly rapidly. Got stuck on PLUM/GAMBOGE for a time and was another who couldn’t get past Rupert Bear at 25.

    My archetypal Largo is Handel’s Famous one (at least that’s what my World’s Favourite Classics calls it).

    1. “Handel’s Largo” was my first thought too, but I wanted something that definitely counted as a “movement”.
  12. Round about an hour again. No great sheikhs. Held up at the end by 21 and 22, and I’m embarrassed to say the Dusty gag went completely over my head. Didn’t even know she was dead.
  13. Well I was going rather swiftly through this until I ground to a complete and utter halt on 25 – stared at it for about 10 minutes trying to get around that the only Ruperts I knew were a bear and a still alive media magnate. Eventually resorted to the little red book and saw BROOK for tolerate. Don’t think that would have come to me in another hour of staring. Oh well…
  14. 16:45 .. I had a question mark against 12d because I thought Dusty was still alive. On Googling her name, I was sad to discover that the rules regarding people’s names had not been transgressed.

    Last in ANOINT, which I always want to spell ‘annoint’.

  15. Didn’t quite finish this one today, despite finishing most in quite a fast time. Gave up in the end with 19d / 21ac / 26ac blank, and resorted to the Chambers Word Wizard. 26ac I should have got. 19d I probably would never have got. 21ac as obvious as soon as I wrote in the latter. As I got 16d wrong (a punt on TAA), it was academic anyway.
    1. That’s aged me! It’s only been gone for about 9 years, but I guess for the younger generation, TWA and rivals PAN AM, who folded earlier, mean about as much as GWR or LMS.
      1. At the age of 24, I also completely failed to get TWA, and entered TEA instead in desperation. It was the last clue left, so it seemed a shame to fail by a single letter…
  16. Spike Jones’ Sheik (sic) of Araby is on youtube. And the tongue-twister ‘The sixth sick sheikh’s sixth sheep’s sick’ doesn’t work if you say ‘shake’.

    I found this easier than yesterday, about 20 minutes. I do feel that Carmen is well past its failed MOT.

    sidey

    1. Who would want Spike Jones’ verson when there is a Beatles one available!

      Not a difficult crossword today in the main, but I sat and looked at PLUM for some time trying to justify it, and our Dusty took a while too, embarrassingly since I consider her a highlight of the 60s & 70s.

  17. About 30 minutes here, getting stuck in the SW on PLUM, BROOKE and my last entry, GAMBOGE, which I’d not heard of before and had to check on whether it existed afterwards. My familiarity with BROOKE comes only from these puzzles. By the way, most over here wouldn’t know of a CEILIDH, and I think most over here pronounce SHEIKH as ‘sheek’, and spell it without the final ‘h’. COD to Dusty. Best regards.
  18. TWA folding has ruined the air-hostess asking if you want Brand-name coffee or Brand-name tea…

    BEA was standard crossword fare for many years, never saw Braniff featured though.

    1. Bother! My link to ”The Old Vicarage Grantchester” failed. You’ll have to look it up yourselves if you’re interested.
  20. Catastrophe on Overage which I just didn’t believe for too long, and Anointed. About 40 minutes finally. No COD. Liked the Sheikh tongue-twister above.
  21. Over an hour in two sessions and virtually the same as vinyl but didn’t get COTE or GAMBOGE.
  23. 11:48, with the last 2 mins on 21ac (PLUM).  Unknowns were BRIGANDAGE (18ac), OVERAGE (7dn), Trans World Airlines (16dn TWA), and GAMBOGE (19dn).  VIRGINAL (16ac) and EFT (4dn) didn’t come as readily to mind as they should have done.

    I should have known TWA, really, because the TWA Flight 800 disaster rings a bell.

  24. … was the interpretation of the acronym shortly before it folded. I remember the tea/coffee joke, too. My time on this puzzle was OK but poet Brooke beat me. I liked Unblemished instrument and Just a swell.

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