24962- Coin rejected

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
This took me 50 minutes with the last 20 spent unravelling the SW corner where I had put an incorrect answer at 26ac. Other than that and my earlier error at 3dn this was mostly straightforward stuff with only EPARCH and COLMAR unknown to me but both quite easily gettable from wordplay. Yet again on my blogging day there’s very little to say so I’ll say what there is and shut up…


Across
1 RE,COURSE
5 COLdMARch – I’m afraid that until today the existence of this town in Alsace had escaped my notice.
9 GUMPTION – Anagram of cOMPUTING. Does anyone remember the furniture polish?
10 BAN,G UP – This is PUG NAB reversed.
12 T,RIPE – Shame that such a tasty plant should have become synonymous with stuff and nonsense. According to Wiki, in the US it’s designated a fruit but elsewhere it’s classified as a vegetable. I’ve never heard this before; it was always a fruit in our house.
13 LOO,SE (HE)A,Departs – A position in rugby football that I’ve only vaguely heard of. LOO is a card game.
14 POINT-TO-POINT – Anagram of TIP-TOP NOTION.
18 A,CA(DEM,Y AWA)R,lanD – ‘Off to sea’ is AWAY MED reversed inside A CAR then the D from ‘land’ to complete the solution.
21 PIN(AFORE)S – The opposite of ‘formerly covering legs’ is ‘legs covering formerly’, PINS being slang for ‘legs’.
23 Deliberately omitted. Seek and hopefully ye shall find.
24 Inquire,CA,RUShes
25 LEON,AR,DO – RA and NOEL reversed followed by DO.
26 The,ANNE,R – The old silver 6d coin. This was cause of my downfall in the SW as I wrote in STATER early on.
27 UN,wanT,ETHER – ETHER is the ‘number’ i.e. anaesthetic referred to here

Down
1 bRIGHTOn – Now part of the City of Brighton and Hove.
2 COMMIE – Sounds like ‘commis’.
3 UP THE POLE – Another early error here, I wrote IN THE NEST not entirely with conviction.
4 SCOT,LAND, YARD – SCOT is a tax I only know from doing crosswords. The last bit is DRAY reversed.
6 Deliberately omitted as I don’t rate it.
7 MAG,N,ETIC – This is all reversed. GAM being the school (of whales) in question.
8 RAPIDITY – Anagram of TRY A DIP I.
11 SOU,TH-(Wife)E,STERN – I think some dislike ‘banked’ as a containment indicator but I have no problem with it.
15 PERCH,A(N)CE
16 WAR(PAIN)T – My last in. I had been thinking of ‘slap’ as ‘make-up’ but took ages to see of the possibility of PAINT. WART is a lovely word for an obnoxious person and one that I had forgotten all about. It sounds vaguely old-fashioned to me. The sort of term that Bunter and his chums might have used.
17 MAIN,TAINt
19 EPARCH – Anagram of PREACH. I suppose I must have met this word before but I really didn’t recognise it today.
20 ARDOUR – Sounds like ‘harder’ as spoken by a Cockney.
22 F,LUKE – St Luke was a physician before becoming a disciple.

25 comments on “24962- Coin rejected”

  1. I thought this was an imaginative and fun puzzle, and I was pleased get it done and dusted in 68 minutes. My biggest hold-ups were in the NW, where I was slow onto RECOURSE (‘though I considered ‘resource’ almost at once) and TRIPE – once the latter fell, COMMIE (one of those that always catches me out), GUMPTION and RIGHTO completed the grid.

    ‘Though no problems for rugby fans, LOOSE HEAD may have caused a few problems. The most famous of that ilk at the moment is probably Australia’s Sekope Kepu, after his hapless display against the Irish last weekend.

    I don’t think I’ve ever thought of rhubarb as either a fruit or a vegetable, just as rhubarb. Thereagain, that might have something to do with an almost Virginia Woolfian distaste for classification, once beautifully described by Bourdieu as ‘symbolic violence’.

  2. Was this meant to be a themed puzzle based on 1950’s slang? It certainly resulted in some pretty bad clues, 16dn being outstanding.
  3. DNF
    Having taken a fearful bashing over the last 2 days this setter delivered the coup de gras with WARPAINT.
    Tortured solve not helped by a streaming cold, thoughtlessly entering RESOURCE and then having spring start in May (global warming?) leaving me with COLMAY. If you think that was bad, at one point I was so desperate to think of a word for protective garments I came up with PINAFORES as a starting point for a thesaurus search, indeed the book was in my hand before the penny dropped.
    Off to the chemists.
  4. Went along at a fair pace on this: for me the last three have been progressively easier. But forgot to return to rights/righto debate and signed off with the wrong one (despite living next to said town). I don’t know if there’s a name for the 21 type of clue but I rather like them: here the ‘legs covering formerly’ has the inanity that keep the world alive.
  5. Once again defeated by an unknown city: COLMAR. Otherwise quite an enjoyable, if somewhat tortuous, challenge. COD (in the end) to PINAFORES. Now that I’ve seen the correct parsing TANNER comes close (I initially entered THALER and only got the right answer after entering MAINTAIN).

    Thanks, jackkt for an excellent blog, particularly disentanging all the elements of ACADEMY AWARD.

  6. Does it make sense to say this was not as hard as it felt? 20 minutes here, with the NW giving the most trouble. RIGHTO is a fine clue but horribly elusive.
    Maybe I was just being dense. I sketched in SCOTLAND ages before I twigged to YARD – I was fixated on vans, for some reason. ACADEMY should have leapt out once I got AWARD, but didn’t. COLMAR was today’s jamais couché avec, but now that I’ve seen the pictures, I might go there – all the twee pralinenschachtel* style of mediaeval Germany but in French.
    WARPAINT would make it as my CoD, not least because it unlocked the SW, but RIGHTO was funnier. Enjoyable challenge.
    *Chocolate box, apparently. I looked it up.
  7. Nothing particularly difficult here and a steady 20 minute solve. Two pieces of lax usage, both of which have been covered before on this blog.

    As Jack says, Brighton is now Brighton and Hove and is a city. SCOTLAND YARD is a street name. The force is The Met.

    1. I wasn’t making any sort of criticism by mentioning the city as I don’t think its existence (only since 2000) precludes references to Brighton as a town if one is referring to the resort.

      I disagree over ‘Scotland Yard’ which along with ‘the Yard’ is commonly used to refer to the C.I.Department of the Metropolitan Police, notably in detective fiction but also in real life. Howver if one were to pick over those particular bones one would also have to disallow ‘force’ on the grounds that ‘the Yard’ is now part of the Metropolitan Police Service and ‘Force’ has been relegated to history. The new Commissioner appointed earlier this week was asked in an interview if he has plans to change this back and responded that there are more important things to think about and spend money on, however I was left with the distinct impression that he feels the change to ‘Service’ was a retrograde step which sends the wrong message in these troubled times.

  8. Third puzzle in a row which to my mind wouldn’t have felt out of place in next month’s competition, so 23 minutes felt like a reasonable result. Once you get into the right mindset, and are aware that definitions are likely to be a single apparently unobtrusive word, or otherwise carefully disguised, not impossibly tough (though spotting how each clue works isn’t always obvious).
  9. I found this a bit harder than yesterday’s, taking 35 minutes, with much of the NW corner blank for some time, apart from 3 and 12, which were early solves. Struggled to think of the Rugby position, having only …SE HEAD from the wordplay until I got the initial L from 4dn. WARPAINT and ACADEMY AWARD also gave me trouble (what intricate wordplay for the latter, but a neat surface).

    Re jackkt’s blog comment on GUMPTION, I do indeed remember ‘Gumption’, but in the UK,if memory serves me right, it was an abrasive paste for cleaning basins, baths, tiles, etc.

    1. You may well be right. I remember the advertisement with a very macho-sounding voice-over (Patrick Allen or someone similar) intended to convey the product’s cleaning power, but in those days I’d have had no interest in the product itelf so I can’t recall exactly what it was used for.
  11. 25 minutes, but with a careless TENDER for 26ac. My old coin was TEN D, my queen was ER, and, er…
    Otherwise “not as hard as it felt” sums it up perfectly. It felt like a bit of a grind and I didn’t enjoy it very much. I’ve no idea why.
    At least APERCH and EPCRAH are not words.
  12. …is the home of the Musee d’Unterlinden which houses one of the most graphic and startling of works of Renaissance art, Matthias Gruenewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. It is well worth the journey.
    Thanks jackkt for the explanation of “warpaint”. I had trouble with that and with tanner. Just under 2hrs for me. Quite why I toyed so long with “bravery award” is a mystery.
  13. Like keriothe I didn’t enjoy this, and can’t really say why. Was glad to get it out of the way with everything correct in about 45 minutes. SCOTLAND YARD had me stuck for some time (SNOWLINE YURT anyone?), GAM was a new school to me and COLMAR and EPARCH were guesses from the wordplay.
  14. Another tough one for me, just less than an hour. I went through the RH side pretty quickly, but was delayed in both NW and SW. Last entry was WARPAINT, which I had seen much earlier, but had no idea how it could mean ‘given slap’, and still don’t, although I gather from Jack’s blog that it is UK slang for makeup. I still don’t get directly from makeup to WARPAINT, but the ‘pain’ in the ‘wart’ seemed to fit so well that I went ahead. COD to RIGHTO!, which made me giggle. I lack acquaintance with a ‘commis’ and why BANG UP is ‘put away’. Over here it’s an adjective meaning ‘very good’. GUMPTION over here usually means ‘assertiveness’, not common sense. TANNER from wordplay only. Happy to have finished this at all. Regards to everyone.
    1. WARPAINT is also slang for make-up (the girls spent hours putting on their war paint before the dance). BANG UP means to send to jail (He was put away/banged up for five years)
  15. I had to leave this after 25 minutes to go and play for my usual Friday U3A singalong. Came back to complete 1d and 9a and a couple in the SW corner. I saw GUMPTION but hesitated over it because I thought the word meant “courage” or “guts” rather than anything to do with common sense. I think this meaning of “can do” is behind the name of the cleaning product. I didn’t immediately see the cryptic of 1d but it was a great eureka moment when the penny dropped. Probably about 40 minutes all told.
  16. Ah, silly me, I hadn’t seen ‘number’ in 27ac as a verb. I thought it was the number three with ‘set’ as an anagram indicator; leaving ‘free’ as the definition.

    Hello to the blog.

    1. Hello, and welcome if you’re a newbie. Hope you’ll stick around. On your wordplay at 27ac, I don’t recall ever seeing a clue where one has to make an anagram of part of the solution and if the day ever arrives I may have to give up solving!
      1. Luckily for you indirect anagrams like that are a thing of the past. I gave an example (from 21dn in Times cryptic No. 5,000) in my blog entry of a couple of weeks ago.
  17. Couldn’t do this in one sitting, about 15 minutes, a bit of a break, then the rest came in a flash. Kind of the opposite of yesterday (glad I didn’t have to blog this!) where I got a lot of clues from the literal. In without understanding wordplay: LOOSE HEAD, ICARUS, COMMIE, SCOTLAND YARD. In from wordplay alone – COLMAR, BANG UP, EPARCH, TANNER. In because it was the only thing that looked like it would fit in the grid – LOOSE HEAD.
  18. 13:03 here: top half quite brisk; SW corner a lot slower. An enjoyable puzzle with some neat clues.

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