26074 What’s French for “raining cats and dogs”?

Author   ZabadakPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
16.27 to place all the available letters in the correct order, so pretty much my average. After yesterday’s amusing diversion (I was amused, anyway) we’re back to the convention of actually having definitions for every clue – spoiled rotten, we are – and little if anything that the average punter won’t have heard of. It is a pangram, but of the kind where you’d hardly notice, since almost all the high-scoring Scrabble™ letters (other word games are available) are coyly placed in unchecked squares. It might have helped a bit, I think, if I’d noticed how close I was to the full set while patrolling the NW frontier, as it took a while longer than the other quarters.
For amusement, and inspired by 1 ac, I’ll star each of the answers my computer fails to recognise. I’ll guess there will be three. So let’s throw the letters in the air and see where they land:

Across

1 SPELLCHECK*  What one gets with computer?
And straight away I’ve remembered that the visual editor in LJ doesn’t spellcheck. But MS word does, and I’ll feed the info from there. One of life’s little ironies is that spellcheck isn’t recognised by your average spellcheck. Short period SPELL; more or less C(irca) and HECK for those who want to say hell but daren’t ‘cos they’ll get a whack from their ma.
6 HEMP  drug
Good old fashioned cannabis by another name that smells as sweet. Did you know that in 1563 Queen Elizabeth I decreed that land owners with 60 acres or more must grow Cannabis or else face a £5 fine? She needed the string. P(erson) on HEM. (Note for novices: on does not necessarily mean at the front)
9 PROTEAN  in many forms
DTIK this as its meaning. Sharply criticise PAN; insert ROTE for repetition.
10 SIDECAR  drink
The fish is the IDE, and blemish SCAR. Insert one in t’other
12 CONFORMING  obeying rules
Trick CON, group of children FORM, 1 N(o) G(ood)
13 EMU  it’ll never fly
There are too many arboreal creatures, and things that won’t fly (starting with, say, bricks) to solve this without checkers. It’s a (l)EMU(r) with its “wings” clipped.
15 LAYMAN  no cleric
Set against gives LAY, and the bishop is a (chess) MAN
16 BOOTLESS  unprofitable
Brush up your Shakespeare: JC: “doth not Brutus bootless kneel?” Rather neatly, your ship, SS, is docked (just placed in this case) at BOOTLE. You are then in the purview of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board (and little lambs eat ivy).
18 IN COMMON  Shared
Wages are INCOM(e), which is docked and has MON(day) added.
20 ALBERT  Prince
The HALBERT* loses its head. Many variant spellings, but not of Albert.
23 TOM  male
As in cat. The big work is a TOME, from which the E(nergy) is detached
24 LIKE BLAZES  forcefully
Well, it is what arsonists do.
26 FRESHET flood
Surprisingly, no *. Did not know this word, and misread flood as food anyway. The lady is SHE, and “to be anxious” supplies the consuming FRET.
27 CREVICE split
C(old) REV(erend) and C(hurch of) E(ngland). Nice surface.
28 STEW  Food
Club caterers are STEW(ards) who turn up half cut.
29 NON-STARTER  Perhaps main course.
Defined by what it isn’t. Also any horse that you are foolish enough to place a bet on. Which may well therefore also become a main course of (say) lasagne.

Down

1 SEPT*  clan
Originally Irish. Group is SET. Grab P(ower)
2 ECONOMY  Thrift (is called for)
An anagram, the first of the day, of MONEY placed around CO(mpany)
3 LIEBFRAUMILCH*  wine
Anagram of IF LIBERAL CHUM for the iconic 70’s plonk, almost all of which Germany sensibly exports.
4 HUNGRY  Poor
The country of countless cracker jokes with its A(rea) removed
5 CASH IN ON  Take advantage of
Trick is (again, see 12) CON, and it receives A well-deserved kick in the SHIN. Verbal use permitted by Chambers.
7 EXCRETE  Discharge
Old (ie former) lover is EX, CRETE is, apparently, an island. Who knew?
8 PERQUISITE  fringe benefit
From which “perk”. Agent is REP, Reverse it, add QUITE for somewhat, and insert (h)IS sans initial.
11 DIGITAL CAMERA  one gets the picture
An anagram of DAME LIT A CIGAR.
14 PLAINTIFFS people in court
A slightly disguised chestnut: obvious is PLAIN, diplays of irritation TIFFS
17 COCKATOO  One bird
Another bird is a COCK, and this one is AT OO, representative of eggs.
19 COMPETE try to win
Finish is COMPLETE. Delete the £.
21 ELEGIST  cryptic definition
An elegy is a song of mourning, and keen is, in one of its definitions, to mourn. A rather fine laconic clue.
22 ABACUS  Not something we now count on
And just who is “we”? A BAC(k) support (not a bra!) is U/S
25 JEER shout of disaproval
J(udge) plus E’ER for a poetic “always”

55 comments on “26074 What’s French for “raining cats and dogs”?”

  1. … today. Though it took a while to get started. Also never heard of FRESHET, but that was the only unknown. And a bit thrown by “kick” = SHIN. Didn’t spot the pangram — unusual! Bit of thickness setting in this morning.

    And one possible answer is: il pleut comme vache qui pisse. Or did you have the hallebardes in mind?

    Edited at 2015-04-16 02:18 am (UTC)

    1. Definitely les hallebardes. I can’t quite nail down the point where it entered my consciousness, but I think it might well have been a Ripley Believe It or Not, invited to smile at the quaint foreigners and their ways.
      The Japanese, of course, have それはダットサンの歯車を降っている, roughly translated as it’s raining Datsun cogs.
  2. If only I’d known the word SEPT which I thought of straight away from wordplay, and had written it in right at the start things might have worked out differently. As it was, I scrambled around the grid trying to get a foothold and eventually started in the SE corner with JEER and worked my way upwards – never the easiest route to follow when solving. I simply couldn’t get the thing to flow and although I got there eventually without resort to aids it was a very slow process. My other unknown or forgotten was FRESHET.
  3. A solid but not really entertaining crossword. Held up a bit by having ‘pill’ at 6ac for a while. I thought LIEBFRAUMILCH was going to be a problem but the answer came quickly enough. ELEGIST (which the spellchecker just queried) probably COD.
  4. I was going to echo Z’s comment on EMU, and I’m impressed by vinyl’s checker-free solve. I got as far as ‘gnu’ and decided to wait a while. Couldn’t get Hal out of my mind on 20ac, even though I’d thought of ‘halbert’; as mctext says, a bit of thickness. I put in ‘contend’ at 19d (‘finish’), which slowed things further. As did trying to think of a wine at 3d–Liebfraumilch is wine? Who knew? COD to ELEGIST.
  5. I’m with Vinyl on the EMU, my first one in. Possibly due to a geographical advantage.

    Struggled with the rest, particularly the German wine and the ELEGIST.

    In my riparian childhood a minor flood was always referred to as a “fresh”. I always just took it as a reference to the semi-salty water being flushed out into the ocean, but perhaps it derives from 26ac.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

    1. It all comes out the same in the wash, it seems. Oxford gives the derivation as “Late 16th century: probably from Old French freschete, diminutive of freis ‘fresh’.”
      1. Presumably the result of a frog-strangling gully washer? (See above re cats and dogs.)
  6. Enjoyed this. Didn’t know 8 and 26, and tried to spell the hole as a ‘crevace’ – a sort of nounal ‘obstruse’. 54 mins.
  7. … 20ac perhaps?

    For the Japanese, my crib has: 土砂降りである (doshaburi de aru) — Earth and sand are falling.

    Edited at 2015-04-16 05:39 am (UTC)

    1. Datsun cogs/cats and dogs. I confess I Googled ダットサンの歯車 just to make sure, and then came the dawn. And yes, I agree, Z should be ashamed.
      1. There is no end to my admiration for a man who goes that far in search of a pun.

        Chapeau!

  8. On EMU, it’s not just letters being removed from either end but L and R, i.e. Left and Right. I think that makes the solution less random than suggested above.

    1. If that’s right (and why not?) it makes the clue both more elegant and helpful. I clearly failed to spot it before and after solving!

  9. 16:58 … ‘fraid I’m another smarty-pants who got EMU straight off the bat (not that sort of bat, though there is something zoological in the air today).

    Last in by a mile was BOOTLESS. This might be quite a hard clue for those who have never heard of Bootle, like.

    COD … LIKE BLAZES. Of course.

    1. I entered into a heated internal debate with myself about whether an ARSONIST really “likes” blazes; I mean, obviously, they’re his job, but it might just be a means to an end for him. A pyromaniac on the other hand…
      2. I think it’s one of those jobs where the pay isn’t very good, and the career can be short, so you only do if you love it. It’s one of those things arsonists have in common with ballerinas.
        1. “It’s one of those things arsonists have in common with ballerinas.”

          [laɪx]

          Edited at 2015-04-16 11:34 am (UTC)

        2. I’ll wager the arsonist-ballerina Venn diagram has a surprisingly large intersection.
      3. I can’t believe nobody picked you up on the ‘heated’ internal debate, Verlaine. Got that one through to the keeper.

        Edited at 2015-04-20 11:50 am (UTC)

  10. About 15 minutes after deducting time spent helping plaintive 2 year old navigate her way around the CBeebies games site. I know the weapon as a HALBERD so held out doggedly for a Prince Alberd…
  11. All very pleasant and straightforward until the last pairing of 1ac and 1 dn. Whilst I thought it was likely to be ‘sept’ I was unconvinced and then wham! Epiphany! 1ac was of course ‘shellshock’!
    Then came the tricky job of justifying this. 5 mins later I had proceeded no further and then the penny dropped. Der, Brian. Wish I was clever.
  12. 17 mins. It would have been 16 but like tringmardo it was hard for me to stop thinking of “shellshock” for 1ac, and I felt stupid when the penny dropped. Although I’ve seen PROTEAN a few times I had never bothered to find out what it actually meant so I’m glad the wordplay for it was clear. I’m also glad FRESHET was clearly clued because if I’d come across it before I’d forgotten it.

    Thanks for reminding me about Blue Nun Olivia.

    As someone who grew up in Bootle I got a kick out of Sotira’s “like”. Thanks for that.

      1. Sorry Olivia, that one is lost on me.

        I see Black Tower also got a name check below. I recall that me and my friends also drank a fair bit of Niersteiner back in the day.

        1. Not you then Andy – it’s another one I sometimes chat with on the Club Forum.
    2. A mere 18 miles from where I grew up, as the crow flies. Quite a few rivers in the way mind you.
  13. 14:13. Bit of a Mephisto feel to this one: BOOTLESS, FRESHET, SEPT, halbert. I enjoyed it.
    I’m another who got EMU straight away with no checkers. ‘It’ll never fly’, three letters, can’t make an arboreal creature out of MOA, next.
    My last in was ELEGIST, and I thought it had a bit of the feel of yesterday’s puzzle to it. In a good way.
    It was always il pleut des cordes when I lived in France, which must be the stage before ‘raining stair rods’.
    1. Round our way they say ‘ill pleut en cordes’, but more often, ….’comme vache qui pisse’, a bit more basic.
  14. Heavens that took me back – to when I first moved to NYC. There was a version of it called Blue Nun that was advertised constantly on radio. And then there was Mateus Rose and Gallo Hearty Burgundy. Ou sont les boissons d’antans. 15.21
    2. Piat D’or (aka Piat D’og) is still around. I think that the advert was ‘The French adore … ‘ And what happened to Babycham?

      Edited at 2015-04-16 10:44 am (UTC)

      1. It was recycled after consumption with no additional treatment as Carling Black Label.
  15. Just over 12 mins – helped by spotting that it was probably going to be a pangram
  16. 19 minutes dead with a few ticks for good clues and QMs for queries.

    The former went against spellcheck, like blazes (although I now agree that pyromaniac would have been better) and non-starter.

    Queries were protean (meaning?), Albert (what’s the weapon?), freshet (DNK), sept (DNK) and perquisite (DNK). I’d have got the last of these much more quickly if I’d spotted the pangram.

    Add me to the “checkers, schmeckers, emu was my first in” club.

    Regarding your note for novices at 6 Z, in an across clue “on” pretty much always indicates at the back.

    Black Tower was the archetypal undrinkable Lieb.

    1. I mentioned it because it ain’t necessarily so, and because I’d contemplated PILL (bit of a stretch for “on edge”) and wondered whether I had ever passed up the chance to try PRIM. Or, indeed, RIMP.
  17. Much like others – no real problems but a bit of head scratching over things like arsonists “liking” fire – clearly not necessarily true. Then the blog reminded me of some truely awful wines like Mateus Rose. I have to go and lie down.
  18. Unlike most, I struggled quite a bit with this one taking just under 40 mins. I put some of it down to using an iPad because, with both long down clues being anagrams, I just couldn’t mentally unscramble them for ages. Only DNK was FRESHET.
  19. Unsettled by ‘set against’ = ‘lay’; ‘kick’ = ‘shin’; ‘keen’ as noun. I see the last’s genuine but the other two feel a bit disreputable. Since no-one’s bothered I suppose I must be missing something – I hope so.
    1. ‘Set’ is just ‘lay’. ‘Shin’ meaning to kick in the shins is in Chambers and Collins.
  20. About 20 minutes, ending with SPELLCHECK/SEPT. I looked up SEPT afterwards because I’d never heard of that meaning. I knew everything else, though, even Bootle being vaguely familiar. It must have appeared here as I have no other way of knowing it. I recall the various versions of the LIEB… mentioned here. But what I more clearly recalled after reading the comments here, and z’s mention of Carling’s, was their advertising slogan: Hey Mabel! Another Black Label! Regards.
    1. Reasonably sure Bootle has appeared here, but in conversation: mctext has mentioned growing up in Bootle, from memory.
      Very tired and didn’t feel up to making the effort, so went for aids for PLAINTIFF and STEW, of all things. Otherwise same lacunae in knowledge as everyone else.
      Rob
  21. 8:07 for me, so it could have gone a lot worse (as well as somewhat better).

    Like tringmardo I managed to resist bunging in SHELLSHOCK at 1ac.

    A pleasant, straightforward solve.

  23. Four and three-quarter hours for me although, to be fair, that did include a break while I had a shower, drove into town, had a superb Greek meal and returned home. Actual solving time probably around half an hour.

    DNK “halbert”, and wasn’t at all sure. I had a half memory of a “halbard” (which doesn’t exist) being some sort of medieval tunic (which it isn’t). Also DNK SEPT, which was too close to “sect” for my liking. Still, all’s well that ends well.

    Failed to parse ELEGIST, and wondered if there was some famous (though clearly not that famous) write called “Keen”. Nor did I know FRESHET as anything except a small stream. Fortunately, the wordplay and checkers were enough.

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