26410 Caesar adsum iam forte: Latin for speakers of other languages.

Author   ZabadakPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

My 17’ 22” demonstrates the care with which I approached this pleasant little number, checking every clue for proper and satisfactory wordplay and checking for typos at the end. It’s not every day I outpace Verlaine, though, and I look forward to reading his excuse. I thought this rather on the easy side, with lots of Times standards and a balanced selection of clue devices, nothing much to frighten the horses. I mean, yes, there’s some Latin, but of the kind that is pretty well counts as English, so much so that Google can’t be bothered to translate. And there’s a bit of cricket, but even that looks like it’s designed to provoke the I-don’t-do-cricket grumpies and doesn’t really need cricketing knowledge. In the following observations, definitios in the reproduced clues are in italics, answers in BOLD CAPITALS.
Across
1.  Provide what’s needed to involve companion fielder? (7)
CATCHER The not-really-cricket question, since cricket catchers tend to have exotic and potentially gigglesome names: leg slip, fly slip, gully, silly mid on. More rounders. CATER with an inserted C(ompanion of) H(onour)
5. Seconddrink, then another (7)
SUPPORT A verbal drink and a nounal one
9.  Two graduates going in change one’s college(4,5)
ALMA MATER.Just for fun, I ran this through Google Translate, and it came up with….alma mater. So it’s Latin you’re supposed to know dipso fatso. Means “kindly/bounteous mother”. Your two graduates are both MA’s and take consecutive places in ALTER, change.
10. Love element in abstract style(2,3)
OP ART Op(tical) art was designed to appear to be moving. The term, if not the style, was introduced in the Sixties, so if you can remember it, you weren’t really there. Trippy with or without chemical or herbal assistance. Simple wordplay places 0 (love) in front of PART element, and you’ll notice the space appears to move to the right. Groovy.
11. Chapter in story reversed brilliant success(5)
ÉCLAT Reverse TALE for story around C(hapter)
12. Male in each community coming out (9)
EMANATION As well as being per, each can be just EA. Insert M(ale) and append NATION for community
13. Lowerunder sea, began to slip (8,5)
ABERDEEN ANGUS Our first anagram, signalled by “to slip” and fuelled by UNDER SEA BEGAN
17. Plot resolverunknown in Aeneid as much revised (4,2,7)
DEUS EX MACHINA A device for getting an author out of a hole he never should have dug. Here’s one, from Life of Brian. Our second anagram, and second bit of Latin, “revised” from the assembly of AENEID AS MUCH plus X (unknown)
21. Language tested by Liberal on Conservative answer (9)
PROVENÇALYes, yes, it’s a language as well as a place, French with a Spanish lisp. Rather wonderfully, “hello” is “adieu” in  Provençal, which must cause riotous amusement on the border (if you can find it). For our purpose, Proven is a translation of tested, to which you add (in a sequence I’ll leave to you to decide) C(onservative), A(nswer) and L(iberal)
24. Fabulist initially allowed revolutionary attitude(5)
AESOP How many creators of fables do you know? Right. The initial letter of Allowed and a reverse of POSE ( attitude)
25. Still at the crease, no boundaries in Perth(5)
INERT Looks a lot like a cricket clue, and the wordplay is indeed cricketous. At the crease IN, pERTh without its boundaries.
26. Daughter on court after game fragments (9)
MATCHWOOD D(aughter) WOO court, MATCH game. Assemble with care.
27. Falls back once more having run ahead initially (7)
NIAGARA Well, it was never going to be Pissing Mare (sic) or Reichenbach. Reverse AGAIN (once more) and insert the initial letters of Run Ahead
28. Wildliferights must protect old English river (3,4)
ROE DEER Two R(ights) to be precise, surrounding O(ld) E(nglish) DEE, which is indeed a river.

Down
1.  Husband in cloak left union group(6)
CHAPEL Primarily a union of printers or journalists. Take H(usband), CAPE (cloak) and L(eft) and follow the instructions.
2.  I’m an adult flogged in foreign state(5,4)
TAMIL NADU Bottom right of India, produced for our amusement by throwing the letters of I’M AN ADULT into the air and (with the help of the anagram fairy*) watching them fall neatly into place. The anagram indicator, flogged, introduces the first of two cruel and unusual punishments employed by Johnny Foreigner. Tut tut.
* See 17ac
3.  In time Mark lost one leg! (4,3)
HOME TIE In is Crossword for HOME, take the M(ark) out of TImE
4. City scoundrel and US lawyer married (9)
This could be ROTTERDAM or anywhere
Liverpool or Rome
‘Cause ROTTERDAMis anywhere
Anywhere alone
Well no, it can only be Rotterdam, because scoundrel is a RAT ROTTER, a US lawyer is a DA (I know that from Perry Mason on a 9 inch b&w Bakelite® telly) and M comes from Married.
5. Country squire’s first visionary sent heavenward(5)
SYRIA Is it in bad taste to use poor Syria in this trivial pursuit? Take the S from Squire, decide visionary as an adjective is AIRY and reverse it as prompted by “sent heavenward”.
6.  Men, having split apart, perhaps maintaining correspondence? (3,4)
PRO RATA Hey! More Latin! Primarily as seen in job adverts, where it means you’re going to get a lot less than the juicy 30 grand in the headline. An anagram of APART surrounds our O(ther) R(anks), men.
7.  Aleppo man in houses of certain Arabs?(5)
OMANI Hidden (houses) in AleppO MAN In. See 5d. One of the world’s oldest continuous cities is now mostly rubble.
8. Enormous femalein States exploded (8)
TITANESS Yes, I first put giantess with no regard for the wordplay, a straight anagram of in States. What a strange surface!
14. Nonstop flight? (9)
ESCALATOR A moving staircase, what what?
15. Happy to dispense biblical justice to old PM (9)
GLADSTONE.  Not a particularly fit punishment for one who sought to rescue prostitutes rather than bring them to biblical justice (see above, Johnny Foreigner) GLAD for happy precedes .
16. Notice opportunity that may provide home for small charge(8)
ADOPTION AD(vert) plus OPTION choice
18. Elite artist is complex woman(7)
ELECTRA Jung’s plundering of Greek myths to provide a catchy title for girls competing with their mothers for their fathers’ attention. The wordplay is not at all complex: elite morphs to ELECT, and the artist is a R(oyal) A(cademician)
19. One tool under vehicle in work that’s Scottish?(7)
IVANHOE That’ll be I (one) and HOE (tool) under VAN (vehicle). Wally Scott, author
20. Rest associate with Republican to seize power(6)
SPIDER In snooker, a device to allow a cuing action over the top of an intervening ball. Associate with give SIDE, add R(epublican) and insert P(ower
22. Last letter‘s nothing great(5)
OMEGA Possibly the fastest repeat in Times history, turning up two days ago in the Hayley Dixon effort. Easy peasy: 0 (nothing) MEGA great.
23. Male in unconscious state — this gives pause(5)
COMMA You know what? I don’t think you need me to explain this.

62 comments on “26410 Caesar adsum iam forte: Latin for speakers of other languages.”

  1. This threatened to be one of my vanishingly few under-10s, but I dithered and wavered over 3d (I don’t do cricket, he said grumpily); should have thought of ‘in’, though. Biffable clues, like 17ac (enumeration and def), 24ac, as Z says. Had no idea what a SPIDER was doing here, but inferred that it’s a rest, as well as a frying pan; now, thanks to Z, I know it’s a rest in snooker.
  2. …I thought DEUX ES MACHINA was dodgy when I entered it, and I was right. Or wrong, if you want to take the negative view.

    Does any animal have a higher “mentioned in crosswords” to “mentioned in real life” ratio than the ROE DEER? I doubt it.

    Nice crossword and great blog. Thanks setter and Z.

  3. … an easy puzzle, but I liked the Latin. Happened to be discussing the DEUS EX MACHINA in a seminar lately, with regard to the Jonsonian Masque where the part was often played by the King himself.

    20dn struck a chord with yesterday’s Brendan in the Other Place. US solvers may (or may not) see the funny side of that puzzle depending on their political allegiances.

    1. I find it hard to believe that the relevant group includes any Times or Guardian cryptic solvers.
      2. I wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece last September predicting a Trump presidency. Who knew it would prove so (potentially) prescient?
              1. As Sam Johnson put it, we more frequently require to be reminded than informed.
  4. 27 minutes, although would have got dangerously close to Verlaine territory had I not stuck ‘Inara’ in at 7dn. Since she’s a Hittite goddess, I reckon she could easily metamorphose into an Aleppo man if the mood took her. PRO RATA last in.

    Scott has fallen so much out of fashion that I wonder of I’m the only regular here that’s read Ivanhoe. His novels set in Scotland (frequently with English heroes – Scott knew which side his bread was buttered) are generally better, The Antiquary being the pick, not least because it is the wittiest of his works.

  5. Mostly straightforward 32 minutes with 13ac as last one in for some unaccountable reason.
    1. Took me a while to see it too. With just the first A and the D, I was lured by ACCIDENT PRONE! Quite appropriate eh?
  6. 9:47 … a friendly return after a couple of lazy weeks in Spain — something about coffee on a patio in the morning sun makes timing a puzzle seem quite unnecessary, one day back in the UK and it’s suddenly important again. Thanks for easing me back, Z8, with a very Spanish-sounding definitios in your intro — please don’t change it!

    Wouldn’t you know it, just yesterday I encountered ESCALATORs of the non-nonstop variety, those clever ones that come to rest when no one’s around and which, abetted by a very continental disdain for signage, allow the more dimwitted among us to discover that we have started up the down escalator only after taking several brisk steps up it, whereupon it springs into action. There was a chap sitting at an empty desk nearby, for no obvious reason, who watched without expression or comment as I picked my self and my suitcase off the floor. I love a country where someone gets paid to sit and cause embarrassment to travellers. I wonder what his job title is.

    Edited at 2016-05-12 06:18 am (UTC)

  7. Yay… first all correct in a long time, but my LOI, an unparsed HOME TIE (something to do with cricket), could quite easily have been ‘home tee’ (something to do with golf?).

    All others ok, with, as has been noted, some easy opportunities for biffing.

    Thanks for the blog, Z, and the Beautiful South ear worm that I spect will be with me all day…

    1. The HOME TIE is more likely to be from football, where in cup competitions such as the Champion’s League you play home and away legs once you get to the knock-out stages. At Tottenham, we call such ties “being embarrassed by the Spanish clubs”
      1. From memory Tottenham’s only had 2 knock-out ties in the Champion’s League (my apostrophe). Totally outplayed by Milan, but ultimately overcoming them. And a reasonable effort against Real, though ultimately succumbing.
        Rob
    2. In a nice quirk of timing, Paul Heaton’s about to guest on the radio show I’m listening to!
  8. 25′, with PROVENCAL nearly LOI. TITANESS straight in after the recent appearance in a clue. Spotted 3d quickly, loving cricket, hating football, but able to distinguish the legs. First Test starts next Thursday. Unable at the time to parse it though, thanks blogger. Never read Scott, but isn’t Ivanhoe the one with Robin Hood?
  9. Easy but pleasant puzzle with no question marks. A lot of places it seemed to me as I solved. Thought IVANHOE was a film and like Olivia recall Elizabeth Taylor in it. Dorset is over run by ROE DEER so see them quite frequently on walks and on the golf course
  10. The one that came to mind was the one in the rye, since cricket and baseball didn’t quite seem to fit. Speaking of fields, I’ve been raising a nice crop of typos lately and today was the latest (PRO RARA) which was a pity because I was in the 10 minute range for once. Yup, robrolfe, Robin Hood (of Locksley) was in it and so was Elizabeth Taylor in the 50s movie of it. Welcome back Sotira.
  11. FOI as above, so don’t read my novel. I once played as a ringer in a cricket match, and unusually for me held a catch. I can still hear the little lad who was scorer yelling out “catcher’s name?” and me trying to find out what I was called. Enjoyable puzzle, I thought, finished in a sedate forty minutes.
  12. It happens less often lately that I do these after coming home sozzled from the pub, but so it occurred tonight. Would have been somewhere in the 10 minute region, except that my inebriated brain just couldn’t make head nor tail of H_M_ T_E, for the better part of 10 minutes. Even despite my complete lack of interest in sporting matters I probably should have been able to navigate that one, eh, it seems simple enough the morning after!
  13. 20 minutes, by far the easiest of the week, partly because some of the longer answers could be biffed with only a couple of checkers. In fact I didn’t even need those for 17, where the letter count was enough. A slight hold-up with 12, which I entered initially as EMANATING, wondering if TING was some new word; then I got 8d, so TING became TION, even weirder; finally I realized my parsing was wrong, and ‘Male’ was M not MAN. That little error held me up a couple of minutes.
    As dj says, easy but pleasant with nothing to query.
  14. 24:55. Good to see our old friend the ROE DEER again. As they are near Jimbo in Dorset they’re also popular up here in Hampshire. I reckon I’ve also seen TAMIL NADU once or twice here before in the past year, which is more than outside of crosswordland!
    1. My apologies to the roe deer, now that google tells me there are 500,000 of them in Britain.

      Mind you there are 70 million people in Tamil Nadu…

  16. 17 mins which, if I infer (or is it deduce?) his time correctly, gives me my first ever sub-Verlaine. I now know how the folks in Leicester felt! Nothing obscure for me today – the more foreign phrases (and the absence of flora) the better!
  17. Sed Brutus passus sum…… A pleasant 35 minutes spent on this one, with no particular hold ups. FOI, TAMIL NADU, LOI, PROVENCAL. Smiled at ESCALATOR and ADOPTION. Spotted the anagram at 17ac which was made easy by the E from ELECTRA. Thanks to Z for another entertaining blog and to the setter.
  18. 9 minutes. Nothing much to add really: straightforward, lots of biffing, still quite fun.
  19. For some reason I found this a lot trickier than Tuesday’s. Held up in the SW by 21a, 14d and 16d (LOI). Seems obvious now they’re in!
  20. About 20 minutes, in a leisurely solve. Ended with HOME TIE, whatever that is. It fit. CHAPEL was also a bit odd, since our union members over here wouldn’t often go close to any chapels. ‘Visionary’ as ‘airy’ furrowed my brow for a while as well. But came home safely for all that. Regards.

    1. The part played by Methodists and other non-conformists in the formation of Trades Unions is hard to overstate, and may have played a role in the choice of Chapel to describe meetings and local groupings.

      Edited at 2016-05-12 05:11 pm (UTC)

  21. 9 mins so I’m another who was on the setter’s wavelength. I also finished with HOME TIE , which I confess was biffed but parsed about 30 seconds after I entered it, and I sympathise with V having to try and parse it after an evening on the sauce. I agree with Z8 that it relates to football rather than cricket, although I would always call it the “home leg”.

  22. Something about today’s crossword has been nagging me today. With Aleppo and Syria featured, and a fat lady exploding in the States, there’s a bit of a dark shadow over this otherwise jolly jaunt. Of course, we’re used to ignoring surfaces and treating words as just collections of letters, but….

  24. A gentle 20 minute stroll here with nothing to frighten the Aberdeen Anguses. Worried about tomorrow now! Thanks z8

    Edited at 2016-05-12 06:08 pm (UTC)

  25. 15 minutes rushed between golf and dentist, am now sorer and poorer, easy but liked the puzzle.
  26. Didn’t get to this until the afternoon, but pretty much zoomed through it until I got to HOME TIE which went in from definition alone. Helped I knew SPIDER and CATCHER straight off
  27. Just me then who thought Tamil Nadu was an awful clue, one of those abominations where an obscure and/or foreign word is clued by a blinking anagram?

    Tamil Danu for the record. I think I’m 1 and 3 for the week so far if that’s the right US notation.

  28. Oh dear. I snatched defeat from the jaws of victory on this one. I found it pretty chewy but persevered, and then blew it.

    My first mistake was putting “pen pals” in for 6d, despite the fact that it only fit about 30% of the parsing. That led me to the equally wrong “no art” at 10ac (“no art” being that well-known Japanese abstract movement based on the theatre of the same name). Then when it came to 13ac I just threw my hands up – taking care to set my glass down first, of course. Particularly galling because I knew that it had to be some manner of bovid.

    Oh dear oh dear. I feel a bottle of sloe gin coming on.

  29. Nothing particularly difficult, so why did it take me 55 minutes? My LOIs were in the NE corner: SUPPORT, then PRO RATA and OP ART and TITANESS. Well, actually SPIDER was my LOI after I convinced myself it couldn’t really be anything else. I couldn’t see why it was a rest and eventually decided it was probably, like hemidemisemiquaver, one of those quaint and astounding British names for musical notation. HOME TIE also fit the wordplay perfectly, but not any concept I could get my mind around. Just a typical crossword day, I suppose.

    Edited at 2016-05-12 10:09 pm (UTC)

  30. 10:36 for me, the last few minutes spent on 3dn. (I’m relieved to see that others – including verlaine! – also made heavy weather of this clue.)

    I seem to be in a minority in not really finding this puzzle terribly interesting. It just didn’t feel like a Times crosssword. KarenR on the TCC forum confesses to having been held up by bunging in ESCHERIAN for 14dn, a delightful answer which would have raised the tone considerably if it had been correct.

  31. Arrived here from the QC and made goodish progress, with 4 clues left. Figured PRO RATA would be Latin, but missed the Other Ranks. Never heard of Op Art and was trying elements such as ‘Na’, up the wrong tree there. But definitely getting better. The QC and its blog is good training.
  32. Roe deer have deemed it appropriate to dine off the plants in our (fenced) garden. Pleased to say they are now deterred by an ultrasonic scarer, which seems to work.

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