I’m not particularly enthusiastic about my 21.12 time – I couldn’t get a foothold in the NW and went around the grid from the NE quarter, sometimes with only bit of answers entered. It all came together in the end. I think there are a few rather iffy bits, and certainly some that derive more from the other side of the Pond rather than from the King’s English. But I don’t think it’s particularly frightening and early times are pretty quick.
Definitions underlined in italics, excluded letters are [enclosed] and I make up most of the rest.
| Across | |
| 1 | One breaking up light or formal gathering so lovelessly (5) |
| PRISM – PRIM for formal gathers, takes in, SO without its 0 or love. | |
| 4 | Spars with parent boxing in street with son (9) |
| MAINMASTS – I would have said that spars were the transverse rods that support the sails rather than the masts, which held me up a while, but I’m prepared to accept Chambers’ definition of spar(s) as being “a general term for masts, yards, booms, gaffs, etc”. Anyway, it’s parent MAMA with IN enclosed followed by ST[reet] and S[on] | |
| 9 | Music practice — it may contain hard, boring bit (4,5) |
| ROCK DRILL – Ah, endlessly running up and down your scales and arpeggios. But not here. Music translates to ROCK and practice to DRILL, and it had better contain a hard bit or it’s not going far. | |
| 10 | Powerful person, one helping to draw the line? (5) |
| RULER – Two definitions, one whimsical. | |
| 11 | Embellished lecture beginning to nark dons (6) |
| ORNATE – To lecture is to ORATE. The N of nark clothes itself therewith. | |
| 12 | Put off agent employed to hold line (8) |
| REPULSED – REP for agent, USED for employed, L[ine] inserted. | |
| 14 | One keen on deserts is most erratic, moving out of south (10) |
| MERITOCRAT – An anagram (moving) of MOST ERRATIC minus the S[outh]. The just pronunciation of deserts helps. | |
| 16 | It’s used in branding record and disc (4) |
| LOGO – That’s LOG for record and O representing disc. | |
| 19 | Romance and alcohol on vacation one’s spent in Rio (4) |
| REAL – Both RomancE and AlcohoL are emptied. Currency in Brazil. | |
| 20 | Traveller must respect this awfully simple diet (5,5) |
| SPEED LIMIT – A simple anagram (awfully) of SIMPLE DIET. | |
| 22 | Pair cycling around interrupts one who dislikes trouble (3,5) |
| HOT WATER – TWO is the pair that cycles to become OTW, placed inside HATER for one who dislikes. | |
| 23 | Race, going from right to left? It helps if one has a break (6) |
| SPLINT – The race is a SPRINT, in which the R[ight] becomes L[eft]. Not a reversal clue, then. | |
| 26 | To a large extent, show assent about menu’s content (2,3) |
| NO END – Show assent NOD, and the EN innards of menu fill in. | |
| 27 | Worshipper, I understood, needing to swap sides (9) |
| IDEALISER – Start with I REALISED for I understood, and swap the R and D from each end. I’m just about OK with the definition, though I don’t think it’s ideal and I’m not loving it. | |
| 28 | Failed to observe friend with gin dancing around (9) |
| INFRINGED – As in did not observed/obey the rules. An anagram (dancing around) of FRIEND and GIN | |
| 29 | One of the Pretenders with cover of Precious — flipping outstanding! (5) |
| PSEUD – The first and last of P[recious] plus DUE for outstanding “flipping”. And here it is! | |
| Down | |
| 1 | A one-time artiste (9) |
| PERFORMER – It’s that sneaky A=PER again, plus FORMER for one-time. | |
| 2 | Hot fire from the US or from South America once (5) |
| INCAN – Hot – the latest thing – gives IN, and (relying on Chambers) CAN, “to dismiss or sack from a job (N Am slang)” derives from fire. | |
| 3 | Requiring change in China, Buddhists may do so (8) |
| MEDITATE – EDIT for change inserted into MATE, Cockney rhyming slang from China plate. | |
| 4 | Lady could employ one male assistant briefly (4) |
| MAID – Not the strongest of clue IMHO, M[ale] plus AID[e] | |
| 5 | Naughty setter’s going to enjoy appearing in plot (3-7) |
| ILL-BEHAVED – Imagine our setter saying I’LL HAVE for I’m going to enjoy but put the HAVE bit inside BED for plot. Evil version of Rimmer from Red Dwarf: “First I’m going to lash you to within an inch of your life. And then….I’m going to have you….” | |
| 6 | Speak unclearly having knocked back double dose of alcohol (6) |
| MURMUR – The reverse of two RUMs | |
| 7 | Morale’s so poor where public flogging takes place (9) |
| SALESROOM – Apparently a N American version of saleroom. An anagram (poor) of MORALE’S SO | |
| 8 | Fiddle with projectiles going heavenwards (5) |
| STRAD – ivarius. DARTS are the projectiles upside down. | |
| 13 | Carol’s drinking some tea and dashing (10) |
| SCUPPERING – Carol is SING. Insert CUPPER which is (apparently) some tea, but I’d have spelled it CUPPA. So does Chambers. Dashing as in destroying. | |
| 15 | Carvery offering pan with grouse (5,4) |
| ROAST BEEF – Pan (criticise) gives ROAST, and grouse (complain) gives BEEF. | |
| 17 | Won glaring competition with revised tour dates (9) |
| OUTSTARED – An anagram (revised) of tour dates. | |
| 18 | Following border by Turkey, one goes on foot (4-4) |
| FLIP-FLOP – F[ollowing] LIP, border, plus FLOP for turkey, again “chiefly N American.” | |
| 21 | Fan of Independence Day in good article by Hello! (6) |
| GANDHI – D[ay] is inserted into G[ood] AN for article and HI for hello | |
| 22 | Chinese people with bits of information in Asian city (5) |
| HANOI – HAN are Chinese people, O and I are digital bits of information. | |
| 24 | Admission made by litigator tackling small problem (5) |
| ISSUE – A litigator might say “I SUE”. Insert S[mall] | |
| 25 | New guided tours advance (4) |
| LEND – LED for guided “tours” N[ew]. | |
I enjoyed this and managed to see what was going on pretty much on seeing the clue with the exception of MERITOCRAT and SCUPPERING, which took some time. Saw PRISM immediately but didn’t parse. I also thought that spars were horizontal, and masts vertical, but no. Yesterday, ROSBIF and today ROAST BEEF. Plenty of anagrams today. COD to ROCK DRILL for the misdirection.
Thanks Z.
I enjoyed this, even though I was forced to move from the iPad to the iPhone because of problems with letters getting ‘stuck’ in the grid. In fact, the only thing that irked me was the mention of FLIP-FLOPS – footwear associated with the seventh circle of Hell. 29:14.
I’m pleased that others found this a walk in the park, but I struggled and felt pleased just to finish which I did in about 55. I had a particularly hard time in the top left, with PRISM, ROCK DRILL, INCAN and PERFORMER being among the last to fall. I enjoyed the long anagrams but they weren’t easy. Thanks to Z, especially for explaining SCUPPERING. I couldn’t figure CUPPER and didn’t get that sense of dash either.
From The Times They Are A-Changing:
Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticise what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly ageing
Please get out of the new one if you can’t LEND your hand
For the times they are a-changing
LOI was the reluctantly entered SCUPPERING, and I still have not found CUPPER meaning a spot of tea in any dictionary. Surely a homophone indicator was inadvertently dropped.
Threw myself off for quite a while by confidently writing TOWER (“a tower of industry,” say) instead of RULER.
SOED has it: cupper – noun var. of cuppa.
CUPPER is clearly a lexicologistically-created back-formation from ‘cuppa’ – the whole point of which is that the spelling reflects the affectionate informality.
33 minutes and very enjoyable.
I wasn’t entirely happy with ‘worshipper / IDEALISER’ as a definition, and the wordplay ‘swapping sides’ confused me for a while because in other clues that often means changing or swapping L for R or vice versa.
8.52, rather fun, MER at ‘cupper’ but it had to be, and Collins also gives it as an alternate spelling.
Thanks both.
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
(When You are Old, Yeats)
30 mins with a cuppa pre-brekker. I quite liked it, mostly PerFormer.
Ta setter and Z
11:16. A massive breeze-block for me today. All but 27ac done in about 6m, then over 5 minutes staring at that one. I considered IDEALISER early but rejected it on the basis that 1) it’s not really a word, 2) idealise doesn’t mean worship and 3) I couldn’t see how the wordplay worked, fixated on a R/L swap somewhere. Eventually I just bunged it in because I couldn’t think of any other words, found to my surprise that I had an all-green grid, and then instantaneously saw how the clue worked.
A bit of a frustrating experience.
13.40
Not keen on “in good article” for GAND or the superfluous “hard” in 9ac, but otherwise a decent workout. Nice anagrams for OUTSTARED and SPEED LIMIT.
LOI LEND (after trying to make LEAD work, which it didn’t)
COD PSEUD (though not strictly a cover: ‘Precious’ was the first song The Pretenders played at their initial rehearsal, and the opening track on their first album. The last verse is particularly fine.)
We sat next to Chrissie Hynde in a restaurant last week. At least my wife swears it was her.
There’s a guy works down the chip shop swears he’s Elvis ….
Saw The Pretenders in the old Apollo in Glasgow. Possibly the loudest band I’ve ever heard. A terrific live band. And Chrissie? Drool.
39:01. a slightly groggy solve which normally means I stare and give up – but weirdly I felt I was on the right wavelength for much of this. I really liked the puzzle, MAINMASTS was really satisfying to get from the wordplay. thank you!
21:38* (with not 1 but 2 typos)
This felt as if it should have been quicker but then I always think that having got to the end.
Like our blogger I initially failed in the NW but found solace in the SW and worked my way around the grid from there. MERITOCRAT was a new one to me but the checkers saw to that and I didn’t think too hard about CUPPER because it had to be.
Here’s hoping for a keener eye and a green grid tomorrow.
Thanks to both.
31 minutes with LOI SCUPPERING, thrown by the CUPPA spelling. POI was IDEALISER, put in with no conviction. Otherwise enjoyable. COD to PSEUD. Thank you Z and setter.
Just over 20 minutes.
– NHO MAINMASTS but got there from wordplay and checkers
– Not familiar with the ‘cupper’ spelling but with the checkers SCUPPERING had to be right
– Didn’t understand the ‘oi’ part of HANOI
Thanks Zabadak and setter.
FOI Ruler
LOI Meritocrat
COD Performer
33 mins. Some great misdirection in Deserts, Flogging etc and lots of warm feeling of achievement when the penny drops.
Thanks for explaining the D in GANDHI which I mistakenly thought was Good = GD and grumped about.
Nice to see ROAST BEEF following yesterdays ROSBIF. Thats humourous editing. Or just coincidence.
COD to MERITOCRAT.
Thanks both.
From INCAN to IDEALISER in 27:22 with a lot of bafflement in between. Eyebrows were raised at CUPPER and I failed to parse PRISM. PERFORMER and MERITOCRAT were very late entries. Thanks setter and Z.
It’s ‘cuppa’, and always has been, whatever any dictionary claims. Poor clueing. Liked the rest of this, which was challenging but fair.
I’ve never heard ‘cupper’ either, but if a setter can’t rely on the dictionary, they’re a bit stuck!
This is a curious one. CUPPER doesn’t appear in the OED (or ODE), and although it’s given as an alternative in Collins none of the dozens of examples they give spells it that way. Lexicographers don’t just make things up though, they must have found real-life examples.
Hadn’t seen that, just accepted cup without thinking. Cuppa would be a more usual Brit word.
Same here – I would always write ‘cuppa’ but I just accepted CUPPER as an alternative without really thinking about it.
I went with cup and wondered if Spering was the surname of some woman called Carol of whom I had not heard…
Maybe they wrote a few articles with the word in it, then found it in their corpus.
Yes, they do. Deliberate ‘mistakes’ are put in to catch out pirates, particularly, it seems, from the Far East. Same with cartographers. We drove along a road in Spain, years ago, that had been hewn out of a cliff face, with a drop of several hundred feet to the sea, and was barely the width of the car. Yet it appeared in Collins Road Atlas of Europe – not even just the Spanish one. My wife worked for Collins at the time, and jokingly complained to the one of the cartographers, who replied, “That’s nothing. We invented a lake shaped like an elephant in Switzerland.”
Interesting, I guess this could be one of those.
Yes. This crossword is a lake shaped like an elephant.
“Mountweazel” is one of the words used to describe such entries, though it’s in neither Chambers nor Collins.
Oh, I didn’t even look at “cuppa”
in Collins. I guess that’s all right then. (Though only in an accent where both spellings sound the same.)
There does seem to be a fixation on here with believing everything one reads in the dictionary must be correct. I definitely know it’s not, and hopefully you now may suspect it’s not, but too often it’s just a convenient crutch that comes to the setter’s rescue.
The Times crossword is fast becoming simply an extended dictionary-trawl, inducing many shrugs-on my part at least. I seem to be in a minority of one though.
A good crossword should require little or no recourse to a dictionary. I’d rather guess the word and be wrong. Even if I’m luckily correct, neither am I impressed post-solve with the discovery that it’s the 24th entry in the dictionary under that word. Especially if it’s qualified with ‘arch’ or ‘obs’.
Seconded!
19.27. A good puzzle I thought, though maid wasn’t up to the standard of other clues. Almost made a mess by trying scampering at 13 dn before realising it was another kind of dashing.
Idealiser took a while. Really liked Gandhi and meritocrat.
29:52 so just inside the half hour, but obviously on the slow side now I’m here and look at the other times. Didn’t like and NHO cupper it’s deffo cuppa! But I thought otherwise it was well and cleverly clued. LOIs were LEND and finally IDEALISER, because I was stuck on idoliser.
Thanks setter and blogger
Just under 30 minutes (which is good for me). Hesitated too long over salesroom and idealiser.
Very dim today, taking exactly an hour. Four perfectly simple anagrams defeated me for quite a while, even with all the checkers there. On several others I had the wrong end of the stick and they were really quite easy. I couldn’t, and can’t, explain why the setter bothered to include ‘briefly’ in 4dn: surely both an aid and an aide are assistants?
I think it has to do with the surface, which prompts us to think of the personal, fleshly assistant rather than the inanimate one!
About 20 mins.
I’ve only ever seen cupper in its plural form, cuppers. It’s a locution used at fancy schmancy universities to mean competitions for poshos in rowing, punting, Bollinger quaffing, etc.
Thanks, Z.
and in football, rugby, cricket and any other inter collegiate competition.
like the one you went to (teehee- I know!)
Busted! Good to see you, hope all’s well 😊
Steady but slow solve. Agree about idealiser which I saw pretty quickly but needed all the checking letters before being convinced it was right. Some nice constructions and concealment by the setter, include]ing the first and last across clues prism and pseud creating a nice symmetry. Last in was mainmasts – agree with the learned blogger’s comment on this. 43 mins.
20’50”, agree CUPPER can only be someone who using cups in quackery.
PSEUD LOI, the allusion passing me by.
Thanks z and setter.
17.30…. no real problems with this, though a MER at idealiser. I failed to parse Incan as I didn’t separate hot from fire, so this was inevitably my COD when it was explained to me, and half a point to the setter.
38:54
Not at the races today. Breeze-blocked for a while so took a short break, and of course, on return, all of the remaining answers dropped easily into place (even if I didn’t quite understand what was going on).
MAINMASTS built from cryptic.
SCUPPERED -show me one English person that would spell cuppa with an -er ending
FTP
MERITOCRAT (though assumed it must be something to do with ‘just deserts’)
IDEALISER – no idea what was going on, and the definition wasn’t the best
NHO ROCK DRILL
It was INCAN that freed the NW cludge, with 22a/22d, 27a and 29a all following in quick succession.
Thanks Z and setter
I looked at the comments just to see what kind of hammering CUPPER would get.
Well deserved imo.
20.24.
The you’ll get a kick out of seeing the flak the setter is getting for his Quickie!
But not well deserved, in that case, IMO.
18:50.
COD: MERITOCRAT
I thought that “maid” was fairly acceptable in the sense that “a lady may employ one”, i.e. a lady’s maid
DNF
Ran out of time at 22’ with only IDEALISER left to go. Doubt I’d have got it in another 22. My first MER – not good enough.
Otherwise smashing, with COD to MERITOCRAT.
Thanks all
I failed on Meritocrat. Didn’t think of those kind of deserts.
34 minutes (ignoring a brief interruption in the middle), but despite its being quite easy and with the shared complaints about IDEALISED and CUPPER I found it very enjoyable. The pennies didn’t take long to drop, but they raised a smile every time. So good value for money (measured in coppers, of course, or was that cuppers?).