Saturday Times 25293 (13th Oct)

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
Solving time 20:28 – should’ve been a bit quicker but I carelessly bunged in SADDLE BAG for 15D, which really threw me and stopped me getting the two long answers for a few minutes. Apart from that it was all fairly straightforward – even the two unknowns at 11A and 2D had very helpful wordplay and went straight in.

Good luck to those of you going to the Times Crossword Championships today. Unfortunately I won’t be there as I’ve had a gout attack and my foot’s too swollen to get a shoe on. Anyway, on with last week’s puzzle…

Across
1 MAKES UP – MAKE SUP, ref. the saying “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”
5 WEIGH-IN – sounds like “way in”
9 TEA LEAVES – (elevates a)*, Cockney rhyming slang for thieves.
10 WIDOW – WINDOW (opportunity) minus N (last letter of “occasion”).
11 LIKUD – hidden reversed in “departed UK – ill-disposed”. The ruling conservative political party in Israel.
12 REKINDLED – R.E. (Royal Engineers = soldiers) + KIND LED (sort not born leaders).
14 OVER MY DEAD BODY – MY (gracious) + DEAD BODY (remains), after OVER (maiden, perhaps).
17 POWER BREAKFAST – POWER (might) + BREAK (rest) + FAST (swiftly).
21 PINEAPPLE – (plane, pipe)*
23 EMMET – MET (settled) next to ‘EM (border as pronounced in an East London borough). An old word for an ant.
24 AT SEA – alternate letters of “Take a satnav”, reversed.
25 BEER BELLY – cryptic definition, made me smile!
26 YORKIST – YORK (bowl, cricketing term meaning to bowl a batsman out with a full-pitched delivery) + IS + T (meeting at right-angles, e.g. a junction).
27 NIGGARD – NIG(h) (to hand briefly) + DRAG (yank) reversed. In answer to jackkt’s question in yesterday’s blog, here’s an example. You can capitalise an ordinary noun to deceive (as long as it makes sense capitalised), but you can’t drop the capital from a proper noun. Unless you’re the setter of the TLS crossword, who breaks that particular rule all the time!

Down
1 METTLE – ME (immediate forerunner of FA – as in doh, ray, me etc) + TITLE (Premiership, say) without the I (one lacking). Brilliant lift-and-separate clue.
2 KHARKIV – R (mayor finally) inside KHAKI (material for military) + V(olume). Ukraine’s second-largest city.
3 SLENDERER – LEND (advance) inside SERE (dry) + R(un).
4 POVERTY TRAP – OP reversed (upcoming work) + (part time very)*, &lit.
5 WAS – WASH (bath) without the H (no longer hot).
6 IOWAN – O (nothing) inside I (single) + WAN (white).
7 HIDALGO – HI (welcome) + GLAD reversed (on the way up pleased) + O(ld).
8 NOWADAYS – (do any WAS)*, the answer to 5dn making up part of the anagram fodder.
13 KEEP AN EYE ON – KEY (principal) + EON (time), around E (centre of clear) + PANE (glass).
15 DUFFEL BAG – DUFF (pants, i.e. rubbish) + G(ood), ABLE (fit) reversed.
16 EPIPHANY – E(nglish) + PIP (seed) + HAY (grass) around N(orth) (point).
18 WINDSOR – WIN (gain) + DSO (Distinguished Service Order, high military honour) + R(ight).
19 SOMALIA – (aim also)*
20 STAYED – double definition.
22 AMATI – A + MAT (tangle) + I(sland). Famous family of Italian violin-makers.
25 BIT – double definition.

25 comments on “Saturday Times 25293 (13th Oct)”

  1. 27′, far and away the fastest Saturday cryptic I’ve ever done–I’m usually happy to get in under the hour. DNK the rhyming slang at 9ac, but fortunately that didn’t slow me down much once I had some checkers. I didn’t know that Kharkhov was now Kharkhiv, but the wordplay was transparent enough. I’d never have thought of defining ‘drag’ (what linguists call an activity verb) as ‘yank’ (an achievement verb): he’s dragging/??yanking the corpse off the stage, he’s yanking/??dragging the flowers out of the vases, he suddenly yanked/??dragged my hat off, etc. (Bet Jack will have an example from Chambers that will shut me up.)
    I was waiting for this blog the whole week, to find out how 1d worked. I had naively taken FA to refer to football, and assumed there was some sort of preliminary title match, or earlier version, or some such that could explain ME; if I could print “D’oh!” here in 20-point type, I would. Splendid clue! COD with oak-leaf cluster. But 15d was no slouch, either.
    1. No, I don’t have anything to offer, Kevin, except to note that Collins Thesaurus has ‘yank’ for ‘drag’ but not vice versa. However as has been commented in the past, thesaurus listings are not hard and fast proof of much.

      I tend to think of ‘yank’ as being something short and sharp whereas ‘drag’ is a longer haul of something that offers resistance. I rather like your ‘corpse’ example where undoubtedly either word could be used but would they convey the exactly the same meaning?

      1. I didn’t really pick up on this before, but I think it’s significant that Bradford’s doesn’t have YANK under DRAG or vice versa. However, Chambers does have one definition under drag, “to pull roughly and violently”, which is fairly close.
        1. I don’t see the violently part in ‘drag’, and SOED backs me up. The only thing I see in common is that they’re both acts of pulling. I can’t think of a context in which the words are intersubstitutable.
  2. Never seen 2dn spelt with an i instead of an o before.
    Not sure what the “borough” is doing in 23ac, the clue seems better off without it. My loi.

    Sorry I won’t see you today Andy. Good luck to all the entrants!

    1. I think it’s a misdirection that greatly helps the surface as all boroughs have borders/boundaries whereas to apply the term to East London in general would be less likely. It certainly confused me anyway, trying to work out which boroughs are in the east and how they might be relevant to clue.
  3. 40 minutes but with one wrong. It was 2dn that did for me, the only one I cheated on. As things turned out I’d have done better to have trusted to the wordplay which originally led me to KHARKIV but when I looked it up in Collins I found the city (of which I’ve never heard despite my Russian ancestry!) was listed as KHARKOV, so in it went to the grid on the assumption that the cloth must have an alternative version.

    Didn’t understand 1ac before coming here and I never heard of LIKUD.

    I was really pleased when I finally cracked 1d which I only got after I had spotted the tonic-sol-fa reference.

    Thanks for the example re capitalization, Andy. I hope it will stick in my brain this time but wouldn’t count on it.

    Returning to my original userpic today to mark the occasion and will enjoy my day all the more for not being part of it. Needless to say, good luck to all those braver than me who put themselves through the ordeal.

    Edited at 2012-10-20 08:48 am (UTC)

  4. Got this right for a change, in half an hour, nothing remarkable or unknown, easier than the usual Saturday job.
  5. Mettle. Doh Ray Me etc.. But equally well, why not Do Re Mi etc. This would lead to ‘mittle’ rather than ‘mettle’
    1. Why not Do Re Mi? Because “mittle” (quite part from not existing) wouldn’t satisfy ALL the components of the clue.
  6. 31:34 for this. EMMET (meaning ant, as opposed to tourist) and KHARKIV were new to me.
    I crashed and burned at the championship this morning, with my last three bunged-in answers in the last minute all proving wrong, and they were spread across two puzzles so I only actually solved one correctly. And that’s assuming I didn’t make a stupid mistake in the first one, because I didn’t get time to check. Ah well, there’s always next year…
    1. We’ve had EMMET here at least once–a while back, I think–where I learned that it also means (meant?) ‘outsider’ or something like that in Cornwall or some place like that. I knew it from NY Times puzzles.
      1. Yes, it means “tourist” in Cornwall. Just down the road in Devon they say “grockle”.
  7. 41 minutes, with Kharkiv not causing a problem as the Ukrainian styling was known from the Euros.
  8. .. who once again has won the Times Crossword Championship in convincing fashion, completing all three crosswords in the grand final in about 20 minutes. Second was Jason James, who took about 30 minutes, a considerable feat in itself.

    Well done to all the competitors!

  9. Took 44 minutes and still got one wrong. I bunged in KHARKOV when I had all the checkers and didn’t bother with the cryptic. Never a good idea. I guessed EMMET from the definition but couldn’t see where the EM came from. I think it’s a dreadful clue but am grateful for the explanation nevertheless. Ann
  10. Nice to see ulaca’s comment about KHARKIV. Had it not been for Euro 2012 I would probably not have gone with the “proper” spelling (I hope in this forum that’s not a controversial assertion.

    Interesting point about the “East London borough” – one of those occasions where you add a bit for the sake of the surface in the hope that the effect on the cryptic reading will be neutral

    Sorry to hear about Andy’s gout. But as ever thanks for the blog and all the comments.

  11. 11:39 for me.

    I’ve a tried and tested rule which says: “never put in a word you’ve not heard of unless you’re absolutely desperate”. But with 2dn, there either had to be an alternative spelling of the familiar KHARKOV or an alternative spelling of KHAKI, and the former seemed decidedly more likely.

    Sorry you didn’t make it to the Championship this year, Andy. I was wondering what had happened to you.

  12. Thanks for posting the results here – congratulations to Jason this year, as well as, invitably, to Mark for another superb result. Good to have met JerryW in person as well as other crossword friends – hope to see you all again next year.

    Hilary Marchant

  13. I can’t find the next one blogged anywhere on the site. Or anything between 25,293 and 25,300.
    1. They’re all here. You need to go backwards from this one, as it’s a Saturday puzzle and blogged a week later. If you click on “Previous 10” at the bottom of the page you’ll find the ones you’re looking for.

      Alternatively you can navigate with the calendar on the right of the screen and go directly to that day’s blog entry.

      1. Thanks! I sort of figured that was the case, had run into the Saturday puzzle thing before. Can’t go backward, though, or I’ll see puzzles I haven’t yet worked. So I’ll try to figure out what day this one appeared in Merrie Olde England. I usually just type “Times” and the puzzle number in Google and bingo, the Times for the Times entry is the second link. But I drew a blank this time. Also when I searched “site:http://times-xwd-times.livejournal.com/” with the number.
        1. “…I’ll try to figure out what day this one appeared…” Ha ha. Absurdly easy.
          I see what my problem was in searching: that puzzle is misnumbered as 24924.
          1. Well, 25924 actually. People are normally very quick to spot errors like that, so I’m surprised this wasn’t picked up before. I’ll get the blogger to correct it. Thanks.

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