Times 25234 – Dinka or Luo, anyone?

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 65 Minutes

Music: None, golf on TV

I found this one rather difficult. There are a few unusual words, and in some cases the wordplay is not particularly helpful. I had to make a few guesses, particularly for the long anagram. Since there are not many obvious ones, I am not omitting much tonight.

While I completed the puzzle and was pretty sure it is correct, there were a couple of clues I don’t fully understand. Fortunately, I managed to figure them out while writing the blog.

Across
1 AMULET, A MULE + [exhibi]T. My first in.
5 RIGHT OFF, sounds like WRITE OFF…..to just about everyone.
9 GOINGS-ON, GOING + SON
10 MEWING, ME + WING, where ‘fly’ is a verb, and so is ‘wing’.
11 DAKOTA, DA(KO)TA, the old territory divided into South Dakota and North Dakota..
12 WHARFAGE, WHARF(AG)E. A river I never heard of, but the answer is evident enough. Anyone who thought it was a plant, raise your hand.
14 STONY-HEARTED, S + TONY(HEAR)TED. Lift and separate ‘small boys’, even though ‘small’ is frequently used to indicate nicknames.
17 MAGIC LANTERN, anagram of GIRL CAN’T NAME.
20 FUNEREAL, F + UN(E)REAL.
22 WARREN, double definition, where Hastings is not a town, but Warren Hastings, the famous Governor-General of India.
23 AT LAST, A ‘T’ LAST. I thought of this type of clue long before seeing the answer.
25 TRIANGLE, T(R I)ANGLE.
26 MESMERIC, M(E)S + [a]MERIC[a]. A toughie, one of my last ones in.
27 SHEATH, S + HEATH. Ha-ha, Mr Wilson, ha-ha, Mr. Heath.
 
Down
2 MOOLAH, MOO + HAL upside-down.
3 LANGOUSTINE, anagram of LINNAEUS GOT. A very clever anagram, and a somewhat obscure critter which I only vaguely recalled.
4 TESLA COIL, CAL SET upside down + OIL. This was one of the ones where I was at a loss to explain the cryptic, because I thought the state was AL.
5 RUNAWAY, RUN(A)WAY.
6 Omitted, finally an easy one!
7 TOW, [s]TOW. ‘Tow’ is a type of prepared flax.
8 FINE GAEL, FINE + GA([bottl]E)L. A really toughie if you’re not up on Irish politics.
13 FIRING RANGE, FIR IN GRANGE, probably used before..
15 EDELWEISS, E + anagram of SEES WILD. I nearly put in ‘eglantine’ with two checkers, then thought again.
16 MAQUETTE, MA[r]QUE(TT)E. Tough answer, tough cryptic, I have a feeling many solvers will get stuck here.
18 NILOTIC, NIL + OTIC. Obvious to me, but I’m into philology. Others may not be so fortunate.
19 MERLOT, MERL[in] + TO backwards. Never saw the cryptic until just now.
21 Omitted, another obvious one, look for it!
24 AIM, A + I’M, where ‘train’ is a verb meaning to point.

21 comments on “Times 25234 – Dinka or Luo, anyone?”

  1. So quite a different experience at this end. Had to ponder a few things such as “to be had” (GOING) at 9ac before the penny dropped. “Any jobs going?” — that sort of thing.

    Also wondered about “train” = AIM (24dn). Yes, both mean “point” but we aim AT and train ON surely?

    23ac: my reading is that both “stoAT” and “polecAT” have AT last.

      1. OK, but it also makes it difficult to substitute “aim” for “train” in any actual sentence.
  2. 34′ before getting 7d, 8d, & 10ac, which probably means a total of, oh, say, just under 50′. Or over, as the case may be. 5ac is one of those really irritating clues that could go either way, and I started with the wrong way. I have no idea how or why FINE GAEL suddenly appeared to me with F—G-E-, but it did, and the other two fell into place. I have no idea either why MEWING didn’t occur to me, since I knew it had to be something with MEW or MEOW, but then I can be even denser than the occasion requires.
  3. My thanks to both blogger and Usain Boltesque Western Australian commenter for help with the two I couldn’t parse, GOINGS-ON and FUNEREAL.

    An hour for me, slowed down a tad by makig the long down anagram even harder by copying the anagrist down with two a’s and no o’s. Unusual puzzle in that there were, for me, 4 words/phrases unknown (MOOLAH, TESLA COIL, TOW and MAQUETTE). Last in FINE GAEL, which I did know, but might have spelt ‘Fina’ without the sryptic, and COD to TRIANGLE for being deceptively musical.

  4. 15 minutes for all of this except 22ac. After another ten minutes I hadn’t got it so I resorted to aids… and still couldn’t get it. I was never going to, as I didn’t know either Warren Hastings or the required meaning of WARREN.

    Edited at 2012-08-06 05:45 am (UTC)

  5. I am sure your parsing is correct but I saw the letter “l” of Ravel as a capital “L” thus a right angle.
  6. Snap, Kevin G! 34 minutes for all but three and 50 minutes total to complete the grid, only in my case it was 8dn, 4dn and 9ac that caused the hold-up at the end.

    At 12ac the River Wharfe didn’t leap out at me but once the thought had occurred I was able to verify it immediately with reference to Wharfedale, the Yorkshire dale from which the loudspeaker manufacturer takes its name.

    I agree with mct’s parsing of 23ac although of course vinyl1’s version also works and leads to same answer.

    LANGOUSTINE is pretty well-known from menus and TV cookery I think.

    My DKs or forgottens were TOW, MAQUETTE and NILOTIC.

    1. Thanks for the info on the speakers. Wish I could afford a decent pair. (Though the ARs are pretty good.) The Wik page on the Wharfe suggests one might find there a Twite on a Spleenwort. (Watch for these words soon!)

      And while we’re on things etymological: MOOLAH is an interesting case. http://www.word-detective.com/2008/08/moolah/

  7. 25 minutes with the last eight on tesla coil. If you don’t know the term the variables are a touch unsettling on this one. Train and aim can mean the same thing even if they take a different preposition. Somehow I see the bow and the Bolt.
  8. 13 minutes, though it felt much harder than that. Or it would have been 13 minutes or so, but, rather embarrassingly, I’ve arrived here with 9ac still uncompleted, and briefly wondered why GOINGS ON was the focus of so much conversation. Think I would have struggled to get that.
    TESLA COIL from a computer game my son played (Red Alert) Now there’s trivia for you!.
    I couldn’t believe Wharfe could be a river, and entered with trepidation. If only I’d thought to put dale on the end.
    CoD to AT LAST (either interpretation) – I just like that sort of clue, though perhaps, as I think vinyl is suggesting, the device is becoming easier to spot.
  9. 10:25 with quite a few correct but left unparsed before I came here. Rather wide of the mark in some cases, such as thinking MAQUETTE must somehow derive from the resistance being MAQUIS, for instance…
  10. 15 minutes, FINE GAEL was the last in and it was a bit of a head-scratcher. Liked the clue for STONY-HEARTED
  11. 71 minutes, not helped by confidently putting WRITE OFF for 5 across, although on reflection that would need a hyphen so couldn’t be correct. Agree with previous comment that what STOAT and POLECAT have in common is not just a final T but a final AT. FUNEREAL and MAQUETTE last two in. Misled for quite a while by thinking “phantom” was a noun rather than an adjective.
    Richard Saunders
  12. I thought this crossword had some magnificent clues in it. Look at 3dn, what a majestic surface reading, concealing an 11 letter anagram.. brilliant. The surface readings generally were excellent.
  13. About 30 minutes, ending with MAQUETTE/MESMERIC. I thought the MAQUETTE and the River Wharfe obscure, but overall a fine puzzle. COD to the MAGIC LANTERN, where the clue misled me into thinking I was looking for a person’s name. Regards.
  14. Just over an hour (with FUNEREAL, NILOTIC, MESMERIC the LOI, all of them rather tough), but one mistake (FINN GAEL? the one doubtful answer I forgot to think over). I rather liked what happened to the American in MESMERIC. Lots of French today (MAQUETTE, LANGOUSTINE).
  15. An enjoyable set of clues and words with which to start the week. Liked Runaway, Right Off, Mewing, Moolah, Triangle and Aim in particular.

    Solved over four sessions that included a wrong guess at Tesla Foil. Fal for state didn’t feel right but nothing else would come to mind as an alternative. LOI Maquette.

  16. 8:56 for me – but I should have been a lot faster as my brain seemed even more addled than usual and (among other idiocies) insisted on bunging in WRITE-OFF without stopping to read the clue (including the enumeration) properly.

    No problem with WHARFAGE though, as I once lived in Ben Rhydding, a few hundred yards from the Wharfe.

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