Saturday Times 25143 (21st April)

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
Solving time 29:44, which didn’t seem excessive at all for this puzzle. The difficulty came solely from the brilliantly crafted clues – smooth surfaces throughout and hardly a word wasted. Top job by the setter.

Across
1 RANSOM – RAN (managed) + SOM(e) (quite a, cut).
5 SOFT COPY – S(t)O(r)Y around FT (newspaper) + COP (busy, Scottish slang for a policeman).
9 JOYOUSLY – J(ack) + YOYO (toy) reversed around US (American) + L(eft).
10 AUGUST – A(nswer) + U(rge) + GUST (get up suddenly).
11 MUMBAI – MU (letter from Greek) + MBA (business graduate) + I (one). The city we used to know as Bombay.
12 IN CHARGE – (reaching)*.
14 ANNE HATHAWAY – HENNA (dye) reversed + AWAY (out) next to A TH(ursday).
17 HANDICAPPING – HAND (present) + ICING (sugary stuff) around A PP (very soft).
20 WIND DOWN – WIND(e)D (out of breath, minus the E for energy) + OWN (have).
22 KIMONO – KO (put out) around I (one) MON (day).
23 KIND OF – DO (party) + F(emale), next to KIN (family).
25 CLAPTRAP – C(ape) + LAP (go round) + TRAP (corner).
26 VERBALLY – (L(iberal), bravely)*.
27 KIDULT – KIT (clothes) around DUL(l) (flat mostly). An ugly portmanteau word, but it has its own entry in the dictionary.

Down
2 AEOLUS – all 5 vowels plus the ‘S, with an extra pen stroke turning the I into an L. Aeolus was the Greek god of the winds. I don’t remember having come across this device before, so full marks to the setter for ingenuity.
3 SNOWBOARDED – S,N (team at bridge) + BOARD (get on) inside OWED (outstanding).
4 MESSIANIC – hidden in “comes Sian – I composed”.
5 SKY-HIGH – (Y(oun)G, Sikh)* + H(usband).
6 FRANC – FR (priest) + ANC (party in Johannesburg, the African National Congress).
7 COG – COGITATE (to chew on things) minus “it ate”.
8 POSTGRAD – POST (job) + ‘AD around GR (the last king).
13 AMALGAMATED – (delta a gamma)*
15 THINK-TANK – TH(e) (article not finishing) + INK-TANK (well for writer?)
16 SANITIZE – SIZE (volume) around TINA reversed.
18 PANICKY – A(mphibia)N inside PICKY (particular).
19 ON CALL – ONE ALL (draw) but with C for Century replacing E for England. The ubiquitous cricket reference, but only in the surface reading.
21 OFFAL – OF FALSTAFF (Sir John’s) without STAFF (personnel). Sir John Falstaff turns up in a couple of Shakespeare’s plays.
24 DUB – BUD (friend from over the Atlantic) reversed.

13 comments on “Saturday Times 25143 (21st April)”

  1. Thanks for that, Linxit. My query was with Aeolus. I’ve come across that clueing device before but only once and some time ago. I thought that, somehow it applied to all the vowels and couldn’t see how that worked. Yes, I thought the setter did an excellent job too. I logged around 1hr 58mins for that. There were several garden paths I allowed myself to be led up but particularly MUMBAI. I had LAMBDA on the brain. Aeolus was my LOI, my COD and the one clue I needed help with.

    Edited at 2012-04-28 07:04 am (UTC)

  2. Similar time and quality to today’s: around 85 minutes. However, while I got home today okay after a few alarums and excursions, this one tripped me up, plumping for the wrong girl’s name at ‘satirize’ and having to cheat for the wind god.

    Top stuff, setter!

  3. Here in Oz, I’ve been led to believe that -ise endings are for Brits, while -ize are the Yanks. I can see that Chambers is feeling more flexible than that, but can I ask – has this ‘rule’ run its course?
    1. Funny thing the snobbery that attaches to these things. Inspector Morse, in Dexter’s books, excoriates those who use ‘-ise’ (must be murderers as that’s what they do to the language!), and of course there’s the ‘Oxford comma’, which decrees that last item in a list be followed by a comma & then ‘and’ (like the Americans again).

      All the dictionaries in the Oxford stable, so far as I know, list the ‘-ize’ variant first. Of course, it’s not wthout significance that American English fossilised many English forms (rhotic ‘r’ comes to mind) and so may claim to be closer to the original – or as close as Oxford. For what it’s worth, I attended the University but use ‘-ise’ and don’t bother with the ‘Oxford comma’, using a comma before the ‘and’ only when and if clarity dictates.

    2. My understanding is that where alternatives exist -IZE is acceptable both in US and UK, however -ISE is sometimes an alternative in the UK only. For other words such as ‘revise’ and ‘advertise’ only -ISE is ever valid. Does that help?

      I thought not!

      Edited at 2012-04-28 09:08 am (UTC)

    3. Thanks for the feedback. I’ll stop looking askance at those zeds (not zees, of course…)
    4. I’m pretty certain that The Times newspaper’s in-house style guide decreed ‘-ize’ until at least the nineties. Not so sure it still does.
  4. 70 minutes with three cheats.

    Martin is correct that the device used at 2dn has cropped up before but I believe it wasn’t that long ago – no more than 12 months at most. I needed aids to solve it despite having met ‘Aeolian’ previously (it’s a type of musical harp and there was a hall of that name in New Bond Street which was a BBC studio in the 60s and 70s) and knowing its association with the wind. Unfortunately I didn’t equate that with ‘howlers’ before looking up the answer.

    I also needed to cheat on SANITIZE (should have got that one!) and KIDULT which I don’t feel so bad about.

    21dn was much easier to solve than to work out the wordplay.

    Mostly an enjoyable puzzle but just on the very extreme edge of my comfort zone in few places.

    1. Jack, I thought it was my lucky day, as shortly before tackling this I’d done a puzzle from the archive and ‘kidult’ came up. I’d never heard of the monstrosity before, I’m pleased to say.
    2. Not the same, but similar quite recently:

      12 ac in 25038 on Dec 21 2011:
      “Blind Ann’s not completely knocked sideways onto mattress by Lee Short”

      BEDAZZLE

      Using the geometry of letters, 2 Ns being rotated 90 degrees to get 2 Zs.

  5. Selecting books at random from the shelf, I notice that the majority published in England before about 1950 use ize endings, whereas those after that date use ise. My sample, however, is unlikely to be statistically valid.
  6. 40 minutes … very happy with a puzzle as confounding as this one on a Saturday, though perhaps not every Saturday!

    Edited at 2012-04-28 01:15 pm (UTC)

  7. This took me 15 minutes before I got properly started. The upside was that finishing at all gave me a great sense of achievement, in spite of a slow time (47 minutes). I guessed that 2d was someone connected with howling winds or howling animals. Hence AEOLUS. But didn’t see the wordplay until coming to this excellent blog. As usual, Linxit has done us proud.

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