Times 24941

Author   daveperryPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 33:28

Apologies for the late blog, but I’m standing in for Tim at short notice.

I started slowly, but sped up as I got into it. I didn’t know the PRONGHORN, nor that SUBFUSC was formal dress, but other than that there were no real problems.

cd = cryptic def., dd = double def., rev = reversal, homophones are written in quotes, anagrams as (–)*, and removals like this

Across
1 CYPRESS = “CYPRUS”
5 SUB + FUSs + C – this is formal wear at Oxford evidently. I knew it meant drab or dingy, but didn’t know the other meaning, so I needed all the checkers in place before I could get it.
9 FOOT + P(L)ATE – I assume ‘driver’s location’ is the definition, as the footplate is where the driver of a steam locomotive stands.
10 LEAVE – dd – I couldn’t see how this worked at first, but the dd splits as follows: Something taken by those withdrawing / consent
11 deliberately omitted
12 EVERGREEN = E + REV rev + GREEN
13 OR(CHESTeR)ATION
17 CONCERT-MASTER = (MOST RECENT CAR)* – I didn’t know the term, but it seemed likely from the anagrist
21 A + N(CH)ORMAN
24 dd – deliberately omitted
25 BING + villagE – Although David Crosby (of Crosby, Stills & Nash) came to my mind long before Bing did. In hindsight, I have no idea why!
26 PLA(NE + TAR)Y
27 EX(C)ITED
28 DANTEAN = (AND NEAT)*
Down
1 COFFER = “COUGHER”
2 P(R)ONG + HORN – I hadn’t heard of it, but the wordplay was clear
3 EMPIRIC = (CRIME)* about PI
4 STATE + MEN + Type
5 SIEVErt – I didn’t know the SI unit of dose equivalent radiation, so I had to get it from the definition alone. At first I thought it might be SI + EVE somehow, which actually helped me get the answer, despite being entirely the wrong approach.
6 BOLOGNA = A + NOB rev about LOG
7 rev hidden – deliberately omitted
8 C + LEANING
14 TRAIN + BAND – another word I didn’t know, but which was clear from the wordplay
15 I + R(RA + DI)ATE
16 SCRAMBLE – dd
18 ERODENT = ER + (NOTED)*
19 TRADE-IN = TIN about (DEAR)*
20 CRAYON = RAY in C + ON – although I wasn’t sure quite how crayon and drawing were synonymous. According to my dictionary, a crayon can be a drawing done in crayon, although interestingly a pencil isn’t listed as a drawing done in pencil.
22 CON + IC
23 MOPED – dd

51 comments on “Times 24941”

  1. Thanks to Dave, and apologies to the world at large. Just come back from holiday, and thanks to the added confusion caused by the Bank Holiday, was convinced today was Monday, not Tuesday.
  2. Although perhaps harder than yesterday’s in general (fewer giveaways), there wasn’t anything totally obscure to stump me like yesterday’s PERFECTA, so today’s took only 5 minutes longer, 35 minutes at a moderate but steady pace.
    I’ve never thought of ‘empiric’ as a synonym for ‘quack’ – almost the reverse, but it’s there as such in Chambers.
    1. Yes, I felt the same and only put it in in pencil to start with, until I had a couple of checkers confirmed.
  3. no particular problems today though not too sure about cypress as a homophone for cyprus. Nor do I follow erratic = planetary. Nor why in 12ac the rev. is to join “another” party rather than just a party. Overall I thought the setter was striving a bit too hard

    1. I would certainly pronounce Cyprus and cypress the same way, and my dictionary lists wandering; erratic as a definition for planetary, so I have no problem with either of those. But I agree with you about the superfluous ‘another’ in 12a.
    2. Collins has “wandering or erratic” as a definition of PLANETARY. I’ve no idea what context this might be used in but I wasted enough time the other day googling “bind”!
  4. Like others wrestled more with unfamiliar words than with clue complexity. Didn’t recall SUBFUSC (must have met it before), didn’t know CONCERT…, TRAINBAND, or quack as EMPIRIC. I think “danger in the countryside” might be over egging it a bit for the dear old ADDER. 25 minutes in all.
    1. I agree that this puzzle relied more on unusual words than ingenious clueing for its difficulty, but surely, Jimbo, you must as a schoolboy, like most of us of a certain age, have read William Cowper’s “diverting story of John Gilpin, showing how he went further than he intended, and came safe home again”:

      John Gilpin was a citizen
      Of credit and renown
      A train-band captain eke was he
      Of famous London town

      (and so on for about another 50 stanzas)

      1. I also got the answer from this poem – the verse you have quoted is the only one I remember!
      2. Memory is a strange thing. I have no problem recalling arithmetic equations but I’m poor at recally poetry. How are you with Newton’s equations of motion?
        1. Fair point, Jimbo. I can remember bits of my schoolboy maths and geometry, rather as I can recall certain lines from poems, but very seldom whole poems (even when much shorter than Mr Cowper’s comic epic). “The square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides” is one that sticks, as does “pi” as the measurement of the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter (3.1 something and then continuing for ever). As for Newton, I have a vague memory that his First Law said something about the speed of a body remaining constant until acted upon by an external force, but I wouldn’t even be able to make a stab at laws two and three. I guess anyone educated, say, in the Fifties or early Sixties was the victim of C.P. Snow’s famous “two cultures” in that you were required to choose at an early age between the humanities or the sciences. Is it any better now?
          1. Absolutely correct. What’s more lessons in English Literature didn’t teach one how and what to appreciate. It was years before I discovered the underlying messages in say Shakespeare’s plays

            My understanding of today is based upon coaching my grandchildren and foster children. The range of subjects is wider but the depth is lacking. There is an emphasis upon passing exams rather than gaining an insight. Many of the teachers are low calibre compared to the 1950s. How many of your teachers would admit to not knowing where Panama is – happened to me only a couple of years ago!!

  5. 25 minutes.
    I found this quite tricky but the wordplay felt reasonably straightforward and I was slowed down by unknown vocabulary: CYPRESS, CONCERT MASTER, PLANETARY, PRONGHORN, EMPIRIC, TRAINBAND. However I spent 5 minutes at the end staring at 5dn SIEVE and even after getting it (and kicking myself) I couldn’t figure out the wordplay, so thanks for that.
    Fortunately I had the foresight to go to the right university for 5ac, which no doubt saved several minutes. And hip hop helped me to the answer for 1ac. Now there’s something you don’t hear every day.
    1. Your hiphop connection for 1a was good. Vallaw had something on Forum about pants at half-staff (mourning) which is also very hiphop. I took the more formal approach via Feste in Twelfth Night and that very tedious namesake of mine.
      2. I don’t know about good, but this is how I convinced myself that this might be a word, and not spelled CIPRESS. I had to google your Twelfth Night reference. This says a lot about the kind of junk that hangs around in my brain and the kind of worthwhile learning that doesn’t!
  6. ‘Planetary’ is pushing it a bit: the literal meaning of ‘planet’ is ‘wanderer’ but it must be a rarefied context in which the etymology holds now. This took me some time, longer than you guys; I need to be at my familiar table back home to get up speed I think. In 12 ‘another’ is just about warranted if the minister’s a political one. COD by a distance for me is 1 down – the blatant nerve of it.
  7. DNF. Gave up on SUBFUSC, arguing there could be no such word, obviously betraying my lack of a proper education. Also confused by some of the vocab, but went with the wordplay in the end. I’m afraid I was too distracted in solving to get much of a feel for this one. Note to self: In future, turn talking book off when solving.

    Sievert was much in the Oz news following Fukushima. I was surprised to find that it is actually an SI unit, since it is a measure of nothing tangible. The Wiki article on it changed on an hourly basis as the two sides in the nuclear “debate” tried to outdo one another on exactly what constituted a dose which might have “immediate health consequences”. Many media commentators started confusing their micros and millis. I think the apologists got background radiation up to 50 milliSievert/yr (/hr?, /day?) at some point, presumably measured (if it is indeed possible to measure Sievert) somewhere near an old tailings dam in Rum Jungle. In Japan, they stuck with good old fashioned becquerel and the amount released almost made it to exabecquerel. I was thinking we might hear the prefix yotta for the first time on TV.

  10. DNF. Had to resort to aids after 50 minutes for the SUBFUSC, where I didn’t know the word and couldn’t unravel the wordplay either. I had to parade around more than once in academic regalia (years ago), but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of SUBFUSC, and it’s a most unlikely looking word specimen besides. Other than that, I agree there was more than usual of the obscure vocabulary floating about today, i.e. ERODENT, PLANETARY as ‘erratic’, TRAINBAND, FOOTPLATE, etc. But for what it’s worth, the sound-alikes at CYPRESS and COFFER are fine with me. Regards to all, except perhaps the setter, who in my mind’s eye is wandering about some drab room dressed in his subfusc, researching more obscure terms.
      1. Thanks Jimbo, yes, my experience of the storm was relatively mild, except for the resultant flooding, which hampers travel all over the NE USA. The rainfall amounts were terrific, and there are still plenty of dangerous conditions.
    2. I believe SUBFUSC is only used at Oxford. So if you’ve paraded around in academic regalia there, you’ll have heard of it. And if you haven’t, you won’t.
      For such an obscure term the wordplay could have been a lot kinder.
      1. I’ve only academically paraded on my side of the pond, so no subfusc for me, keriothe, you’re correct.
  11. About 40 minutes to complete with PRONGHORN and TRAINBAND entirely reliant on wordplay. Did not fully understand PLANETARY = ‘erratic’ until coming here and share Dave’s puzzlement over CRAYON = ‘drawing’ (thanks for the blog).

    Rather too much here that I didn’t understand to call it an enjoyable challenge: but then I don’t understand most of koro’s comment – but I do find it enjoyable!

  12. 75 minutes for this interesting, Mephistoesque specimen, with several dips into Chambers to check words, one of which resulted in ‘prongness’, my only errant answer, being sorted out. Last in ADDER – very cunning, as the Black one would say. No problem with SUBFUSC, as I had to wear it in the dim and distant past. SIEVERT is added to my burgeoning scientific arsenal.
    1. As cunning, in fact, as a fox who’s just been made professor of cunning in SUBFUSC.
  13. I think I got this done in a half an hour; I had scanned all the acrosses in vain and finally put in CLEANING before I noticed that I had forgotten to mark my starting time, then finished in 26′. This certainly struck me as a musty puzzle: EMPIRIC, PLANETARY, TRAINBAND, ERODENT, SUBFUSC. That last was one of many (‘infra dig’ comes to mind), that I’ve had in my head without knowing the meaning (finally looked up ‘infra dig’ years ago, never ‘subfusc’), but somehow the C brought it to mind; once again, dumb luck triumphs over GK. I liked 17, although the hyphen threw me off, and 10.
  14. 45 minutes with a couple of look-ups along the way to check what I had worked out (TRAINBAND, PRONGHORN) and one downright cheat to fill in the blanks in SUBFUSC.
  15. Has somebody explained CRAYON? I thought it was something you draw with, not the drawing itself. Or is there some obscure meaning here? Not that it caused any hold-ups – the checkers and the cryptic made the answer obvious. I have learned 2 useful(?) facts from this puzzle. One is “sievert”, which I’ve never heard of, and the other is the US word for the leader of an orchestra. It has never occured to me that they have a different word for it. Never went to Oxford but have heard of SUBFUSC. 29 minutes
  16. It works the same way as other art media like acrylic and oil – the medium becomes a shorthand version of the artwork. But since we associate crayons with those thick waxy things of childhood, or those multicoloured pencil sets, a crayon by Rembrandt sounds really odd. Magritte, though? “Ceci n,est pas un crayon”?
  17. One of those (done in 23 minutes) where I’d heard of nearly everything without necessarily knowing what it was, cue just about all those mentioned above. I’ve not been pronged by a PRONGHORN, but I have been stabbed by a scimitar horned oryx
    I’m inclined to give CoD to ERODENT for not attempting an internet joke, though it would make quite a nice, crossword savant sort of alternative to “troll”, methinks, in at least two ways.
    1. Had same trouble as everyone else with lack of GK (subfusc, concert-master, trainband, pronghorn) and lack of knowledge of unusual meanings of words (planetary, empiric, erodent). Spellchecker has 3 of those 7 as non-words, by the way, and neither on-line Chambers nor Oxford has erodent.

      And since I didn’t know erosion as being chemically-caused as well as mechanically-caused, with the other 6 above it is voted JACOD, Joint Anti-Clue of the Day.

      Excuse me while I leave in a Huff (1957 model with lowered suspension).

      Rob

  18. Picked my way through this without any great problems in 38 minutes. My only harrumph was the rather technical point that in climbing terms a SCRAMBLE comes at the easy end of the scale, ie not very difficult.

    The appearance of the PRONGHORN reminds me of john from lancs and his memorable description of a wildlife park populated by rare breeds that exist only within the boundaries of the Times crossword…

  19. I must be very dim because I can’t understand this. Endless to-do is fus{s}, the ‘about’ indicates, rather contrarily, that what follows surrounds fus, sub is the press employee, but why on earth is first = c?
  20. 10:15 for me, but I felt I should have been faster. No problem with SUBFUSC (as another former wearer).

    Shouldn’t the enumeration of 19dn be (5,2) rather than (5-2) given that it’s being used verbally?

    1. As someone who’s always getting staff to write ‘follow up’ rather than ‘follow-up’ when using the phrase verbally, I second that emotion!
  21. So, this setter can just fusc off. Planetary was fine a lot besides was well clued but if you haven’t been to oxford ‘old boy’ and the definition you are using is exclusive to you and your pals… you might as well get back to the more obscure Dickens characters… Karl Marx had an excellent solution to 5ac but it involved a lot of bloodshed.
  22. Crayons and ballpoints aren’t in the top ten of drawing media however, to refer to a work as ‘a ballpoint’ or ‘a crayon’ would be similar to saying a charcoal or an oil pastel or an oil or a water-colour I would guess. Kind of lame here though.
  23. I’m surprised at the problems created by SUBFUSC. I’m not an Oxford graduate but it’s one of those words that I’ve come across from time to time in literature or journalism.
  25. Sorry, I didn’t explain that one very well in the blog. It’s not CON, it’s C + ON for chapter / about. I shall adjust the blog to make it clearer.

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