Times 24910 H: it’s easy! No, it’s hard!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 63 minutes

Music: Purcell, Dido and Aeneas, Leppard/Troyanos/Palmer/Stillwell

I managed to do most of this in about 20 minutes before getting alarmingly stuck. After nearly an hour, I still had two I couldn’t get and was beginning to worry I wouldn’t be able to finish. Eventually, I tossed away my wrong assumptions, and then of course I saw the answer at once.

This is a puzzle of moderate difficulty, but as usual it was not the hard parts that held me up. Words like ‘organza’, ‘dewlap’, and ‘eristic’ went in readily enough, along with the outrageously punning ‘Watteau’. If I had had a bit of luck in my thinking, I might have knocked it off fairly quickly.

Across
1 PASSER BY, PASSE R[akishl](B)Y My last in. I got into terrible difficulty because I thought the bishop was ‘Usher’, and the answer was ‘pusher-in’ or ‘pusher-on’, but I just could not make it fit the cryptic. Only my re-evaluation of 4 down enabled me to see it.
5 Omitted.
9 GALLIWASP, sounds like GALLEY + WASP. I was a little uncertain what sort of creature this is, and just put it in on instinct, hoping for the right sort of fauna.
11 LITHE, [Hail, b]LITHE [spirit, bird thou never wert!]. Now for some choruses from Prometheus Unbound…..
12 TWISTED, TWIST + ED. When this corner was completely blank, I put in ‘oddball’, and then erased it, on the grounds that ‘fellow’ is not sufficient to clue ‘odd’ as a DBE.
13 ORGANZA, ORGAN + Z + A. I needed a few crossing letters for this, wanting to put the extreme characters at the beginning.
14 INCONSIDERATE, IN(CON)SIDE + RATE, where ‘without’ is an enclosure indicator and does not go with ‘charge’!.
16 HORSE CHESTNUT. I believe this is a cryptic definition referring to conkers.
20 WATTEAU, sounds like WHAT ‘O!. Outrageous, but fun.
21 ABSOLVE, AB + SOLVE.
23 ORBIT, O(R)BIT.
24 EPIDERMAL, anagram of MALE PRIDE. Rather easy since the anagram is nearly a wrap-around of the original.
25 THEORY, T(HE)ORY. I was briefly held up by thinking ‘governor’ = ‘Pa’, but here a real governor is used, H[is] E[cellency].
26 AGITPROP, hidden word, and one I didn’t see until after putting in the answer.
 
Down
1 PIGSTY, PI(G[ilt]S[een])TY. A clever &lit clue that gave me a lot of trouble, as I tried ‘ca’ and ‘re’ for ‘about’, which turns out to be a containment indicator.
2 SALMI, anagram of ISLAM. I knew it was an anagram, and put this in on instinct, rejecting ‘malsi’. Maybe I was helped by ‘salmagundi’, which is an entirely different thing, of course.
3 ERISTIC, ER(IST)IC, where IST is an anagram of IT’S. Put in just from the literal by me, since I only vaguely heard of Eric Morecambe. I expect many solvers will be in the opposite case.
4 BOARDING HOUSE, BOARDING + HO(U)SE. My second to last in. I saw ‘house’ readily enough, but for a long time had only tried the ‘aging’ or ‘agreeing’ meanings of ‘getting on’. Then I re-examined the clue and found the correct interpretation.
6 COLOGNE, CO LOG + N[ew] E[nergy]. Take ‘firm’s record’ together for best parsing.
7 INTENDANT, INTEN(DAN)T. I couldn’t remember the tribe for the longest time, although I knew ‘intent’ must be the enclosing word.
8 GREY AREA, double definition, one a jocular reference to the author of a famous elegy.
10 PROFIT-SHARING, PROF + IT’S + HARING. Strangely elusive for me, I needed quite a few checking letters to get this one.
14 IRRITABLE. IR[ish] + RITA + B[a]L[l]E[t]. It is safe to say that most solvers will get this from the literal.
15 SHOWBOAT, S(HOW BOA)T.
17 ERECTOR, E + RECTOR. More risible clues can easily be imagined, but will not be appearing in The Times.
18 NASCENT, SAN back wards + C + ENT. A compendium of the usual ‘hospital’ cryptics in one clue.
19 DEWLAP, PAL WED upside down. A word I had heard of without knowing its meaning, but the cryptic is most helpful.
22 Omitted.

20 comments on “Times 24910 H: it’s easy! No, it’s hard!”

  1. Untimed this morning … attending to other duties while solving. But agreed that it’s medium hard. Especially as some of the longer answers weren’t immediately apparent: especially the cd at 16ac. (As some will know, I greatly dislike the cd in general, but this one is at least good fun and full of red herrings.)

    Couple of queries:
    1. Otolaryngology = ear and throat. For the nose to be in there, we need “otorhinolaryngology”.
    2. Watteau was French. So his W is pronounced, strictly, as a V.

    1. That’s an interesting point about Watteau, which hadn’t occurred to me before. But I’m not sure that it affects the clue, as long as “What ho!” could be conveyed in English as ‘watteau’.
    2. Of course, if the Cockney was an early 19th-century one like Sam Weller, he might have inadvertently got the pronunciation right.
    3. Since foreign words usually get English spellings (thinking of say Italian cities eg Genoa/Turin in the Times not Genova/Torino in real life) then surely foreign words can get English pronunciations.
  3. I got as far as 4dn before writing anything in, but then got 10dn as well, and the proximity of the two was very helpful. About 35 minutes in all – I thought I’d finished after 33 minutes, but then realised I hadn’t finished off -E-LAP at 19dn and needed to run through the alphabet before I got it. COD probably to ORBIT for the clever “account of the late”.
  4. I must be very slow after the weekend, but I don’t see how 1dn is a definition of PIGSTY. Can anyone elucidate please?
    1. “Gilt” is an obscure word meaning “sow”. It cropped up in another puzzle recently. So G{ilt} and S{een} inside PITY (shame). And the whole is an &lit.

      Edited at 2011-07-25 05:06 am (UTC)

      1. Thanks. D’oh!! I did the other clue to which you refer only yesterday and checked it in the dictionary and have forgotten it already – old age takes its toll on the short-term memory! It’s a sort of partial &lit isn’t it? – the “Shame about” bit doesn’t seem to have much part in the definition.
  5. 75 minutes with a lot of time spent on the bottom half. Originally had ‘gallivant’ for the lizard (‘v’ for contemplating = see was a bit of a grammatical stretch, of course), but when I checked that in Chambers and saw the correct answer, I was able, finally, to see PROFIT SHARING, which kick-started the final push. Besides the lizard, ORGANZA, DEWLAP and SALMI all unknown.
  6. 39 minutes, with something like Vinyl’s experience: LITHE, GREY AREA, EPIDERMAL, ORGANZA and others going in so quickly I had hopes, soon enough dashed, of getting a low time. (Actually, 39’s pretty low for me.) I spent a lot of time on 10d, trying to think of a way to make ‘dealing’ or ‘trading’ work; getting GALLIWASP (with the help of my dictionary) cleared that up.Never figured out how 16ac worked; even reading Vinyl’s explanation it took a while to remember what conkers are.
  7. Live Journal has been down most of the day and when it did come up eventually I lost my original contribution on attempting to post it. All this only added to the frustrations experienced whilst solving this puzzle which I think is far from ‘moderately difficult’ and extraordinarily so for a Monday.

    I managed to complete it in just over the hour but I succumbed to temptation several times along the way by looking a few words up to confirm my guesswork.

    The RH seemed a little easier than the LH and the NW corner proved almost impenetrable, containing as it did three intersecting words that I have either never met before or had forgotten: SALMA, ERISTIC and GALLIWASP (what is ‘contemplating doing in this clue?). I take some comfort that as I write this the Firefox spell checker is querying the existence of all three.

    Carelessness compounded my problems elsewhere as having noted that 14dn probably ended ABLE, I pencilled these letters in the grid as the last four of 14ac. The resulting B checker didn’t help when trying to solve 7dn where I convinced myself I was looking for the name of an opera. Incidentally, neither Collins nor my edition of Chambers recognises the meaning of INTENDANT required here, so once again I don’t feel too bad about not knowing it myself.

    Not a good start to my week, but if this is the worst things get I shan’t be complaining.

  8. Very late in the day for there to be only 11 comments, but if the site was down most of the day that would explain it. I didn’t find this puzzle easy and took 95 minutes (and one longish break) to do it, but the online score says I got it all right, which at least breaks my losing streak. Some of last week’s puzzles I couldn’t complete at all and those I did complete all had several mistakes.

    Of course today’s puzzle had the usual spate of new and surprising words like GALLIWASP and ERISTIC, but I was a bit cleverer than usual at deciphering the wordplay. No really outstanding clues, but COD perhaps to PIGSTY and SHOWBOAT.

  9. 13:31 here, although the relatively fast time is due to luckily having come across the several obscure words in previous cruciverbal encounters. All had helpful wordplay though, so you just had to know that the word existed to get them.

    The site was unresponsive for most of the day, and I found a couple of external resources that might be useful if/when it happens again:

    http://status.livejournal.org
    http://downrightnow.com/livejournal

  10. Have been trying to access this site all day with Firefox. Just changed browser and got in with IE. I’d never heard of GALLIWASP but it was fairly obvious from the cryptic. Quite a smooth solve. 29 minutes. No time for comments. Flight to Munich at the crack of dawn and I haven’t packed yet. I won’t have access to a printer for the next week so will have to suffer Times Xword withdrawal symptoms for a while. Maybe the beer will compensate. Prost! (Failed to post this 5 hours ago and am now trying again)
  11. Vinyl, I think this is puzzle no. 24910, not 24901 as per the heading. Coincidentally, an exact reversal of George’s error when he blogged 24901. Now starting to wonder if you and George are in fact the same person.
  12. I’m posting this a day late, but as today’s is not up yet it gives me something to do.

    I agree that this was a tough puzzle, especially for a Monday. No doubt it was deliberately scheduled to confound our expectations. i approve of such unpredictability. It took me a full hour to complete, with some clues not understood at the end – 14, 15, 25, though I worked out 14 and 15 subsequently. The validity of ‘governor’ for HE eluded me until I came here.

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