ST 4410 (Sun 5 Dec) – Careless stork

Author   talbinhoPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Solving time: about 5 minutes (interrupted)

Credit where it’s due: this was a good puzzle and I enjoyed it. Ought to have been a bit quicker: I should have been confident of 1ac (DIGITATE), was slow on a couple of the more hackneyed clues and was held up by 14ac (STORKSBILL) and 9dn (STUMBLES) at the end. I didn’t spot any editorial errors this week.

* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.

Across
1 DIGITATE; G.I. (= ‘soldier’) + T.A. (= ‘army’), all in (DIET)* – this always looked likely but I needed checking letters to confirm.
5 FRAMED; FRED around A.M.
10 UNDERFOOT – because a foot is 12 inches.
11 BIDET; BID (= ‘Offer’) + E.T. (= extraterrestrial)
12 LAY-UP; ([yo]U + PLAY)*
13 COME FORTH (“FOURTH”) – because the first three get (gold, silver and bronze) medals.
14 STORKSBILL; STORK’S BILL – slow in coming but I eventually dredged this up, after dallying with ‘stocksbill’.
17 WILL (2 defs) – ‘The Bard’ being one definition and the rest of the clue the other.
19 ASTI (hidden)
20 FAR-SIGHTED; (DITHER + FAGS)*
22 DEER FENCE; ER (= ‘hesitation’) in DEFENCE (= ‘barricade’)
24 SALES; ALE in S.S. (= steamship = ‘vessel’)
26 REPRO; REP (= ‘material’) + rev. of OR (= ‘yellow’)
27 ORCHESTRA; OR (= ‘gold’) + CHEST + R.A. (= ‘artist’) – not great to have the same indicator (‘or’) in two consecutive clues (the crossword staple ‘or’ is a gold or yellow tincture used in heraldry).
28 SATEEN; S.A. (= ‘appeal’) + TEEN (= ‘for adolescents’) – a material similar to satin.
29 HELLFIRE; HE’LL + F[emale] + IRE – nice clue: Hell hath no fury etc.

Down
1 DOUBLE STANDARDS – taken literally, meaning ‘double [the number of] standards [i.e. flags]’. Rather weak, but at least ‘double’ is a different part of speech in the wordplay, even if its meaning is essentially the same.
2 GIDDY; I (= ‘one’) + D.D. (= Doctor of Divinity) replacing U[niversity] in GUY
3 TURN + PIKE – my first thought was ‘try-angle’ which was at least along the right lines.
4 TRONC (hidden) – a collection of waiters’ tips.
6 REBUFF; RE-BUFF (i.e. a second polishing)
7 MODERNIST; (STORMED IN)*
8 DUTCH ELM DISEASE; (AS LUDDITE SCHEME)* – excellent anagram.
9 STUMBLES; ST[reet] + UMBLES – I didn’t know the word ‘umbles’ (meaning ‘entrails’, from the Latin word lumbulus, meaning ‘loin’, and from which the phrase ‘humble pie’ is partially derived) so this was my last, doubtful entry.
15 ON THE SPOT (1 definition, 1 literal interpretation) – very easy but I’m not going to knock a sporting reference.
16 BRAINBOX; BRA IN BOX – probably my favourite clue in this puzzle.
18 EGGSHELL (cryptic definition)
21 OF NOTE; O[ld] F[emale] + rev. of ETON
23 EMCEE; E,E,E around MC (= abbrev. of ’emcee’)
25 LATHI; LATH + I – easy for old hands, probably hard for beginners. A lathi (or lathee) is a stick used as a weapon in India.

4 comments on “ST 4410 (Sun 5 Dec) – Careless stork”

  1. You are right, Neil – a decent crossword with no faults that I could see. Took me about 12 minutes, so on the easy side of average
  2. 6:03 for me, for a very nice puzzle. I particularly liked 1D (I took the wordplay as a nod to Evelyn Waugh’s 1942 novel Put Out More Flags) and 16D. What a pity the ST puzzle isn’t like that every week.
  3. I can’t recall a ST without at least one fairly egregious problem, but this time the only thing I could carp about was ‘repro’ being used adjectivally (or ‘unoriginal’ being used nominally). 35″. Fortunately for me, words that I don’t know often reappear in these puzzles before they have faded from my memory: e.g. ‘tronc’ this time, ‘spiderman’ the other day.

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