Saturday Times 24688 (6th Nov)

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
Solving time: 16:57 to get all but the top left corner. Maybe half an hour more to finish it! The last holdouts were 1D, 3D, 9A and 12A. I just went blank, and probably looked at it three or four times before really knuckling down and grinding out the answers. One for polyglots, with an Americanism plus Greek and Spanish words. Nothing unfamiliar though – the difficulty was all in the clues.

Across
1 BRASS OFF – OFF (not running) after BRASS (money). Not the usual meaning of nark, which threw me a bit.
5 PAWPAW – “pa” in an American accent, twice. I suppose some Americans pronounce “pa” like this. The Beverly Hillbillies spring to mind.
9 HITHERTO – HIT (affected) + HERO (brave chap) around T(ime).
10 BREEZE – double definition.
12 SLICK – cryptic definition.
13 STILL LIFE – STILL (quiet) + LIFE (breath). I thought the second part was a bit loose, but it’s confirmed in the dictionary.
14 HALF-TIMBERED – B(ishop) inside HALF-TIME, + RED (cardinal).
18 YADA YADA YADA – AD (bill) + AY (I agree) reversed three times. Last time I saw it written it had double D’s, but Chambers gives both spellings.
21 HOI POLLOI – H(aving) + POLL inside a pair of OI’s (round one twice). Greek for the masses.
23 IMOLA – hidden reversed in “hospital omitting”. Home of the San Marino Grand Prix.
24 BAILIE – B(ook) + A + I LIE (storyteller’s confession). An old name for a sheriff’s officer or county magistrate.
25 AIR-TO-AIR – cryptic definition. Seems to be talking about directorships rather than missiles.
26 EL NINO – (online)*. It’s not a current though. It’s a climate pattern caused by surface temperature in the Pacific Ocean combined with air pressure.
27 CYPRIOTS – C(aught) + SPY reversed around RIOT.

Down
1 BEHEST – EH (come again?) inside BEST (elite).
2 ANTRIM – ANT + RIM.
3 SPEAKEASY – EASY (not forced) underneath S (player often dealing?) + PEAK (high). S for South as a bridge player I suppose. As far as I know he doesn’t get to deal any more often than anybody else though. Last one I got.
4 FIT AS A FIDDLE – T.A. (Territorial Army, volunteers) inside F1 (motor racing) + SA (sex appeal) + FIDDLE (do).
6 APRIL – lovely cryptic definition. May 1 comes after the end of April.
7 PREMIERE – PRE + ERE (two different words for before) around M(arks) + 1.
8 WEEKENDS – WEE + D(aughter) inside KENS. The surface refers to the American SAT exams, which are university admission tests. I can never remember the rule about capitalization. Is this fair? I know proper nouns can’t lose their starting capital to fit the surface reading, but I don’t think making the whole word upper case is covered. I had a flick through Don Manley’s Crossword Manual but couldn’t find anything. What does the panel think?
11 NIMINY-PIMINY – I inside (in my PIN in my)*.
15 BEDSITTER – BED (plot) + SITTER (something not to be missed, although usually only used when it is!)
16 BY THE BYE – TH(ursday) inside BYE-BYE.
17 ADDITION – ADDICTION without the C.
19 TOBAGO – (boat)* + GO
20 WALRUS – “chips” being slang for a carpenter. You can read Lewis Carroll’s poem here.
22 ONION – O (love) + (u)NION.

16 comments on “Saturday Times 24688 (6th Nov)”

  1. Took me 2 hours and 26 minutes with the obligatory one wrong, this time ‘Harris’ (Three Men in a Boat, anyone?) for WALRUS. Woodwork remains the weakness it has been since I made the world’s ugliest tray at prep school.

    Last in SPEAKEASY followed by ‘shine’ corrected to SLICK. never heard of NIMINY-PIMINY, which doesn’t sound a pedantic sort of word, anyway. COD to BEHEST – I’m a sucker for words with an exclamatory or phatic component.

  4. BTW “nark” in 1ac in the sense of “get on one’s nerves” is frequently used in my part of the world, but usually in the past tense.
  5. I found this quite difficult – about 30 minutes to solve

    At 5A I thought basing a homophone on a supposed US pronunciation was dangerous. The variety of accents from Chicago to St Louis and Boston to LA surely renders this daft, particularly in a UK puzzle.

    I was thrown a bit by EL NINO, which as you say gives rise to currents but isn’t one itself.

    3D is just wrong. I can only think the setter is confused by bridge puzzles in which South is usually shown as declarer. The deal rotates around the table with each player either dealing in turn or being deemed dealer when the same pre-dealt hands are played by all tables

    SATS are also UK exams and I have learned over the years to ignore all punctuation including capital letters. It didn’t particularly strike me as unfair when solving.

    My last in was 23A where IMOLA meant absolutely nothing to me until I Googled it and then realised that GP meant motor racing rather than a doctor.

    1. The idea of the clue wasn’t that South deals any more than any other player, merely that, as a card player, he deals. I feel it is necessary always to indicate the card-playing aspect of NSWE and dislike “opponents” or “partners” to indicate NE/SW or NS/EW etc.

      Apologies for the EL NINO error.

      1. Hello Setter and many thanks for taking the trouble to explain – always welcome.

        I see where you are coming from. I think it’s the word “often” that has caused the problem here. If it is removed from the clue there is no confusion and the clue still works. In solving one can’t find a real purpose for its inclusion. I guess the other factor is that older hands have a Pavlovian response to a single letter meaning for “player”

    2. Paw as a variation of ‘pa’ in 5A came to me from the Pawtucket verse of the Nantucket limerick! (See entry in Wikipedia)
  6. I seem to remember really liking this one.. I always like grids where the words are mostly familiar but the crossword is still difficult. Making a clue hard by dint of selecting obscure words always seems rather a shabby, ST sort of thing to do. Not keen on the yada clue however.. just don’t like the slovenly phrase I suppose. U/nonU, cricket and “it” girls one day, crass Americanisms and casual drug slang the next – we see it all, don’t we?
  7. 60 minutes then used aids to get the last four: APRIL, BREEZE. SLICK and IMOLA.

    I know of course that it’s commonplace for ‘one’ in a clue to mean the letter ‘I’ in a solution but I’m not sure I recall meeting the perpendicular pronoun representing the number ‘1’ in a clue before, nor am I sure that it works in a set of clues where the typeface for each symbol is perfectly distinct. But I’m probably being picky because I couldn’t solve the bloody clue.

    1. But “I” is the Roman Numeral for one – it’s the same thing merely reversed. Or have I misunderstood?
  8. Savoyards should have recognized ‘niminy-piminy’; Reginald Bunthorne in ‘Patience’ invites us to
    Conceive me if you can
    A Japanese young man,
    Francesca da Rimini, niminy-piminy
    je-ne-sais-quois young man

  9. No time for this: as so often at the weekend I didn’t get an uninterrupted spell to solve it.
    However I found it very difficult. There were a number of clues where even after solving I couldn’t see the wordplay for a while (e.g. “for everyone” = u in 22dn) which I choose to interpret as a sign of originality on the part of the setter rather than my own denseness. Also a number of complete unknowns including NIMINY-PIMINY and BAILIE. WALRUS was a lucky guess.
    Thanks to the setter for the intervention above: I was puzzled by “often dealing”. I’ve never played bridge in my life and I’m happy with the convention (it is so common) but I can see the point.
    I rather liked 18ac, I must say: cheeky!
  10. I was much amused by the letters about this crossword on the Times letter page (see Thurs 12th and Sat 13th).
    Well done the setter for a challenging puzzle.

    Nick M

  11. 16:51 for me. This is one of the best puzzles I’ve had the pleasure of solving, with nearly every clue a delight. I raise my hat to the setter – brilliant!

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