Times 24671 – Excudebat Vivianus Ridler, architypographus academicus

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 65 minutes

Music: Ravel, Daphnis and Chloe, Munch/Boston Symphony, RCA LSC-1893.

I hope you all have a couple of OCTs in your book bag as you view the amphorae in the Ashmolean, because otherwise you don’t have much hope. Even an over-educated old boy like me needed to think hard at every turn, and finally got stuck for quite a while. I thought this was a brilliant puzzle with many highly original clues, but if it is all over your head you may not be so appreciative.

Beginners are reminded that obvious clues are not blogged. I will try to find an obvious clue and not blog it, but don’t get your hopes up.

For those who are interested, the music is part of a Living Stereo traversal I am blogging in Audio Karma.

Across
1 EUROPOP, RUE backwards + O + POP. In this type of puzzle, I was expecting some obscure 16th-century musical form, and even wrote in and erased the correct answer without recognising it.
5 GRANGE, [Percy] GRA[i]NGE[r]. This was obvious to me, but I imagine it may not have been obvious to everyone. Grainger was a very strange fellow indeed, and not a composer we have had lately.
8 PARED DOWN, anagram of POWDER AND. I was certain this was going to be a word meaning ‘powder’ and a word meaning ‘shot’ with the last letter removed from each, and finally put it in from the literal.
9 ADD ON, ADD[is]ON. I tried every trick I could think of with ‘Elia’, and got nowhere.
11 EQUAL, [lak]E QUA L[and]. I wanted to do something with ‘earl’, and for a long time miscounted the letters in ‘lakeland’ and thought ‘e’ was the centre.
12 ASHMOLEAN, ASH + MOLE + AN. I saw this right away, one of my first in. Easy if you have heard of the place.
13 SWEATING, anagram of IN A STEW + G[ood]. A relatively easy one.
15 GLADYS, G + LADY’S. So simple, so elegant, and so hard if you don’t see it.
17 OPEN UP, O(PEN)UP. Oxonii, e typographeo clarendoniano, in case you were wondering.
19 AMPHORAE, anagram of A HAMPER + O. When you suspect a plural answer and there’s no ‘s’ in the anagrind, what to do? Try some foreign or classical plurals.
22 INDO-CHINA, IN DO CHINA, where ‘wearing’ = ‘in’, ‘fleece’ = do’, and ‘pal’ = ‘china’ in CRS. A very clever and original clue.
23 CANST, hidden word in [Ameri]CAN ST[ate]. Since I am from Connecticut, and I had the ‘c’ and the ‘t’, I wanted to put ‘craft’ for the longest time, but I couldn’t see how ‘raf’ could mean ‘able’. Then I couldn’t see how ‘ans’ could mean ‘able’. Then I saw it.
24 TARSI, RAT backwards + IS backwards. Not too hard, if ‘3’ doesn’t send you to ‘pedal’. Fortunately, I didn’t have it yet. The comments point out that this actually is a cross-reference to the root meaning of ‘pedal’, i.e. foot bones.
25 AQUILEGIA, AQUIL(EG I)A. ‘Appearing nightly’ is a bit misleading, since Aquila will appear nightly only in the summer, at least at the latitude of the UK and the US. I had to get this one from the cryptic.
26 MEANIE, MEAN + [n]I[c]E.
27 LIONESS, anagram of LOSES IN. Not hard if you know who Elsa is.
 
Down
1 EXPRESSIONIST, EXPRESS + [z]IONIST. I put in ‘Impressionist’ at first, then saw how the clue worked.
2 RE-ROUTE, RE + R(OUT)E. I was expecting two completely different sorts of soldiers, and got the same thing twice, our old friends the Royal Engineers.
3 PEDAL, sounds like PEDDLE. My inability to see such answers instantly is always slowing me up, this was one of my last in and I needed all three checking letters.
4 PTOMAINE, P[lain] + TO MAINE. The literal touches on the etymological meaning of the Greek root ‘ptomos’.
5 GUNG-HO, GUN + G(H)O. Here ‘go’ is used as in the phrase ‘make it go’. Another expression with an interesting etymology.
6 AYATOLLAH, AYA(TOLL A)H. I wasted a lot of time with ‘amah’ before I saw the obvious.
7 GODSEND, DOG backwards + SEND. One of the few starter clues.
10 NON-ESSENTIALS, NONES + anagram of ELSA ISN’T. More classical learning for you solvers out there.
14 T-JUNCTION, T[om] J[ones] + UNCTION. Here, ‘unction’ has the metaphorical meaning of ‘excessive suavity or affected charm’.
16 EMMANUEL, EMMA + UN and LE backwards. Luckily, ‘Emma’ was the second novel I tried. It’s at Cambridge, not Oxford, and this is about as scientific as we’re going to get tonight.
18 ENDORSE, E + N(D)ORSE. Another of the starter clues, I would say.
20 RENEGUE, R + EUGENE upside down. An alternate spelling, with a non-PC meaning of ‘Welsh’ to boot.
21 OK, I finally found an obvious one, omitted!
23 CELLO, CE(L + L)O. I got this from the literal, but it took me a long time to see that ‘head of company’ is not ‘c’, but rather ‘CEO’. The two usual indicators for ‘L’ complete the clue.

36 comments on “Times 24671 – Excudebat Vivianus Ridler, architypographus academicus”

  1. Made quite a meal of this, with a number going in without full comprehension. Eventually needed an assist with 1 ac (I think I balked at defiling the word music) to finish in 39 min. Did not help my cause with “impressionist” and “ayahtolla” going in before a more rational inspection uncovered the errors. Some neat clueing (there is less to some than meets the eye) made for a satisfying challenge. COD to ADD ON, with many close runners-up.
  2. As for science … well … there is PTOMAINE. I know this because I didn’t know the def. Never having heard of EUROPOP either didn’t help. So the NW was tricky. The rest, I felt, not so. Some clever cluing requiring a certain wavelength sympathy. Plus a 3-clue cross-reference (24, 26, 3) which is, I think, fairly rare. Two sessions for this one. About 20 minutes for the first while attending to domestics; and exactly 16 for the second.
  3. Got the Oxbridge stuff pretty quickly but stumbled over the NW in particular, where EUROPOP caught me unawares (like everyone else I was onto ‘rue’ at once but couldn’t quite place it) and PTOMAINE, being unknown to me, proved too hard to track down. A bit of cheating elsewhere, e.g. AQUILEGIA, meant this was a definite win for the setter.

    By the way, you need to change the final ‘o’ in Oxford’s Museum of Art and Archaeology.

  4. Took well over an hour and a couple of sessions. Had to make several guesses which, on post-solve checking, I managed to convince myself were distant recollections. Knew aquilegia was a flower of some sort but couldn’t see how the cryptic worked until coming here. A dazzlingly accomplished puzzle. Does this finally nail the Monday easy, Friday hard myth?
  5. Well, at least EUROPOP suggests this setter might just still be breathing. My one consolation was that the hidden CANST was my last in.
  6. A definite shock to the system. Maybe the insertion of the Championship prelim puzzle on Wednesday pushed this one to Monday? I gave up on PTOMAINE finally. Calling EUROPOP music is a stretch, surely? Otherwise a good workout. COD to PARED DOWN.
  7. Maybe I have misunderstood the blog but isn’t the reference to 3 a clue to the location of the bones?
  8. Is Monday the new Friday? I have found the last two Monday puzzles extremely difficult yet last Friday’s was comparatively easy.

    Slogging through this very slowly I completed all but 4dn, 20dn and 25ac within the hour and then resorted to aids. I was glad I did as I have never heard of AQUILA or AQUILEGIA, have never met RENEGUE with a U and would never have thought of PTOMAINE if I’d looked at it all day. AMPHORAE was a guess based on the available anagrist.

    I’ve mentioned above one of the cross-references in 24. Of the other one, I’m not sure that RAT and MEANIE are the same thing at all.

  9. Defeated by PTOMAINE after 40 minutes.
    A couple of others (ADD ON, AQUILEGIA, LIONESS) were guesses.
    Very good puzzle, although a bit hard for a Monday. Saturday’s was much easier.

  10. Not my cup of tea at all. RENEGUE ??? Didn’t help myself by putting in Andromeda (pieris japonica and constellation) instead of AQUILEGIA; so now thoroughly bad tempered and going out to try something easier, like alligator wrestling.
  11. 20 minutes, but AQUILEGIA was a guess which finally allowed me to get RENEGUE. Thought this was tough but fair, but agreed, blows the Monday=easy theory out of the water!
  12. PTOMAINE was my last, having resorted to going through the alphabet for the second letter. When I got to T the answer fell into place.

    11:27 to complete it.

  13. Constellations and plants in one clue? My idea of crossword hell. One glance at 25a and I knew where we were headed. I mentally gave up there and then. Even after convincing myself that you could spell ‘renege’ as ‘renegue’, I couldn’t sort out the flower. A win to the setter by KO.
  14. 17 minutes, last in AQUILEGIA from the checking letters, found this one a slow slog, really liked the clue for NON-ESSENTIALS (though it took a while to piece together). INDO-CHINA went in from definition alone, as did RENEGUE
  15. A tough but interesting puzzle with some excellent clues. I had several question marks where I didn’t fully understand the wordplay until I came here, though the answer was clear (25ac, 5dn and 23dn).

    Done in two sessions since the diminishing light at my outside solving spot forced me to stop after 35 minutes with several gaps in the NE corner. Finished off at home, taking another 5 minutes. The break seemed to refresh my brain, because in the second session I quickly saw several answers that I’d been struggling with earlier.

  16. 11:27 sg? Ye gods!

    It took me forever to get going and I finally clicked submit on 41:45 making this my slowest solve for some time. Even then I needed aids to get ptomaine. I blame it on the cough I’ve had for about 3 weeks which is wearing me down.

    Right, I’m off to fill up my amphora and water my aquilegias (or more likely aquilegiae).

  17. 24 minutes, most of it stuck in the NW. Not helped by thinking IM- rather than EX- for 1d, not fully getting the clue past the artist reference. Otherwise, some bits of making it up as I go along, AQUILEGIA in particular. A toughish challenge rather than a “gentle Monday”.
  18. solved in three stretches totalling 60 minutes. as others have said a toughie-for a Monday (normally). i liked a lot of the clues. thought the unusual spelling of Renegue was tough as was expressionism i think…as to europop i thought it was eurotrash but there we go!
    Aquilegia -cool…as to Grange for anges i couldnt shift chalet from my tired brain!
    thank you blogger and thank you setter!
  19. Very enjoyable puzzle, which I was pleased to complete in about 50 minutes. Never heard of EUROPOP: is this something to do with Song Contests?

    Many candidates for COD but I think GLADYS and MEANIE have it.

  20. Recorded time of 28 min or so but it was actually about an hour as I had to give up eventually on trying to solve diagonal crosses online (my display still isn’t working correctly) and print it off. Had to get help for PTOMAINE (although I knew it once I saw it), and AQUILEGIA was a guess. ASHMOLEAN came quite late, even though I live in Oxford!
  21. 17:05, ending with a stab at the unknown PTOMAINE (4dn).  Other unknowns were Percy Grainger (5ac GRANGE), Joseph Addison (9ac ADD-ON), AQUILEGIA (25ac), Elsa the LIONESS (27ac), and MIRAGE as an old French aircraft (21dn); the spelling RENEGUE (20dn) was unfamiliar.

    Why is a GUN a greaser (5dn GUNG-HO)?  Because ‘grease’ is slang for ‘kill’?  Or because there are such things as grease guns?

    Barry, the definition of EUROPOP (1ac) as “music” suggests that the setter may never have heard any.

  22. About 45 minutes, but needed aids for the crossing AQUILEGIA/RENEGUE, so stumped today. I’ve never seen that variant spelling, and flowers aren’t really up my alley. Also detoured by assuming we had an ‘amah’ instead of an ‘ayah’ in 6D, as vinyl mentioned. The ‘amah’ as an oriental nursemaid is a US crossword staple, but I hadn’t heard of the ‘ayah’ before today, nor had I heard of the ASHMOLEAN. Very tricky and clever puzzle, with just a small quibble about what must be the extreme rarity of RENEGUE. COD’s to PTOMAINE, GLADYS and CANST. Regards to all.
  23. The most interesting word in this crossword has to be PTOMAINE. Tom Paine was a really pivotal figure in political thought, ‘The Rights of Man’ was more influential than almost any other book ever published in Britain and certainly was a poison for traditional authoritarian rule. PTOMAINE offers us TOM inside PAINE, both with their letters in correct sequence. Is there a word for this ie a two word term such as a name in which one word is contained within the other so making a third word? Are there any others? If so, they could offer new a setting stratagem.
  24. Very much NOT my cup of tea with far too many guesses at obscurities and a couple of references to a dictionary. RENEGUE really takes the biscuit. All very clever but a humourless slog as far as I was concerned.
  25. I remember ‘ptomaine poisoning’ from my childhood　(I suppose being of a certain age helps); just googled it, to find that it’s an obsolete term for food poisoning, as ptomaines were once suspected of being the cause. Not that I ever knew what a ptomaine was.
    Got ‘canst’ fairly early on, but I took CT=Connecticut, and never could figure out what the ‘ans’ was doing; once again, the blogger drops the penny for me.
  26. One of those where I laboured for an age to get about half lunchtime, gave up in despair, before promptly knocking out the rest in 15 mins this evening. Far far too many I didn’t fully understand. Not the most gentle start
    to the week. COD 7d.
  27. Well, here I am panting and licking my wounds, but for reasons beyond my comprehension I was able to finish correctly. After an hour I put the puzzle down with about six entries to go, and when I returned the first time EMMANUEL went in, when I returned the second time hours later the remainder came haltingly but in fairly short order. Next to last was RENEGUE by means of the word play, after finding EUGENE as the man going up (not a common name in my entourage), and the last entry was AQUILEGIA, which I have never seen before, just on a guess because E.G.I fit and AQUILA seemed plausible. I did check a dictionary to find out if it was right, but that was the only aid I needed.

    This Monday was definitely not easy. No COD — I’m still aching.

  28. 13:57 for me. I’m relieved to find I wasn’t the only one who found it tough. MEANIE took me simply ages: I was trying to fit NC into -E-E. The unfamiliar EUROPOP took me a long time as well, not helped by my having typed in LEDAL for PEDAL! An interesting and enjoyable puzzle for all that.

  29. I put “RAREBIT” for 20 – well, it’s Welsh; river (TIBER) – man (RA – Royal Artilleryman) – yes, yes, I can see it’s nonsense. Anyway that was the end of me.
  30. 9:41 on return from hols – looks like one that would have suited me in the championship! PTOMAINE last in.
  31. 90 minutes, the flower too hard (aquileg etc). CoD for Percy, our gift to your English country garden!

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