Happily completed in a steady 17.28, with no particular hesitations except the American city, which I have now added to my list of hazily remembered places should I ever need it again. While there were no laugh out loud moments for me, I did like the “crosser of channel” and the fiddling around needed to resolve 21a. The two long ones evoked for me Paul McCartney’s moving song written in the light of civil rights actually happening in the States.
Definitions underlined in italics, [] enclosing deleted or otherwise unwanted letters, everything else hopefully understandable.
| Across | |
| 1 | Dessert that’s cold and wet I care about (5,3) |
| WATER ICE – An anagram (about) of WET I CARE. I’d call it a sorbet, otherwise it sounds a bit plain. | |
| 5 | Pupil primarily in uniform perhaps to be examined (6) |
| PROBED – First letter of P[upil] then ROBED as in uniform. I think the “perhaps” is there because a robe is not necessarily a uniform | |
| 10 | To try something new was depressing? No, oddly (6,4,5) |
| SPREAD ONES WINGS – An anagram (oddly) of WAS DEPRESSING NO. | |
| 11 | Bit of a lump, very soft, in water (5,5) |
| ADAMS APPLE – The prominent appearance of the larynx, usually more visible in males, the origin myth being that Eve’s proffered apple stuck in Adams throat. It’s PP for very soft in ADAM’S ALE, another culling from Genesis suggesting that for Adam, being (before the apple) innocent, water was a sufficient man’s drink, and therefor good Christians should also eschew anything stronger. I’m inclined to get Real. | |
| 13 | Collection of myths, each with divine content (4) |
| EDDA – Strictly, the collections of ancient Scandinavian hero stories and songs. EA[ch] contains D[octor of] D[ivinity], a divine. | |
| 15 | Fulfil our destiny to some extent in place of pilgrimage (7) |
| LOURDES – Hidden (to some extent) in FulfiL OUR DEStiny | |
| 17 | Minimal growth — number of workers reduced? (4,3) |
| CREW CUT – When the number of workers is reduced, the CREW is CUT: a hairstyle much on display in recent lads’ nights out. | |
| 18 | More stupid old boy given boot finally by employer (7) |
| OBTUSER – O[ld] B[oy] plus the last of [boo]T placed beside USER for employer. A comparative, I think, rarely encountered in the wild. | |
| 19 | Welshman’s penning false account in papers (7) |
| DAILIES – Your Welshman is DAI, with his ‘S for is, enclosing LIE for false account. | |
| 21 | Novice politician cycling backwards (4) |
| TYRO – Takes a bit of sorting out. The politician is a TORY. If you cycle it moving one letter, it becomes ORYT. Then write it backwards. | |
| 22 | Control furore, cut short during a social event (10) |
| ASCENDANCE – I believe furore is meant to give SCENE, which is cut short and inserted into A DANCE for a social event | |
| 25 | Start to retreat to the cricket pavilion? (3,3,3,6) |
| GET OFF THE GROUND – I initially thought this was a CD, but the definition is just start. If you’re on the cricketing field of play, this is how you retreat to the pavilion. | |
| 27 | No fellow crossing river — crosser of Channel! (6) |
| NORMAN – NO plus MAN for fellow with R[iver] inserted. Reference 1066 and all that. | |
| 28 | Learners in capers collecting low grades (8) |
| STUDENTS – Capers are STUNTS, the low grades are D and E. | |
| Down | |
| 1 | Song rendered by idiot in yell (7) |
| WASSAIL – A usually boisterous yuletide song. ASS for idiot in WAIL for yell. | |
| 2 | Black stuff in bottomless lake (3) |
| TAR – I remember a young teen being blown away by the perfect beauty of TARN Hows, to the NE of Coniston Water, one of many small mountain lakes but the only one I care about. Remove its bottom (this is a down clue). | |
| 3 | Exceptionally sharp poet, one waxing enthusiastic (10) |
| RHAPSODIST – An anagram (exceptionally) of SHARP plus ODIST for poet, writer of odes. | |
| 4 | Noise made by the greedy Conservative politician enthralling House (5) |
| CHOMP – C[onservative] MP for politician enclosing HO[use] | |
| 6 | Girl, it’s said, is one of eight on river maybe (4) |
| ROWS – If you include the “is”, you’re looking for a 3rd person singular verb. ROSE is your random girl, and our answer is an aural representation. | |
| 7 | Blessing has been taken amiss — a feature of speech (11) |
| BENEDICTION – An anagram (taken amiss) of BEEN plus DICTION, a feature of speech. | |
| 8 | Some French jargon that is sung (7) |
| DESCANT – Some in French gives DES, jargon is CANT. Chambers rather skates round this definition, but it works via “gibberish”. | |
| 9 | Agent left, someone very good having had to be substituted (8) |
| REPLACED – Agent is REP, add L[eft] ACE for someone very good and [ha]’D | |
| 12 | Spiker of drink? Grown-up needs time to recover finally (11) |
| ADULTERATOR – Grown-up: ADULT, time: ERA, TO [recove]R finally. | |
| 14 | Perplexed American playwright needing surprise ultimately in plot (10) |
| BEWILDERED – (Thornton) WILDER, though I went from (Oscar) WILDE to stop with (Billy) WILDER who was strictly a screenwriter. Whichever, add E from the end of surprise and put the lot into BED for plot. | |
| 16 | US city artist turning up, a drunkard grabbed by Salvationists (8) |
| SARASOTA – It’s in Florida. (I looked it up!). Artist R[oyal] A[cadamician] reversed, plus A SOT from drunkard, all in S[alvation] A[rmy], the Salvationists. A trust-the-wordplay sort of clue, because it’s nor Saratoga. | |
| 18 | Figure month will finish with endless pain (7) |
| OCTAGON – The month OCT[ober] plus endless pain AGON[y] | |
| 20 | Instruments sending sound up in urgent message (7) |
| SPEEDOS – Wasted time scouring the orchestra. There are probably several ways to get to DEEP from sound. I did it via sound/deep sleep. Once you have it, reverse it (sending up) and insert into SOS for urgent message. | |
| 23 | Discharge for one set astray (5) |
| EGEST – EG for “for one” plus an anagram (astray) of SET. | |
| 24 | Old king is tender, as some might say (4) |
| OFFA – He of the Dyke, sounds like OFFER, tender, especially if you are one of those people who can’t be bothered with Rs | |
| 26 | In auditorium win a cricket trophy? (3) |
| URN – And another aural representation: win gives EARN. The Urn is the famous trophy played for by England and Australia at cricket, apocryphally containing the Ashes of deceased English cricket after a very, very rare defeat. | |
46 minutes. I had an error at 6dn because I neglected to include ‘is’ as part of the definition, and came up with ‘one of eight on a river = rower’ which sounds like [it’s said] ROWA, which I discovered is primarily a female name with Arabic origins, meaning “Lovely Vision”. I couldn’t find an example of a famous one, but wondered if I might claim an alternative answer here? [OK, it was worth a try!].
I was unable to account for the D in REPLACED which on learning from Z how it works, seems a little bit dodgy.
NHO of the US city making its debut here. Fortunately I had the second S-checker in place otherwise I may have spent more time trying to make Saratoga work.
Excellent – glad to hear I’m not alone😊😊
I had wondered if it was some derivative of rowena that I was unaware of. I’ll join your alternative answer campaign.
And me.
‘Had’ for D (I’d have thought etc) is pretty standard.
Maybe but I don’t recall ever seeing it in a crossword. Btw, in the example you’ve given I think D stands for ‘would’?
Ah yes, good point! But ‘would’ for D is also pretty standard. It’s quite hard to search for examples but I’m sure I’ve seen it many times.
Nice little workout. Antepenultimate one in URN (cricket!), POI GET OFF THE GROUND (cricket!!), LOI SPEEDO (seeing that word, I don’t think of the watch first).
Exactly the same ROWA ‘mistake’ as Jackkt, with the same reasoning. I still think it works better than the given answer, even though ROWA is a rather uncommon name.
Same here! And I’ve taught more “rowa”s than “ena”s!
Can understand your parsing but cant agree that it works better. IMO its always more satisfying when there are fewer words in the clue that merely link the word play to the definition
The wordplay doesn’t work, unfortunately. ‘It’s said is X’ isn’t a grammatically coherent indication of a homophone of X.
After 45 minutes the only thing I could think of for my LOI 20dn was SPEEDOS, which was so obviously not right that I gave up, hit reveal and…
Anyway, that was largely fun and quite a challenge: ASCENDANCE, BENEDICTION, the NHO city, the NHO EGEST. That dessert doesn’t sound like a dessert, in fact it doesn’t sound like food. I tried ROWA too. Good to see the little URN getting a mention, thanks Z.
From I Shall Be Released:
They say everything can be REPLACED, and every distance is not near
But I remember every face of every man who put me here
I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released
First easy one this week. Just on 60 minutes. FOI WATER ICE Top came out relatively easy. Forced one hour break by video call from son in NY. Took a little while to restart. LOI SARASOTA. Managed to parse all myself.
45 mins held up a bit in the SE until I saw the GROUND bit of 25 ac. I too looked at ROWA and thought it might be a girl’s name but eventually saw how ROWS worked.
The unknown SARASOTA was painstakingly worked out from wp as I too wanted it to be SARATOGA.
I liked the two long clues and NORMAN.
Thanks Z and setter.
11:09. I had similar troubles as others. I did know SARASOTA, probably from childhood holidays to Florida. However I managed to mix it up with SARATOGA and come up with SARATOSA until one of the crossing answers put me right. I finished on ROWS where my initial thought was ROWA (which interestingly the spell checker hasn’t underlined). I’m glad ROWS came to me quickly as ROWA was quite tempting, especially given it sounded plausible as a name maybe due to its similarity with ROWENA.
WOE, thanks to a very silly mistake caused by (relative) speed. Entirely my own doing.
Thanks both.
22 minutes. Same thoughts about ROWA v. ROSE as just about everyone else but eventually plumped for the correct one. I didn’t parse BEWILDERED correctly (thinking of Oscar WILDE) and didn’t do the required mental callisthenics for TYRO.
Favourite was SPEEDOS though since when have budgie smugglers been regarded as ‘Instruments’? 😊
Incidentally, I think the parsing for ADULTERATOR is ADULT (‘Grown-up’) ERA (‘time’) TO (‘to’) R (‘recoveR finally’).
Thanks to Z and setter
Oops, thanks, I’ll correct!
SPEEDO in UK is an abbreviation/slang for ‘speedometer’.
another ROWA here. Thanks blogger and setter.
I found this puzzle somewhat stilted, especially the clueing of REPLACED (biff, move on), and the use of ASCENDANCE (always ascendancy in my book), and OBTUSER (more obtuse surely – the spell checker on here dislikes it too!). I also biffed TYRO and needed Zabadak’s usual excellent blog to explain how it worked.
FOI ADAM’S APPLE (a real ale here too please!)
LOI STUDENTS
COD GET OFF THE GROUND
TIME 11:36
34 minutes, with LOI SPEEDOS, thinking more of swimming trunks than speedometers. I also stopped being BEWILDERED by moving from Oscar to Billy and didn’t get as far as Thornton. And I had ROWA before amending her to ROWS at the last minute. In general, I would say that the PAVILION is part of the ground, indeed the most important part at Tea, but GET OFF THE PITCH didn’t work. COD to ADAM’S APPLE. although more often we called it Corporation Pop. An enjoyable puzzle. Thank you Z and setter.
I actually entered GET OFF THE SQUARE, but soon saw the error of my ways.
37:17 (1 error)
FOI: EDDA
LOI: TYRO
I felt I had made heavy weather of this, struggling to find a foundation from which to build for a while. However, with some perseverance, I was left with two not fully parsed. In the end I opted for ROWA (resulting in the pink square) and presumed it was TYRO.
Thanks to Zabadak and the setter.
DNF. I came here primarily to poke fun at myself for coming up with ROWA, but it seems I was in good company. 13:55 otherwise for a nice meaty puzzle.
Thanks Z and setter.
Enjoyable twenty minutes, had SARASOTA straight away as SOT came to mind, didn’t bother to parse the D in REPLACED, but ended with one wrong as didn’t know TYRO for novice and bunged in TORT for some reason (TROT reversed?). Thanks Z for explanations needed.
12′, but with ROWA too. So please add my voice to the appeal petition.
Wasn’t sure about -CANT, although it was the obvious answer. I always thought if it as hypocrisy, although I remain bewildered (sic) by the line “…and at last ends the age of cant” in the Internationale.
And I hesitated over SPEEDOS for the same reason as others.
Thanks z and setter.
I see ROWA means “lovely vision” in Arabic and Urdu, but a search for “famous people called Rowa” meets with Google’s nearly blank look and redirects you to…..here. You may be out of luck!
Just under 9 minutes but I also came a cropper with the girl’s name. I do now accept that ROWS is much more obvious than the ROWA that many of us stuck in without actually having heard the name in use. I suspect the setter did not know it was a name either, or the clue would have been less ambiguous. Nice puzzle. COD to ADAMS APPLE I think.
Rowa 🙁
Thanks, Z.
2d POI What’s wrong with Malham tarn?
6d DNF. Punted Rowa as a NHO girl’s name. Not added to Cheating Machine. That clue was too clever for me.
14d POI Bewildered, whilst cheating I found that Thornton Wilder is not in in the list of WILDERs in Wiki. So I shrugged and assumed Billy Wilder, then found Thornton in my CM, then found Thornton in Wiki, so he is there but not in the list.
23d DNF (again) Egest; biffed eject.
37m 35s
SARASOTA caused no problems because I’ve visited the city and a friend of mine lives there. One claim to fame is that it is the winter quarters for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus. There is also a pretty good art museum there, Ca’ d’Zan, founded by the Ringlings.
As for 6d ROWS, I think the clue is poorly written.
Add me to the ROWA list, please….
ROWA…
39 minutes but after correcting EJECT (which I put in with no understanding of how it worked). At 19ac isn’t ‘Welshman’s’ just ‘Dai’s’, so no need for the rather uncomfortable ‘s for is? This is fine, but it could easily have been ‘Welshman gives false account in papers’. Had to look up SARASOTA and hoped that a tog wasn’t going to have to be a drunk (unlikely).
But then Welshman’s is surely Welshman is… Apologies for clumsy expression!
19:24
Enjoyed this and finished at a canter but I’ve hit a purple patch for pinks squares and ROWA obliged today. In my opinion, not a great clue and I wasn’t that keen on REPLACED either. I did like NORMAN,
ADAMS APPLE and BEWILDERED.
Thanks to Zabadak and the setter.
Technical DNF due to a careless error — RHAPSODISE instead of -IST, having failed to parse it properly after bunging it in, grrr. Still don’t really get the parsing of ROSE though I bunged it in, convinced it must be right. Did better than usual for a Thursday!
Finished this in 21 minutes elapsed, probably more like 15 minutes in real time because I was doing something else at the same time and kept getting interrupted. Only unknown for me was SARASOTA. I felt this was a very relaxed Monday-ish puzzle.
Thanks as always to setter and blogger
Sprang into action with CHOMP, TAR and WATER ICE. Took a lot longer to fully SPREAD ONES WINGS. Took even longer to see THE GROUND after GET OFF. Missed the D-difficulty by biffing REPLACED. Dismissed ROWA as I’d never heard the name and ROWS fitted the bill. At one stage I had SARATOSA, as I was unable to shoehorn SARATOGA into the wordplay, but THE GROUND got me to SARASOTA in the end. The unknown EGEST helped me put in the ASCENDANCE and SPEEDOS rounded off the exercise. 22:53. Thanks setter and Z.
21:40 – Briefly invented the US city of Saragota until sanity returned, along with a last-minute egestion of ROWA.
36:25
Held up at the end on 20d, doing an alphabet trawl looking for a musical instrument. On reaching SPEEDOS my first thought was that a swimming costume was not an instrument, before the penny finally dropped.
NHO SARASOTA.
Half a century ago, I had a minor part in a school production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”, so his name stuck in my list of US playwrights.
There is a WASSAIL tradition involving orchards, held in mid January, involving singing songs, making loud noises and putting cider-soaked toast in the apple trees.
Thanks Z and setter
Since my brother lives in Sarasota, that was a write-in for me. As often happens, I constructed speedos from the cryptic….but then I erased it – that can’t be right. Then I remembers the UK slang meaning, and put it back in. I did consider Rowa, but I decided that was just too obscure, so I thought again. The trick on a long phrase being the literal is often used in Mephisto, and I eventually saw that is one of eight on river, perhaps, is the definition, so rows must be the answer.
Check the SNITCH – 25% of reference solvers were excluded because of errors – I think I know what error that was!
Time: 27 minutes
ROWA. Why not?
The trouble is that almost anything can be a name somewhere on the planet, and ROWA does fulfil that condition. But its lack of presence in the real world is an obstacle, and the ROSE/ROWS solution, especially with that pesky “is” in the clue, is a much less contentious solution. Might get away with a protest under Championship conditions, and you’d have a lot of fellow sufferers!
Never mind the rarity or otherwise of the name, the wordplay doesn’t work!
I think rows is better just because it’s such a cunning definition. Took a minute to remember the instruments rather than the budgie smugglers
Had a dalliance with Rowa before deciding it wasn’t a real thing. Also thought first of Saratoga, as I’m currently reading The Adventures of Augie March. Around 22 minutes, as I recall.
Yet another ROWA. Not a fan of random names, spelled randomly/wrongly – a Times staple. Still annoyed at the Spanish Inez who was Mexican.
LOI SPEEDOS, knowing the budgie-smugglers couldn’t be it, until they were.
Had heard of Sarasota for some reason, never been to Florida.
NHO WATER ICE. Quick straw poll… how do you pronounce SORBET? I pronounce the T on the end, which is how it was in Oz (and all the dictionaries) when I grew up. Up until the 1980s when pretentious, ignorant yuppies came along and started pronouncing it “sorbay” as if it were a French word. Now the T is never pronounced. Thank goodness for Italians; SORBETTO is unequivocal.
…then I’m a pretentious, ignorant yuppie. But then my Yorkshire-born Lancashire-bred wife pronounces ‘nougat’ as ‘nugget’ whereas to us pretentious, ignorant yuppies, it is if course, pronounced ‘noo-gar’ 😉
Your wife is of course totally right about nugget. They didn’t sell sorbet in Pablo’s Blackpool, or Rossi’s Southport, or anywhere else I went for that matter, until I sold out and moved south. So I’m ashamed to admit that in my life it’s always been ‘sorbay’, not that I’ve ever ordered one. Would it come with a chocolate flake?
31:08
Slowish finish with the last half-dozen or so, coming in a rush. NHO Thornton WILDER, only Billy or Laura Ingalls (neither of whom were playwrights afaik) but somehow came up with the correct answer. Didn’t have a problem with ROWS which was homophonic enough to Rose to not look elsewhere.
Thanks Z and setter
Done in two sessions either side of lunch, but timed roughly at 45 minutes. Avoided the ROWA trap by working out it was ROWS (smug look on face), only to fall at the last (smug look quickly disappears) by failing to return to the unparsed EJECT. As ASCENDANCE was my LOI, it was unfortunate that the starting E fitted in so nicely with my error.
Bah 3d is ist not ise. PB ruined but IOHMTB.
Regrettably “Decagon” works just as well for 18 down. I saw this straight away, so never considered an alternative – so DNF.
Was Isla’s tongue firmly in his/her cheek?
I wonder if he enjoys a buffet before his nugget?!
I was misled for a while by Decagon…which fitted the clue just as well as Octagon….but I suppose was always less likely.
17.20 though I did toy with Rowa for a while. Speedos was another blocker while I grappled with whether budgie smugglers counted as instruments.
Nice puzzle, thanks setter and blogger.
I managed to avoid the bear traps like ROWA and spent ages on my LOI SPEEDOS since my brain would only think of the obviously incorrect swimsuits until suddenly I saw the light. Needed care with the wordplay to avoid SARATOGA/SARASOTA and TIRO/TYRO traps.
34:23. ROWS was my LOI, having seen the homophone for ROSE, and then checking the rest. I’m glad I did it that way round. I liked CREW CUT
ROWA was too obscure. This was fortunately my instinctive response. Showing off my Arabic, I might add that the name as originally conceived would not have sounded like ROWER, but Ru-WAA. Of course that might have changed in practice in Anglo-speaking countries. Slightly uncertain, because the standard Arabic-English dictionary has no word RU-WAA meaning VISION. Rather the classical word RU-YAA does mean vision or dream. SPEEDOS as speedometers crops up fairly regularly, so that wasn’t a problem. SARASOTA I had vaguely heard of, but could not place on the map. Otherwise all slipped in fairly easily. 18’40”.
I found this quite easy (36 minutes for someone generally slow like me). Of course I did have SARATOGA for a while, but the drunkard saved me from that (TOG? probably not). SPEEDOS also eluded me until I had the crossers and finally realised what kind of instrument might be meant. And of course for a long time I had ROWA, like almost everyone else, but actually the clue says quite clearly that that cannot be the answer, because “girl, it’s said” tells you that the answer will only sound like a girl’s name, but won’t actually be one. That bothered me enough that I had another look and R-W- didn’t leave much choice other than ROWS. So for once no mistakes.
30.12. i managed to avoid falling into the ‘Rowa’ trap, but, surely, a member of an eight on the river is a sculler rather than a rower ? I managed to drag out ‘Sarasota’ after trying to fit ‘Saratoga’, then wondered whether it was a place name I had invented. Overall, another puzzle I did not enjoy very much, and I thought that, once again, a number of the definitions were rather too loose.
21a. If you write TORY in a circle and then read it backwards it can read TYRO.
Can’t sleep so finished this off in bed. Had to put the paper in the oven this morning to reverse the best efforts of the English summer to turn it to pulp before I’d even got it home, it didn’t smell great. Glad ROWA was wrong otherwise I’d be grumbling. DNK SARASOTA or a suitable WILDER but both guessable from the wordplay. I think you’re being generous about multiple derivations of DEEP and sound, I can’t think of any that comfortably work unless in a geographical sense perhaps. Thanks for the blog!
14:46. Early to solve this, late to comment. I’ve already done tomorrow’s! This one was tricky.
As mentioned a couple of times above, ROWA just doesn’t work from a wordplay perspective, so the obscurity or otherwise of the name is neither here nor there.
Leaving the obscurity aside can you advise who has stated the wordplay doesn’t work for Rowa please. You’ve stated it twice but I must have missed the others.
Just me! I didn’t mean to suggest that others had said it. But the fact remains that ‘it’s said is’ is not a grammatically coherent homophone indicator.