This was harder than the last two, at least, that I’ve blogged, and my first Dean puzzle for a while. The clues are as usual with Dean quite succinct and very often deceptive by the most subtle kinds of misdirection. I particularly enjoyed the anagrams.
I indicate (Ars Magna)* like this, and words flagging such rearrangements are italicized in the clues.
| ACROSS | |
| 1 | Divine new iced bags provided (6) |
| DEIFIC (iced)* traps IF, “provided” |
|
| 5 | Heavyweight boxer’s consumed by loss (8) |
| FATALITY FAT(ALI)TY This clue a bit of Yoda-speak is. |
|
| 9 | Drug dealer’s growing business support, you might say (10) |
| PHARMACIST “farm assist” |
|
| 10 | Drink in a group (4) |
| BEVY DD If Collins or Dictionary.com had the last word, the “Drink” would have to be a mere homophone of the “group,” but Chambers lists the one-V version as an alternative spelling for the former. |
|
| 11 | Protection from propriétaires (6,7) |
| FRENCH LETTERS Propriétaires being those who might rent, LET out, apartments The true origin of the euphemism FRENCH LETTERS” for “condoms” could not be nailed down by deadline. But did you know that a French term for a prophylactic (great word for a puzzle!) is capote anglaise—English overcoat? |
|
| 13 | Of a female, in a terrible condition (6) |
| HERNIA HER, “Of a female” + (in a)* |
|
| 14 | Outline of tap? (8) |
| ABSTRACT DD As well as a summary or “Outline,” ABSTRACT can mean “to remove or extract”—“tap” in the sense of “to draw off.” |
|
| 16 | Old film from Germany, equally amusing (8) |
| GASLIGHT G(erman), “from Germany” + AS, “equally” + LIGHT, “amusing” The 1944 George Cukor flick is, of course, [actually, only the third version of the story] whence comes the use of this word to mean to psychologically manipulate someone into thinking they are going insane, as is practiced by the Charles Boyer character who doesn’t want his wife (Ingrid Bergman) to catch on to his criminal activities. The lights are not dimming, dear. It’s just your imagination… Nowadays, you might come across someone using “gaslit” as the past tense of this expression, but that misses the point (just as “greenlit” does when you mean “given a green light”). GASLIGHT in this sense doesn’t mean “light with gas” but that someone is fooling around with the gas lighting to mess with your mind (and when your project is given a green light, it’s not lit up in green but you are given the signal to proceed with it). |
|
| 18 | Great time hugging very old bird (6) |
| AVOCET ACE, “Great” + T(ime) embracing V(ery) + O(ld) |
|
| 20 | “Distance” simile — any port in a storm (13) |
| IMPERSONALITY (simile — any port)* …Brilliant! |
|
| 23 | Stern’s with bow (4) |
| ARCO CD The definition wants to fool you into thinking of parts of a boat. But to violinist Isaac Stern, seeing ARCO on a score means “with bow”—as opposed to pizzicato, “plucking,” which is actually heard more rarely. |
|
| 24 | Had to worry about sound of vehicle? (10) |
| ROADWORTHY (Had to worry)* |
|
| 25 | News in factory’s sounding sad (8) |
| PLANGENT PLAN(GEN)T |
|
| 26 | Record kept by tax officer (6) |
| DEPUTY D(EP)UTY |
|
| DOWN | |
| 2 | Ring of whit{e cho}colate (4) |
| ECHO Hidden |
|
| 3 | Computer language for one leaving school (7) |
| FORTRAN FOR + TRA |
|
| 4 | Joined Labour Party (5,4) |
| CHAIN GANG CD |
|
| 5 | One serving craft beers, perhaps (6,9) |
| FLIGHT ATTENDANT CD |
|
| 6 | It’s in the church’s interest (5) |
| TITHE T(IT)HE (At very least a partial) &lit! |
|
| 7 | Throws up three pieces of terrible shellfish (7) |
| LOBSTER LOBS, “Throws up” + TER |
|
| 8 | Cunning, hiding one of rogue soviet comrades (10) |
| TOVARICHES This clue mixes an anagram of “soviet” with ARCH, or “Cunning”—but puts the “one” or I of “soviet” inside the otherwise intact word ARCH. Which is very devious, but/and makes for a great surface! …I’m blogging nearly a week after solving, and it took me a minute to remember how this works. |
|
| 12 | Vanessa’s father turned ring into coin (3,7) |
| RED ADMIRAL The “coin” is the REAL (today the name of the basic currency unit of Brazil and formerly that of Portugal or Spain) and inside it are DAD and RIM<=“turned.” “Vanessa” is the name of the genus of butterfly that includes the RED ADMIRAL. …You learn something new every day! |
|
| 15 | Small barrier due to be bought (9) |
| SWALLOWED S(mall) + WALL, “barrier” + OWED |
|
| 17 | After song, have to rest (3,4) |
| LIE DOWN LIED, “song” fr. German + OWN, “have” |
|
| 19 | Edge of flowering fruits? (7) |
| OUTCROP OUT, “flowering” + CROP, “fruits?” |
|
| 21 | Large increase definitely — about 1000 (5) |
| SURGE SUR(G)E |
|
| 22 | Drop of whiskey with punch chaser (4) |
| WHIT W(hiskey) + HIT, “punch” |
|
I don’t know how long this took me, but it was long. I never did figure out how TOVARICHES worked. (It didn’t help that I took ‘soviet comrades’ to be the definition.) Or RED ADMIRAL, and now I see why: I had no idea who Vanessa was. This strikes me as a less than fair clue. I liked CHAIN GANG, TITHE, FLIGHT ATTENDANT, inter alia, but COD to FRENCH LETTERS.
I figured out the parsing of TOVARICHES just before reading the blog and I’m glad to say mine agrees with Guy’s. A very neat clue.
FRENCH LETTERS I thought was also very neat but wouldn’t have been improved if the chosen French word had more than one diacritical?
ARCO was delightfully cleaver and misleading. There is an additional pitfall with this clue: in the Times’ font, lowercase R followed by N looks very much like M to anyone with less than perfect eyesight. If you read this as “Stem’s with bow” then you’re lured even deeper into the shipping deception as Stem is part of a Bow.
What word would you have preferred to propriétaires?
I agree about the font, and people have been complaining about it here forever…
I’m not sufficiently fluent in French to offer an alternative. My comment’s an observation or question rather than a criticism. It is a very neat clue.
I’m glad I’m not alone on the RN issue.
I noticed recently that The Guardian puzzle suffers the same defect. It’s amazing that the no doubt highly paid techies at both newspapers have yet to come up with a solution, or perhaps changing the house-style font would be a matter for highest level newspaper management who probably don’t give a damn about crossword puzzles or solvers.
I think the potential for “rn”/ “m” confusion is present in many fonts. As I type this, it’s not that easy to be sure that the two-letter version (which I typed first) is not an “m” when seen without “m” next to it. The alphabet used on the London Underground is, I believe, supposed to be a model of clarity, but a long time ago when I lived in north London, I once heard a member of a family with Yorkshire accents say, looking at the line diagram over seats on the Piccadilly line, “Look – Amos Grove”, seeing an old-style forename instead of “Arnos”. I think our fonts avoid what I call the “Illinois problem” – serious difficulty in distinguishing capital I and lower case L.
Thanks, Peter. As I read this on screen the two letter rn is distinct from m, and if I squint I can actually see daylight. I print puzzles to fit A4, which I think means the font is larger than in the newspaper, but even with a magnifying glass I can’t tell the difference between m and rn. Usually the context makes the intention clear but I was taken surprise recently thinking ‘bur-n’ when the setter meant ‘bum’!
Vanessa Redgrave gave me the first part of the butterfly, and I stumbled across the admiral once the checkers were in place. Reverse engineering led to the fact that a Vanessa must be a butterfly, having nothing to do with the family of actors after all!
I found it difficult to get a foothold into this puzzle, taking several minutes to get WHIT as my first in.
Slow but steady progress thereafter for a completion in 35min.
Thanks for parsing ARCO for me. Knew the word as a violinists instruction, but didn’t spot Isaac.
Quite hard as expected from a Dean Mayer puzzle and I only just came in under an hour. All eventually parsed though I had exactly the same experience as Guy when I had another look at TOVARICHES this morning. I doubt I was the only person to think “Redgrave”, and therefore her father Sir Michael, for ‘Vanessa’ at 12d. (On edit, Corymbia above just beat me to it). Her surname helped with the RED bit of the answer anyway, as did her politics and perhaps the previous TOVARICHES. I first put in SHOT for 22d, parsing it as a double def – ‘Drop of whiskey’ and ‘punch chaser’ – which sort of works, though WHIT is the better answer.
Favourites were FLIGHT ATTENDANT, TITHE (I’m probably wrong but I would classify it as a partial &lit as ‘church’s interest’ is not part of the wordplay) and the CHAIN GANG cryptic def, an oldie but a goldie.
Thanks to Dean and Guy
I added that classification at the last minute, when I realized that I hadn’t given it one and that the wordplay is too involved for it to be a mere CD. The definition is certainly incomplete without “It’s in the.” Those words don’t really count as wordplay without the definition either—in my humble opinion. But I’ll add to the note.
Thanks. I try to tiptoe very gently in the &lit / partial &lit territory as I’ve come a cropper more than once before.
My own view is that this is more of an art than a science, which allows for some fluidity between categories in classification. There are, of course, certain strictures that must be adhered to in the actual construction of clues.
I don’t think it’s &Lit at all, partial or otherwise. ‘It’s in the’ is the wordplay, giving T(IT)THE. ‘Church’s interest’ is the definition.
The 1938 stage play of GASLIGHT and 1940 British film preceded the Cukor film.
By four years! I knew the film was based on a play. The British film version hewed closer to that original. Just finding out about the British film. This is scandalous corporate behavior (Wikipedia):
« Encouraged by the success of the play and film, MGM bought the remake rights, but with a clause insisting that all existing prints of Dickinson’s version be destroyed, even to the point of trying to destroy the negative, so that it would not compete with their more highly publicised 1944 remake starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, and Joseph Cotten. “Fortunately they failed, and now the British film has been restored by the BFI and issued in the UK on Blu-ray in a pristine print.” »
I just now found it on YouTube!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYmtzaHwCKo
I forgot to give my take on the puzzle. I needed 52 minutes to complete the grid with one look at the dictionary to find an alternative meaning of Vanessa (the word ‘butterfly’ was enough for me to think of RED ADMIRAL), and a little assistance with the distribution of unchecked anagrist in TOVARICHES.
Pizzicato may be heard more rarely, but generally speaking a string player is likely to encounter the term ‘arco’ just as infrequently, as it only appears after a passage marked ‘pizzicato’. The rest of the time it’s assumed that the bow will be used.
Yes. That’s exactly why I wrote that “arco” is most often what you hear, rather than read. It’s the default setting for a violin! So to speak.
It wasn’t intended as a criticism or a correction as I had noted what you said. I was just adding a little more context for those who may not know it.
I just wanted to use the phrase “default setting.”
70m 53s
Re4d, the exact same clue and solution ‘Joined Labour Party’/’Chain Gang’ was in ST Cryptic 4979 and duly noted in the back of my notebook at the time as very amusing.
Thanks, Guy.
Who set 4979?
Same setter, same blogger!
Ha! I shudda known!
(It’s an odd-numbered one, and keriothe and I have never switched.)
Well, this was typically very difficult for me, and I was disappointed to DNF with 2 unsolved, despite numerous revisits. Those were BEVY and TOVARICHES. The former just never occurred to me and the latter I’ve either NHO or more likely never taken in. And I would never have worked out the parsing. The crossers I had didn’t indicate a likelihood of an anagram, so I was completely at a loss. The rest of the puzzle was, however, entertaining, though I missed the Isaac Stern reference.
An enjoyable and ultimately successful struggle. I had to look up a few post solve – including Vanessa, Stern and Tovariches.
Is “Germany” = “G” ok in 16ac?
I don’t think I’ve seen that before. Dictionaries only seem to have “German” under “G”.
There probably is a longer abbreviation where G is Germany, but I can’t bring it to mind.
I don’t think there is, and you’re right. This has come up here before. Here, it can be resolved by saying that the clue’s “from Germany” equates to… German! Thanks
Around 45 minutes
Loved ARCO now the Stern reference is explained. Less sure about the comrades as, even squinting, I can’t really see where the instruction is to put the rest of the anagram of SOV(I)ET around AR(I)CH.
Also liked the ATTENDANT clue as a CC that works
Thanks Dean and Guy
The clue says “cunning” or ARCH hides “one” of an anagram (“rogue”) of “soviet” and you figure the rest of that word must be lying about there too…
(Odd to see “soviet” uncapped—spellcheck was resistant!)
I agree with Dvynys : “you figure the rest of that word must be lying about there” – ought to be an instruction to that effect, in order to be completely fair ( however brilliant the surface reading). I wonder if Peter B would have put this in the ‘Good clues’ section of a Clue Writing contest report?
This has been bugging me, but I think I’ve got there. The clue works if, for the wordplay, one reads ‘of’ as ‘among’. Ignore previous comment!
DNF, defeated by TOVARICHES, RED ADMIRAL and ARCO, none of which I came close to parsing.
Thanks Guy and Dean.
COD French letters
90 minutes with one mistake: I alphabet-trawled 23ac, realized it would be something to do with music, but the only possibility that seemed reasonable was TRIO (as I don’t play the violin, I am not familiar with musical instructions to violinists). If Stern was playing in a trio, it would be with bow, so that didn’t seem entirely unlikely. The rest of it (and actually, that, too) was superb as usual.
A tad too many NHOs for this one to be labelled ‘enjoyable’ (ARCO, TOVARICHES, GASLIGHT, WHIT, AVOCET) but soldiered on and solved the rest. Wordplay for GASLIGHT was too convoluted for me to untangle, and so on. I’ve seen the CHAIN GANG clue before ( it’s in my book of ‘super’ clues), but liked the originality of the FRENCH LETTERS and HERNIA. Took a while to get to DNF status!
Thanks Dean and Guy
Started this off in a cafe and left after 30 minutes with only 7 or 8 clues filled in. Took several more sessions to finally complete the grid with quite a bit of electronic help and over two hours all up.
FORTRAN was one of the early answers – it was one of the languages around when I was studying programming but not one that I had to learn.
A number of new terms were cause for the longer solve time, including TOVARICHES (ended up finding by googling the Russian term for comrade), GASLIGHT (the movie), PLANGENT and ARCO. Finally got it all done and fully parsed – so satisfying in the end.
Finished with that TOVARICHES, BEVY (after 8d provided the V and realising that there was another version of ‘bevvy’) and finally that ARCO. Those last three probably took as long or longer than the rest of the puzzle.