Times Cryptic 29154 – Sat, 15 Feb 2025. Stiff Saturday.

30 comments on “Times Cryptic 29154 – Sat, 15 Feb 2025. Stiff Saturday.”

1. I liked this one very much. Usually, I struggle on the weekend’s puzzle’s but I managed to see most of these from the literal. Saw WOLD pretty quickly thinking of ‘The Cotswolds’. NHO BATTLEDORE and had to cheat to get it and noticed it gave two options, dore and door but luckily went the right way. ENDOCRINOLOGIST came when I had enough checkers in place. I thought LETTERHEAD was very good. COD to TIT+WIT+NIT, very amusing and clever.
   Thanks B.

2. DNF
   NHO UNDELETE; and I made the mistake of thinking that E replaced UA, rather than U and A. I couldn’t have told you hat a WOLD is, but I recently re-read Bleak House, where Chesney Wold is the home of Sir Lester Dedlock. I liked BIRDBRAIN, and TABLED.

3. My copy is complete and correct, but there is no time and I remember but little. I do remember thinking that if you are running meetings with both UK and US participants, you better agree on which meaning of table to use!

   1. Or better yet, don’t say “table” whichever you mean!

4. I needed 40 minutes for this. I had no idea what was going on at 5dn.

   Not that it caught me out (I tossed a coin and it landed the right way) but there is an alternative answer at 20dn, namely IDOLIZE. There is nothing in the clue to confirm the spelling one way or the other and the official Times crossword dictionaries (Collins and the Oxfords) both list -IZE first, and -ISE second. This should have been picked up before publication.

   1. I’d bet (a small amount of) (someone else’s) money that, regardless of the dictionaries, the setters use
      -ISE.

      1. You may well be right, and usually when there’s a choice between -IZE and -ISE endings, in real life away from crosswords I tend to use -ISE myself. But crosswords are a different matter and setters need to be aware of commonly used alternative spellings and write their clues accordingly if the letter in question is unchecked. Editors are supposed to be there to pick up on things that setters may have overlooked.

         1. I absolutely agree, and I didn’t mean to suggest that an example like this wasn’t problematic. But I put in IDOLISE here without thinking of IDOLIZE, and I think that was because I’ve seen naught but -ISE here. (Then again, all my life–until the subject came up here a while back–I was firmly convinced that it was UK=S, US=Z, punkt.)

            1. It’s not as simple as ISE in UK, IZE in US. In UK ISE if of Latin origin but IZE if Greek origin, however IZE can in general can replace ISE and usually goes in the US. Thus a house style can stipulate always use IZE but can’t stipulate always use ISE. That’s my understanding. I think I might have read this in Fowler but can’t be certain.

         2. “Editors are supposed to be there to pick up on things that setters may have overlooked”

            Yes, and without giving anything away, I couldn’t believe the answer to [a clue] in today’s 15×15 was not picked up.

            1. I knew I couldn’t parse it, but haven’t yet worked out what the problem is. I removed the reference to a specific clue to be on the safe side. Best save any further thoughts until next weekend

   2. I thought the Times style was -ISE not -IZE?

      1. I have a piece on ‘Times Crossword House Style’ written by Peter B in 2000 that makes no mention of this. It may well be house style for articles in The Times newspaper to standardise (ize?) one way or another for consistency but it surely wouldn’t apply to crosswords as that would place unreasonable restrictions on setters.

5. I started off at a great rate, rebuilding some confidence after yesterday’s bruising ultra toughie. Then things started to get a bit more difficult with WOLD (missed out it was an &lit), DOME (can’t remember seeing it for ‘head’ before), DOWNSWING (brain fade for the required sense of ‘course’), UNDELETE (hard when faced with _ _ _E_E_E) and finally TABLED. Who knew TABLE could be a contranym – certainly not me. Ended up needing a bit more than an hour to finish.

   Loved ‘Tit? Wit? Nit?’; into the “Favourite cryptic clues” file it goes.

   Thanks to branch and to our setter

   1. “All right, ” said Fred, climbing up a ladder
      With his crowbar gave a mighty blow
      Was he in trouble, half a ton of rubble landed on the top of his DOME
      So Charlie and me had another cuppa tea
      And then we went home

6. Ah, Bernard Cribbins and “Right Said Fred”. Great stuff. Thanks for the reminder.

7. DNF, as was unable to think of BYROAD – not a word I’m familiar with, though I should have thought of it. As a consequence, I ended up with a rather unparseable ABROAD, making TABLED impossible. Unfortunate, since, with the B in place, I immediately saw TABLED as the likely answer, though I didn’t understand the second part of the clue. A rare non-finish for a Saturday, but with some excellent clues.

8. I remember in one of the Morse books, Colin Dexter / Inspector Morse talks about -IZE being the correct Oxford spelling.
   But in The Times it’s always -ISE as far aa I have noticed.

   1. Yes, his trust that an Oxford scholar would never use -ISE was sufficient for Morse to eliminate a man as a potential suspect in a murder investigation.

9. DNF after 30

   Couldn’t quite get BATTLEDORE and totally defeated on the vg UNDELETE, not helped by a rather silly FORESWING.

   Liked it though.

   Thanks Setter and Bruce

10. 70 minutes WOE. I was thinking that this was much easier than the previous one until I had two left. Eventually I guessed correctly that TABLED was a two-nations-divided-by-a-common-language thing. I guessed incorrectly that BATTLESORE meant battle-weary, i.e. game no more. I enjoyed it though. Thanks branch.

11. POI/MER 8a Leisured. “Making certain.” I always spell it Ensure rather than Insure, but I accept that it is OK to write Insure, just sloppy IMO. FWIW I pronounce it Ensure as well.
    5d Tabled. I didn’t understand this clue, thanks branch for the logic.
    DNF 17a Deign, 18d Exalted. Too complicated for me.

12. On either side the river lie
    Long fields of barley and of rye
    That clothe the WOLD and meet the sky

    The opening lines of The Lady of Shallott

    This one took a long time. LOI UNDELETE, partly because I had a wrong crosser from GOLFSWING, instead of DOWNSWING. But even when that was corrected UNDELETE was a long time coming.

    I discovered the different meanings of TABLE here, from a Jumbo in August 2022. Ellie-from-the-States was baffled by the parsing of CONSTABLE, and I tried to explain it as cons=studies + table=put up for discussion. Part of the problem was this issue, that “table”, in America, means the opposite, to stop discussing it for now. Like us shelving things

13. 48:05. Remember this one being fairly hard. some weird words (BATTLEDORE being one) keeping things spicy.

14. I spotted the ISE vs IZE ambiguity in 20d, and therefore checked this website’s archives, before submitting.

    I see this has occasionally come up – particularly on Tuesday 23rd Nov 2010 “Times 24,702” 10ac – same clue, same problem.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling is pretty comprehensive:

    “Oxford spelling (also Oxford English Dictionary spelling, Oxford style, or Oxford English spelling) is a spelling standard, named after its use by the Oxford University Press, that prescribes the use of British spelling in combination with the suffix -ize in words like realize and organization instead of -ise endings.
    […]
    The style guide of The Times recommended -ize until 1992, when it switched to -ise.
    […]
    Oxford spelling is not necessarily followed by the staff of the University of Oxford. The university’s style guide, last updated in 2016, recommended the use of -ise for internal use.”

    1. Many thanks for your diligent research. On the last but one para I would still maintain that whatever The Times newspaper style guide says it surely can’t be intended to apply to answers in their crossword puzzles.

       1. Fair enough, but if you look back through the crosswords, my impression is that setters almost always use -ise endings. Similarly, they use ONE/ONES instead of YOU/YOURS.

          1. You may well be right about setters using -ISE more frequently, but if the middle letter is unchecked and there is nothing in the wordplay, the deciding factor surely can’t be the ‘Oxford ending’ convention unless that has been made clear to solvers and regularly reiterated.

             It’s true that setters use ONE’S rather than YOUR in phrases and sayings almost invariably, but I remember at least one occasion within the past couple of years when YOUR turned up and distracted us. However that’s not quite the same because of checkers. There can never be a situation where YOUR and ONE’S are interchangeable in a completed grid.

15. I don’t suppose anyone will read this now, but I had another look today as I’d won the prize for it, and just noticed that there’s a Nina, which is pretty unusual for the cryptic, let alone a prize one! There’s a D in every answer.

    1. Well spotted, Andy.

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