Sunday Times 4906 by David McLean

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
10:44. Once again I have left it very late to blog this one so I don’t remember much about my solving experience… other than that I enjoyed it. I should really try harder to write these things on the day. Subsequent analysis of the clues confirms that lots of them are top notch, and the surface readings (which I have trained myself not to notice when solving) are in several cases outstanding.

Points of discussion? Maybe a slight question mark about the definition at 7ac, and we might debate how cryptic 22ac is, if we want something to argue talk about, but overall another great puzzle so thank you Harry.

Definitions are underlined, anagrams indicated like (TIHS)*, anagram indicators are in italics.

Across
1 Detachment fire on half-strength Saudis
DISPASSION – sauDIS, PASSION (fire).
7 Surprises wife, lurking in recessed place in field
WOWS – W contained in SOW (place in field) reversed (recessed). I’d have said that to WOW is more to impress than surprise, but I guess one is implicit in the other. The use of ‘place’ here is really clever: nouns that can be verbs are the setters friend!
9 It isn’t result man’s knocked, but player
INSTRUMENTALIST – (IT ISNT RESULT MAN)*. Nice clue, the surface evoking the lingo of the football commentator.
10 A cable containing conservative agreement
ACCORD – A(C), CORD.
12 Dislike rendering on villa’s eastern side
AVERSION – villA, VERSION (rendering).
13 Tough barrier that a soldier goes over
ADAMANT – A(DAM), ANT.
15 Ties unfortunately cost a shilling
ASCOTS – (COST A)*, S.
17 You must get bit of nitro and spring crook
UNWELL – U (you, text lingo), Nitro, WELL (spring).
18 Your good health is from good spirits and one drop of Orvieto
CHEERIO – CHEER, I, Orvieto.
19 Once more make sure nurse follows on quickly
REFASTEN – RE (on), FAST, EN (Enrolled Nurse).
21 In hearing, a group is tried
SOUGHT – sounds like ‘sort’, to non-rhotic speakers anyway.
22 She’s very big in New York
STATUE OF LIBERTY – (barely) cryptic definition.
24 Very experienced army walk away from front
ARCH – mARCH.
25 Heavy trailer not in need of refurbishment
TORRENTIAL – (TRAILER NOT)*. Definition cunningly hidden in plain sight.

Down
2 Local news overlooked by head of ITV
INN – Itv, NN (new x2). Not a hard clue to solve but what a surface!
3 Go off with a parent to get financial aid
PATRONAGE – (GO A PARENT)*.
4 Dive deeply in coastal waters
SOUND – DD. I wasn’t sure about the first definition but it’s in Collins: ‘(of a whale, etc) to dive downwards swiftly and deeply’. The example of the second most familiar to me as an honorary Canuck is Parry Sound in Georgian Bay.
5 Out or not out? England cross with bit of play
INEXACT – IN, E, X, ACT. No assembly required.
6 Letter lady found outside of King’s Cathedral
NOTRE-DAME – NOT(R)E DAME.
7 Country cries out to be heard
WALES – sounds like ‘wails’.
8 A chopper with a delayed time of arrival
WISDOM TOOTH – CD. An excellent example of its type. These clues are tough for seasoned solvers because you waste time looking for wordplay (time of arrival = ETA? with = W? etc) when there is none. Some people dislike them but it’s a kind of bluff and when it works well (as here) they can be excellent.
11 Repeated correspondence with franchised landlord?
CHAIN LETTER – a bit of a confusing clue in that if you’re a franchisee running a pub in a chain you will be (in a property sense) a renter rather than a landlord, so to make sense of the wordplay I think you have to separate the parts: [franchised] = CHAIN, [landlord] = LETTER.
14 Bunch involved in complicated Mantel plot
ALLOTMENT – (MANTEL)* containing LOT.
16 Fat, but puds halved in my dieting period!
CORPULENT – COR(PUds), LENT.
18 Talk about one that’s spruce?
CONIFER – CON(I)FER.
20 American leader comes to Long Beach at last!
AITCH – American, ITCH. One of my kids is keen on the Manchaster rapper Aitch at the moment. The things one has to put up with.
21 Small fish spear
SPIKE – S, PIKE.
23 Film about Sri-Lanka ultimately being Ceylon?
TEA – reversal of ET, sri-lankA. There is a rule that you’re not allowed extraneous words in containment clues so the setter has to sneak a dodgy hyphen in here to make Sri Lanka one word.

38 comments on “Sunday Times 4906 by David McLean”

  1. After intermittent attempts to finish–SOUGHT, of course, my LOI–I submitted off leaderboard. WISDOM TOOTH was my POI; I was stuck on ‘chopper’=either ax or helicopter, and couldn’t think of anything to fit W_S_O. A wisdom tooth is a molar; a grinder, hardly a chopper. DNK ‘crook’. I think the only SOUND I know of is Puget Sound, but it didn’t occur to me at the time. I have ‘feh’ written by STATUE OF LIBERTY, but aside from that I thought this was one of Harry’s best.
    1. Here in England “choppers” is slang for all teeth, not just some of them..
      1. Actually, I think it is in the US, too (although not in my idiolect). I wasn’t really objecting, but indicating why I was stuck on ax/copter.
  2. Yes i like this one too.. I do love a good surface reading, and this has lots.
    Re 7ac I was not too sure either about wows = surprises or about recess = reverse. But I solved the clue OK so wotthehell..
  3. I don’t understand the issue with WOWS. In “he wowed her with flowers” it means surprised. Apart from STATUE OF LIBERTY (barely cryptic barely covers it) I found this a great solve. It never crossed my mind that describing wisdom teeth as choppers is not that accurate…to me choppers means teeth (among other things, of course).
  4. And another thing was that I think I knew CROOK from the Australian philosophers on Monty Python. “How are you feeling Bruce?” “A bit crook, Bruce”. Chambers actually has it as Australian and NZ, so maybe that’s not 100% fair without anything additional in the clue.

    Edited at 2020-06-14 05:01 am (UTC)

  5. 32 minutes no queries.

    Re 4dn: Surely Plymouth Sound is one of the most famous? The starting point of many an historical voyage.

    Edited at 2020-06-14 05:04 am (UTC)

  6. 41 minutes. For some reason, I took an age to parse DISPASSION. I don’t think I knew the antipodean use of crook to mean UNWELL. Barry McKenzie, my principal source, was an awful long time ago. The crossers and cryptic were clear enough. I was wowed by WOWS, but COD to WISDOM TOOTH. We’re spoilt with good Sunday puzzles. Thank you K and David.
  7. ….is surely not far away.

    No real problems, but I felt I should have got there a little quicker.

    FOI ACCORD
    LOI SOUGHT
    COD WISDOM TOOTH
    TIME 15:31

  8. Same last two as Kevin but more towels were thrown in at the 30 minute mark. Problem was that I was fixated on the first word being WESTON as they used to make choppers there (the super Mare version of Weston that is). And I fear my alpha trawls are half hearted at the best of times, otherwise the “h” would have unlocked both words.

    So thank you Setter – a very fair 2-0 to you there – the clue for WISDOM TOOTH was excellent. And thanks as always for the blog

  9. The discussion about 7A is a good illustration of an editorial question. How far do you insist on definitions being accurate according to the official dictionaries, and potentially lose some entertaining clues. “Wow” meaning “to surprise” seems harmless, with other words like “amaze” crossing the same border. “Recess” meaning reverse is in Chambers, where the setters are not really supposed to look for the STC, and apparently in the original Latin. Strictly speaking, a second quibble in the same clue should have triggered a request for something different, but then we would almost certainly not have wowed people with “place in field”.
  10. I don’t get ‘sought’ where ‘sort’=’a group’. ‘Wows’ is too much of a stretch with an unagricultural definition of ‘sow’. ‘Refasten’ is another stretch too far. ‘Make more certain’? Of a button?
    1. The clue says sure, not certain. Collins: ‘physically secure or dependable‘.
      1. Quite apart from that definition ‘sort’ and ‘group’ are synonymous verbs.
  11. I usually manage to get onto David McLean’s wavelength and in my first hour I got all but 8 clues.That’s pretty good for me.
    However I was defeated by WISDOM TOOTH, SOUGHT and ADAMANT. With hindsight I see 8d is excellent. I’m still not sure that Tough = Adamant; and Tried= Sought is not obvious to me.
    There was lots to enjoy here. I got WOWS without parsing. David
  12. 13:51. I enjoyed this a lot. Unlike some, I rather liked WOWS. I liked WISDOM TOOTH but COD to AITCH.
  13. Exactly the same problems and solving experience as dvynys. I regularly pass Weston’s helicopter museum so that’s my excuse for making the connection!
  14. I took (wrongly) SOUND in the sense of sound out to give the deep dive part.
    Speaking of which, last week I received an unsolicited invitation to a webinar on the reliability of information. It was to begin with a ‘data deep dive’. Words fail me ….. which is not a good trait in a crossword solver.
    1. Yes I thought the same while solving, it was only when I came to write up the blog that I realised that it didn’t really work.
  15. Nice to see you keriothe doing something that I never dare to do when blogging on Fifteen Squared for fear of a whole mass of people saying how hidebound I’m being: you say that there is a rule that you’re not allowed extraneous words in containment clues (23dn).

    But is there such a rule? I’ve heard this in connection with hidden words, but I’m sure I’ve seen things like ‘a’ as the last letter of ‘Sri Lanka’. Did Hoskins really sneak a dodgy hyphen in?

    1. I believe there is. It makes sense to me because otherwise setters could insert any number of redundant words into a clue, which strikes me as not quite cricket. I suppose you might consider that ‘Sri Lanka’ is a single lexical unit but as far as I’m aware it’s never spelled with a hyphen.
      1. I’m not sure that there is an explicit rule for endings like this, but if a setter used something like “finale of Beethoven’s 5th symphony” to indicate Y, I think I might well ask for something different (like “symphony’s finale”), but on reflection think “Sri Lanka” as a “lexical unit” didn’t really need the hyphen.

        Most (broadsheet) papers do have a similar rule about hidden word clues, but our setters have been told that I will allow just a tiny extra word that doesn’t contribute to the answer. But with most of them working for other papers, they don’t often remember to take advantage.

        Edited at 2020-06-14 11:43 am (UTC)

      2. Slightly different from the examples under discussion, but didn’t we very recently have a clue where the answer was hidden in ‘A and B’ where one had to ignore the ‘and’? Or something along those lines. Not easy find using Search, but I’m sure I remember it. It may even have been one I blogged.

        Edited at 2020-06-14 01:50 pm (UTC)

        1. Possibly. In Thursday’s Guardian puzzle by Philistine there was something like this: ‘consecutive atoms show fruit’, where you get the answer (TOMATO) by putting ATOM next to itself. I think it’s a different category though since it’s a set of cryptic instructions rather than just a case of finding the answer directly in the words of the clue.

          Edited at 2020-06-14 02:18 pm (UTC)

          1. Found it now:

            QC 1610 by Pedro 11 May 2020

            11ac Girl seen between Rachel and Ena? (5)

            HELEN : Hidden [seen between] {Rac}HEL and EN{a}. Not sure I’ve seen an interrupted hidden word before, but it seems perfectly legitimate.

            It’s worrying how the weeks fly during lockdown. I’d have sworn this was within the past two weeks, but more than a month has passed!

  16. I still worry about the wisdom of Kevin starting these discussions: he invariably get’s things wrong – as English is not his first language. And ‘The Counties of British Isles’ not his Mastermind subject – as was mine, with ‘English County Cricket in the 1930s’ my second.

    At 4ac recess printing (intaglio) is a reverse printing method to traditional lithography and photogravure, used for the printing of high quality stamps and bank notes.

    FOI 7ac WOWS – what a wowser!

    LOI 22ac STATUE OF LIBERTY – never heard of it, although I have seen the original on the banks of the Seine.

    COD 8dn WISDOM TOOTH – can one have them put in?

    WOD 6dn NOTRE DAME – be careful with the pronunciation.

    Time 35 minutes.

    Edited at 2020-06-14 02:49 pm (UTC)

    1. Inter alia:

      Not sure how you can know that you’ve seen the original version of something you’ve never heard of. Or that Paris has the original version – my understanding is that the versions there are all copies of the original in NY.

        1. Oh, irony. Last resort of internet pests. I don’t visit TftT every day, so I don’t know what your comments are like during the week. But from what I see on Sundays, I think I would have told you to take the snide smart-arsery somewhere else if I’d seen it when I was running this site.
  17. 22:13 I found this fairly easy going once I’d got a foothold. I thought 22ac was a bit weak. I wasn’t entirely sure about the two meanings of sound in 4dn. I liked inexact, chain letter, corpulent and aitch.
  18. I found this an enjoyable tussle. I managed most of it in half an hour or so, but was taken to 40:16 by my last few clues. WISDOM TOOTH and SOUGHT took ages. WOWS also took a while, but finally led me to the chopper. Thanks Harry and K.
  19. As one might’ve guessed, my LOI was CROOK.
    Don’t tell my employers, but I didn’t notice the hyphen in “Sri-Lanka.” I agree that a hyphen isn’t necessary here but I’d look askance at an utterly extra word in this kind of clue. That would at least take some getting used to.
    I wasn’t given pause by “recessed,” seeing it immediately as “set back.”
  20. Late to the game, so I benefit from all the discussion. I liked Wows; it’s the kind of loose definition that doesn’t bother me at all. I had no problem with Sri Lanka or Sri-Lanka. I liked Inexact for the wording of the clue. Thanks keriothe, David M, and especially Peter B.
  21. Thanks David and keriothe
    Nice and solid puzzle that took three 15 minute sessions to get it out, starting with the gimme STATUE OF LIBERTY which gave me a good foothold down at the bottom.
    Had no issues with the rest of it, and indeed, quite liked WOWS when it finally dropped for me. Did notice an unusual number of clues that elicited a single letter as a part of the charade.
    Finished in the NE corner with PATRONAGE, DISPASSION and SOUND the last few in.

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