Times Cryptic No 27498 – Saturday, 02 November 2019. Why is it so?

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If you were on song, you might have got through this quickly. For me, it was more like ‘slow but steady’. I finished confident of the answers but with lots of questions to look up. Why is a 25ac sensitive? What is a 23ac? Who is 17dn? And more.

I had no obvious clue of the day, but 15ac set the mood of the moment. Thanks to the setter for a very enjoyable puzzle.

Clues are blue, with definitions underlined. (ABC*) means ‘anagram of ABC’. Deletions are in [square brackets]. The blog is in Times New Roman font, as part of an ongoing, gentle campaign to urge the club site to use a font in which it is easier to tell one’s stem from one’s stern.

Across
1 Arrived shortly, turning up with son for college (6)
CAMPUS – CAM[e]. PU=UP ‘turning’, S[on].

5 Brilliance of girl shown endlessly in competition (8)
RADIANCE – DIAN[a] in RACE.

9 Partial metaphor is misplaced in a maxim (8)
APHORISM – hidden answer.

10 Casually play with pasta (6)
NOODLE – double definition. ‘Noodling’ is apparently casual improvisation in jazz.

11 Trendy food shop has to supply food, mostly tasteless (10)
INDELICATE – IN, DELI, CATE[r].

13 Top cover for American district gangster (4)
HOOD – triple definition. Actually, a triple abbreviation: HOOD short for hoodie, HOOD short for neighbourhood, HOOD short for hoodlum!

14 Obese, eating seconds, and not running (4)
FAST – S in FAT. The answer is one of those cute words with exactly opposite meanings: moving fast, or tied fast.

15 What rail services need accompanying words and music? (10)
SOUNDTRACK – a light-hearted double definition. You wouldn’t want your train running on an unsound track!

18 Broken arrester in device holding something back (10)
RESTRAINER – (ARRESTER IN*), ‘broken’.

20 Cat and comb ultimately makes catacomb? (4)
TOMB – TOM, [com]B.

21 Deep sea fish, black when small (4)
BASS – B[lack], AS, S[mall].

23 Surveyor’s instrument — they cart me about (10)
TACHYMETER – (THEY CART ME*), ‘around’. Apparently, it’s a surveying device that uses rangefinder technology.

25 Am keeping notes about sensitive plant (6)
MIMOSA – AM ‘keeping’ SO and MI, all backwards (‘about’). Apparently mimosa leaves may respond to touch.

26 Very poor walkway state getting turned round (8)
PATHETIC – PATH, CITE ‘turned around’.

28 Briefly immerse pot for small plant (8)
DUCKWEED – DUCK, WEED. Tempting to think WEE=small, but no, I think WEED=pot, and duckweed is just a small plant!

29 Good, I am allowed a cocktail (6)
GIMLET – G[ood], I’M, LET.

Down
2 Await developments in a leaf attachment (9)
APPENDAGE – PEND in A PAGE.

3 School research task needs to stand out (7)
PROJECT – double definition.

4 Mountain runner regularly visited Sikkim (3)
SKI – odd letters of SiKkIm.

5 Dance of millions in Cuba — right for clubs (5)
RUMBA – M for millions in CUBA with C for clubs replaced by R for right.

6 Race to put on vital headgear (6,5)
DONKEY DERBY – DON, KEY, DERBY.

7 One further person yet to be named (7)
ANOTHER – um, *another* double definition.

8 Transparent sheet left over instrument (5)
CELLO – CEL (short for celluloid, I discover), L[eft], O[ver].

12 Show a case for taking fast before one took food (11)
INSTANTIATE – INSTANT, I, ATE.

16 Uniform used on Royal Navy vessel (3)
URN – U[niform], R.N.

17 Caught rewritten line by me in play (9)
CYMBELINE – C[aught], (LINE BY ME*), ‘rewritten’. Cymbeline was a king of early Britain, in a Shakespeare play. Lucky I looked that up! Did anyone else guess French, female?

19 What stands up like this out of hot footwear? (7)
TUSSOCK – T[h]US (like this), SOCK.

20 Member in the House that is born in Chelsea, perhaps (3,4)
TIE BEAM – I.E. (that is), B (born) in TEAM.

22 Parting device for stamping coins in gold (5)
ADIEU – DIE in AU.

24 Young archer finished in police department (5)
CUPID – UP in C.I.D.

27 Wicket perhaps overturned endlessly in game (3)
TAG – GAT[e], ‘overturned’.

24 comments on “Times Cryptic No 27498 – Saturday, 02 November 2019. Why is it so?”

  1. This seems to have left no impression on me, as I have no comments on my copy. Luckily DUCKWEED came back to me, as did DONKEY–it was a DNK in an earlier cryptic–once I had DERBY.
  2. I think we can take it that ‘hoodie’ is derived from HOOD so in that sense the answer is not an abbreviation.

    A rare 30 minute target achieved on a Saturday. Not necessarily very easy, but I had met all the trickier stuff (e.g. TACHYMETER, TIE BEAM) before and managed for once to remember it all. Looked twice at ‘line’ for LINE in 17dn but I knew the play if only by title.

    To answer your first question in the intro, Bruce, SOED has this entry:

    Mimosa noun & adjective. M18.
    [ORIGIN Modern Latin, app. from Latin mimus mime noun + -osa fem. of -osus -ose¹ (named from its being as sensitive as an animal).]

    Edited at 2019-11-09 06:06 am (UTC)

  3. 15:25. But I didn’t know CEL as an abbreviation and took a while getting the parsing of TUSSOCK. As for MIMOSA, I wondered if it was related to the Venus Fly-trap… but on checking I found its not. NHO TACHYMETER either, but the anagram could lead to no other instrument. So thumbs up to the setter for reducing my level of general ignorance, and thanks for the blog, Bruce.
    1. I could swear this just came up a few days ago, but although CEL derives from ‘celluloid’, it is not an abbreviation of the word. (You wouldn’t say that something is made of CEL, for instance.) As the clue says, it’s a transparent sheet– of celluloid, which an artist draws on for an animated film.
  4. INSTANTIATE and TACHYMETER were new to me but the wordplay and crossers were helpful. I didn’t know that MIMOSAs responded to touch either. Got through this in 24:54, so not difficult at all. Enjoyable though. Thanks setter and Bruce.
  5. More or less the half hour on this. LOI was TIE BEAM. Frank Lampard is really making an impression if Chelsea are now thought of as a team. I did briefly wonder if there was a DUNK WEED but, being one of the world’s confirmed non-dunkers, I then saw the DUCK on the pond. I stumbled on TACHYMETER via tachometer. COD to DONKEY DERBY, which brings back the memory of a member of the aforesaid breed running off in the wrong direction at Poulton Gala with a six year old me clinging on for dear life, parents chasing after us, for the animal only to stop by the fence to the railway track. Good job it wasn’t a steeplechase. Enjoyable puzzle. Thank you B and setter.
  6. I must have been off form last Saturday -perhaps like our rugby team, the memory is still painful.
    I did manage to find the TACHYMETER, knew Cymbeline and constructed the DNK INSTANTIATE, but my usual weaknesses in the scrums of plants and fish let me down. And I failed to tackle the TUSSOCK.
    Pink Floyd used to noodle, so that was an easy one for me.
    David

  7. ….NOODLE on a CELLO.

    A little easy for a prize puzzle, although NHO TACHYMETER, and am grateful to Bruce for parsing APPENDAGE. I, like Bolton Wanderer, initially considered “dunkweed”, but the truth emerged quickly enough.

    FOI RADIANCE
    LOI INSTANTIATE
    COD TUSSOCK
    TIME 9:48

    Edited at 2019-11-09 09:51 am (UTC)

  8. I didn’t note my time for this one, but I seem to remember it went fairly quickly. My minimal notes show a question mark about “cel” and also add me to the club of those who avoided a DUNKWEED by thinking for a bit longer.

    By stunning coincidence, 25a was a write-in as I am currently growing a MIMOSA pudica from seed, and I can confirm that the leaves respond in a pleasingly odd way to touch even at its current seedling stage, folding in on themselves about a half-second after I brush them with a fingertip.

    Edited at 2019-11-09 11:01 am (UTC)

  9. It seems I whizzed through this in under 15 minutes, making it by a distance the easiest of the week. I too considered DUNKWEED before accepting it wasn’t a thing, though you never really know with plants.
    Thanks for the comments, Bruce. That on Cymbeline sent me (inadvertently, perhaps) on a quest for French women in Shakespeare plays. Apart from Katherine in Henry V, with the Bard’s hilarious/cringe worthy riff on French accents, I knew of none until unearthing an entire play set in France, All’s Well. I’ve learned something!
      1. Fair call, though she is in Henry VI part 1. I knew someone would come up with a character I was less aware of.
  10. Make that four in a row (and five overall) for DUNKweed, and 12 in a row for viewing this as pretty straight-forward. I was glad of having the angrist for Cymbeline – I’m pretty sure that if I were stopped on the street and asked to spell it I’d have either too many or too few letters in wrong places. thanks, Brnchn, you too, setter
  11. 21:53 for a pretty straightforward puzzle but sadly ending up as a DNF because I was another dunkweed.
  12. at 25ac is my favourite fragrance. My grandfather always us to have great bunches of it at Christmas. He would study the bright-yellow pollen under his microscope. Today it is better known as an OJ champagne cocktail.
    My WOD

    FOI 10ac NOODLE

    LOI 28ac DUCKWEED for some reason.

    COD 9ac APHORISM well hidden!

    Time: a seemly 36 mins

  13. Incidentally, this morning’s blog reminded me that I was going to take a video of my MIMOSA, so if anyone’s curious as to exactly why they’re called “sensitive”, you can see my very own seedling reacting to touch in a video on Twitter.
  16. When I exit and re-enter the Xwd on the iPad all previous answers I’ve posted have disappeared. This only started happening recently. Needless to say, this is vexing. Is there a fix?

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