Sunday Times 4852 by Dean Mayer

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
21:23. This was a superb puzzle, I thought. Vintage Dean, with loads of clues that I had to look at three or four times before they succumbed, and with lots of ‘eureka’ moments along the way. And a few of the best kind of clues that don’t even look cryptic when you first look at them.

So many thanks to Dean for twenty minutes of entertainment, and here’s how I reckon it all works…

Definitions are underlined, anagrams indicated like (THIS)*, anagram indicators like this.

Across
1 Cry with pain
WAIL – W, AIL. It doesn’t look like a cryptic clue, but it is.
4 Iron skirt and tiny pants that she has?
FEMININITY – FE, MINI, (TINY)*. You could call this semi-&Lit, depending on your taste in clothes.
9 Running off isn’t held in high regard
ADMINISTRATION – (ISNT)* contained in ADMIRATION. The way the cryptic elements are hidden in a completely plausible surface reading here is excellent.
10 Very narrow lane, one running between hills
VALLEY – V, ALLEY.
11 Passing light over pipe
ELAPSING – reversal of PALE, SING.
13 This is mostly put on for men
STAG – STAGe.
14 My doctor’s intention — a lot of mistakes
CORRIGENDA – COR (my), RIG (doctor), END (intention), A.
16 Trio’s appeal to enter Fight Club
FRATERNITY – FRA(TERN, IT)Y. TERN is a rare (Collins) word for a ‘group of three’. Not one I knew, but given the other elements in the clue it seemed clear what the answer was.
18 Drop and shatter
DASH – DD. I have a bit of a bugbear about double definitions: I dislike them when they are difficult only because one of the meanings is hopelessly obscure, so that you end up just bunging in the answer based on one of the definitions and hoping or the best. This clue is not that. It uses the fact that everyday words have different meanings to bamboozle you, but when you make the right connections you are entirely sure of the answer.
19 Old poetry equally exotic?
OVERSEAS – O, VERSE, AS.
21 Apple seed has phosphorous in
PIPPIN – PIP (seed), P (phosphorous), IN.
22 Beachwear showing wobbly parts of bodies
SWIMMING TRUNKS – I’m not sure of the exact equivalence between ‘wobbly’ and SWIMMING: you might feel the former while your head is doing the latter, but is that the same thing? The ideas are close, at least.
24 Make quiet arrangements with sadness
PLANGENTLY – or PLAN, GENTLY!
25 Food kept by white couple, you might say
YOLK – sounds like ‘yoke’ (couple). Very nicely disguised definition.

Down
2 White flower, one created by boffins?
ALABASTER – or A LAB ASTER, geddit? A little bit corny but brilliant.
3 Spill jam? Flimsier sandwiches
LAMPLIGHTER – LAM(PLIGHT)ER. This was my last in, and I hesitated for ages before finally putting it in, faute de mieux. If I hadn’t been designated blogger I would have left it at that, but I kept thinking about it dutifully until finally I realised that ‘jam’ was PLIGHT and so ‘flimsier’ wasn’t LIGHTER after all. Doh!
4 Find attractive youth leaving home
FANCY – inFANCY. Cryptically X leaving Y can mean either Y without X or X without Y. I find the former the more natural reading but this isn’t a court of law so either has equal validity.
5 To plug damage, uses liquid rubber
MASSEUR – MAR containing (USES)*.
6 Royal Mint’s unorthodox routine
NORMALITY – (ROYAL MINT)*.
7 Head teachers?
NUT – DD. Not sure the question mark is necessary.
8 Unsure about husband’s old letter
THORN – T(H)ORN. The old English letter þ, representing the sound ‘th’, which survives anachronistically as a Y for reasons that are lost in the history of pub signage.
12 Go very cheaply
SPEND A PENNY – CD. A euphemistic expression dating from the days when public loos were coin-operated.
14 Prayer wheels crack after Mass
CARMELITE – CAR (wheels), M, ELITE (crack). I confess I googled CARMELITE to see if it was a form of prayer before I realised that the ‘prayer’ is a person.
15 One’s given spades in awful cards
DISMISSAL – DISM(I’S, S)AL. ‘Cards’ are ‘an employee’s national insurance and other documents held by the employer’ (Collins) and to ‘get ones cards’ is to be fired.
17 Sound of egg on penetration
INSIGHT – sounds like ‘incite’ (egg on).
20 I, for one, love dancing around wife
VOWEL – (LOVE)* containing W.
21 Crew push the boat out
PARTY – DD.
23 Mum’s new bloke
MAN – MA, N.

28 comments on “Sunday Times 4852 by Dean Mayer”

  1. Damn, he’s good! I think Dean may have even outdone himself in economy of cluing: 5.2 words per clue. DNK TERN, but it didn’t matter; DNK ‘push the boat out’, which I suppose made 21d for me one of those DD’s that Keriothe doesn’t like, but I felt happy enough to know one meaning; still, it was my LOI. Preceded by CARMELITE–where I wasted time wondering if there could be a prayer so called, until the penny finally dropped–DASH, and DISMISSAL–where I didn’t understand ‘cards’, and thought it had to do with red cards in soccer. Great clues–although I could wish Dean had avoided my=COR–but COD to 9ac.
    1. I’m surprised you didn’t know ‘push the boat out’. It’s a very commonplace expression but I guess only in English English. Edit: and I see Collins (which has both British and American dictionaries) has it as British only.

      Edited at 2019-06-02 08:32 am (UTC)

  2. 49 minutes. LOI LAMPLIGHTER. This definition of SPILL is becoming familiar, but it still took some parsing. I only got one of the meanings to DASH, which had to be enough. Didn’t know TERN. so FRATERNITY was entered from crossers, definition and two of its components. COD to FEMINITY. Fine puzzle. Thank you K and Dean.
  3. To my mind “running” implies that the answer should be ADMINISTRATING which I at first put in, without parsing. Does anybody agree – surely ADMINISTRATION is a noun?
      1. Beaten to it on the response. In my days as a Times Championship contender, any time a partly-filled spot in the grid ended in I??, “possibly -ING or -ION” was my thought, and I would pause to make sure I picked the right one.
  5. Beaten by ADMINISTRATION. I put ADMINISTRATING as did vinstappen. That also ruined 8d, THORN. Couldn’t make sense of it. .
    I liked PLANGENTLY but ALABASTER gets my COD award.
  6. 31:32, so 10 more minutes of fun than our blogger had. TERN for trio raised an eyebrow, but otherwise no quibbles. COD to CORRIGENDA. Great stuff! Thanks Dean and K.
  7. Another penny drop moment for CARMELITE here. Didn’t know tern for trio. CORRIGENDA a new word for me too. LAMPLIGHTER came as yet another PDM. A great puzzle which kept me busy for 38:19. Thanks Dean and K.
    1. I meant to say of CORRIGENDA that I don’t know whether I’ve come across it before or not. I think not, but it’s such a natural corollary of words like ADDENDA or ERRATA that it seemed familiar anyway.
        1. Or a list of points for discussion in a meeting at the Rover’s Return.
  9. In the end this was too difficult for me but I had some notable successes en route: CORRIGENDA emerged from somewhere and I had a fast start with Spend a Penny.
    Quite a few defeated me: Lamplighter and Carmelite ,perhaps predictably, but also Valley and Masseur.
    Enjoyed the challenge. David
  10. About an hour of solid stuff.

    FOI 7dn NUT

    LOI 14dn CARMELITE (from Starbucks?)

    COD 24ac PLANGENTLY

    WOD 14ac CORRIGENDA

  11. Dean is in another league. I look forward to his crosswords every three weeks so much.
  12. ….would have sat comfortably in the accompanying Mephisto, which had numerous cricket references in its clues.

    An excellent puzzle, but I put down the pen not short of the 20 minute mark, and used aids to solve the CARMELITE FRATERNITY crossover.

    COD SPEND A PENNY (or twenty of them at the new “improved” Wigan Bus Station).

  13. Easily the best crossword so far this year. Even with lamer=flimsier not quite working for me. Mr Grumpy
    1. A lame excuse is a flimsy excuse. Collins gives ‘unconvincing’ as a synonym for both words and gives ‘a lame/flimsy excuse’ as examples. Similar in ODO.
  14. Ha! It wasn’t my week to be on duty, so I didn’t parse it! Thanks!
  15. I thoroughly concur with the comments on this excellent puzzle.
    No-one seems to have commented on the typo in 21ac, where PHOSPHOROUS should be PHOSPHORUS, or is this an alternative spelling that is not in Chambers?
    1. A common mistake, phosphorous refers to the adjective describing compounds of phosphorus. I only know this as a result of A-Level chemistry. Regards Skipper-Bob.
  16. As usual a good teaser from the Dean. FOI 22a, LOI 5d, COD 14d, time 40m (Skipper Bob, having some trouble with my LJ password)
  17. Thanks Dean and keriothe
    Agree that this was an excellent puzzle which took a few sittings to get out. Didn’t get to see the word play of LAMPLIGHTER, getting bogged down with LIGHTER as ‘flimsier’ which was the obvious trap that the setter had put there – a very clever clue. Did not know the phrase ‘push the boat out’ to mean to celebrate lavishly. CORRIGENDA was also a new term but was clearly clued.
    Liked the whimsical word play for ALABASTER and the misleading ‘prayer’ at 14d.
    Finished this very enjoyable puzzle with that CARMELITE and FRATERNITY (where the definition was clear enough but took a while to work out the why).
  18. Dismissal came easy for me. In Ireland until about the 80s employers had to buy Insurance Stamps and stick them on your Insurance Card. They had to show you the card at the end of each year to prove their honesty. If you were being fired they “gave you your cards” to take on to your next employer.

    Tom (and Jan) Toronto.

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