This wasn’t a cakewalk. I felt at times that it pushed the envelope (an expression that was briefly discussed on the first occasion I encountered answer #3—and the first of the three times that it has stumped me!—Times 27844, of 10 December, 2020). It may seem easier if you don’t have to write it up. I’m curious about the other solvers’ experiences.
I indicate (Ars Magna)* like this, and words flagging such rearrangements are italicized in the clues.
| ACROSS | |
| 1 | Paid athletes training by court in Panorama (8) |
| PROSPECT PROS, “Paid athletes” + P(hyical) E(ducation), “training” + CT, “court” |
|
| 5 | A little amount of bread to be picked up (4) |
| SOME “sum” |
|
| 8 | Ligue 1 side taking lead from Scottish Premiership side (6) |
| ANGERS |
|
| 9 | Utahan criminal bored by old black German’s way (8) |
| AUTOBAHN (Utahan)* with O(ld) and B(lack) somewhere inside |
|
| 10 | Pack of hams and pickles finally eaten by pet (4) |
| CAST CA(S)T One of a few clues here (the second is just below) where the definition is as cryptic as the wordplay |
|
| 11 | Wig partner adjusted for one in a shell suit? (5,5) |
| TIGER PRAWN (Wig partner)* |
|
| 12 | Mill around with noble cop and reactionary (7,5) |
| COLONEL BLIMP (Mill, noble cop)* A comic strip character and the protagonist of the 1943 movie The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which one critic has called “England’s greatest film ever.” …I’ve never seen it, but—oh, boy!—have just discovered that it is available on YouTube. |
|
| 16 | Steps to be taken over bladed weapons? (5,7) |
| SWORD DANCING CD …Maybe the easiest clue here |
|
| 18 | Some blockhea{d I let tan te}nor’s an amateur (10) |
| DILETTANTE Hidden …Quite the strange surface. What’s going on? |
|
| 20 | Scream from gangster making duke tense (4) |
| HOOT HOO[-D,+T] In the sense of something hilarious. “Scream” seems to indicate wilder merriment than HOOT, which Collins defines as a merely “amusing person or thing.” |
|
| 21 | Erotic pleasure gets king in cold sweat (4,4) |
| BLUE FUNK BLUE, “erotic” + FUN, “pleasure” + K(ing) A state of terror …Not sure I knew the term before. |
|
| 22 | Unknown artist seen about with cooler singer (6) |
| CANARY Y, “Unknown” + R(oyal) A(cademy), “artist” <=“seen about” with CAN, “cooler” (jail) |
|
| 23 | Flipping rubbish start for young right-winger (4) |
| TORY ROT<=“flipping” + Y |
|
| 24 | A choice about head of department taking over? (8) |
| ADOPTION A + D |
|
| DOWN | |
| 1 | Writer getting call at work in office building (8) |
| PENTAGON PEN, “Writer” + TAG, “call” (as a verb) + ON, “at work” |
|
| 2 | Batch of deliveries on time, but open (5) |
| OVERT OVER, “Batch of deliveries” (cricket) + T(ime) |
|
| 3 | Go mad in a pub to the south on the lash (4,3,4,3) |
| PUSH THE BOAT OUT (a pub to the south)* “To entertain, celebrate, etc lavishly” in Chambers; Collins has “to celebrate, esp lavishly and expensively.” In a given context, one could surmise that “Go mad” means acting, spending, etc., extravagantly (though a dictionary reference is not handy). The anagrind “on the lash” (getting or being drunk) comes up in an AI overview if you google it, and in Cambridge Dictionary and Wiktionary; Collins has it only as a “New Word Suggestion.” We’re on the cutting edge here. |
|
| 4 | Loud noise beginning to chafe film director (5) |
| CLANG C |
|
| 5 | Coach turning right in old place like Morocco, say (9) |
| SUBTROPIC BUS<=“turning” + T(R)OPIC Noun definition 27 (the penultimate!) of “place” in Chambers is “A topic, matter of discourse (obsolete).” TOPIC is “from Latin topica translating Greek ta topika, literally: matters relating to commonplaces, title of a treatise by Aristotle, from topoi, pl of topos place, commonplace” (Collins). |
|
| 6 | Upstanding Barnet medical officer seen with warmonger (6) |
| MOHAWK M(edical) O(fficer) + HAWK, “warmonger” “Barnet” means hair by way of Cockney rhyming slang, “Barnet Fair.” |
|
| 7 | Important cause represented in unrealistic drama (5,2,1,6) |
| STORM IN A TEACUP (Important cause)* |
|
| 13 | Celebs on broadcast ultimately showy in a rude way (9) |
| OBSCENELY (celebs on)* + |
|
| 14 | Haul up fish of a low standard (3) |
| BAD DAB <=“haul[ed] up” |
|
| 15 | Foreigner with men navy captured close to Ibiza (8) |
| ANDORRAN AND, “with” + O(ther) R(anks), “men” + R(A)N, |
|
| 17 | Event celebrating Shakespeare perhaps is OK (4,2) |
| WILL DO It’s a DO in honor of WILL! 😀 |
|
| 19 | Knight covered with no clothes at front is thus (5) |
| NAKED “Knight” + |
|
| 20 | Do not top or tail tongue (5) |
| HINDI |
|
DNF
I never got ANGERS and PUSH THE BOAT, and I’m not surprised. DNK Ligue 1 and naturally didn’t know the teams in either league. NHO ‘push the boat out’ or ‘on the lash’, so could not make anything of the clue or fill in unches. I didn’t try very hard to parse NAKED, and I’m glad I didn’t.
I had Push The Boat Out as being defined by on the lash, with go mad as the anagrist.
I see the knight, I see caked for covered, but I don’t see how the knight gets into the cake before the “c” is removed.
I assumed that there was a topical = place definition somewhere, and I’m glad I didn’t chase it all the way to the 27th definition. Thanks for the extra work, Guy
“Go mad” could not be the anagrind; it would have to be “going mad” or simply “mad.” And “in” isn’t part of the anagrist. And…
(Funny how anagrind doesn’t have anything to do with grinding. Horryd hated that word.)
Regarding NAKED, you’re right. It’s just N, the Knight, and then CAKED losing C(lothes). Thanks.
…and PUSH THE BOAT out is a verb, whereas ‘on the lash’ is an adjective. ‘Go mad’ may not have dictionary support but in context (in the pub on NYE, say) if someone said it you’d be in no doubt what they meant.
Found this more difficult than some recent Sundays and certainly some stretching involved. PUSH THE BOAT OUT has only ever meant to me ‘ spend a bit more’ so that held me up and the parsing of 19d was a complete mystery although the answer was clear enough. COLONEL BLIMP was,I confess, a complete blind spot.
I think BLUE FUNK is old fashioned forces slang. It’s a term I’ve seen used by authors such as John Buchan.
NAKED was my LOI only because I couldn’t unravel the wordplay. In then end I decided K covered by NAE (no) with D(ress) = clothes. My excuse is that I had just finished the Mephisto where such trickery would have been par for the course. Thanks Guy, for a more natural reading.
In cryptics, K is usually, as in chess notation, reserved for the king (as in 21 here), leaving N for the knight.
Yes, I would normally go for N for knight. But K is possible as well (Chambers)
9:98. My only problem with this was 5dn. TOPIC simply does not mean ‘place’ in English, and to the extent it ever did the best the OED can do is a single citation from 1650!!
Well, Chambers didn’t have a citation, but as it’s in Chambers…
Inclusion in Chambers is not (rightly IMO) usually considered sufficient justification on its own.
Not here, only in Mephisto, I guess…
Indeed. In Mephisto (and Azed) the clear rule is that if it’s in Chambers, it’s allowed. Here there is a desire to keep some connection to the actual spoken language!
I found this easier than most of David McLean’s, with no unknown vocabulary and only a couple of unparsed clues. I agree that ANGERS, with its employment of a specific sport for both definition and clue, was rather unfair, since it precludes the ability to work out the answer without specific knowledge. In the end, a combination of biffing and guessing got me there. I thought CAST was terrific once I’d finally dug out the answer and liked the easier TIGER PRAWN too. I didn’t parse CANARY as I’d forgotten ‘cooler’ and ‘can’ are both US slang for prison. Like Paul.in.London, I thought ‘go mad’ and ‘on the lash’ equally likely candidates for the anagrind – luckily, it made no difference to the answer, as either was plausibly a definition – in fact, I assume David intended to keep us guessing… I certainly didn’t parse SUBTROPIC, but it had to be.
My thanks to David McLean and Guy du Sable.
Yes it was a bit tricky. I failed.
8a Angers. I am not a football fan. At all. I HHO Rangers and Celtic, no other Scottish ones, and at a guess thought Ligue 1 might be Italian, if not probably Spanish. I HHO Inter Milan and Real Madrid, and that’s it. I thought that Angers fitted so I asked Wiki about Angers, selecting its football team out of the list of subjects, et voila! Ligue 1. So a proud DNF then.
20a Hoot; I had an unparsable Hail here.
24a Adoption. I had adopting, so 15d wrong too.
3d I enjoy pushing the boat out, but as Guy explains it is a Britishism not familiar to all, ditto on the lash.
5d Subtropic biffed since I didn’t understand topic=place.
15d Andorran, DNF, I essayed Antidrug but not with any sensible explanation. Complicated clue IMO, but I should have worked harder.
17:11. I was also preparing for a long mental trawl with the football question, but luckily Rangers and Celtic are the two Scottish football teams that many Brits know even if they don’t know any others. NHO BLUE FUNK. Missed the LANG of CLANG at the time somehow, despite his films being some of the very few I’ve actually enjoyed watching. I think the word ‘commonplace’ is a nice remnant of the ‘topic’-‘place’ connection.
Didn’t keep a record of this, but I know I didn’t finish it. Looking at the answers now, I don’t remember getting TIGER PRAWN, SWORD DANCING (certainly wasn’t easy for me!), BLUE FUNK (not a term I’m familiar with), SUBTROPIC or WILL DO.
No trouble with ANGERS (and not because I like football!). It doesn’t seem too tricky to me: Rangers is an obvious Scottish Premiership team to think of, ‘taking lead from’ is a clear enough instruction, Angers is a place in France, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that they might be in Ligue 1 at the moment, even if you’re not well-versed in French football.
Thanks Guy and David.
COD Mohawk
Yes, this was a rather strange David McLean puzzle, with some very obscure clues (at least for some of us, ANGERS being the prime example. Fortunately I vaguely remember seeing the town in the sports news I don’t read, and RANGERS seemed reasonable as well). I found SWORD DANCING untypically weak, but that was made up by SUBTROPIC. I got PUSH THE BOAT OUT right only because it was an anagram and there were too few Os available for PUSH THE BOOT OUT. And I had to come here to understand HINDI. My time was 50 minutes.
27.04 with a typo
ANGERS was last in though shouldn’t have been because I’m perfectly familiar with RANGERS, but I misread the w/p. No major problems elsewhere. Liked STORM IN A TEACUP.
Thanks David and Guy.
Apologies – I should have requested something different for SUBTROPIC.
As no-one else has mentioned it, just confirming that the contained letters in 9A are O(ld) (B)lack
I agree with Chris Lutton on ANGERS. There cannot be many people in Britain who don’t know that Rangers are a Scottish football team. Either Celtic or Rangers has won the top division in Scottish football for 46 of the last 50 seasons.
Added B. Ta
Thanks David and Guy
Not sure how this come up at only 88 on the Snitch – I certainly found it more challenging than that, taking over the hour to get it done. A mix of the pretty easy and the pretty hard. Missed the anagram for STORM IN A TEACUP (quite neat when seen) and no idea about the full understanding of SUBTROPIC – and although on paper had the T-R-OPIC, had no idea of why. NAKED was another parsing mystery – just couldn’t be anything else. I had HOOT meaning to jeer or scream at someone, rather than the comic angle – but I do like that better.
BLUE FUNK, COLONEL BLIMP and Fritz LANG were all new learning.
Finished with CANARY, PUSH THE BOAT OUT and that ANGERS (knew the town not so much the footy team) as the last few in.
I fairly flew through the top half of this ( with the exception of ANGERS, where I didn’t see the football connection! – a moments reflection should have given it to me); and I made up SUBARABIC ( no idea why). My other big hold up was COLONEL BLIMP, who I’d forgotten was a reactionary. All the rest , apart from HINDI ( which I still don’t get, even though I biffed it), went in smoothly. Liked the hidden DILETTANTE and the ‘shell-suited’ TIGER PRAWN.
A “shindig” is a party, a “do,” and when you have (most of) that word but “not top or tail,” that leaves you with HINDI. I try not to over-explain, lest I seem insulting…
Foopball only seen in Molesworth or on tv, so I knew it would be a DNF. This saved a lot of angst over 5d as I gave up and came here. Thanks for the explanation blogger and apology editor.
HHO some European teams, but was amused to see a snippet from the USA featuring Inter Miami. By coincidence, later that night the Ken Burns “Civil War” map of Indian tribal areas included the Miami tribe west of the Appalachians. (The old term is used consistently rather than Native American.)
27:04
Passing the time on a wet Tuesday – found this most accessible, though didn’t manage to parse everything, namely HINDI which I probably should have. Though I am quite keen on football, still managed to muddle up my European leagues, mistakenly wondering if Ligue 1 was Italian – once the answer popped into my head, all became clear.