Times 27057 – solvitur festinato cum laude hodie

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
By the time you read this, if you can be bothered, I hope to be restored to binocular vision – of a quality I haven’t ‘seen’ for sixty years – and the ‘where’s yer parrot’ jokes will presumably stop. Even with one eye this was pretty straightforward for a Wednesday, I thought, but none the less enjoyable while it lasted; a sub 20 minute time, which is fast for me if not for our top charioteers.
Although of a scientific bent from an early age, I loved Latin at school, in spite of, or because of, our master Mr Percy Cushion, (it’s true!) of course pronounded cue-shun, and he was also short and roly poly.
Anyway, I digress nimis.

Across
1 Marries and goes off embracing husband after speculation (8)
BETROTHS – BET = speculation, then insert H into ROTS = goes off. I learnt something today; I’d have spelt it BETHROTHES in a spelling quiz, and lost.
5 Confused chatter about river fish (6)
BARBEL – Crossworders know their fish. Insert R into BABEL.
9 Uniform material was adopted by soldiers and sailor (5,4)
OLIVE DRAB – LIVED (was) inside OR (soldiers) then AB.
11 Moved to take-off after disembarking one becoming stressed (5)
TAXED – TAXIED disembarks its I.
12 Legend of river and lake that is put back beside other legends (7)
LORELEI – Reverse I.E. and L behind LORE. I once cruised past this legendary rock on the Rhine while in Cologne at an advertising jolly (sorry, ‘conference’) but was tottyoccupied at the time and didn’t take much notice.
13 Ravel’s one enthralled by flute playing of melodious quality (7)
TUNEFUL – No pavannes or Maurices required; Ravel’s one is UN and it goes inside (FLUTE)*.
14 One lacking complaint nevertheless inclined to be patient (13)
HYPOCHONDRIAC – Cryptic definition, ha ha. Why is it one’s friends are all hypochondriacs yet I’m the one who has real complaints and they’re indifferent?
16 Game UCD alumna put out degree citation (5,3,5)
MAGNA CUM LAUDE – (GAME UCD ALUMNA)*. not a term used at UCD in Ireland, I think, more in USA.
20 Finished a couple of lengths in total (7)
OVERALL – OVER = finished, A, L, L.
21 Cautious about soldier perhaps in US city (5,2)
SANTA FE – SAFE = cautious, around ANT for soldier.
23 I’d recalled way of working one part of speech (5)
IDIOM – I’D followed my MO, I  reversed.
24 Leading attraction? The Queen, among the aristocracy (3-6)
TOP-DRAWER – I suppose this is a double definition, a TOP DRAWER would be a main attraction, and top-drawer meaning aristocratic, posh. Collins has it with and without hyphen.
25 Fall back, displacing new line in reciprocal arrangement (6)
MUTUAL – AUTUMN = fall, reverse and remove N -> MUTUA, add L.
26 Results after cooking will include ultimate in apple crumble (8)
STREUSEL – (RESULTS E)*, the E from end of APPLE.
Down
1 Protection from weather? British happy to forgo headpiece (6)
BROLLY – BR(ITISH), (J)OLLY). Is brolly only an English thing or is it Transatlantic too?
2 Row about component of education for painstaking student? (5)
TRIER – TIER = row, around R one of the three R’s.
3 Some deliveries friend picked up showing a degree of duplication (7)
OVERLAP – OVER = some deliveries as in cricket, LAP = PAL reversed.
4 Pair of lines showing Batman and Robin possibly appearing on time (6,7)
HEROIC COUPLET – Well, Batman and Robin could be a heroic couple, add T for time. My ignorance of poetry terms didn’t stop me once the checkers were in.
6 Harmonised a duet not disregarding old fashions (7)
ATTUNED – (A DUET NT)*, NOT loses it O for the anagrist.
7 Area for sales and storage beside the rink? (3,6)
BOX OFFICE – A box off ice could be a storage area next to the rink, ha ha.
8 Boy with disgusted comment about large fortune (4,4)
LADY LUCK – LAD = boy, YUCK = disgusted comment, insert L.
10 Preserves narrow strip of land containing core of some abundant resource (10,3)
BOTTOMLESS PIT – BOTTLES = preserves, SPIT = narrow strip of land, insert OM being the ‘core’ of SOME. I was thinking some kind of jam at first.
14 Cleanliness expert — sadly in pig-sty he has no power (9)
HYGIENIST – (IN IG STY HE)*, the P being dropped out.
15 Big store I line up with little hesitation, raking millions in (8)
EMPORIUM – Reverse I, ROPE (I line up), insert M, add UM for little hesitation.
17 Condition I intend escalating among reforming drinkers (7)
ANAEMIA – Insert I MEAN reversed into A A Alcoholics Anonymous.
18 Old soldier cut down after rifleman missed first alarm (7)
UNNERVE – GUNNER loses its G, VET loses its T.
19 Favourite part in brief? It’s refined stuff (6)
PETROL – PET = favourite, ROL(E) = part in brief.
22 Whiskey consumed by a military group in former days (2,3)
AS WAS – A, SAS, insert W for whiskey phonetic alphabet.

49 comments on “Times 27057 – solvitur festinato cum laude hodie”

  1. This felt much longer than it in fact was. I resisted MUTUAL, because the definition didn’t feel right; I DNK an agreement called a mutual. Biffed BOTTOMLESS PIT. I parsed 24ac à la Ulaca. I’m pretty sure BROLLY hasn’t crossed the pond; I know I wouldn’t say it on a bet. Congratulations on the eye job, Pip; cataract? Whatever.
  2. Nothing very hard, most of it done on my homeward subway ride. I hesitated over AS WAS, as it seemed rather a random pair of words rather than a stand-alone phrase. I’ve always loved the term BROLLY, almost as much as “bumbershoot”—which I must have heard first from Batman’s butler, Alfred.

    Congrats on the improved vision, Pip (wow, sixty years…)!

      1. I’ve never seen “as was” used that way, only like this: “She was into drone music, as was I.”
  3. 18 minutes for this, so definitely on the easy side. I parsed 24a slightly differently, with ‘Leading attraction? The Queen’ as the wordplay (TOP DRAW ER) and ‘among the aristocracy’ as the literal.

    I too would have failed the spelling test at 1a, where the more common adjective BETROTHED exerts a powerful back influence on the little used verb.

  4. We definitely had BOTTOMLESS yesterday. 17’57”, three minutes of which was spent on the unknown STREUSEL before guessing. Loved BROLLY. Doing the puzzle online definitely suits me. Thanks pip and setter.
  5. 17:39 … for a somehow tricky puzzle. Enough difficult spellings in here that I’m happy not to have messed up, what with LORELEI, HYPOCHONDRIAC, thingy LAUDE (where I first put LAUDA), BETROTHS and the not-met-before STREUSEL.

    I was also very slow on the uptake over Batman and Robin (who I always think of as homoerotic rather than heroic), and I lost a lot of time when TOP DRAWER sent me into a reverie over the episode of Patrick Melrose that I watched last night. If you haven’t seen it, do try. It’s stunningly good, but it paints a grotesque picture of the British aristocracy. The episode I watched last night, with Princess Margaret and the French ambassador, was excruciatingly wonderful. It’s on Sky, but I notice the first episode is available for free on the Radio Times site: https://www.radiotimes.com/patrickmelrose/

    Hope all is well, Pip, and that your peepers are back to owl level

    1. Magna cum Lauda being the bottles of champagne shared after an Austrian grand prix victory?
    2. Maybe I’ll give Patrick Melrose another go. I lost patience with the relentless addict-failing-to-quit routines in the first episode.
      1. Episode 2 couldn’t be more different. And 3 is different again. Each covers a separate novel and each plays like a 1-hour film, really.
  6. 37 minutes here, with a few unknowns, notably STREUSEL, slowing things down along the way. Still, glad to know what STREUSEL is called having enjoyed it on the top of cakes for years without needing to know its name…

    FOI 1d BROLLY, LOI the aforementioned 26a, not long after the combo of BARBEL and BOX OFFICE, where I’d been trying to shove “tax” into the first word all along. Enjoyed “Ravel’s one” and “off ice”. WOD EMPORIUM. I think the world needs more emporia.

  7. Not easy, but I worked away at it steadily and completed in 43 minutes. Luckily for me OLIVE DRAB and HEROIC COUPLET have come up before, as prior to that they were completely unknown to me. I got STREUSEL from wordplay as it was unknown until today. I’ve seen {g}UNNER followed by VE elsewhere within the past week.

    In a grumpy mood I’m tempted to resort to expletives about there being yet another foreign expression clued as an anagram but fortunately I have retained a faint knowledge of the Latin inflicted on me from the age of 7 to 13, so I was able to recognise the likeliest combinations of letters once I had most of the checkers in place.

    I prefer ulaca’s version of the parsing TOP-DRAWER although I must admit to not spotting it for myself. I think I must have biffed the answer and moved on.

    Edited at 2018-06-06 05:34 am (UTC)

    1. cum laude, magna cum laude, and summa cum laude are standard at US uni’s; I’d just assumed they were also used in the UK. Ditto for OLIVE DRAB for the US Army.
      1. The whole X-cum-laude bit is filed in my brain under “things where I’ve gradually worked out roughly what they mean from context over the course of years watching American telly”!
      2. They may well be used in the UK but not in circles frequented by me. I think I only know ‘alma mater’ from a US context (probably in songs by Tom Lehrer) and prior to that the only Alma I knew of was Cogan.

        Edited at 2018-06-06 06:24 am (UTC)

        1. And not the Alma where a battle took place in the Crimean War, near Sebastopol?
          1. I only knew that originally because there was a pub I passed travelling to and from school every day called The Alma with the picture of a soldier on its sign. I still knew Alma Cogan long before that though! Come to think of it, I knew a Sebastopol Inn in Devon. Both long-lost pubs now, I’m afraid.

            Edited at 2018-06-06 08:56 am (UTC)

            1. My very first school was Alma Road JMI, St Albans, a memory mostly of a hard asphalt playground which floated unbidden to the surface on reading these comments. We were squeezed in while our estate school was being built. I don’t think I ever previously made the link with the battle, though undoubtedly that’s where the name came from.
            2. Me too, if I am honest. but in Huntingdon where I used to live there was a monument to the Crimean war with all the names on it ..Balaclava, Inkerman etc. and I learnt more from those quite excellent history books, the Flashman chronicles
          2. The Heroes of Alma ; is it still in St.John’s Wood? Used to drink there.
            1. “The Heroes Of The Alma was situated at 11 Alma Square, off Abbey Road. The Beatles used to visit, between recording sessions. Closed in 2002 it is now used as a private dwelling.”
    2. I share your grumpiness. We didn’t do Latin at Bash Street and it took a good chunk of my 54:50 solve to eliminate the combinations until I had one that seemed plausible.

      A pleasant surprise when it all came up green.

  8. Completed in 83 mins, with only minor spelling issues with hygienist and streusel.

    FOI brolly.
    LOI unnerve.

    COD Hypochondriac.

  9. 35 mins with yoghurt, granola, mixed berry compote.
    Luckily the fantastic ‘Archipelago’ bakery sells date slice topped with streusel – otherwise this might have been an OWAA! (obscure word as anagram).
    Thanks setter and Pip.
  10. This clearly suited me; I waited for all the checkers to make sure I was spelling the vaguely-remembered STREUSEL as correctly as I could, but otherwise all the knowledge fitted my definition of general, and the wordplay was clear. Congratulations, Pip; as I slog through my middle years, it’s nice to hear some good medical news for a change.
  11. A relaxing stroll in the park this one with only STREUSEL causing a raised eyebrow – not met before but near enough to strudel to be guessed from checkers and cryptic. Knew the Latin US uni-tag from working with US companies.

    I hope things have gone well Pip

  12. LOI OVERALL as I couldn’t spell HYGIENIST. I knew the GK so no real problems.
    Pip, good luck today (I would get rid of the crutch and tricorne hat if you want the jokes to stop?).
  13. ….that an OWAA is a good thing, without which both STREUSEL and MAGNA CUM LAUDE would have eluded me.

    FOI BETROTHS, where I raised an eyebrow at the “missing e” but had fully parsed it immediately. That “e” then turned up at 22D, where WHISKY is correct as regards the phonetic alphabet.

    Smiled at the thought of a babel fish at 5A. “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” is a great favourite of mine.

    LOI STREUSEL after 9:22

    COD HYPOCHONDRIAC

    I must now avoid the BOTTOMLESS spoiler, as I have still to tackle both yesterday’s and Saturday’s puzzles.

    Thanks for the (as usual) excellent blog Pip, and glad to hear you’re over the eye problem.

      2. I concur after checking official sources. Maybe the spelling is a sop to the Irish. I’m surprised that SNP leader Wee Jimmy Krankie hasn’t included the correction of this anomaly in her independence demands.

        Edited at 2018-06-06 10:18 pm (UTC)

        1. I only bothered to mention it because I read an article once that explained, inter alia, why it was whiskey not whisky. Something to do with recognition of how to pronounce it by more nationalities.. Nothing to do with the Irish I think.
          Civil aviation however uses “whisky”
  14. I had a nine o’clock meeting this morning, so did this in two sessions totalling about three quarters of an hour. I’ve never heard penultimate-in MAGNA CUM LAUDE. Is it used at all in British Universities? I’ve attended two and my children three different ones and I’ve never heard the term. (Oxford, Manchester, Lancaster, Nottingham, London.) Admittedly, the two Oxford ceremonies were in Latin and the lunch beforehand hadn’t skimped on the wine, so I might have missed it. Nor did I know LOI STREUSEL, cobbled together from the letters with me thinking it sounded like a Strudel. I prefer Apple Pie. My baker/confectioner mother always called crumble a lazy cook’s pie. Fortunately, I knew SANTA FE from an obscure Dylan song. Found this tough. Thank you Pip and setter.
  15. 16.43, so on the easier side for me. My excellent daughter-in-law graduated MAGNA CUM LAUDE from the University of Delaware, so no problem with that bit of US Latin.
    Odd that we had OVER overkill – twice in the puzzle – and the crossing of ATTUNED and TUNEFUL in case we needed additional prompting.
    STREUSEL of course unknown, but as Jim says close enough to strudel. So close, in fact, that an anglicised (assuming there’s an umlaut) version STREUDEL was my first entry until I checked the anagram.
    Best wishes for visual success, Pip.
  16. Slow going, esp. the last, streusel, which I was half sure I’d got wrong but couldn’t see how. The puzzle perhaps too full of uniform material, but enjoyed Sotira’s couplet and Olivia’s reminiscence. Good luck Pip.
  17. I got a good spelling lesson from this – there is a chance I learned Hygienist, Anaemia, Betroths, Lorelei (I’d have opted for Lorilei) and Streusel. I didn’t know the fish, so I opted for Garbel which picks up the confused bit along with a different fish, but didn’t really explain the bel part. Nice blog, Pip, thx
  18. Passed the finish line in 14.19 despite my mind wandering a few times. I was sure for a while that the inclined patient would be something to do with psychiatry. And I thought a betrothal was an engagement rather than a marriage. SANTA FE comes in a Judy Garland song – The Atchison Topeka And The Santa Fe (railroad). I forget which show it was but speaking of musicals, no thanks to Myrtilus for that crisp apple strudel reminder. Pip’s memory of his Latin teacher jogged mine of my history teacher who said that the famous Pitt family were known for their thinness and were dubbed “bottomless” accordingly. Somehow now I think she may have given us an “alternative fact” there.
  19. After last week I thought perhaps the editor had decided we need to be worked harder, then this week three easy ones so far. I guess it’s just natural variation.

    My doctor once told me I had HYPOCHONDRIA to which I replied “Not that as well” 😉

  20. 12:18. LOI was streusel which I must have some knowledge of as once I sussed that we were looking for a nounal & edible crumble rather than a verb it went straight in.

    For the Latin I recalled seeing CUM LAUDE before and, using all my powers, decided that MAGNA was marginally more likely than MNGAA for the first bit.

  21. I was held up at 1a and 4d by the conviction that BETROTHS had an E in it. HEROIC eluded me for a while even after I’d conceded that the E didn’t belong in 1a. Those 2 together with the unknown STREUSEL, where I saw the wordplay but struggled for a sensible arrangement of the letters, held me up for around 10 minutes of my 39:26. HYPOCHONDRIAC and BOX OFF ICE raised a smile. Somehow MAGNA CUM LAUDE and SANTA FE surfaced without effort. The correct spelling of HYGIENIST was prompted by OVERALL. Thanks setter and Pip. Hope all has gone well with the parrot defenestration!

  22. Held up by biffing SUMMA CUM LAUDE and totally ignoring the clue. Otherwise, no real problems apart from STREUSEL which was new to me and went in on the basis of it being the only arrangement of letters which didn’t look totally weird.

    Time: all correct in 35 minutes.

    Thank you to setter and ( hopefully recovering well ) blogger.

    Dave.

  23. 18:35 with, like robrolfe, the last 2-3 minutes getting to STREUSEL and finally convincing myself it could be a word. Mind you, EMPORIUM took me a while to spot too. LADY LUCK my favourite. Good luck with the eye op, Pip.
  24. 8:16. No problems today.
    In my experience BOTTOMLESS PIT is more likely to be used to describe something that will never be filled, rather than exhausted. ‘Donald Trump is a bottomless pit of need’, for instance. It’s a phrase that comes up a lot when people are doing building or renovation works.
    I knew MAGNA CUM LAUDE but as far as I’m aware it’s never used in the UK.
  25. Rather easy today (so I finished in 27 minutes). No real problems, and although I don’t know what a HEROIC COUPLET is, what else could it be? MAGNA CUM LAUDE well known, since it is used in Germany and I have often sat on doctoral examination committees where this grade was given.
  26. 29:51 mostly straightforward with a mild harrumph at the outrageous obscurity (i.e. something unknown to me) clued as anagram at 26ac where I took a while to find the likeliest arrangement of letters, thinking of strudel helped.
  27. No problems today, save working too much which prevents coming here til now. It took me a while to see BROLLY, but STREUSEL was last in. I had the GK needed today. Done in around 20 minutes or so. Regards.

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