Times 26,551 – Sweets for my sweet, what the heck for my honey

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Due to an unfortunate concurrence of events – not least my PC being on the blink and the time machine needing further time at the service centre to remove all traces of the use it was previously put to in the Outback – I am writing this up on my iPad, having solved the puzzle thereon on the Times website.

To save time – and also to enable additional comment on this grey Monday morning – I will be writing this entire entry up using only what is stored up in my little grey cells, with no recourse to Google and his slightly rebellious offspring, Wikipedia.

So, you will be getting the naked, unadulterated Ulaca. A scary thought, indeed. Thank God this was largely weighted towards the Classics, even if there is one suspiciously scientific clue, which I may make a complete cock-up of, parsing wise.

Still, that will cause great delight in some quarters, so I rather think everyone will be happier rather than sadder upon reading this blog. 33:50 on the dodgy and incredibly slow iPad.

ACROSS

1. DISACCHARIDE – I mean, honestly, what a silly word. For goodness sake, call a spade a spade and all that. An anagram* of ‘sic[k] I had cared’.
8. RETRIAL – reversal of I + R in LATER.
9. BAVARIA – reversal of AB followed by V + ARIA.
11. AVENGER – ‘fury, perhaps’; VEN (archdeacon) in AGE + R.
12. SENATOR – SENIOR with I replaced by A T.
13. HOYLE – ELY and OH reversed. No idea if this is Sir Fred the astronomer, and to which games the reference might be being made. Possibly the theoretical kind I don’t understand. Thanks to McText: Edmond Hoyle wrote ‘treatises’ on various card games (some of them invented for crosswords, such as quadrille and piquet), one on chess and one on probability theory. It obviously did him no harm, as he lived to nearly a hundred.
14. DESCENDER – this would be a CD referring to the orthographic arts, methinks.
16. FILAGREED – I + LAG in FREED; I put in filigreed at first until I twigged that a lig is something you only find on a Scrabble board and never in the can.
19. SAGAS – a palindromic Njally thing.
21. INSTANT – charade of IN ST and ANT. What Keriothe has next to the Bisto in his kitchen cupboard.
23. CORNICE – another charade, of COR + NICE.
24. GORDIAN – the sort of clue I pray for, even if this one is far too generous with the first letter being given. ADORING*, with ‘fans’ being the cunning anagrindisator.
25. IMMENSE – the setter must be someone who has suffered the trauma of being clubbed about the head by a mathematical type (note the punctiliousness of ‘relatively short’). I + MM + SEEN*.
26. AMERICANISED – got to love this clue, but would it be even better with a ‘zee’? Thanks to K: there’s an overt reference here (missed by me) to Americans spelling words like colour sans U; and there’s a delicious covert reference to that sort of thing being, well, you know, just not cricket. Shades of Charters and Caldicott.

DOWN

1. DITHERY – A Replaced by THE in DIARY.
2. SHINGLE – H in SINGLE.
3. COLERIDGE – COLE + G in RIDE.
4. HOBBS – the great Sir John Berry of Surrey and England, the scorer of a record 197 first-class centuries: one record that will never be broken. OB (short for ‘obiit’ – ‘he [has] passed on’ in Latin) + B in HS.
5. REVENUE – ‘income’; RE + VENUE.
6. DERATED – RAT in DEED; ‘derided’ is a far superior word, but a ‘rid’ is not a pest.
7. PREACHIFYING – CHIEF PRAYING*; I’d have though the whole point of preachifying is that it is something one does when he or she isn’t in the pulpit. Not even in holy orders, in fact.
10. AIR FRESHENER – REFRAINS HERE*.
15. SEDUCTION – CUTIE NODS*.
16. LUSTRUM – a word that most of us will only have come across in crosswords; LUSTR[e] + UM.
18. GLACIER – one for our Northern brethren; if someone oop North has a vacant look on their face (not indeed an altogether uncommon occurrence), and it is a look that is even more vacant than the average, you could say that their look is ‘glassier’ than ever, even if autocorrect is not on your side.
19. SHRIMPS – last of [ou]R in SH and IMPS.
20. GRINNED – [o]NE in GRIND; I suppose a grimace is like a grin – with some people I can think of, definitely, now I come to think of it, Steptoe for one.
22. TONIC – COT around IN, all reversed.

51 comments on “Times 26,551 – Sweets for my sweet, what the heck for my honey”

  2. Made a rod for my own back by confidently inserting a tasty GRANITA at 18dn; icy it may be, but I should have thought longer about whether “graniter” is a word (it’s clearly not). Having tidied up that confusion, I then wrote in FILIGREED with equally misplaced confidence. Epic fail, as I think the young people say these days.
  3. What mctext said; as in ‘according to Hoyle’. I was fairly sure when I came to 4d that it would be too much of a good thing to be ‘Grace’, the only cricketer name I know, but the wordplay was kind. I was held up by GORDIAN, it taking me a while to grasp that this was an anagram; but especially by, to join the group, FILAGREED, a spelling only the setter knew of, and the mother of non-homophones for such as moi, GLACIER. You people talk funny.
  4. The book in question is The New Complete Hoyle Revised – Doubleday 1991 first published as such in 1947.Hoyle died in 1769 so the authors are actually,The Morehead brothers along with Frey and Mott-Smith. Hoyle’s first treatise of five game was first published in 1746. This tome makes wonderful bed-time reading.

    The rest of it took me 45 minutes and I agree with ulaca that 1ac DISACCHARIIDE is a silly word but then so is 7dn PREACHIFYING and 26ac AMERICANISED in it’s Anglified state, my LOI.

    FOI 3dn COLERIDGE

    WOD 16ac FILAGREED

    COD 17dn LUSTRUM of which I was totally unfamiliar.

    Blog-on Dude!

  5. . . with which I would have been quite content had I not stupidly written two Hs instead of two Cs in 1 across. Now for an autumn of interesting Wednesdays – the last three could be quite challenging I hear.
  6. I was mildly held up by putting in a confident LATRIER for the legal procedure: it has the advantage of looking like Norman French and sounding like something nasty to do to a serf, and the wordplay works,but not much else (including not being a real word) going for it. But I had already figured out that this was one of those puzzles feeding us obscurities with only the wordplay to nudge them into “fair enough” territory.
    It’s a shame we couldn’t fit STOKES into the famous cricketer clue. I know it was “only” Bangladesh but what a fine, match-winning all-round performance. In particular, top scoring on that pitch was no mean feat And what a magnificent Test team Bangladesh have become.
  7. 22:23 … With a fair bit of that devoted to going round in circles with H_Y_E. In the end I arrived at the right answer by entirely bogus ‘logic’, having no idea what was going on and misparsing the thing completely. AMERICANISED also caused me quite a delay.

    To avoid sidetracking this thread, I took the liberty of creating a Championship chat thread here: http://times-xwd-times.livejournal.com/1616888.html

    1. This is irrelevant here, but I’m delighted to hear about ‘Travesties’; I was, in fact, going to look for you today to inquire. I hope they cut the overlong excerpt from Mrs. L’s diary?
      1. I’m 99% sure they did, Kevin (I only found time to skim the play before seeing it so I’m not quite certain). They’ve done a wonderful job with it. I can’t remember laughing so much while learning and thinking so much, which I imagine would please Tom Stoppard.
  8. 30 minutes and par for me.
    One P.S. about Hoyle: there is a lovely outtake during the filming of a Bond movie where Roger Moore is playing a particularly tense game of cards. A telephone accidentally rings on the set whereupon Moore exclaims “that must be Hoyle”.
    Thanks Keriothe for explaining 26a (yes, it was bleeding obvious – in retrospect) and I must now commit LUSTRUM to memory.

    Edited at 2016-10-24 07:55 am (UTC)

    1. LUSTRUM was on my crib sheet of useful words that I had swottily prepared ahead of Saturday’s competition. Needless to say, not one of them came up, but wouldn’t you just know that one of them would in the first Daily puzzle thereafter! So that was a write-in today, anyway.
  9. 12m. No real problems, other than a couple of minor self-imposed hitches: I bunged in PRIESTIFYING and DISACCHAROSE, neither of which really looks like a word if you think about it for a few seconds, which of course I didn’t. Although I think I had DISACCHARIDE in my mind at the point I started typing the word, which illustrates the perils of solving pre-caffeine. Fortunately AVENGER and DERATED were pretty easy clues and set me back on track.
    I knew there was a scientist of some sort called HOYLE, and assumed he must be the famous game theory chap. Von Neumann does sound a bit like HOYLE, you’ve got to admit. But as mctext points out we’re not looking for a scientist of any sort, but a fellow called Edmond known as the ‘father of whist’.
    You may have declined to mention it because it’s so bleeding obvious, ulaca, but 26 is a reference to the removal of the U from words like ‘colour’. This was far from obvious to me, indeed it took a few minutes of head-scratching after solving to see the light. Probably just the absence of caffeine again. I’ve had my dose now, and it certainly wasn’t INSTANT. Unlike Bisto we do actually keep some of this in the cupboard: some people seem to prefer it to coffee.
    I said it yesterday but I’ll say it again: it was very nice to meet a few old and new friends from round here at the George on Saturday.

    Edited at 2016-10-24 07:20 am (UTC)

  10. I’ve played piquet for many years. It is arguably the best of all card games for two people, and over the course of an evening, contains very little luck
  11. Problems here too, going for FILIGREED until I checked the wordplay, and rather stupidly writing “induction” at 15dn which made 14ac impossible until it had been corrected. Couldn’t make any sense of GLACIER as a homophone. LUSTRUM unknown but was gettable from wordplay as was the silly word at 1ac.

    Those of a certain vintage may remember a song by Phil Harris called “The Darktown Poker Club” which contained a line to the effect “This game ain’t gonna be played according to Hoyle, it’s gonna be played according to ME”.

    I have sent separate apologies re the time machine failure but it wasn’t programmed to take off for ulaca until next Monday.

    Edited at 2016-10-24 07:42 am (UTC)

  12. 17:43. I thought there were some good surfaces today, in particular that for PREACHIFYING, my COD (even if it is a silly word). Not so sure about GLACIER, doesn’t sound much like glassier when I say it. Perhaps such clues should contain a regional accent indicator as well as the homophone indicator. LOI HOYLE which I’ve never heard of. I was quite tempted by HAYLE which I’ve at least heard of as a place name but OH seemed like the more likely expression than AH.
  13. I was pleased when I realised that the non U referred to spelling, and not the social mores of our cousins. For a few minutes I was almost indignant on their behalf. Finished in 35 minutes again, less than gruntled with DISACCHARIDE which I had filled in from anagram and the middle letters. The only HOYLE I knew was Fred who was on the wrong side of the Big Bang debate against Martin Ryle in my school days. Again the clue allowed no other answer. WOD PREACHIFYING, having sat through a sermon of bum-numbing length yesterday in an unheated Church. I suppose my GRIMACE did contain a wry GRIN, but only when the vicar was looking my way.

    Edited at 2016-10-24 09:26 am (UTC)

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  15. I’ve seen lustrum in the wild, but only while being an Oxford classicist. About 7 minutes for this puzzle, which seemed oddly relaxing after Saturday. When will I learn that thinking through answers that don’t make any sense is even MORE important at the competition level?
  16. 23 min, but had biffed 16ac, and didn’t go back to parse it before submitting, so couldn’t see any error till reading comments in the forum. 1ac was FOI – seeing CCH in anagram fodder had me entering SACCHARI.. , finding I was going to be short, checking off the letters used, and realising that DI- would be good as a prefix.
    It would have nice to have a Z in 26ac, but I don’t see any way that could have been achieved in the grid used
  18. A relatively quick solve today. Having a break in the middle helped – SHINGLE, SAGAS and 7dn & 26ac all popped in after the interval. FOI CORNICE, LOI LUSTRUM.

    I will moan, as I am wont to do, about the nonsense that is “FILAGREED”. When a dictionary says “also spelled” one can often insert a mental “by ignoramuses”; the dictionary is by no means recommending the alternate spelling. This particular errancy gets a paltry 258 hits on Google, which is so low as to be at the random-typewriter-monkeys level.

    Edited at 2016-10-24 11:59 am (UTC)

  19. At 4pm BST today I’ll be doing a live Facebook broadcast, going through the clues for today’s puzzle

    RR

    1. Very interesting. It would be helpful if you posted a link to the relevant site. Can those of us not able to watch it live (or not able to find it) watch a replay later?

      Edited at 2016-10-24 01:01 pm (UTC)

    2. Sorry: the link was unavailable until the thing started. Hopefully people who were interested found it.
      It is recorded for posterity I believe 🙂
  20. DNK LUSTRUM otherwise a nice easy solve. I believe that Fred is coming back into fashion..
  21. Brilliant puzzle for a Monday I thought, 30 minutes, not so easy. DISACCHARIDE my FOI is of course an excellent word, describing as it does, two single saccharides such as glucose, fructose or galactose, joined together as in sucrose, maltose and lactose.
    PREACHIFYING on the other hand is a silly word.
    26a I got eventually but didn’t get the obvious spelling reference to non-U, until coming here, doh. First class clue now I see it.
    LUSTRUM I remembered as one of Robert Harris’s trilogy of novels about Cicero. Well worth a read.
    FILAGREED as said above, a new spelling for us but wordplay left no room for doubt.
    I’ve got a copy of the paperback modern version of HOYLE so no issues there.
    Reading the thread started by Sotira about Saturday, I look forward with some trepidation to blogging the nine in due course. Assuming RR sticks to the usual practice of Wednesday publishing.
    Perhaps next year I’ll pop over to London and put faces to those avatars and do sme damage to my liver in the George.
  22. Like most others I was tempted towards FILIGREED, which admittedly would have been an improvement on FRICASEED, which I had in there for fifteen minutes or so.

    Learned a handy new word in LUSTRUM and knew GORDIAN only from the knot. Couldn’t parse the homophone, it takes two giant leaps for me to get from GLACIER to GLASSIER, so let’s make it COD.

    Thought “according to Hoyle” was more widely known, I mean it’s used by Jules in Pulp Fiction, what more do you need?

    Nice meaty crossword. Thanks setter and U.

  23. 15:37. I think we’ve had FILIGREE spelled the funny way before so I was on my guard for that one. I had to sort of guess LUSTRUM, HOYLE and GLACIER.

    Nor related to anything much but something I wanted to mention is some of the wonderful language used on the commemorative plaques in Postman’s Park which I visited on Sunday morning on the circuitous route to Kings Cross. Apart from all being terribly humbling where else will you see expressions like INTREPID CONDUCT, A DANGEROUS ENTANGLEMENT OF WEEDS, and ON A DESPERATE VENTURE? The tale of Sarah Smith, Pantomime Artiste, might be of interest to someone here.

    1. It’s actually come up twice: 25519 (5 July 2013) and 25913 (9 October 2014), eliciting numerous comments on both occasions. Must be a special Times crossword spelling.
  24. I’ve done a search on Facebook, and the only relevant page I can find is “The Times and Sunday Times” page. I’ve “liked” it, so hopefully I’ll be notified when the event starts. On the Other hand if it’s an RR event only, I’m unable to find which of the RRs on the site is the correct one.
  25. I zipped through this one in 25 minutes with HOBBS FOI from WP, when I couldn’t make GRACE fit the clue. Paused briefly over the spelling of FILAGREED, but the WP was clear. Biffed my LOI, AMERICANISED as I didn’t twig the clever wordplay until coming here, doh! The word LUSTRUM was vaguely familiar, but I didn’t know its meaning until now. Again the WP was very helpful. An enjoyable puzzle. Thanks setter and U. Congrats to those who battled through the competition on Saturday.
  26. Jack Hobbs was a groundsman at Bedford School, where I taught maths, but not in my time I hasten to add.
  27. I found this quite straightforward (and I took 40 minutes to solve it, much better than my usual hour), but it helped that I saw Americanised right away (once I had a few crossing letters) and had no problems with DISACCHARIDE as an anagram. I also don’t know any famous cricketers other than Grace, but HOBBS seemed plausible enough and fit the wordplay. LUSTRUM also unknown, but clear from wordplay. COD to AMERICANISED and maybe IMMENSE.

    Edited at 2016-10-24 05:07 pm (UTC)

  28. About 25 minutes, ending with AMERICANISED because it fit the checking letters. Didn’t get it until coming here either, and I think it’s a tad loose. FILAGREED held me up due to the oddball spelling, and difficulty remembering all the UK slang (leg or lag, maybe lug?). Salute to those who took place in the competition, you brave souls. Regards.
  29. 24 mins. I never felt like I was on the setter’s wavelength, although in retrospect I made much heavier weather of some clues than I should have done. I was grateful that the wordplay for FILAGREED was so helpful because “filigreed” was eminently biffable, as a few of you seem to have found out to your cost. GLACIER took much to long to see because I wouldn’t usually pronounce it the required way even though I’m well aware of both. A biffed AMERICANISED was my LOI, although the parsing penny did drop a couple of minutes later.
  30. 10:47 for me, still feeling tired after Saturday’s exertions (and a busy Sunday and Monday), and making heavy weather of AMERICANISED (took ages to spot the obvious) and PREACHIFYING (took ages to spot the anagram).

    No problem with FILAGREED as it’s been on my “list of difficult words” for ages and so was revised only last week. (After many years, this list is now well over 1000 words long, and contains some stupidly arcane examples which are never likely to appear in a modern Times crossword!)

  31. … was onto saccharine, but believe it or not, didn’t see the anagram. I thought SEDUCTION deserved a mention as a bit of a classic, lovely surface and that faint whiff of seaside postcard naughtiness. I also enjoyed AMERICANISATION and spent a moment or two wondering whether the clue may have been cleverer yet had the answer been AMERICANIZED; but then confused myself further as an Oxford man by concluding that the answer is, in fact, misspelt (or should that be misspelled?)
  32. I think 26 is a very poor (non-)clue. I didn’t stumble over it but it’s really only half constructed at best. Other than that, this was an enjoyable puzzle.
  33. Well, this week is turning out to be a particularly vicious one, and seems to be throwing things at me more or less at random. Hence my current ill temper, and hence my arriving here long after everybody else has gone home.

    I am in no mood for agreeing with anyone, but I do have to agree with Pip Kirby that disaccharide is indeed an admirable word, and far less silly than, say, the endless, pointless Greek-derived names for obscure grammatical constructions that nobody – not even a Greek – ever uses. (Is there a Greek-derived name for the propensity to pointlessly name obscure grammatical constructions? No? Thought not.) Perhaps our esteemed blogger was assuming that “disaccharide” was simply a pompous name for table sugar, but it is not. Table sugar (sucrose if you are feeling molecular) is one of many disaccharides, and the term disaccharide is about as simple a word for “two simple sugars linked together” as it is possible to get.

    And while I’m in a bad mood I may as well mention that I think “fan” is a fairly poor anagram indicator. Oh, and I hate AIR FRESHENERs and am not at all keen on COLERIDGE.

    There, I feel better for having got that off my chest, and am almost in a frame of mind to tackle today’s cryptic.

    Edited at 2016-10-25 09:40 pm (UTC)

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