Times 26248 – a self-referential pangram

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : 10:32, but a lazy typo is keeping me off the leaderboard. Interesting puzzle this one, it is not too difficult, and I expect a lot of the longer answers will be susceptible to biffing. It is a pangram, but that didn’t help me in solving, as most of the outlier letters went in pretty quickly.

There are also no direct anagrams! I can’t think of a daily where there haven’t been any at all – there are a few partial anagrams. In all the wordplay is exceptionally sound, the sort of puzzle that is straightforward to blog. I was very impressed by 8 down with tricky wordplay and an excellent surface.

Away we go….

Across
1 DISCIPLINE: P, LINE(score) after DISC,1
6 LAZE: sounds like LAYS
9 MALEVOLENT: MALE and then we’ll take the middle away from VOL-au-vENT
10 JUNE: two bits of French here, JE(I) holding UN(a)
12 BRIGHT AND EARLY: RIGHT(proper) with BAN(outlaw), DEARLY(much) surrounding it
14 ABOARD: ABROAD with the R moved
15 FOOTPATH: FOOT(pay the cost of), P, AT, H
17 FRONTIER: N, in FR(French),O,TIER(level). Glad I didn’t have to know the name of the French version of O-Level – is it Baccalaureate?
19 BEACON: or BE A CON
22 THELONIOUS MONK: (IN,HOTEL)* then MONK(brother) after O,US
24 HOAX: H, and OX holding A
25 COTTONTAIL: TT(crosswordlands favorite races) inside (LOCATION)*
26 DOES: DOPES missing a P
27 MENDICANCY: D,ICY(showing no warmth) around CAN, with MEN(people) at the start
 
Down
1 DUMB: Take the end off of DUMBO
2 SALERNO: SR(sister) containing ALE then NO
3 IN,V,I,GO,RATION
4 L,O,LIT(books),A: The Russian-American being Nabokov. I used to work with a Nabokov scholar, who recently passed away, and was friends with his wife and translator, Vera, until her death
5 NON-UNION: NUN,1 in NOON
7 AQUARIA: A QUAR(t) then A1 reversed
8 EVERYTHING: VERY THIN inside EG
11 WEST GERMANIC: WE and then C(elebrate) after (MASTERING)*
13 FAR-FETCHED: double definition
16 SEMITONE: TIMES(a national newspaper) reversed then ONE
18 O(ut),PE,RATE
20 CONTAIN: CON(Tory), then alternating letters in TeAm, IN(elected)
21 HUNTED: an old German in drainpipe trousers could be a HUN TED
23 CLAY: hidden reversed in roYAL Castle

83 comments on “Times 26248 – a self-referential pangram”

  1. Thanks for pointing out the lack of anagrams George. I think anagrams are my (relative) strength, so that would explain the slightly slower solve today.

    Didn’t know that I knew THELONIOUS MONK. He just sort of emerged from some dim recess as the checkers fell into place. Funny how that works.

    Many great clues today, so I can forgive the setter for thinking that June is in the Summer. Bloody foreigners.

  2. Slowed down at various points, e.g. actually wondering if ‘hoag’ was a word before I remembered OX, and as usual thinking of everything but the possibility of a hidden clue with a hidden clue at 23d. Biffed 22ac from the T and enumeration, although I did parse it then. LOI SEMITONE, which I put in because I couldn’t think of anything else, only thinking of ‘national’=TIMES after submitting, and wondering if that worked. I’d forgotten about drainpipes, and in any case didn’t know they were sported by Teds. George, you’ve got a typo at 17ac.
    2. Hi Kevin – I replied to your Rendell reference on the Forum. My time was about the same as yours give or take the odd second.
  3. 65 minutes, with a slap on the wrist for not spotting the reversed hidden at 23d when I’d spotted that it was a reversed hidden clue (my penalty for enlarging the font and having ‘royal castle’ split across a line break) and a pat on the shoulder for working the totally unknown musician out laboriously and at great length from the bits. I was most impressed with myself for not being satisfied with ‘my’ or ‘man’ for BROTHER and for being able to suss out that NX or X couldn’t really be a slang term for jazz, even among the most spaced out of hep cats.

    Finished with an unparsed SEMITONE. Top half actually quite rapid (10 or 12 minutes) but then the fun started…

  4. I wonder if SALERNO will give anyone problems. I knew it from a solitary (I think) season their football team, Salernitana, spent in Serie A some years ago.
    1. I think vinyl’s right. It was the main invasion point for the re-taking of Italy in WWII
      1. As said to ulaca, Olivia, I know Salerno because, when you are driving north from Sicily, the autostrada only starts to improve north of Salerno. Well, that’s how it was about 8 or 9 years ago. Given that it took the Sicilians 24 years to complete the autostrada along the north coast between Palermo and Messina, I doubt much has changed. The M-word, of course.
    2. Not this solver. When driving north from Sicily, the autostrada only start to improve at Salerno!
  5. Left with 16dn. SEMITONE seemed to fit but I didn’t parse it and the definition seemed wrong – I thought a semitone was an interval, not a note.

    Heigh-ho!

    Dereklam

    1. I also wondered about this and the dictionaries I’ve looked at seem to offer no support to the clue as set.
      1. I was going to say exactly that, as a semitone cannot exist in isolation, only in relation to the pitch of another note. There’s nothing in the usual sources to support the definition in the clue so in the light of recent comments I have made here about dictionaries being the ultimate arbiter I’d have to say it’s invalid.

        On the other hand I can imagine one might substitute the words ‘note’ and ‘semitone’ readily enough in some circumstances, for instance on a piano keyboard moving up or down a note would be the same as moving up or down a semitone.

        1. It didn’t even occur to me when solving but your example of moving up or down a note seems perfectly valid to me.
          1. It’s a bit forced though. Musicians would be unlikely to use such vague terminology – up or down a semitone is exact whereas up or down a note is not. It’d be more likely to refer to the next note in the scale or key of the piece where it might be equally well be a tone.
            1. The fact that I bunged in SEMITONE without any qualms at 16D says more about my imperfect knowledge of musical terminology than anything else. For what it’s worth, The Oxford Companion to Music defines “semitone” as “the smallest interval in common use in Western music, covering half a tone”; in a separate entry under “tone” it says, among other things, that “in American usage ‘tone’ is synonymous with the English ‘note'”, which seems to muddy the waters a bit.
      1. Not really on the point but I’ve always been amused that the Germans use “notes” where we’d use “music”. As in “Remember to bring your music” or “Can you read music?” I had no problem with NOTE/SEMITONE in a crossword context. (But had problems with the puzzle as a whole. 46mins.) Ann
  6. A couple of queries:

    12a When the sun is up proper, outlaw gets much put about

    The cryptic (though not of course the surface) would be better served by ‘When the sun is up proper gets outlaw much put about’.

    8d All skin and bone on the inside, say?

    This would suggest EG in VERY THIN to me more than what we have. I don’t think the comma really makes up for the lack of an ‘of’, which is what one really needs to make sense of the clue.

    Am I onto something or is there something in each clue that I’m failing to see?

    2. To me the comma makes it clear which is intended, and EG inside VERY THIN would be better expressed by ‘skin and bone, on the inside say’. Mind you aren’t we told to ignore punctuation?
      1. But what ‘skin and bone, on the inside say’ would be ignoring is the ‘rules’ of punctuation!
            1. It doesn’t look to me more than usually gibberish for a cryptic construction. ‘[With] skin and bone on the inside, say’ is no more forced than ‘[when] listened to [,] songs’ in 1ac, for instance. And less so than ‘proper, outlaw gets much put about’.
  7. I read it as ‘say’ with ‘all skin and bone’ on the inside; seemed all right to me.
          1. I’m with you on this one Ulaca. I can see what’s intended but I don’t think it quite works. I had a squiggly line under it too.
          2. The way I read it the absent/implied word is ‘with’. Not sure if that helps but it works for me!
  8. A very enjoyable crossword with a set of clues that I found terrifying until I buckled down and got to grips with them, but it still took me 52 minutes to complete the grid. I was held up very badly along the way after biffing the jazz pianist who I’d heard of but was convinced his first name was Theolonius.
    1. Ditto, except for me his name was definitely Thesolonius …. I had awful problems trying to squeeze that into one too few lights (but managed, with disastrous consequences).

      I also biffed Salamis for no good reason. I need to stop doing this.

      24 minutes. Really excellent puzzle. COTTONTAIL my favourite. I love the idea of rabbit racing. Would the jockeys be mice?

      1. There are no jockeys ….. 6 of them chase a greyhound ( of course, there are 36 of them by the time they pass the finishing line).
        1. I once lived in Thessaly, so there could be some memory scramble going on in the obsolete model CPU of my brain.

          Nostalgia corner: I don’t know why I misremembered the jazzman’s name. I became aware of him in my ‘rebellious’ youth when I discovered I much preferred Radio 2’s Round Midnight with Brian Matthew to Radio Luxembourg. The theme tune was, of course, Thelonius Monk’s song of the same name, though I don’t know which recording. Anyone? I believe John Coltrane played sax (mmm, smooth) on at least one recording of it.

          Nostalgic Trivia Corner: Brian Matthew is not only still broadcasting, aged 87, but he owns a yacht called Round Midnight. Nice.

          1. I appreciate the Fast Show nod of course but ‘smooth’ strikes me as a bit off the mark as a description of Coltrane’s style!
            Thelonious Monk is a bit of a nostalgia-inducing name for me too. He featured heavily in my jazz phase, c.1989-92.
            1. I may be confusing him with some other jazz musician I know almost nothing about! Fast Show references were especially for you, keriothe.
          2. I’ve got Monk’s Music in my meagre collection of jazz CDs and Round Midnight isn’t on it at all. Hope this helps.
      3. There is an English jazz band named “The Felonious Monks”. You may want to think twice before inviting them to your house.

        Dereklam

  9. Generally bright and entertaining. I was held up at the end by SEMITONE where both wordplay and literal were not convincing but gave the only reasonable answer. The clues for EVERYTHING and CLAY were very good. On the other hand DUMB was, yes, pretty dumb.
  10. 40mins, tricky but enjoyable.

    Same as Galspray for the jazzman (ie didn’t know that I knew him), and, like others, I ended with SEMITONE (without questioning whether it was interval or note). Didn’t stop to think too much about EVERYTHING either, thought it a great clue at the time. Must admit, I don’t often think too much about surfaces… BRIGHT AND EARLY biffed from enumeration and one or two checkers. SALERNO from out local Italian restaurant.

  11. I’m glad to see that I wasn’t the only one to be somewhere between 30 & 60 minutes and also stumble on SALAMIS, the spelling of THELONIOUS & SEMITONE. I found I had lots of partial answers for a long time but it was that pesky SW corner that caused me the most head-scratching.
    There was a definite sense of elation as I put my last one in (13d), so in my eyes it must have been a pretty good puzzle.
  12. 14m. No unknowns today, and not much outright biffing. Quite a lot of what you might call semi-biffing: seeing the construction of the clue but not bothering to work out every element, or exactly which bits go where, when the answer (‘jazz musician’) is obvious.
    Very enjoyable puzzle.
  13. Unlike galspray and janie, I definitely knew that I did not know the jazzplayer so a DNF. Salamis never occurred to me but Palermo did.
  14. Straightforward but satisfactory puzzle for me today except for SEMITONE my last one in – not a note as covered above by Jack

    Got T…MONK from “brother”, “jazz” and (10,4) – which as others have said was a feature of the puzzle, a mix of part parse and biff. No real stand out clues.


  15. I just never got going!Took a break and then filled it in fairly quickly.But by then over an hour.

    I think this two-child policy thing is wearing me out.

    13 dn FAR FETCHED why Asia?

    Thelonious Monk’s middle name was Sphere!

    horryd Shanghai

    1. This is a kind of definition by example, indicated by the question mark. So you can read it as ‘imported from Asia, say’.
    2. I’m sure there are lots of bits of Asia that are far, far away even from Shanghai. Even for those of us on the crossword’s home turf, some bits of Asia are regarded as Near East and others Far East, and near-fetched doesn’t work. Perhaps to be fair to Geography, the clue should have referenced, say, moon rocks.
  16. 41:44 and a bit of a struggle. In retrospect I’m not sure why as there was nothing too obscure. The top half went in OK, but the bottom took a lot longer. 16d my LOI as I was fixated on ‘National’ as the definition. SEMITONE as a note grated, but I see that has already been discussed. 25a my favourite once I eventually stopped looking for a synonym of chatter and saw the light.
  17. 15:29, top half easy but a tricky bottom. My only other squiggly line (apart from “everything” as above was under hand out for ration.

    As a guide to my lack of high-browness I only recalled semitone from Fawlty Towers when Basil was arguing that the fire alarm and burglar alarm were easily distinguishable.

  18. One of those wrecked experiences when I inadvertently closed the puzzle when more than halfway through, having therefore to remember and re-enter everything up to that point. A double point typo was almost inevitable and a time of nearly 30 minutes redundant and unrepresentative. Otherwise, still glad it was your’s not mine George: SEMITONE completely opaque in wordplay, as I couldn’t equate national and TIMES and was struggling to see how Semite included on. Might have helped if I’d seen I=ONE: conventional wordplay, wrong way round. BRIGHT & EARLY also resisted interpretation.
    MONK I got from proud memories of a quadriplegic I employed once who could do a brilliant impression of the great jazzman.
  19. Nearly half an hour, with 16d LOI – wondered whether ‘national’ was indicating Seminole, but eventually went reluctantly for ‘note’. Also failed to parse 12ac, thinking BRIGAND was somehow involved. No problem with 8d – the intent of the clue was so clear that I didn’t take time to analyse it in detail. 22ac: I was aware that his first name was often misspelt, so carefully checked wordplay.
  20. Count me as a 60min plus solver, but a very enjoyable puzzle. Dragged MONK from somewhere dark and dingy in the morass that pretends to be my mind. I struggled with the usual subjects (BRIGHT, JUNE, HOAX) and played with SEMINOLE for a while (member of the Indian (should I be saying Native American?) nation, but couldn’t make it work.
  21. Glad to see there are other members of the Seminole nation here. Id’ been keeping quiet about it. 25.46
  22. 42 minutes to fill the grid, but about five more to fully work out some of the wordplay. I enjoyed the clues a lot, but I’m with those finding 8 hard to swallow. None of the explanations suggested in its defence convinces me, whereas “All, say, skin and bone on the inside” would work. I cannot see that the clue as set can be read as equivalent to that.
    I have to confess I didn’t even notice the ‘semitone’ issue.
    1. There is still an implied ‘with’ in that construction (say, [with] skin and bone on the inside’). And if that is OK I can’t see how ‘[with] skin and bone on the inside, say’ isn’t.

      Edited at 2015-11-05 01:01 pm (UTC)

      1. One can Ieasily imagine a football commentator saying: ‘Costa, Robben and Muller on the inside’. One cannot really imagine him saying: ‘Robben and Muller on the inside, Costa.’

        As some linguists might put it, theme before rheme – the way the English language works.

        Edited at 2015-11-05 02:04 pm (UTC)

        1. I can’t imagine anyone saying ‘maize is listened to maze’ either.
          Or, with reference to 12ac, rendering ‘Muller on the inside of Costa and Robben’ as ‘Muller, Costa gets Robben put about’.
          I think many clues fail this standard of English usage.

          Edited at 2015-11-05 02:52 pm (UTC)

      2. ‘X,Y on the inside,…’ is a normal parenthetical construction that can easily be read as ‘X, having/with Y on the inside,…’ It describes a disposition of elements and doesn’t need the addition of an implied ‘with’ to make sense of it.
        I have to strain to read ‘Y on the inside, X’ as ‘With Y on the inside, X.’
        Cryptic syntax is sometimes strained, but when a cryptic construction strains normal English syntax and idiom beyond a certain point I don’t find it very satisfactory.
        1. Personally I don’t find one word order more or less strained than the other: a matter of taste I guess. And in any event the syntax here doesn’t strike me as unusually strained by the standards of normal wordplay. To my mind 12ac is worse from this point of view, although I don’t mind that one either.

  23. Thanks Keriothe – I realise that

    but I live in Asia don’t see it as that far!

    I also realise that the Times Crossword is Londoncentric but

    wouldn’t Antarctica or Mars have been slightly more far fetched?

    At first I was groping for FAR EASTERN..

    horryd Shanghai

    1. Ah, sorry, I missed your point. I don’t think this would be the first time that there is an implicit assumption that we are located in London (or at least the UK) for the purposes of these puzzles.
  24. 12.5 minutes, which turns out to have been Quite Good Considering. I totally biffed in Thelonious Monk, Lolita and quite a few others and failed miserably to parse SEMITONE even afterwards, beyond vague suspicions that a SEMITE could be a national. Excellent puzzle any way you cut it though.
  25. It took me a while to persuade myself that MENDICANCY was a word, but from the wordplay it couldn’t have been anything else. I very much enjoyed FOOTPATH, which has an excellent surface.
  26. I notice the paper appears as an answer in today’s QC (15a) and starting with the Sport section here(16d). David
  27. A tasty puzzle, done in bits and pieces with interruptions. I have no trouble with the slight convolutedness of the odd surface commented on (‘…on the inside, say’ and 12, with the raffish ‘proper’. Though come to think of it it could have been ‘properly’). A national uprising if no Times lingers as fully appropriate, if not quite clued in. Memories of Thelonious from schooldays in the fifties.
  28. DNF after 60m. I misspelt THELONNIUS which made 16d impossible but I would never have got it anyway as in my musical world semitone is simply not a note any more than a word is a clause. Other than that an enjoyable struggle and a very good blog and discussion. I agree with U about 8d not quite working but it didn’t slow me down at the time – I was crawling anyway!
  29. So many comments already, all been said. Half an hour, strange, tricky puzzle with several unparsed and a flirt with the Seminole nation; also puzzled by WEST GERMANIC defined by ‘foreign languages’ and NON UNION defined by ‘group of workers’.
    No sympathy for the orientally located solvers moaning about Asia being ‘far’, much as I am sure The Times of London is pleased to have its overseas subscribers (me included); to the setter, Asia is a continent or two away.
    1. I think it’s clued by “shunning group of workers”.

      And WEST GERMANIC is defined by “languages”. “Foreign” is the anagrind for “mastering”.

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