Mephisto 2515: Mike Laws

Author   glhPosted on Categories Mephisto
I don’t recall all of the solving process but I think it was two long sessions and one short one to fill in the details. Not too many out-there words this time around.

Across
1 CRUCIVERBAL: VERB(=word) in CRUCIAL(=key)
11 MO,OC,OW: for some reason I laugh out loud when MOOCOW appears in a crossword
12 PORT,O R,I,CO
13 MIRANDA: AND in MIRA (a star in Cetus)
15 MO,ERA: alternative spelling of MOIRA
17 E,DUCE: as opposed to Il Duce maybe?
19 TRAGOPAN: GO in TRAPAN (alternate spelling of TREPAN), an asian pheasant
20 ROSEWOOD: OWES<= in ROOD, this took a while to get
26 PIONEER: ONE(did you hear the one about) in PIER
27 AU,(i)DIOT,APE: nice wordplay
28 NJORTH: Norse god of the wind – hadn’t heard of him, but from the wordplay it was going to be NJORTH or SJOUTH
30 UNDERGROUND: rather nice double definition
 
Down
3 UNDRESSED: double definition the second being the military usage of dressed
4 ILONA: L in IONA, Hungarian form of Helen, thanks Chambers
5 VERDEROR: (ORDER)* in VER(y) – keeper of the law in royal forests. I bet they get natty uniforms
6 ROO,T,E
8 LOCK: double definition
9 TWO(=OWT<=),PEN,NORTH: this stumped me a bit over a year ago in aother puzzle
10 GAMMERSTANG: (h)AMMERS in GANG – a wanton girl and a great word
14 YUPPIE FLU: YUP,(FILE,UP)* and a word I haven’t heard in a long time
16 KAOLIANG: (NAIL,OAK)<=,G – a sorghum grain
21 ONE-MAN: ON(=drunk),NAME<=
23 F,LOTE: LOTE is an old word for lotus, didn’t know that but pretty generous checking letters here
25 JU(ne),JU(ly): nice clue, one of my first entries, but I did a double take at the J in the second spot in 28 as a result. Edit: I had originally put JU(ne),JU(ne), but as Peter pointed out in comments, it’s the two summer months

8 comments on “Mephisto 2515: Mike Laws”

  1. 19a Chambers (11th Ed) indicates that ‘trapan’ is a variant spelling of ‘trepan2’ (a decoy or a snare) and not ‘trepan1’ (the old cylindrical saw). After reading your blog, I went back and checked an older Chambers (1998) which gives ‘trapan = ‘trepan1’. It’s no wonder I had difficulty parsing this clue!

    GRM

    1. That’ll teach you to get ahead of the game! In his more playful moments Ximenes used to occassionally base a clue around the fact that the entry in the recommended Chambers was wrong in some way (out of sequence for example). Anybody using the wrong version of C found such a clue rather difficult but whinges were given fairly short shrift!
  2. Much easier than 2514 (or 2516), at about 30 minutes, with just 5 dictionary look-ups – 5, 10, 19, 23, 28. This doesn’t mean I knew all the other words already, just that the wordplay was clear enough to settle on one grid entry. Didn’t bother to look up TRAPAN = TREPAN as it seemed a plausible variant. Couldn’t find NJORTH in that precise spelling but saw “close enough” variants, e.g. in Brewer.

    Minor point: I think 25 is meant to be JU(ne),JU(ly).

  3. I made the mistake of jumping to conclusions and not paying attention to the clueing.

    At 15 I had MORTA (the Fate with the scissors) and UNARRAYED at 3 which I was quite pleased with – it has the same 2 meanings as UNDRESSED and fits the bill perfectly well as long as you are prepared to overlook the fact that it doesn’t exist.

    ROSEWOOD seemed to be the obvious answer at 20 but I was trying to fit
    ?YEW into ROOD.

    1. UNARRAYED was bad luck. I can imagine myself putting it in if I didn’t have MOERA there to stop me.
    2. There seem to be so many names for the fates that when I see one, I hope for helpful wordplay, MOERA went in from the wordplay, and I remember not looking up to checking the fateyness until writing the blog.

      ROSEWOOD was the other way around, it went in with a “this would be a good answer for the definition, and looks like it would fit the wordplay”, I didn’t see the reversed OWED until I was looking at some other clues.

      I’m learning more for the barred-grid puzzles it’s best to start with wordplay and then come back to definitions.

  4. Agreed, much easier than both 2514 and 2516. Off to a great start of course with 1A going straight in and then both 9D and 10D pretty obvious. It’s not often that I manage to work my way down a Mephisto from top to bottom but as Peter says there was very little to look up and words like VERDEROR were known to me.

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