QC 1005 by Grumpy

Author   astartedonPosted on Categories Quick Cryptic

A mine of double definitions today, a couple of them very pleasing to the crossword-solving senses (whatever they are) as described below. I found this of medium difficulty (if I give you a scale of between 6 and 15 minutes for my normal solve on a QC this one came out at just over 10) and so was more challenging to me than my previous two encounters. FOI (as it should be) was 1A and LOI I believe was 3D. COD was probably the double D at 22A, slightly pipping the other neat one at 17A for the way in which the definition manages to turn the surface on its head.

So many thanks to Grumpy (love the tag, reminds me of the wife and me) for a witty and elegant 10 minutes.

In my last blog I said I had another comment to make about thanking the setter which I said I would postpone until now. This was because at the time the Christmas Turkey had not been blogged and was under embargo and my comment involves reference to it. And the comment is that all these excellent setters deserve all the thanks that we can give, particularly having seen how difficult most of us find the composition of even a single cryptic clue, let alone a whole cryptic puzzle, quick or otherwise.

My first time helping stuff the turkey was a couple of years ago. Sotira very patiently took me through about 3 or 4 email iterations of my very simple clue of a 3-letter word before finally declaring it up to scratch. I was a little embarrassed at my slowness of wit, but this year was relieved to see that I cannot have been the only one with similar problems, as she very sensibly declared that she was going to be a ruthless editor because she didn’t have time to conduct 32 sets of email negotiations! As it is, my offering this year was accepted in its sense although its actual wording was slightly edited for reasons I might describe as ‘handwriting’. So I was pleased with that. But then after getting through that filter, we were all subjected to the clinical gaze of the blogger – and very few of us came out unscathed (myself included).

When I first picked up The Times crossword with serious intent many years ago I was in a summer job as a student. I didn’t have a clue (sorry – NPI) how to tackle it. I just picked it up one day in my lunch hour and thought I would read it through because I liked puzzles. Although I had never tried a cryptic crossword, I had heard of its fame as a tough nut to crack and thought I would try and see what it was all about. I read the clues one after the other and then surveyed the still-blank grid. I read them again. Still no glimmer of light. In this manner the whole lunch hour passed and I quietly admitted that this probably wasn’t really my game.

But the barb had lodged and the poison had worked its magic, and I kept on picking up the puzzle and reading it. At this stage I don’t think I was even thinking in terms of ‘definition’ and ‘cryptic’. I guess I was really just reading the surface and hoping that would mysteriously guide me to the answer. But somehow, one of the answers eventually presented itself, and then one or two more. And then I started getting the hang of it and after a couple of weeks I was patting myself on the back for managing to get about half way through.

The point being, there was no QC in those days, and I think I have therefore always looked at it through the wrong end of the telescope. As a seasoned Daily Cryptic solver, I never had it as something to cut my teeth on, and so my experience of it has always been as an ‘easier version’ or ‘warm-up’ to the main puzzle. But since starting this blog I have realised what an important innovation it has been for the novice; if it had been around in my day I certainly would not have had so many fruitless lunch hours.

But as another enthusiast very wisely told me in circumstances which I may relate in a future blog: “If they want to **** you, they can **** you.” To paraphrase, if ‘they’ wanted to, these wizards could just turn the heat up a notch and have me barbecued as easily over a 13 x 13 grid as over a 15 x 15 one. We are like children playing Chess with our Dads – they always let us win. Except my Dad never did, and I never did with my children either, except that it wasn’t too long before they started to win anyway and… oh dear, maybe this wasn’t the best analogy. But I suppose the point is that our enjoyment of these delightful daily linguistic excursions depends entirely on the razor-sharp judgment of the setters – make ’em hard, but let the poor saps get there in the end.

Definitions are underlined in italics, and cryptic parts are explained just as I see them.

Across
1 Plant in the shade (5)
LILAC – double definition.
4 Unlooked-for line forming part of church (7)
CHANCEL – CHANCE (unlooked-for) + L (line).
8 Plunge in river cut short after one minute (7)
IMMERSE – MERSE (river, in this case Mersey, cut short) after I (one) + M (minute).
9 Engineers left in charge for survivor (5)
RELIC – RE ([Royal] Engineers) + L (left) IC (in charge).
10 Hit tunes as recollected by fan (10)
ENTHUSIAST – anagram of HIT TUNES AS. The anagrind is ‘recollected’ (as in ‘collected again’ rather than the surface intention of  ‘remembered’, although come to think of it etymologically they are pretty close as to ‘re-member’ literally means to put togther again).
14 Expert bearing weight right away (2,4)
AT ONCE – the expert (ACE) is ‘bearing’ a TON (weight).
15 Islander, famous at last, with a grouse (6)
SAMOAN – S (famouS at last) + A + MOAN (grouse).
17 Feel grateful for increase in value (10)
APPRECIATE – a neat double definition.
20 Swear nothing is taken from path (5)
CURSE – take O (nothing) away from COURSE (path) and you have…
22 Seeing less impressive performance (7)
BLINDER – another neat double definition which manages to turn the surface on its head. If you see less you are BLINDER, which is also an impressive performance, as in “Messi/Ronaldo/Best or [insert your favourite footballer] played an absolute BLINDER!”
23 Wise king on his own one day? (7)
SOLOMON – SOLO (on his own) + MONday gives the famous biblical wise king.
24 One in Germany, say, brought back spirit (5)
GENIE – my limited German tells me that ‘one’ is EIN, and my limited Latin tells me that ‘say’ is Exempli Gratia. Put ’em together and turn ’em round.
Down
1 Put down face up (4)
LAID – DIAL (face) when put ‘up’ in a down clue.
2 Branch grasped by climber (4)
LIMB – contained in cLIMBer
3 Very bad article in French account of past events (9)
CHRONICLE – CHRONIC (very bad, as in CHRONIC pain) + LE (even in these gender equalised days this is the more common French definite article found in crossword land).
4 Controls, we hear, for some Europeans (6)
CZECHS – checks (controls) sounds like those European CZECHS. Which reminds me of that other homophone ensrhined in the name of a band I think I once saw called The Bouncing Czechs…
5 You can’t live without this song (3)
AIR – double definition, one cryptic. Unless of course you happen to be an anaerobe.
6 Apple brandy and soda served up after Calvin’s dropped in (8)
CALVADOS – CALV (‘CALVIN’ dropping the ‘IN’) plus SODA reversed, ie ‘served up’ in a down clue (although might also be an acceptable anagrind in an across clue?). I am quite familiar with this French apple brandy as it is a favourite tipple of my Father-in-Law, for whom I created an Apple and Calvados Soufflé with Caramel Calvados Sauce on the occasion of his last birthday.
7 Finding piece of wood to entertain pet at home (8)
LOCATING – a LOG is a piece of wood. Put in a CAT (a type of pet, although not in my house) and make it ‘at home’ (IN) and you have your definition.
11 Get cracking with fish that’s quite unexpected (9)
STARTLING – oh those useful slippery crossword fish – GAR, IDE, CARP etc… but in this case LING. Get cracking (START) with it and out pops another definition before your very eyes.
12 Five hundred gather with copper in capital (8)
DAMASCUS – one of those useful Roman numerals D (five hundred) + AMASS (gather) with CU (copper, element number 29 in the Periodic Table) ‘in’ it gives the capital of Syria.
13 Type of punishment for NCO (8)
CORPORAL – the sort of punishment I used to say ‘never did me any harm’ at school (and also in fact thought did me some good), but which in the modern consciousness has come to be seen as barbaric. And I do agree, even though I look back on those days with fondness. And of course it always hurt the master more than it hurt me (and in modern psychological terms perhaps there is an ironic sense in which that was true. Discuss amongst yourselves.). Of course a CORPORAL is also an NCO in the army so this is a double definition, the first one being slightly cryptic.
16 Ape an old historian (6)
GIBBON – another double definition, with a reference to the author of ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’. I believe he presented a first edition copy as a gift to the Duke of Wellington on one occasion. The Duke picked it up, turned it over disdainfully and said something like “Ah, another big, thick book, eh Gibbon? Always scribble, scribble, scribble?’ Again, reminds me of my schooldays. Wellington I am sure must have been the ‘good-at-games’ bully and all-round great chap, while poor old Gibbon would have been the swot working away conscientiously in the corner and coming top of the class to general ridicule. Ah those sunlit days!
18 Original garden for PM (4)
EDEN – cor! Wot a lot of double definitions!
19 Lake that sounds spooky (4)
ERIE – oops, nearly another double definition but not quite (narrowly missed it by an ‘E’). A homophone instead. The great lake sounds like EERIE (spooky).
21 Wood required by barrel makers (3)
ELM – hidden in barrEL Makers.

39 comments on “QC 1005 by Grumpy”

  1. 8 minutes. I’m having a good run of QCs at the moment after a long string of problem puzzles.
  2. 38 minutes. Lots of good clues. I found half fairly easy and the rest quite tricky, especially:

    chancel (couldn’t see why chance = unlooked for)
    Enthusiast
    Chronicle
    Calvados (COD)
    Gibbon (LOI and historian unknown).

    Thanks for the blog, the quickies have been great for learning the art. If I had an extra 2 hours in the day I could manage the 15×15 as well.

    1. Well thanks for your comment. I guess it is clear now? (Chance as in chance encounter?) Do go for the 15 x 15 some time. I’m sure you’ll quickly get the hang of it as I did all those years ago. As with Nigel Slater commenting on cooking the Christmas turkey: “don’t get nervous, it’s just like cooking a big chicken…”. It’s just the same thing but bigger!
  3. I wasn’t very sure about BLINDER, but it sounded somewhat familiar. I’m embarrassed to say that I biffed DAMASCUS, having been looking for an L instead of a D. It was the Duke of Somewhere Else–already forgotten–not Wellington, but I’m glad to cited the quote, one of my favorites (the not yet Duke of W was about 11 years old at the time). I do hope it was your father’s most recent birthday when you gave him the soufflé, not his final one! 3:55.
    1. Great points. Thanks for clearing up the bit about the Duke of Wellington, I am no history buff but I do like a good story. Guess I should have checked my facts first as it is so easy to do so on Google these days (apart from all the FAKE NEWS of course…).

      And yes, it was only my father-in-law’s most recent birthday. May he have many more! Thank you for the lesson in clear communication!

  4. Had no understanding of the clues and even with the answers lilac no clue how that is a double def. I thought this puzzle to be far and away the hardest I have seen in a couple of weeks.
    2. So sorry, I obviously did not do my job properly. Lilac is obviously a plant, but it is also a ‘shade’ of colour (one that is like unto the colour of the flower’s petals). I think they call that a transferred epithet or something like that (can anybody else help me there?) So you could probably imagine someone like Oscar Wilde turning up at some function in a ‘striking lilac suit’ for a possible instance of its use in that sense.
      1. A transferred epithet is something like this from P.G. Wodehouse: ‘He sipped a thoughtful cup of tea’. Here the epithet (thoughtfully) is transferred from he to the cup of tea (which is obviously not capable of thought). In Wodehouse the effect is mildly whimsical. Virgil also uses the technique a lot, to more serious purpose.
  5. Well, someone who writes ‘I’m glad to cited the quote’ when he meant ‘I’m glad you cited the quote’ is perhaps not the most qualified person to teach clear communication.
    1. Just checked up on the Gibbon anecdote:

      “Another damned thick book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?”

      Attributed to Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, 1781, upon receiving the second (or third, or possibly both) volume(s) of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from the author. quoted by Sir Leslie Stephen in the Dictionary of National Biography, (1921), vol. 21, p. 1133.

      This is the great thing about crosswords. They are not an idle pastime. You actually LEARN from them!

  6. Since when has “chronic” meant “very bad”? It just means “persistent” of similar. Am I using the wrong dictionaries?
    1. I do agree, and I almost took this point in the blog but felt that the strictly medical use of chronic as opposed to acute had morphed into common usage as simply meaning ‘bad’ through the perception that an illness that persists for a long time is usually worse than one that is here today and gone tomorrow.

      I believe I am influenced in this (perhaps wrongly) by my father (who was a doctor and who was always very exact in his use of medical terminology in the professional context) who diverted this adjective into everyday usage to mean just that. A ‘chronic’ situation to him in everyday life was simply a ‘very bad’ situation, so I sort of grew up with that meaning tacked on to the standard one, and when I saw it in the clue it did raise an eyebrow but then passed my internal checker on the basis that usage in that context was not alien to me. (I think my father also just liked the SOUND of it. There is almost an onomatopoeic element to using it to mean bad – it just SOUNDS bad!)

      Checking in at least one of the online dictionaries I do see that it is acknowledged at least in some quarters as informally having that meaning, although total respect to your comment.

    2. ODE sv ‘chronic’ 2 (Brit) (informal) of a very poor quality. [and gives as an ex.: The film was absolutely chronic.
      I learned this from a cryptic, of course.
  7. Thanks, Astartedon, for helping me out here. Like the above poster, I found this really tough (even though I was on a roll last week – even completed the Saturday 15×15). Didn’t see “recollected” as an anagrind, tried to make an anagram of ARTICLE/EN for 3D as my checkers fitted, kept thinking “shade” meant a ghost…oh dear.
    It’s the first day of my week’s holiday and have spent an hour swearing at the newspaper! Oh well, there’s always tomorrow 🙂
    1. That’s what crosswords are all about. A bit like life really. One week it’s all going great and everything seems easy and the next week it’s all fallen apart.

      Thanks for your comment on 3D. Yes, I did think about commenting on this possible misdirection but you can only say so much and I thought I’d gone on long enough already.

      Glad to have been of some help!

  8. Very nice blog. As to your last paragraph, a well-known setter (can’t now remember which, but I strongly suspect Araucaria) once described their job as to have a battle of wits with the solver, and lose gracefully. Obviously how long it takes, and how graceful the process is, varies every day…
    1. Thanks very much. Yes, I had heard that quote too and it was somewhere in the back of my mind but I couldn’t quite put the mental finger on it. It sums things up very well.
  9. I managed to scrape under my target 10 minutes by 5 seconds, and as my solving times tend to correspond with our blogger’s, I would agree this was a puzzle of medium difficulty. I started with LAID and finished with CALVADOS. I was delayed at 16d by biffing SIMIAN and needed BLINDER to correct that. Nice puzzle and nice blog. Thanks Grumpy and Don.
    1. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who came up with simian and was delighted to find that Lü Simian was a Chinese historian. Hard to believe that was entirely coincidental on the part of Grumpy 😀
  10. A good workout for a Monday – maybe presaging a tough week? Hope so!

    I also had a mer at the use of chronic but, in non-medical terms, it has generally come to mean bad so I was happy to go with it.

    Many thanks to setter and blogger.
    6’00”

  11. Having successfully negotiated quite a few of Grumpy’s teasers around the grid, I came to a halt with a blank NW corner. Eventually spotted Limb, and that gave me Immerse, Lilac, Laid in that order. I still didn’t have any idea what was going on in 3d, even with all the checkers in place. I tried Lucy’s anagram, but it took an alphabet trawl to find what Grumpy was looking for. Perhaps the clue could have started with ‘Persistent article in. . . ? Overall, I thought this was at the difficult end of the QC scale. Invariant.
  12. The NW was not immediately obvious but I made fairly quick progress round the rest of the grid ; then after 8a I managed to find Laid and Lilac. My last two were At Once and finally Damascus. 17 minutes in the end. I was sharpened up by doing the weekend puzzles.
    COD to 22a. David
  13. I completed all bar 12d in 15 minutes and then had a complete brain fade. For some reason I was convinced that 500 had to be VC (presumably 95) and couldn’t figure out how to include that and CU into a capital city. 6 minutes of befuddlement ensued before I managed to biff the answer without any understanding of how it worked – after reading the excellent blog I couldn’t believe how dozy I’d been. Enjoyed the whiskey references in 15a
  14. I found the SE the most tricky. FOI 4a. LOI 12d. COD either 12d or 15a. Thx for a really helpful blog smoothing out my ‘nearly parsed everything’. I never find Grumpy the easiest so thx to the setter for giving me a chance today.
  15. I liked this blog – as an old hand I have often felt that there is an inadequate welcome. for new solvers to join our community
  18. Really enjoyed your comments, Astartedon. Thank you. Your own approach to cryptics probably chimed with many readers.
    My slow development in the art was nurtured with the help of the Daily Torygraph Cryptic which I still go back to from time to time when the Times Cryptic stumps me (and when I can pick up a free copy from Waitrose – I just extract the crossword and ignore the rest).
    ….apart from the Alex cartoon, that is.
    I think the QC is probably about the same level as the DT Cryptic for me.
    1. Thank you so much for your kind comments.

      I’m afraid I don’t think I have ever strayed into the Torygraph for my amusement. I used to enjoy Alex when he was in the Independent, but like a lot of the wonderful journalistic talent that started so altruistically at that organ, they eventually ended up following the money. But then I suppose that is exactly what Alex would do, so unlike the rest of them he was at least behaving in character…

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