QC 2969 by Joker

Author   MerlinPosted on Categories Quick Cryptic

Joker on the gentle side here, 10:22 for me.

One of my pet peeves: that blasted sol-fah business, with all their variant spellings. But no Eton, and a great &lit and clever surfaces throughout.

ONE=I appears twice today, and the device of saying “one” is to avoid saying “I”, but it still seems to mean “I” when used by the Royal Family. I think it works better in French, where they have “on” for the generic you.

Definitions underlined in bold , synonyms in (parentheses) (Abc)* indicating anagram of Abc, other wordplay in [square brackets] and deletions in {curly} brackets.

Across
1 Premature judgement upsetting once to Crippen (13)
PRECONCEPTION – (ONCE TO CRIPPEN)*

Obviously an anagram to start us off, but I found this very hard to unpick, and needed most of the checkers.

Crippen was a famous murderer, in the days when there weren’t many celebrities. He was found guilty of murdering his wife and was the first criminal to be captured with the aid of a digital phone (well, wireless telegraphy)
8 Those at match were exultant seeing English knocked out (5)
CROWD – CROW{E}D (exultant) – E{nglish} [knocked out]
9 New — a perfume just being created (7)
NASCENT – N{ew} + A + SCENT (perfume)
10 Unremitting on the outside, but not cross (7)
ETERNAL – E{x}TERNAL (on the outside) – X (cross)

Tricky, with “on the outside” looking like a device for the outside letters of “unremitting”, and ETERNAL does not seem a very likely synonym for “unremitting”
11 Work chanced upon over time (5)
TEMPO – OP (work) + MET (chanced upon) all reversed [over]
13 Garial lot may get confused with this? (9)
ALLIGATOR – (GARIAL LOT)* sounds like Gharial (a crocodile)

This required some sleuthing: the gharial (Gavialis gangeticus), is a fish-eating crocodile from India. Alligators live in the New World, so the two are unlikely to be confused, except in a zoo.

&Lit “may get confused with this” : it’s A semi&lit, (since “with this”) do not form part of the wordplay. See 6D for a full &lit.
17 Perfect one to trade (5)
IDEAL – I (one) + DEAL (trade)
19 Highly praise advert university passed on (7)
ADULATE – AD (advert) + U{niversity} + LATE (=died, passed on)
20 European female fined when working for Turkish gent (7)
EFFENDI – E{uropean} + F{male} + (FINED)* [working]

EFFEDNI  is a title of respect or courtesy in the Middle East, particularly in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, like Turkey, similar to “sir” in English.

Not a common word in English, I first came across it in Tintin, Cigars of the Pharaoh when Tintin travels to Egypt.
22 Motorist losing velocity suffering falling quantities of rain? (5)
DRIER – DRIVER (motorist) – V{elocity}

A bit of a contrived definition. But here’s how to think about it: imagine looking at a graph of hourly rainfall as you might see on the iOS weather app. You see falling (reducing) quantities on the graph, it is getting DRIER.
23 Thug with money is not very polite (5-3-5)
ROUGH-AND-READY – ROUGH (Thug) + AND (with) + MONEY (Ready)

With four checkers I thought “ROUND AND ROUND” was a good shout. I’m not thrilled with money=ready, we’ve had it before, but I always say “readies” for money. The OED only has it has an adjective as in “ready money”.
Down
1 Select beat regularly for soldiers on watch (6)
PICKET – PICK (select) + b{E}a{T}

The military usage comes from the original meaning of a fence or stockade. And in industrial relations (now the most common usage, I’d argue) from the military.
2 Former partner I think of highly, free from blame (9)
EXONERATE – EX (former partner) + ONE(I) + RATE (think highly of)
3 What could be first loud noise during exam (7)
ORDINAL – DIN (loud noise) inside ORAL (exam)

You see these clever definitions for both ORDINAL and it’s twin CARDINAL quite often in puzzles. As a reminder “first”, “second”, “third” are called ordinals. Hence, it could be “first”.

I’m going to the dentist this week, so I will be getting an “oral exam”, although I don’t think this phrase is often used this way?
4 Fire Conservative over decline with share (13)
CONFLAGRATION – CON{servative} + FLAD (decline) + RATION (share)

I think I’ve always spelt and pronounced this word wrongly, with an extra A in the middle.
5 Place one in job (5)
POSIT – I(one) in POST (job)
6 What’s found in Antarctic expanse (3)
ICE – Hidden in Antarctic expanse

I’ll hazard that this is an “&lit” as the whole clue is the wordplay and the definition. Very nice clue: my COD (although it’s an easy one)
7 Idea unacceptable outside India (6)
NOTION – NOT ON (unacceptable) contains I{ndia}
12 Girl that’s drunk (9)
MARGARITA -Cryptic

I found this very hard, my LOI.  I was looking for a girl’s name, that was also a synonym for a drunk. I thought “MARY BERRY” might be Rhyming Slang for “merry”. MANHATTAN was an early contender, wouldn’t surprise me if girl babies are being called that these days.
14 Noise from above — or below following inversion of height? (7)
THUNDER – UNDER (below) follows TH (=HT(height) reversed [inversion of])
15 Flowing Nile, a river seemingly one-dimensional (6)
LINEAR – (NILE)* [flowing] + A + R{iver}

This is a nice surface: on the map, the “top bit” of the Nile does look very linear.
16 Break one’s promise to wager note (6)
BETRAY – BET (wager) + RAY (note)

Not happy with “Ray=note”, compilers already extend different spellings to these tiresome abbreviations which I think are on the way out anyway. The usual spelling is “re”, it’s not in the OED, but is in Collins on-line. I’d have preferred something like “heard” added to the clue.
18 Large group starting late meal (5)
LUNCH – L + b{UNCH} (group) with first letter missing [starting late]
21 Viral infection was airborne reportedly (3)
FLU – Sounds like [reportedly] FLEW (was airborne)

97 comments on “QC 2969 by Joker”

  1. Easy day again. Didn’t parse the ‘tem’ in TEMPO so thanks for that, should have seen it. Thought the same about RAY in BETRAY but perhaps the setter was thinking ‘The Sound of Music’ and ‘Ray, a drop of golden sun’, but I agree, a homophone indicator might have been added. I thought 1a would have worked better with ‘ upsetting to Crippen once’. NHO Garial for the crocodile but ALLIGATOR it had to be. Knew EFFENDI from somewhere in the distant past. MARGARITA went in when I had the last letter ‘A’ from ROUGH AND READY. DRIER was very convoluted and still think ‘suffering’ could have been replaced with another word, maybe ‘experiencing’. Managed to see the two long anagrams with a few checkers in.
    Thanks Merlin and setter.

  2. The first few acrosses went straight in and got me on my way to 6.04, with LOsI TEMPO and POSIT. Got into a tangle for a while by putting applaud for ADULATE and took it on trust that ‘garial’ had some link to ALLIGATOR. A nice QC, thanks Joker and Merlin.

  3. 11 minutes. RAY is the Anglicised spelling of ‘re’ and is in all the usual dictionaries (including OED). It’s part of the system of western musical notation that dates back more than 1000 years so is unlikely to be on its way out any time soon. ‘Unremitting’ and ETERNAL are fine as synonyms and are listed as such in both Collins Thesaurus and Chambers Crossword Dictionary.

  4. All green in 14.49 but quite a tussle. MARGARITA was elusive, pizza would have got me there a lot sooner and took took long over BETRAY, wondering what ‘bet ray’ might be – pesky down clues! Ended up with POSIT and TEMPO, so the same as Lindsay, just much slower. Needed Merlin to explain how I got THUNDER and TEMPO where I’d sort of satisfied myself over the parsing but was wrong.

  5. 8:55 for one of my smoother runs at a puzzle by Joker, but not without a few pauses on the way – most of which seem to echo Quadrophenia’s. TEMPO not parsed, and MARGARITA needed the final A checker; these two were my LOIs. Gharial dragged out of goodness knows what deep memory to help me unravel ALLIGATOR – I’ve never seen one, couldn’t tell you anything about them and it is often a real puzzle as to why one remembers the most obscure things.

    Thank you Merlin for the interesting blog. And yes, the only place I’ve met the word EFFENDI was in a Tintin book too.

  6. Thanks Joker, and Merlin for your explanation. Little on the first pass and then it fell in, so a medium time for me of 17:20. Does GARIAL LOT (I understand it’s the anagram) mean ‘sounds like gharial’ in that it’s being called out, as in an auction?

  7. Joker is one of our favourite setters and this proved no exception. Writing out the obvious anagrist for 1a and spotting the answer quickly got us off to a good start with those 7 starting letters.

    I think I know of Effendi from Indiana Jones.

    Although I’m a classical singer I’ve always preferred ray to re. Julie Andrews gives us the definition as “a drop of golden sun” so that must be the right spelling 😀

    POI tempo finally gave us the M to make the drink obvious at 18.10.

    Thanks Joker, and Merlin. We’ve seen Nina’s from Joker before (my absolute favourite being the one he created without the use of j, o, k, e or r in the grid. Very clever and hugely impressed by the solver who spotted it). I can’t see anything, but then like many others, I rarely do.

    1. I have a friend called Ray, who’s a bit of an Eeyore character, so he’s always been Ray, a drop of golden sun, to me. So Ray it is.

    2. She also sang te a drink with jam and bread – so not so reliable on the spelling!

  8. Enjoyed this one and only LOI MARGARITA put up much resistance.
    Finished in 5.53.
    Thanks to Merlin

    1. Yup – so did I, and was going to suggest it as an alternative parsing but on second thoughts had to concede “chanced upon” a bit far-fetched there, so deleted it again.

  10. 31 minutes (v.g.) then came to a full stop with Re/Ray and, unforgivably, failed to biff it.

    NHO garial spelled without an h (I suspect it’s not actually a dictionary word), but I’m inclined to be lenient in return for the obvious anagrist.

    I always assumed one = I in crosswords because the letter ‘I’ and digit ‘1’ are orthographically similar and only realised the pronoun connection from today’s blog.

    1. In many fonts 1 is identical to a lower case L, not an I (not this font though). I hope setters don’t start using that!

      1. On many old typewriters they saved numeric keys by not having a “1” or a “0”, you were supposed to use the lowercase l and capital O. What is extraordinary is these keyboards had single keys for ⅓ and even ⅝ s!

        And that “!” was also not present, despite it being probably the most widely used special character on a mobile phone. I guess things just weren’t funny in those days.

        1. Single quote (‘), backspace, full-stop (.) = exclamation mark (on a typewriter). ” is more commonplace now, but all typewriters had ‘, not all had “.
          One of my earliest It jobs was replacing typewriters with word processing, and one of the good ladies was noticed still using that sequence long after she was given a keyboard with a !, and wondering where the ‘ had disappeared to.
          One of the others never quite got the hang of saving, and would roll her eyes at trivial changes as she would have to “do it all again”. (I have just noticed that the published font on this site is different from the one you use to type in, the single quote mark is upright as you type in (and on typewriters) but curved when published – ho hum)

          1. At least the eye-rolling, former typist didn’t try to use correction fluid on the screen – I hope….

  11. 31 minutes (v.g.) then came to a full stop with Re/Ray and, unforgivably, failed to biff it.

    NHO garial spelled without an h (I suspect it’s not actually a dictionary word), but I’m inclined to be lenient in return for the obvious anagrist.

    I always assumed one = I in crosswords because of the Roman numeral, and only realised the pronoun connection from today’s blog.

  12. Weird. I looked at this, saw ICE (I always start with the short ones) and then my brain froze. I went to get another cup of coffee and came back to it 10 mins later.
    Everything then just clicked and my actual solving time was shorter than yesterday’s (but my time is meaningless given the break). The long answers were helpful.
    Some nice clues. I liked LINEAR, NOTION, and ORDINAL but I entered PICKET without knowing that meaning. My LOI was Margarita.
    Thanks to both.

  13. Fast fir me 11:35 but nho greek gent so relieved that f-i-n-e-d went in correctly. Didn’t parse alligator tempo or lunch so thanks Merlin and Joker for being merciful

  14. That was fun – all good, even LOI ALLIGATOR. NHO garial (is that a surprise – has anyone?), but with all the crossers it finally popped out. CNP a couple of others, so thank you, Merlin, for your good and interesting blog (especially all that about Crippen). Thanks also to Joker for a friendly puzzle.
    Oh! You say “sounds like Gharial” but my 1950 dictionary has “garial, see gavial. Gavial or garial, an Indian crocodile”. By 2000 (Collins) this is now gavial, gharial or garial, only no longer indexed also under garial.
    TEMPO is a curious one: it is not time, but rate, or speed. MER?
    DRIER: couldn’t work out what “suffering” is doing there. Ah, bUNCH, so that’s what the group was.
    Managed to drag MARGARITA up from somewhere but just can’t think what kind of drink it is, please?

    1. Margarita cocktail is principally made up of tequila, lime juice and triple sec. Sure there’s a recipe online somewhere…

        1. Lovely idea of a pure life – but that’s not me! I’m just not a cocktail person – true, pure in the sense that I prefer one “pure” drink, especially wine, to a mixture of many. But the notable exception is Campari Spritz which is our (Mrs M’s and my) favourite treat – so much better than the relatively sickly Aperol Spritz currently taking over the world. But whatever your poison is, continue to enjoy, that’s the important thing. We’re all different!

  15. Only 4 across clues left after the first pass, so no dramas here. I suppose a lot of people might confuse a garial with an alligator….

    FOI CROWD
    LOI ADULATE
    COD ALLIGATOR
    TIME 4:02

  16. NHO garial or gharial, so just unravelled the obvious anagrist. Started with PICKET, then picked off the top row downs until PRECONCEPTION became obvious. Then it was steady away until ROUGH AND READY completed the grid. 6:11. Thanks Joker and Merlin.

  17. Lovely puzzle, most enjoyable, very fast but stuck on DNF MARGARITA – darn!
    Liked many inc NOTION, NASCENT, BETRAY (PDM), EFFENDI, DRIER.
    Biffed ALLIGATOR, and the long ones.
    Thanks vm, Merlin.

  18. 7:25 (Bede writes “De temporum ratione”, explaining how to determine the date of Easter)

    Very straightforward. MARGARITA was my LOI.
    NHO garial, but the anagram was obvious with the checkers in place.

    Thanks Merlin and Joker

  19. Needed all the crossers for alligator and margarita. Otherwise a steady and enjoyable solve. 9:48.

  20. A pleasant jog thanks to Joker and Merlin. (incidentally you have a typo in 4d).
    Margarita = tequila and OJ.

      1. OJ = Orange Juice. (It appears that I was wrong about that, apparently the orange flavour is triple sec and lime juice)

  21. I misparsed TEMPO in the same way as Russell and biffed LUNCH which should have been obvious. Another learning day with a new word GARIAL, but the answer was clear. Also NHO PICKET’s military meaning. Getting used to crosswordland’s various spelling of the Sol-fa scale, but it does seem quite random at times. Thanks Merlin for your usual interesting blog.
    (NB typo in 20A)

    1. So there is (typo in 20a) – two, actually! And thank you for joining our little TEMP + O club – but no one else seems yet to challenge TEMPO = time?

      1. To a non-musical expert like myself – tempo means time. After all, wouldn’t telling a musician to “keep in time” mean to stick to the correct tempo?

        1. No, not really! “Keep in time” means “play rhythmically correctly” without hurrying or slowing. Yes you can stretch that and say in that case, it effectively means “keep to the correct speed” = keep in time, so that then speed = time. But it’s a stretch! And I’m relieved to see that Collins has three lines on tempo without mentioning the word ‘time’ (the definitions are speed, rate and pace) until you reach the derivation, which is of course Latin tempus = time. But that’s etymology, not language.

            1. A pleasure! Thank you for your kind appreciation. Maybe we can all agree on a MER?!

            1. Yes 3/4 is a “waltz time” if you like; it’s actually a time signature, but certainly one associated with the waltz. But 3/4 is not a tempo, or a speed; you can have a slow 3/4 or equally a fast one. Expressed the other way, you can have (the time signature) 3/4 in a slow tempo or a fast one. Clear?

  22. A second straightforward completion of the week. I had TEMPO from Temp= work plus the O from over, which didn’t seem quite right so thanks for the actual parsing. When I see that Joker is the setter I normally prepare for a lengthy struggle but not today.

  23. Another easier one from Joker (as with the last few – I do miss the harder ones from days past!). Would’ve been sub-6, but LOI MARGARITA held me up for ages.
    Nice crossword, great blog, thanks J and M.

  24. 10 minutes, so quite quick for me.
    LOI MARGARITA after TEMPO where I wondered about the parsing.
    I also frowned at RAY but now just accept the many variations.
    COD to NOTION.
    David

  25. 27:25 so not so easy for me. Biffed ALLIGATOR , TEMPO, BETRAY and took a while to decode 1a.

  26. It’s probably a first for me as all 3 long ones were write ins. My FOI was PRECONCEPTION and like others here I misparsed TEMPO. I DNK EFFENDI but with the anagram fodder and checkers there was no room for error. LOI in 6:25 was BETRAY. Thanks Merlin….I didn’t like ray for the note either.

  27. 1o minutes ish . I recognise Margarita as a girl’s name so it went in very quickly for me. I put in picket and alligator without ever having heard of the military use of the former or the gharial referred to in the blog. I don’t expect every clue to be a gimme but setters can be tricky and even mischievous, in my opinion, without relying on the obscure. Overall very enjoyable – thanks Joker and Merlin

  28. 13:06 for the solve. Can’t say I particularly enjoyed it as I found it was too much bif-then-parse. Was all done by eight mins except MARGARITA (cannot think of a woman with that name) and BETRAY but still had questions on the parsing of LUNCH and DRIER. NHO EFFENDI or garial. Did enjoy the construction of the THUNDER clue.

    Thanks to Merlin and Joker.

  31. I usually end up with a time pretty close to my ten minute target with The Joker’s puzzles, but for some reason I found this exceptionally easy finishing in 6.18. I’m pretty sure this was my best time for a Joker grid. My only hesitancy was with LUNCH where I wasn’t totally convinced my parsing was correct, although it seems my concerns were ill founded as my interpretation matches Merlin’s.

  32. 7:07

    A bit slow in the head perhaps today – even with three checkers, had to think twice over THUNDER. MARGARITA needed four checkers to come to mind.

    Thanks Merlin and Joker

    1. 7.07 … “A bit slow today”. Reminds me of a famous Thurber cartoon showing a Formula 1 pit-lane mechanic saying to a colleague “I’m all fingers and thumbs today – took me more than 3 seconds to change that tyre”.

  34. 13a Alligator. Never noticed the absence of the h from Gharial, and Wiktionary says no-h is archaic, but I added it to Cheating Machine anyway. The gharial has a very long narrow snout with lots of teeth to help stop the fish escaping. They rarely bite people.
    14d Thunder, biffed. Never thought of Ht or th or under. Thanks Merlin and Joker.

  35. On the wavelength from the start, unusually for me, no unknowns in answers or clues, and all done in not much more than 5 minutes.

    Was briefly puzzled by the (couldn’t be anything else) ‘RAY’ in BETRAY, as the only spelling I have ever seen for the musical note is ‘re’, but I’ve now seen that RAY is in the OED, not just Collins, so it’s fair enough – even though, until today, I would have assumed it was a spelling error, or at best a cryptic reference to the song in ‘The Sound of Music’.

  36. 9.10 NHO garial but ALLIGATOR leapt out at me. PRECONCEPTION took ages though. Finished with THUNDER and ADULATE. Thanks Merlin and Joker.

  37. DNF. All-but-two inside 20 minutes, but despite working on them assiduously for a further 12-13 minutes, TEMPO and MARGARITA never came and I gave up. A waste of time for me, I’m afraid.

    Thanks to Merlin.

  38. LOI MARGARITA (my aunt’s name – hopefully she’ll forgive me for not spotting this immediately). Didn’t know EFFENDI but sounded plausible. Biffed ALLIGATOR (thanks for explanation Merlin). Needed all the checkers for PRECONCEPTION. Nice puzzle but maybe not as many smiles as usual? Thanks Merlin and Joker.

  39. A 1d/1ac start and steady progress gave me a shot at a sub-15, but with no real idea what I was looking for at 13ac, I thought the anagrist looked as if a musical term might be involved. Cue several wasted minutes until Alligator popped up and went in with a shrug. Thanks Merlin for the explanation. At least that made loi Margarita obvious. CoD to 14d, Thunder, for the surface. Invariant

  41. I found the bottom half easier than the top but still managed a very respectable 12 minute finish. Quite a few were biffed and not even parsed after the event including 1ac where I failed to see the anagram. Thanks to Merlin for the explanations. I didn’t much care for the definition at 22ac – seemed a bit convoluted.

    FOI – 9ac NASCENT
    LOI – 11ac TEMPO
    COD – 13ac ALLIGATOR

  42. Managed to finish today’s puzzle, WITH MARGARITA as my LOI. Really enjoyed this puzzle, NHO of NASCENT or EFFENDI but the clues I thought were well constructed so you could figure it out. I join those who thought TEMPO was TEMP + O, so thank you for the blog 😁

  43. 9:22. I wanted MADELEINE first for MARGARITA but came to my senses and realized you can’t drink the former.

  44. ‘And lit’ clues are always great fun, and I always take my hat off – or I would if I were wearing one – to the setters who find them. ICE was good, and my COD. Also liked CROWD, POSIT and MARGARITA – indeed, liked it all !!

  45. 9.28

    Very high NITCH here caused mainly by the TEMPO/MARGARITA crossers, possibly due to feeling knackered by my morning run. Liked CROWD.

    Thanks Joker/Merlin

  46. Joker in a gentle mood indeed, taking (or giving) only 9:54 which is quick for me. Learned “garial” today, check out Collins for a great photo. So I pick ALLIGATOR for my COD, a very apt clue. The Turkish gent frightened me but somehow EFFENDI appeared instantly in the pneumatic mail tube from the back office. I tried biffing POSIT for 5d, didn’t like it, and put it back as LOI with trepidation. But of course the dictionary supports it (“to place, put, or set”).

    Thanks Joker and Merlin.

  47. 11:34. Echo the MER at TEMPO and never managed to parse LUNCH, but a meal with the checkers L_N_H was pretty clear.

    Thanks to Merlin and Joker.

  49. We had BREAKFAST yesterday and LUNCH today

    What are the odds of having DINNER tomorrow?

    1. There’s Tea in between Lunch and Dinner. And in the 19th century Supper was not a less formal dinner but a separate meal just before bed. Shame we missed Elevenses though, always enjoyable.

  50. A tad under 11 mins mostly held up in the top half by putting in a confident but incorrect PREPERCEPTION after not properly checking the anagram. Well most the letters were there.

    This led me to wasting a lot of time thinking of a word for exam that was not test but began with a t.

    Nothing else really troubled:

    FOI: PICKET
    LOI: TEMPO
    COD: EXONERATE

    Thanks blogger and setter.

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