Quick Cryptic No 172 by Mara

22 comments on “Quick Cryptic No 172 by Mara”

1. 19 minutes. I agree there was some tricky stuff here along the way, also about the missing ‘S’. Also about the ‘capitalist’ element in 8dn because the defining feature of SRs financially speaking is that they are rich, not the source of their wealth or what they do with it other than spend it on certain leisure pursuits and dress style.

   Out of interest, according to Chambers and Brewers SRs can be both male or female, not that the clue makes any reference to this one way or another.

   Sorry you had problems accessing the puzzle, Chris. The link sent to your LJ account was correct. I wonder if perhaps you omitted the final / as that often gets overlooked. Not that it matters now of course.

   Edited at 2014-11-04 08:44 am (UTC)

   1. As has now been pointed out below, ‘capitalist’ surely refers to the London location and has nothing to do with capitalism. Should have thought of that myself.
2. I’m not bothered about the definiton at 8d, but it was a crying shame that this puzzle wasn’t proofread properly, as it rendered a very fine, if tough, Quickie a bit of a damp squib ultimately.

   I sometimes wonder why someone at The Times doesn’t just do the puzzle as a punter. That way the kind of error that we had in Saturday’s Prize and this one would be avoided. I should know – I spent two or three minutes of my 15 trying to make the 11-letter anagram fodder fit.

   Back to the puzzle, ORGAN was very nice, while the unfamiliarity of the (foreign) target words HOWDAH and GANJA made those clues particularly tricky.

   Two tips for the less experienced solver: at 3d, ‘mill’ is often a ‘factory’ (or vice versa), and at 6d, ‘I have’ often translates to IVE, as ‘I will’ does to ILL.

   1. Interestingly (well, you know) howdah and ganja were two of my immediate write ins. It just depends on your vocab I suppose. Similarly Panto – my youngest does Panto every year (as do many of my actor friends) so, given the month, Panto is a word near the top of my mind at all times right now!
   2. “I sometimes wonder why someone at The Times doesn’t just do the puzzle as a punter. That way the kind of error that we had in Saturday’s Prize and this one would be avoided. I should know – I spent two or three minutes of my 15 trying to make the 11-letter anagram fodder fit. “

      Sadly, experience shows that solving the puzzle as a punter does not always find these errors, because that is exactly what we do do 🙂

      Yes, “capitalist” refers to “person from London” cryptically
      RR

3. I completed this in under 15 mins BUT I didn’t know why some of the answers were correct and for Sloane ranger I was literally going through the alphabet in my head trying to work out the missing letters of the first word and I only saw it was Sloane when I actually got to S. So I don’t think this counts as a great effort on my oart even though I finished it very quickly (for me). Almost all the answers were ‘guesses’ from checkers and definitions.
4. Thought SLOANE RANGER was somewhat odd, both in terms of the definition and the missing S. That said, I’m wondering if “capitalist” here is leading us (somewhat cryptically) to “someone who lives in the capital” – viz. London, with rich being the necessary prerequisite to live in that bit of the capital? (But it still does not explain the S).

   Other than that, very nice puzzle. (Chris, I share your sentiments re. “par” being “expected score” – this definition pointed me to “triple bogey”…)

   1. Spot on, Nick – it’s ‘capitalist’ in the sense of one living (originally) around Sloane Square. I’d missed that too.

      A pity that the setter/editor combo didn’t add two S’s to the clue, which could have read nicely as ‘Move along! Earners becoming rich capitalists’ or ‘Moving along, earners become rich capitalists?’ Forget that – it’s been a long day of proofreading an annual report is my excuse.

      Edited at 2014-11-04 10:06 am (UTC)

      1. Moving along, earner’s becoming rich capitalist?
5. When I started to play golf ‘par’ was the target score for the whole course.

   Hence, ‘Par for the course’

   The target score for the hole was ‘bogey’ and this word was often inscribed on the tee marker.

   I understood that the Americans did not at first use the word ‘bogey’ in any golf connection but borrowed it, later re- exporting it with its current meaning. When I started the older members could get very stuffy about this. They were even more put out when we changed our golf balls to USA size, Americans of course having larger balls.

   1. I vaguely remember this in sepia tones from 1960s Wentworth.

      I’m not rising to the other comment…

6. I agree that the omission of the ‘s’ is probably down to an error somewhere but it is not easy to pluralise the clue without pluralising the answer into ‘sloane rangers’

   ‘Moving along, earner’s become a rich capitalist’

   is the best I can come up with or is abbreviating ‘earner has’ a bit too colloquial?

   1. I knew I was missing something. That sounds good to me, although I’m not sure I’ve seen an anagram across an apostrophe, and don’t know the ‘rule’ about that.

      Edited at 2014-11-04 10:07 am (UTC)

      1. I don’t think there is one, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen apostrophes included before now.
7. Quite chewy but not as difficult as some of Mara’s for me.

   I also wondered if it should have been earner’s in 8d. Have seen a similar clue for 13a so that was a write in. Last in SORT and favourite LEECH.

8. The usual time, which sounds like a decent effort if the usual suspects found it a little trickier than normal. SLOANE RANGER was my LOI for the obvious reason.
9. How about “a song learner” for the anagram fodder. This would keep the indicated answer as singular rather than plural.
   1. Nice! 🙂
10. 26 mins but I was initially very slow & needed some gentle banter with Z8 to get me moving.

    It is a shame about the inadequate proofreading of 8d – but we are all fallible!

    My COD was HOWDAH, especially as Z8 rode an elephant in Thailand last year – looked too precarious for me – I redefine ‘coward’.

    LOI was ‘ok, yah’- I taught near Sloane Square for a year & hated it.

    Super blog Chris – thanks!

    Edited at 2014-11-04 12:47 pm (UTC)

11. Surprisingly, considering the comments of some of the regular 15×15 solvers, I found this fairly straightforward with LOI being SLOANE RANGER. With the checkers it was difficult to see a connection with money, i.e. rich, wealthy etc.. Thought of what might fit the second word and once RANGER popped into mind things became clearer (even if the S was missing for SLOANE). So like a few others I parsed it as a rich somebody from London.

    GANJA only needed the horse “backward” to immediately clue it. Must have been the circles I moved in as a youngster where reggae was a firm favourite with a fair number of people I knew and Ganja was the term most associated with cannabis in those circles. Googled it again to discover that it’s actually Sanskrit in origin (thanks Wikipedia), followed by the definition from Urban Dictionary below

    GANJA
    “The East and West Indian word for marijuana from the Hindi language. The Indica strain of cannabis has the highest percentage of THC than any other strain grown. The word is used in the West Indies because of the East Indian influence from culptivating and smoking the buds of the plant. Ganja was brought by the East Indian slaves to the Carribean and then spread all over the world from there, but Indica Ganja originated in India.”

    1. In the interests of pedantry (and where better to indulge), the (East) Indians in the West Indies were brought over as indentured labourers. Whilst not fully in line with modern HR practice, their Ts & Cs were a slight improvement on those of your actual slave
       1. 🙂

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