Quick Cryptic No 2754 by Lupa

72 comments on “Quick Cryptic No 2754 by Lupa”

1. DNF. I didn’t get UPSTARTS as I couldn’t think of UP in the solution since up was also in the clue. PRESSGANG was the second hardest for me since force and iron both leading to PRESS confused me. Oh well, at least it finally revealed itself!

2. 2D, can’t help thinking that the Trying/Testing was about ‘don’t try/test my patience’. Much the same thoughts re riptide being in Oz and well aware of the hidden dangers. Failed on upstarts and still don’t really get the start/open up meaning. Pressgang was a write-in for me but I’m a bit iffy on club/gang. Felt this was pretty difficult for a QC.
   Thanks blogger and setter.

   1. How about “I’m going to start a business” being synonymous with “I’m going to open up a business”? That was what I came up with.

3. That’s good enough for me. Thank you.

4. Another DNF, quit at 15 with ADAGIO and SWARM outstanding. I was nowhere near getting warm as meaning getting closer, NHO agio and never thought of the musical term. So that’s a fail. I thought some others among these, including UPSTARTS and REGRETTED, were very tough for a QC. Thanks to the Doof for explaining the former. I too began with a confident E-D at 8ac, though the perch took its time arriving. Still don’t really get what’s going on with the clue for TRYING. Like, what is ‘out’ doing?

   1. Oh, I think I’ve split it in the wrong place. I think it should be “Testing out” as one definition and “in court” as the other. Will update. Thanks!

      1. Either way it confuses me, I’m not sure how ‘in court’ means ‘trying’, just as I can’t see how ‘out in court’ means ‘trying’ but I think it’s time I moved on!

         1. If you’re in a law court you’re being “tried”, hence “trying” 👍

5. 15 minutes following on from 20 yesterday, so either I’m running a bit slow this week or the puzzles are on the harder side at the moment. But revisiting it now I can’t identify anything that should have delayed me unduly.

   AGIO is a little out of the ordinary but ‘slow / ADAGIO’ was a write-in. I remember in the days I used to travel on the continent seeing AGIO signs all over the place.

6. Battled to the end today but it was a bit of a slog. High spots were REGIMENT where I tried about a thousand combinations of those eight words before the right one came to me and the simple pleasure of solving EXUDES. Should have got to my LOI ADAGIO sooner but trying to remember ‘bourse’ delayed me and I’ve NHO ‘agio’. All green in 21.34.

7. Another fail, with some blanks in the NW. I also had a rogue T which messed up THEE. I thought of YE and THOU but didn’t see the “hidden”

   NHO AGIO, I change currency, trade fx, use my credit cards abroad but never come across it. Isn’t it just called “commission” ?

   Went through all the five letter fishes I could think of, but missed PERCH.

   COD PRESSGANG

8. With a minor bit of help to find the first letter of LOI upstarts (enter a vowel, click check!) got to a finish in just under 40. Mrs RH on her best biffing form this morning otherwise I doubt we would have got there. Spent a long time trying to think of a Mediterranean aniseed flavoured spirit with the letters that PDM’d into espresso.

   As Doofers said some write ins, however my first anagram of arm came up with ram which I convinced myself could also mean damage 😳

   Thanks for the parsing of a few, and thanks Lupa.

9. Another toughie with the NW being particularly stubborn. A biffed UPSTARTS finally opened up that corner.
   Started with IDIOM and finished with ENTRANTS (wrongendoftheclueitis) in 10.18, which I’m not too unhappy with considering the Quitch is currently running at 130.
   Thanks to Doofers

10. Threw in the towel after 30 mins of biffing and getting nowhere near finishing. Have spent a large part of time travelling the world and never seen ‘AGIO’ advertised.
    I do remember being driven en famille to Spain where we played a game of counting Cambio Weasels (Wechsel) which were plentiful at the Pyrenees border towns. I suspect that the Euro has rendered them extinct.
    Thanks Doofers and Lupa

11. For the second day the Congratulations did not appear when completing the grid. Hat to click Check button. Only a minor thing but one does get a buzz from being congratulated.

    1. Third day in a row!!

    2. On some of the puzzles the “Congratulations!” screen has become a “Completed” screen with social media sharing buttons. I guess the transition isn’t going smoothly.

12. I enjoyed this even though my printout is littered with scribbled bits of words.
    FOI: THEE to LOI UPSTARTS which seemed to take ages to see. NHO of AGIO but the answer was clear.
    Smiley faces against ENTRANT and DISARM.

13. Completed in 12 minutes, and as Doofers says, a number of very friendly clues, but some which decidedly weren’t and it was far from all parsed, so I needed the blog even more than usual today. Even after reading it though I took a good long time to understand UPSTARTS: ups = fortunate times is I presume a reference to the first part of “ups and downs”, but if so this really is quite a stretch as I don’t think ups is ever used on its own outside the phrase.

    Others that held me up were club = gang: not really synonyms for me (though I am sure there’s a dictionary somewhere which insists they are), as while both are groups of people, the essence of a club is order and structure and the essence of a gang is informality. And ADAGIO – easy enough to biff the answer but I worked in markets, specifically FX markets, for 40 years and never once heard the term agio.

    So not entirely on Lupa’s wavelength here, even if all green in the end. And I agree with those that say that the whole point of riptides, and the reason they are so dangerous, is that the water is usually not turbulent, and so catches swimmers unawares.

    Many thanks Doofers for the blog
    Cedric

    1. Admittedly in the context of ups and downs, but this example in SOED shows a construction where UPS meaning ‘fortunate times’ is separated from ‘downs’.

       Conan Doyle: I’ve had ups in my life, and I’ve had downs.

       If he’d just said “I’ve had ups in my life” it would still have been a perfectly meaningful expression illustrating the usage required in the clue.

14. 29.13 keeps me out of VSCC but needed alphabet trawl and pencil and paper for some anagrams. I agree it was clued fairly but with a bigger dose of the cryptic and the obscure than some. Parvenu, Swarm, Idiom, Tripe, Entrant, Pressgang, Looks, Upstarts, Regiment and even Smut taking a couple of passes to get a handle on. I agree with Curryowen about the inclusion of up in the clue and answer… …possible alternative ‘appear’
    Thanks Doof and Lupa

15. Another ultimately hard one, but completed with no errors today.

    Same problems as some others – T written in at the end of the clue making TRIPE and THEE impossible until I biffed UPSTARTS and realised that it was potentially in the wrong place. ENTRANT was my LOI where I suffered, as did Plett, from wrongendoftheclueitis.

    9:55

16. Couldn’t even buy an answer to start with, but the bottom half of the grid seemed a lot more friendly (Agio excepted), and after about 15mins it was fully populated. Returning to the blank top half, I did wonder why I’d struggled earlier, as this time round the answers kept coming, with an unparsed Upstarts (thanks Doofers) unlocking loi Tripe. Quite an odd experience, going from no chance to finished in just under 23 mins, and a window seat near the front. CoD to Pressgang for the pdm, a nose ahead of Elation and Swarm. Invariant

17. Understandable biff of ADAGIO as NHO agio. Also biffed REGIMENT which I should have got. LOI UPSTARTS. This was definitely at the harder end for a QC. Thanks Doof for the clear blog.

18. I don’t accept that “first seen” can logically indicate the S in SWARM. It needs to be “firstly seen”, “first of seen”, “first in seen”.

    1. Completely agree, I’m not sure how that one got past the editor.

       Seen at first would have worked as well.

19. I thought some of the clueing was unforgivably loose. UP in both clue and answer, dodgy syntax for TRYING, the random DES simply being presented rather than clued…..

    There were some clues that the average 12 year old could solve, but then some obscurities – fortunately I knew “agio”, and “arriviste”. Overall a rather unsatisfactory experience, although I can’t really see why it took me almost twice as long as average to mop it up.

    FOI MAR (like Doofers I’d put the “ed” into 8A)
    LOI UPSTARTS (besides my earlier comment, I wasn’t expecting it in the same puzzle as PARVENU)
    COD PRESSGANG (whatever happened to hyphens?)
    TIME 7:40

20. I found this very hard, finishing in 17:36
    NHO AGIO.
    LOOKS and SWARM both caused long delays, as did my LOI UPSTARTS, which was finally entered unparsed. Thanks Doofers for making sense of it.

21. 14:14

    Tough for a QC.

    Thanks all

22. 30 mins…

    Tricky in places, but got there in the end. Nearly came a cropper by biffing “Ram” for 11ac, before realising it was probably the other word. Quite a few clues where you felt you needed another answer before being certain.

    FOI – 16ac “Sop”
    LOI – 22ac “Swarm”
    COD – 18ac “Pressgang”

    Thanks as usual!

23. 24:19

    Some chewy stuff here. Didn’t really see ENTRANT as a synonym for individual. Only got it when I saw SMUT. But it was LOI ADAGIO which really held me up and never did parse.

    1. ENTRANT is a synonym for “individual joining”

       1. Ah yes, as nicely explained in the blog, thanks. I took joining to be an instruction to put ENT together with RANT.

24. Looked harder than it turned out to be in the end. Biffed ADAGIO = slow, but, like many others it seems, NHO AGIO despite being an inveterate traveller. LOI STAB.

25. Pleased to finish in 42m and actually spotted the hiddens for a change.
    Overall I enjoyed this one despite two unparsed clues.
    LOI was the biffed UPSTARTS which was not easy with UPS for ‘fortunate times’
    COD: ELATIONS and I thought ESPRESSO was a nice anagram.
    Thanks Lupa and Doofers for the helpful blog.

26. 10:59

    I quite enjoyed this challenging grid from Lupa – after seven minutes with about 70% done, I had to nip off to the dentist, completing the job on my return. As with others, AGIO unknown, whereas I might have seen that Butcher’s was CRS, but missed that and bunged in the answer from definition. Once I’d landed the correct fish, the NW completed itself. I liked PRESSGANG.

    Thanks Lupa and Doofers

27. Failed to finish this one, throwing in the towel on 1dn when UPSTARTS defeated me. I had all but this one after about 13 minutes, but after a further 7 minutes I gave in. An alphabet trawl of the first letter didn’t help as I must have quickly dismissed the U as a possible starter. I even wondered if PERCHED maybe wrong as another answer was perhaps possible. This nagging doubt together with the fact that I thought it had to begin with SP just about did it for me.

28. 10.38

    Mixed bag for me. Liked the different feel to this and thought ENTRANT and ELATION nice clues but tend to agree with some of what Phil said. Also don’t think AGIO belongs in the Quickie and that clue should have been reworked.

    Thanks Lupa and Doofers

29. Early start for me and it helped – all done in 15 minutes! My first Lupa (I think) and I found the clueing approachable and logical – despite the redundancies noted by others. Slow had to be ADAGIO and UP RAVEN jumped out as PARVENU. Getting PERCHED as my FOI definitely helped the whole NW. Flirted with PARADE for ‘trots out’ until LOOKS put paid to that. Very enjoyable – thanks to Lupa and to Doofenschmirtz!

30. Pleased with ourselves for completing this in 26 minutes without aids (unless you count “check” which us relative beginners find helps us avoid trouble down the line).
    Upstart one of the last in followed by stab and swarm. Like doofers ED first in with an attempt at last T saved by aforementioned check.
    Always an enjoyable part of our day.

31. Hopeless! I gave up after 60 minutes (!) with one error and four clues unsolved. Two other clues were in by pure chance only (PARVENU and ADAGIO), as I DNK the meanings of the definitions in the clues or the solutions.

    So, even worse than yesterday’s Izetti and even less enjoyable (sorry Lupa).

    Many thanks to Doofers.

32. DNF – couldn’t see PRESSGANG or REGIMENT, the latter being much more frustrating.

    Does anyone else take issue with the ‘a’ in 4 down?

    Its contributing to ‘mood destroyed’ not ‘a mood destroyed’ surely, otherwise the rules governing hidden clues are rather loose!

    1. I’d agree if the setter had included a completely extraneous additional word but I think in the case of a definite or indefinite article that might be considered a link word that improves the surface reading it’s allowable. ODDEST is still part of the expression ‘a mood destroyed’. Strict adherents of Ximenes principles may well disagree though.

33. A good ten minutes quicker than yesterday, but that still meant this took 38:00, so not a great day at the office. Good thing I’m not at the office (school). Mind you, if I was, I might have been able to enlist the help of those “average 12 year olds” that Busman referred to. I don’t think I’ve met a 12 year old, average or otherwise, who knew the first thing about cryptic crosswords. Maybe I don’t work in the right establishment. Anyway, got there in the end with LOI POLL of all things having assumed before that I was looking for a word for about that I had to knock an L off, and only saw the answer once I had POI LOOKS. Never heard of PARVENU or arriviste, though I got the anagram quite quickly thanks to learning French on Duolingo. Anyway, thanks to Lupa and Doofers.

34. Yes, another one that was rather tricky in places. Biffed and could not parse UPSTARTS, LOOKS and ADAGIO – thanks for explanations D. Took me a while to see what was going on with THEE. Seemed like complete gobbledygook for quite some time. Another QC which required perseverance. Thanks Lupa.

35. 1d Upstarts; I too was foxed by this, thinking that Up in the clue and answer indicated it was wrong, but.
    5d Riptides, I tried to invent the tiderips, but it got overwritten.
    15d Regiment, Wiktionary says regimen=diet, is dated, and medical only. It delayed me a bit as it seemed too easy to be right.
    20d MER Adagio, NHO agio… but I have as it has been added by me to Cheating Machine some years ago, almost certainly because it was in the clue or answer in the crossword, prob the Times 15*15. Its def is much more specific than currency exchange, hence the MER. However jackkt says he’s seen signs on actual currency exchanges, but that isn’t English IMHO. If the answer was “cambio” I would expect a warning that it’s foreign, ditto for “agio”. The English meaning of Agio is the premium of quality on a bill or negotiable instrument. It may be some Euro language for FX as well, but. See def in Wikt: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/agio
    That said, Adagio was a write-in!

36. 16.54 I had a similar experience to Doofers. I couldn’t explain ADAGIO and UPSTARTS was LOI. PRESSGANG, THEE and PERCHED took a good while too. Thanks all.

37. Another tough one for me 23 mins or so on the back of another tricky one yesterday. Never heard of AGIO but was sure the answer would be ADAGIO and once I was committed to the crossers thereby provided I tidied up the SE corner. LOI UPSTARTS which I didn’t parse but feels like I’m in good company.

38. Took much longer than usual to finally arrive at a DNF – defeated by “UPSTARTS”.

    I just wasn’t really on Lupa’s wavelength; I don’t like far-fetched, near-miss synonyms and conventional single letter indicators, ‘mark(s)’ = ‘M’, ‘singular’ = ‘S’, etc, are another pet hate.

39. I failed on ADAGIO – all I could think of was a guess at ADARIL with ARIL being LIRA backwards but I assumed no such word. AGIO would never have gotten in a million years although I should have guessed ADAGIO as it is in my memory bank somewhere

40. I’m not getting ‘comgratulations ‘ screen either. ADAGIO belongs in other crossword

41. I found this tough! I started by putting the ED at the end of 8a and my FOI( was ODDEST followed by THEE. Quite a while later I had a STAB at 22d. NHO AGIO. Knew ADAGIO though. 13:20. Thanks Lupa and Doofers.

42. DNF. Biffed ADAGIO as I could only parse the AD bit. Failed on LOOKS (should have got that one) and UPSTARTS (not a chance).

43. It became clear relatively quickly today that we were at best destined for the SCC. We did at least finish, though in 22:39. A tough week so far! In part held up by ELATION because I’d initially been happy with SHOT (tosh / crazy) for 22d and then couldn’t parse EMOTION. Certainly needed to come to the blog for the parsing of LOI UPSTARTS and ADAGIO (NHO agio). Thank you Doofers and Lupa.

44. At least I finished, albeit very slowly and not fully parsed. Similar MERs to those above, so slightly more relief at finishing than great enjoyment on the journey. I look back fondly to Monday’s stroll…

45. Slow again but at least I finished this one which wasn’t the case yesterday. I had to give it 30 minutes though and couldn’t parse UPSTARTS, POLL or LOOKS. I can’t really equate the ‘rant’ in 11ac with complaint or the ‘gang’ in 18ac with club. The SE corner remained obstinately blank for quite some time with both ELATION and REGIMENT taking far longer than they should have. Agio for currency exchange rang the faintest of faint bells once I had biffed ADAGIO.

    FOI – 12ac REGRETTED
    LOI – 23ac LOOKS
    COD – 6dn DISARM

    Thanks to Lupa and Doofers

46. DNF. After 60.
    Could someone please explain where ‘singular’ fits in in 23. Thx. J

    1. As per the blog. S is apparently an acceptable abbreviation for singular, I’m not sure I’ve seen it outside of a crossword, but simple enough to remember to try an “s” if you see the word singular.

       1. Thanks. Looking again at my answer I’d put in hooks. This clue was like n batting against Shane Warne. And only 3 words!

47. Looked at this after golf. Solved a few, then dozed off. It took me quite a while to finish overall.
    LOI ADAGIO- I have a financial background and have never heard of AGIO; and if Cedric hasn’t heard of it, it must be obscure.
    Late in were STAB (chestnut, but missed it for too long) and SWARM.
    Could not parse UPSTARTS or TRYING -thanks for those.
    A tough QC.
    David

48. 11:17. bit harder than most – pleased to finish at all. FOI was THEE, and then play progressed anticlockwise. LOI was UPSTARTS. thanks lupa and doofers!

49. 20:00 dead – does that put me into or out of the SCC? I rather enjoyed the puzzle either way, particularly THEE and SWARM. Would be nice to finish the week with something a bit gentler, so fingers crossed.

    Thank you for the blog!

50. DNF x 3. Failed on ADAGIO, SWARM and STAB. Was exhausted by then anyway.
    Slow on UPSTARTS but quick on PARVENU, ironically.
    Penny dropped with THEE eventually. Ditto LOOKS, IDIOM, PERCHED, TRIPE, ESPRESSO. Feel I shd have been quicker with some.
    Thanks for blog, Doofers. Am late today after entertaining lovely ladies
    to lunch.

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