Good morning, and today we have a very nice puzzle by Teazel, which was right on the money for me – excellent clues, some nice deceptions and misleading wordplay, and no archaic words or unusual meanings.
The only standard type of QC wordplay we are missing is a hidden, whether straight or reversed. But that does not detract from a first rate QC, which I completed in 11:40 and much enjoyed. Thank you Teazel!
How did everyone else get on?
PS – for those who do not usually look at the 15×15 blog, the blog last Thursday by Zabadak was a veritable tour de force, being entirely in rhyming couplets. Apologies to all, but I will certainly not be trying to emulate him, as I find constructing a normal blog quite challenging enough. Or, to put it another way:
When asked to write his blog in verse / Cedric’s reply was somewhat terse. / “That’s not happening at all – / It would drive me up the wall!”
Definitions underlined in bold italics, (abc)* indicates an anagram of abc, ~ marks insertion points and strike-through-text shows deletions.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Psychiatrist’s contract (6) |
| SHRINK – A nice DD to start us off.
It is far from clear (well, far from clear to me) why psychiatrists should be colloquially known as shrinks. The internet has any number of theories and explanations, each rather more implausible than the last, so I await enlightenment from the TfTT community. |
|
| 5 | Site contains a magnificent residence (6) |
| PALACE – P~LACE (site) containing A (from the clue), with the containment indicator being, er, “contains”. Not the most obscure indicator we’ve ever seen! | |
| 8 | Extremely clever reviser of text, to whom I’m indebted (8) |
| CREDITOR – CR (“extremely”, ie first and last letter of, CleveR) + EDITOR (reviser of text). | |
| 9 | Prepare to swallow cold cut (4) |
| CHEW – C (cold) + HEW (cut).
It is clues like this that for me, help lift a puzzle from good to excellent. The surface is so smooth, as one of the food items one could be chewing on is indeed a cold cut of meat. |
|
| 10 | Turn on waterworks with very little pressure (4) |
| WEEP – WEE (very little) + P (pressure).
Another surface that reads extremely naturally. |
|
| 11 | Little flower in cold fall (8) |
| SNOWDROP – SNOW (cold) + DROP (fall).
At least, this is how I arrived at the answer, and Teazel’s general intentions are clear enough, even though neither of the component synonyms, Snow = Cold and Drop = Fall, are particularly close. I await comments below on a better (ie tauter) parsing! |
|
| 12 | A maths broadcast is source of inspiring problems (6) |
| ASTHMA – (a maths)*, with the anagram indicator being “broadcast” (not, for once, the indicator of a homophone), and the definition referring to the meaning of Inspire as Breathe in. | |
| 14 | Divides up bulbs for cooking (not the first two) (6) |
| ALLOTS – |
|
| 16 | Messy room used for lengthy sleeper (8) |
| DORMOUSE – (room used)*, with the anagram indicator being “messy”. | |
| 18 | Cloak and headgear, last of range (4) |
| CAPE – CAP (headgear) + E (last letter of rangE). | |
| 20 | Heads turned in shock (4) |
| STUN – NUTS (heads) reversed (“turned”). | |
| 21 | Partly shaved heads of thugs on news somehow upset residents every day (8) |
| TONSURED – First letters (“heads”) of Thugs On News Somehow Upset Residents Every Day.
It is tempting to put Heads into the definition here, as tonsures are indeed a way of shaving the hair on your head. But Heads is part of the wordplay and not needed as part of the definition, which is simply the adjectival phrase Partly shaved. |
|
| 23 | Old, unusually clear prophecy (6) |
| ORACLE – O (old) + (clear)*, the anagram indicator being “unusually”.
An oracle is a person, originally a priestess in ancient Greece, who is believed to be able to deliver divine, wise, or prophetic messages from a god. It also refers to the sacred location of these pronouncements (for example Delphi), and the messages themselves. It is the last of these meanings we need here. |
|
| 24 | Study American country’s energy (6) |
| PERUSE – PERU’S (American country’s) + E (energy).
It is never entirely clear whether in a phrase like country’s, the s is to be included in the answer or not. In 1A it wasn’t, here it has to be and in the very next clue, 2D, it isn’t again. |
|
| Down | |
|---|---|
| 2 | Large crowd he’s taken round old road (5) |
| HORDE – H~E (he, from the clue) surrounding (“taken round”) O (old) + RD (road). | |
| 3 | Giving full details of home department hotel (2-5) |
| IN-DEPTH – IN (home) + DEPT (abbreviation for department) + H (hotel, in the NATO alphabet). | |
| 4 | Sportswear set for assembly (3) |
| KIT – Our second DD, with the second definition as for example in kit-cars, which were briefly popular in my youth (and extremely dangerous if they were not properly put together, which many of them were not). | |
| 5 | Act almost had to go through (9) |
| PERFORATE – PERFOR |
|
| 6 | Clear openings for lawbreakers upset detectives (5) |
| LUCID – LU (openings for, ie first letters of, Lawbreakers Upset) + CID (detectives). | |
| 7 | Brave guy in bed for a smoke (7) |
| CHEROOT – HERO (brave guy) inserted into C~OT (bed), the insertion indicator being the straightforward “in”.
Cheroot is one of the very few loan words in English which comes from Tamil. Its origin is the Tamil word curuṭṭu (சுருட்டு), meaning “roll” or “roll of tobacco”, which entered English in the 1670s via the Portuguese word charuto. |
|
| 11 | Perhaps Oscar Wilde caught at last, breaking law (9) |
| STATUETTE – ET (WildE caughT “at last”, ie last letters of), inserted into (“breaking”) STATU~TE (law).
A wonderful lift-and-separate, as we are not concerned with Oscar Wilde the person here at all; the reference to Oscar is to the little figurines given to the winners of Hollywood’s Academy Awards, and Wilde is just to give us a final E in the wordplay. |
|
| 13 | Mobility device firm put in store for renovation (7) |
| SCOOTER – CO (company, firm) inside (store)*, the anagram indicator being “for renovation”. | |
| 15 | Caught one without protective coat (7) |
| LACQUER – Sounds like LACKER (ie one who lacks, one without), with the homophone indicator being “caught”. | |
| 17 | Person in charge is frantically busy (5) |
| MANIC – MAN (person) + IC (standard abbreviation for in charge). | |
| 19 | Iron the newspapers (5) |
| PRESS – Another DD. | |
| 22 | Small bite and small drink (3) |
| NIP – And having opened with a DD, we also close with one, the fourth of the puzzle. | |
The QUITCH is high, but I did not find this that difficult. Cheroot, tonsured, and statuette are not words you would expect to find in an easy puzzle, but they’re not obscure, either. As for snowdrop, you have to NOT lift and separate, a snow drop is a cold fall.
Time: 8:36
20 minutes, but nearly half of that was accounted for by my being stuck for ages on my last two answers which as so often intersected – PERFORATE and ALLOTS. No other problems.
I always understood that SHRINK in this sense comes from ‘headshrink/er’ and was originally associated with the traditional practices of South American tribes who physically treated human heads after death in order to preserve them. It’s a cynical reference to the increasing popularity of psychoanalysis in the treatment of anxiety and other human failings in the mid-20th century.