roTimes Cryptic No 27142, Thursday, 13 September 2018 ‘?

55 comments on “roTimes Cryptic No 27142, Thursday, 13 September 2018 ‘?”

1. ….I was really quite tired, and took 68 long minutes to puzzle everything out. This is a fine puzzle that I was not quite in the mood to appreciate, and even when I correctly understood the wordplay I couldn’t call the correct words to mind.

   I see that our blogger has had a slip of the keyboard on the wordplay for 24, which is not surprising considering he is solving and posting in the middle of the UK night. Meanwhile, I am ready to go to bed at 10:30 PM over here.

2. I dithered between ‘apostrophism’ and ‘apostrophist’, somehow missing the E (actually, I know how; I didn’t parse the clue carefully). To apostrophise is not to digress, but to address, as in my favorite apostrophe (from the wonderful ‘A Stuffed Owl’): ‘Inoculation! Heavenly maid, descend!’, where the poet–for want of a better word–unwisely chooses to address inoculation, having unwisely decided to make it a goddess. Senior moments trying to remember JOINT and TRAP. (The J gave me MAHARAJA.) ARECA shows up often in the NYT, so I actually spotted the hidden immediately, something I never do. ‘Keen to have it’ vs. ‘Avoiding relations’; hmm. This was definitely a toughie, and I was glad to have finished it, even with the error.
   1. Ditto Kevin.
3. …so far! I had to take a break and when I came back to this, APOSTROPHISE suddenly snapped into clear view, from the (quite precise) definition and a few crossers. CONCUPISCENT reminded me, of course, of Wallace Stevens, “Call the roller of big cigars,/ The muscular one, and bid him whip/ In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.” Nice trick with MYRTLE. But was the fact that we had ARABIAN as recently as yesterday supposed to make ARABIA less likely to spring to mind—even when both are clued using “aria”?

   Edited at 2018-09-13 04:32 am (UTC)

4. I got myself into the doldrums on several occasions whilst solving this difficult puzzle to the point where I succumbed to the use of aids more than once to get myself started again, and remotivated in the process. But the only word I didn’t know at all was CONCUPISCENT which I managed to construct from wordplay, so that was a small consolation for being defeated by two or three other clues.

   I had a MER at TITHE defined as ‘offering’ as I only knew it as a form of tax which surely is demanded rather than offered up voluntarily, but I then found this as a secondary meaning in SOED which seems to clear up the point: …in certain religious denominations: a tenth of an individual’s income, pledged to the church.

   Edited at 2018-09-13 05:36 am (UTC)

   1. Whereas I only knew the secondary meaning!
   2. To be fair, tithing is a core part of traditional mainstream Judaism and Christianity.
   3. Censorship? Not surprised you deleted your own post too. A bit incriminating.
5. Almost an hour with yoghurt. blueberries, granola, etc.
   I wasn’t Myrtle-less for long, but I was a long time getting the 12 letter ones.
   And ‘covet’ for desire took far too long to come to mind.
   Mostly I liked: Joint Account.
   Thanks setter and Z.
6. I despaired of getting started with this, then I despaired of finishing it. I had quite a lot of empty grid staring at me until about three quarters of an hour in. Then I finally twigged the JOINT bit of 4d JOINT ACCOUNT and everything else arrived fairly steadily, if not quickly, to let me finish in 58 minutes.

   FOI 23a ENEMY (though I’d uncertainly pencilled in 6d ARECA at that point.) LOI 19d DEMOTE, just after 14a HINDMOST. The word always reminds me of Larry Niven’s Puppeteer species, a timid race whose ruler is the HINDMOST, as the wisest always lead from the rear…

   DNK MANIOC, TERMAGANT, WOD CONCUPISCENT, APOSTROPHISE, ARECA.

   Edited at 2018-09-13 07:58 am (UTC)

   1. That’s the third time this week I’ve posted and when I’ve submitted yours has appeared immediately before! Is your routine get to the office and check in here before starting work at 9 as well?
      1. Complete coincidence! My waking times are all over the place this week, and I’m between contracts and don’t have a deadline for starting work. I just shuffle over to my computer whenever I’ve finished the puzzle in the mornings…
   2. Like the Duke of Plaza-Toro in ‘The Gondoliers’:

      In enterprise of martial kind,
      When there was any fighting,
      He led his regiment from behind–
      He found it less exciting.

      1. Yes! The Puppeteers would have counted the Duke as an exemplary strategist.
7. I knew this was going to be tough when there were no 3 or 4 letter starters, few multi-word answers and so just going through the clues in order I didn’t get anything until ENEMY. Like Guy I needed a break to finish this, and after a quick browse of the news I came back refreshed, ending up with TRANQUIL.
8. Challenging puzzle today but at the end, a sense of satisfaction for cracking all the tough nuts. Smiled at 7Down. Thank you, setter and blogger
9. Great puzzle and blog. Took me nearly an hour, and it took me a long time to get going. Better once SE quarter slipped in easily!
10. Tough puzzle with some first class clues for unusual words. Exactly the opposite of a vanilla offering. Thank you setter and great effort z8 – not an easy blog!
11. … and he has done. My first ‘did not finish’ for a while, not getting TRAPSHOOTING (shouldn’t it begin with a C?) and CONCUPISCENT, which was the reason I gave up after three quarters of an hour. Head banging against wall became too painful. APOSTROPHISE unparsed also. COD to JOINT ACCOUNT. Thank you Z, and setter for this proto-stinker.
12. 11:59. I seem to have been on the wavelength for this one. I had to be careful with spelling in a couple of places: TERMAGANT always looks to me like it has too many As, and without the wordplay I wouldn’t have been sure about the middle vowel in CONCUPISCENT. APOSTROPHISE was new to me.
13. 34’22 but with a hurried-in late-nt, missing litany. Good work-out generally – it has the Times salt. (An extra s in 18 answer, z.)
    1. So there is(s). Fooled by the ‘s in guy’s. no wonder I had trouble with the explication grammar. I’ll strike it through

       Edited at 2018-09-13 09:53 am (UTC)

14. A little over 40 minutes. I found this one quite difficult – my first pass only gave me a couple of answers, and things didn’t get much faster after that. I think APOSTROPHISE was my only NHO (at least with that meaning), and I only got it because I mistakenly thought the two apostrophes in the clue were some component of the answer. Very enjoyable and value-for-money puzzle!
15. My first thought (naturally enough) was C; but cooler heads–mine, for one–suggested that that was not really a sport. I suppose it is with a T.
16. Value for money in today’s offering, plenty of thought required. The long acrosses are both pretty offbeat words, though clearly clued, and accessible (or at least identifiable as actual words) for smug classicists. For me, the NW corner proved most impenetrable, until I got the J from JOINT ACCOUNT, and after that the Indian prince, and then everything else, fell into place in a neat fashion.

    Like you, Z, I despair at the inability of a single sports commentator to distinguish between a crescendo and a climax. See also: use of “to be fair” when they mean “to be honest”…(cont’d p.94)

17. Had to work hard on this one: 47 mins. I liked the more wide-ranging vocabulary used in here, though I consider it a bit dull to clue a rare and arcane word like ARECA (hands up those who knew that one!) as a hidden. I thought the definitions were very clever and well chosen — e.g. ‘works’, ‘The Stones’, ‘still’ was well disguised, ‘address’, ‘keen to have it’ — jolly good! And some great wordplay.

    A fine blog, thank you.

18. Crap shooting was part of Bolton’s problem in their relegation season….

    Edited at 2018-09-13 10:24 am (UTC)

19. Mr.Harty is fair game for compilers now.

    FOI FEDORA, following which I completed the NE corner in just over a minute. Cue false sense of security, as I then went a further five minutes before SUSPENDER opened up the SE corner.

    I biffed TERMAGANT and TRANQUIL on the basis that they couldn’t be anything else, so thanks to Z for enlightening me. The “stood = ran” explanation took me back to the classic “Running, Jumping, and Standing Still Film”.

    The last 33% of my 25:20 was spent in trying to fit anything into 17D that wasn’t “forecast”. Glad I wasn’t alone in spotting “covet” only after a struggle. Not helped by the total absence of a “nan” from my family circle.

    COD CHASTITY
    WOD CONCUPISCENT

20. Very nice puzzle, with CONCUPISCENT and APOSTROPHISE standing out for me. I agree that the definitions were probably rescanned a few times by the relevant bot to ensure wit. It worked.

    50 mins for me including flat white and two paracetamol.

21. A lovely puzzle, even if the number of clues using a word’s outside letters was a little heavy. By far my favourite of those – and my COD – was 23a, where “in case of emergency” was a new trick to me.

    Like others, TERMAGANT does not come easily to me so it was delightful to have the checking vowels. I don’t remember ever coming across MANIOC, CONCUPISCENT or APOSTROPHISE, but the years spent as a crossword-solver helped with ARECA as my FOI… never encountered outside of crossword-land.

    10m 44s in total, most enjoyable.

22. A valiant effort at 46:30, but to no avail as a dreaded pink square appeared in APOSTROPHESE. I hadn’t heard of the word and interpreted “a fellow’s” as HES instead of HIS. Rats! MOTETS FEDORA and ARECA stood as lone entrants to the grid for quite a while, until ENEMY joined them. MYRTLE DEMOTE and then SUSPENDER then opened things up a bit, but it was a struggle. My rating developed into AROSIA until wiser councils prevailed. COVENANT was my LOI when I stopped trying to shoehorn some rare relative into WO_E_ANT. I’d been trying to use “knit” as the anagrind in 13a, so had an S instead of a T in the anagrist, but a couple of checkers soon put me right. I had a good idea of what was required at 14a and the wordplay helped me dredge the word from the depths. JOINT ACCOUNT was a very helpful breakthrough for the NW as the ruler followed and opened it up. A satisfying puzzle to solve despite my error. Thanks setter and Z.
23. Tough but very fair with some excellent clues. I had to work hard at this with very few biffing opportunities identified. I nearly gave up in the NW but finally got there in just under an hour.

    COD: Tranquil. “Stood” was a very well disguised piece of wordplay that had to be lifted and separated from the definition “Still”.

24. A very liturgical puzzle and most ingenious. I got all the way to TERMAGANT before cracking a clue and then a longish pause after that so I thought Oh you’re one of those are you. But then somehow found the wavelength. 19.48
25. Eventually all in correctly, though took 2 hours to do it. Couldn’t parse APOSTROPHISE and a few others such as CONCUP… whatever took a bit of working out. Spent an unreasonable amount of time on MYRTLE, my last in, trying to think of an unusual ‘landscape’.

    I prefer Gorgonzola but any sustenance to finish this was welcome and I’ll go for ROQUEFORT as my pick of the day.

    Thanks to setter and blogger.

26. Well set. Well blogged. Not quite so well solved, but definitely well enjoyed.
27. Ditto what Paul just said, and said again. Took me a while, and threw in MOTETS, HEARTY and TRANQUIL to finish without really parsing them. Mote? Whatever, took around 40 minutes. Also got APOSTROPHISE via wordplay, not really familiar with that sense of it. Regards.
    1. King James Bible. Matthew 7 3-5. A mote means a speck, a beam is somewhat bigger.
       3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
       4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
       5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
    2. Hard to tell if it’s a slow and faulty wi-fi, a slow and faulty LiveJournal, or a slow and faulty user. But I know where I’d place my bets. But I removed the “copy” so now I’ve said it just once.
28. 40:07 I don’t remember thinking this was particularly hard when solving but it probably helped to know some of the more difficult vocab: areca, manioc, termagant, concupiscent and apostrophise. I missed the ran for office / stood for office equivalence in 9ac but time and ye olde biro were enough to get tranquil. I also completely missed the pretentious /arty bit of 2dn. An entertaining puzzle. I think my FOI was fedora (bit of a shrug at the definition) and my LOI trapshooting where I had shooting but the required synonym for mouth refused to present itself for a while. I liked the lift and separation of text and books in 26ac. Keen to have it and conversely avoiding relations were also great fun.
29. “APOSTROPHISES” in solution is 13 letters, not 12 as required!!
    1. You are quite right, and so is Joekobi above. As with my other (known) oversight at 24, I have struck through the error, rather than pretend I hadn’t made it. A crossed out capital S doesn’t look very different, so I took the liberty of taking it out of bold as well. Might not show too clearly on some platforms.
       1. Rather a fanciful attempt at a definition you gave for this one, too. I’m surprised that you haven’t corrected it.
          1. Really? Fanciful? Moi? From Chambers: “a sudden turning away from the ordinary course of a speech to address some person or object present or absent”. From me: “In an address, suddenly takes a side turning onto a different subject, digresses, like the American Bishop at the wedding of the year”. Aside from a minor difference in grammar caused by my inadvertent extra S, pretty close to spot on, I’d say.
             Some sources also allow the more prosaic “add an apostrophe to” but it’s not the classic meaning, which obviously has a longer history.
             1. Since I knew the definition (as Merriam-Webster has it), “RHETORIC | address an exclamatory passage in a speech or poem to (someone or something),” which corresponds to the clue without any further gloss, your definition seemed a bit out of left field. Not only is it not at Merriam-Webster online, but I also don’t find it at Oxford or Collins, and as for Cambridge, to which you refer, the online dictionary only keeps defaulting back to APOSTROPHE so I can’t find the definition to which you refer.

                I don’t doubt that your definition exists, since I trust you implicitly, but “address” all by itself is a sufficient and straightforward definition.

             2. There is a sense of “digressing,” as you say, in that “apostrophe” etymologically breaks down to “turn away.” I merely don’t agree that “address,” without any further qualification, is in the “‘you what?”” school of definitions.

                Edited at 2018-09-14 04:53 am (UTC)

                1. On that level, my sense of “youwhatness” is stems from this being one of those definitions that is perfectly adequate in a clue – “address” on its own can certainly mean “apostrophise” – but it’s not exactly the first synonym you’d think of. Preach, sermonise, lecture, whatever. It’s hard to get from “address” to “apostrophise”, but with the wordplay giving you the building blocks of the word, you can arrive at “apostrophise” and either know or look up that it means address, albeit in a rather specific way.
                   Oh, and it’s Chambers, not Cambridge. Back in the day (and still for the Listener) it was the only dictionary that counted.
                   1. Here’s the definition in Chambers of APOSTROPHISE: “verb | rhetoric | to address someone or something in an apostrophe2.”

                      “Address” is exactly the first synonym I would think of for APOSTROPHISE. It means to address someone besides your ostensible interlocutor, audience or readers, rhetorically turning away from them to invoke someone else—whether that is in a speech, a sermon, a poem…

                      It does not mean “an address,” but “to address [someone or something]”

                      It does not mean “to sermonize” because “sermonize” is not a transitive verb.

                      1. Ah yes, but you’re the wrong way round. I defy you (apart from within the current discussion) to go as first thought from “address” (our definition in the clue) to APOSTROPHISE. And you’ll have to concede that address could mean “sermonis/ze” even if apostrophise can’t. Oh, and in Chambers, sermonis/ze is listed as both transitive and intransitive.
                         1. You have lost me. I went from “address” immediately to APOSTROPHISE in working this puzzle. And “to sermonize someone,” which does indeed sound very awkward to me, is not the same thing as “to apostrophise someone,” which specifically means to address that particular person or thing directly—usually by name and/or with a descriptive epithet. “To address” is much more a precise definition for the word than “to sermonize,” which, actually, I would not find acceptable as a definition in a cryptic clue.

                            Some random quotes:

                            When John Keats was in Girvan during his Scottish tour in 1818 he apostrophized the rock in a fine sonnet.

                            “You poor little runt,” he apostrophized the harmless two-spot.

                            “You must be a ‘lost, strayed or stolen,’” she apostrophized in delight.

                            Obscure noblemen, forgotten builders — thus he apostrophized them with a warmth that entirely gainsaid such critics as called him cold, indifferent, slothful…

                            miserable paunch! cried the monk, striking with his two hands the part he apostrophized.

                            He apostrophized “Thy mellow Vintage, Lisbon” when he should have sung “Thy potent fermentation, Jamaica”

                            When the poet apostrophized Felitza as one “from whose pen flows bliss to all mortals,” he was obviously extolling Catherine.

                            At the very outset the poet apostrophized the cloud saying “O! cloud, the swift mover. Where, where’re you moving?

                            Edited at 2018-09-14 09:00 am (UTC)

                            1. Thanks for the examples: I found some too. I think we are at slight cross purposes. If your mental Thesaurus takes you straight from “address” to “apostrophise” then I’m impressed.
                               I only got there via the wordplay, and once I’d worked out what the entry had to be, made the association with address.
                               But in the (clever and misleading) context of the clue, address could make you think of postcode as much as (Chambers Thesaurus) speech, talk, lecture, sermon, oration, harangue, discourse, monologue, soliloquy, dissertation, diatribe, philippic, apostrophe (hooray!), allocution, disquisition. And that’s just the nouns.
30. It has been a while since I attempted the 15×15 so it is no surprise that it took me 2 hours with 2 reveals. First reveal was 14a CONCUPISCENT (DNK) and my LOI and final reveal 1d MOTETS (another DNK). I also spent a while sorting the letters for 13a TERMAGANT and biffed 5a MANIOC from the wordplay. With the 15×15 I have given up on there being a possible grid containing all words I know and rely heavily on wordplay.
    1. Today’s was a bit of a beast to start back on: a lot of the 15s are a fair bit easier, and just occasionally everyone claims to know all the words! But for me, the joy of cryptics is the playing with words that gives you a shot at the answer even if unfamiliar or half forgotten.
31. Very pleased to have finished and thankful that I wasn’t the only one to take ages with this (though I concede I generally take far longer than most on this blog). After 1 hour, I had only 11 clues solved, none of which were entered in quick succession, and it took me a further 57 minutes to complete the grid – FOI – ENEMY, LOI – IDOLATER. Have to agree that the limited number of easy starting places and plentiful long and not-oft-used words proved quite a challenge.
32. Very pleased to get this all correct without cheats, but timed with a calendar rather than a clock.

    Edited at 2018-09-13 09:08 pm (UTC)

33. A day late; sorry. About 25 mins over 2 sessions for this tough but enjoyable battle. Would ‘getting’ be better than ‘get’ in 21? Just a thought.

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