Saturday Times 24568 (June 19th)

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
Solving time 13:27. Not a great deal to say about this one. A few very good clues, a couple of minor niggles, pretty standard fare really.

Across
1 HELL FOR LEATHER – HE’LL + (father role)*
9 LITTERBUG – cryptic definition.
10 EATER – (rep)EATER
11 OOMPH – O(ld) MP inside OH (Ohio=state). Definition is “It”, i.e. that old crossword chestnut SA or sex appeal. The surface reads like an &lit, which threw me for a while.
12 SHORTSTOP – POT reversed after SHORTS. Approximate baseball equivalent of mid-wicket.
13 EARL GREY – EARLY around G(a)R(d)E(n). Liked the definition, “Drunk leaves”.
15 BOLERO – BO(w)LER + O
17 HOODOO – HOOD + (g)OO(d).
19 JEWELLER – WELL inside JEER. A different type of setter to the usual. My crossword brain instantly flags up “dog”, “me” or “I”.
22 REDINGOTE – (ignored)* + TE (note). “Tailor” is the very apt anagram indicator.
23 CHAMP – double definition.
24 EDITH – hidden in “dressed it, h</font>aving”. Edith Cavell was a nurse in WWI executed by the Germans for helping Allied soldiers to escape.
25 ILL-OMENED – (old lie)* around MEN.
26 FLIGHT RECORDER – F(ine) + LIGHT + RECORDER.

Down
1 HOLD ONE’S HORSES – double definition.
2 LATIMER – LATER around 1M. The ill-fated Bishop Latimer, who was burnt at the stake in 1555.
3 FRESH – FLESH with the L changed to R.
4 ROBUSTER – O.R. (soldiers) reversed + BUSTER. Is this a real word?
5 EGG-NOG – E.G. + GONG reversed.
6 TWENTY-ONE – ONE (somebody) following TWENTY. Another name for the card game pontoon, or blackjack, or vingt-et-un…
7 ENTITLE – double definition
8 TRAPDOOR SPIDER – (predator + 1’s prod)*, &lit.
14 GROUNDHOG – HOG (corner, as a verb) underneath GROUND.
16 PETERLEE – PETER (safe) + LEE. A new town in County Durham founded in 1948.
18 OLD GIRL – OLD GI + R(espectfu)L.
20 LEARNED – EARNED (made) underneath L(abour).
21 SOVIET – VIE inside SOT. Not sure what the word “awful” is doing in there. It would only be necessary if SOT was anagrammed.
23 COMBO – COMB + O

15 comments on “Saturday Times 24568 (June 19th)”

  1. Needed to check REGINGOTE, as thought it might be redingore, as I’d never heard of the word. Last in the deceptive JEWELLER.

    Re SOT, imagined the ‘awful’ had to do with the subject being stupefied with booze. As for ROBUSTER, two-syllable adjectives with the stress on the second syllable typically take ‘more’, but there are exceptions – or at least words which felicitously take either construction – such as ‘profound’. A bit of a stretch, mind.

  3. 12:44 for me.

    There are three citations for “robuster” in the (online) OED, the most recent being from P. G. Wodehouse’s Bill the Conqueror (1924): “A gentle breeze … brought pleasant Spring scents from the park across the road to blend with the robuster aroma of coffee and fried bacon”.

    On the other hand, I didn’t like FLESH = “skin” in 3D, since surely in conventional usage flesh and skin are considered quite distinct. Or am I missing something?

    2. COED has “the surface of the human body with respect to its appearance or sensory properties”. Best example I can think of is as in “flesh-coloured”, which means pink your skin, rather than red like your, er, flesh.
      1. The (online) OED goes into a little more detail, defining “flesh-colour” as

        The colour of the flesh (of a ‘white’ human being) as seen through the skin; usually employed to denote a tint composed of ‘a light pink with a little yellow’ (O’Neill Dyeing 1862).

        I note that the first definition in the Sykes edition of the COD is “Soft substance between skin and bones …”.

    3. One has to wonder if there is any influence from the Robusta coffee bean here – subconscious, or conscious (Wodehouse having fun). Euphony and rhythm also come into play when the comparative adjective precedes the noun: ‘roBUSTer aROma’ fair lilting off the tongue.
  4. As you say, linxit, pretty standard stuff. For some reason, I found SOVIET quite difficult, even with all the checkers but I don’t think that “awful” was why.

    Thought JEWELLER was clever and definitely the best clue. COW

  5. 1 down threw me for a while as I thought the expression was “hold YOUR horses”. Still, I got there in the end.
    1. The Concise Oxford has “hold one’s horses” and “hold one’s tongue”. “One’s” and “your” are interchangeable in most expressions like this, so the crossword setters tend to choose “ones” as the resulting checking letters are easier for them. There are some expressions like “Keep your hair on!” where COED has “your”, and I don’t think we’ve ever had “Keep one’s hair on” as an answer.

      The practical result is that it’s best to check what fits the two intersecting clues before writing ONES or YOUR in the grid.

  6. Agreed, very standard fare. Why are we getting very high quality puzzles Monday to Friday that working people are finding difficult because of time constraints and middle of the road average ones on Saturdays when folk have more time to devote to solving?
    1. You only have to go back three Saturdays for a puzzle that was hard enough to keep you happy. You get a variety of difficulties on Saturday because Saturday puzzles are supposed to be good puzzles rather than difficult puzzles. The appropriate level of difficulty for Saturday is debatable – people have more time, but that means some people who don’t do the puzzle in the week do it on Saturday.
  7. Before I throw this one away: 10:23, with no evidence of any particular problem. ‘ONES’ is written next to each grid square for the middle word of 1D, so I played it safe. More applause for the meaning of “setter” at 19. And for a good set of surface meanings which I suspect is the reason for this puzzle showing up on a Saturday.
  8. It took me as long to get my last answer – Peterlee (16) -as to do the rest of the puzzle. I suspected the answer was the name of a newly-created town in Britain, like our Levittown here in the States, but I had never heard of Peterlee. While it was not difficult to surmise that the last part of the answer was “lee” (sheltered area), the first part of the answer was problematic. “_e_e_” for “safe” leaves a huge number of letter combinations that could possibly fill the three blanks, and it only occurred to me after quite a while that I had seen “safe” used as a clue for “peter” in these puzzles in the past. When I checked on Google, there indeed was Peterlee.

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