ST 4358 (Sun 6 Dec) – Fossil fool

Author   talbinhoPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: Turned to a dictionary after 20 mins for 11ac and 8dn.

Harder than usual this week with several obscurities. I didn’t know the flower PENSTEMON, the fossil (and old tribesman) AMMONITE, the EROSE variant of ‘eroded’, either of the long phrases used in 7dn or the exact meaning of DUENNA, and GEEGAW is hard too. The clues are variable with 15dn (PORRIDGE) perhaps the best.

Edit: As vinyl1 points out below, this week’s error is that the definition of OMAHA as a state at 2dn is incorrect.

* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.

Across
1 COLD STORAGE; (ACTOR’S LODGE)*
10 A + WAR + E (= middle letter of SWEET, i.e. ‘sweetheart’)
11 PENSTEMON; PEN (= ‘swan’) + ON (= ‘ahead’) around STEM (= ‘stalk’) – I wasted a lot of time on this and did in fact come up with the right answer but it looked so unlikely that I didn’t write it in (plus it didn’t fit with my best guess for 8dn). One red herring was thinking that ‘stalk of this’ might indicate the first letter of ‘this’ (not really justifiable, but no worse than usual for this crossword). The actual parsing is not much better, with ‘of this’ being superfluous. A penstemon is one of these.
12 PLAINSONG; PLAIN’S + ON + G
13 E + ROSE – I was very doubtful about this, but apparently it can mean the same as ‘eroded’.
14 OP + POSE – better clue, with ‘Bar work’ needing to be ‘lifted and separated’.
16 ADENOIDS; (A NOSE DID)* – good anagram but an awkward partial definition (‘Perhaps caused breathing difficulty?’). I remember a particularly graphic passage in Boy where Roald Dahl describes having his adenoids out without an anaesthetic.
18 LARKSPUR; LARKS “PURR” – I didn’t help myself here by reading ‘reportedly’ as ‘repeatedly’.
20 CINEMA; (A MINCE)* – ‘pie’ in the sense of ‘confused printing’.
23 WHIST (2 defs)
24 GREENLAND; GREEN (= ‘gullible’) + LAND (= ‘set down’)
26 REGARDING; (DAGGER + R + IN)*
27 BAIRN; (BRAIN)*
28 YELLOW FEVER; (FEEL VERY LOW)* – not sure this is worded quite correctly, but the anagram is brilliant.

Down
2 OMAHA; A HAM (= ‘a radio buff’) + O (= ‘ring’), all reversed – ‘is to’ is superfluous padding here. Edit: Worse, OMAHA is a city and not a state, as defined.
3 DUENNAS (cryptic definition) – nice clue. A duenna is a Spanish governess, so might be considered an unwelcome presence (i.e. a gooseberry) by her charges.
4 TIP + TIP TOP – struggled here until I remembered ‘wrinkle’ = ‘tip’ (in the sense of ‘hint’).
5 RENEGADE; (AGREE NED)*
6 GITTERN; rev. of TIG, + TERN – initially I wrote in ‘gattern’ here with ‘tag’ instead of ‘tig’, but I knew it wasn’t quite write and luckily the rest of the puzzle took me long enough that I remembered to check it!
7 CAM(P) FOLLOWERS – I knew neither the phrase camp follower nor ‘cam follower’ (a roller in contact with a cam) so this took me a while and was a nervous guess. It’s a clever wordplay but I’m not sure I like ‘money’ for P (as in ‘pence’).
8 AMMONITE (2 defs) – a fossil (named after the Egyptian ram-headed god Amun) and a member of the Ammon tribe. My best guess here was ‘Jacobite’ which led me astray on 11ac. Once I’d checked that answer with a dictionary I quickly guessed the right answer here, but didn’t know either meaning.
9 UNDERSTANDING; UNDER (= ‘inferior’) + STANDING (= ‘status’)
15 PORRIDGE; (ORDER PIG)* – this is a very good clue, with the anagram indicator (‘swill’) read intransitively. Unfortunately, this being the Sunday Times, you feel (especially when compared with other clues in this particular puzzle) as though this one is good almost by accident.
17 DUNGHILL; DILL (= ‘herb’) around (HUNG)*
19 SET FREE; SET (= ‘agreed’) + FEE (= ‘charge’) around R[ight]
21 IGNOBLE; (GOBLIN)* + [rifl]E
22 GEEGAW; ref. of WAGE + E.G. – a word I’ve seen a few times in crosswords recently, sometimes as ‘gewgaw’.
25 ABIDE (2 defs) – not the best double-definition clue, since the two meanings are virtually the same.

8 comments on “ST 4358 (Sun 6 Dec) – Fossil fool”

  1. I thought this was an improvement on recent weeks. I did not notice the glaring error pointed out by Vinyl, probably because I make the same mistake myself. Penstemon obviously went in easily since I had only learned to spell it the previous day.

    I thought Gittern and Erose would be more appropriately placed in the adjacent Mephisto. My working theory was that the word was a French past participle erosé.

    I had never heard of a cam follower or the wrinkle meaning of tip but they did not cause much trouble. There was a bit of confusing and unnecessary padding in a couple of the clues “on icy mountain” in 24 and “have the gang” in 19.

  2. 4:29 for me. I did this puzzle late on Tuesday evening when I was feeling tired and a bit down after making a miserable attempt at the day’s Race The Clock. I felt I was dropping a couple of seconds on every clue in a succession of minor senior moments, and since it seemed such a simple puzzle I assumed you were going to massacre me with a time of around 3 minutes!

    Looking at it again, it is simple, but only if you know all the words – which is perhaps where my 55-60 years of doing cryptic crosswords helps, though I think I’m familiar with the ones you had difficulty with from other, non-crossword contexts – apart from “cam follower”, which was new to me, and EROSE (familiar mainly, if not entirely, from crosswords).

    I didn’t notice that 2D defined OMAHA as a state, but that could be because the clue had been corrected by Tuesday evening (it has by now). I particularly liked 28A, where I don’t remember coming across the anagram before (and have no objection to the wording).

  3. Excuse the late comment, but the syndicated puzzle is published here in Canada six weeks following its appearance in the UK.

    There seems to be a bit of a glitch in the solution shown for 4d which, I believe, should be TIPTOP

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