ST 4382 (Sun 23 May) – Cabriole eh?

Solving time: 7 mins

A little harder to get into than many Sunday Times puzzles, partly because of the awkward grid with four corners connected only by four under-checked seven letter answers, but not too difficult overall, though I spent at least a minute on 23ac (CABRIOLE) at the end. There were some strange clues as well as some online bizarreness at 18ac.

* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.

Across
1	POSTPONE; POST (= ‘Mail’) + (OPEN)*
5	STAGED; T in rev. of DEGAS
9	ILLUSION; (SUN OIL I’L[l])* – a decent anagram but awkward indicator (‘reapply?’) and awful defintion (‘Not true!’).
10	CORNEA; “CORN EAR” – clever
12	ENABLE; rev. of (ELBA + N.E.)
13	MANDARIN; MAN + DARIN[g] (= ‘almost enough audacity’) – hmm.
15	ASSASSIN BUGS; ASS,ASS + (BIG ‘UNS)* – ‘latching on to’ is part of the ‘hanging’ definition (these insects attack and such the blood from other insects).
18	NEURASTHENIA; (EURASIAN THEN)* – weirdly, ‘down’ was abbreviated to ‘dn’ in the online version of this clue.
23	CABRIOLE (2 defs) – I wasn’t totally convinced this was a word and had no idea what it meant, but it was all I could see and fortunately it was correct. The clue is a bit odd and I thought at first that ‘dancers’ needed an apostrophe, but I suppose you could read it as saying that a CABRIOLE is [something that] ‘dancers leap’.
24	IS + ABEL
26	ODETTE; T[he] + TA after ODE
27	BADGERED; BAD (= ‘ruinous’) + (GREED)*
28	ENSU(R)E
29	CONTENTS (2 defs)

Down
1	P + RIVET
2	SOLWAY; SOL[e] + WAY
3	PESTLES (cryptic defintion) – a pun on the verb ‘pound’.
4	NEON; N[orth]E[ast] + ON
6	TRODDEN; (RED DON’T)*
7	GENEROUS; (RUSE GONE)*
8	DIAGNOSE; (SAD EGO IN)*
11	PAR(S)LEY
14	P(ANT)ILE – another word I only vaguely knew.
16	ANECDOTE; (ONE ACTED)* – why ‘now’?
17	TUMBLERS (2 defs)
19	A + VIA + TOR
20	INSIGHT; “IN SITE”
21	OBERON; O.B. + E.R. + ON
22	ELUDES (2 defs) – not sure about this. It makes sense if ‘duck’ is read in the sense of ‘avoid’, but that’s exactly the same meaning as the other definition, ‘Gets away from’, so if this is correct it’s a poor clue.
15	TAR + O – ‘salt’ as in ‘sailor’, hence [jack] TAR.

5 comments on “ST 4382 (Sun 23 May) – Cabriole eh?”

5:49 for me – so for once a little faster than you (though it would have been nearer 4 minutes in my heyday as I had several minor senior moments).

I’m generally not too bad with clues to do with dance, so CABRIOLE presented no problem (apart from rashly bunging in CAPRIOLE, but I corrected it almost immediately). I suspect the omission of the apostrophe is just sloppy clueing for the sake of the surface reading.

I think you’re right about 22D, and that it’s simply a poor clue.

35 minutes. As I never blog them I don’t worry too much about working out all the wordplay in ST puzzles. It makes life much easier.

I suppose it’s merely a coincidence that we have the same answer at 13ac on two consecutive Sundays. Or poor editing.

I wasted time over this one, precisely because I felt it couldn’t be just what it seemed to be. There had to be a catch, I thought, but catch there was none. Same sort of thing happened last week (ST? I forget), where the clue was not in the least bit cryptic and could have been lifted straight from a standard crossword (eagled, if I recall, was the solution)

The explanation “[The] TA + after ODE ” leads to what I wrote (weeks later here in Toronto, Canada) — “Odetta:.
Where did I go wrong?

Also weeks later in Toronto…………….

There is a mistake here, the note is TE, not TA.

Re: 23 CABRIOLE.

According to OED, it’s a “springing dance step in which one leg is extended and the other is brought up to it”.

Wonder if leg in the clue was intentional. It would have worked as well without it, cabriole is a type of furniture as well as being a type of furniture leg.

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