ST 4383 (Sun 30 May) – Shank’s ‘mare

Author   talbinhoPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 11 mins, one mistake (17dn)

Not my finest hour: a hasty wrong answer at 1ac cost me a lot of time, but this all felt very sluggish. I ended up stuck on 17dn and guessed incorrectly (but none of my alternative thoughts were right either), and it was a perfectly fair clue. There were a couple of oddities in this puzzle but overall it wasn’t bad at all.

* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.

Across
1 SHARPISH (2 defs) – a nice clue which I got as soon as I corrected 1dn, which was not quickly.
5 PROFIT; “PROPHET” – ‘accrue’ diverted me for far longer than it should have here.
9 MOLDAVIA; rev. of AM around OLD, + VIA (= ‘through’) – this came up in a recent Listener which exploited the marvellous fact that Transnistria is an anagram of TRAINS x 2.
10 MAR + IN + A
12 ORNATE; (I G.I.) from ORIGINATE – this took me a while to understand after solving.
13 MANDARIN (2 defs)
15 ANDANTE (cryptic definition) – rather transparent
16 F,E,T,A (initial letters) – nice clue but a well-used idea.
20 [f]EELS
21 MINIBAR; BAR (= ‘Prohibit’) next to MINI[m] – a curious use of ‘stuck on’; I was expecting the word for ‘Prohibit’ to come first.
25 SENT + IN + EL
26 TOM-TOM; rev. of 2 x MOT (= ‘word’ in Nice, i.e. in French)
28 ATTLEE; A + T.T. (= teetotal = ‘dry’) + LEE (= ‘shelter’)
29 TERIYAKI; (TIRE)* + YAK (= ‘ox’) + I
30 KENNEL; N,N (= (North) ‘poles’) in KEEL (= ‘barge’) – apparently ‘keel’ meaning a barge and ‘keel’ meaning the bottom of the ship are not cognate. The former is from Old Dutch kiel (‘ship’), the latter from Old Norse kjölr.
31 TROTTERS (cryptic definition) – I was reduced here to looking for words that fit ?R?T?E?S. Having ruled out the likes of ‘critters’, ‘fritters’ and ‘brothers’ I stumbled across the answer and after a few moments thought I remembered a piggy connection with ‘sounder’. This was correct: a sounder is a herd of pigs or a young boar. Given the question mark, I rather liked this one.

Down
1 SAMSON; S.A.M. (= surface-to-air missile) + SON (= ‘boy’) – not ‘ramrod’, which I put in thanks to ‘boy’ = ‘Rod’ and the weaponry connection, and which held me up a lot on 1ac.
2 AILING (hidden) – good clue, although ‘Hospital’ could have been dispensed with.
3 PHAETONS; (STANHOPE)* – an anagram I’ve seen before, which helped.
4 SAIL; (IS A L[iberal])* – I couldn’t remember what a ‘spanker’ was but the anagram was straightforward.
6 RWANDA; (AND WAR)* – a strange clue which I can’t really fathom. The anagram indicator can only be ‘Hot’ or ‘worn’, not both, which leaves the other word as superfluous, even if a semi-&lit is intended.
7 FRIARIES; (I + AR[abian]) in FRIES
8 TRAIN + MAN
11 WAG TAIL – should have got this instantly but didn’t.
14 CABINET (2 defs) – ‘cabinet pudding’ is something like a fruit pie, I think. I was going to say that I’ve never had it, but I probably have and called it fruit pie.
17 RED + SHANK – I couldn’t decide between ‘redstalk’, ‘redspark’ and ‘redswank’ and eventually went for the first because of the ‘leggy’/’stalks’ connection. I also wondered if the answer might be ‘redstart’ with an alternative to KENNEL at 30ac; all wrong. Should really have got this, I must have seen the answer word before and I certainly knew ‘shank’ in a sporting sense, even though I’m not a golfer.
18 PLANKTON; rev. of NOT after PLANK
19 CANOEIST; (NOTICES A)* – a ridiculous definition (‘rower’); canoeists definitely do not row, they paddle.
22 BIREME; (BEER I’M)* – two thirds of a trireme, I suppose. Good to see this clued without the words ‘soldiers’ or ‘engineers’.
23 ETHANE; (ETNA + HE)* – actually ‘He’; ‘HE’ stands for High Explosive.
24 [j]EMMIES – I missed the double meaning of ‘prize’ on first look, which is pretty poor on my behalf.
27 WEIR[d] – a bit wordy, with ‘looks’ somewhat out of place.

7 comments on “ST 4383 (Sun 30 May) – Shank’s ‘mare”

  1. 9:39 for me, with MINIBAR taking a long time to come to mind. This was a very mixed puzzle, with some amusing clues (like 31A, which I twigged reasonably quickly), but that awful howler at 19D – and I didn’t like the “of” in 13A either.

    Regarding 1A, as a former choral singer I can say from experience that the average singer tends to sing flat rather than sharp (that certainly applies to tenors anyway :-).

  2. I assumed ‘war-worn’ should have been ‘war-torn’, since Rwanda is a ‘torn republic’ as a result of war.
  3. 40 minutes. Didn’t understand 1ac (the average singer thing which Tony S has already questioned), 6dn or 31ac until I looked it up and found “sounder” is a “boar”.
  4. I assumed that ‘hot’ was in there to narrow down the range of possible republics, Rwanda being in equatorial Africa, hence, supposedly hot. Actually, I gather that it’s rather cool, e.g. Kigali being 20 degrees year-round.
  6. The European TV Awards (Monte-Carlo Television Festival) are spelled “Emmies”.

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