ST 4392 (Sun 1 Aug) – Blankety banco

Author   talbinhoPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 4:10

It’s been said that if you have nothing nice to say, you should say nothing. That, however, is not the lot of the blogger. This was dire. I dallied briefly at the end over 3dn (BANCO), 9ac (UNLINED?) and 2dn (UNLUCKILY?) before quickly deciding I wasn’t prepared to waste any more time on this puzzle than was necessary. I still don’t understand the last two of these answers and they may be wrong, so please explain if you can.

* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.

Across
1 PLUMBER; P + LUMBER – ‘Softwood’ needs splitting here, and I’m not sure why it wasn’t just given as two words. The PC ‘-person’ grates a bit, but that’s really the least of the problems with this crossword.
5 EXPLOIT; P.L.O. in EXIT
9 UNLINED – I can only think that a double definition is intended here, but whether the second definition is ‘Blank’ or ‘plain’ I’m not sure. Perhaps the idea is that an ‘unlined’ jacket (say) is plain, but that seems very tenuous.
10 CHIANTI; (CHINA)* + rev. of IT
11 JACK OF ALL TRADES (cryptic definition) – “…but master of none”, as the saying goes.
12 MAILED; M + A1 + LED – ‘the van’ meaning ‘the front’.
14 BOY SCOUT (cryptic definition) – strangely, ‘sixteen’ in this clue (which refers to JAMBOREE, the answer to 16dn) is a word, but when the same device is used at 16dn the clue number is numeric (’14’).
17 DAYBREAK; DAY + (BREAK)*
18 TSETSE; (TSE)* x 2 – not well worded, with a superfluous ‘to’.
21 MARINE BIOLOGIST (cryptic definition) – better, if totally transparent thanks to the question mark which I’m not sure was required.
24 GLAMOUR; G[entee]L + AMOUR
25 TRESTLE; T (= ‘Model’) + “WRESTLE”
26 DEHISCE; (SHIED)* + C.E. – terrible definition, with a superfluous subject (‘Seeds’). Luckily I knew this word or I doubt I’d have guessed this.
27 SEA FRET (cryptic definition) – another fairly tired maritime pun to go with 21ac, and this clue is clumsy too since what’s meant is ‘Mist which is…’.

Down
1 PLUM JAM; PLUM (= ‘Victorian variety’) + JAM – except that the Victoria (or Victoria plum, but not ‘Victorian plum’) is a variety of plum, not the other way round.
2 UNLUCKILY – pass.
3 BANCO; B[owler] + (CAN)* + O[ver] – awful wordplay. This is apparently a variant name (not in Chambers) for Bunco, which I didn’t know and I nearly put in ‘bingo’.
4 RED + RAG – a partial definition.
5 ESCALLOP; (SCALE)* + LOP
6 P + RIM + ROSE’S
7 OWNED; (NOW)* + E[uropean] D[emocrats] – ‘over’ as an anagram indicator?
8 TWINSET; (TEST WIN)*
13 ERRONEOUS; (SURE, ONE OR)* – terrible. Clues like this make me question whether the setter thinks non sequiturs like ‘other’ (the ‘anagram indicator’ here) are valid or is just too lazy to write something better.
15 OUTFITTER; OUT (= ‘not in’) + FITTER (= ‘in better health’) – ‘in’ does double duty here.
16 JAMBOREE (cryptic definition) – not great: this is essentially the same clue as 14ac.
17 DEMIGOD; (DODGE I’M)* – another anagram indicator that doesn’t work: ‘formulate’ cannot be an intransitive verb, although at least it looks like it might be. Something like ‘developing’ would have worked.
19 ENTREAT; E.N.T. + (RATE)*
20 AORTAS; (ROTA AS)*
22 REACH (2 defs) – why the exclamation mark?
23 OMEGA; O + (GAME)*

14 comments on “ST 4392 (Sun 1 Aug) – Blankety banco”

  1. 9: I think the clue is just saying that unlined/blank paper is also called “plain” – “unruled” is one def. for “plain” in Chambers. I’d call it a cryptic def rather than double def as “blank = UNLINED = plain” is only one def.

    14/16 difference in formatting of numbers: I think this confirms that the current software at the Times gets confused when a number in digits ends a clue – in 4391/1A, a final number at the end of the print version was omitted in the online version at seen by the customers. It seems to cope OK when the number in digits is in the middle of the clue.

    18: I’m not keen on “to” as a link word but I’ve seen so many setters use it (including Brian Greer I think) that I just might give up grumbling about it.

    2: I wonder whether “material” should have been “material gain” – then the clue would make reasonable sense.

    5: I can’t find dictionary justification for banco=bunco – I can find ‘banco’ as a call made in baccarat or chemin de fer by a player who wants to bet against the bank, but that’s not “game”. (And “bunco” is a swindle rather than a game, so that doesn’t really help either). So I’d agree with “dire wordplay” here.

    1. I still don’t understand 2D even with “material gain”. I wondered if LUCK could be a material (like DUCK), or, since I can find no evidence of that, whether the setter could have confused the two. (I’ve checked and the answers are given as UNLINED and UNLUCKILY rather than UNDINED and UNDUCKILY 🙂
  2. A slow 10:23 here, some of it spent trying to work out whether there were any alternatives to UNLINED and UNLUCKILY (the former seeming extremely iffy, and the latter being a total mystery).

    I thought 3D might refer to the game PUNTO BANCO, but I can’t find any reference to it as simply BANCO. I initially wanted the answer to be BINGO as well, but fortunately the wordplay eliminated it.

    I’m perhaps more tolerant of sloppy clues than most, but even I can’t stomach “in” doing double duty in 15D (assuming there’s no other explanation).

  3. The ST cryptic suffers because of its superficial resemblance to the daily cryptic: as a result, we expect standards which are seldom met. I don’t think they even have an editor, or any review of contributions..

    So far as this poor, benighted example is concerned, I can’t explain 3dn at all, it seems to be just an error or confusion on the part of the setter. I can understand 2dn and 15dn however. 2dn is perhaps a simple, ungainly def. Nothing was gained, because of ill chance.. for 15dn, “not in” = out and “better health” = fitter mean that the in does not really have to be used twice.

    Why I should be spending time defending clues in the worst crossword I complete, I don’t know!

    1. The Sunday Times does have a crossword editor – Barbara Hall, who I believe writes slightly more than half the ST puzzles. I don’t know whether she amends the contributions from the other three Sunday Times setters (Don Manley, Tim Moorey, Jeff Pearce). She’s a setter of very long experience and has a style that’s old school and non-Ximenean – maybe pre-Ximenean would be a better description.

      For me, double duty and treating “better health” as a definition of “fitter” are equally bad.

    2. Like Peter, I’m not convinced by “better health” = “fitter”, Jerry. I’d be interested to know if can you devise a sentence in which the two are interchangeable – however, I think you might find it difficult given that “fitter” (in the context of health) is a comparative adjective and “health” is a noun (qualified by a comparative adjective).
      1. Well you are right of course, and I agree with you. I think perhaps it was what the setter had in mind though..
  4. I didn’t notice any of the faults complained of above as I raced (for me) through this in 20 minutes last thing before putting the light out for the night. The only one that caused problems solving was SEAFRET which I’ve never heard of. I put queries against several I didn’t fully understand but never got round to going back to think about them later.
    1. Not in a way that convinces everyone, as the discussion above should indicate. Like Jerry, I think it’s effectively just describing not getting things by chance as “unlucky”. Why those things should be “material” isn’t terribly clear – I thought something like “material gains” would make sense of it, but the person here with most experience of this style of clue-writing (Tony) didn’t agree.
      1. In Dickens’s ‘Our Mutual Friend’, Rogue Ridherhood enviously refers to his fellow-scavenger Gaffer Hexham (they both earn a living looking for corpses floating on the Thames) as being ‘in luck’ specifically with reference to finding a body. I don’t have access to an OED or suchlike, so I don’t know if this is anything more specific than the general meaning, but it did come to me when solving this wretched puzzle.
        As to not having anything nice to say, Talbinho might like to know of Alice Longworth Roosevelt’s (I think it was her) remark: ‘If you haven’t got anything nice to say about someone, sit here next to me!’
  6. Thanks Pete. My question was actually intended for jackkt’s comment immediately previous to mine; I thought from the wording that it might indicate an explanation for “unluckily”.

Comments are closed.