Solving time: About 30 minutes offline.
Not a particularly imaginative puzzle, this one. There were three hidden words, and five single letter removals. I noticed someone on the forum querying the practice of using references to living people in the ST puzzle, but this, to the best of my knowledge, has always been the case. There were three of these this week Sue Barker, Jeremy Irons and Antony McPartlin.
4, 11 & 15 were also pretty similar in their construction, but I actually rather liked these ones. In fact, I’ll give my COD to 11a.
cd = cryptic def., dd = double def., rev = reversal, homophones are written in quotes, anagrams as (–)*, and removals like this
Across | |
---|---|
1 | THE I = THEFT with FT replaced by I – a British newspaper only launched in 2010, from the publishers of The Independent. |
4 | AD MINISTER – The minister responsible for ads |
9 | EDWARD = W in (DREAD)* – Edward Lear, the nonsense poet |
10 | METEORIC = (TOME CRIE |
11 | FORWARDERS – dd – Secondary posters of emails are people who receive them and forward them on. A cooler is a prison (makes me think of Steve McQueen in The Great Escape as Hilts, the Cooler King) so if it’s intended for prison staff it is FOR WARDERS. |
14 | ESAU – hidden |
15 | SKIN TEST = SKINTEST or most skint – I rather liked this one. |
17 | ISSUED = SUE in (SID)* – My first thought for Barker was Ronnie, which it clearly wasn’t. It took me a while to come up with Sue Barker, the former French Open tennis champion, and host of the BBC’s A Question of Sport |
18 | GAL + L + OP |
20 | AFFIANCE = A + FF (following) + (IN |
22 | HAN |
23 | CONSIDERED = SIDE (opinion) in CON + R + ED |
25 | SCARFACE = SCARF (stole) + A + C |
27 |
|
29 | EYEWITNESS = (SEES WITNEY)* |
30 | POTS = STOP rev, a period being the American term for a full-stop. |
Down | |
2 | HADDOCK = HOCK about (DAD)* |
3 | IRA – hidden |
4 |
|
5 | MUM = “MUMM” – G. H. Mumm & Cie being one of the largest Champagne producers worldwide |
6 | NOT A SNIFF = F (fine) + F (fellow) + IN (at home) + SAT ON (continued to sit) all rev |
7 | SOONER + STATE – The official nickname for the State of Oklahoma, so ‘briefly? OK’ is the definition, as OK is its standard abbreviation. |
8 | EMI |
12 | WINDLESTRAW = ( |
13 | ENTRAIN = (TRANNIE)* |
16 | EXPECTANT = C in (EX + PET + ANT) – Ant being half of Ant & Dec, the cheeky Geordie TV presenters, known for always standing in alphabetical order. |
19 | AN(ARCH)Y |
21 | CH + E’ER + I |
24 | IRONS – dd – Jeremy is the British actor, the clubs are of the golf variety |
26 | EWE – hidden |
28 | HAS |
I assume the definition at 12dn is ‘bent’, but if so, I can’t relate that to anything I have seen in any dictionary definition of ‘windlestraw’, a word I have never met before.
I think there are guidelines somewhere about the use of single letter abbreviations but in any case presumably these wouldn’t apply to the ST along with the living person rule. I’m thinking of S for sun and G for Gulf which I don’t recall meeting before.
Edited at 2013-03-17 06:42 am (UTC)
I would be interested to see a copy of the guidelines you mention
From memory I believe we were told that the list was quite a short one.
Interesting to me that often puzzles I struggle with the rest of you breeze through, and vice versa. I’m not up to your times, but found this one straightforward. Quite a lot has to do with somewhat arcane British slang or cultural references which lose me but zero you right in. Doolally. Tourist Trophy. Sue Barker. But then today I get Sooner State and Scarface.
Go to a dictoinary – online Collins would be my choice – key in a letter and note all the abbreviations.
Then the hard slog: work back through old Times’ clues to see which abbreviations have been used. If you’re confident enough you could probably do it from memory without looking at old clues – I reckon I’d get >95% correct of which abbreviations have been used(=allowable) and which haven’t in the past 6 or so years I’ve been trying the crossword.
On the whole though, I found this to be an enjoyable puzzle from Tim Moorey.