Sunday Times 4528 (10 Mar 2013) by Tim Moorey

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 CRIEd)*
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 palACE)* – I had the answer fairly early but it took me an age to work out the wordplay.
22 HANdS
23 CONSIDERED = SIDE (opinion) in CON + R + ED
25 SCARFACE = SCARF (stole) + A + Chicago policE – Al Capone’s nickname. Although the famous 1983 Al Pacino movie was not about Capone as such, it was based on the 1932 movie of the same name, which was in turn based on the 1929 novel which was about Capone.
27 bOTHERS
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 sADDER
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 EMIgRATE
12 WINDLESTRAW = (oscaR + WILDE WASN’T)* – Not a word I knew, but rather a good one that I shall have to try and remember!
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 + Invest Others – ‘See you’ is the definition – I’m not keen on ‘beginning’ being used to indicate two letters, really it ought to be beginnings.
24 IRONS – dd – Jeremy is the British actor, the clubs are of the golf variety
26 EWE – hidden
28 HASh

12 comments on “Sunday Times 4528 (10 Mar 2013) by Tim Moorey”

  1. I almost gave up and turned my face to the wall when I started this online, so unforthcoming were the answers. But I pulled up my socks, and after I have no idea how long anymore, actually finished. Even though I had no idea who Sue Barker was. 7d was lovely, but my COD goes to my LOI, FORWARDERS.
  2. I wonder if the setter planned a Nina featuring the word ARDUOUS in the second row but abandoned the idea. Shame it didn’t quite happen (for whatever reason) because it would have summed up perfectly my experience of this puzzle. I think I solved most of it within 30-40 minutes but the remaining 5 or 6 answers eluded me and eventually I resorted to aids.

    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)

    1. Bent is a type of grass, Jack, as (dried) is windlestraw.

      I would be interested to see a copy of the guidelines you mention

      1. There’s nothing set in stone but the subject has come up here before (with ref to the daily puzzle) and I forget where to look for them.
      2. Having looked into this further I don’t think I have ever seen the list but in 2010 Peter Biddlecombe mentioned in passing “the Times xwd’s short list of allowed one-letter abbreviations” and in 2009 Anax wrote “Some changes are afoot at the moment, and the list of allowable single-letter abbreviations is one area being looked at as it needs updating”.

        From memory I believe we were told that the list was quite a short one.

    2. I seem to remember some sort of guidelines–perhaps not that formal–in Tim Moorey’s how-to book, which I don’t have access to at the moment. I think it was there, for instance, that I read that e-mail abbreviations (jp for Japan, de for Germany, etc.) were not allowed.
  3. Enjoyed this immensely, though it took me 90 minutes. Last in like others was forwarders. Adder was fun and windlestraw the best of the bunch: bent as grass being vaguely familiar on the one hand and the connection of the slang term bent with Wilde’s trial of the century being very neat.
  4. Thought this was a little harder than some of Tim Moorey’s recent puzzles. Didn’t recognise WINDLESTRAW or bent, rendering that particular clue an exercise in constructing the likeliest-looking word from the anagrist.
  5. Took forever. Needed aids and still didn’t finish. I’ve never heard of the SOONER STATE. Most of the LH side went in reasonably quickly but then I came to a full stop/period.
  6. I, too, would appreciate a reference to guidelines.

    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.

  7. You could probably compile the list yourself without problems, though with a lot of work.

    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.

  8. It took me a while to get going with this one, but once I had solved my first couple of clues I was up and running, though I had to resort to aids for windlestraw, which was a word new to me, and a couple other clues.

    On the whole though, I found this to be an enjoyable puzzle from Tim Moorey.

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