Sunday Times 4629 by Dean Mayer

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
16:39. Relatively straightforward for a Dean Mayer puzzle but very enjoyable as always. There are a few definitions in here that strike me as odd and/or loose: I’ll be interested to hear what others think. I can see what Dean’s driving at in each case, which is the important thing. There are also some really first rate clues: 3dn and 12dn are my favourites.

Across
1 Film about team’s departure
EXIT – E(XI)T.
4 Softest of shots, nothing to catch
SQUASHIEST – SQUA(SHIES)T. I considered SQUISHIEST here, and SQUIT could perhaps be taken to mean ‘nothing’ in a rather loose way, but SQUAT is clearly closer.
9 Curse stories associated with The Graduate
ANATHEMA – ANA is a word meaning ‘anecdotes or literary gossip about a person’ found exclusively in crosswords. Here it is followed by THE MA (graduate). I didn’t know this meaning of ANATHEMA, but according to Wikipedia, ‘in the New Testament, the word is used with the meanings of a curse and forced expulsion of someone from the Christian community.’
10 One might support keeping it civil
POLITE – POL(IT)E.
11 “Skid” marks
INVERTED COMMAS – the marks used in “skid”. Also seen on roads and underpants.
13 Egyptian god embraced by smart priest
CURATE – CUTE surrounds the sun-god RA. CUTE in the sense ‘clever or cunning, especially in a self-seeking or superficial way.’
15 Friend, welcome! Starts to exchange hostile correspondence
HATE MAIL – ‘starts to exchange’ tells you to swap the first letters of MATE, HAIL! Cute clue.
17 Still in position
STANDING – DD.
19 Perfect angle in parts
FINISH – this was my last in, and even once I’d figured out what the answer must be I hesitated, because I couldn’t see how it worked. Eventually I realised it’s IN contained in (parting) FISH.
20 Some Christians prefer it over sin?
REVISED VERSION – one of those clues where you have to derive a cryptic indication from the answer, rather than the other way round: ‘over sin’ is an anagram of VERSION.
23 No more opera — I hate it
ENOUGH – English National Opera: ugh! I wouldn’t know: I’ve never been. The idea of being able to understand what they’re saying in opera doesn’t appeal to me.
25 The heartless boss wants huge shelters
TESTUDOS – ThE, STUD, OS. The Roman ‘tortoise’, a shelter sometimes made by joining shields together, rarely effective as a defense in any confrontation with Gauls.
26 Above the tent, bar has come loose
BETTER THAN – (THETENTBAR)*.
27 Win each service
EARN – EA (each), RN (Royal Navy).

Down
2 Nobody cross? Turn up the gas
XENON – reversal (‘turn up’, because this is a down clue) of NONE, X.
3 Cloth’s cut in this outbuilding
TITHE BARN – a TITHE was originally a tenth of a crop taken as a tax by the church. It was therefore the cloth’s cut. Brilliant!
4 Midget couple described by agents as darlings
SWEETIE PIES – S(WEE, TIE)PIES.
5 Person won’t start, having got to reflect, to do so?
UM AND AH – hUMAN, then a reversal of HAD. A semi-&Lit where the wordplay is also part of the definition but not all of it.
6 One stupid assistant’s run over
SAP – PA’S reversed.
7 Religion is mostly unconvincing
ISLAM – IS LAMe.
8 Meets when its safe is blown
SATISFIES – (ITSSAFEIS)*.
12 Second pair of grouse shot — not so safe, then!
OUT OF SEASON – OU (the second pair of letters in ‘grouse’), then an anagram of NOT SO SAFE. Another semi-&Lit referring to the fact that OUT OF SEASON (any time other than 12 August – 10 December in this case) a pair of grouse might expect to feel safe, since it’s illegal to shoot them! Another brilliant clue.
14 Word perfect? Great to include noun
UTTERANCE – UTTER (as in ‘perfect nonsense’), A(N)CE. ‘Word’ is a slightly odd definition.
16 Fine – wrong clue
MINUSCULE – Another slightly odd definition, unless I’m missing something, but it’s close enough. The wordplay is ‘-‘ for MINUS, then an anagram of CLUE.
18 Force wife to share cost
GO DUTCH – ‘force’ for GO seems like yet another odd definition. Is it just me? It’s followed by DUTCH, which is not Cockney rhyming slang for ‘wife’.
21 Trumpet relative with higher volume
VAUNT – AUNT with V (volume) above it (‘higher’).
22 Our skirts certainly smell
ODOUR – O(DO)UR, where DO means ‘certainly’. Yet another odd definition, but I assume it’s in the sense ‘please do’ in response to the question ‘may I?’ Edit: I assume wrongly. See Dean’s comment below
24 In the Midlands she drove most of the way
HER – HERd. I will take it on trust that people in the Midlands say HER when others might say ‘she’. Edit: here I assume correctly! Again, see Dean’s comment below.

27 comments on “Sunday Times 4629 by Dean Mayer”

  1. Hugely enjoyable with plenty of crackerjack clues – 12d was outstanding, and 5d, 23a, 20a and 15a also top notch I thought.

    Re. GO / FORCE in 18d, I took the GO to mean vim kind of force (if that makes sense!)

    Great blog – thanks for explaining the ones I couldn’t parse properly (4a, 3d, 16d). Still don’t really get the HER Midlands reference…

      1. Is ‘her indoors’ a Midlands expression? And besides isn’t ‘her indoors’ just a specific formation that doesn’t change when object (‘I’ll ask her indoors’) changes to subject (‘her indoors told me’)? Similar to ‘she who must be obeyed’, but the other way around.

        Edited at 2015-02-22 10:20 am (UTC)

    2. Yes, I thought it must be something along those lines. So I can sort of see what Dean’s getting at, but it still seems a little odd to me.
  2. I went for SQUASHIEST, after some internal debate, and after looking at the Club forum I decided that that must have been my one error. Didn’t even notice that I’d misspelled MINUSCULE, even though I’d never parsed it (wouldn’t have been able to anyway, I’m sure; so thanks, keriothe). There’s a splendid–and, I believe, authentic–ANATHEMA in “Tristram Shandy”, book 3, ch. 11.
  3. There’s a strong argument for “squit”. (a) “squat” means “anything — “he didn’t know squat” is correct; “he knew squat” isn’t. (b) ODO has “squit” as “a nobody”, i.e., a nothing.
    1. I don’t actually use the term, but I don’t see a problem with “He knew squat”. Probably helps to have a complement: “He stuck his oar in even though he knew squat about the subject.” If I recall, Anax in the Club forum said that he’d have used ‘nobody’ if he had intended ‘squit’ (not, of course, that that’s a compelling argument for ‘squat’).
      1. Just working from ODO. I quote:

        SQUAT
        N. Amer. informal: short for “diddly-squat”. I didn’t know squat about writing plays.

        SQUIT
        Brit. informal: a small or insignificant person. a little squit like Thorpe.

        That’s enough for me … whatever Dean may say. In fact, I had SQUASHIEST.

        The thing he missed out on is at 11ac. In the old radio show “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue”, the clue (minus quotation marks?) was given as the definition for the word “undeterred”. Now that’s very Anax? Still, to him if he’s on: this was a great puzzle.

        1. ODO (and Collins has the same thing) doesn’t reflect my experience of actual usage. I hear and use it reasonably frequently – both with and without ‘diddly’ – and it definitely means ‘nothing’. I suspect the confusion arises from the fact that ‘I don’t know squat’ is the same formation as ‘I don’t know nothing’.
        2. Here is the entry from the Oxford Dictionary of Modern English Slang:

          Diddly-Squat noun US A trivial amount or number; nothing. 1963-. Also diddly-shit 1964-, diddly 1964-. NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE This ball player would be shown fumbling on the guitar, prompting the veteran rock musician to say ‘Bo, you don’t know diddly’ (1990) SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE When it was all over, I got a huge free bag of ginseng. Lucy got diddly-squat. ‘You see?’ I told her smugly, as we walked back out on the street, ‘sometimes it pays to be a crybaby’ (1997). [Alteration of Doodly-squat noun]

          Can you imagine the rock musician in the first example saying ‘Bo, you don’t know something’?

          Edited at 2015-02-22 09:30 am (UTC)

          1. … No. But, as per the ODO example, I can imagine him/her saying “You don’t know anything”. So again, “squat” means “anything”.
            1. Ah yes, fair point. Still, we’ll have to agree to disagree over whether the better equivalent of this phrase is ‘you don’t know anything’ or ‘you don’t know nothing’. The second example is unambiguous, anyway. And in all the experience I have of actually using them, and hearing them used, ‘diddly squat’ and ‘squat’ mean ‘nothing’.
              See also here, here, here and here.

              Edited at 2015-02-23 07:49 am (UTC)

  4. can’t pinpoint it but i was tripped up by having one too many Is some moons ago and somehow remembered. yes the definition is tricky but works. didn’t parse right away because i failed to spot the minus sign until post-submit but it was a perfectly fair clue.

    squashiest/squishiest. must admit that as a US solver the A seemed obvious although there were some who got very exercised on the club forum. it may have helped that we’d just had ‘squit’=’nobody’ on feb 11th – 26019 as follows: nobody welcomes new peer. squint.

    yes ‘tithe barn’ was a beauty. 27.46

  5. I’m afraid I was another SQUISHIEST, but no complaints. I just didn’t think of the alternative, which does seem rather more accurate. I also managed a double typo in FINISH, but that’s testament to the effect of a DM puzzle on my brain cells. Not much left for checking by the time I’m done.

    TITHE BARN very memorable.

    Slightly unclear about the “Skid” marks clue. Is ‘skid’ just an arbitrary choice of word here for the surface? Would it have worked just the same with, say, “Tide” marks? or am I missing something?

  6. Superb crossword, this one, enjoyed it immensely.
    I see I wrote squishiest and squashiest side by side before deciding on the latter. I thought it a bit of a toss-up.
  7. Many thanks for the blog, Keriothe. Just to clear up that last pair:
    22 – ‘do’ is an intensifier as in ‘They do tend to behave that way’.
    24 – in the Black Country especially, ‘her’ often replaces ‘she’ altogether, so you frequently hear people saying something like “Her’s just gone out and bought a new dress” (more likely “Her’s just bought a new frock, ay it?”).
  8. Well, I now know where I went wrong: FINISH. Even with keriothe’s explanation I don’t think I would have got it. I thought that I must have had SQUASHIEST or MINUSCULE wrong, judging by the comments in The Times but, no. As others have said, “cloth’s cut” in 3d is brilliant. The – in 16d is really good, too.
  9. My version of the crossword says it was by Tim Moorey but this was classic Dean. Really glad for the blog this week, even knowing the answer didnt always help! Thank you.
  10. I think there’s a genuine case for alternative answers to this one.

    Collins has “nothing” defined as “a person or thing of no importance” and “squit” as “an insignificant person” so what’s to argue about? I never gave it a second thought when solving as “squit” with this meaning had turned up only a couple of days previously (#26019) so it was fresh in my mind.

    Edited at 2015-02-22 08:18 pm (UTC)

    1. I agree. ‘Squit’ is a bit looser than ‘squat’, but no looser than some of the other definitions in this puzzle (which, to reiterate, and for the avoidance of doubt, is not a complaint). As you suggest, when we’ve found a valid answer I don’t think we should always be expected to check that there isn’t a better one. So if it were up to me I would allow both. I wonder what the editor thinks.
      1. OK – will tell the competitions team that for prize-winning purposes, SQUISHIEST is correct.
  12. Well, I had SQUIDGIEST (old Daily Mail headlines die hard), which in my world wins on points as squat and squit maul each other to death.
  13. When I saw I had an error, I assumed that going for ‘squat’ had been the wrong choice, but another look at my solution revealed an overlooked typo (O for C). Grrr.

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