Sunday Times 4662 by Dean Mayer – have done with childish Day-O

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
23:13. I found this decidedly tricky but for reasons I can’t now understand. Some of it is arguably a bit stretched or loose, which might explain it in part, but I didn’t notice most of this when solving. Generally speaking I think it’s a sign of quality when clues that were hard to solve look easy in retrospect, and I certainly enjoyed this puzzle.

Across
1 Lifetime is short and about to be over
SPARE – SPAn, RE. ‘Lifetime’ for SPAN was the first of several things in this puzzle that seem a bit loose to me, but I didn’t notice while solving. I think I just thought ‘span, lifespan, that’ll do’ and moved on.
4 Dad is gone, “being distraught” identified
DIAGNOSED – (DADISGONE)*.
9 A raised hand
STANDING OVATION – CD. I’m sure I’ve seen this idea, or something similar, before, but I can’t find it by googling. And it still took me ages to see it!
10 Band of priests, like boy band, embracing pop
MANIPLE – a MANIPLE is an ‘ornamental band formerly worn on the left arm by the celebrant at the Eucharist’, apparently. A boy band is MALE, surrounding NIP which means ‘pop’ in the sense that both are things you might do to the shops.
11 A metal coin oddly buried by Scotsman
CALCIUM – CAL(CoIn)UM.
12 Flag from castle found in ship
STREAMER – ST(R)EAMER. R is short for ‘rook’ in chess. We occasionally get complaints when a rook is defined as a ‘castle’, but in chess as in all things, a stickler’s prescription of what is ‘correct’ has limited impact on the words that people actually use.
14 Opening pieces of music occupy us near the stage
MOUNT – first letters (‘opening pieces’) of ‘Music Occupy Us Near The’
16 Start to record, playing the same piece of music
RONDO – Record, ON (playing), DO (ditto, the same).
17 Noun I’m on about — also short noun phrases
NOMINALS – reversal of N (noun), I’M, ON, then ALSo. I don’t think I knew that NOMINAL could mean ‘noun phrase’, but it makes sense.
19 I had returned fan’s present
DISPLAY – Reversal of I’D, SPLAY. I was looking for an admirer for a long time before the checkers led me to the right meaning of ‘fan’.
20 “Knock” and “knack” — brilliant
LAMBENT – LAM (knock), BENT. Again, BENT for ‘knack’ seems a bit, well, hmm.
22 He’s mad, but Winner’s put out film about racism
WHITE MAN’S BURDEN – (HE’S MAD BUT WINNER)*. A reference to the late Michael Winner, director of the terrible Death Wish films. I knew the phrase, but not that it was a 1995 film starring Harry Belafonte and John Travolta, or that it comes from a poem by Kipling.
24 Roughly marked patch about to be put in outhouse
SPLOTCHED – S(PLOT, C)HED. A bit of a loose definition, but close enough I suppose.
25 Croaking right into pig’s ear
HARSH – I got this from the wordplay, and I don’t really understand how ‘croaking’ equates to HARSH. A croaking (or croaky) voice, perhaps, but again it seems loose.

Down
1 Imagine guarding missile plant
SESAME – SEE (imagine) containing SAM (surface-to-air missile). As usual when I see the word ‘plant’ in a clue, I panicked, but it turned out to be one of the ones I know.
2 Over pit, knock back forcibly
AGAINST ONE’S WILL – AGAIN (over), STONE (pit), SWILL (knock back).
3 Find oneself often duplicating content
END UP – contained in ‘often duplicating’. I wasted time here trying to find a four-letter word meaning ‘often’ in which repeating one of the letters would give an expression meaning ‘find oneself’, until I saw the obvious.
4 Risk capital?
DANGER MONEY – CD.
5 A daughter’s love for song and dance
ADO – A (a) D (daughter), O (love).
6 Primitive old lady in news, not a complete success
NEARLY MAN – N(EARLY, MA)N.
7 Web designer keeping habit that’s uncultivated for priest?
SPIRITUAL LEADER – RITUAL (habit), LEA (uncultivated) contained in SPIDER. I didn’t know this rather obscure term for ‘fallow’, but I didn’t really need to.
8 Fantastic chap turned into unlikely deity
DYNAMITE – reversal of MAN contained in (DEITY)*.
11 Author into rice salad, nuts, cooked with sugar
CARAMELISED – (RICE SALAD)* containing ME (author).
13 Cream that is applied to bad girl in part of hospital
EMOLLIENT – MOLL (bad girl), IE contained in ENT (ear, nose & throat).
15 Those boring fights interrupted by commercial material
BRADAWLS – BR(AD)AWLS. I put this straight in. I can only know of this boring tool from past crosswords.
18 Smell of sulphur on fish
STENCH – S, TENCH.
21 Radioactive material in insect trap
MOUTH – U for uranium in MOTH.
23 It comes from volcano while hot
ASH – AS, H.

24 comments on “Sunday Times 4662 by Dean Mayer – have done with childish Day-O”

  1. Couldn’t make anything of 1ac; now I see why. I think I wasn’t the only one to fling in ‘now’ (volcaNO While) at 23d–‘while hot’=now; where it stayed until forced to go. I’d never heard of Winner, or the film, but with a couple of checkers, 22ac was easy enough. I’d thought the phrase was from Kipling’s “Recessional”, but it’s the title of a pretty wretched exhortation to the US to take over the Philippines. Almost DNK DANGER MONEY, NEARLY MAN–I think I’ve seen them once each in a cryptic, but it took some doing to pry them loose from memory. MANIPLE was a bit less recalcitrant; I’m surprised I knew the word at all, though. No problem with BENT; an artistic bent, etc.
    1. But ‘artistic knack’? I can see that they mean kind of the same thing but I don’t think they are substitutable.
      1. I had no difficulty with BENT=KNACK but didn’t really know why and I was surprised that my edition of Chambers didn’t support it. Collins, however, gives both ‘inclination, propensity’ (which is how I understand ‘artistic bent’ and probably the reason your substitution test doesn’t work) and ‘aptitude’ which is a lot closer to knack.
        1. Yes, I think ‘aptitude’ can be a reasonable substitution for both in certain circumstances (although to my mind a ‘knack’ is more something acquired), but that doesn’t mean that ‘knack’ and BENT are substitutable. This is an example of z8b8d8k’s ‘three point turn in a thesaurus’.

          Edited at 2015-10-11 08:59 am (UTC)

          1. If the only reference book connection I can find between two words is shared membership of a thesaurus list, I’m reluctant to allow them to be counted as synonyms. But if both have the same word in their definitions, like “aptitude” in this case, I’m happy unless there are qualifications or other distinctions (chihuahua and wolfhound would both have “dog” in their definitions). If you don’t think the kind of aptitude involved here is ever the same, please tell the dictionary publisher …

            Edited at 2015-10-11 10:40 am (UTC)

            1. OK then, a three point turn in a dictionary! I don’t have a problem with the publishers of Collins, but I neither do I think that the presence of ‘aptitude’ in both definitions makes them synonymous. The meaning of X can intersect with Y and Z without Y and Z intersecting with one another. In this case I think you might talk about an aptitude for opening cans or an aptitude for literature, but you wouldn’t talk about a bent for opening cans or a knack for literature. Perhaps there is an intersection in this case, but if there is it’s small, which is why I think it’s a bit loose. As I said below it didn’t bother me while solving, which is the important thing.
              1. Is “what you would talk about” the standard? If it is, bits of trickery like “wicked thing”=candle or flower=river would appear to be illegal.
                1. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here, and besides I’m not saying that BENT/knack should be illegal: I’m just saying it’s a bit loose. I can see how they sort of mean the same thing, but I have to squint a bit, and/or look quite hard for a dictionary that happens to use the same word in their definitions.
  2. I couldn’t get 1ac either. But it took me a couple of hours to get to that point. Again, looking back, I don’t really know why. I think Dean does such a good job of hiding the definition. You look at the clue, you instantly see how it works and…you are wrong.
  3. Very slow to start and very slow to finish but somewhere between the two was a period when I raced through and got most of it done. DK that LEA was specifically uncultivated and I also don’t get HARSH for “croaking”.
    1. I was a bit surprised by Keriothe’s, and now Jack’s, comment on HARSH. At the time nothing seemed amiss to me; and surely a) what usually croaks is a voice, and b) a croaking voice is harsh. I actually just now went to SOED, which gives sv ‘croak’ ‘1. of a frog or a raven: make its characteristic deep harsh sound’, and sv ‘harsh’, ‘1c. Rough to the ear; grating, jarring, discordant’.
      1. If the dictionary justifies it then fair enough. I don’t come into contact with ravens but for me the croaking of frogs is a delightful gentle and restful sound.

        Edited at 2015-10-11 06:21 am (UTC)

        1. I don’t come in contact with ravens, but I sure as hell do with crows, which is as near as damn it (Japanese cities are a paradise for crows), and they sound harsh; trust me. On the other hand, I also like the sound of frogs; but convention has it that their croak is harsh, too.
          1. I thought what birds of the crow family do is “caw” defined in SOED as: Of a rook, crow, raven, etc: make its harsh natural cry. I’ve never heard “croak” in that context and the same dictionary under “croak” only mentions frogs and ravens though it does add that it’s deep and harsh sound. So no complaints really, just a little surprise.
            1. I really am sorry to go on like this, but I knew there was something in ‘Macbeth’: Lady M, on learning that Duncan is coming to spend the night, says
              The raven himself his hoarse
              That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
              Under my battlements.
              And surely what’s sauce for the raven is sauce for the crow?
              1. Don’t be sorry: what is this forum for if not going on about the meaning of words?
                I am happy to withdraw my quibble on the basis of Lady Macbeth’s raven. Like Jack, I was thinking of frogs, or of people: a croaky voice is a rather gentle one, and I personally wouldn’t use the word ‘croak’ to describe the noise a crow makes.

                Edited at 2015-10-11 07:57 am (UTC)

              2. In Aristophanes’ ‘Frogs’, the eponymous chorus’s croaky refrain – the unforgettable Brekekekèx-koàx (well, it’ the only part of the play I can remember after nearly 40 years) – drives Dionysus nearly to distraction.
                1. In the movie they would no doubt be played by the Pacific Tree Frog, and say ‘ribbit’.
                  1. Hong Kong (like many (sub-) tropical countries, I would imagine) has some pretty impressive ‘croaky’ frog choruses of its own.

                    * An orientalist or a linguist would of course spot the deliberate mistske, it being the Japanese who have a problem with the distinction between l and r (the story going that the world’s one-time best selling car was intended to be called the Corona, before ending up as the Corolla), while the Cantonese Chinese, at any rate, tend to mix up their ls and ns, Benny Hill notwithstanding.

                    1. Indeed, but in movies the noise is often Pacific Tree Frogs. Someone recorded the frogs that happen to provide the croaking chorus around Hollywood and the sound has been used in movies set in all parts of the world.
                2. I should have remembered–although I never read the play–that among Major General Stanley’s talents is
                  I know the croaking chorus from ‘The Frogs’ of Aristophanes!
                  I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zophanies….
  4. A long time …. !

    I had to take a break from this with 2d and 10a unsolved, finishing it somewhat later. AGAINST ONE’S WILL is fiendish if you don’t see it straight off, and MANIPLE, though I’ve seen it before, never feels quite right. Something about that word bothers me in this age of the ‘mankini’ etc.!

    No issues for me. Yes, knack / bent is loose but I’ve learnt to love loose.

    Generally, the usual, never dull challenge from DM and much appreciated.

    1. I should add that knack/BENT didn’t bother me at all while solving: it was only in the process of writing up the blog that the looseness occurred to me. In fact I think the only one that bothered me significantly was ‘croaking’, which turns out to be justified by both dictionaries and (more importantly) Lady M.
  5. Bent for knack worried me at the time but a check in Collins showed aptitude for both so all good. Not much of a clue, though. STANDING OVATION took longer than I liked. NOMINALS for COD. A typical Mayer Sunday cryptic, a bit left-field and good fun.

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