Sunday Times 4907, by Dean Mayer — Going Up ’T Country

Author   Guy du SablePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
Take a deep breath… it’s really a BREEZE! For some reason, this puzzle seemed a lot harder at first (I didn’t even see the hidden word—what else could it have been?!) than it turned out to be after I picked it up again the next morning.

But later, having started the blog, I realized that my parsing of one clue was insufficient. With regard to one letter, I had vaguely guessed what might be up but let it slide, and now no dictionary was substantiating that very dim glimmer. There was only one thing to do, and that was to call Keriothe to come to my rescue. James informed me, which I did not even suspect, that the usage in question was not uncommon in Northern England, and could be heard in at least one Monty Python sketch. This is so well-known over there, he expressed surprise to be at somewhat of a loss to find ample dictionary support, though he was able to send a screenshot of a Chambers definition; when I Googled the exact same words, the three results were all pages about crosswords.

I fully expect y’all to tell me that the T in CROATIA gave you no pause at all.

I indicate (asmanarg)* like this, and italicize anagrinds in the clues.

ACROSS
 1 Name of specific item (4)
CITE — Hidden
 3 About to explode after removal of pin? (7,3)
HOPPING MAD — CD HOPPING because you’ve lost a leg (“pin”), ouch. The evocation of a grenade can only recall the flash-bangs thrown at too many protesters worldwide.
10 Old mariner making a delivery (7)
ORATING — O(ld) + RATING, “mariner”… a non-com in the British navy, to be precise
11 Source of fruit or veg (7)
ORCHARD — OR, “or”(!) + CHARD, “veg”
12 Take charge on extremely simple mission (11)
SEQUESTRATE — S[-impl]E + QUEST, “mission” + RATE, “charge”
15 Sort of early religious sect (5)
AMISH — AM- ish, ante meridiem, kinda
16 A deep breath? (3,6)
SEA BREEZE — CD
17 Columns needing punctuation and edited English (9)
COLONNADE — COLON, “punctuation” + (and)* + E(nglish)
18 Muse over container’s weight on return journey (5)
ERATO — O(ver) + TARE <=“on return journey” I wonder if the other muses are jealous over this one’s overwhelming popularity in crosswordland. For his (fantastic) new album, released on Juneteenth, Bob Dylan was inspired to write “Mother of Muses.”
19 It can secure cables and it’s flexible (7,4)
ELASTIC BAND — (cables and it)*
23 Pirate in Merseyside port heading for Glasgow (7)
BOOTLEG — BOOTLE, “Merseyside port” +G[-lasgow]
24 Spies crossing road, not quite the country (7)
CROATIA — C(ROA[-d])(T)IA The CIA is, alas, omnipresent… ’T (with the apostrophe) is (to quote the screenshot) “N Eng dialect for the.” (Live and learn. I was thinking, well, it means “the” in WTF…)
25 To show initiative, draw on log (10)
ENTERPRISE — ENTER, “log” + PRISE, “draw,” in the sense of “pull” I underlined “To show” as well, which means ENTERPRISE can be a verb. I like that better than thinking that those words are just tagged on as instructions, neither wordplay nor definition. That might have been the intent; I certainly had a hard time finding the word as a verb in an online dictionary. But having just returned from CROATIA, I was somewhat convinced by the Wiktionnary entry, which concludes by citing a 1913 Webster’s Dictionary: “enterprise (third-person singular simple present enterprises, present participle enterprising, simple past and past participle enterprised) | (intransitive) To undertake an enterprise, or something hazardous or difficult. | (Can we find and add a quotation of Alexander Pope to this entry?) | (transitive) To undertake; to begin and attempt to perform; to venture upon.”
26 Son given child support for moving things (4)
SKID — S + KID

DOWN
 1 Ford repair makes one bad-tempered (10)
CROSSPATCH — CROSS, “Ford” + PATCH, “repair”
 2 Without drama, essay will restrict a new writer (10)
TRANQUILLY — TR(A)(N)(QUILL)Y
 4 Have zip that won’t open (5)
OUGHT — [-n]OUGHT ”Have to” and “ought to” aren’t always the same thing… unless free will is an illusion.
 5 Reproduce, for piano, a passage (9)
PROPAGATE — PRO, “for” + P, “piano” + A + GATE, “passage”
 6 Modified coal a recurrent source of power (7,7)
NUCLEAR REACTOR — “Clean” coal? Don’t make me laugh… (coal a recurrent)*
 7 Ape downs energy drink (4)
MEAD — M(E)AD, “Ape” as in “going ape,” “going MAD”
 8 Man presumably coming to collect daughter (4)
DUDE — DU(D)E
 9 Bad luck to wind up senior academic (4,10)
VICE CHANCELLOR — VICE, “Bad” + CHANCE, “luck” + ROLL<=“up”
13 Composer able to play with another? Fine (4,6)
BELA BARTOK — (able)* + BART (“another [composer]”) + OK, “FIne”… I had never heard of Lionel Bart, though I’d certainly heard of Oliver!
14 Indirectly, it keeps the clock ticking (6-4)
SECOND-HAND — DD
16 Port containers sent north with incense (9)
STAVANGER — VATS<=“sent north” + ANGER, “incense”
20 They can secure money for the government, it’s said (5)
TACKS — ”tax”
21 Musical instrument, gong, keeping its shape (4)
OBOE — OB(O)E, the gong being the medal of the Order of the British Empire, O the gong shape
22 Defeat right away (4)
ROUT — R(ight) + OUT, “away”

34 comments on “Sunday Times 4907, by Dean Mayer — Going Up ’T Country”

  1. ….before I got started, not helped by my newsagent sending a Sunday Telegraph so that I couldn’t solve on paper as is my wont. Once I got going, it all fell into place surprisingly quickly.

    FOI SEA BREEZE
    LOI ORATING
    COD HOPPING MAD (AMISH ran it close)
    TIME 10:57

  2. 16′ to get all but the last 4, HOPPING MAD, OUGHT, MEAD, DUDE. MEAD probably my LOI, as I never did parse it. BART rang the tiniest of bells, not that it mattered. COD to HOPPING MAD.
  3. I eventually found this in Chambers:

    t- or t’ an obsolete shortened form of to before a vowel, as in tadvance (Spenser); N Eng dialect form of the

      1. as in ‘trouble at t’mill’, which is almost a cliché. ON EDIT: and indeed, if you Google ‘trouble at t’ mill’, you will find more hits than you probably want. I imagine Keriothe was thinking of–may have mentioned–the Spanish Inquisition sketch.

        Edited at 2020-06-21 02:45 am (UTC)

        1. James wrote that he “checked the Monty Python sketch and actually according to the script it’s just ‘trouble at mill’. But then Chapman does use ‘t’ in this sense in his very next line.”
          To wit: “One on’t cross beams gone owt askew on treddle.”
  4. T’ = the is common Yorkshire usage, as for example in the song “On Ilkley Moor bah t’hat:” “Then t’worms ‘ll cum and eat thee oop, On Ilkla Moor baht ‘at”
    1. There is no ‘t”. The definite article is unvoiced ie silent if it is at all present.
        1. The mistaken belief that people say t’ instead of the has been sustained and spread by comedians like Cryer who anyway is from Leeds.
          1. I just wanted to know what you meant by “unvoiced ie silent”, since an unvoiced sound is not silent, and what you meant by “silent if it is at all present”, since if a sound is present it’s not silent.
      2. There is! I’m a Yorkshireman, don’t tell me how to speak.. t’worms will get you.
      3. I’ll agree that it is very often “silent if present”, but there is an audible effect in cases like “We used to ‘ave to get up out o’t shoebox at twelve o’clock at night and lick road clean wi’t tongue” – another Python example from the “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch. That sketch was a borrowed one from another series and apparently only performed in live shows, not the TV series for which I have the published scripts. The online text I found had “of shoebox” which is clearly wrong from one Youtube version, though in that one, “wi’t tongue” is omitted. It also has “wit'”, which is a less helpful spelling. The sound is effectively a glottal stop, so often difficult to hear clearly. There should probably be another one before “road”, but that would be very hard to hear as the stop follows a consonant.

        And it’s not just Yorkshire. I heard it from my Lancashire mother.

        The fact that neither Collins nor ODE has it is very surprising to me. In a large part of their market you can hear it far more often than some of the words they define.

        Edited at 2020-06-21 08:08 am (UTC)

          2. Citing comedy: Yes. 2 reasons: The original one: you can hear several versions on Youtube. The other: comedy has to be accurate to work, though I don’t think the blokes had to be Yorkshiremen specifically. But we’re talking about an accent, and you can’t caricature/satirise things that don’t exist. (Existence sometimes including the fictional kind.)
        2. If anyone else queries it Peter, just refer them to my old granny, who was regularly off to t’shops, pronounced “Off tut shops”
        3. From an article on Yorkshire dialect on the Historic UK site:
          Examples of the Yorkshire dialect can be found in literary works such as ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Bronte and Charles Dickens’ novel ‘Nicholas Nickleby’. The reader will notice that in Broad Yorkshire, ‘ye’, ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ are used instead of ‘you’ and the word ‘the’ is shortened to t’.

          If anyone wants to read the whole thing, it’s available here: https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Yorkshire-Dialect/#:~:text=The%20reader%20will%20notice%20that,’%20is%20shortened%20to%20t’.

          Edited at 2020-06-21 09:06 am (UTC)

  5. 28 minutes. The brilliant Boltonian comedian Peter Kay will refer to t’internet, Guy, although he is deliberately making himself the butt of the joke for using that construction with something modern. HOPPING MAD is a cracker, and my COD in this terrific puzzle, with AMISH a close second. Thank you Dean and Guy.
  6. 33 mins to solve the first 5 clues and then 25 mins for the other 23. Odd.
    Once again, my notes don’t mention any COD candidates.
    Thanks for the explanation of OUGHT, Guy.
    I’m sure I’ve seen PROPAGATE clued previously along the lines of “a real scandal”.
  7. A quibble: an OBE is not O-shaped, but an actual gong (as seen being banged in Rank Films) is.
  8. No problem with the Yorkshire ‘t. The humour surrounding it continues in Barry Cryer’s contributions to the Uxbridge English Dictionary on ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’. Anyway, as has been noted above already, IT’S IN CHAMBERS so that’s an end to whether or not it’s valid for crossword purposes.

    PRISE as ‘draw’ and VICE as ‘bad’ don’t sit well with me although I note that ‘bad’ as a noun dates from much further back than the fashionable ‘my bad’ which continues to grate on my ear.

    Edited at 2020-06-21 10:11 am (UTC)

  10. This was an enjoyable puzzle and not too difficult once I got going.
    I too had a question mark about Croatia and 4d troubled me as I couldn’t get past OVERT for a long time. I was fortunate to see the Monty Python live show at the O2 with the Four Yorkshiremen sketch.
    My last two were CROSSPATCH and then CITE. The hidden stayed hidden right until the end-well done setter. Finished before 2pm. David
  11. No particular problems with this one and probably my quickest Dean finish at 25:16. Didn’t appreciate HOPPING MAD until it was explained to me here. I was concentrating on the PIN within the expression. Doh! Thanks Dean and Guy.
  12. 19:00. I had a similar experience to Kevin with the NE corner holding me up for several minutes at the end. I liked HOPPING MAD when I eventually saw it. LOI DUDE. I’d no trouble with t’ abbreviation at 24A. COD to NUCLEAR REACTOR.
  13. 13:39. For what it’s worth I read the words ‘to show’ in 25ac as assembly instructions, but it works either way. As GDS mentions I was very surprised to find that ‘t isn’t in either of the usual dictionaries.
  14. I initially had Ship for 26ac which seems to work perfectly well – S (son), HIP (child support), meaning – moving things.
    COD – Bootleg
  15. “Ship” would then be in the infinitive form, while “moving” is a participle or gerund.
  16. 53:55. A lot of this went in without too much trouble but there were a few that needed a bit of thought. Hopping mad took ages. Definitely my COD once I saw it. No problem with t’ t’ in Croatia.
  17. I could never have finished this because I had BOWLING for 10a. The “old mariner” Tom Bowling, title of a famous song by Charles Dibdin that used to be a regular part of The Last Night of the Proms in the medley of sea songs that included Rule Britannia. My answer fitted the clue so perfectly that I bunged it in without a second thought. And then struggled in vain… Ann
  18. Thanks Dean and guy
    Nice puzzle that took three sittings totalling around the 44 minutes, across last Saturday. Afraid that there was still just a great big question mark with the T of CROATIA – good to see it explained here. Took a while to see the BART bit of 13d, but remembered him soon after looking him up and seeing him as the lyricist of Oliver!.
    Agree with the COD and close runner up with HOPPING MAD / AMISH.
    Finished in the NW corner with SEQUESTRATE (a new term), AMISH (with a grin after the penny dropped) and OUGHT as the last few in.

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