Sunday Times 4936 by David McLean

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
13:55. A medium-difficulty puzzle from Harry this week. There were quite a few cryptic definitions, which won’t be to everyone’s taste. I quite liked these though, particularly the clever 14ac and 3dn.

Clue of the week surely has to go to 17ac, which looks particularly prescient after the shocking events in Washington.

Definitions are underlined, anagrams indicated like (TIHS)*, anagram indicators are in italics.

Across
1 Marine air private takes on heading to tense favela
SHANTYTOWN – SHANTY(Tense), OWN.
6 Opposition member’s article Congress backed
ANTI – AN (article), reversal of IT. IT (and congress) in the Monty Python ‘nudge wink know what I mean’ sense.
9 Fish for ray over far end of pier
BREAM – B(pieR)EAM.
10 A large old queen eating with old king
ALEXANDER – A, L, EX(AND), ER.
12 Ghost in closet startled IT workers
TECHNOLOGISTS – (GHOST IN CLOSET)*.
14 Two points linked by bridge?
PARTNERS – CD. The PARTNERS in bridge are East/West and North/South, hence ‘points’.
15 People inside university meeting Liberal official
CONSUL – CONS (people inside), U, L.
17 Out-of-time president of America might create this
RUMPUS – tRUMP, US (of America). Eerily prescient.
19 Company opening filled by a new contract
COVENANT – CO(A, N), VENT.
21 Pompous Tory leader plans of merit confused
SELF-IMPORTANT – (Tory, PLANS OF MERIT)*.
24 Republican jealous with first lady being constantly in Vogue
EVERGREEN – R, GREEN follows EVE.
25 Stupid writer put one into end of sentence
IDIOT – I, D(I)OT.
26 One might be spotted heading away from accident
RASH – cRASH. (And not tRASH as I initially put for some reason).
27 I believe backsliding saleswoman and boyfriend must be split up!
PERSONALLY – reversal of REP, SON, ALLY. Interesting wordplay, in that you have to split ‘boy’ from ‘friend’ to create the equivalence with SON and ALLY, but a bit of a weird definition. People do use PERSONALLY to mean ‘in my opinion’ (‘personally, olives are disgusting’), but I can’t find any dictionary support for it and I would say it’s non-standard. Or perhaps I’m missing something.

Down
1 Sandwiches for people on a bench
SUBS – DD.
2 A punter or a pimp?
ABETTER – A, BETTER. The answer here could also reasonably be ABETTOR, and I hesitated over which to put in, but BETTOR for a gambler looked wrong to me. It’s in the usual dictionaries though, labelled as an American spelling in Collins and Lexico but not in Chambers. Let’s see which version generates the pink square!
3 How one might describe enemy sapper?
TIME-CONSUMING – CD, based on time being known as the enemy.
4 Things many might run in coaches
TRAINERS – DD.
5 Raised mark in oral exam makes you twirl about
WHEEL – sounds like (in oral exam) ‘weal’.
7 People eager to drop habits?
NUDISTS – CD, and not all that cryptic.
8 Not sure what to go for: Rocky or True Lies?
IRRESOLUTE – (OR TRUE LIES)*. Nice surface: Sly or Arnie?
11 A great looming shifting mass
AGGLOMERATION – (A GREAT LOOMING)*.
13 Saw drunk with porters and shorts?
SPORTSWEAR – (SAW PORTERS)*. Definition by example indicated by the question mark.
16 Dope artist and lad brought up for high singers
SOPRANOS – SOP RA, reversal of SON. SOP for a ‘foolish or weak person’ (Collins) was new to me.
18 Cuts of fish
MULLETS – DD.
20 A home for soldiers
ANTHILL – another fairly straightforward CD.
22 Bit quiet, you say?
PIECE – sounds like ‘peace’.
23 Don’t go and mention cuddling teddy at the front
STAY – S(Teddy)AY.

32 comments on “Sunday Times 4936 by David McLean”

  1. I pondered ABETTER/ABETTOR for some considerable time, and eventually, sadly, plumped for the latter. All the references I looked at pointed me to the O being the most common usage, so I’m unhappy with the looseness of the clue. Apart from that I had a typo with TRAINERE, so it was all in vain anyway. 27:04 with 2 pink squares. Drat. Thanks setter and K.
  2. Harry’s puzzles have been difficult for me recently, but not this one. I had a ? about SOP, which was new to me. PERSONALLY didn’t bother me at the time, but I don’t think it works. ‘Personally, olives are disgusting’, for instance, doesn’t mean I believe they’re disgusting. But I liked the wordplay. I hesitated for a moment over E/O, but while ABETTOR looked right, BETTOR looked clearly wrong. Having just now gone to ODE, I was surprised to see BETTER referring to BETTOR; but then ODE is being inconsistent in that BETTOR says ‘chiefly US’.
    1. If people commonly say ‘personally, olives are disgusting’ to mean ‘I think olives are disgusting’, then that’s what it means. For me it’s ungrammatical – a bit like the commonly heard ‘the reason being is’ – but I don’t make the rules.

      Edited at 2021-01-10 08:49 am (UTC)

      1. Of course, you’re right [well, not of course, of course, but quite often]; but I was assuming, naively no doubt, that people do NOT commonly say etc. To say ‘personally, olives etc.’ is to say–for that very sayer–‘Olives are disgusting [for me/to me]’. My attitude toward the taste of olives is not a question of belief.
        1. I suppose I picked a bad example: The taste of olives is not a matter of belief. But the grammatical construction is the point and someone might use the same formation to express their belief that a vaccine is a vehicle for Bill Gates to install microchips in your bloodstream in order to control you via the 5G network.
          1. That’s what I was claiming from the start, viz. that one does not, in fact, say, e.g. “Personally, the vaccine is a vehicle …” I may be wrong–no, really–and if so, so be it. I do hope you didn’t think I was claiming ungrammaticality.
            1. One does not, but some people do. I’ve certainly heard it, and it always annoys me in the same way as ‘the point being is’ or ‘the thing is, is’ or ‘the proof is in the pudding’.
              1. Having lived for the last 40+ years outside an English-speaking environment, I’ll have to yield to your experience. At least I haven’t heard ‘the proof is in the pudding’ for some time. (Or, one of my favorites, ‘The end never justifies the means.’)
            2. Grammatically, “Personally, the vaccine is a vehicle” says “The vaccine is personally a vehicle”—whatever that might mean.
              1. So “Hopefully, the vaccine will be available soon” doesn’t mean what it obviously does mean? Frankly, your argument is dubious.
                1. Anxiously, the writer is awaiting a reply from his prospective editor.

                  “Hopefully” is an idiom that doesn’t function as grammatical “rules” would seem to prescribe for an adverb. Similarly (!), words like “frankly,” “honestly,” etc., are commonly used to qualify the following phrase as the speaker’s opinion. I am—or was heretofore—unaware of the acquisition by “personally” of such status. (“Personally” is, moreover, redundant if you add anything to make it grammatical: “Personally, I think…”? How else would you think?)

                  If you can’t beat ’em…
                  Personally, I am not convinced that this is “standard.”
                  But you’re talking about something like,
                  “Personally, this is non-standard.”
                  Non-standard forms are accepted here, though, and are of course not flagged as “var.” in a cryptic.

                  Edited at 2021-01-11 04:01 am (UTC)

  3. In a sentence such as ‘Personally, the negatives outweigh the positives’, the ‘personally’ might just about be glossed as ‘I believe’.

    As for the puzzle, 42 minutes, so more than twice as long as Deano’s today.

    1. Sorry, ulaca, I didn’t think we were supposed to refer to current puzzles. I haven’t looked at today’s yet.
      1. Just clues shouldn’t be discussed or give away. No issues with saying you’ve done it or found it easy or difficult.
  4. The only clue I couldn’t parse was ANTI, so, thanks, keriothe.
    FOI was ALEXANDER while LOI was EVERGREEN. That’s ironic as I worked for an airline called Evergreen for 20 years.
    I liked PARTNERS but my COD has to be RUMPUS.
    I have a query about PERSONALLY. Is that a known trick to use REP to clue saleswoman knowing that solvers will be looking for something other than REP?
    Also I thought 5d was what val, formerly of this parish, would have described as a “double helix”. I think you can make a case for both WHEEL and WHEAL.
    Finally, unlike the previous day’s cryptic when I could only find 2 anagrams, in this one I found 5: (12ac,21ac,13d,11d,8d)
    1. Not sure what you mean about REP. If I see ‘salesman/woman’ it’s the first thing I think of.
      I take your point about 5dn. I think WHEEL is the more natural reading of the clue but you could just about read it the other way round. I had the advantage of never having seen that spelling of WEAL.
  5. Just as well I never heard of BETTOR or I’d have had a choice to make at 1dn. Anyway it’s confirmed now that -ER was David’s intended spelling. Will the editor allow an appeal, I wonder?

    When it reached the point that I was missing only 1ac in the grid I looked up the meaning of ‘favela’. I see it has come up a couple of times before but I didn’t remember it. That’s no great surprise, but what’s really concerning is that it re-appeared in a clue in yesterday’s puzzle and I had already forgotten its meaning again!

    Edited at 2021-01-10 06:55 am (UTC)

  6. 35 minutes. I plumped for ABETTER but from the cryptic, thinking that I’d have spelt it with an O. COD to TRAINERS. I didn’t think PERSONALLY was defined, but I had no trouble with it. SOP presented no problems. Similarly, I did quite like PARTNERS and TIME-CONSUMING. A mixed bag, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Sadly, the RUMPUS was prophetic. Thank you David and K.
  7. Enjoyed this one – taking approx 25 mins. I saw 26a as CRASH minus its first letter, probably a better synonym for accident than TRASH.
    1. Thank you for spotting my deliberate mistake! Honestly I did mean to write C, I don’t know where the T came from. I will correct it now.
  8. 32mins today so I’m pleased with that. I agree with K re 14ac and 3d. I also liked 18d for its economy. I am another CRASH minus C here.

    Thank you setter and Keriothe for the blog.

  9. ….anything other than ABETTER, as I’d only say “bettor” if the definition was “puntor” (then there certainly would be an outcry).

    FOI BREAM
    LOI WHEEL (again, no alternative considered)
    COD RUMPUS
    TIME 14:08

  10. I seemed to race through this; must have been on the wavelength. FOI was STAY. LOI RUMPUS only because I had put FILLETS at 18d wondering how that was cryptic.
    I had three left at 10.10 a.m. the others being SPORTSWEAR and PARTNERS. All done by 10.25 a.m. in under 40 minutes.
    Never considered anything other than ABETTER. COD to RUMPUS, only parsed much later.
    David
  11. Abetter/abettor: I failed to notice that there was a choice in both def and wordplay. As only one of our two main reference dictionaries says that the -OR version is American both times, I’m going to tell the people in charge of the draw that ABETTOR is an acceptable answer, though we don’t yet have the ability to allow an alternative in the Crossword Club leaderboard scoring.
  13. 13:57. I chose ABETTER on the basis that there was no homonym indicator, so it had to be BETTER. Or is a BETTOR also someone who bets? Good stuff. TRAINERS got the biggest tick on my copy. Thanks K and David.
  14. 21.59. Was going to come here and bemoan my DNF (another abettor – I was conflicted and lingered over -er or -or for a little while before submitting and getting a pink square) but take heart from Peter B’s comment above. I thought this puzzle was great fun.
  15. I had ABETTER! I never even considered the alternative (does that count? Ha).
    LOI WHEEL.
  16. As a prophecy, that would be rather an understatement (typically British).

    Edited at 2021-01-10 11:24 pm (UTC)

  17. Thanks Harry and keriothe
    Unfortunately, we skip the Christmas Special in our syndicated version of the Sunday Times puzzle in The Australian paper here. So now we will be only two weeks behind. Found this one pretty straightforward and was able to complete it in a single session, but not without some challenges in some of the parsing.
    Am pretty sure that I have come across the ABETTER / ABETTOR issue in another crossword recently in a similarly clued version of it. Would be avoided if the E/O light was not blocked. Was able to correctly guess the E in this one – it still does seem more logical with the BETTER angle.
    Grinned at the classic 17a – it was spookily accurate, especially following the goings-on on the 7th – a classic surface and construction. Thought that SHANTYTOWN was very good as well.
    Finished up in that NW corner with the cleverly defined PARTNERS, that SHANTYTOWN and WHEEL (where I needed all of the crossers to get).

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