DNF. I failed on 19dn here, unable to find the required country that sounds like the (to me) unknown disorder. I don’t think I ever would have got it, largely because South Korea is, in my experience, generally still referred to as just ‘Korea’. In most contexts it’s pretty obvious which one you’re referring to so the ‘South’ is often dispensed with. This is obviously not accurate so I’m not complaining but it’s my excuse, so there.
How did you get on?
Definitions are underlined, anagrams indicated like (TIHS)*, deletions like this, anagram indicators are in italics.
| Across | |
| 1 | One helps a writer issue a Mann novel |
| AMANUENSIS – (ISSUE A MANN)*. ‘A person employed to take dictation or to copy manuscripts’ according to Collins. I thought it referred to a more significant sort of assistance. You live and learn. And then, inevitably, forget. | |
| 7 | Pursue payment |
| WAGE – DD. | |
| 9 | Plans a school wrestling team adopts |
| SCHEMATA – SCH, (TEAM)* containing (adopting) A. There is an implied ‘which’ between ‘a’ and ‘school’. | |
| 10 | Bacon piece Arnold reviewed |
| LARDON – (ARNOLD)*. | |
| 11 | Fortune-teller’s line swallowed by old people |
| ORACLE – O, RAC(L)E. | |
| 13 | A contrarian’s comeuppance? |
| DOWNFALL – to a contrarian ‘comeuppance’ might be DOWNFALL, its opposite. | |
| 14 | Threshold of a boom in air travel |
| SOUND BARRIER – CD. | |
| 17 | Award-winner artist briefly back on show |
| EXHIBITIONER – EXHIBIT, reversal of RENOI |
|
| 20 | Article by a newspaper |
| THE TIMES – THE (article), TIMES (by). | |
| 21 | Club record set to be broken by United |
| CUDGEL – C(U)D, GEL. | |
| 22 | Gross painting that’s rushed inside |
| ARRANT – AR(RAN)T. | |
| 23 | Cook in boiling water |
| IRRIGATE – IR(RIG)ATE. | |
| 25 | Prepared cheese rolls |
| MADE – reversal of EDAM. | |
| 26 | Wet blanket left on babies |
| SPOILSPORT – SPOILS (babies), PORT. | |
| Down | |
| 2 | Biscuit pack trimmed in dark red |
| MACAROON – M( |
|
| 3 | Born in here, every second counts |
| NEE – |
|
| 4 | Raise spirits back from the dead |
| ELATE – |
|
| 5 | Mud, Fijian perhaps, lacks iodine |
| SLANDER – |
|
| 6 | Game one playing alone picked up |
| SOLO WHIST – sounds like ‘soloist’. | |
| 7 | “Oath”, perhaps, exactly as he said it |
| WORD FOR WORD – ‘oath’ being a word for a (four-letter) word. | |
| 8 | Look up! Don’t stop and stare! |
| GOOGLE – GO, OGLE. | |
| 12 | Be focused and cordial |
| CONCENTRATE – DD. | |
| 15 | Giants hard to hide among six-footers |
| BEHEMOTHS – BE(H)E, MOTHS. The ‘six-footers’ (insects) here are either a number of BEE MOTHS, or possibaly a single BEE and a number of MOTHS. Take your pick. | |
| 16 | Soldier who runs waste tips in Exeter |
| DESERTER – DESERT, E |
|
| 18 | Code of honour an ex-president papers over |
| BUSHIDO – BUSH, ID, O. ‘The feudal code of the Japanese samurai’ (Collins). | |
| 19 | Expression of a former country’s disorder |
| CHOREA – sounds like ‘Korea’. | |
| 21 | Sea life caught by the mouth |
| CORAL – C, ORAL. | |
| 24 | Break from knitting a pullover |
| GAP – contained in ‘knitting a pullover’. | |
7d OATH I interpreted as to give one’s word means to give one’s oath.
A quick Sunday at 17mins.
Very enjoyable Sunday outing. Thanks to setter and blogger.
No time, as I was DNF until I looked once more just now and decided on LOI ARRANT. I knew CHOREA; Woody Guthrie died of it. There were a couple of suprisingly easy clues, like 25ac, but as always some winners, with wonderfully elegant surfaces: I liked THE TIMES, MACAROON, ELATE.
You beat me to it… I’ve come across a medical paper by one John Ringman, “The Huntington disease of woody guthrie [sic]: another man done gone,” about a hypothetical influence of Guthrie’s Huntington disease [his form of chorea] on his creativity. Guthrie, who was just 55 when he died, left “countless songs and a tremendous volume of letters to his name. His personal life was similarly driven with Woody having had 3 wives and at least 9 children and an insatiable appetite for traveling the United States.… Woody’s most productive time artistically was in the 5 years immediately preceding the onset of overt symptoms of HD. I hypothesize that subclinical HD may have been an important driving force behind Woody Guthrie’s creativity.”
There’s a fascinating Woody Guthrie museum in Tulsa OK which, among many things, highlights his influence/inspiration for pretty well every musician I’ve ever heard of.
32 mins for me with CHOREA the LOI. I know that technically unified Korea was split into North Korea and South Korea at the end of the war, it still seems a bit unfair to call Korea a “former country”. But I had heard of CHOREA, although I couldn’t tell you anything about it, but I couldn’t fit anything else. I thought an AMANUENSIS was a handmaiden, but Chambers does not support that at all.
32 minutes. I’ve just finished this and found it reasonably gentle. I wasn’t 100% confident but entered CHOREA for Korea as a ‘former country’, thinking of Sussex as a “former county”. I can see what WORD FOR WORD is getting at, but wouldn’t be able to explain it and hadn’t come across LARDON before. Didn’t Dr. Johnson have the help of AMANUENS(E)S when compiling his dictionary? DESERTER with the sneaky ‘Soldier who runs’ def was my LOI.
I liked the SOUND BARRIER cd, with Concorde springing to mind, even though figuratively it didn’t provide the hoped for ‘boom in (supersonic) air travel’.
22 minutes suggests this was very easy for a Sunday puzzle. Fortunately I knew of CHOREA which came to mind quickly with the aid of checkers and I didn’t stop long enough on the clue to consider why it said ‘former country’.
The first time I heard the word AMANUENSIS was with reference to Eric Fenby who served the composer Frederick Delius in that capacity for the last 6 years of his life. His role and its importance was certainly more than suggested by Collins as quoted by our blogger, as there are at least 6 major Delius works that would never have been written if all Fenby had done was take dictation or copy manuscripts.
I agree with Corymbia about 7dn and don’t see it as at all complicated. ‘Oath’ is simply a word meaning ‘word’ as in a promise, and WORD FOR WORD means ‘exactly as said’.
It’s also a word meaning ‘word’ as in swear word! It works either way I guess but I don’t see ‘oath’ and ‘word’ – in the promise sense – as quite equivalent since the latter only has that meaning with a possessive: it is necessarily someone’s word.
Whilst I agree that oath can mean a swear word, I’d say that ‘word’ doesn’t mean a swear word unless unless you put something else in front of it – ‘swear’ (obviously) or ‘four-letter’ for example. ‘Oath’ however can mean ‘promise’ without the possessive, e.g. one takes the oath in a court of law or takes / makes an oath of allegiance.
But you don’t take the word in a court, or make a word of allegiance. I think it works either way though and I’m probably overthinking it!
Didn’t encounter any real problems here. Again. It was a good weekend! Grid complete, in a relatively speedy 35 minutes, much due to Mr Price’s clear clueing, great for someone still learning. (Though who isn’t?) Not come across EXHIBITIONER before, NHO CHOREA – or had but only with HUNTINGDON’s and both lodged waaay in a back drawer of my memory. Had no problem with WORD – took it as oath/promise. Thanks, all.
Finished over a long time, off and on. Struggled with Amanuensis and Chorea – needing all the checkers for both. Liked Solo Whist.
finished this one reasonably quickly (for my standard).
DNF
Like our esteemed blogger just couldn’t see the country. Harder with it not being an “old” name and with the alpha trawl for c not immediately suggesting a k sound. 20 mins before the breeze block
I thought CUDGEL IRRIGATE SOLO WHIST and LARDON were all superb, the last my favourite
Thanks Keriothe and Robert
I first came across AMANUENSIS in a job advert on a university noticeboard: to provide assistance to a disabled graduate student. And I can see there are similar things online now:
“Amanuensis (Scribe) for Examinations – Job Description…An Amanuensis (Scribe) is responsible for providing an accurate and legible handwritten record from the personal dictation of a student in examinations.” (University of Oxford Disability Advisory Service).
But, I also always remember the James Joyce/Samuel Beckett anecdote:
Once or twice [Joyce] dictated a bit of Finnegans Wake to [Samuel] Beckett, though dictation did not work very well for him; in the middle of one such session there was a knock at the door which Beckett didn’t hear. Joyce said, ‘Come in,’ and Beckett wrote it down. Afterwards he read back what he had written and Joyce said, ‘What’s that “Come in”?’ ‘Yes, you said that,’ said Beckett. Joyce thought for a moment, then said, ‘Let it stand.’ He was quite willing to accept coincidence as his collaborator. Beckett was fascinated and thwarted by Joyce’s singular method.
(Richard Ellmann, “James Joyce”, 1959).
DNF in 30 minutes, because DEFECTER for 16dn seemed so reasonable that I never saw DESERTER (which is indeed somewhat better). On the whole a very easy Sunday offering, but quite as delightful as always. COD to GOOGLE.
Another done by CHOREA.
Thanks Robert and keriothe
… and another done over by CHOREA, after smugly finishing after 37 minutes – I had put in DHARNA, the non-violent disorder used by Gandhi in India (more a former part of the Commonwealth rather than a former country as such) – oh well !
EXHIBITIONER was a new term and remembered I had seen AMANUENSIS before in a crossword after agonisingly trawling through the anagrammatic combinations. LARDON was only vaguely familiar and didn’t work out the ‘soloist’ homophone though was confident of the answer.
Finished in the SE corner with the cleverly defined DESERTER, CUDGEL which confirmed the last bit of EXHIBITIONER to finish off the grid.