13:56. I enjoyed this puzzle a lot, just the right level of difficulty for a Sunday on which I also had to go for a run, cook lunch, walk the dogs and do some work. There was nothing I didn’t know in the answers but in writing up the blog I did learn a couple of things about golems and dartboards.
Definitions are underlined, anagrams indicated like (TIHS)*, deletions like this, anagram indicators are in italics.
| Across | |
| 1 | I fantasise about everything under the sun |
| DAYDREAMER – I think this is just a cryptic definition based on the fact that what happens during the day happens ‘under the sun’. Although if you live in the UK you might question this notion! | |
| 6 | Toothy type conservative Gordon Bennett backed |
| CROC – C, reversal of COR. | |
| 9 | Maine journal rebuffed one with feet of clay |
| GOLEM – reversal of ME, LOG. As far as I can tell the expression ‘feet of clay’ has nothing to do with GOLEMs, but one of those creatures might be made from that material, in which case its feet would be. Could have done with a question mark! | |
| 10 | Tickle flipping relations into the small hours? |
| TITILLATE – reversal of IT, |
|
| 12 | Garnish on a rotten main wants spicing up |
| ORNAMENTATION – (ON A ROTTEN MAIN)*. | |
| 14 | Duke you left by a river of reeds, perhaps |
| FISTULAR – FIST (duke), U, L, A, R. ‘Hollow, esp slender and hollow; reedlike or tubular’ (Collins). | |
| 15 | Light breeze over the eastern side of Barrow |
| WINDOW – WIND, O, |
|
| 17 | One with busy people nursing ten beastly types |
| IBEXES – I, BE(X)ES. | |
| 19 | Inferior E, perhaps |
| LOW-GRADE – DD. Obligatory drug reference from Harry Part I. | |
| 21 | Wild claim about power, skill and relentlessness |
| IMPLACABILITY – (CLAIM)* containing P, ABILITY. | |
| 24 | Object, having to take ill-considered punishment? |
| THRASHING – TH(RASH)ING. | |
| 25 | Those first in lines of songs on the radio |
| HEIRS – sounds like ‘airs’. | |
| 26 | One heading to bed on board craft on delta |
| DART – D, ART. This is more or less a straight definition, but unless you know that ‘bed’ is a word for one of the segments on a dartboard you may not realise that! I assumed it was something to do with the point of the DART embedding itself. | |
| 27 | Tenor kidnapped by Brahms and Liszt? Rotters! |
| COMPOSTERS – COMPOS(T)ERS. Not a reference to drunkenness for a change. | |
| Down | |
| 1 | Troubles making love lead to icy insults |
| DIGS – DOGS (troubles) with the O changed to I |
|
| 2 | Chicken on top of stove turns golden |
| YELLOWS – YELLOW, S |
|
| 3 | I will show you the first of these things |
| ROMAN NUMERALS – CD. | |
| 4 | During fall, Altman shot around one uni, then another |
| AUTUMNAL – (ALTMAN)* containing two separate Us. | |
| 5 | After knight leaves, tidy up and put away food |
| EATEN – |
|
| 7 | Buy the farm if interior of study gets fitted out |
| READIED – REA(DIE)D. ‘Buy the farm’ is US military slang of uncertain origin. I knew it from somewhere. | |
| 8 | Can we sleep after seismic event and landslide? |
| CLEAN SWEEP – (CAN WE SLEEP)*. A nicely original anagram indicator. | |
| 11 | Lag delights in messing around authorities |
| LEADING LIGHTS – (LAG DELIGHTS IN)*. | |
| 13 | In league A, field a fit Batty |
| AFFILIATED – (A FIELD A FIT)*. | |
| 16 | Dynasty over at last, first parts of Cops on next |
| COMING UP – MING, UP after CO |
|
| 18 | Sovereign contrary agent hid in foreign capital |
| EMPEROR – reversal (contrary) of RO(REP)ME. I think this really needs to be ‘hidden’ for the cryptic grammar to work and it wouldn’t have spoiled the surface. | |
| 20 | When you want a lot of unopened porridge |
| ANYTIME – |
|
| 22 | Excellent work secures Magnus’s first mate in Spain |
| AMIGO – A(M |
|
| 23 | Does dope in America finally graduate classes? |
| USES – US, |
|
9A: Clay is the typical material – typical enough for the ODE def to be “a clay figure brought to life by matic.
26A can’t be a plain def unless there are roles for crafts and deltas in darts. These were intended to indicate D + ARTS
18D In Collins, “hid” and “hidden” are both past participles of “hide”
Thanks Peter.
Golem: take your point but other materials are available and feet are just one part of the anatomy…
26ac: I didn’t meant the whole clue, just the definition. ‘More ore less’ just because it’s a little fanciful even if you take its literal meaning.
18dn In standard English ‘x hid in y’ is not synonymous with ‘x hidden in y’.
You might want to look at the plot of the novel Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett.
9A: This seems like a case of “definition by fact”, with the understanding that a fact that applies much of the time and doesn’t cover all the possibilities is OK. If such a definition was not OK, lots of favourite clues or devices would have to be ruled out – “He represents one, and I another” uses less than 2 per cent of the possible ELEMENTS, and fails to mention that they can also be represented by words. And a “Nice cake” would have to be just a “French cake”.
18A: I think I failed to check whether the darts meaning of “bed” had reached the pages of Collins and ODE, though it turns out that the darts version of “board” is also not there. And I should have read all of your comment.
18D: as “hid” is given the same meaning as the only meaning for “hidden” in Collins, it’s arguably as fair as apostrophe-s meaning “has” = “goes with”, when in real-life English that only happens for “has” as part of a past tense. It differs in two ways: firstly, it’s a novel idea rather than cryptic xwd routine, and second, that meaning is missing from ODE. The second one may mean that I don’t allow it again, but the first is an example of a setter’s inventiveness. Sometimes setter inventiveness gets ruled out as too inventive, but sometimes it’s fair inventiveness meaning the solver has to think rather than recognise something familiar.
Yeah I don’t really have a technical objection to 9ac, and I don’t always think DBEs need them (on the familiar Old MacDonald argument), but I thought the double obliqueness here would have made one helpful.
I’m not very keen on this use of apostrophe-s either, to be honest, but it’s so useful!
9a Golem. From Wiki:
A golem … is an animated anthropomorphic being in Jewish folklore, which is created entirely from inanimate matter, usually clay or mud.
DART was very gettable from the wordplay and then saw the connection to dartboards. Having just done some research online, it seems that the 20 segments of the board are just that, but it’s the divisions within the segments, treble 20, double 19, etc that are the beds as well as the inner and outer areas of the segment that only score the segment’s value.
DAYDREAMER went in with a shrug but it had to be. Liked LOW-GRADE and ROMAN NUMERALS when the penny dropped. Lovely crossword.
Thanks K.
The puzzle was fairly approachable, and I solved steadily from the cryptics without worrying too much about the literals. Golem? Fistular? OK, whatever.
The origin of buy the farm is pretty well known.
Time: 45:40.
The origin of buy the farm is disputed.
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/bought-the-farm.html
73m 07s
Thanks keriothe, not that I wanted reminding by 19ac that I only got 3 Grade E’s at A-Level!
Thank you also for DIGS, DART and COMING UP.
The ‘somewhere’ I knew ‘buy the farm’ from is Len Deighton’s first spy novel, The Ipcress File where some of the action takes place on an American military facility in the Pacific
I really liked ROMAN NUMERALS!
44 minutes, unsure of what FISTULAR and GOLEM were.
I didn’t feel the need to invoke a dugs reference at 19ac. My parsing was: LOW-GRADE, main definition ‘inferior’ (in quality in general e.g. coal, petrol), supported by ‘E, perhaps’ (LOW GRADE e.g. in an exam). The latter is in support rather than a second definition because the enumeration would be (3,5) rather (3-5) as in the clue.
BTW, K, I never noticed before that the clues in the your blogs omit the enumerations, but the script should pick these up.
I agree with your parsing of 19ac but unless it’s a reference to drugs what is the surface meaning?
I always remove the enumerations from the clues, I don’t think they add anything in the blog write-up. The enumeration is right there in the answer!
Yes, I agree the drug reference is in the surface. I didn’t mean to imply it wasn’t there, only that I didn’t see it whilst solving as I tend not to think about surface readings when an answer comes easily by other means unless I’m on blogging duty.
Well it says something that it’s 11 or 12 years since we started putting clues in the blogs and this is the first time I’ve noticed you don’t do it! It only came to my attention today because I wanted to double-check the hyphen before explaining my parsing.
The fact that you’ve never noticed perhaps supports my view that it’s unnecessary!
The hyphen in the answer is generated automatically by the script, of course.
I’ve never thought of omitting the enumeration (no more than I’d noticed that you do), but sometimes the enumeration distinguishes the answer from a hint that isn’t divided the same way, or does/doesn’t include a hyphen.
Well sure but it’s there in the answer. I see no point in giving it twice.
It’s part of how the clue works and someone who hasn’t worked the puzzle but reads the blog wouldn’t see such a distinction made in the clue, so an answer might occasionally seem somewhat arbitrary.
Anyway, I fiddle with the template enough already. I don’t see any reason to take the time to delete the enumerations.
Didn’t make notes, but I remember it was tricky, with some easier clues, particularly on the left hand side, sich as GOLEM, FISTULAR and IBEXES, which were easily parseable. The last in were the relatively straightforward HEIRS and READIED, where the phrase ‘buy the farm’ was completely unknown and therefore confounded me. Mr Ego eventually supplied both answers.
still not sure about 1AC, where does the dreamer part get defined in the cryptic…about everything under..?
I don’t think ‘dreamer’ is separately defined. The whole thing is a cryptic definition for DAYDREAMER. Or if you prefer I guess you could read ‘I fantasise’ as a definition of DAYDREAMER with the rest of the clue an additional cryptic hint.
At 10ac how do we get ’tillate’ from ’till late’? Two or three L’s and no homophone indicator?
Yes, it should be ’TIL LATE using the abbreviation for until.
Correct! Thanks, I’ll amend the blog.
26a Dart, did know about the beds on a dartboard.
7d DNK Buy the farm, and looked it up so DNF.
20d Anytime. I had entered 19a as Low Grdee, and failed to notice, so DNF as Daytime does not parse.
I wouldn’t have realised about beds on a dartboard without the blog and interesting comments.
I found 16d COMING UP, quite complicated. Is “first parts of Cops” = CO fair? To say the “first parts” of a single word gives the first two letters. Or is the definition just “next”, and “first parts of Cops on” gives C+O?
(Basically, I am checking whether “on”, should be underlined.)
Good point. Your reading is certainly more conventional from a wordplay perspective, and I suppose ‘next’ is a perfectly good definition. So I suspect you’re right.
I read it as the first two letters in “cops” when test-solving, and more importantly, that’s what’s shown in the setter’s notes, so the fact that you can read it another way is accidental. As we follow a strict rule that a “bit” or similar of a word must only be one letter, even if it’s a “bit of floccinaucinihilipilification”, it seems logical for “first parts of” to mean precisely the first two.
Thanks Peter.
Thank you for coming back and looking that up for me.
I don’t think I’d seen that “first parts of” device before.
Looking on this site, the only example I can find is from a weekday puzzle “Quick Cryptic 542 by Pedro” (2016):
4 Greeting first parts of body of work (3)
BOW – First letters (first parts) of Body Of Work
And looking at fifteensquared, it seems to have come up three or four times over the various newspapers covered there – similarly as the first letter of multiple words.
So I think “first parts of” to be the first two letters of a single word is possibly a new idea.
I can see that “parts” would be larger than “bit”, but will need to think about why that means “precisely” two letters and no more.
I’m happy to believe that it’s a different interpretation to some previous ones, but what I think should matter is whether it makes sense, and I think it does. There are certainly other indications in cryptic clues that can be interpreted in more than one way, and the solver has to find the one that leads to an answer for which the whole clue makes sense.
I’m counting “part” and “bit” as the same thing for this purpose, and my idea is that if “bit” always means the smallest possible “bit”, “bits” or “parts” should follow suit, and indicate two letters if applied to a single word.
Right, yes thank you, I see.
So, “bit” and “part” can mean one letter. Therefore, “first bit of Cops”, and “first part of Cops” could mean “C”.
And so the plural “bits” and “parts” would mean more than one letter.
And it’s nice to find a clever indication of “first two letters”, avoiding explicit pointers such as “couple”, “pair”, “duo”, or “brace” etc.
“first couple of cops” = “CO” is certainly fair, but probably too obvious.
I suppose the issue is whether “first parts of” must mean “precisely the first two”.
The first people to arrive at the meeting were Andy, Brian, Charles and David.
If we think of Wednesday evening on ITV1, would “first parts of Grantchester” be acceptable for “GRA”, or can it only mean “GR”?
The rule used is actually stricter – “bit of Cops” with no positional indication has to mean C rather than O/P/S.
In real life, I think many people would see “Grant” as a part of “Grantchester”, but if we’ve gone down a road of strictness that says that “bit of Grantchester” must be G in a cryptic clue, making “bits of Grantchester” only mean GR is just being consistent with that standard.
(I think the idea behind this strictness started long ago when someone like Afrit or Ximenes objected to “lion’s tail” meaning ION — a tail three times as long as the L as the lion’s implied body.)
Very interesting. And very good!
Thanks for taking the time to go through all that with me, Peter.
Much appreciated 🙂
Thanks David and keriothe
Found this one pretty challenging taking a couple of sittings and 72 minutes to complete. Was one of those puzzles that I couldn’t really find a foothold to build off and had scattered answers for a good part of the solve. A couple of new terms in FISTULAR and GOLEM with both being quite gettable from the word play. Also didn’t know the ‘bed’ term in the dartboard.
Liked the trick with ROMAN NUMERALS and some of the more unique definitions used. Was surprised to see the anagram for LEADING LIGHTS contain ‘lights’ included in the fodder.
Finished in the SE corner with HEIRS, LOW-GRADE and COMING the last few in.
The dartboard bed thing immediately made me think of Bullseye.
“Stay out of the black, and into the red. Nothing in this game for two in a bed!” A nice gentle bit of innuendo amidst an explanation of the rules of one of the rounds of that show.