Sunday Times Cryptic 4853, by David McLean — Tout est dans les clous

Author   Guy du SablePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
Every ingredient of this tasty puzzle seemed to be in apple-pie order… hence my headline. The expression, nodding here (first) to, uh, clue (a near homophone) 18—comes from the fact that pedestrian crossings in France were as late as 1950 demarcated by two parallel rows of nails (clous) placed in the pavement; hence, to go between the nails means to follow the rules, respect the code. Of course, if you are a schoolchild at an intersection in Great Britain, there might be a LOLLIPOP MAN to keep you in line.

I (blithely assure myself I) have no more questions about any of this, except—just possibly—1. 1 across, of course…

I do (ganasarm)* like this, and italicize anagrinds in the clues.

ACROSS
 1 Foreign article covering a sport (8)
LACROSSE — L(ACROSS)E. I think the “a” in the clue must stand for “Across,” as in these puzzles—although I found this neither in a list of cryptic-crossword abbreviations nor in any online dictionary. I toyed with the idea that “sport,” in the sense of a mutation (sport of nature), and “cross,” in the sense of a hybrid, could be listed somewhere as somewhat tangentially synonymous, but this is not an &lit…
 6 One longing to get rid of York’s premier brass maker (6)
EARNER — [-y]EARNER
 9 One charged to protect conservative figure (4)
ICON — IO(C)N
10 Change weekly alcohol units, perhaps, over time (10)
ALTERATION — AL(T)E RATION
11 Too fab, essentially wonderful (2,4)
AS WELL — [-f]A[-b] SWELL
12 Burning houses labourer evacuated unhurt (3,5)
ALL RIGHT — ”Burning,” ALIGHT, walls in L[-aboure]R
14 Cosmetic surgery’s needed for lean matron (10)
ORNAMENTAL — (lean matron)*
16 Christ appearing in England, oddly (4)
EGAD — EnGlAnD. Blimey!
18 Some overclouding point of great interest (4)
CLOU — HIdden. Literally, as we have seen, “nail.”
19 John McEnroe often put his foot in it (6,4)
TENNIS SHOE — CD. (Boy, did he ever!)
21 Land our hands cultivated (8)
HONDURAS — (our lands)*
23 Boyfriend chasing former PA? (3,3)
OLD MAN —Hmm. If your “boyfriend” is your MAN and this word comes after (is “chasing”) OLD, or “former,” you then have an expression for your pa. But why the question mark? And is arbitarily capping the definition (all—both—letters) a legitimate ploy? And then some gals call their boyfriend—or even their husband—their “old man.” But if “boyfriend” were the definition, I couldn’t make sense of the wordplay.
25 Sea mist over Ramsgate front is normal (10)
MAINSTREAM — ”Sea” is MAIN, and then you have STEAM for “mist,” over (enclosing) the first letter (“front”) of Ramsgate.
27 Send back American periodical (4)
EMIT — TIME<=
28 Feel aggrieved at being powerless here (6)
RESENT — [-p]RESENT
29 Building alteration? Concrete’s first to go (8)
TENEMENT — The first word after the definition is the answer to clue 10, or TEN, and then you have [-c]EMENT. My LOI. I couldn’t, actually, parse it till Tuesday.

DOWN
 2 New cast learn of predecessors (9)
ANCESTRAL — (cast learn)*
 3 Compass displaying north in storm (5)
RANGE — RA(N)GE
 4 You could say one’s a non-chain rental service (5,6)
SMALL LETTER — CD.
 5 Pull out old treatise (7)
EXTRACT — EX = “old” and TRACT = “treatise”
 6 Sport that doesn’t hold wife’s attention (3)
EAR — [-w]EAR
 7 Isn’t a rest fantastic for irritability (9)
RATTINESS — (Isn’t a rest)*
 8 English policeman upset, getting hard time (5)
EPOCH — E(nglish) + COP<= + H(ard)
13 Chap who makes kids properly cross before school? (8,3)
LOLLIPOP MAN — CD. A new term to this Yank.
15 Great deal for a roll plus salsa? (9)
ABUNDANCE — A BUN (“roll”) + DANCE (“salsa,” DBE)
17 Love is not a road I travelled (9)
ADORATION — (is not a road I)*
20 Starting out on climb, nervous initially (7)
NASCENT — N[-ervous] + ASCENT
22 Talk over singer, that’s rude ultimately (5)
ORATE — O(ver) + RAT (“singer”) + [-rud]E. “That’s” meaning “that has” (which I find annoying, y’know, but so be it).
24 Fancy shot taken round central Leeds (5)
DREAM — DR(E)AM (E being the middle, or “central,” letter in “Leeds”)
26 Rubbish piece of needlework? (3)
TAT — DD, the second referring to ink under the skin

33 comments on “Sunday Times Cryptic 4853, by David McLean — Tout est dans les clous”

  2. I liked this puzzle which I zipped through in 19:59, although I didn’t understand the TEN bit of TENEMENT until pointed in the right direction. I had to take CLOU on trust, but it wasn’t a huge leap of faith. Thanks Harry and Guy.
  3. An easyish one, although I biffed MAINSTREAM and ALTERATION and never did parse TENEMENT. DNK CLOU. And I still don’t get AS WELL; how does ‘essentially’ entail eliminating the first and last letters of ‘fab’? I have ‘feh’ written in the margins by 19ac and 13d; QC clues at best (we’ve had LOLLIPOP LADY once or twice before, Guy; that’s how I knew it).
    1. The idea is that this is the “heart,” and thus the “essence” of the word. Yeah, I know, but this isn’t the first (or third) time we’ve seen this ploy.
  4. Brilliant work on parsing 29a, would never have sussed it….you have a rogue team in 2 down
    1. Thanks. Fixed. At first, I thought the anagram fodder contained, instead of “learn,” the odd “leam.” Which is, indeed, a Scottish dialect word, but I thought a bit much!

      Edited at 2019-06-09 12:49 am (UTC)

  5. Hmmm … the idea that the answer is a clue for the clue number seems a bit out there to me. But, well done getting it!
  6. I think that there’s a convention that if a word such as a proper name needs a leading capital, it has to have it. (And so the cunning setters like to put it at the start of the clue to disguise why it has a capital!)

    On the other hand, i think it’s accepted that words which don’t need a leading capital can be given one to mislead the solver into thinking it is a proper name. So, there seems no difficulty with capitalising a whole word to make it look like an acronym?

    Edited at 2019-06-09 01:33 am (UTC)

    1. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a word which doesn’t require an initial capital written in ALL capitals; and I hope not to see such. In any case, as I said above, PA (written in capitals) is an abbreviation in UK English for ‘personal assistant’, so there’s no problem with PA in the clue.
      1. So it’s Personal Assistant in the surface meaning, fine, but don’t you agree that “pa” or “Pa” is the definition? Or does “Personal Assistant” = MAN, so the definition is “Boyfriend,” after all?

        Edited at 2019-06-09 03:13 am (UTC)

        1. You beat me to it. I was about to edit my comment to the effect that while I see no problem with PA meaning pa (or Pa) in the wordplay, PA as the definition meaning pa (or Pa) would be (is) a problem. At least I don’t think I’ve ever seen a definition in all caps, even 2, when the definiendum is something that does not require–nay, forbids–spelling in capitals. On edit: You beat me to it again, as this original reply went to your unedited reply. Anyway, I think I actually did parse it that way last week: boyfriend the def, with PA (man) chasing former [chasing former, [is] old]. But ‘PA’ is, I assume, gender-neutral. And I’m guessing that an executive wouldn’t refer to his PA as his ‘man’.

          Edited at 2019-06-09 03:24 am (UTC)

          1. Kevin, PA = father is definitely the definition .. “old man” does not mean any form of assistant or boyfriend. Man = boyfriend, old = former.
            So far as the capitals are concerned, the unwritten “convention” is that you can mislead by adding them where they shouldn’t be, but not by removing them where they should be. a totally stupid convention in my view, but a lot of them are..

            Edited at 2019-06-09 06:47 am (UTC)

            1. ‘Old man’ can definitely mean boyfriend, as of course can ‘man’, but here your reading of the clue seems inescapable. But I find it hard to conceive of the convention as permitting capitals ‘where they shouldn’t be’ as opposed to permitting them on the initial letter: I would be surprised to see, say, ‘mugWORt’ or ‘FLAN’, or even, ah, PA.
              2. The basis of the first-letter convention is that any word can be capitalised if it is at the beginning of a sentence. Since we are supposed to take each individual wordplay element separately before assembly (which is why I don’t like the insertion of an orthographic element into a homophone, but let’s not go there again) it is legitimate to write a word as if it were at the beginning of a sentence even when it isn’t. But by the same convention it is not legitimate to write a proper noun without a capital because this is never done. You can like or dislike this rule but it’s perfectly logical.
                People write things in capital letters all the time, for one reason or another. For emphasis, in signage, headlines, crossword answers. So it seems fine to me to do so here.

                Edited at 2019-06-09 09:04 am (UTC)

  7. Finished fifteen minutes with a grudgingly entered OLD MAN which I simply didn’t get. TENEMENT also went in unparsed. I’m afraid this was difficult for the sake of being difficult in my opinion, and I couldn’t even be bothered to submit it for competition purposes. Thank goodness for Mephisto !
  8. 28 minutes. I solved this after going to Communion. Our Sunday setters do rejoice in pithy clues, and EGAD is the most succinct statement of the Nicene Creed I’ve come across. I parsed, without hesitation, OLD MAN as PA, ie father, which was the definition, former being OLD and boyfriend MAN. I’d biffed TENEMENT without knowing where the first three letters had come from until guided. I have to make that COD, or should it be clues of the day? I liked LOLLIPOP MAN too. Very enjoyable. Thank you Guy and David.
  9. Only 24 minutes which I score as some sort of achievement considering there are some odd things going on here.

    I took the definition at 23ac to be PA despite the capital letters as using OLD MAN for ‘boyfriend’ would never have occurred to me, although I now find it is in Collins as a third option after ‘husband’ and ‘father’, both of which I am fully familiar with. Also ‘man’ for ‘Personal Assistant’ doesn’t sit right with me either, and certainly not in the context of business administration. Bertie Wooster had a ‘man’ of course but would never have used a term such as Personal Assistant, let alone PA. And Jeeves would have described himself a ‘genteman’s gentleman’. Whichever way one chooses to parse the clue it seems a bit odd, but as I have already mentioned this is an odd puzzle, demonstrated even more clearly at 29ac.

    I am delighted to admit that the reference to tattoos never occured to me at 26 as I assumed a connection between needlework and the ancient craft of ‘tatting’ as practised in lace-making. It turns out I was incorrect as tatting doesn’t involve needles because it’s a form of weaving that uses a type of shuttle instead, and also as far as I can find, the finished articles are not called ‘tat’. Still it was a more pleasant thought for a Sunday morning than having needles stuck into oneself.

    Edited at 2019-06-09 05:54 am (UTC)

    1. I also thought of tatting as needlework, and only found out that it isn’t, and that it’s not a noun, after reading Guy’s blog. Never thought of tattoo (that ‘tat’ isn’t in ODE, by the way).
  10. 1ac i took ‘across’ to equate to ‘covering’, as in covering all areas or across all areas?
    10ac what is the word ‘weekly’ doing in the clue? ‘Ale ration’ could be alcohol units.

    Many thanks in anticipation of a response.

    1. ‘Covering’ can’t be indicating ACROSS because there is no containment indicator (i.e. something telling you to put ACROSS inside LE).
      I suppose ‘weekly’ is just there because a ration tends to be an allowance over a particular period of time.
  11. 40 minutes, and I rather enjoyed them. Guy, should it be “You could say one’s a” underlined as the definition in 4d (my COD)? FOI 2d, LOI 29a TENEMENT, where I wanted to parse it before I wrote in the obvious answer, and it took me a while to clock that there was something almost Guardian-y going on!

    I had the same MERs as others, but the fact that I use, e.g. “1a” pretty much every day here made me perfectly happy with “a” for “across”, dictionaries notwithstanding, and the question-mark in 23 was enough for me to dismiss any queries of my own.

    Edited at 2019-06-09 07:42 am (UTC)

  12. I agree with jerrywh’s deconstruction of OLD MAN. PA is the definition. Old = former. Man = boyfriend.
    Thank you, Guy, for the ten in TENEMENT. I don’t think I would ever have got it.
    At one stage I thought there were a lot of anagrams but I only counted 5 in total. That’s about normal, isn’t it?
    LOLLIPOP MAN was my favourite.

    Edited at 2019-06-09 07:57 am (UTC)

    1. That was my original construction too—which I’ve gone back to!
  13. 15:07. The one that gave me the most trouble was SMALL LETTER. The wordplay is a bit tricky, and even when I’d seen how it worked I hesitated because SMALL LETTER struck me as something a 7-year-old would say rather than a legitimate grown-up term. It’s in the dictionaries though. Incidentally I think the primary definition is ‘you cold say one’s a’, and ‘non-chain rental service’ is a secondary, mildly cryptic one. SMALL LETTER is not a recognisable term for a rental service.
    I thought this was fun and I enjoyed the quirky bits. I never figured out what was going on with TENEMENT though so thanks for that.

    Edited at 2019-06-09 08:37 am (UTC)

    1. I didn’t get that, because that meaning of SMALL LETTER seemed a little “green paint” to me (and “non-chain” seemed to refer to a letter in a cryptic way as well), but I forgot to Google to see if the term had any real application in real estate.
  14. Our American friends seem to be heavily engaged in discussing the rights and wrongs of the innocuous 23ac.

    The majority of PAs are apparently female, although I had an excellent young American man as a PA, back in the day.

    The PArsing is irrelevant the answer was OLD MAN!

    My objection was the kerning at 2dn LEAM?

    FOI 9ac ICON

    LOI 6dn EAR!!

    COD 29ac TENEMENT one has to be on one’s toes!

    WOD PA!

    I thought 21ac might upset a few folk.

  15. 34:34 but annoyingly with two typos in my online entry: oFate at 22dn and tenemRnt at 29ac. The parsing of 29ac went over my head in any event. Didn’t have a clou what a clou was either.
  16. 17:09. Didn’t get ‘a’ for ‘across’ in 1A or where the TEN came from in 29A, so thanks for explaining. I liked EPOCH.

    Edited at 2019-06-09 10:14 am (UTC)

  17. 21 minutes for us today, and I notice that we’re solving this only one week late here in Oz.
    Thoroughly enjoyed this Sunday morning cerebral workout, grateful for the parsing of 29a thanks to Guy. Our main crosswords are the times and the guardian genius and so the device at 29a was acceptably devious.
  18. Thanks David and guy

    … have unravelled that parsing several times in puzzles from other papers, but didn’t have a clue about it here.
    Never seen CLOU before … and resorted to a dictionary to confirm that it was indeed a word when the U popped into the last crossing place. Was another that went down the ‘make lace’ – TAT route, instead of the skin pricking one.
    Finished in the SE corner, where all the contentious ones were. TENEMENT (with the first three letters unconfirmed), DREAM (don’t know why it was late) and OLD MAN (after struggling to convince myself that PA was really meant to be … well … pa).
    Found it a very enjoyable solve on Sunday evening after driving back from a weekend up in the country.

    1. I just wish my own brain would remember which tricks usually went with which papers! I’ve often missed the second hidden in the Guardian because my brain appears to stop looking for them after its found one, having been trained on the Times…

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