Sunday Times Cryptic 4901, by Dean Mayer — Paint It, Red

Author   Guy du SablePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
In this puzzle I was delighted to find, like a shiny prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box, a word heretofore utterly unknown to me, and which I can’t even imagine running across in real life anytime soon, clued as an anagram, and gettable only after the checkers were in, but got, which is to me one of the supreme gratifications in working these things. This word is the kind of thing one expects to find in profusion in the weekly Mephisto—whose namesake, the devil we know, lurks below—which, had I but Dictionaries enough and Time, I would tackle more often. I speak, of course, of MINIATE, which was my POI and is now filed under the rubric of “Surely never to be forgotten” (we’ll see…).

With His Satanic Majesty materializing alongside SATISFACTION and ROLLING STONE, we almost have a theme going.

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

ACROSS
 1 Swimmer covering bottom that’s not sexy? (8)
FRUMPISH — F(RUMP)ISH
 5 Base coat for a skirting edge (6)
PRIMER — P(RIM)ER, PER being “for a” and RIM, “edge”
 9 Trigger’s memo about opening time (8)
DETONATE — D(NOTE<=“about”)ATE
10 Orange or rust? (6)
CARROT — CAR ROT(!) My Last One Parsed, believe it or not.
12 The devil, he helps me out, keeping one close (14)
MEPHISTOPHELES — Sympathy from the devil? (he helps me)* with I, “one” + STOP, “close” inserted
14 Fantastic—two bones (5)
RADII — RAD, “Fantastic” + ii, “two”
15 Divide then bind an element in a different form (9)
ALLOTROPE — ALLOT, “Divide” + ROPE, “bind”
17 Zombie relative almost eating fruit (9)
AUTOMATON — A Trump voter in my family? AUN[-t] swallowing TOMATO (which doesn’t look at all like brains)
19 Early morning, first pair of big feet (5)
IAMBI — I (1) AM + BI[-g] To quote James Merrill, “The little feet that patter here are metrical.”
21 A contamination, perhaps (5,9)
BLOOD POISONING — It could also be B contamination, say, hence “perhaps.” Neat &lit, and it took me a minute to see the def.
24 Stories about good old monarch’s fluffy cat (6)
ANGORA — AN(G)(O)(R)A If I ever see ANA outside of a crossword puzzle, it will be a red-letter day.
25 Boxing, not boxing book author (5,3)
NOBLE ART — NO(B)(LEAR)T My LOI, and coming in last at least partly because a competition in which knocking one’s opponent unconscious is an accepted and even desired outcome strikes me as the farthest thing from NOBLE, notwithstanding the admiration rightly due to figures such as Muhammad Ali.
26 Criticism surrounding husband’s funny routine (6)
SHTICK — Please don’t embarrass me again, dear…  S(H)TICK
27 Go outside when he finds a beach relic (8)
SEASHELL — SE(AS)(HE)LL, “How much does it go for?” “How much does it SELL for?”

DOWN
 1 Fancy European flag (4)
FADE — FAD, a collective “Fancy” + E(uropean)
 2 Prudent new investor will welcome this (7)
UPTREND — (Prudent)*
 3 A pagan god is among ones identified for worship? (9)
PANTHEISM — PAN, “A pagan god” + THE(IS)M, “is” surrounded by THEM, “ones identified”
 4 Small, it’s a bustling camp settlement (12)
SATISFACTION — S(mall) + (it’s a)* + FACTION, “camp”
 6 Get to lecture? No parking (5)
REACH — [-p]REACH
 7 This cherry is extra large, see (7)
MORELLO — MORE, “extra” + L(arge) + LO, “see!”
 8 Rhubarb is dry but full of one’s spit (10)
ROTISSERIE — ROT, “Rhubarb” + IS + SER(I)E
11 Progressive rock from one of The Drifters? (7,5)
ROLLING STONE — ROLLING, “Progressive” + STONE, “rock,” with a CD
13 A modest bar’s fancy dishes (10)
DREAMBOATS — (A model bar’s)*
16 Sing, later playing percussion instruments (9)
TRIANGLES — (Sing, later)*
18 Half of them should care (7)
THOUGHT — TH[-em] + OUGHT, “should”
20 Unexpected item in bagging area is paint (red) (7)
MINIATE — (item in)* holding A(rea) 1 : to paint with red lead or vermilion | 2a : to decorate (as a manuscript) with letters or the like painted red : RUBRICATE… from Latin miniatus, past participle of miniare to color with cinnabar or red lead, from minium cinnabar, red lead. From the same root we get “miniature,” thanks to those medieval illuminated manuscripts.
22 A kind of column of wood or ice (5)
DORIC — Hidden
23 Very good deal rejected for this type of aircraft (4)
VTOL — V(ery) +LOT<=“rejected” Vertical Take Off and Landing (Actually, this is another word I didn’t know, until informed by the commenter below.)

58 comments on “Sunday Times Cryptic 4901, by Dean Mayer — Paint It, Red”

    1. Thanks! I’ve amended the blog! Another word I’d never seen before (though not as interesting as MINIATE).
    3. Very great deal = lots in my book . Don’t see why both aren’t allowable.
      1. I tried to justify STOL as the answer but couldn’t make sense of “very.” My original blog entry said this. What’s the difference between “a lot” and “lots”? I don’t think there is one, really, but if we were to say “lots” means “a whole lot,” can you also say it’s “a very good deal”? Seems to me that the idiom “a good deal” loses the sense of “a lot” or “lots” when you add “very”: it now means a deal that is very good.
        (“A great deal” is not used in this clue.)

        Edited at 2020-05-10 10:27 pm (UTC)

      2. Both aren’t allowable because ATOL isn’t a type of aircraft!
        This is one of those ‘is this an obscurity’ questions that arises from time to time. It seems to me the wordplay here is ambiguous, and many contributors here (who tend to have quite extensive vocabulary) didn’t know VTOL, so I would, on balance, say that the clue is a bit unfair.
        This is someone who knew perfectly well that the answer was VTOL and still put in ATOL, which doesn’t fit any aspect of the clue, so what do I know?
          1. Ah yes, sorry. The point stands though: STOL isn’t a type of aircraft either!
              1. Sorry, I have been completely missing the point all this time! In my defence no-one has actually pointed this out explicitly until now, so I thought the complaint was just ‘how can I be expected to guess this totally obscure thing when there are two possibilities from the wordplay’.
                So the clue is clearly ambiguous and STOL would have to be allowed in competition conditions.
                1. No, VTOL, as I explained above in this thread, is the only good answer, since “a very good deal” does not mean “lots.”
                  1. Since I was missing the point so comprehensively in a different way that part of the argument passed me by!
                    I see your point, and people would generally say ‘a great deal’ in these circumstances. But ‘you are in a very good deal of trouble, young man’ is perfectly grammatical and understandable English so I personally wouldn’t mark STOL as wrong.
                    1. Thst sounds very strange I think the sense of the idiom is lost when “very” is added to “good.” I wouldn’t count STOL as a correct answer.
  2. I made hard work of this taking 52 minutes, only to find that STOL was incorrect. It was like finding out at the end of the evening that she hadn’t saved the last dance for me. Paint all the squares black. I didn’t know LOI MINIATE but it eventually fell out of the anagram. I also post event checked the first three letters of RADII, being insufficiently with it to know that word for fantastic. COD to ROLLING STONE. Thank you Guy, and also Dean, unless you deliberately set up the elephant trap of STOL for VTOL.

    Edited at 2020-05-10 07:43 am (UTC)

  3. I had a very slow start on this one, and apparently didn’t speed up much from there, given that I took an hour and three to finish. Thanks for parsing 21a BLOOD POISONING, which I couldn’t see at the time, but which I think is great now I know how it works!

    FOI 18a IAMBI (not usually the kind of word I have for my FOI!) LOI 8d ROTISSERIE, GOD (groan of the day) 10a CARROT. VTOL well-known to me as the production of the second-generation Harrier “jump jet” during my boyhood was very newsworthy and even prompted a video game, Strike Force Harrier, that I spent (wasted?) many hours playing on my Acorn Electron…

    Edited at 2020-05-10 06:58 am (UTC)

  4. As good as Dean’s efforts always are
    Seeing the “very” I put VTOL straight in, other possibilities fortunately not occurring to me. Nho miniate but it was all it could be. I seldom miniate, these days.
  5. One of Dean’s best in my view. 20d is now in my Crossword Hall of Fame. I just loved “Unexpected Item In Bagging Area”. Superb. My only question is why was “red” in brackets?
    Not far behind is CAR ROT. Vying for the bronze medal position on the podium are PANTHEISM and IAMBI.
    As I spent my entire working life in aviation and remember the Harrier well, VTOL was not a problem.
    The three references to Mick, Keith etc were just the icing on the cake.
    1. In the surface, “paint” is a noun; as “red” is intrinsic to the definition, it had to be added some way.
  6. ….but I got some SATISFACTION, before throwing in the towel after 15 minutes. VTOL wasn’t a problem, but DNK MINIATE or UPTREND, both of which I biffed correctly. Thanks to Guy for parsing DETONATE.

    I was eventually stuck at 10A/8D. Had I spotted CARROT , I’d have got ROTISSERIE.

    COD ROLLING STONE

  7. At first I thought this was going to be impossible to finish. I got 8 clues in my first hour and only had 13 after a second session. But I stuck with it and finished the puzzle at 6.35pm.
    However victory was STOLen from me. I thought that you could get LOTS in a very good deal. Did not think of Very=V; and it is obviously a better solution.
    So I’ll join BW with a hangdog expression in the STOL hangar.
    LOI ROTISSERIE. COD to PRIMER although I also liked the unexpected item in the bagging area.
    David
  8. Worth it for ‘unexpected item in the bagging area’. No problems but had to take the unknown MINIATE on t’rust.
  9. Fortunately STOL never occured to me, as I was very familiar with VTOL from the Harrier Jump Jets which, as already mentioned, had a prominent role in the Falklands War. MINIATE was constructed from the anagrist once the checkers were in(and checked on Google!). The rest of the clues were gradually dragged into submission, but 47:36 had elapsed before I submitted. Thanks Dean and Guy.
  10. For your comment alone on 25a you should be disqualified for failing to meet the required weight.
        1. Hey, buddy, you wanna take this outside? Ha!

          Yes, that’s what it is, a cryptic crossword, glad you noticed. But when I revealed that I did not get one answer till very late because I find the definition oxymoronic, for the indisputable reasons I gave, you decided to make it personal, opining that I am not qualified to blog.

          Evidently, you were taking the defense of boxing. The crossword, though, merely used an epithet that has traditionally been attached to the activity, and I didn’t say the puzzle is flawed, only why I, featherweight though I may be, did not immediately see the connection.

  11. 16:36. 20dn is brilliant, and I assume must have arisen from the observation by Dean that ‘unexpected item in bagging area’ constitutes wordplay for this particular word. The clue is a bit spoiled for me by the weird brackets though. I’d have just left the word ‘red’ out altogether. All it does is add some completely unnecessary precision to a word no-one’s going to know anyway!
    Like GM I’m perfectly familiar with VTOL from the Harrier Jump Jet, which played a prominent role in the Falklands War. So I will never know what possessed me to type in ATOL. Was it just a typo? Did I somehow manage to get a fighter jet mixed up with a circular coral reef? I will never know.
    1. I was writing my comment as the same time as you. Spooky we both put in ATOL and commented as such simultaneously!
      1. Ha! Spooky indeed. Great minds and all that. It’s very odd because I do remember thinking of the Harrier Jump Jet as I put in the answer. I’ve just no idea how I put in ATOL, or how that survived my customary answer check. Of course when you check your answers you don’t necessarily remember the clues so it may just have been a case of not knowing with sufficient certainty how to spell ATOLL. As I said, I will never know!

        Edited at 2020-05-10 10:13 am (UTC)

    2. I think when cluing obscure words, it’s best to use the first definition, of which “red” is here an essential part.
      1. Collins has ‘to paint with minium’, which is still painting. The other way round (defining ‘paint’ as ‘miniate’) would be a DBE but this way round it seems fine to me: indeed completely conventional.
        1. A very particular kind of paint, this is. I have to side with the setter and editor on including “red”—quite aside from its having given me another Rolling Stones reference. As you probably know, it was Decca Records that so oddly placed a comma in the title for the sungle release of “Paint It[,] Black.” People wondered if it wasn’t a call-out to African Americans.

          Edited at 2020-05-10 03:17 pm (UTC)

          1. That’s interesting, I did not know that. Probably cock-up rather than conspiracy.
            Rolling Stones aside, I regard the ‘red’ as unnecessary. RADII are very particular kinds of bones, VTOL is a very particular type of aircraft, BLOOD POISONING is a particular sort of contamination… I can’t see any reason for treating MINIATE as a special case. And ‘unexpected item in bagging area is paint’ is a much neater surface.

            Edited at 2020-05-10 03:35 pm (UTC)

            1. No question, there was no conspiracy! Just a typo or mistaken choice.
              “Red” might have helped someone somewhere get this rather obscure answer, or get it more quickly. But we’re just repeating ourselves now.

              Edited at 2020-05-10 03:48 pm (UTC)

              1. Guy is right (many thanks for the blog btw). The easier answers for 20d just weren’t yielding clues that didn’t feel old, and when the wordplay for this jumped out it was too much to resist – but it’s an uncommon word for which the def ‘paint’, while accurate, just wasn’t helpful enough, not least because it can be verb/noun. The idea isn’t to defeat the solver but to give an extra nudge towards the answer when it feels appropriate.
                1. Thanks Dean, for the puzzle as ever and for the clarification. I stand by my view though. The vast majority of solvers (me included) won’t have had a clue what MINIATE meant, without it causing a problem solving the clue. Nothing wrong with that: deducing obscure words from wordplay is one of the fun things about these puzzles. Among the small minority who know what MINIATE means though I would be surprised if you found a single person who was able to answer/not answer this clue because of the presence/absence of the word ‘red’.
                  Anyway, Grannie, that’s how you suck eggs!
                  1. Googling this phrase and slight variants has not turned up the original, only other people invoking it as if everyone will know what they mean. I sure don’t.
                      1. Thanks. I’d already gathered how the expression is used, and these dictionaries leave me in the dark as to its origin. “Sucking eggs”?
                        2. I am sorry to say that I’m inclined to think the off-color explanation is the most plausible.
  12. 34:38 with 1 pink square. I unaccountably put ATOL in for 23D when I knew it was VTOL. LOI ROTISSERIE once I had corrected IAMBS to IAMBI. I liked DREAMBOATS and DETONATE best, but the “unexpected item…” too.
  13. 36:38 but I was another stol. Just didn’t know the required acronym. Held up by car rot in an “is that it?” sort of a way. I liked the unsexy swimmer’s bottom in 1ac, radii, blood poisoning and of course the brilliant unexpected item in bagging area leading to the unknown miniate.
  14. Had Au-burn here, i appreciate slightly wrong on a couple of levels, but i don’t think CARROT is tremendously better.
      1. Au = gold = OR
        Burn = oxidise (Chambers) = rust
        It requires a bit too much of a three-point turn in a thesaurus, but it almost works!

        Edited at 2020-05-10 08:39 pm (UTC)

  15. Nah, there’s really only one good answer here; some of us just hadn’t heard of it (me) or didn’t remember it. The flaw I saw with my answer, as it appeared in the earliest version of this blog entry, should have told me that I needed to look further.
  16. From vaguely remembered schoolboy maths comes the definition of a quadratic equation: a q.e. has two solutions, either two distinct real solutions, one double real solution or two imaginary solutions. IMHO, this clue is an example. It cannot be described as a trap, elephant or otherwise, but merely a toss-up “Guess what the setter is thinking.”
    Stephen
  17. and I find Guy brawling outside with all-comers. Memories of Piccadilly Circus on VE night, miniating the town red!!

    FOI 7dn MORELLO

    LOI 20dn MONTAGE!! DNF!

    COD 26ac SHTICK

    WOD 12ac MEPHISTOPHELES

    Guy-The NOBLE ART is the noble art- a year in the ‘Pop’ would have helped you no end!

  18. Thanks Dean and guy
    Found this one quite tough, almost stretching out to the 2 hour mark over a number of sittings. Even then, along with some others it seems, I managed to get 23d wrong, didn’t see the clever play with A for blood type at 23a and for some reason didn’t parse ALLOTROPE at all.
    Took a while to unravel SEASHELL and, again like a number of others, had not heard of MINIATE (with its excellent surface). Grinned at CARROT when finally saw the play with rust.
    Finished in the SE corner with NOBLE ART (on guy’s side here) and my wrong stab at 23d as the last one in.

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