Sunday Times Cryptic 4937, by Dean Mayer — Crumbs of comfort

Author   Guy du SablePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
This time I’m writing this up almost a week after the working. The character of my marks indicates that I filled it in pretty quickly—when there’s a tough one, I like, for some reason, to inscribe the letters carefully, artfully with my Uniball Ultra Micro pen, but on an easier one (especially the Quickie), my calligraphy approaches a scrawl. This one is somewhere in between. In any case, I remember having it all worked except one when I climbed out of the tub (it’s hot bath season).

I indicate (gas an arm)* like this, and italicize anagrinds in the clues.

ACROSS
 1 Spot hiding fish in strong current (4,4)
TIDE RACE — T(IDE)RACE
 5 Tabloid needs right journalist to pressure (6)
REDTOP — R(ight) +ED(itor), “journalist” + TO + P(ressure)
10 Fat pig eating starters of raw greens — wow! (11)
FLABBERGAST — FLAB, “fat” + BE(R)(G)AST… unusual to see this form of the word, isn’t it? “This will flabbergast you!”
11 Sheep — English people generally (3)
EWE — Hey, who you callin’ sheeple? E(nglish) + WE, “people generally”
12 An example of this is not uncommon (6,8)
DOUBLE NEGATIVE — CD, if just barely… it’s not uncryptic.
15 Guy that mixed a new cocktail (9)
MANHATTAN — MAN, “Guy” + (that)* + A + N(ew) I can see its glimmering shore just across the East River when I walk on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, but I haven’t been to the eponymous isle since mid-March.
16 Man possibly following a path taken by bride? (5)
AISLE — A before ISLE, “Man, possibly”
17 Holy text published on approval from the east (5)
KORAN — OK<=“from the east” + RAN, “published”
19 Cleansing tractor, horse and lorry (9)
CATHARTIC — CAT, “tractor” + H(orse) + ARTIC, “lorry”
21 Row of buildings, factories etc. (5,9)
NOISE POLLUTION — CD, playing on two senses of “row” Also appeared in this Wednesday’s puzzle, also clued with a (somewhat better, or at least more C) CD.
23 Crumbs eaten by binge eater (3)
GEE — Hidden This was for me this puzzle’s most educational clue. My first thought was that GEE and “Crumbs” aren’t the same thing, but it turns out that their uses do overlap, GEE being an expression of surprise, enthusiasm or sympathy, and “Crumbs” expressing dismay or surprise. But I was only familiar with the former of the latter’s senses, seeing it as equivalent to Charlie Brown’s “Rats!”—and I was quite unaware that it, like GEE (from “Jesus”), is a euphemistic way to take the Christian Lord’s name in vain. Apparently, it started out as “Crums,” and substitutes for “Christ!” “Crumbs, you know it ain’t easy / You know how hard it can be-e-ee…”
24 Exciting? Alas, one isn’t excited (11)
SENSATIONAL — (Alas, one isn’t)*
26 Official witness that holds informer back (6)
NOTARY — Y(RAT)ON <=“back”… “by that tree,” “by YON tree”
27 Saw knees trembling in passion? (8)
WEAKNESS — (Saw knees)* Wins this episode’s Creative Anagrind Prize.

DOWN
 1 Hard to lose opening argument (4)
TIFF — [-s]TIFF
 2 Continue guarding old soldier (7)
DRAGOON — Who’s guarding the guardians? DRAG O(O)N
 3 Pull a leg bone (3)
RIB — DD
 4 Feature of bank statement, of course? (7,7)
CURRENT ACCOUNT — CURRENT is “course” and ACCOUNT “statement”; I guess this qualifies as an &lit. (No, it’s an &lit. after all. Thanks to keriothe for making up my mind.) There are two senses to the term, one being your personal holdings at your financial establishment and the other referring to a nation’s trade balance.
 6 Lavish living to hide ruin, mostly (11)
EXTRAVAGANT — EXT(RAVAG[-e])ANT
 7 Temperature cool — it’s horrible (3,4)
THE PITS — T(emperature) + HEP, “cool,” daddy-o + literally IT[’]S
 8 Will start to provide testimonial (10)
PREFERENCE — P[-rovide] + REFERENCE, “testimonial” My LOI, because it was hard for me to see “Will” as equivalent to PREFERENCE. “Where there’s a PREFERENCE, there’s a way,” anyone? However, there is a weaker sense of “Will” that is appropriate, and the two words are found together in synonym lists.
 9 Female worker expects to be given this (9,5)
MATERNITY LEAVE — CD, playing on the double sense of “expects”
13 Be in tears about crossing a river — it’s a problem (5-6)
BRAIN-TEASER — (Be in tears + A)* + R(iver)
14 A report’s conclusive evidence? (7,3)
SMOKING GUN — CD
18 Try to get into torn dress (7)
RAIMENT — R(AIM)ENT
20 Extremely tender bit to lick (7)
TROUNCE — T[-ende]R + OUNCE, “bit”
22 Stops losing good advantage (4)
PLUS — PLU[-g]S
25 One oddly like (3)
ILK — I, “One” + odd letters in LiKe… at first, I underlined the whole clue; there is overlap between wordplay and definition, but on a second look, the last word supplies the definition all by itself (ILK being a type, not one example of the “like”). Collins (online) has, in American English, ILK meaning “same, like,” but marks this as Obsolete. The current definition, “kind; sort; class” is said to be used “only in of that (or his, her, etc.) ilk, of the same sort or class: from a misunderstanding of the phrase of that ilk as used in Scotland to mean ‘of the same name…’…often used disparagingly.” The American and British entries differ only insignificantly.

40 comments on “Sunday Times Cryptic 4937, by Dean Mayer — Crumbs of comfort”

  1. I imagine this is my fastest time for a Dean puzzle. I also felt it was as close to vanilla as Dean gets. I was lucky to have very recently learned what ‘Crumbs!’ means, so my dimness with hiddens didn’t come into play.
  2. Ulaca had already indicated in comments on last Sunday’s blog that this was an easy one but I was listening to the 3rd Test between Australia and India from Sydney when I attacked it so I wasn’t really concentrating.
    In any event, I had no queries for Guy to answer.
    My two favourites for this were DOUBLE NEGATIVE and NOISE POLLUTION. The latter has cropped up again since.
  3. 15 minutes this morning. LOI TIDE RACE, COD MATERNITY LEAVE. From the UK, CRUMBS was defined as I would use it, with GEE being a US import, but one with us all my life, and used particularly by British fifties teenagers trying (and failing) to sound cool. I know because I was that man. A pleasant puzzle. Thank you Guy and Dean.
    1. I can’t let an opportunity to use my Billy Bunter avatar pass. ‘Crumbs!’ was one of his favourite expressions, along with “Oh, Crikey!” and of course “Yaroo!”. Schoolboy slang from the early days of the last century that survived well into the 1950s perpetuated in The Magnet and other comics and on BBC TV.
  4. Quite straightforward for a Dean.

    in recent months I have become quite surprised at the number of word repetitions I have been seeing, far more than hitherto. These repetitions are appearing every week now. And it stretches credulity to think that a phrase like “Noise pollution” should turn up twice in three days, purely by coincidence.
    I wonder what is causing it? Has The Times changed its rota? is it deliberate intervention by the editor(s)? I think we should be told ..

    1. My guess is that it was the same setter. No doubt he had a couple of good ideas for this phrase.
      But The Times convention is not to tell us.
      1. Except we know who this one is … Dean used not to set for the daily cryptic, but perhaps he does nowadays
        1. Dean is listed as one of the setters for the puzzles in book 24 in the Times xwd books series, which has puzzles from 2016. (And book 23/2015 – no list in previous books).

          I get no information about the content of upcoming Times crosswords, and as far as I know the same applies for Richard Rogan and upcoming ST ones. That list in the Times books is of 24 different setters, so there’s a pretty good chance that it was someone else’s Times puzzle. Not for the first time, I quote Mike Laws who once said (from memory) “It would be actually be far more surprising if this never happened”. In this puzzle, NOISE POLLUTION has fairly friendly checking letters (N?I?E?O?L?T?O?) and I suspect it twice just looked more appealing than some alternatives fitting whichever of those were in place when it was chosen.

          As I’ve mentioned the Times xwd books, I’m taking this chance to mention that on 2 September (according to the Amazon UK site), all good bookshops will have book 1 in a new Sunday Times cryptic crossword series. Like the Times ones, it will have 100 puzzles, and as long as it does well enough, the plan is to have one every two years, alternating with the concise series.

          Edited at 2021-01-17 11:09 am (UTC)

          1. Ah, thanks for the info., Peter. Yes I agree that coincidences will happen, it is just my impression over the past year or so that they are happening much more regularly than they used to. Perhaps its been going on all the time and I’ve just become more sensitive to it.. what do others think?

            I am absolutely hopeless at identifying setters, though Dean’s style is more individual than most, and last Weds. doesn’t feel like one of his to me.

            None of this is a problem at all, it is just interesting.

            1. There may just have been a bit of a run of them. Just as it’s inevitable that this will happen, it’s inevitable that incidences will cluster from time to time.
    2. When it comes to coincidence/repetition, please also bear in mind how setters work. I’m either normal or abnormal in never moving to a different puzzle while one remains unfinished. On the other hand, a friend who sets elsewhere will often tweet the day’s appearance of a puzzle set 4-5 years ago. This may be for thematic reasons – an idea started with the need to use certain answers/clues and they were brought in first, allowing freedom to switch over to something else, perhaps more urgent. The similar ideas in clues a few days apart may have years separating their writing.
      Another factor: Long answers can be problematic. In most cases they will offer either a CD or an anagram, and anagrams are precious – most outlets restrict how many can be used. When we invoke the wordlist for a long answer slot, we scroll down until something shouts a potential idea, and we dismiss everything before that point. Over time, inevitably, the attractive answers are depleted and we will start to re-use the good ones. We hope, of course, to improve on an old idea, but there’s only so far you can go. In the end you just hope the repetition is long enough after the original to either entertain new solvers or to give the more experienced the ego boost of knowing how good their memories are!
      1. Hey, Dean.. one of the things you are saying is that software has made a vast difference to how crosswords are set .. and this is surely true. Gone are the days when Ximenes would start with a blank grid and start to pencil in interesting words until he was able to complete a grid. Life must be much easier now, at least in that particular area, but possibly the software is setting patterns we are not noticing.
        Also the power of the Internet search is available now to show how many times a word has come up .. it is much easier now to compare crosswords over time. We can say for example that the wonderful priest Eli has turned up 614 time since TfTT started 🙂
  5. I had 6 left at 12 noon after about 45 minutes, so this was easier for me than most Dean puzzles. But the final six did take a while. FOI was EWE; LOI the unknown TIDE RACE. It was the NW where I had the blanks and eventually I saw TIFF which opened up the last few.
    COD to Maternity Leave. Enjoyed the test.
    David
  6. I got through this one so quickly that I didn’t read the wordplay properly for 15a and biffed MANHATTEN. Nice puzzle. 20:30 WOE:-(
  7. Penfold tends to say “crumbs” when something bad is about to happen (which is often) but I tend to use it more in a “goodness me” sort of sense.

    Agree that this was gentle by Dean’s standards.

  8. 10:59. A couple of quibbles:
    > I don’t see 4dn as an &Lit. As I read it the definition is ‘feature of bank’ and the wordplay (statement, of course?) is a sort of whimsical reference to the ACCOUNT (statement) of a CURRENT (course).
    > I do think 25dn is &Lit, since the whole thing is needed for the wordplay, which means that either part of it is doing double duty as the definition (not allowed) or the whole thing is definition (allowed).
      1. I don’t know who decided, but it’s a well-established rule and you never see it. So this clue is either an &Lit or an extremely rare deviation from a consistently adhered-to convention.

        Edited at 2021-01-17 02:21 pm (UTC)

        1. It’s a failed &lit, which I’ve seen a lot of. The whole thing doesn’t work as a definition without the wordplay.
    2. I’m afraid this isn’t a science but an art and classifications may vary. “Feature of bank” seemed too elliptical to be the whole def. for 4. I suspect 25 may indeed be meant as an &lit but I’m rather demanding when it comes to this most difficult of clue types.

      Edited at 2021-01-17 02:26 pm (UTC)

      1. It is elliptical, but I can’t see how ‘feature of bank’ plays any part in the wordplay, which would be required of the clue is &Lit.
        1. Ah, you’re right. I had this as a CD at first, went back and forth. “I guess this is” was a hedge and I meant to reconsider. “Of course” isn’t part of the definition either.
          1. As ever, the nitty gritty about this is completely ignored (or at least not thought important enough to send an email) by the “ordinary solvers” rather than the “crossword rules fusspots”, and I’m using that description because crossword editors often have to be such fusspots. Personally, I’m happy that the clue tells you enough for you to find the answer, which is surely the reason why all the detailed rules are there. So far, nobody is saying “this was so unfair that I couldn’t solve the clue”.
            1. Yeah, I noticed too that only my fellow Sunday blogger addressed these fine points. Even Vinyl said he didn’t “overthink” anything in this one.
              1. Maybe we could get “Puzzle Fusspot” onto the word list so that it could keep popping up. Ill bet the setters could think of dozens of ways to clue it.
  9. …I turned MANHATTAN into an AISLE of joy, and was another to turn in a PB for a Dean puzzle.

    FOI EWE
    LOI NOTARY
    COD NOISE POLLUTION (liked MATERNITY LEAVE too)
    TIME 8:02

    1. I’ve only come across it in crosswords, and I think I got badly caught out the first time I encountered it.
  11. 16.54. A rare sub-20 minute solve on a DM puzzle, this setter definitely showing his softer side.
  12. 21 minutes, my fastest time not just for a Dean puzzle but more or less for any Times cryptic. No real problems, nothing unknown, and actually I solved in 20 minutes but thought it wise to proofread for a minute. All quite unlike other recent puzzles which I can’t quite finish.

    By the way, since PB is commenting, but not solving these with us, what is the exact criterion for a time to constitute a PB?

  14. Thanks Dean and guy
    Was a one sitting jobbie to get this one done and was able to maintain a steady progress throughout. There were a couple of look ups required to check up YON for ‘that’, PREFERENCE for ‘will’ and OUNCE for ‘bit’.
    Liked all of the long clues but MATERNITY LEAVE was the one to bring a grin.
    Finished in the NE corner with that PREFERENCE, REDTOP (which I continue to forget) and THE PITS (which I thought very good as well).

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