Sunday Times Cryptic 4951, by David McLean — CD-aRAMa

Author   Guy du SablePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic

The last time I blogged, there was a bit of discussion about Cryptic Definitions, in which both the setter and the editor joined in. I just sat back with some popcorn (so to speak). An imaginative and, optimally, amusing CD is of course as good as any other kind of clue. They often keep me guessing a bit longer because I am looking for wordplay first. For this puzzle, we’re given a larger than usual selection from the setter’s CD collection. See anything you like? Once you’d solved two or three, you probably didn’t expect any more, but after four or five, you might have wondered where it ends.

Quite enjoyable, this, but there were a few clues that I did not find fully satisfying. Either they are missing something, or I am (which is far from unthinkable).

I indicate (A man rags)* like this, and italicize anagrinds in the clues.

ACROSS
 1 Axe-wielding man with hand round a neck? (9)
GUITARIST — Scary! CD “Axe-wielding man” could be an easy-enough cryptic clue for GUITARIST in an otherwise noncryptic puzzle. The extra words may not slow down anyone’s solve, but they certainly make the clue more entertaining.
 6 Eastern region relations coming over by punt (5)
TIBET — IT<=“coming over” + BET, “punt”
 9 Costs of rings (5)
TOLLS — DD
10 A quiet word of advice for office allocator? (9)
APPOINTER — A + P, “quiet” + POINTER, “word of advice”
11 Broadway theatre? (9,4)
OPERATING ROOM — I had considerable trouble seeing what “Broadway” is doing here, but [Edit: I missed the obvious. It’s just to indicate that the term is an Americanism. The rest is left just for y’all to laugh at.] decided it must be a factitiously compound word indicating that this is a “broad (i.e., longer) way” to say this sense of “theatre,” which so often indicates that the letters OR are part of an answer. I almost classed this as another CD, but had second thoughts; yours are welcome.
14 Prisoner with name sewn in stockings (7)
HOSTAGE — HOS(TAG)E
16 Trips in which stars get unwanted exposure (7)
OUTINGS — DD
17 Engineers seen by coach and train for the second time (7)
RETEACH — RE, Royal “Engineers” + TEACH, “coach”
19 Cut from the Man City football squad? (7)
TOPSIDE — TOP SIDE… “Cut” of beef from the thigh, no bone (I had to look it up; it’s a UK term). Wikipedia: “Manchester City jointly hold the record for most second division titles with Leicester City, both clubs having won the league on seven occasions.”
21 A tender time in Barking is unknown (13)
INDETERMINATE — (A tender time in)*
24 I’m turning in skilled horseman to get a hearing (9)
GOODNIGHT — “Good knight”—good grief!
26 Love to tuck into beer for a moment (5)
POINT — P(O)INT
27 Computer system news chief’s given a shot (5)
DOSED — DOS, “computer system” + ED, “news chief”… (I am glad to report that I will have gotten my Pfirst Pfizer shot by the time you read this.)
28 Lockdown? End of this in stormy April, say (9)
PARALYSIS — ([-thi]S + April, say)*

DOWN
 1 Do nothing or fetch two presents (3,7)
GET NOWHERE — GET, “fetch” + NOW HERE, “two presents”
 2 Bug over loch is evil (7)
ILLNESS — ILL, “evil” + NESS, name of a famous “loch”
 3 Very bewildered, in the main? (2,3)
AT SEA — DD
 4 I’m a hit with a gent dressed by George (7,4)
IMAGINE THAT — (I’m a hit + a gent)*
 5 Touch of cold? (3)
TAP — The wordplay is an oblique DBE referring to the sense of “faucet” (it might be hot), which wouldn’t, however, have stood on its own as even a non-cryptic clue. This was my LOI, or very close, and though the foregoing explanation may not be entirely convincing, I am not going to attempt to explain the convoluted theory that I first formulated.
 6 Criminal in photo stealing books possibly over forty, by the looks of it (4,2,3)
THIN ON TOP — (in photo + NT, “books”)* It would be the hair of the middle-aged chap that’s THIN ON TOP, a reference to which is conspicuously missing here. (None of that hair is itself nearly so old!)
 7 Superhero grabs small chap a bouncer might hit (7)
BATSMAN — BAT(S)MAN
 8 Dashed nonsense written about EU leader (4)
TORE — ROT<=“about” + E
12 I get no credit for putting down celebrity life (11)
GHOSTWRITER — CD
13 Women at work who’ll tell you where to go! (10)
USHERETTES — CD
15 Possibly sleeping around with old knight is wild (9)
ABANDONED — AB(AND,“with”)(O)(N)ED
18 Men in suits? (7)
TAILORS — CD
20 Type to give one stress with rightist slant? (7)
ITALICS — CD
22 Force wild child on drug to get counsel finally (5)
IMPEL — IMP, “wild child” + E(cstasy) + [-counse]L
23 Days and years on earth rising? Blimey! (4)
EGAD — D + AGE <=“rising”
25 Space is ultimately big and likely endless (3)
GAP — [-bi]G + AP[-t]

41 comments on “Sunday Times Cryptic 4951, by David McLean — CD-aRAMa”

  1. I liked Get Nowhere, Ghostwriter (which liking, I guess, places me vis-a-vis CDs), and the blog. Thanks Guy
  2. Somehow I think that the fact that MANCHESTER CITY is top of the premier league is a more likely justification for TOPSIDE. I stupidly put USHERESSES instead of USHERETTES. Then I had to put an O in PILS (beer) to get POILS, which isn’t a word. But the wordplay worked so perfectly I assumed it must be.
    1. I really have no idea what I’m talking about when it comes to sports, let alone UK football. My use of a WIkipedia quote (which does say, however, that they have often “won the league”…?) is a(nother) tip-off to that.

      Edited at 2021-04-25 05:10 am (UTC)

  3. Americans know zip about football (played with the foot) as noted by the collapse of the European $uper League last week. An ab$olutely shamele$$ attempt at a ‘Coup de $occer!

    Manchester City have won the Second Division seven times but it would be awfully bad manners to even mention it!
    American sport does not have promotion and relegation so it is beyond your comprehension!They were once the “Yo-Yo” club.
    The ‘ManCs’ are built presently on Arab Emirate oil dollars and have Barca’s Pep Guardiola as a manager, who knows a great deal about philosophy. But not as much as Eric Cantona!

    City are known as “The Noisy Neighbours” as they are sited close to the giants of football MANCHESTER UNITED who also loathe Liverpool and Leeds United – who we play later today at Elland Road. Fortunately with no crowd allowed, there will be no rendition of ‘Who’s that sitting on the runway?’ which was penned in the Sixties. Go You Reds! ‘Simply Red’ is named after Manchester United! ‘Oasis’ are City boys! The Pale Blues.

  4. I forgot to note my time but it was normal. No problems, but the neck of the guitar and Broadway in those cryptics were certainly distractions.I liked GHOSTWRITER best. I notice that some cricket fans are getting hot under the collar about a BATSMAN being called a batter in The Hundred. Much a s I regret that competition and many of the other ‘innovations’, that’s what they’ve always been called in Lancashire. Hornby and Barlow long ago would have been batters too. Thank you Guy and setter.
    1. And Batman is not a superhero. He has no superpowers but has merely trained his own natural abilities to the peak of physical perfection. And he is rich with lots of gadgets.
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  6. Since I’ve never heard the expression OPERATING ROOM I assumed that ‘Broadway’ indicates an Americanism. And I haven’t watched an US hospital drama since Dr Kildare in the 1960’s so I don’t know what the Americans call an operating theatre.

    Edited at 2021-04-25 06:00 am (UTC)

      1. Yes. Not my thing. I remember now I watched the first few episodes of ‘House’ because I like Hugh Laurie but I soon gave up when I realised it was working to a basic format that was going to be the same each week. It may have improved later but I was lost to it by then. If they referred to operating rooms I didn’t notice.

        Edited at 2021-04-25 11:56 am (UTC)

    2. D’oh! Thanks, Jackkt. I guess my impression comes from American cryptics that “theatre”—“theater,” rather—is often used for OR. Also, the “compound word” ruse is something my Anerican friends Joshua and Henri do in their puzzles (Out of Left Field blog); I’m not sure now that I’ve ever seen it here.

      Edited at 2021-04-25 09:16 am (UTC)

  7. ….I submitted “tells” instead of TOLLS. I thought it was weak, but, since I’d already formed the same opinion of APPOINTER, RETRAIN, and TAILORS, I let it by.

    I was never on the wavelength here (but then I haven’t been for much of April) and spent 15:33 while writing copious derogatory marginalia.

    I particularly disliked the blatant ageism of THIN ON TOP. You can have this “affliction” any time from your late teens (Prince William anybody ?) whilst I still have a full head of hair at 73. Just not sound logic.

    I was puzzled by Broadway, and even considered that 55 Broadway is the operations centre of Transport for London — which made OPERATING ROOM at least a little vague. Once I accepted (grudgingly) that it simply inferred the USA in general, I thought no more of it.

    I needed a while to see TOPSIDE (LOI) as I detest Manchester City, and everything their zillionaire owner and his like have done to the game here in England. I once stood regularly on the Stretford End at Manchester United — now I couldn’t be bothered to urinate on their car park.

    The puzzle generally left me feeling dissatisfied, although I did like PARALYSIS, and COD GOODNIGHT.

    1. Well, the definition for THIN ON TOP did have “possibly”, though maybe “fifty” would have been a better age – some website informs me that more than half of men over 50 are bald “to some extent”. (See pic<== for one example – taken when I was 36 …)

      55 Broadway has gone the same way as many other famous HQs – London Transport (or whatever they’re called this year) left in 2015 and apparently it’s going to become (wait for it) a fancy hotel.

      Edited at 2021-04-25 08:42 am (UTC)

  8. The queries are mostly answered, but no-one has yet said that “thin on top” is simply an idiom (presumably in British or British-influenced English only) which always relates to hair, just as “upstairs” and “use your loaf” are about another part of your head, not specified in the words of the idiom.
  9. Yes, it always relates to hair, but I’ve never heard it used without more explicit references to follicles.
    1. Well, the first hit for “going thin on top” in Google Books has: “For the three boys were now grown men, and the eldest, David, was even going thin on top though I fell romantically for the young Pat …”. Plus other hits on the first page.
      1. “Going thin on top” is a bit different from just saying, “He’s thin on top.” Just a hair. It seemed a bit odd.
        But you can certainly say, “He’s balding,” which is how Lexico defines “thin on top.”
        So “getting thin on top” would be “becoming balding.”

        Edited at 2021-04-25 08:57 am (UTC)

        1. The use of “going” in usages like “going crazy” and “going well” does not change the meaning of the other word.
          And unless you think that “balding” needs more clarification when it describes losing hair in the most visible place, that ODE definition confirms that “thin on top” in the clue says enough.

          Edited at 2021-04-25 09:19 am (UTC)

          1. I was just kidding around about “getting”…please!
            And I wasn’t saying anything different from you about “balding.”
            This clue was too vague for me—or not, since I did get it.
            1. You started out with “It would be the hair of the middle-aged chap that’s THIN ON TOP, a reference to which is conspicuously missing here.”

              Rather than making a comment which appears to be critical, and provoking a debate where you end up saying that at some point you were only kidding, maybe it would be have been better to google for “thin on top”, which would have confirmed the usage in the clue, and say (if anything) that it was used in a slightly different way on your side of the Atlantic.

              Edited at 2021-04-25 11:18 am (UTC)

              1. Obviously, I should have looked further, but going by the dictionary alone, the usage doesn’t seem basically different from the usage here. I acknowledged that usage, but still found it somewhat of a leap to go directly to that idiom from that clue. Still seems odd to me to say, “He’s thin on top”—his head doesn’t taper!

                My remark that I was “only kidding” when I made one offhand remark about the idiom (“going…”) that you Googled was not disingenuous (how could that possibly have been serious?), but I was giving you too much credit for being able to read my mind when it rattled off on that tangent instead of letting me get back to sleep.

                Edited at 2021-04-25 01:13 pm (UTC)

                1. “Seems odd”: that’s practically a definition of the phrases we call “idioms”. ODE “idiom” def: “A group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words (e.g. over the moon, see the light)”. A footballer who is “over the moon” about winning says so with his feet quite clearly on the earth.
                  1. Yes, and all language is ultimately convention. The idioms you mention do not strike me as “odd” in quite the same way, but I’m not arguing with you.
  10. Generally I liked this but I had some problems. I was another with USHERESSES who thought POILS must be a word. I also had a very confident NIP at 5d which meant I never did get 1a. I have promised myself this is the last time I get caught out by AXE in a clue.
    I also struggled to parse the OPERATING ROOM.
    I enjoyed EGAD.
    David
  11. as I had INDETERMINANT (Oops!) at 21ac so 12dn USHERETTES wasn’t quite possible and I had another silly mistake.

    FOI 28ac PARALYSIS

    (LOI) 1ac GUITARIST

    COD 2dn ILLNESS

    WOD 12ac GHOST WRITER

  12. DNF as it beat us even after well over the hour. I confidently put NIP as 6D, which made 1A impossible. However, Guy’s definition of TAP now makes sense — but I think you missed the other meaning of ‘touch’ in the sense of ‘ask for money’, also ‘tap’. Possibly a UK meaning, exclusively? Thanks for the helpful blog — worth waiting for. Gill D
    1. That meaning didn’t occur to me, possibly because it isn’t evoked in any way by the clue.

      Edited at 2021-04-25 09:06 am (UTC)

  13. 13:46. I got badly stuck at the end because I had put NIP at 5dn, which seemed like a perfectly good answer but made 1ac difficult. I eventually realised that it must be GUITARIST and reconsidered.
    The definition at 6dn is a bit vague but going THIN ON TOP is undoubtedly something that happens with age and as Peter points out above ‘possibly’ is part of the definition.
    1. It just shows how individual solving experiences can differ. This was my FOI. Is it only in American crosswords—not even cryptic—that an “axe” is a guitar every other Monday?
      1. I didn’t get it the first time I looked at the clue, and by the time I had my second look I had an N at the end. I think I would have got it much more quickly otherwise.
        1. Some comfort in seeing that I wasn’t alone with NIP. GUITARIST was my LOI, and only because ‘axe’ had come up recently; otherwise, I imagine I’d be a DNF.
  14. I had to battle with this one for 50:45, but did eventually solve it. I was unsure of the crossing pair RETEACH and TAILORS, but went with them. TOPSIDE and GHOSTWRITER were my last 2 in. AT SEA was FOI. GUITARIST took an age to see. Thanks Harry and Guy.
  15. Yeah, but it’s broken. I shall be generous and say I didn’t like this much. Way, way too many cryptic definitions, and while the fact that by the sixth or seventh I was muttering Oh no, not another one (I may have said it out loud) might have coloured my appreciation, they really weren’t good enough for the most part.
    I mean, Broadway theatre? Really? Is OPERATING ROOM conspicuously American? It’s not so given in my Chambers or in my experience. What on earth is Broadway doing in the clue, especially with theatre spelt that way?
    Men in suits is half way to being reasonable, but again as you guess the answer from the crossing letters you’re more likely to say yuck than bravo.
    The two oblique references to commonplace phrases, “I’m turning in” and especially “by George” stretched patience a little more.
    Is cold, even with a ?, really okay to clue tap? I mean, I got it, but with a sigh (it was late in and I was already disgruntled).
    On a more personal note, the use of Manchester City to clue TOPSIDE was a) product placement and b) cruel to Spurs supporters, all the more so today after the Caribou thingy.
    25.18, but really, really not my cup of oolong.

    Edited at 2021-04-25 07:26 pm (UTC)

    1. Commiserations!

      Collins online does tag OPERATING ROOM as American, but an entry for British English further down says it’s “another name for operating theatre.” Your and Jackkt’s experiences have differed, but my impression is that a Brit is rather more likely to use “operating room” (perhaps after having binge-watched M*A*S*H) than a Yank is to use “operating theatre.”

      Edited at 2021-04-25 09:01 pm (UTC)

  16. V unusual to disagree with the ever wise words of Z8 but I thought OPERATING ROOM was a great clue even though it was one of a couple of cryptics I didn’t get. In the 90’s TV series ER they used to refer to the OR all the time. Must admit to musing whether the clue should have had theatre spelt the US way though.

    Also had NIP and completely missed the guitar meaning of axe. Another rather amusing cryptic but I take the point that there were rather a few

    Got TAILORS but wanted the answer to be kings or jacks

    All in all I liked it even though doing it so late meant it was a DNF

    1. I still don’t get where OR or operating room comes from Broadway. It has since occurred to me that if the way is broad there is more operating room: is that it? Really?
      1. Since Peter Biddlecombe stopped by and didn’t disabuse us of the notion, I think we have to accept that it is supposed to indicate that the term is considered American (or at least was at some point). Not much of a clue, in any case. OPERATING ROOM could have been clued with (more, and more interesting) wordplay and “theatre” (“Broadway” or otherwise) simply served as the definition. As is, it does sort of qualify as a very short CD.

        Edited at 2021-04-25 11:28 pm (UTC)

  17. Thanks David and guy
    Not sure whether it was a wavelength thing, the number of cds or that it just didn’t hold the interest, but it took a number of sittings to work through this one. Took a conglomerated hour and although the grid was all correct, didn’t properly parse ABANDONED and didn’t fully understand the ‘Broadway’ part of OPERATING ROOM.
    My Liverpool-supporting son-in-law certainly didn’t like the ‘Man City’ / TOP SIDE definition and could see that it would cause even more angst over there. Grinned at the use of DOS at 27a and wondered how old one would need to be to recall it – doubt if said son-in-law would know it … aggh those old .BAT files and command lines.
    Finished with GUITARIST (which needed a word-finder … and then annoyed that forgot about the ‘axe’), TAP (did go down the NIP path but not in writing) and TORE (which had been left forgotten over the other side).
  18. OK, so I’m thick as the proverbial. But what is the connection between a guitar and an axe?

    Ray Scott

    1. As an old rock ’n’ roller, I didn’t give it a second thought, as I’ve seen AXE used quite often for “guitar” and AXEMAN for “guitarist” but I see now that Lexico and Collins have it a American slang (aha) extending to other instruments.
      Collins: any musical instrument, esp a guitar or horn
      Lexico: A musical instrument, especially one played by a jazz or rock musician

      …this would explain why the setter added the bit about the neck!

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