Sunday Times Cryptic by David McLean — fabulous

Author   Guy du SablePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic

I liked this a lot. Seven (!) anagrams, certainly not complaining about that, and I learned a new phrase, a new word, and a new English town. I didn’t like not being able to fully parse a clue and even wondering if something might be wrong with it. But that’s life!

I indicate (Ars Magna)* like this, and words flagging such rearrangements are italicized in the clues.

ACROSS
 1 Bleeds and clots (4)
SAPS    DD
 
 3 Fabulous being man, lads are fantastic (10)
SALAMANDER    (man, lads, are)*   “Fabulous being” because of certain ancient myths about the lizard-like creature, some fire-related (an association first noted by Aristotle). The Wikipedia entry is fascinating: “This connection likely originates from the tendency of many salamanders to dwell inside rotting logs. When the log was placed into a fire, the salamander would attempt to escape, lending credence to the belief that salamanders were created from flames.” And that’s just the beginning. Not a myth is their magical ability to regenerate severed limbs, which scientists are hoping to reverse engineer to apply to our species.
 
10 Dingy sites for development? (9)
DARKROOMS    CD
 
11 Jilted lover on gin cut and bit player (5)
EXTRA    EX, “jilted lover” + TRAP   An EX need not have been jilted, of course, but that would do the trick.
 
12 Cliff or Frank (5)
BLUFF    DD
 
13 Guards nukes? Try to be composed! (8)
Homer Simpson has this down pat.
TURNKEYS    (nukes, Try)*
 
15 A lady belts extremely insolent nudist (7)
ADAMITE    A DAM(IT)E
 
17 Force in Ghana out to get some [M]iddle Eastern money (7)
AFGHANI    (F[orce], i’, Ghana)*   Chambers gives “i’” (with an apostrophe) as a form of “in.”   …Really? I’ve seen that i’ Mephisto, if memory serves, but never here. My first and seemingly  the most natural reading of the clue, which however doesn’t account for the I, is “F in an anagram of ‘Ghana’”; this is just my valiant effort to make it work. Edit: I also found the lower-case “middle” confusing, as noted below.
 
19 Sack teacher from Norfolk by phone? (7)
DISMISS    MISS from, you hear, the Norfolk town of DISS   …which I don’t recall ever hearing of!
 
21 Mild easily downed, quart sunk (7)
AFFABLE    QUAFFABLE
 
22 Party worker welcomes minister in power (8)
DOMINANT    DO, “Party” + MIN(ister) + ANT, “worker”
 
24 A bit of red bottled by Split wine producer (5)
GRAPE    G(R)APE
 
27 Hell of husband recedes if female leaves (5)
HADES    H(usband) + FADES
 
28 Place royal knocked back sweetened brew (5,4)
LAGER TOPS    SPOT REGAL <=“knocked back”   Lager infused with lemonade   …NHO!
 
29 Driving iron later swung on tee (10)
TORRENTIAL    T(ee) + (iron later)*
 
30 Bohemian flatulent fellow sent packing (4)
ARTY    FARTY
 
DOWN
 1 Is dad sober repositioning furniture? (10)
SIDEBOARDS    (is dad sober)*
 
 2 A day with you is out of sight (5)
PERDU    PER, “a” + D(ay) + U, “you”
 
 4 Way to punch a European champion (7)
APOSTLE    A PO(ST)LE
 
 5 Country song about US troops at front (7)
AUSTRIA    A(US)(Troops)RIA
 
 6 Vertical section of Alpine mountain (5)
APEAK    Alpine + PEAK   A nautical term meaning “in a vertical or almost vertical position”—Collins online gives as an example “with the oars apeak” and cites as American English the sense used for a dropped anchor and an anchored vessel as being as vertical as possible under those conditions.   …NHO!
 
 7 Drab myth I jazzed up for bombastic speech (9)
DITHYRAMB    (Drab myth I)*
 
 8 Tramp in European capital getting picked up (4)
ROAM    “Rome”
 
 9 Work with one framing Formula One wall art? (8)
GRAFFITI    GRAF(FI)T + I
 
14 Exercise feels silly without vigour (10)
LIFELESSLY    (feels silly)*
 
16 Muscles do turn sore for runner (9)
ABSCONDER    ABS, “muscles” + CON, “do” + RED<=“turn”ed
 
18 I’m surprised it is run by design (2,6)
GO FIGURE    GO, “run” + FIGURE, “design”
 
20 Red permanent marker used on permit (7)
SCARLET    SCAR, “permanent marker” + LET, “permit”
 
21 Island opposed to island miles away (7)
ANTIGUA    ANTI + GUAM
 
23 Spring produce (5)
ISSUE    DD   What you ISSUE (produce) ISSUEs (springs) from you.   …Hardly double at all.
 
25 A spirit lifts when love enters romance (5)
AMOUR    A + RU(O)M<=“lifts”
 
26 Jab flew and hit … WHACK (4)
SHOT    Quadruple definition!!!!
 

 

42 comments on “Sunday Times Cryptic by David McLean — fabulous”

  1. Is 28a correctly clued? Lager Top is well-known in the UK, which would be a brew of sorts. Isn’t brews required to make lager tops?

    2. If you see “brew” as meaning a kind of beer, “we had lager tops” seems a possible statement with that meaning, but “brews” would have done little harm to the surface reading

      1. In that case you’d say “this brew is stout, this brew is bitter” and presumably “this brew is lager top”. But l agree it’s a minor observation.

      2. Collins specifically gives ‘lager tops’ as a singular alternative to ‘lager top’.

          1. The question, as always, is not whether it sits right with you (or me), but whether people use it as a singular. A dictionary like Collins won’t just have made it up.

            1. You want me to write “But I’m sure it’s in a dictionary, somewhere?” after every comment?
              It was just a comment K, nothing more.

            2. Never have been a fan of Collins. Chambers certainly doesn’t support Collins. But the Chambers has its quirks also that are hard to explain (eg so=provided). So I guess we have to accept we’re solving a puzzle and not subediting prose. I wonder what Derrek Macnutt would have made of it?

              1. He was a pipe smoker.. he probably would have been pretty chilled about it all. And crosswords in his day took all sorts of liberties..
                (Derrick!)

  2. 47:21
    Slowed down by DNKs PERDU, APEAK, & LOI LAGER TOPS. It took me some time to see ‘exercise’ in 14d as anagrind, not PE. Parsed GRAFFITI & ABSCONDER after submitting. I couldn’t see where the I in AFGHANI came from; I took the definition to be ‘some middle Eastern money’.

      1. ODE says ‘… stretching from the Mediterranean to Pakistan …’ Anyway, I can’t see any other way to account for ‘some middle’.

        1. And Merriam-Webster has « the countries of southwestern Asia and northern Africa —usually considered to include the countries extending from Libya on the west to Afghanistan on the east ».
          In that case, not capitalizing “Middle” is a mistake. Deceptive capitalization of common nouns is permitted but proper names must keep their capitals.
          So I was considering the lack of a capital M as intentional. The Wikipedia definition of Middle Easr is more restrictive (corresponding to the part before usually considered above).

            1. I take this as a universal rule of cryptics. It’s eminently logical, a clear guardrail against unfairness.

              1. Not really, because apparently a setter can capitalise any random word in a clue, and then claim there must be a sentence somewhere that it would be the first word in …

                    1. I will need clarification on when we are allowed to politely disagree (you are allowed to say to GdeS that the rule is illogical) and when we must ‘give over’ (I am not allowed to say that it isn’t). The rules are not quite clear to me (unlike the rule on capitalisation 😄)

                    2. No idea why it would be “wrong.” It’s just a convention. The explanation I remembered is that any word in a list or at the beginning of a sentence might be capitalized. Also, some writers capitalize random words to make a phrase farcically grand: “He thought he was making a Very Important Intervention.” But there’s never a good reason to not cap a proper name.

                      1. We might get to the point where the widely-adopted social media convention of writing entirely without punctuation (including capital letters) is considered sufficiently authoritative (as text-speak u etc now is) but we aren’t there yet.

          2. I don’t remember how I parsed this. I might have used the Mephisto play. Is possible that middles refers to the middle of “force in Ghana” i.e. “in” of which we’re told to take some i.e. “i”. Form an anagram of the resultant phrase to for Eastern money?

            1. No, since “[M]iddle” is part of the definition, not the wordplay. The same thought crossed my mind, though, when solving.

            2. I saw F in Ghana out as “A(F)ghan” followed by get some m(i)ddle as the wordplay.
              Eastern money being the definition.

  3. No solving time to report. I had the same issue as others with AFGHANI and still don’t really get it. ‘In / i’ seems dodgy to me; also the missing uppercase.

  4. After a run of tricky Sundays, this was a joy…and the more anagrams the better. Only quibble is the abbreviated ‘i’ in 17a which as Guy says, is pushing it a bit. I’m not keen on random abbreviations.

  5. 17A: I should have asked for a version avoiding in = i’, and as Middle East is conventionally capitalised for both words, it should have been. But I’m honestly struggling to see what else it could mean with East capitalised, and if deliberate deception was intended, I don’t think it would have been.

  6. Half an hour or so.

    – NHO ADAMITE but the word makes perfect sense and the cluing was kind
    – Bunged in ADIEU for 2d before SAPS set me straight to get PERDU
    – NHO DITHYRAMB and had to hope I’d filled in the non-checkers correctly

    Thanks Guy and David.

    FOI Sideboards
    LOI Dithyramb
    COD Austria

  7. This was a relatively approachable puzzle – i.e. I managed to finish it – not always the case with this setter! However, I misparsed 5d by thinking ‘song about’ was AIR and not being able to account for the extra A. Doh! MER at GO FIGURE meaning I’m surprised. I wouldn’t say so – I understand it to mean ‘work it out’, but perhaps over the pond? I also didn’t understand the spare I in AFGHANI, and hoped there would be a rational answer in the blog. Liked the clever 4-way definition of SHOT. I also liked ADAMITE, specifically because NHO, but well clued. DITHYRAMB also NHO, so waited for the checkers before apportioning the remaining letters!

  8. About an hour. For the “i” in AFGHANI, in desperation, I thought it must be “some middle” – ie a small part of the word middle, so take your pick of the five letters available, and choose the “i”. I’ve never seen anything like that before. I don’t think I’ve seen in = i before either, but now we know.

    On edit: just to add, this was at the same time my way of accounting for the presence of “middle”

  9. My thanks to David McLean and Guy du Sable.
    15a Adamite. Took a while to find the nudist sect.
    POI 7d Dithyramb, I saw this word from the crossers, but didn’t know what it means! Looked it up to confirm.
    I liked 30a (f)ARTY, because I have a pathetic schoolboy SOH.

  10. Only desperate solution for Afghani I could come up with was money being the definition and “middle Eastern” being the letter I if “eastern” could be Asian and the middle letter of that is an I?

    Hence the lower case middle as well

    Maybe there’s a reason this can’t be that?

  11. 9:40. My only real problem here was AFGHANI, where I couldn’t believe that ‘in’ would be allowed to indicate I as part of an anagram, and the uncapitalised ‘middle’ – combined with the fact that Afghanistan is not conventionally considered to be in the Middle East – led me to believe that the definition must just be ‘Eastern money’. Unsurprisingly I failed to parse the clue!

  12. 32.48

    Thought this was quite tricky. ADAMITE only vaguely known; DITHYRAMB not known; like Kevin failed to see the grind/grist for my LOI LIFELESSLY; and like others perplexed by the ending of AFGHANI, though I did recollect the money so that overcame the parsing puzzlement. But my biggest issue was knowing LAGER TOP but not that it could be – or that the clue could accommodate a plural. Not ideal spending 5 minutes thinking “what else can it be apart from LAGER TOP, but there aint enough letters” only to find one was (sort of) staring at the answer.

    Lots to like elsewhere and overall enjoyed the workout.

    Thanks Guy/David.

  13. Had a hard time with this: just not concentrating enough, I guess. GO FIGURE! Had the wrong word in for 21a ( Equable) which didn’t allow me to get 18d. Only when I got GRAPE did I figure it out. NHO ADAMITE, nor LAGER TOPS, nor that meaning of APOSTLE., and was looking for a river for 16d! So all in all, not a successful solve for me, but enjoyable nonetheless.

  14. I found this quite a challenge but got there in the end. I have one question: I wrote in PERDU very tentatively, as the clue included no indication of any French connection. Is this word used in English?

  15. Thanks David and Guy
    Did most of this in a couple of sessions on Saturday when it was published here. Held up by 26d which took me till today to realise that it wasn’t FADES at 27a and failing to find a -F-T word other than pfft! Finally sense prevailed and was able to see four definitions pointing to SHOT with a head slap. There were a number of other words that I had to look up – DITHYRAMB, LAGER TOPS, that version of APOSTLE and APEAK.
    Maybe there is some sort of building or gaming terminology where fi is an abbreviation of ‘force in’ – didn’t sweat too much on it all the same.

Comments are closed.