Sunday Times Cryptic No. 4827, by Dean Mayer — Boxing Day?

Author   Guy du SablePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
I didn’t notice while working it last week, but this puzzle has a large number (13!) of enclosure clues.

As usual, I went through this in no great haste, taking time to stop and savor (when warranted) the surfaces. Life is too short to biff it away.

I do (gramasan)* like this, and italicize anagrinds in the clue.

ACROSS

 1 Furniture not completed very quickly (5)
SOFAS — SO FAS[-t]. IKEA only has four letters, so couldn’t have been that…
 4 In trouble, guy is flirt (8)
WOMANISE — WO(MAN IS)E. Guilty as charged! I see “flirt” is an accepted synonym, but I always imagine womanising as going a bit further…
 8 Fancy dinner parties interrupted by a no-hoper? (14)
PREDESTINARIAN — (dinner parties + a)* Who let him in here? It’s only logical that an omniscient God would know who will go to Heaven and who to Hell, so it would seem that the Calvinists would have to be right about this, if you believe in an omniscient God (and the whole separating-the-sheep-and-goats thing). Problem is, the concept of monotheism, a great logical step forward, entailed the notions of this entity’s omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience—which attributes retrospectively introduce incoherencies and contradictions into the tales that were told in earlier epochs about an all-too-human Creator.
10 Before a call, Romeo spoke (6)
RADIAL — R(omeo, as in the NATO alphabet) + A DIAL.
11 Soapstone location found around tea time (8)
STEATITE — S(TEA)( T)ITE. NHO, but it was easy enough to work out. Rather a lackluster surface.
13 European plan beset by harsh conduct (9)
DEMEANOUR — D(E)(MEAN)OUR. “Mean” is a verb here, “I mean to…,” “I plan to…”
14 Makeshift hospital acquired by a physician (2,3)
AD HOC — A D(H)OC You have to work with what you can get.
15 Iron in mouth turned muddy (5)
BEFOG — GO(FE)B <— I don’t get a clear picture from this.
17 Moved beams in to touch wood (5,4)
ABSIT OMEN — (beams in to)* A Latin phrase that didn’t immediately come to mind. That it is an anagram clue, and what the definition is, seem pretty obvious, but the first four-letter word I tried was AMEN.
19 Brown bags for a scholar in Kent (8)
SUPERMAN — “Brown” is SUN (or “tan”), which encloses (“bags”) “for a,” i.e., PER and “scholar,” M(aster of) A(rts).
20 Crook feeds amazing bat (6)
WILLOW — W(ILL)OW. “Crook” with a sense of “ill” was new to me. Australian. It’s a cricket bat, but I knew that.
23 Good friends supply sweet eaten by one daughter (4-10)
WELL-ACQUAINTED — WELL is a “supply,” and QUAINT (somewhat to my surprise) is “sweet,” which is inside ACE (“one”) D(aughter). “We’re well-acquainted,” “We’re good friends”—passes the substitution test, despite an apparent grammatical mismatch.
24 Checked defect in the diamonds (8)
THWARTED — TH(WART)E D
25 Parasite taking shelter by church (5)
LEECH — LEE (“shelter”) + CH

DOWN
 1 Small uniform for a senior cop (5)
SUPER — S + U + PER (“for a”). The latter part we also have in the clue for… SUPERMAN. Looks a bit lazy.
 2 Right to avoid delivery charges? (7,2,6)
FREEDOM OF SPEECH — Cryptic Definition.
 3 Some of us met an amazing composer (7)
SMETANA — Czech, 1824–1884.
 4 Behind comedian, horse (4)
WITH — WIT + H. As in backing, supporting, “I’m with her.” You might have seen the definition as a position indicator at first (I did).
 5 Painter is stopping his work to see financial expert (10)
MONETARIST — MONET + AR(IS)T. Well, maybe for an hour or so, to confer with Georges Petit…
 6 In heaven grandma carries one version of the Bible (7)
NIRVANA — N(I + RV)ANA. A bit unusual to have a surface-connector word opening the clue, with the def. right behind it. It was always the King James Version in my family.
 7 Fried food spread is in line to be cut (7,8)
SPANISH OMELETTE — SPAN, “spread” + IS + HOME, “in,” + LETTE[-r], “line,” cut. “Thought I’d drop a line,” write a letter—but Merriam-Webster defines “line” as “a short letter,” so perhaps “to be cut” could be cut! Kind of hard to give a plausible sense to the surface.
 9 Refuse to accept fire warning (6)
BEACON — BE A CON
12 Rovers player on after Caledonian meeting (5,5)
ROYAL ASCOT — So there was a British comic strip that ran for many years, Roy of the Rovers, about a young footballer. That was news to me, so this was my last one in, though the wordplay is pretty obvious. His name is tacked “on” (above, as is most proper for a down clue) to “after,” here meaning “in the style of,” A LA (we’re ignoring the grave accent, of course, but the French themselves often do so for capital letters) SCOT (“Caledonian”).
13 Corrupt, sleeping over? Endless sex (6)
DEBASE — ABED<— + SE[-x]. I’ve heard it said that Sunday puzzles are often racier than the usual weekday fare. I love this clue.
16 Wild animal area introduced by travel channel (7)
GORILLA — GO (“travel”) + RILL (“channel”) “introduc[ing]” A(rea)
18 Minor hearing about sex (7)
TRIVIAL — TRI(VI)AL. VI being six in Roman letters, or “sex” in Latin.
21 Thickness having to include diameter (5)
WIDTH — WI(D)TH
22 Pool located, but not duck (4)
FUND — F[-o]UND Where is that damned canard?

36 comments on “Sunday Times Cryptic No. 4827, by Dean Mayer — Boxing Day?”

  1. I had no idea what was going on in 12d, but the Caledonian helped me biff. LOI was BEACON, which took me a long time to parse. I was surprised by the two ‘per’s; un-Deanian, I thought. The Calvinists weren’t no-hopers; they hoped that they were on the list of invitees to salvation. They just thought they couldn’t do anything about it one way or the other. As for foreknowledge, there’s a whole literature on the subject; if you ask God (as transcribed by Milton), the Fall wasn’t His fault:
    …if I foreknew,
    Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
    Which had no less prov’d certain unforeknown.
    1. I’m not buying that excuse! That is, if He is omnipotent and omniscient.

      I hear that some Christian apologists have stopped saying “omnipotent,” because they are tired of hearing questions posed such as, “Could He create a boulder so big that He couldn’t lift it?” Instead, they will say “maxipotent”!

      1. You’re not the only one; one reason why there’s a big literature on the subject. ‘Maxipotent’, yet; I’m glad to see my computer has underlined it in red.
  2. 22:25. Failed to parse SPANISH OMELETTE, so thanks for that. DNK the no-hoper or that meaning of crook at 20A. Otherwise no problems. I liked VI for SEX at 18d, BEFOG and THWARTED but COD to ROYAL ASCOT.
  3. I took an hour on this. DNK STEATITE, which I eventually constructed and, knowing that soap was Sodium Stearate, decided it was close enough to be linked. ABSIT OMEN needed all the crossers and O level Latin. I liked your PREDESTINATION discussion, Guy. As a theist physicist who, with Gödel, has taken the infinite outside the system, I’m always wary of the omnipotent, omniscient etc applied to this world as it evolves. The doctrine of The Trinity has God learning on the job, taking into account the free-will actions of animate creation. MY COD goes to FREEDOM OF SPEECH, which Kierkegaard at least has such a God welcoming. I got WELL-ACQUAINTED early but fretted about the apparent grammar mismatch until I finished. Thank you Guy and Dean.
  4. 33 minutes, can’t remember why, although I think ROYAL ASCOT took some time.
    In my experience, the more committed PREDESTINARIANs don’t have hope, they have absolute and unshakeable certainty both about their own everlasting happy acquaintance with the almighty and everyone else’s inevitable wailing and gnashing of teeth.
    Quite what that has to do with the founder of the originator of Christianity is beyond me, and (pace his alleged omniscience) probably beyond him him too.
        1. Well, I could make a case for S/Paul as a source of the predestination obsession, though I think he was selectively quoted.
  5. A slow but steady 53 minutes, starting with FOI 1d SUPER and ending with the unknown 11a STEATITE. That and ABSIT OMEN were the only two this puzzle added to my vocab list, which isn’t bad for a Sunday. Enjoyed 1a SOFAS(t) and 18d; I’ve seen the Latin “sex” used to indicate the Roman numeral before, but it’s such a clever trick I still enjoy it.
  6. Eventually I finished with the unknown STEATITE. ABSIT OMEN also unknown. Also could not parse WILLOW or SPANISH OMELETTE so thanks for those. It’s very pleasing when the unknowns turn out to be right.
    I liked this in yesterday’s Times from Sathnam Sanghera:
    Viral tweet of the week from @pegerella: “The man who invented autocorrect should burn in hello”.
    David
  7. I read the definition as a verb, as in “…served only to muddy the issue” = “…to befog the issue.”
    1. I don’t see how it could be anything but a verb here. My comment on this clue was about the surface.
      1. Duh! Silly me. Yes. I thought your comment indicated that you didn’t see any logic in the solution. Sorry.
  8. If I was God, I reckon there are some things, exercising my divine rights, as it were, I would choose not to know in advance. Chief among these would be the choices made by my people vis a vis recognising me.

    About 90 minutes for the puzzle. Wonder if he knew that in advance?

  9. I was slowed by the unknown finger-crossing anagram and some quirky defining (BEFOG=muddy, WITH=behind, PREDESTINARIAN=no-hoper, WELL-ACQUAINTED=good friends). I hung back from biffing ROYAL ASCOT until I could see a parse for it — which took a long while. But eventually done in 48 mins.
    Thanks for the well-developed blog.
  10. I think I forgot to bring my brain along for this puzzle. I eventually finished up with a correct solution, but only after struggling for an hour and 42.5 minutes. I also needed aids for a couple of answers. Time to draw a veil over it methinks. Thanks Dean and Guy.

    Edited at 2018-12-09 12:16 pm (UTC)

  11. 51:25 I found this quite tough. Didn’t help that I struggled through it with a stinking cold. I was grateful for the wp at 11ac. The Latin expression at 17ac was unknown but the likeliest looking arrangement of the letters.
  12. 24:32. I found this very tough but I enjoyed the struggle. I worried about 17ac once I had figured out that it was probably a Latin phrase but with all the checkers I didn’t have much doubt. STEATITE also unknown to me, but Roy of the Rovers very familiar from my youth.
  13. This puzzle did something not achieved by any other cryptic crossword in my (nearly) 8 years at the ST. Any guesses?
      1. The setter is to be congratulated “for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is”
        So now
        1) Someone will spot it and we’ll all go wow!
        2) Someone will spot it and we’ll all go is that it?
        3) No-one will ever know.
        Anybody? Peter?

      2. Is it something you can see only if looking at the completed grid? I don’t have my copy with me.
        Sure is a poser.
        1. You don’t need the completed grid – the thing that’s special is visible in this blog posting. Answer in a day or two.
            1. If that’s unique since I started, it would be a second thing about this puzzle. The thing I’m talking about is not to do with clue types.
              1. As you all seem to be stumped …

                It’s a seriously “crossword editing” point — the clues consist entirely of characters for which the version typed on a standard keyboard is the one we use in print. So there are no quotes or apostrophes to curl, no em-dashes to replace hyphens or pairs thereof, and no ellipses to replace with the single-character version so that a line break never breaks them into separate parts. It’s the complete absence of apostrophes that’s most unusual.

                Edited at 2018-12-11 05:17 pm (UTC)

                1. Damn! I, of all people, should have gotten that! We use curly quotes etc. at TheNation.com and I run my blog here through the script I use there to fix all such things in one fell swoop.
                  1. Heh. I also found it interesting. I imagine it wouldn’t be that easy to do deliberately!
  15. Thanks Dean and guy
    This was near the bottom of some old puzzles that I’d kept from our Australian newspaper – pulled it out this weekend. Found it pretty tough going, taking a couple of sessions adding to 31 minutes. Started off smartly enough with SUPER and SOFAS at the top but was slowed up with the local knowledge required for the ROYAL ASCOT parsing and a couple of new terms in PREDESTINARIAN and STEATITE. ABSIT OMEN wasn’t totally unknown but had to confirm it in a dictionary again.
    Needed the blog to fully understand the last bit of the word play for SPANISH OMELETTE, the whole parsing of BEACON and the VI (sex) part of TRIVIAL which I’ll have to file away for future use.
    Finished with SUPERMAN (which I quite liked), the Latin phrase at 17a and that BEACON as the last one in,

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