Sunday Times Cryptic No 4877, 17 XI 2019, by David McLean — Zing!

60 comments on “Sunday Times Cryptic No 4877, 17 XI 2019, by David McLean — Zing!”

1. … is familiar – it’s the insulation around your hot-water pipes. So, it wasn’t hard to get to “lag” as a verb.
2. I don’t have a time for this, but it took me a long time. I was ready to throw in the towel with 7ac and 23ac unsolved, when finally I recalled ‘Christmas’, which had appeared here once. I had no idea about the hospital reference, although I knew the hospital, but was satisfied with one definition. Similarly, I finally recalled ‘lagging’–again, it must have been here once. DNK trot. SLIGHTISH slowed me down too, a bit, because I couldn’t believe it.

   Edited at 2019-11-24 12:46 am (UTC)

3. is a polite English maiden aunt’s expression that avoids actually saying ‘Christ! as a moderate expression of surprise. They and Ian Carmichael would also use the word SLIGHT-ISH it is rather Engl-ish.

   This puzzle must have been difficult for the Brothers Jonathan as the differences between English and American English are far wider than can be imagined!

   Trot is specifically a toddler – a child who is in process of learning to walk – one who toddles or trots.

   Lagging is standard English for insulation as per Mr. Browndog. America is lagging behind here – not what POTUS demands!

   And Guy I don’t remember a song we played at high school – because this side of The Pond – a high school is only attended by gals -not Guys. When in Rome….?

   FOI 7ac GOSH!

   LOI 26ac HORSE OPERA

   COD 13ac LONDONER

   WOD 21ac PEELER – get’s under Jonathan’s skin!

   1. I assumed that most of my British colleagues here would be familiar with the American term, David, and would not find this reference confusing. By “we” I meant, of course, myself and the others in my public (sic) educational establishment, not the international community of London Times puzzle solvers.

      In the blog I implied that I did not find this puzzle particularly hard, Brother Jon as I may be.

      Did you check out the link? It really seems as if Judy is singing expressly to one older, blonde woman in the audience…

      Edited at 2019-11-24 03:52 am (UTC)

   2. I should have known ‘lagging’, but then there are lots of words I should know and don’t. No problem with SLIGHTISH the word; I (and I gather, Guy) didn’t care for the clue. And I would have thought that if a child can trot, it has learned to walk.
      Horryd, is there some reason you keep referring to Americans as Brother(s) Jonathan? When this appeared here some time ago, I don’t think any of us knew the term, and it was pointed out that it refers–to the extent that it’s still even in use–to New Englanders (or rather to a typical New Englander). Vinyl is from (or at least in) Connecticut, I’m from San Francisco, never been to New England, and I have no idea about our other Murcans.
      1. I’m from a very small town in West (By God!) Virginia, but have lived in New York City for the past 34 years, after about four years in Philadelphia, PA.

         I sometimes get the impression our friend in Shanghai thinks we Yankees are interlopers and should speak the Queen’s English or none at all. I would counter, if explicitly presented (as surely will never happen) with such a ridiculous argument, that one of the charms of English, besides the extent to which it has imperialistically absorbed idioms from all over the world, are the many varieties of the language in use around the world today.

         Edited at 2019-11-24 03:41 am (UTC)

         1. Dear Guy,

            English has absorbed idioms from the world over – but most of the changes are coming Stateside. Did you ever saw Julian Pettifer’s brilliant BBC series on the English language?

            The French Language is protected by law; Franglais is not acceptable.

            Have you encountered Chinglish, Singlish-la and Sea Speak.

            I think only in the last three years have I found that the re-born ‘America First’ concept somewhat galling. We see POTUS and his like, mangling words and meanings and generally degrading the language I treasure.

            I believe there should be a tangible differentiation beyond Miriam Webster. So far we only have ‘Americanisms’. Why not a Constitutional change that would re-brand your language as ‘American’? It would surely please the Executive, myself and others.

            Including Irishman Oscar Wilde, “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.” And that was over a century ago.

            America First – so why not include your language, and finally free yourselves of the English?

            1. Please, don’t make me throw up.
            2. What nonsense! English English (to the extent that there is even such a monolithic thing, which there isn’t) has changed at least as much since it was separated from American English (to the extent that there is even such a monolithic thing, which there isn’t). And French changes all the time, like all languages, in spite of the futile efforts of the Academie. You won’t hear many French people using ‘fin de semaine’.
               In short my dear H your view is based on a series of fundamental misconceptions about the nature of language and how it changes.

               Edited at 2019-11-24 09:34 am (UTC)

               1. My dear K your view is based on a series of fundamental misconceptions about how a common language, in this case English, can survive ‘cultural distance’.

                  In America itself the language is being weaponised in an Orwellian sense – a cultural divide is plainly in evidence. I keep hearing the refrain. ‘Do words matter!?’
                  California bears little resemblance to the Mid-West. Will it ever?

                  This is echoed in Boris’s Britain.

                  These separations can also be clearly marked as with the Castillian/Spanish/Hispanic ‘cultural divide’. I recommend Elena Gomez Parra on this fascinating subject.

                  Edited at 2019-11-24 11:26 am (UTC)

                  1. I have the feeling that you’re trying to tell us something; I wonder what it might be. Certainly not a reply to Keriothe, in any case.
4. Today’s puzzle shows all the clues but only reveals the top part of the grid!

   A ‘Skeleton Crossword’! Quite a challenge!

   (Don’t tell the Editor!)

   1. It’s not as hard as a diagramless in The New York Times, because we are told how many words are in each clue and can fill in the black squares ourselves. I’ve just realized this and am going to print out as is and get to work with the black ink.
      1. Well, I have passed on the news about this strange grid, but as it just switches to white squares, anyone who understands the rotational symmetry used in crossword grids should be able to add the missing blocks and numbers. As just over half of the block pattern is there, you don’t need to guess anything, and you could print a second copy, cut and stick to get the missing blocks in the lower half, and then just add the numbers.
         1. Problem fixed now, though you may need to refresh the relevant page (Ctrl+F5 in Chrome on Windows) if you’ve displayed it already.

            Edited at 2019-11-24 10:07 am (UTC)

5. Stranger still, it was fine this morning, about 00:30 GST, but now it’s as Horryd says.
6. Too late, I already emailed Biddlecombe.
   1. Thank you. I have done the Everyman instead, as I couldn’t face sitting upright at my computer rather than lounging on my sofa with a printout. Later I may be happy to attempt the Times either way…
7. The grid displays correctly until you go into print mode so there are alternatives to filling in the blanks by hand, e.g. you can screen-print or use snipping tool and paste the grid into Word or Paint and print it from there.

   From my pov the fault was present from the moment the puzzle went on-line so I am intrigued that it was okay for Kevin for a while.

   Edited at 2019-11-24 05:59 am (UTC)

   1. I’m equally intrigued. I was done and dusted in under 15 minutes, so I was probably offline, or at least had stopped looking at the puzzle, before 00:30 (9:30 am Japan time). And Horryd reports the anomaly at 02:58. (I say ‘anomaly’; that’s to say that this particular type of foulup has not been heretofore presented by SNAFU Central.)
      1. Just seen your comment in the Forum and you mentioned it was okay when you solved on-line, which I think removes the intrigue factor. There’s nothing wrong with the puzzle until one goes to print it so on-line solvers shouldn’t be affected, only those us who prefer to solve on paper. There was a problem with printing right from the off, and there still is at the time of writing.
8. It is not quite the challenge I forecast as it only took a few minutes to reconstruct the grid and add the numbers.

   And as Jack notes, it is intriguing how it was OK over in Osaka earlier on, which would suggest it was OK at 8am in Shanghai, but I didn’t arrive on the scene until about 9.am.Are we perhaps being hacked by the Ukrainians or perhaps the Lower Silesians.
   It’s something of a Puzzle!

   Edited at 2019-11-24 06:21 am (UTC)

9. I found this hard but not impenetrable as I got through it without reference to aids until it came to parsing.

   GOH as an abbreviation for Great Ormond Street Hospital may be used in certain circles but not widely enough to have made it into any of the usual dictionaries.

   Why is ‘well-shaped’ in ‘better’ rather than ‘good’ form.

   ‘IN LATE’ is comparative. 1am would be early for some, especially night-shift workers.

   NHO TROT for ‘child’ but it seems widely accepted so I don’t know how I have managed to avoid it, even in crosswords, until now.

   FWIW I have never heard of ‘High School’ being used exclusively to refer to girls’ schools in the UK as asserted in a comment above, nor can I find any support for it in the dictionaries, e.g. Collins has: 1) In Britain, a high school is a school for children aged between eleven and eighteen…Sunderland High School. 2) British, another term for grammar school.

   1. As an alumnus^* of the Ilford County High School for Boys, I feel I must concur!

      ^*Technically an Old Parkonian. It’s a long story…

      1. High Schools for Girls. Probably dated but it certainly happened in some places. In my long-ago educational experience, Croydon High School was and still is a girls’ school. And when we moved, Eastbourne Grammar School was for boys and Eastbourne High School was the equivalent for girls.
      2. “Sunderland High School for Girls first admitted boys in 1988.” I think Collins is sneaking one in there!

         “Ilford County High School is a selective secondary Grammar School for boys located in the town of Barkingside of the London Borough of Redbridge. It was formerly called PARK HIGH Grade School and as a result old boys are referred to as Old Parkonians.” It really ain’t a High School in the traditional English and is defined as a Grammar School.

         Did any Gals go to Grammar Schools, back in the day!?

         Public School v Private School in the UK – please discuss.

         1. Certainly both sexes in Altrincham and Sale went to grammars rather than highs. I seem to think this was largely true throughout most of South Manchester and Cheshire, although the top school for girls was Manchester High.
10. 21:50 with one pink square where I spelt PARACETAMOL wrong, despite all the letters being there for me to construct correctly. Grr. I thought there was a bit of willful obscurity here; I’d never heard of the abbreviation for the hospital at 1A, Trot for a toddler, Jonathan as an apple or SUCKER for a baby. But probably just my general ignorance showing. I liked LID and STUPID for the wordplay. Thanks David and Guy.
    1. I don’t think sucker is a baby as such, but ‘baby’ is just an example of something that sucks (in the literal sense, not the modern terminology for something that’s bad). So I’d have said ‘sucker’ is not so much a second definition as a cryptic hint designed to give solvers another way into the answer.
       1. Thanks, Jack!
          I thought I had underlined as as well. i’ve included the quirk and called it a DBE.
11. ….I might have been prepared to put in more effort. Fortunately, I gave up after 15 minutes with half of the grid still blank, in the sure and certain knowledge that I wasn’t going to get 7A. I think it’s an appalling clue, and good enough reason to spare myself further effort.
    1. It’s hard for me to gauge the difficulty of this clue for folks over there. The acronym came up immediately online, and I imagined that the place must be pretty well known, after I’d read about it, and saw that it’s in a central area quite near the British Museum where once I’d spent several days myself (never finding a B&B that had anything resembling coffee).
       But apparently it doesn’t spring to mind for many non-Americans either…
       1. I know of the hospital, and maybe somebody more Londoncentric would know the acronym, but I’m based 200 miles away (doesn’t sound much to an American, but it’s almost a third the length of the UK !) and it was lost on me. As for Christmas, whilst I look upon it as a curse, I’ve never used the word as an imprecation (unless preceded by “bloody” or worse), nor have I ever heard anybody else do so. I’d consider this a Mephisto clue.
          1. Just realised that “Christ’s Hospital, in London” would be an alternative version of the same logic – and the likely Mephisto version as CH was the school where Ximenes taught, though relocated to Horsham by then.
             1. Nice thinking Peter – and I’d still have been no wiser !
             2. Gosh! My crossword knowledge is turning in circles right now, because the only reason I know anything about Christ’s Hospital was because I read Charles Lamb’s essay about it after Elia came up in a crossword…
       2. Are you saying that you went to the British Museum for the coffee, Guy? An interesting, B Jonathan, idea!
          1. No, I don’t think I tried the museum cafe. One B&B in particular tried to pass off something as “coffee” that was, well, unspeakable. But I mentioned coffee specifically for the American tourist theme.

             Edited at 2019-11-24 05:45 pm (UTC)

             1. Yes indeed. They can gripe all they want about American English, but until they learn to do coffee properly, we won’t pay attention
12. … but I have lived there or nearby for almost half my life. I do a lousy Bud Flanagan impression. GOSH was LOI. I forgot to write a time on my torn-out copy, but it was a steady solve at best. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone use Christmas as an expression of surprise in the last sixty years, but I do remember such a usage in the fifties. Eventually, I also remembered a previous similar clue.There’s no way otherwise I’d have thought of the acronym for Great Ormond Street Hospital for an English infirmary, and I walked past it last week. I guess I only know the London teaching hospitals better as we played them all at football in my New College days. I’ve never heard of TROT for child either, so the semi-biffed CHILD-BEARING also caused a head shake. I did like COD HORSE OPERA. Thank you Guy and David.
13. I have no printout to check; last week I was quite under the weather so I probably binned my sheet by accident. I do however remember that 7a GOSH pushed me well over my hour.

    It’s only due to recent American influence that I got there at all—one of Marvel’s Luke Cage‘s catchphrases is sweet Christmas!, and I watched the first season on Netflix last year. Probably a solid ten minutes after that I finally figured out what was going on with the English infirmary, despite having been treated there once as a child!

14. I went through this pretty quickly, only getting stuck for a while on Gosh. For a moment I did consider that, at the point when you get technical enough to call female canines “bitches”, then the proper definition for “dog” is a male canine, so maybe the idea of a bitch dog is inconsistent. With that said, I still liked the clue.
15. I found most of this straightforward, but spent the last few minutes in the NE corner on GOSH and SUCKER, both of which I eventually parsed to my satisfaction. I also spent a bit of time wondering about TROT for CHILD, and whether it was a misprint and should’ve been TOT. However, it is apparently in the dictionary, so one lives and learns. DOSSIER held me up for a while too. 32:56. Thanks Harry and Guy.
    1. Exactly the same here. Breezed through the rest, but for me ‘sucker’as baby was a stretch too far, and had never heard of the euphemistic sense of Christmas – it’s not listed in Chambers or Collins – nor the hospital in its abbreviated form – similarly unlisted.
16. Only GOSH went in unparsed. I knew the usage as an exclamation – my father uses it and saw the H for hospital but never got the GOS part.
    I passed my eleven plus and went to a High School for Boys. My sister went to the High School for Girls next door. We both could have elected to have gone to the Grammar School in the next Town.
    1. If I’d been a girl I’d have gone to Woodford County High School instead of Ilford County High School! I wonder how my life would have been changed.

       If I hadn’t got into either I might’ve been bound for the progressively co-ed Seven Kings High School, or possibly Beal High School, the local Comprehensive, which I understand was a fine school despite the sniffiness of my parents’ circle about it… I see from Wikipedia that Ofsted currently rate it as “outstanding” and it’s now calling itself a Highly Achieving Specialist School, whatever that is…

17. 11:49. We are regular visitors to GOSH but I had no idea about the expression of surprise so I still put this one in last, and with trepidation. I was also a little bit worried about 17ac because I couldn’t quite believe that TROT was a word for ‘child’.
    I can never remember how to spell PARACETAMOL so I paid very careful attention to the number of As and Os in the anagram fodder. I would certainly classify this clue as an &Lit, since the whole clue is the wordplay and also serves as a definition, even if it’s a quirky one.
    1. You know, the clue could have read “Analgesic bit of meds…” etc. and we’d have a strictly Ximenean definition + wordplay clue. I fail to see what the pale actor has to do with the definition, strictly speaking. Some people like the term “semi-&lit” for this kind of thing.
       1. ‘Semi-&Lit’ is when there is a part of the clue (usually something like ‘this’ or ‘one of these’) that doesn’t contribute to the wordplay, and acts as a definition only by reference to the rest of the clue. A clue like this in which every word does contribute to wordplay is &Lit. The definition is very much by example (the situation being a rather particular one to say the least!) but this is indicated by the question mark.

          Edited at 2019-11-24 06:50 pm (UTC)

          1. OK, right, a semi &lit is when only part of the clue is wordplay but the whole clue is the definition. This is an inverse situation, seems to me.
             I find it virtually impossible to see the rest of the wordplay, after “Bit of meds,” as necessary for the definition or even contributing to it in any way, even as a DBE.
             I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: perfect &lits are rare.
             1. Yeah I wouldn’t try to justify this as a ‘perfect’ example of the genre. But all the words are part of the wordplay, which makes it an &Lit IMO.
                The whole thing is a definition in the sense that a pale actor might shakily gulp a PARACETAMOL, so you could define it that way. In the same way you might define a steak as a ‘piece of meat eaten lustily by a cautious chiropidist, say’. In each case the question mark, or the word ‘say’ is doing a lot of work, but technically it’s valid I think.
18. City of Oxford High School for Boys, alas no longer. Most distinguished old boy TE Lawrence. We new it as COHS……gosh that was close! The girls high school is still very much flourishing.

    Most annoyed to have been sucked in for a sucker.

19. I spent quite a long time on this and eventually just wrote in what seemed most likely. Last three were PEELER, GOSH and SUCKER. Happy they were all correct;thanks for the explanations. I was another for whom TROT was unknown in this meaning.
    I was aware that Christmas could equate to Gosh but I missed the infirmary part. Later I looked at a restaurant bill I’d got on 13 November; the first line was “1 GOSH Donation”. So it may not be in all the dictionaries but it may be on your restaurant bill (optional, but I didn’t check it carefully and so missed the GOSH).
    David
20. 47:48 (though that doesn’t account for a break of a couple of hours between my last but one and my last one in). There were a few unfamiliar bits amongst the standard fare to trip me up. I’ve heard of Jonathan Trott but I hadn’t heard of Jonathan as a kind of apple or trot as another name for an ankle biter, so 17ac and 21ac went in with partial understanding. LOI was 7ac. Came back to it after a break did an alpha trawl and remembered Christmas as a mild exclamation. That was sufficient to put in gosh. Didn’t think of a specific infirmary and I’m not sure the acronym for GOSH would have occurred to me in a month of Sundays, even though the hospital itself is reasonably well known to me.
21. I think horryd needs to stay in more…
22. Still not clear on 3 down . . . . LID.
    1. Well, I’ll reply Dear (Anonymous), even though I don’t know how you’ll know that I did. Commenters who are logged in get alerts when someone has replied.

       A word for “slip” (slide) is divested of its “jacket,” the two outermost letters, and thus you get a word for “cap,” LID.

       1. Thanks for all your Blogs, Guy. We’d be in the dark a lot of the time without you and all the other bloggers.

          The way we get the answers to the questions we occasionally ask is to check back to the particular blog later.

          Janet and Tom.

          Toronto.

23. And on a lighter note: Why are there no aspirin in the jungle?

    Paracetamol.

    Known as Tylenol on the western shores of The Pond.

    Janet and Tom

    Toronto.

24. Thanks David and guy
    Made a progressive start with this one late last year … but then came 7a. It was the only clue left and kept at it every now and then until this week when googling to help find a relationship between Christmas and a hospital – an entry for this clue in this site came up revealing all … so a definite DNF after a long time.
    Found the rest of this puzzle as entertaining as usual from this setter with a wide range of devices and enough interesting definitions to keep one on ones toes.
    The last two before GOSH were the double definition of PASTE and INSULATE (with the lesser known word for ‘lag’). Also did not know the TROT term of a child – had tried to justify TOT around R … not all that successfully !

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