Times 29152: Tricky wordplay Thursday

87 comments on “Times 29152: Tricky wordplay Thursday”

1. 25:13
   I biffed STONES THROW, INEBRIATE, & WASTREL, parsed post-submission. Biffed PANELLIST, couldn’t figure out NELLI, although I knew the phrase. I did not at all care for ‘perhaps Gladstone’ defining ETONIAN.

   1. I agree with you, Kevin, about ETONIAN.

      1. Me too

   2. Agree

      1. My failure, and after getting AMARANTHINE and ELEMI too! I entered ELORIAN, think ROLE might do for importance rising.

   3. Yes-only about 50,000 alumni to choose from.
      And considering he is one of our greatest prime ministers, and comparing his achievements with the antics of a couple of our more recent former pupils, defining his essence as simply ‘Etonian’ does seem to be rather damning him with faint praise.

2. Took about 90 minutes Whilst the bottom went in reasonably quickly I really slowed to a crawl on the top. It started me biffing CAFETERIA instead of TRATTORIA. I was getting nowhere and I thought SAC must be wrong. I had to look up several answers to check them eg ETONIAN for Gladstone and RHEIN where I initially put RHINE and MAGDALENE. I knew AMARANTHINE.
   Thanks G

3. This took a bit more than average time – following Zabadak’s comment yesterday I made an effort to pay attention to the cluing and enjoy the ride, but I don’t think that slowed things down overmuch. Good advice, that, though.

   Like glh I felt a bit lucky to get the letters to Amaranthine in the proper places, and I definitely liked the lost bird.

4. Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, galloping through the sward…thanks for the earworm, LUPIN. 31.27 and a decent challenge which started off seeming harder than it eventually was, mostly. Used the check function on the immortal word, which I jagged, and had no idea what NELLI was about until informed by glh.

   From Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues:
   I started out on burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff
   Everybody said they’d stand behind me when the game got rough
   But the joke was on me, there was nobody even there to CALL MY BLUFF
   I’m going back to New York City, I do believe I’ve had enough

   1. Interesting… The “official” lyrics, on Dylan website, do read “CALL MY BLUFF.”
      But on Highway 61 Revisited, it’s only “bluff.”
      I don’t know if I’ve ever heard him sing it that way.

      1. OK I cheated. I didn’t think that would get past you but when I saw CALL MY BLUFF the temptation was too great, seeing the ‘official’ lyrics have it like that. (Some of those official lyrics are weird, btw, check If you see her say hello as an example…)

5. Most of this was not too bad if you just follow the cryptics, and a fair amount of biffing is possible. Most solvers, like me will have to think long and hard about amaranthine. With these letters, you would expect ana- something, maybe anathanetic or something like that. Of course, US solvers will not have heard of Call My Bluff, and Priam was a bit of a surprise – oh, that Paris! I couldn’t parse temperament, which made me doubt it for a long time, but with all the crossers I decided that must be the answer.

   Time: 40:08

6. 46 minutes with one error because of one of those annoying clues with an obscure answer clued as an anagram that if you don’t happen to know you have to guess at. I’m looking at you AMARANTHINE where I switched the M and the R. Having later established the correct answer I also had great difficulty finding out why it fitted the definition ‘immortal’ when the first dictionary entries I looked at only had it as a colour and a flower.

   I biffed SIGMA and TEMPERAMENT and never understood the parsing until coming here.

   I was surprised by ‘life / NELLI{e}’ and agree with Kevin about the poor clue for ETONIAN.

   George, you’re missing the H in the parsing of CHOCOLATE.

   1. whoops. ta

7. 17.34 WOE

   No not that one – another very sloppy mistake (WASTRAL). Looks horrible when you spell it out.

   Maybe a little bit too much biffing but I did enjoy some of the clues, including. like Kevin, the “oh that Paris” moment.

   Thanks George and setter

8. DNF on the 50:50. Can’t do much about that – and even AMARANTH has appeared just once in the last 5 years if my googling is correct, so my huff seems justified. Nice puzzle otherwise.

   Thanks both.

9. 53m 55s
   LOI was ETONIAN. Along with Kevin and Jack, I didn’t like the clue at all.
   Interesting (I think!) point about the MOA. They became extinct in NZ soon after the arrival of the first Maori who hunted them. That extinction led, in turn, to the disappearance of the Haast’s Eagle, an enormous bird of prey with fearsome talons (there’s a recreation hanging in the Te Papa museum in Wellington). The Moa had been their main source of food.

10. But godlike Priam from the chariot rose:
    “Forbear” (he cried) “this violence of woes;
    First to the palace let the car proceed,
    Then pour your boundless sorrows o’er the dead.”
    (Iliad, book 24)

    About 45 mins finally to crack the excellent Priam and LOI Temperament. Never got Etonian and couldn’t parse Panellist. Isn’t it Nelly Duff=puff?
    Pity about those two.
    Ta setter and G

    1. My googling suggests that is the origin, but I think that in this case ‘puff’ does mean life, as in ‘never in all my puff’.

       1. Yes, I’m sort of ok with puff=life. My point is that it is nelly with a Y.

       2. Nellie and her close relative Nelly are supported:

          https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/dolqbzi

          1. One lives and learns.

    2. Rather foolishly I thought lide cut short was referring to Little Nell from the Old Curiosity Shop😂

       1. Not foolish at all. That was one of the ideas I had too, while failing to parse.

    3. Which translation is that, M.?

       1. Alexander Pope

          1. Thanks.

11. Veritable fest of wordplay that must’ve defied a biffer, but since I like unravelling things in any case, so what. Many decent examples here, too many to list as faves, but I found 1 across a pretty good starter in that respect.

    As for ETONIAN, I’m not quite sure there’s too much wrong. I was reminded in the solving that UK’s had 20 PMs who attended the establishment in question, with 9 (including W.E.G., who apparently was the first of three in a row) following the Eton-Christ Church Oxford route, and the cryptic in that one was a cinch really.

    Bravo, good ‘un I thought, and thanks GLH for the blog. 56 minutes.

    1. That’s all very true, but being an ‘Etonian’ does not define Gladstone nor vice versa.
       Why not just use ‘public schoolboy’?

12. Forgot to say I’ve seen the {b}UNION clue somewhere very very recently. Can’t find it in a search here or at The Guardian though.

    Btw, today’s Guardian is by Don, if anyone’s looking for another challenge.

13. 9:04. I found this nicely tricky too.
    I have been aware of the amaranth since encountering a hedge fund of that name early in my career. It proved to be very far from immortal.

    1. 😅

14. DNF, missing AMARANTHINE and ELEMI. Pity, as I was enjoying it until then. Old episodes of Call My Bluff have been running on BBC4 recently, or was it BBC2? I didn’t know Gladstone was an Etonian. I did know he was from Liverpool though. Couldn’t he get in at the Liverpool Institute? Good puzzle until the last two. Thank you George and setter.

    1. Same here. I guessed ARAMANTHINE and EMENI, so quite close. Ah well.

15. A little bit gutted with this. I was flying through it at the start but took far too long to see AMARANTHINE, TEMPERAMENT and OZONE all things that should have been straightforward in hindsight.

    LOI ELEMI for which I got fixated that it had to have an EF in there somewhere. Still one of my faster times.

16. A fair few biffs, but it was a lucky tossup between EMENI and ELEMI that won me the day.

17. Another who failed on amaranthine and elemi. Recalled that Gladstone was at Eton though.

18. DNF, with the wrong consecutive letters at 19a (EMENI rather than ELEMI) and ARAMANTHINE rather than AMARANTHINE.

    – Entered RHEIN with no confidence whatsoever as I had no idea how it worked (never thought of fleet=RN), and I would normally expect it to be spelled Rhine
    – Didn’t figure out the ‘nelli’ part of PANELLIST, as all I could think of was Nellie the Elephant…
    – Trusted the wordplay to get PRIAM as I don’t know my Greek mythology well enough

    Thanks glh and setter.

    COD Resilient

19. *19:40 (typo, again!)

    The unknown AMARANTHINE was my last in and spent a bit of time to make sure that the resulting word was the most plausible available, only to let myself down with another stupid typo.

    Otherwise I felt relatively on-message throughout for what I think was a tricky one.

    Thanks to both.

20. About 30′ before going to bed. Like others LOI AMARANTHINE required some letter juggling with largely unhelpful crossers. AMARANTH was the only word sounding vaguely familiar, possibly the hedge fund mentioned above…dunno! Didn’t parse SIGMA, looking for something less obvious, and didn’t see Nelli(e) = life. Does RHEIN need something to indicate a German spelling or is it acceptable as an English spelling? Thanks George and setter

21. A most enjoyable 34 mins with lots of complex wordplay and disguised definitions.
    Luckily I had heard of Amaranth as a plant, its where quinoa comes from, and just hoped there was some etymological link. Looked it up now and there is, an unfading flower in Greek myth apparently.
    Did not parse NELLI so thanks for that.

22. Two TV programmes, one obscurity as an anagram, foreign spelling of a river……all added up to a good challenge. I wasn’t brave enough to submit on leaderboard after constructing the nho AMARANTHINE, and couldn’t understand where NEL came from, the LI being the shortened life.

    The sitcom NOT ON YOUR NELLIE was more than fifty years ago!

    15’31”, thanks george and setter.

23. 17:36

    COD: CHOCOLATE

24. On form today, not as speedy as our blogger, but about 16 minutes to polish this off. Biffed TEMPERAMENT and PANELLIST without parsing fully. I liked MOA and PRIAM and raised an eyebrow at ETONIAN and the spelling of RHEIN in German, but not a big deal.

25. From SAC to AMARANTHINE in 19:31. PANNELIST was biffed from definition and past in the clue. AMARANTHINE from crossers and fingers crossed. Got the correct Paris quickly. On the wavelength for this one. Thanks setter and George.

26. Regarding RHEIN, is there a convention about when the English or local name is used? As a former resident of Köln, the river was easily gettable!

    1. I have a friend from Göteborg who says that folk there are proud of being the only town in Sweden with an English version of the name, ie Gothenberg. Must remember to mention that, next time I am in Madras, or Pekin…

       1. I think it’s Gothenburg in English- at least it was last century when I took a ferry from there to Tilbury.

          1. Yes. As I said …

    2. I think in the past there’s usually been something in the clue to indicate the local spelling, but I’ve noticed recently it’s been omitted. We had another example only a week ago that at the moment escapes me.

27. Steady solve today, not quick but never bogged down.
    Ninja-turtled amaranthine because of the fine SF book “To Live Forever” by Jack Vance, where the eternal ones are known as amaranths. Also the flower comes up occasionally.
    Nelli(e) = life as in “Not on your” seems rather a stretch to me. I also thought that defining someone by reference to what school they went to is unsatisfactory. You may as well say he was tall.

    1. I thought that about Nellie too but I have been persuaded of its validity by this from Brewer’s: Probably from rhyming slang “Not on your Nellie Duff”, “Duff” rhyming with “puff” which is old slang for “breath” and thus life itself. It’s not recorded who Nellie Duff might have been.

28. Very tricky and strictly speaking a DNF as I had to check AMARANTHINE and ELEMI .

    I liked MONT BLANC.

    Thanks g and setter.

29. 16:48 with a fair bit of reverse parsing slowing me down. Where Gladstone went to school would be well down my list of things you need to know about him.

30. 13:14. A bit wordy for my taste, but a fair test. DNK Gladstone was an Etonian, that “nellie” meant life, nor my LOI, AMARANTHINE. Thanks George and setter.

31. 28 minutes. Similar to others, quite a few were biffed first and parsed later, though I couldn’t work out TEMPERAMENT or the NELLI(e) bit of PANELLIST. I wasn’t 100% sure the M and the R were the correct way round in AMARANTHINE either, but half-remembered having heard of the ‘Immortal’ sense of AMARANTH. ETONIAN was my LOI, only thanks to crossers, so a few lucky ones today.

32. 21:09

    Enjoyable, though didn’t quite see everything – parsing of TEMPERAMENT and PANELLIST eluded me. With the B and N checkers at 18d, I momentarily toyed with BROSNAN defined by Pierce, but BELLY-UP brought me back on course. Don’t know why I knew the word AMARANTHINE, but couldn’t have told you what it meant. COD to MAGDALENE.

    Thanks G and setter

33. 1849, and rather less elegant that yesterday’s, I think because of the more arcane GK needed. That said, PRIAM was good value for a penny drop.
    I was stymied by the Gladstone clue, partly because we had his bag recently in a puzzle I can’t mention yet, and partly because his alma mater is a long way down the list of things I know about the Grand Old Man. I look forward to ALBANIAN being clued by reference either to me, Pope Adrian IV, Stephen Hawking, or Al Gore. What, you didn’t know?
    The NELLIE reference passed me by, shamelessly biffing, but I would have struggled to get it from “life”, never having translated the phrase from its CRS.
    CALL MY BLUFF was a favourite of mine, partly because it came on before the risqué BBC version of the Canterbury Tales, which I was allowed to watch because I was doing it at school and which piqued my adolescent interest. It has indeed been repeated recently on BBC4, along with Face the Music with Joseph Cooper and his dummy keyboard.

34. Technical DNF — had to check for the flower and the fragrance. But why all the fuss about Gladstone’s alma mater? No complaints here. I didn’t know he’d gone there but it was clear from the clueing. Wagnerians have no complaints either about RHEIN. FOI SAC, LOI PANELLIST, COD PRIAM.

35. I think in defence of the ETONIAN clue that Eton was rather a factory for Prime Ministers at one time (and of course the wordplay was very helpful). If ‘Harrovian’ had been clued by ‘Churchill maybe’ that would indeed have been no good. The AMARANTHINE clue seemed much worse: an obscurity clued by an anagram, so if you didn’t know the word then aramanthine would have been equally possible. 46 minutes. I recently saw Nelly Korda, the woman’s world no. 1 in golf, referred to as ‘Nelly the Elegant’ and thought it was rather nice. Now I’m not so sure, having learnt that it’s ‘Nellie the Elephant’.

36. On a long train journey with time to kill, so I thought I would step out of my QC comfort zone and try the main crossword for a change. And I seem to have chosen an interesting day to do so, with several clues exciting comment from solvers more experienced than me.

    I got ETONIAN from the wordplay but had to trust that Gladstone went there – a slightly odd choice perhaps given that there are several more recent and better known OEs who have graced (or disgraced) the office of PM. I biffed but did not parse TEMPERAMENTAL and PANELLIST (nelli for life cut short is waaay above my pay grade), ditto NIRVANA (Ana = stories also NHO), got but wondered about the German spelling for the Rhine … but all to no avail as I guessed ArAmANTHINE for my LOI. Seems a tough word to have as an anagram: no way to choose between plausible answers if you don’t know the (somewhat obscure) word. I thought one was meant to be able to solve clues from wordplay?

    Many thanks glh for the blog

37. LOI 28a biffed Temperament. Just couldn’t see it. Thanks glh.
    3d Etonian, DNK William Ewart was one.
    5d Rhein DNK the Germans can’t spell.
    POI 8d Amaranthine DNK is of non-existent flower and =immortal. But the only pronounceable anag (as I thought at the time, not thinking of switching M & R).
    14d Panellist biffed, never thought of not on your nellie, but did discover that a nellie is a bike. That didn’t reassure me at all.

    1. Mark Twain: “They spell it da Vinci and pronounce it da Vinchy: foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.”

       1. Ho ho! I like that.
          I only discovered the other day that Mark Twain named himself after one of the calls that the sounding guy on a ship calls out: “By the mark twain” equals 2 fathoms. I guess the Mississippi Missouri is a bit dodgy for depth in the dry season.

38. Another ARAMANTHINE. A tough anagram if you don’t know the word. I’d have been more upset if I hadn’t already messed up with EMENI which sounded all right at first but I should have known better

39. Enjoyable puzzle, a good difficulty. ‘Perhaps Gladstone’ the only slightly bemusing part.

    2 errors because I plumped for EMENI over ELEMI (was a toss-up).

    I didn’t manage to parse TEMPERAMENT (couldn’t shake the idea that ‘time’ was the first T or something like ‘temp’), or ETONIAN (definition didn’t help much either, just guessed from the checking letters), and NHO ‘Nellie’ meaning life.

    NHO: PRIAM, AMARANTHINE, ELEMI, WASTREL, MOA.

    COD: MAGDALENE

40. Bifferoo to the next clue. All mentioned above, but special mention to TEMPERAMENT and NELLI(E). Not proud of myself (and it’s never too satisfying), but I got them all right in a decent enough time, despite not paying too much attention to how I got there.

    I ninja turtled AMARANTHINE from a Thai restaurant that used to be by the station in Earlsfield.

    15:56

41. 49:33
    LOI was a guessed ELEMI.
    COD to MAGDALENE.
    I did not know what school Gladstone attended, so spent ages searching for answers based on bags, premiers and Peelites, until with all the checkers in place ETONIAN was the only answer that fitted.
    Needed pen and paper to get the unknown AMARANTHINE.

    Thanks glh and setter

42. Just about right. COD – PRIAM

43. DNF in 27 mins. Plonked Emotion and ebeli in for Etonian and elemi in desperation rather than hope. Having seen those answers, pretty good clues though if you don’t know elemi, rather tough. Guessed amaranthine but could have gone either way asNHO that word.

44. Well, I raced through most of this before going to the gym, with only 5-6 clues left to do after my exercises. Same as everyone else, by the looks of it. I guessed right with ELEMI and AMARANTHINE, only to fail on the Gladstone clue (thinking that ELORIAN might be another obscure word).
    Looking for more rigour tomorrow. I liked PRIAM and MONT BLANC.
    Thanks George and Setter.
    BTW fascinating episode of ‘word of mouth’ with Michael Rosen on R4 right now. All about Cockney. I hope a setter or two are listening.

45. 41:25. I found that pretty tough, though it looks from the snitch that the regulars didn’t find it too bad. I really enjoyed the battle with the wordplay though and it was worth the effort. LOI was AMARANTHINE, which only rang the most muffled of bells. thank you both!

46. Had a go at this but gave up with 11 clues unsolved. The blog clearly explained why I hadn’t a hope of ever getting them!

47. I remembered AMARANTHINE from Keats or Shelley … or possibly WS Gilbert:

    ‘What time the poet hath hymned
    The writhing maid, lithe-limbed,
    Quivering on amaranthine asphodel…’

    But I didn’t get ELEMI, which wasn’t my fault, or STAVE, which was definitely my fault. Just couldn’t see it.

48. 27 mins all straightforward until LOI ETONIAN. Since EMOTION and EROSION were wrong, I was stumped. Might have helped if I’d seen the cryptic. I know quite a bit about Gladstone because he lived very nearby (Hawarden), but not where he went to school.

49. 40 minutes, which I enjoyed very much. Actually, I biffed quite a bit of it and understood the wordplay afterwards and it seemed to have been on my wavelength today, since I immediately thought of the right sense of Paris and Boots, for example. But of course NELLIE=life failed me, as did the correct parsing of PRIAM — I kept asking myself how MARP could be a carriage, since I wasn’t expecting the wheels to be literal wheels; I thought they were an inversion indicator.

50. I’m probably missing something really easy but could someone how stories relates to ANA?

    1. A collection of interesting stories or anecdotes about a person or place.

       1. Ah I see thank you. Kept typing in ‘ANA stories’ rather than ‘ANA meaning’ in google

Comments are closed.