Times 24,117

Author   richardvgPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Solving time: about 18 minutes

Four minutes in to this (when I thought things were going well) a friend got on to the tube and sat next to me. Once she’d settled down to read her paper, I re-started, but I am not sure about the timing.

I also ran into problems with the North-East corner. The key mental block was not solving the anagram at 3D until I had all crossing letters. I had looked several times at the second word and convinced myself that I didn’t know any animals to fit “P _ N _ E _”. 1A also seemed rather tricky. The words were all pretty straightforward once discovered, except for ORGANON. I think I knew this word existed, though I didn’t know what it meant, and I still don’t think I am likely to use it in conversation any time soon.

Only minor quibble is that I don’t understand how “carryon” can define LIAISON at 4D. (Now resolved thanks to comments. Jimbo tells me that the paper puzzle had “carry-on” with a hyphen, and Kurihan points out that “carry-on” as a noun means “affaire” or “liaison”. Thanks, both.)

Across

1 (c)ROCKS ALMON(d) – difficult – “topped” for “lose first letter” and “chopped” for “lose last letter” could have had other meanings. And “fruit” for “almond” is not obvious.
6 CHAD – two meanings
10 P + LATE – I did want this to be PAGED for some time
11 AT LEISURE – (SEE RITUAL)*
12 APPLES AND PEARS – rhyming slang for “flight” of stairs
14 ORGAN ON – an unfamiliar word. Wordplay is straightforward, but only after you lift and separate “operating system”. For too long I was sure that OS would be part of the answer
15 OVERSEA (=”oversee”) – an old-fashioned variant for “overseas”
17 F(LEAP)IT
19 MAN + DATE
23 NORWEGIAN – (IN RAGE NOW)*
24 EDITH – ie EDIT(o.r.) + H(ard)
25 EVEN(t)
26 BEDSITTERS – (RESIST DEBT)*

Down

1 R(OP)Y
2 CHAMPAGNE – (=”sham pain”)
3 SHETLAND PONIES – (ANTELOPES HINDS)* – aargh!
4 LIAI + SON, LIAI being (I AIL)(rev) – The closest I can get to justifying “carryon” as a definition is that as a verb (and with a space) “carry on” can mean to pursue an affaire or liaison. Perhaps someone can improve on this? (Yes, they could. See intro.)
5 ORLANDO – two meanings, the first a ref to the composer
7 H(ot) + A U.S.A.
8 DEE + PSEATED – (AT SPEED)*
13 CON + F(I’D)ENCE
16 SMALL-TIME two meanings
18 TO(N(ew) TIN)E
19 MU SINGS
21 GOR(S)E
22 THUS – being “this” with U(nited) for I (=one)

38 comments on “Times 24,117”

  1. I took a while to get into this, but 35mins in the end so not so hard. I thought there were some nice references and like the long anagram at 3dn.

    ORGANON is new to me, but quite gettable. Shades of Lord Gnome in ORGAN for “periodical”.

    Also a few questions, which probably are probably just me being slow. In 1ac “pots” = ROCKS ? And is an almond a fruit? At 24ac does “that’s” clue IT?

    A couple of easy ones for the Cousins at 5dn and 6ac.

    And I bet Kevin’s first entry was 12ac! You were just 2 days early!

  3. Quite a tricky one that left me with several still unexplained when I had completed the grid. It took me for ever to see the wordplay at 1A despite having pencilled in ROCK SALMON quite early on. I think nuts are fruits in the wider sense of the word.

    I don’t time myself accurately on commuting days now but I’d estimate roughly 40 minutes.

  4. 9:41 so an improvement on the last couple of days, but then there was no final clue where alternatives needed pondering. Wordplay not understood until afterwards for 1A, 24, 22. 3D took too long – should possibly have swallowed pride and done it with jumbled letters on paper rather than in my head.
  5. 4dn “carry-on” is also a noun, meaning a liaison or illicit affair. Chambers and COED have it hyphenated only.
      1. Yes, Richard, there is. One of the pleasures of using the printed paper today was to work out anagrams and wordplay by scribbling across the smug face of a certain Mr Pietersen!
  6. After several days of channeling the setter, the spirit departed this morning and it took two good half-hour sessions. In the end it didn’t appear to be appreciably more difficult than the others. Had trouble with plurals after yesterday. Thought 15A must involve OS for OVERSEAS, until some other part of my brain hit me over the head with a rubber mallet. Also mistook Gibbons for Gibbon as in “Gibbon’s Decline and Fall”. What a difference the placement of an apostrophe. Thought the inclusion of an obscure Elizabethan/Jacobean madrigalist might raise hackles but my organon (i.e. Google) tells me he is still quite widely sung, particularly in church choirs. Not as interesting as Gesualdo but then he probably didn’t murder anybody. Luckily, I have no shame when it comes to anagrams and the ponies proved to be the solution to my impasse.

    As for the almond issue, most of what is called fruit is actually pseudocarp (not sure if there’s a barrowman’s cry fot that). The fruit is the bit which grows into something. Now as to the difference between a fruit and a vegetable…

  7. 21 min. Much of it wasted in the NE. As I recall from my time in the UK, nothing good came from that direction. So “Hausa” and “chad” were not that easy, the chad reference being to whether or not the election of George Dubya hinged on the reliability of a punch card voting system in Florida.
  8. Another reasonably easy puzzle at about 25 minutes to solve. I worked from NW to SE with no particular hold-ups.

    The obscure words were easy enough from the wordplay and TONTINE brought back memories of actuarial studies. I seem to recall they are illegal in the UK – for fairly obvious reasons.

    A number of good clues. I particularly liked 6A in conjunction with 5D; 14A; 24A; 25A; and 8D.

    1. The comic possibilities of tontines were explored in “The Wrong Box” – both book and film.
    2. Tontines are illegal in a rather British way – they’re recognised as a class of business in Insurance legislation, but no companies are authorized to transact this class. As far as I remember, “The Wrong Box” exaggerates them. Real ones were annuities shared between surviving members of a group, and therefore increasing for the lucky ones as the others died. In the book/film, there’s just a big lump sum, paid to the last survivor when all the rest are dead.
  9. Wish setters had a way to more clearly indicate ONES vs. YOUR in phrases like DIG IN ONES HEELS. I forgot about the potential ambiguity and spent ages trying to solve 19D and 18D as a result.

    Other than that, a wonderful moment of serendipity solving CHAD as NPR had a program on about the elections in which fraud in 2000 was alluded to (since today’s the day that Cheney officially approves the 2008 results).

    1. From experience I have assumed that the practice is to use “one’s” where either is possible. In some cases – most obviously imperative expressions – only “your” makes sense, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

      I’m sure Peter or other experienced solvers can shed light.

      1. My impression is that for the Everyman, Guardian and Telegraph you might as well toss a coin between “your” and “one’s”, or rather leave it blank until you have confirmation. But I think the Times almost always has “one’s”.
        1. That’s right. The practical effect is that if you don’t have the confirmation from checkers, getting it by testing possibilities like Y/O and U/E is the next thing to do.

          I think there are a few informal phrases, like KEEP YOUR HAIR ON, where even the Times xwd ed thinks that “ONES” would be ridiculous, but I don’t rely on any of these. I hadn’t thought of imperatives, but LEND ME ONES EARS would certainly be a no-no!

          Edited at 2009-01-08 12:30 pm (UTC)

          1. Peter’s examples are both clear imperatives, so only “your” is possible”.

            There are cases where a phrase may be either indicative or imperative. For example “hold your/one’s tongue” can be either. If the definition was simply “keep quiet” I would expect it to be “one’s”. If it was “Keep quiet!” that is pretty certainly imperative, and therefore “your”. “Don’t talk!” is unambiguously imperative and requires “your”.

            I think the answer is use “one’s” in all cases, unless the meaning clearly demands “your”.

  10. 14:25. I too couldn’t think how P?N?E? could be any animals that I’d heard of and I also confidently wrote in PAGED at 10a (I don’t know why, it doesn’t work). Like yesterday my last minute was spent on one clue, this time TONTINE, and was relieved to be correct. I can only remember seeing YOUR rather than ONES once in a Times crossword, but my memory is as reliable as a packet of poundshop batteries.
    Thoroughly enjoyable today, my COD nod going to 6a for its lightbulb moment.
  11. 25 mins, I got really bogged down with this one in the NW corner. 14A is a tough clue for an obscure word. Like others, I took a while to crack 3D,

    Tom B.

  12. A not far off average 35 minutes here, with nothing causing any real problems, though I have to admit that the wordplay for 1ac (my last in) completely eluded me before arriving here, so cheers! Lots of good clues here, I thought. My favourites were 16d, 12ac, 24ac, with the middle one perhaps getting my COD nomination.
  13. Gave up at 30 minutes with 10a missing (pass the numpty hat) and 18 wrong (tinmine anyone?)

    For 3d I resorted to scribbling down a jumble of letters and the ponies jumped out straight away, as if started by a firework. 2d felt chestnutty but took too long to get and 12 was a gimme.

    At 14 there’s another example of the sort of apostrophe that Sotira (and, indeed, I) dislike where it only appears to work as “organ has”.

    I liked “belts out” for “sings” at 19 and also enjoyed 17, 1d & 8.

    Q-0, E-7, D-8, COD 17.

  14. 18:52 .. Very smart puzzle with some beautifully engineered wordplay. Must have been built by the Germans. Do the Germans do crosswords? And if so, are the grids really, really big?

    Q-0, E-8, D-7.5 .. COD 12a for reminding me that “fruit flies like a banana”

    1. They do have ‘Kreuzwortraetsel’, but I’ve only ever seen definitional (or allusive) puzzles, not cryptics as we know them. I don’t think any language lends itself so well to cryptic crosswords as English, for a variety of reasons.

      Tom B.

      1. When a former employer sent me to Frankfurt for a C programming course (don’t ask why) c. 20 years ago, I saw a Sunday newspaper puzzle that seemed at least partially cryptic. I’ve looked at the Wiki article on Kreuzwortraetsel, but neither my German nor Wiki Translate is good enough to decide whether the Schwierigkeit (difficulty) section is telling me that there are German puzzles resembling cryptics, or just mentioning cryptics as difficult foreign puzzles.
        1. According to the article, it seems that one Berlin-based paper publishes something similar to an English cryptic. Not a paper I’ve ever read – I lived in Frankfurt for a while – but I’d like to track it down and see how the clues work. Thanks for the reference, Peter.

          Tom B.

  15. 9.05. Judging by other comments I was lucky to get the anagram at 3D straightaway. Probably my main holdup was ORGANON where my brain was too reluctant to separate “operating system”.
  16. I found this another easyish one (that’s three in a row). All but 15A finished in 24 minutes, then 2 more minutes to see OVERSEA. I didn’t know TONTINE, but the wordplay ofered little else. I did like the anagram in 26.
  17. The painter, Francis Bacon, a mighty champagne drinker, had a favorite toast: “Sham pain for my real friends, and real pain for my false friends.”
  18. I believe it was ‘Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends’.

  19. I crawled through this one in about 45 minutes, having to look up ORGANON at the end; I am unfamiliar with this word, perhaps explaining why my mind lacks organization. I didn’t get the wordplay for 1A til coming here, and I also took far too long to think of PLATE and CHAMPAGNE, so the NW area really held me back. Overall, though, a pretty fun puzzle; I especially liked 24A. Regards to all.
  20. One of those that I feel I struggled with without fully understanding why. There were some difficult clues, but I managed to get most of those while still struggling with easier ones – champagne, plate, shetland ponies.bc
  21. CHAMPAGNE at 2d was my POI (penultimate) as it took me ages to see the double homophone – not being familiar with the toasting habits of Francis Bacon. That finally allowed me to get PLATE at 10a as my LOI. I had trouble equating “old” with “late” – you can die young and be late but not old. Humpf.

    There are 2 “easies” omitted:

    20a Be stubborn but make an impression at grass-roots level? (3,2,4,5)
    DIG IN ONES HEELS. More commonly said as DIG ONES HEELS IN or DIG YOUR HEELS IN. Interesting discussion on YOUR v ONES above involving imperatives – where a command would use YOUR. My rule is that, in the Times, it is ALWAYS ONES except when it isn’t. I wait for confirming crossers if in doubt.

    9d Unsophisticated hobby brings in extra money (6,8)
    SIMPLE INTEREST. I don’t know much about this but I think compound interest is better?

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