Times 24198 – Surely not Nutella?

42 comments on “Times 24198 – Surely not Nutella?”

1. Congratulations on the first blog.

   28mins here which was longer than it should have been. Lots of names used, but no real knowledge required. 25ac held me up for a while – ROE DEER seemed improbably weak, while RED DEER at least seemed to have something of the Norwegian Blue parrot about it.

2. 
   Congrats on your first blog, kororareka.

   28 minutes for me (snap, kurihan!) with few hold-ups. I also didn’t like 25 and I never heard of the Irish port.

3. 6:08 – straightforward puzzle as already stated. Minor delays in dismissing Don Quixote / Sancho Panza from the wordplay at 20,and in pondering an animal to fit R?? BEAR => B?? REAR at 25.

   Nudge to the person who thought they were seeing two defs plus wordplay for the first time about a week ago here’s another one! (13/EXPRESS).

   1. Isn’t it 3 definitions plus wordplay? EX-PRESS; not stopping; newspaper; say. I think that is an unusual construction but it works very well.
      1. 2 or 3 definitions depends on whether you claim that “definition by example” needs a clarifier (Express, say) or not. Doubtless the reason for “say” rather than perhaps, maybe or some such, is because of the extra definition material. Very clever.
         1. Jimbo is right – it’s three. D by E would be using “Express” to clue NEWSPAPER, not the other way round.
            1. Pfft. I guess I need to be awake when I post in here…
   2. That was me and it did occur to me at the time…
4. an express time at 35 minutes for me
   nothing too hard but i did like the shorter hombe and treasure island. a useful start to the week
   well done on your first blog
5. About 15 mins, held up at the SOLTI/SCHILLING crossroads. 10A looks like another challenge in terms of clue taxonomy: a ‘semi-partial &lit.’?. Nice crossword, 5D appealed to me.

   Tom B.

6. I bet you’re glad that’s over kororareka – well done.

   A lot of good stuff here leavened with some truly awful. In among the praiseworthy are EXPRESS, BOSWELL and TREASURE ISLAND. No prizes for guessing my two booby prizes. I can’t make LINCTUS sound liked “linked us” and the ROE DEER spoonerism is just tosh. Luckily I didn’t spend long trying to fit Bournemouth into 29A so 25 minutes to solve.

   1. Interesting, Jimbo, but try as I might I can’t say “linked us” so that it sounds any different from “linctus” without inserting a break between the two words that would sound unnatural in my every day speech.
   2. To me this homophone is quite precise. How in heaven’s name could anyone pronounce linked us and linctus differently?
   3. BOSWELL and TREASURE ISLAND praiseworthy? They are ridiculously easy, an experienced solver laughs and write them in.
      1. If they raise a chuckle, I’d say they’re worthy of praise. Not for being difficult, but for being clever.
7. 11 minutes, just about dead on. I would have broken into single figures for the first time ever if I hadn’t taken almost two minutes to think of EGRESS – too fixated on “d” for departure as in train timetables.

   I don’t pronounce “linctus” and “linked us” the same either, but I think we’ve established fairly conclusively that there’s no such thing as a guaranteed 100% homophone in all dialects. Anything that sounds near enough the same to make it clear that’s what the setter is on about, is good enough for me.

   10ac is a fine example of a partial &lit which is so clever it deserves its place in the grid.

8. There is a bit of a Spanish feel about today’s puzzle. However, the main reason for my slow, 48 minute, time was the natural history questions. I always assumed that the domestic goddess was named after the Italian for fennel-flower. On consulting Chambers, I see that both fennel-flower and love-in-a-mist are members of the genus Nigella.

   I had to get stonechat from the wordplay and I had difficulty with roe deer simply because dough rear is such a pathetic spoonerism.

   I struggled with both the Dorset resort and the Irish port because, in both places, I thought I was looking for a homophone rather than a simple anagram. Thanks for the blog Kororareka and my sympathy over Drogheda. Perhaps only in Ireland would they have a port that is 4 miles from the sea. It is better known for its industry and as a Dublin dormitory town.

   1. I am partially exonerated then. But there’s no excuse for persisting with my first idea when it clearly wasn’t working. Let that be a salutory lesson. At the time I remember thinking “What’s that Drog-something place which crops up from time to time? How can Drog be mad?”. I blame the extra pressure and throw myself on the mercy of the court.
9. Found this one pretty easy and might have had a fast time if I’d timed myself and hurried it up a bit. Agree with comments already made about mixture of good and bad. Somewhat surprisingly, linctus and linked us do sound alike the way I say them, but I object to homophones that don’t work for all on principle and if it doesn’t work for Jimbo it’s a bad clue in my book. bc
   1. That would mean no homophones, ever. I’m not sure that would be a good idea.
      1. Not sure whether that’s true – I think there are plenty of homophones that would work for pretty much all native British speakers (*). If a genuine attempt was made to use only those, I’m sure no reasonable person would object to the odd genuine error that crept in.

         But if that’s not practical, no homophones would be the lesser of two evils. I can remember when almost every crossword had a “missing word from a quotation” clue. They’ve disappeared, largely unlamented, I suspect. It wouldn’t bother me to see homophones go the same way.

         (*) Peter raised an objection to this a couple of weeks ago that I wasn’t able to respond to at the time but will now. He observed the degree of regional variation in pronunciation of, say, the “a” in father. I think this is something of an artificial . I would pronounce “beer” and “bier” differently than a Londoner, but they would still be homophones for both.

         1. The a concerned was in “bath”. I can’t think of an example where this would make a difference in what was or wasn’t a homophone, but the point is that there are differences between similar sounds, which are significant for some but not for others.

            There’s also a difference between “bad” homophones and quote clues. The quotes often made it impossible to guess which of several possible words was the right one, or to know that your answer was right. How often have “bad homophones” actually made the clue unsolvable?

            1. Peter I wasn’t suggesting any similarity between quote clues and homophones, merely that there’s a precedent for a particular type of clue falling out of favour without any harm done.

               I don’t feel I’ve properly articulated my objection to RP homophones which is to do with the perpetuation an old-fashioned, ahistorical and rather offensive view of English as an orthodoxy-with-variations that was thoroughly discredited as even when I studied English Language in the 70s. Other institutions, notably the BBC, dropped the pretence of standard pronunciation decades ago. I think it’s time The Times caught up. But the argument is subtler than this brief summary implies. bc

               1. There is a precedent, but I believe it’s for removing a clue-type that simply doesn’t fit into the style of cryptic crosswords, not one that does but causes too much trouble.

                  I don’t support the idea that any version of English is superior, but I don’t believe that the rules used for finding homophones for cryptic clues say anything about superiority, any more than the rules for Scrabble say that the words that match the rules are “better” than those that don’t.

                  And lenny has a point (below) – if you understand Groucho’s “sanity clause” gag, it does seem rather po-faced to insist on 100% precise homophones.

      2. Not sure whether that’s true – I think there are plenty of homophones that would work for pretty much all native British speakers (*). If a genuine attempt was made to use only those, I’m sure no reasonable person would object to the odd genuine error that crept in.

         But if that’s not practical, no homophones would be the lesser of two evils. I can remember when almost every crossword had a “missing word from a quotation” clue. They’ve disappeared, largely unlamented, I suspect. It wouldn’t bother me to see homophones go the same way.

         (*) Peter raised an objection to this a couple of weeks ago that I wasn’t able to respond to at the time but will now. He observed the degree of regional variation in pronunciation of, say, the “a” in father. I think this is something of an artificial difficulty. I would pronounce “beer” and “bier” differently than a Londoner, but they would still be homophones for both.

         1. Sorry not sure how to delete the duplicated post.
10. Started off at a good lick and was looking for a fastish time for me (say 25 to 30 mins) but then, sharing kororareka’s experience (congrats, by the way, on your first blog), got bogged down for no particularly good reason in the NW corner. In the end about 45 mins – too long for what was, on the whole, a straightforward puzzle, as some of the very fast times posted above testify. The Austrian SCHILLING took an absurdly long time to drop at 3dn, and DROGHEDA at 18ac would have come much more quickly if I’d spotted the anagrind instead of trying to find the name of an Irish port that sounded vaguely like “mad dog”! The wordplay and surface reading at 7dn were, indeed, delightful, but the answer so obvious, for anyone with a smattering of knowledge about Boswell and Johnson, which must mean almost everyone, that the clue was almost instantly soluble as a non-cryptic literary general knowledge question.

    I must say, on this occasion, I’m with the non-Jimbo faction about the LINCTUS/”linked us” homophone at 23ac. The similarity of pronunciation is surely perfectly close enough – indeed, virtually identical for most speakers — for the clue to work. I also agree with the comment that if it were made a rule that homophones have to be 100 per cent satisfying for all speakers of English everywhere, then that would effectively rule out all clues turning on puns, given the variety of accents and pronunciations in these islands alone. And that would be a pity. I’d also be prepared to defend Jimbo’s “tosh” Spoonerism at 25ac. Agreed, it isn’t a proper spoonerism, but it is in accord with the rather loose way references to Spoooner are used in cryptic xwd clues. It is also, of course, a pun, since (I presume), after transposing the first letters of ROE and DEER, we are required to take DOE as sounding like “dough”=money and REER as sounding like “rear”=back. Possibly there should have been some indicator of the homophone in the clue. But, on the whole, I thought this was an enjoyable little joke by the setter.

11. They wouldn’t for me. I pronounce them differently, although to most people the difference is perhaps too subtle to spot.

    There’s something like 37 vowel sounds in the English language. If you actually use all of them correctly, there’s no such thing as a homophone, I suspect.

12. …but the hard ones were very hard, ‘Nigella’ and ‘Drogheda’, in particular, even with all the crossing letters. So my potential 15 minutes ballooned to 45 as I wracked my brain for the last couple.

    We will see what next Monday brings….

13. 11:28 .. only real hold-ups were NIGELLA and DROGHEDA. I enjoyed the ‘Yoda grammar’ of the Franco clue. A tick for the neat NOVEL and STONECHAT, too.

    I’m no fan of “Spooner may have had” type contrivances. This one was especially overwrought. 23a isn’t homophonic for me, either, but close enough not to exercise me much.

14. I found this pretty easy, finishing in 20 minutes. In some cases it wasn’t even necessary to consider the wordplay. NIGELLA just leaps from the definition if you know your plants, while a mental run through the sol-fa scale quickly gives Solti if you know your conductors. I fare rather better with names such as these. Anything sporting, other than F1, makes me struggle. I saw no problem with the linctus/linked us homophone, but I share dorsetjimbo’s view of the Spooner clue.
15. I don’t have a real time due to interruption, but I thought it overall in the range of average difficulty. My last entries were NIGELLA and STONECHAT. I didn’t understand the ‘chat’=’rabbit’ part of that one, nor did I know ‘punt’=’bet’ in 17. We don’t us the word LINCTUS over here, but for what it’s worth, if we did, it would probably be pronounced as a homophone for ‘linked us’. COD for me is 5D. Regards to all.
    1. Kevin, “to rabbit” is slang for to talk incessantly
16. Thanks Jimbo. Upon reflection, I’m sure that crops up in these puzzles every so often, but I can’t remember every slang usage I learn here, sorry to say. Thanks for the help. I appreciate it.
17. In standard English pronunciation, according to the commonly used phonemic chart designed by Adrian Underhill, there are 12 pure vowels and 8 diphtongs, a diphthong being a combination of two vowel sounds. ‘Ear’ is an example of a diphthong. There is now an interactive version of the chart on the web, where you can hear the sounds of the phonemes, if you’re interested. I would judge that ‘linctus’ is nearly a homophone for ‘linked us’, except that the final ‘s’ would normally be pronounced as ‘z’in the latter.
    1. Try “they linked us up2 followed by “they finished the linctus up”. I cannot make them sound other than identical.
18. I would pronounce ‘linked us up’ with the /z/ phoneme, and ‘drank the linctus up’ with /s/.
19. This discussion is getting a bit po-faced. Most plays on words are funny simply because they are not exact homophones. When Chico Marx says “You can’t fool me, there aint no sanity clause” no-one quibbles about the phonemes.
20. George (glheard) here at a public computer, so I’m not logging in. Finally guessed a geographical anagram correctly, had not heard of DROGHEDA and was waiting to get at a computer to find there was a port called ORHGDEDA or DRDGOEHA
21. Well done Kororareka. You may start breathing again. Found this quite easy (16 min). Fortunately Drogheda and nigella were gimmies. Last in after much cogitation was egress.
22. I forgot to say ‘well done’, kororareka (a compliment in itself). I wouldn’t trust anyone who didn’t get nervous about hitting that ‘Post to Community’ button for the first time – it’s like being lent the keys to someone else’s much loved car. Congrats on bringing it home in one piece (and for clearing all the used coffee cups and donut wrappers off the back seat).
23. Hi kororareka, from a fellow Perthite.
    I thought you must live in Perth from varios comments you have made and it seems I was right!
    Ann H

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