Times 24207

Author   richardvgPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Solving time: 13:08

Relieved to finish in a reasonable time. There were three words I just didn’t know: 28 (MAYWEED) was a plausible name for a plant, but 23 (ZENANA) and 19 (STABILE) were bold guesses. The wordplay for all three was reasonably straightforward, which is good of the setter.

But lots of the wordplay in other clues was anything but straightforward. There were at least four that took me a few minutes each to untangle after I finished. All entirely fair, I think. My favourites today are 1 (INDIGO) and 15 (GHOST STORY)

Across

1 IN + FANCY – though I can’t yet think of a sentence in which “fancy” and “favourite” are interchangeable
5 MO(HIC(k))AN
9 DELIVER + A N(ew) C.E. – with the first element being REVILED(rev)
10 LEV(y) – being 100 stotinki
11 G(R)OT TO – neatly done
12 SMASHING – two meanings, and also using an alternative meaning of “wicked”
14 FEA(THE)R + W(omen) + EIGHT, the definition being just “nobody”
17 EXPRESS (state) TRAINS (schools)
21 TA(C(our)T)LES + S(pread) – I wondered about the definition, but Chambers is happy that discreet can mean tactful.
23 ZEN + AN, A
26 B(uilt) + ROAD + STAIRS – the “to the west” being an instruction to put ROAD (meaning “path”) to the left of STAIRS (meaning “flight”)
27 D(IT TAN)Y

Down

1 (w)IND + I + GO – I thought of this with just the first letter, put it in once I had three checking letters, and then took several minutes afterwords to see how the wordplay worked
2 FELL O(w) F, F
3 NO. + VITIATE – I wasted some time trying to incorporate “nunnery”
4 YORE (=”your”) – being Scottish, I often find that homophones don’t work for me. This one seems more of a stretch than most.
5 MO(N.T. MART)RE
6 (w)HEELS – another one that I put in on the basis of definition and checking letters, with the explanation coming much later
8 NAV + 1 + GATE, that is (1 VAN)(rev) followed by a Scottish or Northern English word for a street
13 G(HOST’S + (defea)T)ORY
15 EVI(DENT)L + Y
16 BEST + O + WED
18 PICK (=”pic” = picture = film) + SAT(urday) – took me a very long time to work out. I wanted the K to be the end of “week”.
19 STABILE – (IT’S ABLE)* – Not a word I knew, but guessed – correctly – that it was the counterpart of a mobile
20 PA(USE)D
22 LIBRA – reversed hidden
24 (d)AD(‘s) A(r)M(y) – ie central letters of dad’s followed by alternate letters of army

44 comments on “Times 24207”

  1. 13 minutes for me also, but should have been considerably quicker. EXPRESS TRAINS was a very easy win for 14ac. Only when I got stuck on the downs did I realise it was actually the clue for 17ac. Oops!

    In horseracing, “the punters’ fancy” – also known as the jolly – is the favourite, ie. the best-backed horse in the race. (An individual punter’s fancy is not necessarily the favourite, because he/she might think something else will win.) Myself, I would have thought that “fancy = favourite” was valid in a romantic/teacher’s-pet sense, but I don’t know if the dictionary justifies that thought. Come to that, I don’t know if the horseracing terminology has made it into the dictionary…

    I’m with you an ZENANA. Never heard of it, but it seemed clear from the wordplay. I’m aware of STABILE as a word in its own right but couldn’t have told you what it meant. I also didn’t know DITTANY, and left it alone because the wordplay could have led to any of several words I didn’t know – not all of which would have been real words! In particular I thought of ITTANDY, but the wordplay wouldn’t quite stack for that – “edges” would be extraneous, I now see.

  2. Another good crossword today, and another good example of how difficult words can be used fairly. I hadn’t heard of dittany or zenana, but felt able to enter both. Stabile (opposite of mobile 😉 I was vaguely aware of.

    Fancy in 1ac is presumably used in the sense my grandmother used, ie favourite person “Who’s yer new fancy man then?” (addressed to my sister, not me!)

  3. 25 mins today, the last 5 of which were spent in the SW corner.

    At 18dn I had PICKS ON for a while, thinking PIC + K(last of week) + ON(broadcast?) but could not account for the S. I think PICKS ON is standard English for “criticises” – PICKS AT seems to be N country, and is new to me.

    ZENANA MAYWEED and DITTANY were also guesses from wordplay.

    I thought this was good fun with lots of worthy clues.

    1. Around here, at least, to pick on someone is to bully them, whereas to pick at something is to find fault with it.
      1. OED has

        pick on

        “2. To single out for unfair or unkind attention or adverse criticism; to victimize.”

        pick at

        “2. To find fault with, nag at, criticize; to taunt, tease. Now chiefly regional.”

  4. Not just northern. All the major roads leading out of Leicester are gates. Must be Scandinavian considering how many thoroughfares in Oslo are also gates.

    Conrad

    1. I’d forgotten about the gates in Leicester. (There’s a whacking big Boots store on Gallowtree Gate, or there used to be…)
      I suspect you’re right, and that it dates back to the Vikings occupying much of northern England – or at least, “northern” as defined by people living in London. ;-D

      All of the villages, towns and hamlets ending in “-by” are Viking-origin names. There aren’t many of them south of Leicestershire-ish.

      1. Yes, gates relate back to the Vikings, definitely. We have them in Loughborough too.

        Ten and a half mins for this one – MAYWEED was the only unfamiliar term.

  5. 11:04 Another who wanted 18D to be PICKS ON but eventually gave up chasing non-existent wordplay. Remembered ZENANA’s meaning from holiday visits to historic buildings, but thought it was from Moorish Spain rather than India. Curiously, remembered Dittany from the Proms – sometime in the 80s or 90s the BBC Symphony Orchestra recruited a string player (viola?) with the forename Dittany – the kind of thing you notice when idly browsing the list of players. Felt rather sorry for her when I looked it up and found “gas plant”. Mayweed and stabile felt “semi-new” – both with strong link to def as well as wordplay. Toughest wordplay/answer combo for me was probably MONTMARTRE – I can imagine losing time there to someone who just spotted it from the def.

    Sadly, heyesey’s racing favourite version of ‘jolly’ isn’t in the books – it would make a nice change from jolly=RM=Royal Marine. I was a bit surprised to see that Heinz = a 57-bet wager on 6 horses isn’t there either.

  6. The usual suspects for me too. I had to deduce the existence of zenana, dittany, mayweed, stabile and lev. Also novitiate meaning a novice rather than the state of being a novice was new to me.

    Having done all the hard work I struggled with 20, going through ceased, passed and lapsed before I paused.

    The crafty definition of Featherweight held me up in the top half. I needed most of the checkers before I got it.

  7. Same gaps in knowledge as most above. I didn’t know DITTANY but did invent the stinking DUNSADY (that’s it=SA in DUN + D(aint)Y) which definitely made 18 PICKS ON with broadcast being ‘S ON (it was OK for IT ‘S A on Monday). The only problem was that it would have had to be “at the end of end of week”, which I was quite prepared to raise as a quibble. Otherwise, lots of good stuff here, particularly in the NE.

    The stabile was coined by Alexander Calder after his mobiles, as Ross points out.

    1. (‘S ON) = broadcast? Not quite sure how serious your suggestion is, but No! The ‘S in ASTI came from “is” in the clue. There’s no “is” or “has” in this clue, and an ‘S cannot just appear from thin air. On a purely practical basis, if you have a phrase answer involving a common preposition but the wordplay doesn’t seem to work, trying alternative prepositions is a better bet than searching for ways to justify iffy wordplay.
      1. I agree that my pseudo construction of PICKS ON was never going to get a guernsey, but I was quite disappointed to learn DUNSADY didn’t exist (I still think it a better use of the “has”) and I had to reluctantly accept PICKS AT as the only possibility at 18, even though nothing is picked at in Australia except food, to my knowledge. It’s enough to turn oneself into a botanist, discover a new plant and name it Dunsady.
        1. Oh, I should answer my own query on why DUNSADY could not be correct (quite apart from its non-existence). In the Times, the edges are the edges are the edges, neatly trimmed to the letter at the start and the letter at the end. I have been doing a few puzzles from other sources recently which are less precise in their definitions of such things and obviously am still inhabiting that world. E.g. ending unwell = ell and sundry other sins such as unindicated inclusions. No wonder I do the Times.
  8. Sorry, it was jerrywh who mentioned the stabile/mobile connection, not Ross. Also forgot to mention the well hidden LIBRA.
  9. 26 minutes again today. All the words I never heard of have been mentioned more than once. There was a good balance of clues I solved from the definition without immediately understanding the wordplay, and words I didn’t know which I solved from wordplay alone.
  10. Took off like a rocket, but unfortunately it turned out to be one of those early US ones from the time of Sputnik. Took 27 min for the debris to settle. For some reason 20 dn PAUSED would just not come home to roost. The flat/pad synonym may well cause some trans Altantic eyebrow raising as well.
      1. Foolishly ended with “slabite” instead of “stabile”, lazy because I think I’d have recognised stabile if I’d worked through the available anagrams more carefully. I’m weak on plants and didn’t know mayweed existed, never mind that it stunk; the possibility of a plant called dittany was vaguely present in the memory but buried very deep and only got from wordplay. I too had “picks on” for a while (pic Sun as opposed to pic Sat) which, given atrocious (non) homophones like 4 down still seems, alas, as plausible an answer as the correct one – at least until I had the checking letter from the recondite dittany. On the whole a nice puzzle, though. bc
        1. PICK SON = “Pick,Sun” might be inside the range of homophones the Times editor would allow, but it can’t be used here, because of the position of the indicator. This seemed obvious when I started this explanation, but I think I’ve seen how solvers can get mixed up about this – I wrote about some very similar confusion (somewhere else I think) within the last week or so.

          A clue based on a single homophone can have the structure [A {homophone indicator} B] where one of A and B is the def., (usually with the synonyms for A and B having different lengths like WAY/WEIGH, so that only one fits the grid). In such clues, A sounds like B and B sounds like A, so the ‘homophind’ can be seen as applying to A and B.

          But in 18D, the structure is different. The def is “criticises”, and the homophind is inside the wordplay. In “film broadcast at end of week”, the idea is not that the replacements for “film” and “at end of week” sound the same, but that part of the answer sounds like one of them – either [“film”, broadcast = PICK from pic] or [broadcast “at end of week” = SON from Sun”].

          [A {homophind} B] cannot indicate “something that sounds like (A,B)”, except maybe for clues to words like BERI-BERI = “bury”,”berry” or in 1940s-style puzzles where the setter is allowed to completely ignore word order for the benefit of the surface reading. (The usual counter-example challenge applies – if you can find a sensible English sentence where a homophind applies to stuff on both sides in this way, my argument falls apart, but I’m pretty confident no such sentence can be constructed.)

          1. Not to mention that Sunday, although part of the weekend, is officially (and in Chambers at least, is defined as) the *start* of the week. It cannot be the end. Would “end of week= weekend= SUN” be
            used in the Times?

            This apart, I conclude from your argument that “criticized broadcast film at end of week” could be “PICKS ON”, with a quibble due to the “at” which plays no useful part.

            1. With a correction to Criticizes, yes.

              Answer to first Q (added later): Can’t seen a justification for “end of week” = SUN by that route, but can just possibly by the notion that if Sat is one end of the week, Sun is the other end. But then most likely when talking about both ends, as in a convoluted SAT+SU(n)+MA clue for SATSUMA.

              Edited at 2009-04-23 05:45 pm (UTC)

        2. This rare (to Kent) perennial is a delicious culinary herb (like a special origano)I once had originating from Crete – it died out in a cold wet winter and I would love to get it again.
  11. 10:55.  Various things I didn’t know, so a slower solve than it could have been, but all were gettable from the wordplay: LEV (note to self: must learn currencies), ZENANA, BROADSTAIRS (is this just me?), DITTANY, MAYWEED, and STABILE.  Like Peter, I took a while to get MONTMARTRE, which for some people must have been an instant solve given a checking letter or two.  I also shot myself in the foot by guessing that 26ac (BROADSTAIRS) would end in TOW, as in Walthamstow.

    Two quibbles.  In the wordplay for 4dn (YORE), the use of “these” cries out for the addition of “is” after “solver’s”, no matter whether the latter is read as “you’re” or “your” – unless “these” is meant to be part of the definition, in which case it’s out of place.  And the wordplay for 24dn (ADAM) requires us to interpret “central to DADS” as the centre of DADS, which is only possible with a dose of charity.  (I would quibble about 17ac (EXPRESS TRAINS) on grammatical grounds, but “state schools” and “fast-tracked” are compensation enough.)

    Clues of the Day: 11ac (GROTTO), 21ac (TACTLESS) even though “all” is redundant, 26ac (BROADSTAIRS).

  12. This was a good puzzle, couldn’t finish it last night (started around 1am), but knocked it off this morning. Some very good wordplay, particularly for the obscure words (needed wordplay to get DITTANY, MAYWEED, BROADSTAIRS, LEV, and STABILE).
  13. Until I got rather stuck on 18d / 27ac / 22d, I thought I was on for a PB, but in the end settled for an average half hour.

    I spent an age thinking ‘Sign partly put up’ in 22d signified BIL(L) reversed. I gave up in the end and guessed, luckily correctly. Kicked myself when I saw the reasoning.

    Having entered PICKS ON for 18d somewhat hampered 27ac, so you could argue that my difficulties were of my own making.

    COD 12ac, amongst lots of good ones.

    Onto the championship qualifier (not that I will be!)

  14. A fairly steady solve throughout finishing in just under 26 minutes. Everything I would have said has been said.

    An enjoyable half hour.

  15. Back solving after a week away among the ruins of Angkor. I found this pretty easy and finished in 20 minutes, but I confess that ZENANA, STABILE and MAYWEED were all unfamiliar. I prayed STABILE would be correct. I liked the clues in general but 17, 1d and 6 stood out. An easyish puzzle doesn’t have to be dull, and this wasn’t.
    1. Peter I appreciate your explanation. However one can’t rule out “picks on” on that basis without first knowing the fairly esoteric rule that you so lucidly explain: I wonder how many solvers do?
      1. Assuming we’re talking about [A {homophind} B] not indicating “something that sounds like (A,B)”, it’s a derivation from a much simpler rule, which is the one for solvers to remember: If the process apparently described by the wordplay doesn’t make logical sense, you’ve almost certainly misunderstood the wordplay. All the rest is just the detail of how that rule applies in this case.
        1. Revisiting this I entirely agree – indeed, I shouldn’t have needed this to be pointed out. Thanks for taking the time. bc
  16. Anyone know if there’s a problem with Anax’ site? I went to go there just now for an occasional visit and Google is redirecting to an advisory page – ‘Reported Attack Site’, suggesting that the site contains 9 Trojans. There’s a suggestion that the site has been hacked since a number of .cn sites are listed as intermediaries injecting malware. Is anyone in touch with Anax and able to let him know?
    1. I should add that I think it’s AVG Safe Search that’s redirecting me, but I’m not visiting the site while I’m getting that messsage.
      1. My virus software reports that the website is attempting to install a Trojan-horse virus to my computer.

        On the assumption that Anax has not suddenly turned evil and is trying to do us all damage, I imagine his site has been hacked. Someone appears to have inserted a frame into his HTML that uploads a virus to people viewing the page.

      2. I’ve e-mailed Anax about this. I also had a message from him saying that his recent absence here is simply because he’s busy.
      3. Hi Sotira.

        Yes, I’ve encountered this myself – just once, thankfully. No idea where it’s come from but I get some reassurance from advice I’ve received that suggests AVG is picking up on something it doesn’t need to.

        Oddly, the problem first arose when I had a Twitter box on the page – after a while AVG refused pageload, so I got rid. At the moment there’s a link to a real/online poker website (they’re paying me a modest but worthwhile sponsorship which at least covers the hosting cost) but it’s just text with an embedded URL.

        Sadly there are some sad individuals out there who find ways to infiltrate websites without you being aware of it. UKPuzzle is designed and uploaded using MS FrontPage so there’s nothing fancy going on in terms of what I upload.

        The pageload problem I had (about a month ago?) has gone and I’ve had no problems since. But, to be on the safe side, I think that once the poker website thing finishes – just over two months’ time – I’ll decline their offer to renew it.

        FWIW, the puzzle collection is still at #006 as I’ve had a mad rush of setting paid puzzles, but a new Imperator is on Alberich’s site here:

        http://www.alberichcrosswords.com/pages/imperator.html

        As for my recent absence from this blog – there’s nowt untoward. The recent heavy workload is the result of being away on vacation over Easter. Coupled with that, it looks like my contributions to the Times series will be more frequent now, so I’m in “frantically setting” mode. But I still check here frequently just to see what’s going on, which is far more pleasant than what’s going on at the FifteenSquared blog at the moment ;o(

        1. Hi Anax, and thanks. I rather liked Heyesey’s suggestion that you might have gone over to the dark side – Darth Anax, perhaps. I’ll be watching out for evil subliminal messages in future Anax puzzles. May the force be with you.
        2. And Hi from NZ. Hope the above means that your decision to become a full time setter was the right one, and is paying off.
        4. It’s not just AVG. My Avast software is reporting a detected virus too, which means it probably does have a problem.

          And well done on the setting 🙂

          1. That spurred my memory. It was Avast that first encountered a problem and wouldn’t let me load the homepage – that was when the Twitter thing was on. After removing it I stopped having problems.

            Whatever is there seems to be very well hidden. FrontPage allows you to view html code and there’s nothing visible that shouldn’t be there. I don’t know whether re-building the homepage from scratch will help?

  17. Regards all. Glad all is well with you, Anax.

    About 15 minutes forme, the easiest of the week in my experience. Same comments as above re LEV, STABILE, MAYWEED, DITTANY. I’m glad the wordplay to BROADSTAIRS was so understandable because I’d never heard of it either. Also didn’t know GATE as a street. My only real problem, though, came from entering FEATHERDUSTER for 14 at first glance. I fixed it when I got to the very clever EVIDENTLY, which along with TACTLESS were COD’s for me. Best to all.

  18. This puzzle is a good example of the superiority of the cryptic so the conventional puzzle. One has a sporting chance of finishing the puzzle, even if (like me) one’s never heard of MAYWEED, STABILE, BROADSTAIRS (OK, so my geography stinks), or ZENANA. In a conventional puzzle, if you don’t happen to know that a Celebes ox is an ANOA, you’re sunk. And what’s more frustrating than one or two empty squares at the end of the day? I ask you!
  19. I agree with the final comment – the cryptic puzzle is superior because it enables the solver to derive answers they did not previously know.

    There are 3 “easies” left out here:

    25a Lived with a son (3)
    W A S. There are a number of words that indicate simply their first letters. (W)ith and (S)on are just two of these. There are also the 26 phonetic alphabet words as well.

    28a Stinking plant made yew become rotten (7)
    MAYWEED. Anagram of (MADE YEW) to enable us to derive the smelly old plant that one has not heard of before.

    7d Running a bingo game is a vocation (7)
    CALLING

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