Times 24210 – “…and I dips me lid” C.J. Dennis

Author   kororarekaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 45 mins

Some easy clues to begin with, but I hit the wall at about 30 mins with embarrassing gaps in all quarters which took some time to resolve. Was it just me, or were there some tricky clues here? (That’s a rhetorical question.)

Across
1 (ALAIRDSPOETS)* for Milton’s classic PARADISE LOST. Care sat on his faded cheek for some time until this appeared.
9 RAN + KS
10 RED + CAR + P(r)E(t)T(y)
11 SCHOONER – double definition
12 DEVOTE – double definition (the second cryptic). My Collins has appropriate 4. to put aside (funds etc.) for a particular purpose or person so no quibbles there, although I hesitated until the last minute to put it in.
13 L[(GI)&lt]AMENT for LIGAMENT. Lament comes from 15ac meaning jeremiad. Connective material, indeed. Luckily jeremiad appeared recently in a Jumbo, otherwise I would have been lost non-paradisiacally. A jeremiad is a long mournful lamentation or complaint, which brings us to…
15 …PLA[I]NT to complete the connection. I’m sure Blackadder could provide an appropriate metaphor for the cleverness of such a pair.
17 PLUCK + Y – I spent far too long going through my list of games ending in “y”, which is all the more depressing because it only consists of 1. Hockey. “Pick” was my nemesis during the week and here it is again.
18 PR + OGRESS – another disparaging term for a woman. What is the female equivalent of a “chap”, by the way?
20 (enti)RETY, PE(haps) – I was never sure whether the Times countenanced commas in inclusions, but here is the definitive answer. I wonder if other punctuation is allowed?
21 APPL[AUS]E – for a big hand. Aus is either Australia or Austria, according to my Collins, which was written before most people could tell the difference between the two. Nowadays, Austria is more likely to be Aut for Autriche, or is that only in the Eurovision Song Contest and Olympics?
24 OPERA + (EVITA)&lt – A for OPERATIVE – skilled worker. My last in, apart from 12ac. A tricky construction. Spent some time trying to take PRO or ARTISAN away from DEMONSTRATES without success. The obvious non-plurality of the answer eventually led to the penny dropping, but not before I had all checking letters.
25 (ZEBU)* + K(rygystan) for an UZBEK
26 VEN + US + FLY + TRAP – Fly and trap being horse drawn carriages. In retrospect, I’m not convinced by the “responsible for” but at the time I was thankful for an easy get.

Down
1 PERU + SAL is a close study. It took me ages to spot this, with PARISSA unaccountably refusing to budge from my cerebral cortex.
2 RUNT + HE + GAUNT + LET
3 DISCO(very) for a noisy party. I suppose disco = party is OK. I tend to associate it more with clubbing, where I’m often seen in my lurex flares (sans flair).
4 SERGEANT is one of the ranks and Sir Malcolm Sargent is a homophone, amongst other more worthy things.
5 LID + O for a pool. A clue not out of place in the 1930’s. Lido always seems a particularly quaint expression for a public swimming pool; it never made the transition to Australia, possibly being jettisoned as the First Fleet rounded the Cape.
6 (ALEKEGHAS)* for SHAKE A LEG
7 (TOPERINSOMEPUB)* for OPPOSITE NUMBER
8 A + T[T]EST for declare in the sense of aver.
14 MAKEPEACE – being William Thackeray’s middle name. I have to shamefacedly admit to never having read any of his works, although I have seen many television adaptations of Vanity Fair. This was the key to unlocking the left hand side of the puzzle for me (thankyou Mr Collins) which should have been on the tip of my tongue, but wasn’t.
16 (PLEADFOR)* for DROP-LEAF, a type of table often found in confined spaces, often with ingenious mechanisms.
17 PARR + (TO)&lt for a PARROT. I thought this “see” had to be Ely, but I was wrong again. A parr is a salmon, after it’s a fry and before it’s a smolt, which I didn’t know and had to guess.
22 LO + (b)USY for a fairly common idiom still in Australia, and probably elsewhere. Busy = detective, on the other hand, is reasonably UK-centric I would have thought.
23 LIE + U(nwind) as in “in lieu of”.

41 comments on “Times 24210 – “…and I dips me lid” C.J. Dennis”

  1. Definitely some trickier clues thrown into the mix here. I had all done in 12:47 apart from 12 across – _e_o_e, which I then spent 20 minutes poring over without getting further than a guess at ‘remove’. I’m sure you’re right, kororareka, since de-vote makes sense for ‘disenfranchise’, but the meaning as ‘appropriate’ is new to me. No complaints, it just defeated me, so it was a fair cop… unlike 22d. As far as I’m concerned, ‘busy’ is a largely Scouse term for any police officer, not specifically a detective. In fact, I’ve mostly heard it used of uniformed officers.
  2. 27 mins. The top two-thirds went fairly quickly, then I got a bit bogged down finishing the bottom clues, although on reflection there was nothing particuarly hard.

    At 23dn I toyed with SITU – it doesn’t quite work but it’s odd that SIT+U and LIE+U should have similar meanings.

  3. 5:50, which feels better now than just after solving. 1A was an immediate write-in, but PERU+SAL, which I must have seen several times, wasn’t – and might have saved time by leading to quicker answers for 9 and 2. Anything I noted as a bit tricky has already been mentioned.

    At 17D the see would have been ELY, not Eli. Worth a thought, but if the wordplay is (a fish reversed)+ELY which seems plausible here, the answer pretty much has to be an adverb, which doesn’t match “bird”. (Aside from the shortage of ELY___ words)

    13 and 15 are nice example of a pair of clues linked by “…” where the cryptic reading actually crosses the gap. Usually only the surface meaning does so.

    Busy: COED has Brit informal for a police officer, but Chambers has “detective”.

    Edited at 2009-04-27 05:54 am (UTC)

  4. 24 minutes with one wrong at 23 where I bunged in SITU for want of anything better. I also found this an untidy solve with gaps all over the place most of the way.

    BTW there’s a typo at 4d, kororareka, Sir Malcolm should be Sargent.

    1. Now corrected. Ditto for Eli. Thanks to you & Peter for pointing those out. The only thing worse than my typing is my spelling. Putting them together is asking for trouble.
  5. a similar solving experience and time to kororareka, despite becoming fixated that 1ac ended in lass (some sort of sister poem to a shropshire lad i suppose). busy as a detective was a new word.
  6. Just over 15 minutes on a puzzle that gave me few problems other than 12A, DEVOTE (also my last in) where I just guessed that DE-VOTE had to be the only construction that made sense. I finished the top other than 12A very quickly (where PERUSAL and SCHOONER are old hat and the long anagram shouts out PARADISE LOST) but slowed a bit in the second half.

    RETYPE brought back memories of the days when it took a week to produce a business letter with much mutual antagonism between drafter and typing pool. If you never lived through that you have no idea what a boon word processing really is.

  7. Not a difficult solve, I thought, until I checked Kororareka’s blog and realised that I had fallen for Situ, which, apparently, is not even a word in its own right.

    I had trouble justifying Ligament because I had failed to take notice of the ellipsis to the next clue.

    I had no problem with operative since an almost identical clue occurred in last Tuesday’s Guardian “Worker working on musical show nearly backed another”. Spooky.

    1. I think this is a “crossword coincidence” that’s not as surprising when you think about it from the setter’s point of view. First, O?E?A?I?E is quite likely to come up because “non-U” vowels are safe bets for checking letters, but it allows no other choices. Second, reversing Evita for an -ATIVE ending seems nearly as corny as using “see” for the back end of an adverb ending -ELY. The setter can then hardly miss the “two musicals/shows” opportunity!

      SITU is unlucky – the main use of “lieu” is in phrases like “in lieu” which pretty much matches “in situ” for “in place”. After looking at three dictionaries I can see some logic supporting lieu but not situ as an “English word”, but from the pure solving point of view, the weakness of {SIT=stretch out} seems the strongest reason for rejecting SITU. Whether I’d have done this if I’d thought of SITU first is another question.

      1. Re coincidences, I notice we are just coming up to one of the anniversaries of the most famous crossword coincidence, or series of coincidences, of all time. On 3 May 1944, UTAH appeared as a solution in the Daily Telegraph’s crossword of that date. This was the codename for the Normandy beach assigned to the 4th US Assault Division in the D-Day landings. Over previous months that year, JUNO, GOLD and SWORD (codenames for beaches assigned to the British) had all appeared as solutions in DT puzzles. On May 22 came the clue “Red Indian on the Missouri(5)”. Solution: OMAHA – codename for the beach to be taken by the 1st US Assault Division. Then on May 27 OVERLORD (codename for the whole D-Day operation) appeared as a solution, followed on May 30 by MULBERRY (codename for the floating harbours to be used in the landings) and, finally, on June 1 (just five days before the landings were due)by NEPTUNE – codeword for the naval assault phase of the operation. Some of the words were common enough as crossword solutions and could be shrugged off as mere coincidences, but this seemed a coincidence too far, and alarm bells were ringing. Two gentlemen from MI5 were dispatched to Leatherhead, home of one Leonard Dawe, a school headmaster by profession and the compiler of the DT puzzles in question. As he later recalled: “They turned me inside out”. Unable to turn up any convincing evidence that Dawe was a Nazi agent, MI5 eventually let the matter drop. Many years later — in the 1980s, I think – a Ronald French, who had been a 14-year-old pupil at Dawe’s school in 1944, said that he had inserted at least some of the names into the puzzles. Apparently, Dawe was in the habit of inviting boys to his study where, as a mental exercise, he would ask them to fill in the blanks in the crossword grids, he himself later providing the clues for the words they had chosen. French claimed to have picked up the codewords from Canadian and American soldiers camped near the school. He said the words were well-known in the final weeks and days leading up to the invasion, and the only secret was the actual where and when. Fascinating if true.

        On a vaguely related theme: I read a recent article in The London Review of Books which contained the snippet of information that during WWII a woman in Britain was interned for 5 months because the authorities had found the following entry in her diary: “Destroy English queen. Replace with Italian one”. It later transpired that she was a beekeeper.

        1. Your version is very close to the one in Val Gilbert’s 80th anniversary book of DT puzzles. The only detail worth adding is from French: Soon after D-Day, Dawe sent for me and asked me point blank where I had got the words from. I told him all I knew and he asked to see my notebooks. He was horrified and said that the books must be burned at once. He confiscated them … He then gave me a very stern lecture about national security and made me swear on the Bible that I would tell no one about the matter. I have kept that oath until now.

          I find the “overheard codewords” explanation perfectly believable, and the notion that spies would send messages as crossword answers in a national paper frankly absurd. Surely you would hide the message by using a more subtle pattern in the grid or the clues, or “plain text” words would be disguised, like the mumbo-jumbo uttered by BBC announcers for the benefit of the French Resistance.

  8. 8:07.  Like others, I hadn’t come across the financial sense of “appropriate”, so DEVOTE (12ac) was the last to go in.  I was also held up a little by SCHOONER (11ac), which I still haven’t quite internalized as a glass.

    Peter likes the 13/15ac pair because the cryptic reading of 13ac spills over into 15ac, whereas “Usually only the surface meaning does so”.  Here, however, the two clues don’t have a plausible joint surface reading.  I think that’s worse than having a pair of clues with a joint surface reading but disjoint cryptic readings, because in the latter case the joint surface is an optional aesthetic bonus. If you’re forcing the solver to read both clues together in order to solve one of them, you should surely make sure there’s a decent joint surface.

    Speaking of surface readings, can anyone provide a plausible interpretation of 5dn (LIDO)?  14dn (MAKEPEACE) is dubious in this regard too.

    Clues of the Day: 1dn (PERUSAL), 6dn (SHAKE A LEG).

    1. You’re right – careless use of “nice” on my part, as I didn’t actually mean to praise the surface reading – perhaps that’s why my old schoolteachers didn’t like to see “nice” in essays. Personally, I wouldn’t insist on a good surface stretching across the whole of the two clues in this case, but I would want a convincing surface for the two real clues instead, and we don’t get that either – “Connective material soldier put back inside jeremiad” is in “colourless green ideas” territory, though “jeremiad I found outside” is just about OK.
  10. A just under-average 29 minutes, though it took me an age to get going – 10 minutes with nothing entered, until I got 6d / 1ac, and began to work down from there. Despite the time, I didn’t fully understand 12ac / 15ac / 17ac / 5d / 17d until I came here, so not all plain sailing. COD 23d.
  11. I quite like “gel” (hard g), works well with “old” as does chap. Probably not a word though….
  12. hmmm, I just got on (I couldn’t log in to the Times at my usual time last night, so couldn’t print until lately) and was surprised to see that REMOVE is not given as correct at 12. I had it as a double definition as the financial/scientific use of REMOVE as abstract or appropriate. Though I guess remove=disenfranchise means something specific has to be removed… oh well.
  13. A good start to the week. Almost all finished in 15 minutes but then spent another 5 minutes on LIEU and PLAINT. I should have got PLAINT a lot quicker as I think I have come across ‘plant’ as a meaning of ‘found’ before.

    For LIEU it was a case of working through the alphabet, first in character 1 and then in character 3.

    I thought the clue for OPERATIVE was excellent. Like others I started off down the ‘demo’, ‘display’, ‘ant’, ‘artisan’ route before it clicked. I also liked RUN THE GAUNTLET.

  14. I had the same thought. Right vintage, class and sense of irony, but I think it has a decidedly more deprecatory edge to it and definitely open to misinterpretation and offence being taken, in a way that chaps isn’t, unless I’m lacking cultural sensitivity here. (An Australian lacking cultural sensitivity? Surely not!)
    1. Anything is better than womenfolk, and hearty ladies may refer to other gels as chaps – a new sexually ambiguous form of address? (cf Mephisto 2539 14ac)
  15. Not much to add to the comments above. Straightforwardish, but not entirely easy, puzzle, with some v good clues, e.g that for OPERATIVE. Like some others, I was puzzled by appropriate = DEVOTE at 12ac but the “disenfranchise” reference left little doubt that it had to be the answer. I got LIGAMENT at 13ac but couldn’t explain the wordplay until coming here as I failed to spot the link with 15ac. Doh! I’d never heard of a DROP-LEAF table, the last answer to go in, but once I had the cross-checking letters and (belatedly) spotted the anagram, there was not much else it could be. 31 mins for me. Peter B’s time of 5.50 is spectacularly good.
  16. Regards all. I found this pretty easy, about 15 minutes of steady solving and entering. Alas, though, upon arrival here I see I’m on the rocks with SITU instead of LIEU. I thought of ‘situ’ first and just put it in, without looking for alternatives. So, the setter’s bested me today. PLUCKY and MAKEPEACE made me smile. See you tomorrow.
  17. It’s most certainly a word and OK for the xwd, with three entries in COED. Although the dictionaries record an upper-classness that they don’t for “chap”, I’d say they were pretty close. I can’t imagine anyone female being truly offended by being called a “gel”, except by thinking you were taking the mickey in the same way as if you’d addressed them as “your majesty”.
  18. 6.35. Took a minute to get going as couldn’t see any of the NW corner straight off but once the SE section fell into place everything else followed quickly enough even though I had no idea what a JEREMIAD was. Liked 26 with the two carriages next to each other
  19. I would have preferred ‘Back-to-back shows sharing a skilled worker’ for 24.
    1. A definite alternative. “Sharing” doesn’t quite have the same diversionary quality as “lacking” though; so the construction is more transparent, although these things are always difficult to judge in hindsight. I probably would have been equally stumped.
  20. Well today was the first day I’ve completed the entire crossword (have been doing it everyday for the past couple of weeks) – so feeling rather elated. A few guesses (didn’t know that Busy was detective) and some I worked out the answer but wasn’t sure how the wordplay worked (e.g. Lido). I haven’t begun to time myself yet – completing it was quite sufficient!
    1. Congratulations! I wouldn’t like to say how many years it took me before I could reliably complete a crossword of the Times calibre. If it’s only taken you a couple of weeks then grab yourself an avatar (or not) and join the club.
  21. 21 min here, but fell for the SITU option. DEVOTE and PLAINT soaked up a lot of time, and I was expecting at least one of them to be wrong.
  22. Enjoyed this – took me 60 + minutes – but I finished it. Guessed at lousy – so good to see what the word play was. I had never heard of busy=detective.
  23. Hailing from the North East, if anyone shouted “The busys are coming” there would be blank looks all round. The only time I’ve ever the word is when Brookside is on the TV. The Police are known as the Poliss (and not said in a Scottish accent).
  24. 14:13 for me. Last one in, as with a lot of people, was DEVOTE, which cost me a couple of minutes at the end. I eventually thought of DE-VOTE for disenfranchise, and stuck it in. I had to come here to understand how the second definition worked though, but in hindsight should have seen it.
  25. Not in proper crosswordish mode tonight, and gave up after about fifteen minutes with six still unsolved. I wasted some time wondering if BEZNA was the capital of Kyrgysztan.

    I agree with Peter that the surface reading for 13ac doesn’t make a lot of sense; and also about his criticism of SITU, since lying fits better than sitting. (I had Situ in ..er, situ.) I was on totally then wrong track with 4dn, thinking the answer would be one of the Nine Muses or something similar, and couldn’t be bothered to look them all up.

  26. I was a bit baffled by PLANT = FOUND in 15 across – still am. Can anyone clarify please at this late stage?

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