Times 24218

48 comments on “Times 24218”

1. 30 minutes today having completed more than two-thirds of it without stopping for breath. But then I came to a standstill with 6dn 8dn and 11ac missing in the NE, 18dn and 28ac in the SW and 17dn, 24dn and 29ac in the SE and I just had to pick these off one at a time.

   Despite the lesson I should have learnt yesterday and all the sensible advice received here (thanks to all!) I still found myself putting in words without having seen every part of the wordplay and at the end I had to revisit 8 clues to see exactly how they worked. But I did feel pretty confident about all my answers today and there were no mistakes as things turned out so it was worth it to achieve my 30 minute target.

   ONE-TWO at 14ac was a guess as I know very little about soccer, but with those checking letters in place what else could it have been.

   1. Well done!  My girlfriend is hovering at the 31/32-minute mark at the moment, and is hoping to join in at Cheltenham if she can nudge that down to under 30, so it’s a very familiar target.
      1. 28:29 – my personal best!

         Rachel.

2. About 12 minutes for all but 24D, then had to trawl through the alphabet twice to get SLATE as a possibility, but kept going to see if anything else fit before deciding it had to be right. Probably more like 16 mins as a result, although I forgot to stop the clock until a few minutes later.
3. This was a doddle, but I’m not complaining, after recent tribulations. Fortunately, the grid did not allow for any infuriating 4-letter DDs but I still spent a minute at the end, making sure that everything was in place. Last in was the tricky homophone Weighted. The only unusual phrase was Horse Pistol. I have seen this only once before. I think the definition was identical.

   Peter’s preamble is almost a challenge. Well, here goes. A one-two is a manoeuvre executed by one boxer or two footballers, so I reckon the apostrophe is in the wrong place.

   This is the second time in a week that I have seen Sashayed clued with what appears to be a dodgy definition. The Concise Oxford seems closest to me “Walk ostentatiously with exaggerated hip and shoulder movements”. This definition is supported by Chambers. The setter is let off the hook by Collins: “Walk in a casual or showy manner”.

   1. I’m inclined to agree with you about the definition of SACHAYING. It reinforces a point I made in a comment yesterday about why Collins is The Times’s dictionary of choice: it so often has slightly off-the-wall definitions not endorsed by other comparable dictionaries (e.g. Chambers, COED) and thus provides setters with cover for definitions that don’t immediately spring to mind. That said, 27ac was still a nice clue, I thought.
4. Yep, this was – for me – an easy one at just under nine minutes. And I still can’t claim to have beaten PB. Not that I expect ever to do so!

   The trouble with racing through and not fully understanding some of the wordplay (which I don’t often do) is that when you make a mistaken leap: “golden rules” today for me at 22A, then it takes a while to unpick. Never mind, it’s interesting to debate such risk/reward strategies here. I’d say that today it just about paid off for me…

   Neil

   1. Rare reward today, just under the ten (clock not stopwatch!), only slight pause before 24, liked 13.
5. 11:45.  Another case of racing through and then hitting barriers, mostly in the NE corner.

   DISSIDENT (6dn) was the last to go in.  Am I alone in finding “X stopping Y” a dubious indication of Y inside X?  The obvious reading (which is what I had in mind) has it the other way round.  Nearby, the misleading anagram indicator “sorted” in 8dn (IDEALIST) is a bit cheeky, there being no reason why a list should be sorted rather than unsorted or even intentionally scrambled.

   ON TICK (20ac) was new to me – as was the variant spelling OICK, attested only in Oxford dictionaries.  The Shorter lists it as an “earlier” spelling, and its latest citation in the full OED is from 1958, so it’s odd that the Concise lists it without qualification.  Other novelties were HORSE PISTOL (13ac) and CHARLOTTE RUSSE (9dn).

   Clues of the Day: 10ac (SWEATSHOP), 25ac (NUT), and 1dn (BISHOP).

   1. X stopping Y: I think it’s analagous with “arresting” as a containment indicator used in the same direction. Metaphorical and not a favourite, but I must have learned to consider both options. I may be doing this for any container as a result of more frequent “wrong way” usage in some other puzzles.

      I don’t think you can draw conclusions from latest citation dates in the OED. Their latest citation in support of (trombone=musical instrument) is from 1913!

6. The ‘of sorts led’ seems superfluous, unless this is an additional indicator of ‘OS’ (being the leading letters of ‘of sorts’).

   Paul S.

   1. It can’t be an additional indicator of OS, as there wouldn’t be anything to indicate that you only need to use OS once.  I don’t mind “led back” (any more than “brought back”, etc.), and I guess the “of sorts” was meant to stifle quibbles about defining OS as “map”.  (In which case I think it fails, because the only obvious quibble would be that OS is a sort of map, not a map [of sorts].)
      1. “Of sorts” squeezes through courtesy of Collins, which has “X of sorts” meaning an unspecified type of X, rather than a strange/inferior one.
7. ….and was nearly finished after 10 minutes, only to spend the next 20 figuring out the few remaining ones. ‘Bishop’, ‘sweatshop’, ‘weighing’ and ‘digested’ held me up for a quite a while.

   I was trying to make ‘sweetshop’ work, and plugging for ‘D’ + ‘EG’ at the beginning of 18. Once again, it was hard to discard wrong ideas even after it became clear they wouldn’t work.

   ‘On tick’ did occur in the US, Peter, but in the 30s and 40s.

   I must be getting pretty good at UK-isms, because I recognized ‘Ordnance Survey’ and ‘oick’ immediately.

   As for ‘ground rules’, I thought of it at once because it is the example Frank Lewis gives in the little note at the bottom of the cryptic in The Nation, as a potential part of the clue for ‘lures’.

8. 19 mins, considerably held up by not knowing CHARLOTTE RUSSE and doubts about HORSE PISTOL. 1D (BISHOP) is my COD.

   Tom B.

9. 14:18 .. Only serious delay was on ELEGIST where I was looking for a poet’s name. Like Lennyco above, I thought the apostrophe was misplaced in the clue for the old ONE-TWO, but I suppose you could argue that it’s “how a footballer refers to a nifty play”.

   COD 7d LIMIT – that “with lights on either side” for the splitting of “lit” is really neat.

   1. I was going to mention this one in my post below but forgot. Thankfully this was very familiar to me; some years ago I’d written a clue based on “passing trade” as the def and it sprang to mind immediately when solving today’s interpretation.
10. 46 mins for me. But the last four or five of those were spent on 24.

    1ac & 1dn went straight in, and 4 was fresh in my mind from it’s appearance in Monday’s jumbo. With all those first letters, I rattled through the top half in about 10 minutes, but then slowed down towards the bottom.

    COD 10.

11. 32 minutes, so not that hard, though (starting on the down clues), I didn’t get one until the anagram in 15d. Didn’t understand 10ac / 22ac / 7d 23d until I came here. COD 13ac.
12. Although I’m (quite rightly) not allowed to enter the champs it’s still reassuring to clock up a “contender” time – this one took a few seconds over 8 minutes. Mind you, it’s all about consistency and it’s a long time since I managed a very fast solve.

    All pretty straightforward and no quibbles, although if the “no brand names” rule is strictly applied we shouldn’t really have had OS at 11Ac.

    Despite the quick time there were a couple of hold-ups. Amazingly – particularly as the RULES bit went in immediately – there was some head-scratching trying to work out 22Ac’s wordplay instead of just looking at the grid and placing the obvious. This didn’t help with 23Dn (whose TO minus T is a tad sneaky anyway) and I also struggled to spot 6Dn.

    Q-0 E-6 D-5 COD 16 SPECIES (lovely deception of “plants”)

    1. Was Govt. Survey done by a gov. dept. under the Master-General of the OS long before it became a map-selling brand.
       1. Thanks for that – seems perfectly fine now.

          Some years ago I worked as a freelance cartographer (on a G3 AppleMac, the one with the terminally rubbish motherboard that made the system crash every 5 minutes or so) and I was only familiar with OS as the company producing maps.

    2. I don’t think it’s obvious that Times setters should be ineligible for the Times crossword championships.  Firstly, there is a surprisingly poor correlation between setting and solving abilities.  Secondly, even if there were a good correlation, setters wouldn’t be unfairly talented solvers in virtue of being setters; if anything, it would be the other way round.  And finally, there surely can’t be any advantage in being a Times setter as opposed to a Listener setter, an Independent setter, or an independent setter, so for consistency’s sake all setters should be ineligible if any are – which would be absurd.
       1. You’re absolutely right regarding the setting/solving correlation. My own inconsistency in solving would suggest entering the champs would lead to acute embarrassment. However, I think the problem would be a PR one.

          In the event that a setter won the champs, the following day’s Times story would no doubt mention “XX, who sets crosswords for The Times…” and that might just ruffle a few feathers.

          1. Yes, you’re right, it would lead to unreasonable whining – and given the predictability of such a response, I can understand why you lot are excluded.  Ideally, though, I don’t think you should be.
       2. I can understand the ban on various grounds aside from Anax’s PR point. First, if several setters enter, you’d reduce the possible range of puzzles and invalidate the claim that the puzzles used are standard Times puzzles. Second, setters must know far better than solvers how the current editor is likely to amend their clues, and they will also know various fine points of detail about the current editor’s policy which are not publicly stated. Take the old question of whether def by example without indication is allowed. No public statement has ever been made about this by the current xwd ed, and it’s one of the few significant points about the puzzle that (AFAIK) Tim Moorey doesn’t cover in his recent book. All we know from observation is that it’s allowed sometimes. Whether there are any restrictions about its use, we cannot easily tell. Third, my guess is that the quickest setters are used as test solvers in the process of editing puzzles for championship use.

          On the question of whether setters are quick solvers: not necessarily, but quite a few are. Roy Dean is a setter and a double winner of the championship, though age would probably rule out a third win. Richard Rogan has been about 5th in the final, and Brian Greer reached it many years ago. From information seen here and elsewhere, Anax and Don Manley can be very quick, and years ago in the Proms queue, John Grimshaw looked pretty handy too. On the other hand, there’s a nice old story about less rapid solving by former xwd ed Edmund Akenhead – see comments here if you don’t know it.

13. As Peter says, easyish, but well made, as exemplified by 1 across – a simple anagram but a very neat clue (I wonder if it would have read better without the comma). I raced through the early acrosses and downs, but found the lower half trickier. I didn’t understand 22 as I was working on ‘Gross French’ = GROS, ‘individual in Lourdes’ = UN and though ‘violated’ a container indicator, but I had no doubts about the answer. ONE-TWO was a pure guess for me.
14. I got 1ac and 1d and sundry offshoots in very quick time, which strangely is a bad omen for me, and so it proved as I limped home in 45 mins wondering what had happened. Last in was CHARLOTTE RUSSE, which I don’t think I’ve met before; it sounds as though it’s even less than a mere trifle. COD for me also was SPECIES.
15. I made a real muddle of this, penning in CHOCOLATE as the first word of 9 and GOLDEN RULES at 23. It was Cinquo de drinquo though… took a long time to see the error of my ways, couldn’t focus on the clock to see how long that all took.
16. I must say I’m with markthakkar on 6dn in finding “X stopping Y” as a very misleading indicator that Y should go inside X. If anything, as he says, it should mean exactly the opposite. In fairness, the solution wasn’t too difficult, but I did waste some time trying to find a way of fitting “ISNT” inside a synonym for “faction”. Has “stop/stopping” been used in this way before?
17. Not difficult, as almost everyone agrees, and generally a good and fair puzzle (despite one or two minor quibbles mentioned in reply to comments above). “Tailor-made” was (at any rate for me) a new one to add the list of possible anagram indicators and made for an excellent surface reading at 1ac. And, for once, I can’t imagine anyone objecting to the homophone – WEIGHTED/waited – at 18dn. About 30 mins.

18. I have some sympathy. I’ve been asked to change a clue where “about” was used as a containerind; since it can equally point to an anagram or reversal. Or even C, CA or RE. Or ON. Or APPROXIMATELY.
    1. Thanks for that. Interesting, though “about” as a container indictor seems to me easier to defend, since it is an exact description of the position of a container word. The fact that “about” can also indicate all the other things you mention seems to me to fall within the acceptable range of deception tactics available to a setter.
    2. Entirely with Mike on “about” – it may do several different things, but they’re all perfectly fair. If I’d understood the wordplay of 8D while solving, I don’t think I’d have said “nothing to argue about”. Until I get an e-mail from a setter pointing me to the crucial def in COED or Collins that we’ve all missed, “X stopping Y” for Y in X must count as pretty iffy.

       I have a feeling it has been done before in the Times xwd, but I can’t find an example.

       1. Hmm. I may be in trouble! My most recent submission has a clue that uses… go on, guess.

          BUT – my reasoning is based on equating STOP / CONTAIN; to contain the (e.g.) flow of something is to keep it locked in and in that context I’d say “stop” and “contain” are interchangeable.

          Just in case, I’m now going to hide under a large rock for the next 6 months or so. Someone let me know when it’s all over, eh?

          1. Curiously I interpreted “stopping” correctly at first sight this time, but I have been as puzzled as mark on previous occasions (couldn’t say when or where). To “stop” can mean to “plug a hole in”, in the sense that a cork stops a barrel (rather than in the Colt 45 sense), so you can understand our confusion about “X stopping Y” meaning the reverse of what was intended today. This interpretation would assume Y had a hole to plug, so maybe it only works if Y is two words (would that be “if Y = Y₁ Y₂“?).

             I don’t have a problem with “stopping” as a containment indicator, now that I’ve seen it at least twice, and no doubt my confusion will diminish over time until somebody uses it as in infill indicator.

             PS. Having had an intense metaphysical argument with myself, I now see that if X had a hole plugged in it, in the Colt 45 sense, then X would have stopped the bullet, so the bullet would be contained in X. It all makes perfect sense.

19. Regards everyone. About 25 enjoyable minutes for me last night, pretty straightforward despite a surfeit of UKisms, at least for me. Those included ON TICK (which I knew), and the following which I didn’t know: ONE-TWO, O.S. (which I thought was the initial letters of ‘of sorts’ led back, as mentioned previously by Mark and others), oik and oick, TITCH, and the ‘criticize’ def. of SLATE. Nevertheless, it seemed relatively easy, with the checking letters lifting me over these knowledge gaps. The NE corner was the toughest to crack, since I also was stuck on ‘stopping’ in 6D indicating the opposite of what was intended today. COD’s: WEIGHTED, and my last entry, IDEALIST. See you tomorrow.
    1. Please – UKisms? What crossword could possibly satisfy everyone in the world who wants to have a go?
       1. Do read the whole comment. “25 enjoyable minutes” … “checking letters helping me over these knowledge gaps”. Obvious conclusion: a satisfied solver!

          Lists of stuff that people didn’t know, but which didn’t stop them finishing the puzzle, are surely a compliment to the setter and editor.

          1. I do them for fun and to ward off the brain fuzzies of creeping age. If an answer isn’t at hand through use of some of the aids, I’ll ask
             my wife to go to this blog and check for “UKisms” to avoid my peeking and spoiling my
             enjoyment. That usually gives me a break in sorting out the rest.
             Getting stumped has its reward in humility.
             Bob in Toronto
20. 1 hour but included ablutions, breakfast and making sandwiches for day at the Oval, so cock-a-hoop. Pride before a fall.
    COD – one two – so elegant but our American friends would struggle as would those rugger chaps who don’t get to the soccer too orphan.
21. 19 min, which for me these days is greased lightning.
    A well put together crossword, with the less obvious answers being very well keyed. This allowed me to slot in a few before fully understanding the word play. Got stuck for a while in the SW, until the GROUND part of ground rules popped up.COD: 16 Ac.
22. As I mentioned before, ‘on tick’ was familiar to my mother’s generation in the US, if not to us.

    I didn’t think the ‘tear into’ meaning of ‘slate’ was strictly UK, but it may be.

23. If I’d set this crossword and had produced this clue, then the fact that it was mentioned here several times without anyone saying how brilliant it was would have been a source of mild disappointment. For it is brilliant, isn’t it?
    1. “Cold tart with crisp base” for C+HARLOT+TERSE is certainly excellent.  But (1) there’s a quibble to be had over “tucking in”, which (as recently noted on the Crossword Centre message board) isn’t sanctioned by dictionaries, and arguably not by common usage either; and (2) the surface reading of the second half isn’t entirely natural.  One or other of those may explain why the clue’s merits have been unfairly ignored.
24. Having no home internet at present, I will be coming in at the end of the comments for a while (unless someone manages an early blog).

    21mins which included eating breakfast and having coffee.

    HORSEPISTOL did indeed appear fairly recently, although I can’t remember the gist of the definition.

    The first thing to enter my mind at 14ac was “nutmeg” but I didn’t persevere with it (if only because it is not hyphenated).

25. 4Ac: A little late on this but anyway…the name for the city in Hindi is “Naee Dilli”, but when speaking/writing English it’s the same as for English speakers. NEW DELHI = “new deli” would be an acceptable homophone in these parts too.

    – Shuchi

26. Just the tiny omission:

    12a Bird diving into shallow lake (3)
    OWL. Kingfisher is too many letters so it must be OWL hidden in words 4 & 5.

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