Times 24230

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 7:53

For some reason I expected a difficult puzzle today, but this was pretty straightforward – or suited me well. I started slowly, missing the hidden word first time, but got started with 10. Last answers were 18, 4, 1

Across
1 UPPER=drug,CUT – nicely done surface suggesting toothache
6 COMEDY – hidden in “Welcomed youth”
9 PROS = “prose” – most speech (or maybe dramatic speeches) not being in verse
10 PARAPHRASE – (A R.A.) in perhaps* – a common anagram indicator used as fodder. As pointed out below, “other words” is the def and the clue’s initial “In” is a link-word. You can’t assume that the def is always the beginning or end of the clue in this puzzle
11 TIMES,E(R)VER – can’t really buy “stays” as a containment indicator in “always stays right”. “stay” has a “stop/delay” meaning, but I don’t think that necessarily implies “holding”.
13 HOOD – three defs, one being “cover for head” when you apply “just the reverse” to “head for cover”.
14 LONDON,E.R. – Jack London of White Fang and Call of the Wild, at least one of which we had to read at school.
16 G,ALWAY(s)
18 MY STIC(k) – but see Mark T’s comments about “is” below.
20 NA(TI)V(IT)Y – the “includes … both ways” trick seems to be getting quite popular.
22 AlGeRiAn – Agra is a fairly ordinary city, except for being the location of the Taj Mahal.
24 SCAN,DALI’S,E(xpected)
26 BELL-RINGER – 2 gently cryptic defs, one referring to change-ringing
28 ALIT – I=one in ALT. = altitude
29 ENERG=green*,Y
30 ASSENTOR=senators*
 
Down
2 PAR,SIMONY – simony is the buying or selling of pardons, benefices and other ecclesiastical prvileges
3 E,AS=for instance,TEND
4 COPS=”the law”,E
5 TAR – def. and CD referring to “Do not spoil the ship for a ha’porth of tar” – an Oxford Dictionaries website has an interesting aside on the origin of this one.
6 COPY RIGHT = “behave like Conservatives”
7 MARSHAL = “Marshall” – George Marshall had a plan for a post-war stable non-Communist Europe.
8 D(IS,C)O – C=constant? By way of C=speed of light, I think, so constant = G (acceleration due to gravity) is probably possible too. But see the discussion below – C = “a constant in maths” seems more logical.
12 V(enerabl)E,R AND A – verandah’s H is optional. R and A = The “Royal and Ancient” golf club, who look after golf rules – or used to – apparently the rule-making is now done by a separate company also called The R and A.
17 ALTISSIMO – (I’m at a loss I)*. Pitch and scorer are both musical here, not cricket. (Though “altissimo” doesn’t actually appear as a direction in any scores I can remember – the leger lines or 8va (octave higher) sign are clear enough for players or singers to put in their own “altissimo!”.
19 TRAILER – 2 defs, one adjectival the verb “to trailer” = to advertise a film – well spotted, Mark T
21 V(ILL)AIN – indirect wordplay here – “to no avail” = “in vain”.
23 G=key (music),LEAN=list
25 DARTS = Strad. rev. – for once the expensive fiddle isn’t the more common (in xwds) Amati.
27 GO,A

57 comments on “Times 24230”

  1. A similar experience to jackkt – bottom half first and finishing in the NW. There was nothing very hard about it but I was just not tuned in and it took longer than it should have, possibly because of some unconventional indicators.

    “our capital” in 3 cocks a snook at globalisation, although I suppose it is fair enough in a UK crossword.

  2. A very straightforward puzzle, 20 minutes to solve.

    I’m good on the vocabulary of drugs so got UPPER straight away and that always makes a big difference, particularly with the first four down clues being rather easy. Thereafter phrases like “venerable golf club” and “London” as the US author made for an easy ride.

    I’ll join the sceptics on “stays” as a containment indicator. With so many to choose from why use dubious ones? I thought ENERGY was well clued and liked the “in vain” trick.

  3. My reaction too, Peter, but then I wondered if “stays” as in “holds up/props up/supports” might cover it?
    1. Same issue really – none of these suggest containment strongly enough for me.
  4. Fairly straightforward. The lower half went in quite easily followed by the NE and to that point I was well within my 30 minute target but I had problems finishing off in the NW with 4dn, 1ac 11ac and 9ac as the last to go in. 35 minutes in all.
  5. 9:02 for me. I agree with Jimbo that the ENERGY clue is clever. I feel more tolerant than others about “stays”: it is a little bit of a stretch, but somewhere around “constrains” or “restrains” there is an idea not too far from containment.
  6. Yes, I knew that my 6 minutes or so on Monday was a fluke, and this comes as proof. 20-25 minutes, and a blind spot for UPPERCUT last night and this morning, finally cheating it out; I’d been locked in lockjaw thinking.

    Generally enjoyable. I’m comfortable with “stays” in 11. You stay a corset by sewing something into it, so EVER is stayed by having R sewn in. COD 1 now that I’ve cheated it out and understood it! 24 close behind.
    Dafydd.

    1. Corsets can’t justify this use of “stays”.  If the analogy worked, then (bearing in mind that EVER is supposed to stay R) it would be possible to say that a corset stays its stays – whereas if anything it’s the other way round.
      1. You’re right; I made a mess of that explanation, sorry.
        Perhaps I’m not as happy as I thought I was with it. It’s a poor justification to say that an archaic meaning of “stay” is to detain. “Contain” *is* a synonym of “stay”, but only in the sense of “stay your anger” – i.e. restrain it; so that use would arise by misuse of a thesaurus. Perhaps it won’t do then! Thanks for giving me the chance to rethink it.
        Dafydd.
  7. I’ve always assumed constant=C comes from mathematics. The result of an indefinite integration of, say, f(x) is conventionally denoted F(x)+C with C denoting a constant.

    If we do go via constant = any defined constant then you could probably insert any letter you like. E.g. c,e,f,g,h,k,l,q and r are all commonly used physical constants. The roman numerals add in x,v,d, etc. And then there’s the more obscure constants: a=atomic mass number, b=baryon number, …, y=150, z=2000.

    1. My Collins agrees. C is given as the symbol for a mathematical constant. The entry for “speed of electromagnetic radiation” is separate. In a similar vein I thought I had stumbled across a good clueing device using chemical element symbols, as in “all elements make this up”, but then realized that there wouldn’t be too many words which weren’t comprised entirely of chemical element symbols. As for the vast array of physical constants, that’s pretty much why the Greek and even the Hebrew alphabet are used. Options are limited.
      1. I was possibly giving too much weight to the idea that abbreviations have to be in both COED and COllins to get onto the relatively short list of one-letter abbrevs used in the Times xwd (I believe this is still the rule, with a few exceptions). In this case, the Collins version makes much more sense, so maybe this is one of the exceptions.
  8. Generally easy enough, but I had a spot of word-blindness and just couldn’t see “alit” even going through the alphabet with the checking letters. Strange, if I’d come across this word while reading I’d have recognised it without hesitation. It’s hardly an unusual word. But out of context my immediate reaction to seeing it in the solution was that it was a new word, perhaps a technical expression for some kind of legal right over land and I even checked the definition online before the penny dropped. It’s the kind of thing that makes me realise I’ll never be especially good at these – far too slow to make connections that should be fairly obvious. bc
  9. Oh well, somebody has to be last. 27 min. ALIT soaked up some time. One of those that the more you look at it, the more improbable it seems. COD: Nothing leaps out, but if pressed, probably 12 dn, VERANDA.
  10. As I am a novice, I was pleased to get all but one. ‘Alit’, which is annoying as I had already been thinking about ‘alighted’.

    Overall though, I didn’t feel satisfied by today’s workout. Did not think much of the clues for 11ac, 14ac and 15dn. 30ac is just an ugly word.

    On the up side I liked 26ac, 29ac and 24ac.

    W

    1. I think you and bc have both rediscovered an old setter’s ploy – using irregular stuff (plurals, comparatives/superlatives, verb forms) adds difficulty – land=>Landed is MUCH easier than alight=>alit.
  11. A fairly easy puzzle, with no head-scratching pauses, though I didn’t romp through it, taking 25 minutes over tea, which is about standard for me.
    Chambers has “hold, restrain” for “stay”, so I was happy with 17. I didn’t understand RANDA clued as golf club, but the answer was obvious from the VE opening.
    1. Such definitions would be sufficient justification only if definition were transitive: “stay” is defined as “hold, restrain”, “hold” is defined as “grasp or contain”, therefore “stay” is (implicitly) defined as “grasp or contain“.  Since definition is obviously not transitive, we must consider the relevant senses of the words.  Here, to stay/hold/restrain something (as in “It was pity that stayed his hand”) is not to hold/grasp/contain it – or at least, the case against the clue amounts to an insistence on this distinction.
      1. You’re right. I didn’t consider those meanings in Chambers closely enough in the context of their use.
  12. 10:28, with the last two minutes spent on 4dn (COPSE) and 1ac (UPPERCUT).  It hadn’t occurred to me that the E of COPSE might be the E that the law was “covering”.

    Does anyone else find that the “is” in 18ac (MYSTIC) grates?  Essentially: “Most of the staff is spiritual”.  I don’t want to come over all prescriptivist American; I’m quite happy with the likes of “The committee has decided”.  But to my ear the surface reading is simply ungrammatical – Most of the staff has to be plural.

    Peter reads 19dn (TRAILER) as a double definition with “one adjectival”, by which I presume he means “Towed”.  I think it’s one noun (“Towed vehicle”) and one verb (“to advertise film”); the Concise Oxford (unlike the Collins) gives “trailer” as a verb meaning “advertise with a trailer”.  According to the Shorter, “trailer” in this sense is “(rarely) intransitive”, which justifies the use of “film” in the clue.

    Clue of the Day: 29ac (ENERGY).

    1. Sound point on 18A, and at 19D I was just plain wrong, seeing “to adverstise film” as a description of a trailer.
    2. I may be missing something but I’m not sure I understand your gripe about 18A. I took “staff” to mean “stick” and “employ” to mean “use” so I read the clue as “most of the stick I use is intensely spiritual” and wrote in MYSTIC. Sorry, but what’s wrong with that?
      1. How can a stick can be “intensely spiritual”? You can trade the grammar problem for a credibility one, but there is a problem!
        1. It can’t of course but surface readings don’t really bother me I’m so used to completely ignoring them I guess!
          1. Peter’s right – my gripe is with the surface reading.  I know crossword obsessives (including me) tend to ignore surface readings when solving, but clues are ugly and cheap without them.
            1. Whilst I immediately ringed the “is” with a few question marks, my post-finishing tidying up of the loose ends led me to consider the surface to refer to the stick as suggested above, but I allowed the “intensely spiritual” as a visual thing – that is to say, in true lord of the rings style, that the countless inscriptions or markings or even style of the thing evoked enough spirituality for it to be described thus. Therefore I allowed (in my book) the idea of a (partially) intensely spiritual staff.
            2. I didn’t notice it while solving but agree with Mark that ‘is’ jars

              Tom B.

    3. In regards to your ‘is’ qualm i agree but i suppose it’s just giving you an extra clue to think of staff as a stick and not people
  13. A leisurely 35mins for me. I thought most of clues had very good surfaces, and enjoyed the experience. I particularly liked PARSIMONY, UPPERCUT & VILLAIN, but the cunningness of ENERGY and HOOD get my joint COD, the latter for neatly avoiding the verb tense problem of either ganster/gangsters or hood/hoods on their own.
  14. 13 mins, last in was HOOD. I’m happy with ‘stays’ in 11A and thought this was one of the best clues, along with 28A and 29A, but my COD is 1A. I suppose the definition in 10A must be ‘other words’, and the initial ‘In’ is a link-word – hence a rare example of definition not being at either end of the clue?

    Tom B.

    1. Again I saw “in other words” as a descriptive definition, but your reading makes more logical sense.
  15. I have to join the not-so-quick contingent with a time of around 30 minutes, much of it spent puzzling over 9A, 28A and (amazingly) 6A which goes to show how neatly the answer is hidden here; I spent ages looking for a container.

    Agree with Jimbo on 18A which seems perfectly sound to me. Perhaps the only question mark is the sense in which “employ” is intended – a simple substitute such as “have” might be fairer.

    “Stays” at 11A isn’t particularly helpful although it didn’t hold me up and I made the assumption there’s a dictionary def to more or less support it.

    I was nearly thrown by “covers” at 4D. It’s worth mentioning as another of those look-out-for-it indicators that can mean a couple of things; either a container indicator or merely to say one wordplay element is on top of another.

    Q-0 E-6 D-8 COD 20a NATIVITY – not spectacular for surface, but a nice wordplay spot.

  16. Just limped in today at 29:15. Another I found staggeringly difficult, but this time I really enjoyed it. Last in were COMEDY,UPPER CUT and ALIT.
    1. I’m getting worried about you Ken. You’re not being rude about me and struggling as well. Good to see you blogging regularly again – I reckon you need to sharpen up those skills on Mephisto to get you fully into the swing.
  17. 33 minutes, and a fairly easy going one at that, with the NE corner the last to fall.

    Quite a few bits of the wordplay I didn’t understand – esp. 5d / 12d / 13ac – before coming here, but the answers were plain enough that they didn’t cause any issues.

    In 18ac, I thought the surface reading was a tad ungrammatical, where the ‘is’ should have been ‘are’? Which mucks up the cryptic part, of course.

    The hidden word in 6ac was very well hidden, I thought…

    COD 20ac.

  18. 18 minutes and fairly enjoyable. Simony was new to me and I’m not familiar with George Marshall but neither clue presented a real problem although it took a while to work out whether 3 was East End or West End.

    I liked the R and A part of verandah but my COD is copse: cops for “the law” was very clever.

  19. I’ve a real problem with 14 where ROYALTY=ER. I accept that royalty = member of the royal family. And I accept that the Queen is a member of the royal family. But I struggle with ROYALTY=ER. Any royal is royalty. And any specific royal is royalty. But I can’t see that it works the other way round. Could royalty = the Duke of Windsor, or the Prince of Wales? Can royalty (a general term) clue a specific royal?

    Can someone please set me straight!

    1. One def in Collins goes: 2. a. Royal persons collectively b. one who belongs to the royal family
      That gets the setter off the hook, though I can’t think of a real-life example for 2b.
  20. About 15:15 for me. The NE rather than NW corner was my last. Spent the last couple of minutes (a) with GOON for 13ac (‘go on’ being the opposite of ‘head for cover’!), and then having changed that, worrying that 7d was some odd French spelling of Marshal, like marischal or something (but that’s too long).

    I don’t see ER for royalty as a problem – just as ‘animal’ could be ‘lion’ or any other one, ‘ER’ is one example of royalty (albeit an abbreviation for her).

    COD 1ac – is it true that setters take longer over 1ac on average than any other clue?

    1. Not necessarily. The general guideline which many setters try to adhere to is to ensure the first across clue is a pretty good one – sort of setting the tone for the rest of the puzzle. In many cases we cheat a little, drawing upon a pre-written clue that fits the space. Some setters are lucky enough to have databases with many thousands of ready clues. Me? My paltry little Excel file has maybe a hundred. Those are vastly outnumbered by those I’ve tagged as “USED” to make sure I don’t repeat them.

      It doesn’t always work. Some setters (myself included) concentrate on getting the long answers in and clued first as these tend to be the hardest to treat with brevity and originality, and it’s often the case that in no time at all the choices of entry for 1A become limited. That being the case, the search for a good snappy introductory clue can be time-consuming.

      Incidentally, in that BBC4 programme about cryptic crosswords Azed was interviewed. His clueing method is based on the strict principle of starting at 1A and working through them all one at a time. My own approach is to concentrate first on any that offer immediate wordplay potential, an approach which isn’t always ideal. I ALWAYS end up with a handful of recalcitrant little beasts and can spend longer dealing with the last 5 clues than I have writing all the rest.

    2. “Royalty”: the normal meaning corresponds with “animals”, plural. It’s only the “Collins 2b” def mentioned above that has the required singular meaning.
        1. Not particularly – as long as the Royals keep their noses out of real politics, they can spend a bit of my taxes in the interests of tradition & attracting tourists. Just borrowed someone else’s example without thinking of possible surface meaning…
  21. 29:00 .. ambled through this, enjoying some rather witty and original work from the setter.

    Misled by a few, notably UPPERCUT where the ‘toothache’ red herring led me a merry dance (can fish dance?).

    At 6d, I was naturally looking for ‘moat-cleaning’ or similar.

    ‘Glean’ always makes me smile. Something to do with small town American newspapers – the Dogville Gleaner or whatever. All very Norman Rockwell.

    Can’t say that 18a grates with me at all, and the clue made me smile, but COD for 1a UPPERCUT which confounded me for so long.

  22. This was a stroll, quite literally, around South Warwickshire and North Oxfordshire. I did half over coffee in Ratley (Much prettier than it sounds) and the rest over lunch on the village green at Hornton. No real problems, with the last in being Alit because I was not sure that it was a word. My Chambers lists it as an alternative to the more plausible alighted. I was pleased to see simony turn up in the answer to 2. It’s a sin that I remember from my catechism classes but I could never understand how to commit it.

    I was confused by the word French in 7 as marshals are by no means exclusively French. Otherwise the marshal/Marshall homophone was fairly clear. Not to everyone though. I remember a lady who specialised in writing military obituaries for one of the heavies (not The Times) telling me that when she wrote Field Marshal, as often as not, it was changed to Field Marshall by the sub-editor.

  23. Can’t post a time due to interruptions, and perhaps the distraction resulting from said interruption caused me to find this not so easy. Failed to see UPPERCUT for a long time, despite seeing ‘a drug for ?P?E?, then CUT’. Brain freeze, I suppose. I missed the ‘head for cover, reversed’ trick, so HOOD was mostly a guess as a def. for ‘outlaw and gangster’. The last utter guess was BELL RINGER. I’d never heard of change-ringing (thanks for the link, PB), and I don’t get the ‘reminder’ reference, either. My faulty logic after a few trips through the alphabet was: maybe in the UK they refer to a ‘whistle blower’ as a ‘bell ringer’, who could be a person responsible for changes. So in it went, for all the wrong reasons, plus the only alternative I could identify that fit the crossing letters was ‘well digger’, which made even less sense. Thus I made quite a mental workout of this. I’ll see if I’m more alert tomorrow, regards.
  24. Re 11 ac stays: I immediately thought of the (main)stays on a ship, which support the mast on either side, so it seemed to make sense.
    Pretty slow (~ 40 mins), & for some reason took ages to convert C?P?R?G?T to COPYRIGHT: I kept on trying variants of ROGET for the last 5 letters. I/OU + G?T obviously => GHT, but in this case the solution didn’t leap out at me.
    No one who has taken the Tube through King’s Cross & heard the instruction Alight here for the British Library — even at midnight, when the BL has long since been tucked up in bed — should have balked at alit.
  25. Not related to today’s xwd, but I don’t know where else to ask this. I fancy having a bash at compiling a cryptic – can anyone direct me to to a website that tells you how to do it? Starting at the very beginning – how to pick/design a grid, choosing the words and filling the grid and then how to work out the clues
    1. Commercially available software exists which can assist the setting up of the grid, which is probably the most difficult step. E.g. Crossword Compiler. There are probably others.
    2. I don’t know of any good setting guides on the web. There’s some information in Don Manleys ‘Chambers Crossword Manual’. There’s no copyright in daily paper grid designs so I’d suggest just pinching one if you haven’t designed grids before. I wouldn’t spend money on software at this stage – you can do the publishing side in Microsoft Word (there’s enough in Tables for a grid in particular), and there are various crossword-related online tools which you can use to find words to fit. Make sure you understand clues well – there’s more to them than at least some successful solvers realise!
  26. 8:20 for me as part of this week’s four puzzles (so far) done in a batch before this evening’s get-together – each done in under 10 minutes I’m pleased to say.

    I didn’t mind “stays” in 11ac. It sounds familiar – hasn’t it come up before?

    MYSTIC was the last to go in, and while I liked the idea, I felt the surface reading was spoilt a little by having to use “is” rather than “are” for the benfit of the word-play.

    I liked the clue to ENERGY, but that also sounded familiar – which probably just means that I’m starting to imagine things.

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