An undemanding 12 minutes in this household; greatest pause for thought given by two words where I wasn’t entirely sure of all the possible meanings but deduced it was plausible that the secondary ones existed i.e. had it been under competition rules I’d have submitted without too much fear that I’d blundered. (Though I suppose I would say that now I’ve checked to make sure I’m not publicising any such blunder, of course…) Q0-E5-D3
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | ADIEU – AD + I.E. + U(nwelcome). Blast, I am now being earwormed by The Sound of Music; So long, farewell… |
| 4 | CABIN BOY – C(A[BIN]B)OY. Began by thinking there was a COX and thus a BOX involved before working the structure through. |
| 10 | RECTORIAL – =”wrecked” + “oriel”. As an extra layer of distraction, Oriel is a college in its own right, named after the architectural feature in question; not that it’s relevant here, it seems Oriel itself doesn’t have a Rector, but a Provost (for future reference see also Warden, Principal, Master, Dean etc. etc.) |
| 11 | ERICA – ER(o)ICA, or Beethoven Symphony no 3. |
| 14 | NEBRASKA – N(BREAKS)*A, of which Lincoln is the state capital. According to wiki, it’s triply-landlocked, a fact which I find useless but Quite Interesting. |
| 17 | LAND GIRL – LAND + (RIG)rev + L(ake); another use of Light=Land (funny how these things come in clusters). Quick research suggests that the US and Australia, if not most other countries, had their own equivalents of the Women’s Land Army. |
| 18 | GENEVA – GEN + EVA, a common use of the synonym “dope” meaning information, as in The Straight Dope; more on the reforming activities of John Calvin here. |
| 20 | GUIDE – GIDE the novelist round U, as in U and non-U. |
| 25 | VENDETTA – our old friend VEN(erable) + “DEBTOR”. |
| 26 |
TATER – restauranT ATE Raw, which invariably makes me think of the following exchange:
“What’s taters, precious, eh, what’s taters?” “Po – ta – toes. The Gaffer’s delight and rare good ballast for an empty belly. But you won’t find any, so you needn’t look. But be good Smeagol and fetch me those herbs, and I’ll think better of you. What’s more, if you turn over a new leaf, and keep it turned, I’ll cook you some taters one of these days. I will: fried fish and chips served by S. Gamgee. You couldn’t say no to that.” |
| Down | |
| 1 | ANTHROPOLOGY – APOLOGY round (NORTH)*. |
| 2 | ILIAC – (haemoph)ILIAC, presumably, though this struck me as a bit of a blunt instrument; when all we want are those last five letters, they could have been “the back” of anything from necrophiliac to bibliophiliac, but in order to make sure we arrive at the right suffix, the definition has to be so specific that the cryptic element rather diminishes. |
| 4 | CASSIA – CASSIUS – US + A (conspirators in crosswords are regularly the assassins of Julius Caesar, also notably Brutus and Casca). |
| 7 | OVERISSUE – a financial term for exceeding the credit limits of an issue of bonds etc; non-cricketers should always be on the alert when the word “deliveries” appears – six (legal) balls, or deliveries, make up one over. |
| 9 | MAD AS A HATTER – (ADAM)rev+S(A)HATTER, a phrase with its basis in rabbit-fur and mercury… |
| 15 | REENTRANT – (NEAR TRENT)*; not having enough faith in my remembrance of geometry lessons past, I quote the definition “An interior angle of a polygon that is greater than 180 degrees” and hope it passes muster. |
| 16 | CROTCHET – first of the two double defs where I wasn’t quite 100% certain; the “player” reference is to the more obvious musical note; but crotchet is also the noun from “crotchety”, which I had previously thought to mean simply “bad-tempered”, but is equally valid in meaning “capricious”, it seems. |
| 19 | ZAMBIA – swapping the S(on) in ASIA for Z + A M.B. gives the country. |
| 21 | EPHOD – ED(itor) round P(riest)HO(use); not a common word but easily worked out from wordplay – an ephod is one of those items of religious significance found largely in the Old Testament, so how regular a word you think it is will doubtless be in proportion to your experience of Biblical texts. Looking into it, the chaplain at my all boys’ school probably avoided the prominent mention of it in the book of Samuel, given that it happens at a place called Nob, and I doubt our response to that would have been especially pious or mature. |
| 23 | ROOST – once I had R_O_T, it was hard to see that it could be anything but ROOST = resting-place, and that there was some secondary meaning specific to Orkney, describing a river or the tide or a whirlpool. That sounded very plausible, and indeed it is exactly so. |
The reasonably good Mac OS Dictionary (based on the American OED) has the following:
2 a perverse or unfounded belief or notion : “the natural crotchets of inveterate bachelors”.
How poetic and appropriate in the case of some solvers I know on cold Tuesday mornings.
Thank you for the excellent blog Tim.
I toyed for a while with LUNG GIRL but it didn’t seem to make much sense! I’m not sure that 16dn is terribly satisfactory – “player’s” seems a bit weak for a double definition.
Minor corrections: At 19D, I think you take the Z=unknown first, and then just replace S in Asia with MB. 16D I think you just have to read as a cryptic def – a whimsical fancy which can also be associated with a player. And I think Paul is probably right at 7D, though an “over issue” could be about cricket deliveries.
This type of clue used to appear much more often than it does now. Some setters of other puzzles still use it more often than in the Times daily (I think we now get one or two a month when 30-odd years ago you could probably find one every day), but in modern-style cryptic clue-writing it’s gone out of fashion.
I finished with the DD and the CD. Fortunately, I discovered only a couple of days ago that a Roost is a tidal race in Orkney and Sheffield when I was doing another puzzle. Last in was Crotchet, as the only feasible answer.
I’m not happy with Trattoria. If the entire clue is an &Lit it gives a rather xenophobic impression of Italian ebullience. Alternatively “Where dessert is…” is a rather feeble definition overlapping with the wordplay.
Again (as a relatively new solver) I wonder if I should be risking my dignity by participating here with all these crotchet like times.
I did finish (about 2 1/2 hours) but used aids to justify crotchet, roost, Geneva, re-entrant and cassia.
Couldn’t work out the wordplay for Mad as a hatter, thinking Sadam might be the backwards crazy fellow.
Questions:
Does the “raw” in 26ac, apart from being part of hidden word, signify slang?
And what does Q0 E5 D3 actually mean?
I started solving in earnest about 11 years ago, but I’ve only started timing myself comparatively recently, and then only because of the Championship. By all means time yourself if you want to, but it’s certainly not worth trying to shave off a few seconds by writing in answers you’re not sure of. Your initial aims should be understanding and enjoyment – competition can wait!
Various things I didn’t know here: LAND GIRL (17ac), ILIAC (2dn), CASSIA (4dn), CROTCHET meaning a perverse notion or whimsical fancy (16dn), and ROOST meaning a tidal current (23dn).
Clue of the Day: 10ac (RECTORIAL). Nice blog post, too – thanks, Tim.
While tearing through, I didn’t bother with some of the cryptics, the literals were just too obvious.
I share the reservations expressed by lennyco and markthakkar about the clue to TRATTORIA – an attempt at &lit that doesn’t really make it in my view. I think 10 was the best clue of a mixed bunch, but 11 was also neat.
Oli
Gary.
To clarify the difference between my own “5 to 10 years” and Jimbo’s estimate of 6 months: a routine of daily solving attempts and blog reports is something like 10 times more effective than daily solving attempts and unexplained solutions in the paper the next day, based on time required to make similar progress.
Other brief points: Reading a good book will help – Tim Moorey’s “How to Master the Times Crossword” is the best if finishing this puzzle is your main aim. My “Peter’s Cryptic Crossword Corner” site has “YAGCC” pages which cover the basics. If you’re new to crosswords in general, do some non-cryptic puzzles like the Times2 one as well – you should find them easier, and the cryptic/non-cryptic skills difference is less than many people think.
There are easier cryptics than the Times, which some would recommend starting off with, but as long as you understand the range of difficulty and its effect on beginners, learning with the Times is fine. As a starter, I’d recommend following the “Memories” and “About this blog” links at the top, and then trying some of this year’s championship qualifying puzzles which are free on the Times Online website, and reading the reports for them (no. 3 of 4 was published last week and will be blogged this Friday) – these are relatively easy puzzles despite being part of the championship. Just browsing through a few reports (with comments) will give you some useful tips too. If you sign up for the Times Crossword club, you can take use their archives and ours to look at old puzzles – between this version and my solo original, we’ve now got reports going back about three years or 1000 daily puzzles.
Gary
However, having studied Maths in one way or another for most of my life, the fact that I’ve never come across RE-ENTRANT must surely qualify it as genuinely obscure. It’s the sort of black and white arena where synonyms aren’t of much use and there are more familiar words to describe the phenomenon.
By the way, could someone explain the wordplay for 3d? I assume it’s UNKNOWING, with UN=peacekeepers, but how does the rest work?
Trattoria: must appear in the names of a large number of Italian restaurants in the UK. I’m not a restaurateur either, just someone who eats out sometimes.
Both these and re-entrant are in the Concise Oxford. I don’t think you can expect setters to check that (e.g.) all mathematical terms are familiar to particular mathematicians. If it’s in the dictionary, I think they’re entitled to assume that it’s familiar enough.
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t mean any criticism of the setter — if it’s in the dictionary it’s fair game. I was just pointing out that while I usually assume that words I don’t know are commonplace in a niche I don’t occupy, RE-ENTRANT was a rather different story! TRATTORIA I was merely using as an example of the former: ie a word I happened not to know even though it’s probably common if you’re looking in the right places.
Reentrant remembered from school geometry 50 + years ago. A reentrant angle is (or at least was) > 180 degrees measured internally, and so comes back into the polygon.
I can see two main reasons for its demise. Firstly, all that 2D geometry stuff that people used to study in school has largely disappeared from modern curricula, presumably because someone eventually noticed that it was largely pointless! Secondly, in the unlikely event that one did need to talk at length about concave polygons, it’s probably just as easy to talk about the reflex interior angle, rather than coming up with a word specifically for the context.