Times 24,273

Author   richardvgPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Solving time: 12:34

Lots of fun in this one, along with a lot of chewy words. Egeria, sennight, and nilgai are all a bit obscure. And ISA, LMS and Ryde may not be very well known outside the UK. It was Egeria at 11A that took me longest. I baffled myself by deciding that the definition had to be “counties”, expecting “ignoring six” to mean subtracting VI. Once I realised that I shouldn’t lift or separate “six counties” it became easier.

A lot of clues I liked. Particularly 14, 25, 2 and even the simple 21.

(Posting this at 10:35 despite the time at the top (reflecting the placeholder time). And so the first 14 or so comments below were made before this went up. Will try to be earlier next time.)

Across

1 ABSINTHE – (THIS BEAN)*
5 DEC(ember), OCT(ober)
8 EMU – hidden. From the Code of the Woosters: “She looked at me like someone who has just solved crossword puzzle with a shrewd “Emu” in the top right hand corner”
9 LAUNCE’S TON, ie NOT(rev) – LAUNCE is the clown in the Two Gentlemen of Verona. The last time I remember seeing Launceston it was controversially clued as “capital”. And I am not sure “Commonwealth port” is much better – Launceston is on a navigable estuary, but its port is 40 miles away.
10 A G(E)RANGE
11 E + (ni)GERIA
12 DEE + M
14 S (A LAD) DRESSING – great surface
20 LEAR – two meanings: King/Edward
23 I(rk) M + POSE
24 TH(O)ROUGH
25 GO IN GROUND
26 ISA(ac)
27 TSE-TSE – being ((fl)E(fl) + ST)(rev) twice
28 SE(N + NIGH)T

Down

1 ALEXANDR(i)A
2 SQUEEZE – two meanings
3 NILGAI – AILING* – a crossword animal
4 HOURGLASS – two meanings, and the overall phrase works as well
5 DE(E)P END
6 CATHEDRAL – (CAR HELD AT)* – the drama being Eliot’s play
7 CANT + IN A – my only excuse for being slow on this is that “IN A” were so cleverly hiding in plain sight
13 METHOD + IST
15 A L.M.S. HOUSE – the former railway being the London Midland and Scottish
18 LIM(OG)ES, the insert being GO(rev)
19 E(P)ERGNE – the container being GREENE* – took a long time to accept that “Centrepiece” wasn’t part of the architecture
21 ELUDING – INDULGE*
22 D(RYDE)N – the container being the centre of loNDon

35 comments on “Times 24,273”

  1. This was mostly straightforward except for some (to me anyway) very obscure words: Sennight, Launce, Egeria, Epergne, Nilgai, two of which instersected at the start of 9 across making a dictionary necessary for me to finish (since I’d decided Nigial was the only anagram that fitted the crossing letters).
  2. Well, I’ll admit it. LAUNCESTON did for me. I guessed nilgai but then put LOUISESTON in despair. My apologies to the people of Tasmania.

    On the plus side, I now know that Launceston was the birthplace of both Ricky Ponting and David Boon. I’m sure it’s a fine place.

  3. A little over 25 for me; and LAUNCESTON not a problem for us “Commonwealth” types. BTW the Tasmanian one is pronunced in full (LAWN-cess-t’n). Good to see Launce appearing: at least if you’re up to Speed with the clowns of the Bard. Liked the inclusive indicator in 8ac (“partial to”). So: two clues in a row for Australians. Keep up the good work Bruce!
  4. Some unususal words but most were easy form wordplay…ailing could only be Nilgai and once you had Deep end 11 across could only really be Egeria. Agree that Epergne was here recently but wasnt it in the Jumbo ? NEver come across the word Decoct before and had never come across Sennight either.Around 40 minutes in 2 goes one earlier this morning after some wine…so quite pleased. think there will be some fast times!

    Never seen tsetse in the x word before is it a first outing!?

  5. About 35 minutes for this one. Most of it went in on first or second reading of the clues but then I became bogged down in the NW missing NILGAI,EGERIA, CANTINA and LAUNCESTON which accounted for the last 10 minutes of solving time. Eventually I put the first three in with some degree of confidence having spotted the wordplay but LAUNCESTON was a pure guess as the only thing I could think of that fitted. I am familiar with the place in Cornwall but I never heard of the one in Tasmania nor of the clown Launce.

    I’m a bit surprised that EPERGNE seems to have caused some problems because it’s barely a week since it last turned up and was the subject of some discussion here.

  6. 12:15 – knew most of the wacky words but made rather a meal of the clown in 9A, remembering Launcelot Gobbo (Merchant of Venice) and trying to find a way to lose his LOT (I’ve never seen or read Two Gents of Verona). Gave up in the end and relied on geographical memory. I’ve also seen 28A recently, possibly in a Mephisto or other barred-grid puzzle. Pretty sure TSETSE must have been in the Times puzzle before – it’s just so convenient.
  7. Last couple of days have seen my embryonic crossword vocabulary wanting. All but 1 completed with look-up confirms required for NILGAI, DECOCT and SENNIGHT. No amount of research got me LAUNCE (thanks mctext for pointing in the right direction).
    The one failure was EGERIA and even given the answer it took me 5 minutes to work it out, again begging the question, why such a difficult clue for an obscure answer?
    Not a puzzle for new solvers prone to grumpiness.

    Discuss.
    Having absorbed advice on lifting and separating, again, like yesterday, I am curious about the apparent redundancy of Commonwealth as we don’t usually get qualifications for ports?

    1. Yeh, I wasn’t fond of “Commonwealth” either, especially as I spent the day looking for a pommy to sign my Brit passport application and couldn’t. The office said I could, in that case, get any “Commonwealth” citizen who met the other quals. The person on the line obviously didn’t know that Australia is a Commonwealth. Launceston, as you can see here, ain’t much of a port no more. So it’s no wonder no one’s heard of it. I’ve been there and could have done without it.
      1. As it happens, during my 3 years in the antipodes I did visit Launceston, enjoying its beauty spots and features of interest, although I can’t remember what I did in the afternoon.
  8. 18:26, with one mistake (LAUGHERTON for the unknown LAUNCESTON at 9ac).  I spent the last 7 and a half minutes on 11ac (the unknown EGERIA), and was relieved to get there in the end.  Other unknowns were DECOCT (5ac), LAUNCE (9ac), Queen ALEXANDRA (1dn), NILGAI (3dn), CANTINA (7dn), the LMS Railway (15dn), MARCH PAST (16dn), and RYDE (22dn).  Phew!  A nice workout, but bordering on the wilfully obscure.

    A couple of niggles: I don’t like “to” as a link word (9ac); and 24ac (THOROUGH) could have avoided a peculiar surface reading by using “egg” or (innovatively?) “doughnut” instead of “nought”.

    Clues of the Day: 17ac (ALL THE SAME), 6dn (CATHEDRAL), and, despite the punctuation, 19dn (EPERGNE).

    1. have been meaning to ask for the past few weeks how it is you consistently claim not to know reams of content and yet post such magnificent times. Are you using the word “unknown” to mean something you dont use in everyday conversation?! Or is there a trick to rattling off a good crossword even though you dont know what is you are putting down. I guess the answer will be expert word play analysis, but in a lot of these cases esp cryptic defs double defs etc, this cant be the case.

      I for my part seem to find myself not knowing largely the same things as you, but it tends to take me 20-30 mins in those cases to painfully shoe-horn in some answers, often having to resort to aids. Today it was 3,9,7,11 that ripped my soul out.

      What’s the secret ?

      2. I genuinely don’t know the things I claim as unknowns.  (Where I have come across something before, but didn’t know it well enough to dredge it up while solving, I usually describe it as “unfamiliar”.)

        Your suggested explanation is right, but I’d add that I’m confident enough to think I can tell when a clue involves something I don’t know.  Insofar as there’s a secret, then, it may just be that I give up and start guessing much earlier than you do.

        You’re also right that cryptic definitions can be a problem; when I complain about these, it’s usually because (as with NAAFI) I’ve solved the cryptic aspect of the clue and am left with a non-cryptic clue to which I just don’t know the answer, as if I were solving a general knowledge puzzle.  (Some people dislike cryptic definitions for this reason; I think they’re fine for things that most solvers will know.)  Double definitions are only a problem when both definitions are unknown, which is thankfully quite rare.

        Guesswork is a poor substitute for knowledge.  I have an annoyingly high error rate – much, much higher than Peter does.  Today I made up a place called LAUGHERTON on the grounds that a LAUGHER might be a clown; last week I made up a garment called PELUSHE on the grounds that PLUSHE might be a fabric; and so on.  I like to think that, by doing the puzzle and reading the blog every day, I’m becoming less reliant on wild stabs in the dark, but it’s a very slow process.  My long-term strategy is just to get older and thus wiser.

  9. 15:20 for me. The only real unknown for me was Launce the clown, but I put it in thinking of LAUNCESTON in Cornwall. I dredged EGERIA up from somewhere, but for me the wordplay was helpful as “six counties” is always going to mean N.I. Last one in (which added at least a couple of minutes to my time) was SQUEEZE. I had to run through the alphabet to get it.
  10. I enjoyed this, probably because I successfully managed to work out all the obscurities. There was some original and ingenious wordplay. I was helped by Epergne featuring here only a couple of weeks ago. Egeria came because the six counties reference was a fairly clear indication to remove NI from Nigeria. I got the Shakespearean clown even though Two Gentlemen is, I think, the only one of his plays that I have never seen or read. I started to read it once on a plane but fell asleep. That left me with the ailing creature. It was a tossup between the equally unlikely Niliag and Nilgai. I finally decided that Nilgai was marginally more plausible, despite sounding like a plural.

    Three Shakespearean references today. Cleopatra had her salad days but fortunately she did not have to smother it with salad cream. If she did, she could probably have dispensed with the services of the asp.

  11. 34 min, but didn’t seem that long. Every time I stalled, and reached for the aids, something popped out of the deeper recesses. SENNIGHT, EGERIA, and LAUNCESTON all fell to this cunning plan. COD: GOING ROUND – probably too natty to be original, but new to me and greatly appreciated.
  12. A large number of ‘crossword only’ words today I think.

    Otoh, 4d, 14a, and 16d all made me smile.

    Launceston was a late one in for me despite the fact I know the cornish town well.

    3d was a complete guess.

    Probably about an average time for me.

    W

    1. Quickly to mind, SONAR and RADAR have certainly been used. There is probably a tipping point when an acronym becomes a fully fledged word in its own right. It is about 12 years since I left England, when PEPS freely talked about, and not too long after that when ISAs replaced them.
      1. I would have thought that the tipping point should be when the word was in the dictionary in lower case as a word, like sonar, radar, laser, scuba etc, not in capitals.
        1. I agree with the capitalisation test, but not the reference publications. The dictionaries are ultra-conservative and ever so slow. A word can be on its way out again before they react. The broadsheet editorial style book is what you want. So if an acronym is freely used uncapitalised in the Times or FT, it should be fair game.

          (After all, it IS the Times’ crossword)

          1. Wouldn’t the inclusion of ephemeral acronyms be against the spirit of the Times crossword? But if an acronym is around long enough to get into the dictionaries then at least solvers have a fair chance of knowing it. ISA is in Collins, Chambers and COED.
    2. For me the acronym has been admissible where it becomes the “word” that people use to describe the object. Radar and Sonar are excellent examples of this.

      Personally I have never heard people say “Individual Savings Account”, but Isa is quite common.

      And of course there is the lovely Naafi!

  14. came unstuck on egeria as i knew neither the word itself nor six counties reference. thought the rest stretching but fair. i suppose these days the only chance of seeing murder in the cathedral or a cocktail party on the london stage is if they were turned into a musical starring jason donavon. cod 4d.
  15. Considering the number of unusual words I wasn’t too unhappy with my 35 minutes solving time. Funnily enough, NILGAI, DECOCT, EPERGNE and EGERIA wre not a problem, but SENNIGHT took a while and I’m in markthakkar’s company putting LAUGHERTON for 9. I have heard of Launceston, and of the Shakespearean clown, but I couldn’t bring either to the front of my mind.
    I liked the “hidden” indication in 8 and the definition in 6. A nice bunch of clues altogether.
  16. 14.16 Good fun today.There were enough easyish answers to at least give some indication for the difficult ones. I knew of NILGAI. I liked TSETSE and managed to get EGERIA quickly having noticed the NI-six counties connection. Had the same difficulty as most with LAUNCESTON but last to go in were SQUEEZE and AGE RANGE which must have accounted for a couple of minutes at the end.
    Thanks to the setter for this one
  17. Ugh – well everything was going rather nicely, until, faced with N-L-A- I invented the prehensile lizard NILIAG.
  18. Whew. Interrupted a lot, so no accurate time, but my guess is 45 minutes all told, and with 1 wrong: IRA instead of ISA. I know the IRA is an American tax invention, but I didn’t see the wordplay and am umfamiliar with ISA. I had to look up RYDE, SENNIGHT, NILGAI and EGERIA after the fact, new to me. I didn’t know LAUNCE, but I’d heard of LAUNCESTON so that went in without understanding the wordplay. A real workout. My COD is 1A. Regards to everyone.
  19. Another day, another DNF. Not familiar with ISA’s, isa’s or otherwise and Egeria was a complete mystery. I’ve never encountered LMS, decoct, launce or sennight either but managed to deconstruct those successfully.
  20. I must have had a sheltered life. NILGAI, EPERGNE, LMS, LAUNCESTON, DECOCT, SENNIGHT I knew. Never heard of ISA though.
  21. Did it in bed after a long daytrip to France, no chance to blog till now, a bit late I know. I rather enjoyed it and it did not keep me up late as I waited till today to see all the lovely wordplays!

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