Times 24,283

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
26 minutes this morning, which in my world translates as “really quite tricky”, and I use the word ‘tricky’ in a complimentary way: the hold-ups stemmed mostly from well-disguised definitions. While some knowledge of grammar and fine art was required to see a handful of solutions, mostly it required some precision of thought. Very enjoyable challenge. Q0-E7-D8

Across
1 MILLIBAR – “Millie” + bar.
5 PROFIT – PROF(essor) + IT: chairperson being parsed as one who holds a chair; having “it” is an expression of indefinable sex appeal.
10 LET ONE’S HAIR DOWN – nice use of “shock” in its less common definition as a mass of hair.
11 APPOSITION – (IN PATOIS)* round PO; first bit of grammatical knowledge required today.
13 CEDE – (DEC)rev round truc(E): December is one of the 31 day months: easy to work out which was required.
15 SMOTHER – S(pades) + MOTHER: again, use of the less common definition of “dam” meant this was one of the last in.
17 STROPPY – (PORT)rev in SPY: don’t think I’ve seen “stabbing” used to indicate the insertion of one word into another before.
18 SCOURED – S(outh) C(arolina) + OUR ED(itor): if you work for The Times, the editor of that organ is clearly “ours”.
19 RENEWER – RENOIR with the O(ld)1 replaced by EWE: lifting and separating required to clear the surface impression that this has something to do with veterinary medicine.
21 ORAL – (past)ORAL.
22 RATTLETRAP – RATTLE(d) + (PART)rev. gives you a vehicle that would probably qualify for a government bonus if you traded it in.
25 KNIGHT OF THE ROAD – as the clue suggests, this expression has covered various users of the highway at different points in time: these days it generally refers to truck drivers, and I think the RAC had an ad campaign in which they styled themselves “The New Knights of the Road” i.e. it’s a generally complimentary expression. However, in the past, I can find it being used to refer to both highwaymen (hence the “hold up” part of this clue) and tramps, so it appears to have covered the full moral spectrum of road users.
27 LEEWAY – (General) LEE + WAY: once more, the less common definition (“play” as “in room for manoeuvre”) adds interest to straightforward wordplay.
28 FEAST DAY – D(istrict) A(ttorney) in (SAFETY)*.
 
Down
1 MILLAIS – more painting: MILLS round A1 (for non UK solvers, the A1 is the old Great North Road from London to Edinburgh). Again, lifting and separating is required to remove the suggestion that the artist should be Lowry, who really did paint industrial mills rather than Millais; if he painted a mill in his life, I suspect it would have been a scenic water-driven object.
2 LOT – double def. Lot’s wife, of course, is one of those characters whose own name is never revealed: for a modern varaint, see Arthur Daley and “Er Indoors”.
3 IONOSPHERE – (POISON)* + HERE.
4 ASSET – (b)ASSET hound.
6 RARE – easily deduced from the definition and checking letters R_R_: the reference is to his grave, which is marked “Oh Rare Ben Johnson (sic)”, which will reassure English students who always get him confused with Dr Johnson (or Jonson) that they are not alone.
7 FLOWER POWER – another secondary definition, a flag being a type of lily (I must once more admit that my botanical blind spot meant I filled this in without being certain why it was right).
8 TANNERY – ANNE in TRY.
9 CAROUSER – CAR + OUSE + R(ight).
12 PROVOCATIVE – PRO + VOCATIVE. The study of Latin in one’s youth means that the different cases of noun will remain with you always; the vocative is the case used for addressing a person (or item: though as a very young Winston Churchill observed while struggling to decline mensa, why would he ever wish to address a table?).
14 FRINGELESS – and again, marches has nothing to do with walking, but refers to the meaning “(disputed or neutral) border areas”, as in the Welsh Marches. The Edinburgh Fringe is a misleading description these days, since the Fringe actually seems to be the largest bit of the Festival, and no longer just the obscure bits away from the mainstream…
16 RADIATOR – (AID)rev in (o)RATOR.
18 SNORKEL – (RON’S)rev + KE(e)L.
20 RAPIDLY – RA(P)ID + L(aborator)Y.
23 TITLE – TITHE with the H(usband) replaced by L(eft).
24 RHEA – hidden word in Ecuado R HE A cknowledged – a (flightless) bird.
26 OLD – O(f) L(imited) D(esirability).

28 comments on “Times 24,283”

  1. Real pleasure in this, all sorts of images called up from my favourite 22a (Arthur Ransome book illustration, I think in The Picts & the Martyrs) to 1d (Bubbles) via the irate stabber and the flower children with their shocks of hair. 22m from 10 & 15 to final 23d. Lovely full blog, even if today I did not really miss anything.
  2. If I managed this in 6 minutes dead I wouldn’t remain anonymous. Finishing a real chore again today consistent with last week or so, and now very discouraged.

    At this stage of my career I do wonder at the point of answers like RARE, which can be guessed, but have to be researched post-solve to justify. Or perhaps people will be surprised that I have never heard of the profoundly uninteresting O RARE Ben Jonson or will say that it is a crossword chestnut.

    Yours
    Disgruntled of Croydon

    1. I never cease to enjoy the byways of esoteric gk down which books and crosswords lead – I had met “O rare BJ” quoted somewhere, I did not know it was on his tombstone. You never know what will come up in the next pub quiz, or all these titbits could set you up with a career as quiz setter!
  3. 25 minutes, so my best for a while though yesterday would have been even quicker but for the wretched poet. Without access to any aids I was left with FRINGELESS unexplained and RHEA which I knew was a bird but didn’t get the “runner” reference.
  4. 6 minutes dead for me, so one of my quickest for some time. I was consciously racing, so I satisfied myself of the wordplay on a couple later. Thanks for an excellent blog. The Jonson reference was new to me, though it clearly couldn’t be anything else.
  5. A middler for me so around 20 mins. I am increasingly aware that progress lives and dies by the long entries, and given that they are generally cryptic defs, this does add a large element of randomness into how long a puzzle takes (simply because you can either see the CD immediately or miss it for ages for no apparent reason).

    I thought that 7d was a little weak (unless I have missed something) as there is no confirmation of the power part, relying solely on the lesser known meaning of flag. Checking letters give it away, but the clue alone could refer to anything flower related, which for hippies doesnt narrow it down…..

    1. …is the reason it took me a while to spot how good a clue it is. POWER = “might” in the clue.
      1. unbelievable, and it wasnt even disguised or oblique. shows how your mind plays tricks on you when you have a pre-ordained thought in your head. I actually read through the clue again a couple of times to check i wasnt going mad and still missed it!
  6. 40 mins with a few question marks; notably the meaning of marches in 14, how a keel could be a whole boat (since found that in Collins) and how entering quietly can mean quietly entering (now I’ve typed it, it seems more plausible). I liked IONOSPHERE but COD to RATTLETRAP. Very nicely blogged too.
  7. I’d call this a “full on” Times puzzle, ideal for those who have mastered wordplay principles and want to put themselves to the test. Although I didn’t get the reference at RARE its level of obscurity doesn’t concern me too much; the Times has always spiced its clues with the occasional literary reference that may require some digging around to understand and it’s given me another little nugget of knowledge I didn’t have previously.

    It was a struggle, though, about 25 minutes in all, and that despite getting the long ‘uns straightaway. Kicked myself for losing time on PROFIT, CEDE, STROPPY, RATTLETRAP, LEEWAY, PROVOCATIVE, FRINGELESS, FLOWER POWER and RAPIDLY.

    Q-0 E-7 D-8 COD 27A LEEWAY (smooth and deceptive – and very marginally ahead of 7D FLOWER POWER)

  8. 13:09 .. slight hold-up from carelessly falling foul of the old YOUR/ONE’S trap in 10a. I’ve been doing this long enough to know better (ah, but where’s the fun in sinning if one knows no better?).

    First in LOT, last in LEEWAY, which indeed took a lot of thinking about.

    1. I avoided the YOUR/ONE’S trap at 10ac, but suffered a rather longer hold-up as a result of having initially entered LET DOWN ONE’S HAIR, which seemed perfectly OK in itself, but made a nonsense of several cross-checking solutions. It took me an unconscionable time to spot the error. So about 35 mins in the end for what was, I think, on the whole a reasonably straightforward puzzle. That said, Peter B’s 5.25 mins is a rippingly good time.
  9. 10.16. Ref Sotira above – from my memory it is ONES rather than YOUR 95% of the time. Held up by looking for the wrong dam in 15 which helped to SHOOVER the answer from me. I was deceived by OUR ED as I just looked for ED – should really have picked this earlier as otherwise , why Times?
    Also slow to get 3 as I looked to get a word with a consonant as the second letter
    1. This one suited me, inasmuch as I knew all of the various obscurities. Time around 20mins, pretty fast for me. I rather like the literary/artistic bias that leads to clues like “rare” Ben Johnson, but I can understand why some solvers would view it as an inexcusable obscurity. Often feel the same way about cricket, or plants. bc
    2. Thanks, John. I think I knew that, which goes to prove that being able to do the Times crossword and being quite dim are not mutually exclusive.
  10. A nicely constructed puzzle as noted above, but I’m distinctly unhappy with “contents of barn” cluing TITHE. Surely it needs far more qualification? Common or not in England, do ‘Tithe Barns’ still generally hold tithes? Shouldn’t it read something along the line of “previously the contents of a specific type of barn”?

    Or am I missing the obvious as usual?

    1. I doubt very much that even in the most rural parish, there’s anyone who still pays tithes in a form worth keeping in a barn as opposed to a bank.

      If a clue used “protection for the body” to clue CHAIN MAIL, for instance, do you think a word like “previous” would be required, or is it just part of the solver’s task to consider past possibilities as well as current ones?

  11. Another puzzle where good progress in the first 10 minutes led me to think I’d finish in around 20, but then I hit the tricky ones (including 7, 14 and 22), so took 26 minutes in all. I failed to see the wordplay to 18 and wondered how COUR could equal ‘state’.

    Another good puzzle.

  12. 5:25 – ripped through most of this, with the top half mostly falling on first look. SW corner was a gear or two slower.
  13. 12:50 with oral, rare and flower power bunged in without full understanding. I don’t know if that makes it an easy or average puzzle. I’ve developed a knack in the last couple of weeks of posting sub-15 minute times for puzzles that others have found tricky, yet will still take upwards of 20 minutes for a puzzle generally held to be average and will plod along with others on tougies like last Friday’s.

    COD leeway

  14. 14:27 here, continuing my poor initial form when starting the puzzle, then racing through it after staring blankly at the clues for the first 5 or 6 minutes. Hopeless really.
  15. 23 minutes for me. I had all but the SW corner done in under about 15 minutes but it took me far too long to get “knight of the road”. And I missed the “our ed” at 18 across so although I was pretty certain it was scoured I couldn’t see why scour was a southern state or why cour was a state (and I wondered if S AVER ED was a word meaning searched that I didn’t know, since it looked plausible and fitted the wordplay and even the style of wordplay of this crossword).
  16. Greatly relieved to wander through in 21 min, as I was dreading a repeat of last week where we were softened up Monday, and mugged Tuesday. A number of UK-centric clues, and some general trickiness, so a bit of a challenge, but nothing outrageous.
  17. About 15 minutes for me, which is on the quicker side. I agree with vinyl and others that there are some apparent UK-centric usages here, but I didn’t know whether they were UK slang or merely obscure. Got STROPPY from wordplay alone, never heard the word. Other new ones: KNIGHTS OF THE ROAD, march=fringe, kel=boat out east, tithe barn. I knew the Ben Jonson ref., so that was OK, and from some puzzle sometime I had heard of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which I dug up from memory for my last entry, FRINGELESS. First entry was LOT. COD: IONOSPHERE. Regards.
  18. got off to a cracking start with 50% done in perhaps 10 minutes but then hit the buffers …rattletrap took me rather a long time and that slowed me up.around 35 minutes…a fair and tough puzzle at the same time

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