Times 24304 – OOH ER!

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Time taken to solve: 32 minutes again.

A fairly straightforward puzzle to solve which required a bit more thinking about in order to write it up with a degree of confidence, however after all that there is very little to say about it.

Across
1 A,PP,END
5 G,UN,SIGHT – G = good is not in COED but Collins saves the day, yet again. UN = United Nations here.
9 SILENCER – cars not guns.
10 W,ANGLE
11 FOOT,NOTE – I was toying with POSTNOTE here for a while but couldn’t quite justify “post” = “pay” so I looked for an alternative. I was later rather surprised to find that postnote/post-note/post note do not exist in the sense I had in mind.
12 GIFTED – Double meaning
13 DOWN,FALL – County Down + US Autumn
15 TRUE – The odd letters of “torturer”. Oh, that’s the same as the clue, more or less!
19 BORROW,ER – I vaguely knew there was an author called Borrow but didn’t actually know anything about him. George Henry Borrow (1803-1881). He’s in Wikipedia if anyone’s interested. Plus HMQ.
20 (dayligh)T,HEIST
22 FAIR,ER – I said I wasn’t going to mention clichés today, but having two ERs for HMQ in the same puzzle, let alone so close together, is a bit much. There are another four ERs dotted around so I suppose I should be grateful that only  two were clued this way.
23 UNDERMAN – Hidden. I considered being picky over “drastically reduced workforce” but can’t make up my mind about it.
24 LIFELINE – Double meaning
25 R(E)ALLY
 
Down
2 PRI(SON)ER
3 EVENT,I’D,E(ntered)
4 DOCTOR, WHO – WHO from how*
5 GARDEN FURNITURE – My COD. I wrote in furniture straight away but took a while to think of the first word. Today’s “Doh!” moment for me.
7 GO-GETTER – The Asian (Japanese) game is Go. Collins also has it as I-Go which might be worth remembering for future use.
8 TR(END,1,L)Y
14 LOW,LANDER – Someone from the Lowlands of Scotland. The other part is a reference to hitting below the belt or some such thing from the world of boxing of which I know nothing. The expression itself doesn’t appear to exist but Chambers has “lander” as a heavy blow.
16 UN(B)E,LIEF – I’m sure I have met “lief” meaning “gladly” before but I needed to confirm it after completing the puzzle.
17 PRE,T(0)RIA(l)
18 A,B(OVER) ALL – Our cricket ration for today. Half a dozen balls being an over.
19 BOSWELL – James Boswell, author of “The Life of Samuel Johnson” of dictionary fame. Johnson defined “lexicographer”, a writer of dictionaries, as “a harmless drudge”.

32 comments on “Times 24304 – OOH ER!”

  1. Half dozen in before ink dry, and as I was doing thought this would make a good Example 1 in a book on how to do cryptics. But of course I hit the wall (a low one) with SILENCER and THEIST (which I needed to get BOSWELL – harmless drudge new to me). Post-solve checks on the lexicographer, LIEF and GO for a game.
    Wasn’t happy with GIFTED as intelligent even with especially in front (Wayne Rooney) but then find that Chambers has it as “exceptionally clever”. So there!
  2. 15 min, so no great stretch. Little stood out, but I did like DOCTOR WHO, but wonder if it could be tarted up a bit by dropping the first two words to give simply “How to make a TV series?”?
    1. Maybe something like “TV series that could show you how”? Unless my memory has gone, there was a 1960s or 70s ITV show actually called “How!”, which could have led to an interesting clue when more people could remember it (I can’t find an internet mention of it).
  3. 5:49 – not much different in timing to the puzzle Jimbo disliked on Tuesday – I wonder how he’ll feel about this one. I think there’s more going on, but much of it is literary and Doctor Who is as close as we get to any science. At 19, 1980s Guardian solvers might remember a setter called Lavengro – the title of Borrow’s best-known work. I don’t think it was a veiled confession about pinching other people’s clue-writing work!

    At 23, UNDERMAN seems more justified if you add the clue’s initial “have” to “drastically reduced workforce” as the def. I liked the possible Johnson trap at 19D, he and Boswell both being (7) – rather like Bartok and Jonson a few days ago.

    Also liked 5D when the penny dropped to give the first word. Last in was 9A with its homophone disguise (“from what we hear”).

    1. I see what you mean, Peter, but that wasn’t the point I had in mind, it was the “drastically reduced” bit.

      One can be undermanned without drastically reducing the workforce simply by never having had enough manpower in the first place. Similarly one can drastically reduce a workforce without necessarily being undermanned as a result. It’s what they call right-sizing, I believe.

      I would agree it’s being a bit picky which is why I thought twice about raising it and decided not to, but now it needs to be said in order to explain my thinking.

        1. I too now understand Jack’s rather sophisticated objection to 23, which hadn’t occurred to me. My problem with this clue was simpler: like you, Peter, I took “have drastically reduced workforce” to be the def, but in that case the answer would have surely have to be “undermanned”; “underman” would only seem to work properly if the clue began “Drastically reduce workforce etc …”. But perhaps I’m missing a trick.
          1. I thought that too when considering Peter’s suggestion. It’s definitely a dodgy clue, in my opinion.

            I’m a bit surprised there has been no discussion re LOWLANDER with reference to illegal punches. Also that several contributors, as I did, thought of POSTNOTE at 11ac, which doesn’t appear to exist

            1. Thanks, Jack. Glad you shared my unease over the apparent mismatch of tenses in 23 and that it wasn’t just me. Unsatisfactory clue all round IMHO. I guess that the setter had his tongue in cheek with LOWLANDER at 14dn – a reference to the old stereotype which has Gaelic-speaking Highlanders as the only true, untamed Scotsmen and Lowlanders as Anglicised and effete speakers of Scots (derived, I think, from Middle English) coupled with “lowlander” as a quirky/nonsense definition of an illegal punch, i.e “one that lands low”. A bit of a stretch. Plainly there is no such word in reality for an illegal punch, but if we take it as a joke, I think the setter just about get away with it. I didn’t, as it happens fall for POSTNOTE, but did waste some time trying to find a word beginning with POST that would fit the bill before hitting on the more obvious FOOTNOTE.
  4. I found this harder than some — perhaps because I had to do it in about four sessions and didn’t get into the third level of cruciverbal meditation. {PB in my ears saying “Concentrate Grasshopper”!} So I’m guessing about 25 mins. This, mostly because I couldn’t work out what kind of furniture we were looking at and didn’t yet have GUNSIGHT (which makes a nice pair with SILENCER — my COD for not being a homophone). So, I have to confess, today, to being a(n) 23 on the Nietzschean scale of beings.
  5. 18 minutes for me today and the fourth this week under 30′ which I don’t think I’ve achieved before, so feeling pretty smug!
    1. I found this on the easy side but vaguely unsatisfactory. I had similar difficulties with “underman” as jackkt. I didn’t like “prisoner” (is the definition “someone” or “boy” who’s “inside”? either way it seems clumsy, even though easily gettable.) I foolishly had “haggle” instead of “wangle” for 10 ac. bc
      1. The definition is strictly the descriptive phrase “who’s inside”, though I suspect “boy who’s inside” may be what made some of us think of the answer.

        This is on the basis that “Someone being inquisitive” = PRIER, and “about boy” indicates the insertion of SON, combined with an expectation that in “def plus wordplay” clues, each part of the clue will play exactly one role.

  6. This was a very quick solve for me even with one kitten trying to eat my crossword and the other attacking my pen every time I wrote. There were no hold-ups until the very last where I spent a minute or so on 9 looking for a homophone beginning with Tire… I’m relieved others had a similar problem. It was one of 3 CDs today, although I think that Boswell scarcely qualifies as cryptic, the only uncertainty being whose life it refers to.

    I had not heard of, and didn’t need to know of George Borrow.

  7. I quite liked this one – easy enough to keep putting stuff in more or less continuously. For some reason I too couldn’t see past Postnote though. And Garden furniture was nice too when it came to me.
    1. 9:28 for me too. First APPEND, last in were UNBELIEF and LIFELINE. I agree with jackkt for the COD though – I thought it was a brilliant cryptic definition.
  9. After an easy run this was not the stinker I was expecting, though for some reason it took me 30 minutes, twice as long as yesterday. An indication of my inconsistency, I think.
    I rather liked the clues, particularly 5 (got FURNITURE long before GARDEN), 9, 10 & 12.
  10. 17:02 – my first sub 20-minutes (or at least the first I can remember), and I timed myself to the second for the first time.

    The ones that went in without full understanding were BORROWER, BOSWELL & PRETORIA.

    Started with APPEND, then 2 & 3, rattled through the SW corner, then the SE & NE, finished with 9 & 11. COD 5d.

  11. 13.40 Slowest of week for me , despite some of you finding it one of the easier ones.Had EYESIGHT for 5a at first but knew it ws wrong from 5d (clever use of Bedside, I thought).
    Last two to go in took a fair bit of time , a minute or two for SILENCER and then three mnutes or so for FOOTNOTE which for such a simple definition was inexcusable. I just could not see a suitable word to fit and ‘manuscript’ fooled me into thinking it was going to be something more esoteric than , say, ‘document’ might have.I didn’t know the ‘harmless drudge’ reference but knew of George Borrow otherwise could have been in trouble with the 19’s too.
    Rate this as a double bogey for me, but no complaints about the puzzle which was a par.
  12. 10 mins for me, I think a PB. I didn’t time it accurately since I only noted the time after I’d filled in several clues in the first minute and so realized it might be fast.

    Held up for a minute at the end on silencer of all things, or would have been even faster.

  13. Does anyone agree with me that 19d is hardly a cryptic clue for those who know ‘harmless drudge’? I immediately put in Johnson, before I had any checking letters, but then realised that ‘life’ had to have a relevance, and that Boswell had the same number of letters, so changed it.
    1. If the clue fooled you into writing Johnson, then it must count as cryptic! Many CDs are subject to this possible criticism when you happen to see through their bits of deception – there will be someone who understood “bedside” in 5D the right way and put GARDEN just as quickly as furniture.
  14. 20 minutes for another “mechanistic” puzzle that feels in parts as if its been computer generated.

    I’m with Jack on UNDERMAN, knew of “Borrow” only through his previous crossword appearances and can’t see the cryptic element in BOSWELL (if you know the quotation it’s a no-brainer. If you don’t then start guessing. Poor stuff). I quite liked the furniture.

    Thanks for the info on Lavengro Peter. I had no idea. Strange choice of pen name!

    1. Agree, same-y, or classic? Anyway nothing to get at all excited about and 19d is FT Polymath on a slack day. Not what this puzzle should be about.
  15. along came the cropper. cracking along nicely thinking this was going to be an exceptional week, had all but two and a half done inside 15 mins, and all was good. Had even slammed in BOSWELL without even knowing why or who he was, but the letters suggested it must be.

    The two and a half were 9,11 and the first part of 5D. wasnt helped by having put in eyesight? not gunsight, so wasted time playing with E words. finally scraped the last parts together to finish in 25 but stupidly left POSTNOTE as the answer to 11 which I didnt quite like, where further thought would no doubt have got the FOOT part.

    COD must be 5D for the number of D’oh moments, me included

  16. I found this harder than most others, but don’t have a time to post due to interruptions, and I fell for ‘postnote’, so I’m stumped today. I’m sure though, that I was over 30 minutes. I also put ‘FURNITURE’ in first, adding the ‘GARDEN’ later when I realized how to read ‘bedside’. First in EVENTIDE, last in SILENCER. Have a great weekend.
  17. Couldn’t wrap my brain cells around the less-common expression SILENCER over
    here (Canada) as opposed to muffler. Had guessed THEIST but couldn’t see the reasoning until I came here. ‘Harmless drudge’ looked so familiar but no synapses
    fired even though I had BORROWER and FAIRER and LIFELINE across to help with BOSWELL. A good clue in retrospect in that it fooled me. Quite fast (20 mins) for me with those exceptions.
  18. re 16d: ‘lief’ has generally gone the way of ‘rathe’, but I think I’ve heard it — and definitely have seen it, albeit more years ago than I want to let on — in the expression “I’d as lief …:”=I’d as soon …

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