Times 24324: Hunting vocabulary, out in India!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 48 minutes

Music: None, I’m in a remote part of Connecticut for the Labor Day holiday, no vinyl here.

I found this a bit on the hard side, and was distracted by my surroundings. I had difficulty printing with a dubious internet connection, and now I’m hoping I can post to the blog.

There are some very good clues with a lot of deception in this high-quality puzzle. I did not understand a few of them until after I finished solving, but now everything is clear – I hope.

Across
1 STOWAWAY, double definition, hidden by the obscure ‘buckshee’, which means free or gratis. This is apparently from the same Persian word as ‘backsheesh’, which means something quite different. It entered English through Hindi.
6 DISMAY, DIS + MAY. Rather informal slang seems to be creeping into the Times vocabulary.
10 LITERATE, L[ECTURER] + ITERATE. The verb ‘iterate’ is not widely used except among programmers going through the objects in a container.
11 DECK, double definition. In ‘fell to floor’, ‘fell’ is the verb that means ‘knock down’. A ‘record deck’ is a slangish term for a turntable, but it is not really correct to say that a ‘deck’ is part of a turntable.
12 ROOT GINGER, anagram of IN, ROGER GOT. The cross-reference makes this a bit challenging, but does help if you haven’t figured out 23 yet.
14 HUMOROUS, HUM(OR)(O)US. The main problem here is to avoid jumping to the conclusion that the answer starts with AU, although ‘gold’ is the first word in the clue.
18 ACTS, double defintion, where ‘sketches’ bears the sense of brief stage skits.
19 OPULENCE, O(PULE)NCE. Very nicely constructed, and a good use of the seldom-seen ‘pule’.
22 JUST, JU(S)T. The complicated clue conceals a relatively straightforward construction, and fooled me for quite a while – this was last in.
26 TOCSIN, SCOT backwards + IN. Mildly recondite vocabulary, found in Shakespearean stage directions and such.
28 KINGSLEY, KINGS + L + YE backwards. ‘Books’ for ‘Kings’ is a bit of a novelty, because you would normally go for ‘OT’ or ‘NT’.
 
Down
3 WITH KNOBS ON, double definition. This has appeared at least twice in the past three months, and I still puzzled over it for a while.
2 WATERLOG, where WATERLOO receives a ‘G’ in place of an ‘O’. If the setter had used the train station, it would have been even harder.
5 YELLOWSTONE PARK, anagram of LET ONE’S WORK + PLAY, an &lit. I had the YELLOW part for quite a while before I saw it.
6 DOTAGE, DO(TA)GE. Not difficult for veteran solvers, bit of a chestnut perhaps. Newbies take note; they clue TA as soldiers, but OR as men – usually.
13 NATTERJACKS, NATTER(JACK)S. The construction is simple enough, but I had to dig the word
out of the back of my brain. I thought they were some sort of salamanders, but they turn out to be a toad.
15 UNCLOTHED, anagram of HE COULDN’T. A smooth surface and a well-concealed anagram.
17 BULLETIN, BULLET IN. A deceptive construction, with good indirection as to what sort of chamber is meant.
20 STASIS, STASI’S. Here the appostrophe really is the possessive, and not an abbreviation for ‘is’.
23 SPICE, S(P)ICE. ‘Sice’ is a Hindu term for a groom in the sense of a stable attendant. Our setter seems to be well-acquainted the some of the loan-words that were picked up during the Raj.

37 comments on “Times 24324: Hunting vocabulary, out in India!”

  1. Ddn’t find this too hard and finished in 18 minutes. NB: two lots of alarms and two books of the Bible. Only thing I had to look up was “sice” (also “syce”). Really liked the anagrams in this one: all neatly hidden. But 15dn was by far the best and gets my COD.
  2. Hello gents. I found this very hard, about an hour. First in, LITERATE, last in DECK, which I don’t find convincing. Well Blogged, Vinyl. Didn’t know WITH KNOBS ON, or ‘buckshee’. There was a lot of good stuff here, including KINGSLEY, TOCSIN, JUST, BULLETIN, and especially my COD: WATERLOG. I’m off to enjoy the USA Labor Day. Hurrah for us laborers. Regards all.
  3. 11:41 while watching Andy Murray cruise into the quarter finals of the US Open.

    Only real hold-up was SPICE, where I wondered about ‘spike’, but as neither ‘sice’ nor ‘sike’ meant a thing to me, I went for the more obvious answer.

    Last in DISMAY – slangy, but clever, as was the impish 22a JUST. Really nice surface in the easy 2d THEME gets my COD vote.

    It’s not Labor Day here in Canada. It’s Labour Day. You say tomato…

    1. Or … you say Carmeena, I say Carminah; you say Burahna, I say Burayna. Let’s Carl the whole thing Orff.
  4. I found this pretty straightforward with quite a lot of answers going in without having to worry about the wordplay. You can’t read Kipling without coming across syce/sais/saice.
  5. 9:21 – slowish start but then a rush of down answers, then slowed down to ponder possible alternatives to SPICE, but eventually decided the ginger could be nothing else. Knew pule from previous puzzles. Thought YELLOWSTONE PARK was a bit poor – it’s surely “Yellowstone National Park”. I wonder if we’d ever get “CAIRNGORMS PARK” for instance. But “deck” is justified by a def in my copy of Collins – “the horizontal platform that supports the turntable and pick-up of a record player”. I guess this is the original meaning, now replaced by the slangy one.

    I guess TA could be clued as “men”=soldiers, but OR = “men” relates to “officers and men” where men = the “other ranks”.

    1. Always remember OR from the label in a greatcoat I had before coming to Australia and not needing it: “Greatcoats, RAF, Other Ranks, for the Wearing of”.
      1. My favourite of this genre (stock list rather than label I thought) was the juxtaposition:

        • Chamberpots, porcelain, officers for the use of
        • Chamberpots, rubber, lunatics for the use of
    2. Agreed on YELLOWSTONE PARK. Weak clue all round, I thought. Even if the answer had been Yellowstone National Park, it’s not clear to me that this is a place one would necessarily associate with “play”. One might well, perhaps usually, be there on holiday, of course, but there might also be other (work-related)reasons for being there (e.g if you were an ecologist or professional photographer). The clue requires a ? at the end at the very least, I would have thought. Otherwise, good puzzle.
  6. 30 minutes dead with one error picked up when going back to decipher the wordplay (I originally had WATERLOO at 4dn).

    Never heard of SICE or any of its alternative spellings or PULE. TOCSIN was unfamiliar but I thought it may have cropped up before.

    I have no problem with 11 which may be a generational thing or possibly down to US/UK terminology or both.

    The one I don’t find satisfactory is 5dn though the answer came to me immediately on seeing 11,4 with Y as the first letter. The &lit definition just doesn’t work for me.

  7. Pule
    Tocsin
    Sice

    all new…notwithstanding that a respectable (for me) 35 minutes…
    see now that Waterlog is the amswer to 3 down and not Waterloo… drat!

  8. OED gives the spellings as SYCE or SAIS, with SICE given only as a 19th century variant.

    Paul S.

  9. About 20 minus for me today, but with one careless error (WATERLOO) and not completely understanding SPICE.
  10. OK, so I know they must be obvious as they have been left out of blog but:
    I have RHO at 25d, but why? (I know it is a letter),
    and I have WENT AT at 9ac, but why?

    Finished 15 mins before cut-off time which suggests easier than of late, but:
    head still hurts,
    1 error with SPIKE (entered GINGER ROOT first and should have gone back),
    didn’t understand OPULENCE, TOCSIN.

      1. Thanks Jack.
        I still miss the odd homophone and I thought WENT AT couldn’t be right.
        Still, I did suss the G replacing the O in WATERLOG (a type of clue I have only lately absorbed) so hope springs eternal.
      2. Yeah, ‘beat’ = ‘be at’ is a bit of a cliche, so I skipped it.

        I think it has turned up a couple of times fairly recently.

  11. confidence up finished without aids for second day running, so tomorrow probably a shocker. some very good anagrams but cod 17d. pule and sice were new so 23d a struggle til root ginger.
  12. Very slow to begin. After 10 minutes I only had SIR, TOTE and BEE (as in bee line, what’s wrong with that?). Finally picked up speed and mental acuity to finish in 40 minutes. Very much in agreement with vinyl’s assessment and with mctext on UNCLOTHED.
    1. Exactly what you would think. If you check the “About this blog” link you’ll see that vinyl1 is from New York City.

      If someone can enjoy cryptic crosswords, I don’t care whether they call them railway stations, railroad stations or train stations. (But then I wouldn’t care that much anyway.)

  14. 40 mins, having just got back off holiday, so a little rusty.

    First in was ROOT GINGER, and I think I would have struggled with 23 otherwise as SICE is entirely new to me. I was aware that DOGE & TOCSIN were words, but I couldn’t have defined them.

    Struggled with the NW corner at first, as I pencilled MOVE ON in at 9.

    COD to 15 for the rather neat anagram.

  15. My usual 25 minutes for a Monday puzzle, though I thought it was going to be longer from the slow star I made. STOWAWAY (which I should have got earlier) was the breakthrough I needed and everything flowed from there.
    A lovely anagram for UNCLOTHED
  16. 20 minutes here with only the slightly obscure vocabulary causing any problems. Glad to see others are not happy with YELLOWSTONE PARK, I do expect a setter to at least get the name of the place correct! My grandchildren all talk about “train station” so probably an Americanism imported over here by the youngsters. At the other end of the age span we always talked about “deck” for turntable and that was the 1950s!
  17. 7.50 which might have been a decent solving time if I hadn’t put in WATERLOO! I just didn’t the alternative word and thought I was being dense in not seeing the wordplay. Wrong!! I was being dense in a completely different way. So I make this clue my COD.
    Sice is a new word for me and Tocsin only encountered before in barred grids I think.
    Agree about Yellowstone National Park but I suppose most people got it without too much difficulty – so does that help to justify it? Probably
  18. 8:21 here. People commenting so far seem to have found this very easy or very tricky. I’m with the easy crowd as that was my fastest time for a couple of weeks at least. I also wasn’t happy with YELLOWSTONE PARK, and hesitated putting it in for a bit until I had a couple of checking letters. No problems with the obscure vocab, seen them all before in barred puzzles.
  19. I found this one a bit of a struggle – the SPICE/TOCSIN part held me up for a while. Didn’t get uninterrupted time so don’t know the exact time. Liked the clues for KINGSLEY and UNCLOTHED
  20. Seemed to stumble through this, and was surprised to find I had finished (Or so I thought) in 15 min. Then met my Waterloo. Considered mounting a defence, but if Napoleon couldn’t do it, who am I to try. In fact I relly enjoyed this one. Some inventive anagram fodder, with UNCLOTHED getting a grin and my COD. Oh, and do Canadians spell colour, humour etc “correctly”?
      1. With uplifted heart I can report that the natives in this colony are possessed of a most gratifying loyalty to Her Majesty’s language, even retaining our exemplary U (unlike the uppity rabble to the south).
  21. You missed out several clues! The two three-letter words:
    7d, SIR (“IS” upside down, R)
    25d, greek letter RHO – (“row” read out).

    9a BEAT IT/ BE AT IT.
    16a TOTE (as in tote bag, concealed in “phototelegraphy”)
    21a DOWN-AT-HEEL anag. of DONE and WEALTH.
    24a CHARISMA – CHAR(1’S)MA.
    27a ODIOUS – O.D. (overdrawn)+I.O.Us
    8d AUTHENTIC – anag. of “at uni/tech”

    I also met my Waterloo with Waterlog. – good for nothing indeed! Buckshee and sice were new words to me. Quite fast generally, 18 minutes.

    1. Could you please read the ‘About this blog’ before announcing that the blogger has “missed out several clues”? Nobody missed anything. But welcome aboard.

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