Times 24338

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 8:14

This feels like a better bit of speed-solving than a few recent attempts. Answers written in without full wordplay understanding were: 1A, 14, 15, 17, 5, 20. There’s some quite fiendish wordplay and not much of a general knowledge quiz, so it should be a challenge most people can enjoy. And there’s plenty of invention here to admire, as well as the violent matching pair of long down answers.

Across
1 A,M.O.=doctor,EBA=reversal of Abe=president – stock wordplay components but a clue that seemed fresh
4 WRITE OFF = consider valueless, = “right off” = straight away
10 RULE OF THUMB – def. and cryptic def. referring to Tom Thumb
12 INSECTA – (Teach-ins – H=Henry)* – H=Henry is a bit cheeky, as H stands for the uncapitalised henry, the SI unit of inductance. I guess this is an example of the rule used in the Times and some other puzzles – false “upcasing” is allowed, but not false “downcasing”. Applause for the def – Insecta is indeed the class of insects and hence “creepry class”. (And Insecta does get a capital letter, but henry doesn’t – where’s the logic in that?)
14 HE=man,ED=Edward=Teddy,FUL(l)=bursting
15 THE VIRGIN QUEEN – GIN = spirit, inside (never quite)* with H=husband also inserted. And a nicely done semi-&lit, as you can read the whole clue as the definition, as well as the single word “Elizabeth”
17 RUBBERS=several hands (in bridge),TAMPING (as of pipe tobacco) – these “move the space by one” clues continue to surprise me by the sheer number available
21 T(RAIN)ED – tedding is drying (or attempting to dry) hay by spreading it on the ground and waiting for sunshine. Maybe the setter is alluding to this year’s falsely predicted “barbecue summer”
22 MAN(A)GER
23 PHI = “fie” – I’d count PSI = “sigh” as a tempting red herring but a near miss – see comments for the detail
24 SWALLOW = put up with,TAIL=dog (vb.)
26 PAGAN,IN=home,I – I hope fiddle virtuoso Paganini is well-known enough to avoid any grumbles.
27 TRUNKS – nicely done double def.
 
Down
1 AIR,LIFTS=”becomes less oppressive”. The best-known airlift gives us a link to a bit of 20th century history
2 OWL – referring to two bits of literature for children – Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat”, and Owl and Piglet in the Pooh stories. Those who remember their Pooh bear better may be able to confirm my suspicion that “took Piglet home” means “stole Piglet’s dwelling” here.
3 BRONC(o),H=horse,1
5 ROUG(HAND,TUM,B(ruta)L)E – a nicely done bit of complex wordplay.
6 TABLE=counter,AU=Gold – took me a bit longer as gold=OR is usually a better bet in crosswords so was my first punt
7 OVERFEEDI=(free video)*,NG = no good – in Collins but not COED, though the latter does have NBG for “no bloody good”
8 F(LAT(via)LY – guessed at LAT or VIA immediately, Estonia and Lithuania both having an odd number of letters, but the rest had to wait for checker help
9 AT DAGGERS DRAWN – (Great-Grandad, w(a)s)*
13 S=son,PECULATING = stealing money – a fairly common charade but I think they keep varying the wording
16 EGG ROLLS – L=50 in (loggers)*
18 B,(v)ENISON – “benison” is a “literary” (COED) word for blessing, imaginable from “bendiction”. Watch out also for malison, a curse
19 MANO(WA)R – wordplay barely necessary here – how many (3-1-3) vessels can you think of?
20 STEP-UP = promotion – reversal of puppets=pawns, without one p=pawn
25 AWN – a bristle on a grassy plant, and the ending of the answer to 9. The other kind of bristle is “show open hostility” at the end of the clue to 9, just to cloud things a bit for you.

50 comments on “Times 24338”

  1. 20 minutes this morning with no particular problems. Didn’t know BENISON, but pretty simple from the wordplay.
  2. 11:09 for me after a sluggish start, with only a couple of answers put in in the first couple of minutes. I made the mistake of trying to get the long ones first, and they all eluded me, so I moved on and started with INSECTA, then progress was rapid. Last couple in were FLATLY and ERA for some reason, both of which should really have gone in without thinking.
  3. 25 mins for me. Second straightforward puzzle in a row. But lots of nice wordplay. AWN has appeared before, otherwise it could have caused some difficulty. 13dn was last in.
  4. Only had to invent two words (benison,awn) in order to complete, although it would have been more to fully understand all the wordplay. Which probably means that this is an easy puzzle. Even I have heard of Paganini so he must be a very famous fiddler indeed.
  5. About 12 minutes for a very easy but none the less entertaining puzzle. Some of the definitions are very straightforward. Peter has mentioned “vessel” in 3-1-3. “Elizabeth” in 3-6-5 also qualifies whilst “reign of Tom” in 4-2-5 brings the answer immediately to mind.

    My one gripe is 23A where there is insufficient indication that its PHI as against PSI

    2. The phrase “Sigh of disgust” achieves 10,400 hits on AlltheWeb so I think I might have a claim for an alternative answer though I admit PHI/fie is what the Setter had in mind. But having thought of PSI/sigh first it fitted so well I didn’t have any reason to look further.
      1. “fie” does seem to prove that indicating archaisms is not currently compulsory

        As the def. for “sigh” refers to “sadness, tiredness, relief, yearning, dejection, etc.” (combining the usual dictionaries), my guess is that PSI=”sigh” would not be accepted as an alternative in competition conditions. The best hint available to a solver not using books is that disgust is a bit extreme for a sigh, and the surface reading would be just as good if a word like “dejection” was used instead, and that in turn would rule out PHI=”fie”. But I can’t claim that any of this was considered during my solving, or that if I’d thought of PSI first, I’d have managed to avoid writing it in.

      2. Oh, and further to an earlier discussion (was it yesterday?) “Fie” is archaic and there’s nothing in the clue to suggest that.
        1. I think mctext is right. Whilst there are frequent arguments about what does or doesnt constitute a homonym in regional dialects etc, this is slightly more clear cut. Psi is the character that would be used in eg dipsomaniac or rhapsody to represent both the english p and the s and consequently must be pronounced with both the p and the s. The only grey areas come at the beginnings of words such as pseudonym, although that ought to sound the p, and it is probably laziness that has removed it over time. The phi as in graphic is clearly pronounced as “f” with no other parts.
  6. 10 mins, no real hold-up. I liked 20D STEP-UP but think ‘Pushing pawns up’ works even better in a Down clue.

    Tom B.

  7. I think this was really easy – just under 10 for me including an interruption – but I thought it weak and it gave me little satisfaction to clobber it. Awn in 2 clues, and pure Gen.Kn. for owl – or did I miss something here?
  8. 29 minutes. Just my sort of lively puzzle with plenty of variety and a good mix of long, short and hyphenated words and phrases offering lots of ways in so whenever the flow stopped in one area of the grid I found it easy to move elsewhere and start a new one.

    I didn’t actually know the Piglet reference at 2dn but the answer was obvious from the Lear poem and I looked up the Pooh stories afterwards.

    After investigating on the internet I have concluded I must be the only person on the planet who has never heard of EGG ROLLS with reference to Chinese cooking!

    Had to buy the paper this morning because the Club site was down yet again “for essential maintenance of the registration system” so I now have a newspaper I shan’t have time to read properly. What is there about this system that seems to need maintaining so frequently?

    I had PSI = “sigh” at 23.

  9. finished without aids but unfortunately entered psi not phi. my real struggle was 1ac and 1d, where i thought 1ac would start with p. i also missed the subtlety of 17ac reading it as rubber and stamping. cod 1d mainly because of the trouble it caused me.
  10. !2 mins: so pleased to get into the Jimbo league and getting the occasional sub-PBx2. Natch: this was helped by lots of “longs” and “splits” and several “long splits”! Thought this would make a good “nursery slopes” puzzle and have kept a copy for that purpose. (Round here, people are perplexed at some strange fellow doing a cryptic over a morning pie at the caff and often ask what they’re about.) One slight query: isn’t the “one” in 26ac doing double duty? The “one” is needed for both the final “I” and the first word of the def. Maybe?
    1. I suspect the Times xwd ed would say that a description like “who was always on the fiddle” is OK as a definition, though “one who was …” is probably what I think of as the “functional def” – the set of words that makes you think of the answer.

      That said, the current xwd ed has been known to allow gentle rule-breaking as he objects to “solving by rote”, so the double duty is possible.

      Edited at 2009-09-23 10:59 am (UTC)

      1. Just reading a rare criticism of Don Bradman: that he had cricket under the skull not under the skin. I’m starting to wonder in which of these places I have crosswords and fear the former: hence a certain preference for “rote” over “adventure”. I hope this turns out to be wrong!
      2. Didn’t time this but it would have been fast by my standards. Very easy and I expected complaints from posters who don’t like ’em too easy. bc
  11. As someone who usually manages to finish, but in nowhere near the experts’ times, I was thrilled this morning to clock up a complete solve in about 15 minutes – ie just under PBx2, which is probably the other sort of PB for me. I don’t usually bother with timing myself, but after putting the first five or six across answers in immediately, I looked at the clock and thought I might see what I could achieve.

    Is it an easy one, or is it just that my mind is in tune with the setter this morning? I shall be interested to see what other comments are posted later in the day.

  12. An annoying 21:30 for me. I thought I was heading for a record with all but the SW corner done in about 11 minutes, but hit a wall with 6 remaining and wrote nothing for nearly 10 minutes before they all fell into place with a rush.

    I’ve never come across BENISON or PECULATING before so these stumped me for a while.

    Still, 3 out of 3 completed without aids so far this week, so I’m happy with that.

    COD has to go to 15 for its wonderfully accurate description of QE1.

  13. In the past people have claimed that posting solving times is just showing off. In this instance it is! It took 6:25 which means I’m a PB beater twice in a row! That has never happened before and probably never will again!
    I found it a pretty easy crossword with a lot of definitions giving the game away. Later analysis showed some really good wordplay – I’ll give my nod to 20.
  14. When you sigh you don’t actually say “sigh”, so I think the “read out” element points even more strongly to phi/fie.
    1. Hmmm… depends what you think is being read out. If it’s the letter (or at least its name), as suggested by the surface meaning, then PSI and PHI both work for this element of the clue. I don’t think fie or sigh need any reading out – they’re already expressions of disgust or something else, just as “howl” and “ouch” might be expressions of pain.
  15. 9:57 so a very rare sub-10 minute solve for me, so to answer the anonymous question above, this is an easy puzzle.

    Awn, benison, ted and peculating all new but didn’t hold me up, and I agree that some of the definitions, checkers and enumerations led to answers confidently entered without full understanding of wordplay.

    I like the way rubber stamping worked but don’t like the surface, so I’ll plump for swallowtail as my COD

  16. (Also showing off…) 6:48 for me — the best I have achieved since I started timing myself (though a certain person of my acquaintance did it in less than 4). I was slightly held up because I originally put SPECULATION at 13d.
    1. So will I still get your annual pre-champs e-mail that says something like “Solving under those conditions is anathema to me but good luck anyway”? Seems like some extra practice might be needed here!
  17. Like many others I found this easy. If I didn’t get an answer quickly, it came later once just a few letters were in place. I stalled at the last clue, 13, mistakenly focusing on “stealing money” rather than the whole answer. It was a couple of minutes before ‘peculating’ came to me. 18 minutes in all.
    I rather agree with Peter that &lits can be rather contrived, indeed tortured. A semi-&lit can be just as pleasing, or more so.
    I liked the clue for 20 as well as that for 15.
    1. Because “Elizabeth” cannot be interpreted as part of the wordplay. In a true &lit, the whole clue is simultaneously the wordplay and a definition.

      For me, a good semi-&lit like this is better than some of the rather tortured ones that seem to arise from an apparent desire to get credit for a true &lit. (e.g. “initially / finally / at heart” shoe-horned into the definition reading to justify a sequence of initial/final/middle letters)

  19. 9:20 .. Thanks to the setter for bringing a bad patch to an end.

    I solved this just after watching Derren Brown’s latest offering, so with a head full of thoughts about Perception Without Awareness. I’m now going to claim that I process the wordplay of clues like 15a at a subconscious level, rather than just glancing at the definition and taking a punt.

    A bright puzzle full of wordplay that was completely wasted on me (but my hindbrain says thank you).

  20. I will be in Cheltenham this year, Pete (havng been persuaded, against my better judgement, by A N Other) — so don’t expect the email.
  21. solved in 20 at 0230 this morning after a fair few drinks…so must have been relatively easy as bloggers suggest. liked it especially a across Amoeba…

  22. Probably a bit late to leave this comment, but here goes anyway in case anyone is interested. One of the few things that has stuck in my brain re the linguistics element of my 40-years-ago classics degree at Cambridge is that we don’t know how the ancient Greeks pronounced their language, though there are some clues in the literature. For example, whereas modern Greeks pronounce beta as ‘v’, there is a line in Aristophanes which has the sound of sheep bleating rendered as ‘beta eta’ – and while sheep may say baa or maa they certainly don’t say vaa! So beta has become v down the years and the same thing has undoubtedly happened to other sounds. Among my fellow classicists there were several variants in pronunciation, as I also found in Greece five years ago when an Athenian tour guide who had learned ancient Greek pronounced a particular epigram very differently from how I rendered it. So recourse to ancient Greek in the phi psi debate won’t wash. Sorry – lecture over.
    1. With you on the gist but I’d be very wary of drawing conclusions from animal noises. Remembering from some newspaper article that pigs sound very different in Japanese, I found this list which has one or two other surprises – mice sounding like trains for example.

      Edited at 2009-09-23 04:01 pm (UTC)

    2. Given the arguments we regularly have on these pages about current day English pronunciation, it does seem unlikely that we’ll be able to pin down exactly how Aristotle said ‘psi’.

      I taught in Greece for a couple of years and had a running argument with a Greek teacher about pronunciation of the ancient language (we’d been taught it quite differently). Every instalment would end with her saying “I’m Greek. I know.” and me saying “That’s like me saying I’m English so I know how Boudica spoke” and her going off in a huff, muttering something about Lord Elgin. You can see why I don’t work in the diplomatic corps.

  23. Away this morning before blog available.
    Understood the xwd OK and finished in about 25 mins (possibly a record for me) but any smugness blown away when reading comments which for me might as well have been in Greek – come to think of it a lot of it is in Greek.
    Was all this pedantry compensation for the easiness of the puzzle?

    What I liked about the puzzle is that it shows that a straightforward puzzle can yet be inventive. Post-solve parsing of BRONCHI, and confirmations for TED and AWN. Didn’t understand STEP-UP.

  24. Same experience as most others, done in around 15 minutes without any moments of intense struggle, and despite interruptions. First in, 1A AMOEBA, last entry, the unknown BENISON. COD is 20D, which I didn’t understand til after finishing, but very clever. 15A is also good as a clue, but I thought it too obvious from ‘Elizabeth’ and (3,6,5). Regards all.
  25. Took two sittings, didn’t get any uninterrupted time, but a fun solve. I saw the wordplay more readily than the definitions, and needed the wordplay to get SWALLOWTAIL and BENISON. Only one I got from definition alone was RUBBER-STAMPING
  27. I was surprised that no one else found ‘owl’ almost objectionably easy: what other partner to a pussy-cat could there be? I was so sure there had to be a trick that I waited until I had the L as well as the O. ‘era’ was another give-away.

    This is totally unrelated, and I’ve forgotten the puzzle, but I wanted to get this off my chest: the answer was ‘Widnes’, and the clue involved the putative American pronunciation of ‘witness’. As a native speaker of Murcan, I can assure you that we don’t flap the /t/ before nasals. ‘metal’ rhymes with ‘medal’, etc., but the most likely pronunciation of ‘witness’ would be with the glottal stop: ‘wi?ness’; similarly, Wal? Whit?man

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