Times 24,357

Author   richardvgPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Solving time: 12:57

Fairly quick start, then held up on a few, 15 and 22A being last in. Especially galling to be caught out by a hidden word (METHOUGHT), but I do like long hiddens.

Lots of other enjoyable clues today. Although I almost quibble about 17 below, it is very good, and the audacity of China giving ALLY rather than eg “mate” improves it. I also liked “season after season” in 14A (SOMERSAULT). But my clear favourite is 11A (TROPHY), because it made me laugh out loud (really, and on the Tube too).

Few obscurities. I did not know that ARROWHEAD (9A) was an aquatic plant, and although the wordplay is entirely fair, it is not so transparent that I could get it quickly. And the Crufty meaning of BENCH (22D) was entirely new to me. I suppose it is possible that PINTA as a unit of milk is unfamiliar to some non-UK solvers, but it is the only one of Columbus’s ships that will fit.

Across

1 PAT(C)H
4 DECLAIM+ED., the first part being (MEDICAL)*
9 A R(iver) ROW HEAD
10 PINTA – two meanings
11 TRO(P, H)Y – brilliant. I like to think it is a semi-&lit, as Helen was a trophy wife in more than one sense.
12 S(W)EE + TEST – I guess as there is a Bishop of London, London must be a “see” as well as containing sees. Makes a change from “Ely”
14 SOMERSAULT (=”summer, salt”)
16 FOIL – two meanings, “scotch” as a verb cleverly put at the beginning to justify the initial capital
19 DATA – (A TAD)(rev)
20 AUTO + DID ACT – I think that is AUTO as an adjectival prefix meaning “in car”
22 BI(O)AS + SAY – very clever. I worked out it should begin with O in BIAS, but dismissed it first (and second) time round as producing an implausible succession of vowels
23 BER(i)-BER(i)
26 NIGER, being (REGIN(a))(rev) and (REIGN)*. Unusual to have two wordplays. When there are three elements I think that generally two or three of them are definitions.
27 I + M(P)ARTIAL
28 HETERONYM – because 4D means different things when pronounced “duzz” or “doze”
29 S + PLAY

Down

1 PR(ACT)ISED
2 (boo)T + OR SO – I have seen this before more than once, and the answer was obvious from the definition, but it still took me a long time to work out
3 HAWTHORN – because Nathaniel’s surname sounds like the plant, but has an extra E on the end. Personally I would prefer that clue with just the first four words.
4 DOES – a heteronym
6 (big) APPLE + T(imes)
8 DEAL + T
13 SAL(U)TATION
15 METHOUGHT – hidden
17 LITER + ALLY – Can’t fault “China” = ALLY, as they both mean “friend”. But I can’t think of an example where you could substitute them without radically altering the tone if not the meaning.
18 FI(NE AR)TS – Chambers describes this meaning of FITS as archaic. I know it from the Hunting of the Snark.
21 U(SURE)R
22 BENCH – I did not know that this could mean “a platform on which dogs are displayed at a dog show”
24 B + RILL
25 SPAM – two meanings

52 comments on “Times 24,357”

  1. As a newish solver it seems impudent, and often imprudent to quibble but I was left unsatisfied by the number of answers where dictionary confirmation was required, fair in the sense of solvable from wordplay, but too many. No doubt some of the below are known to others but not to me:
    BIOASSAY, FITS, SALTATION, BERBER, HETERONYM, BENCH, ARROWHEAD.

    And some strange stuff like the double cryptic in NIGER.

    And:
    If China is ALLY then it’s a stretch,
    Does a HAWTHORN cut?
    Does TAD need the American qualification anymore?
    If the setter has found SPAM on a menu don’t accept dinner invitations.

    On the other hand I thought TORSO brilliant and my COD by a mile.

    1. I think words like BIOASSAY and HETERONYM, even though not everyday ones, are more acceptable than some obscurities because they admit of analysis. If you know what an “assay” is, then it is obvious what it will mean when prefixed with “bio”. And if you know what a “homonym” is, then you could make a fair guess at HETERONYM.

      And

    2. I agree that China=ALLY is a stretch.
    3. It is not that HAWTHORNE cuts. It is that (Nathaniel) HAWTHORNE, when cut (ie truncated) becomes HAWTHORN.
    4. TAD – good question, Chambers still says “mainly north American”.
      1. You see, the HAWTHORNE bit is what I mean by “imprudent”. And thanks for the blog and the helpful (and to an extent encouraging) response.
      2. Being curious about precisely what heteronyms were, I looked it up in my Collins. I was surprised to find that they are not the opposite of homonyms; in fact if it weren’t for words such as 19ac DATA (which can be pronounced differently but both pronunciations have the same meaning), all heteronyms would be homonyms! Heteronyms are words which are spelt the same but pronounced differently. Homographs are words which are spelt the same but have different meaning, (such as 16ac FOIL) and these are a true subset of homonyms, which are words which have different meanings but are either spelt or pronounced the same.

        Homophones on the other hand are words which are pronounced the same but either have different spellings or different meanings or both. This would include analyze/analyse (an example of a heterograph – same sound, different spelling) as well as foil/foil. For crossword purposes, it is apparent that the only useful device is the heterographic homonym (bow as in bend at waist/bough)and not the homophone.

        I’m glad that’s all cleared up and many regular contributors to this forum will be mightily pleased that we shall never hear tell of a homophone again.

          1. Homophone, if you pronounce the end of “spelled” with a T sound. If not, just two words that start with SPEL and mean the same – therefore synonyms. I don’t understand your “never again” point. Pairs like “bow = bend at waist / bough = branch” are homophones exactly as described by the def. which you quote.

            For crossword analysis purposes, it seems sensible to stick to homophone = spelled differently, sound the same, and homograph = spelled the same, sound different. These may not correspond to the exact field of meaning in the dictionary defs., but seem to cover everything we actually need without using the hopelessly vague “homonym” or anything starting with “hetero-“, and as long as you can see graph=writing and phone=sound by analogy with other words, their meanings are clear.

            Edited at 2009-10-15 11:11 am (UTC)

            1. I was being a tad facetious. I was going to say the answer to the quiz could be “spelling mistake” but being a paid up member of the Royal Society for the Preservation of Strong Verbs, I tend to use spelt (as in the flour, not flower) rather than spelled.

              I thought we’d all be glad to see the back of homophones. A simple rebadging seems to be the answer to most problems these days. I’ll withdraw gracefully from the debate. You’re right about the “hetero-s”; I’m still wondering how heteronyms can also be homonyms. If anything was ripe for rebadging it’s that.

        2. Koro, according to my COED, heteronyms are words which are spelt the same but pronounced differently and have different meanings – as in “does” (female deers) and “does” (carries out).
          1. I suspected that placing implicit faith in my Collins might be the undoing of me, but in this case it doesn’t effect the main argument. Your dictionary’s definition simply excludes the likes of “data” from the heteronym pigeonhole. The “shedulers”/”skedulers” out there would be cheering at this point, arguing there is but one way to pronounce any word, given its meaning. (In fact, Collins may have made this assumption implicitly, thinking that it wasn’t worth stating the obvious.) This would make heteronyms a proper subset of homographs which in turn are a proper subset of homonyms. So all heteronyms would in fact be homonyms as well. Taxonomy is a science I have never properly understood.
  2. first two thirds went in quite quickly, followed by a complete blank before resorting to aids. fit and bioassay were new to me, and i obviously have a cultural gap over nathaniel hawthorne. cod 11ac also my first in, thought 23ac would read better without ‘type of’ and found 26ac just weird.
  3. Started like a rocket and thought I might break 5 minutes, but slowed down horribly in the bottom half for 12:28 overall. My really shoddy bit of solving was failing to see FOIL at 16 – if I can think of EPEE as a possibility, SABRE and FOIL should be obvious alternatives. This might have led straight to 17D, and then 20 and 27 might have fallen on first look, so I reckon it cost me 2-3 minutes.

    Also wasted time looking for (W=wicket plus a 3-letter “falls”), inside TEST, interpreting London as a location for tests. Eventually saw the answer from the def.

    The doggy bench and saltation = “abrupt evolutionary change” were the hardest of the various odd words for me.

    Edited at 2009-10-15 09:51 am (UTC)

    1. I forgot when blogging, but I did the same thing on 12A. I expected it to be T????EST, and in fact I wrote in TASTIEST (as fitting the definition “most appealing”). But I fixed it quickly thanks to CODSWALLOP.
  4. There was quite a bit of newish vocabulary today, most of it already mentioned by Richard or Barry. Some of the words, such as fit, china, may and pinta I have picked up in the last few months of doing this puzzle so they were a great help. My only dead-end was entering Dope for the information on the backward American. This meant it took me a long time to get Methought and revise my answer. Last in was Bioassay, which I parsed correctly but, like Richard, I thought it had an unfeasibly long run of vowels.

    I did not see See for London. I guessed that it must be something to do with South East England.

  5. I was out of the blocks very quickly too, by way of the NE corner, but just as saltatiously hit the wall and plodded home with Ruth Frith who graciously kept me company. (I speak metaphorically.) As most of the words were familiar (except saltation & arrowhead) there must have been some very deceptive footwork in this one. There certainly was some very neat clueing indeed. My COD also goes to TROPHY (and not TROJAN as I hastily entered at first), but I liked many others. Last in was HAWTHORN, whose full cunning I didn’t appreciate till coming here. After METHOUGHT’s seclusion I was looking for auTHOR Not and (WHAT)* as explanations, before eventually concluding it was one of those thingy’s that sound the same even when pronounced differently.
  6. Surely China=mate as in ‘me old China’?

    Puts it closer to meaning ally than the country!

    1. Yes, but not as close as usual – mate and china seem to have an informality that ally doesn’t. Usu-ally, the Times puzzle’s synonyms are re-ally precise.
  7. 20 mins – last 5 spent not seeing 15d (clever in print as on two lines) and thus bioassay, ugh. Thought from clue that bench was actually used as a verb, to bench your dog for the judge, as the dogs at shows are the exhibits. Glad of clarification re homophones et al. Dare I say I rather enjoy them?
  8. 14:07 .. Seemed to be heading for a very fast solve until I reached my final frontier – the south west, where almost nothing was easy.

    Any quibbles more than made up for by the brilliant SOMERSAULT and TROPHY (which made me laugh, too).

  9. Am I to assume from the lack of complaints that no-one had problems accessing the Crossword Club this morning? The page with the print button came up and it even had today’s date at the top but when I clicked to print I was told my session had expired and I needed to log in. I then spent 10 minutes trying to get to the log in page via several routes only to be faced with a 404 error at every turn.

    I bought a copy on the way to work and completed most of it, often writing in answers without understanding the clue. I agree with Barry that there were simply too many of these today. I later polished off the last three using a solver, never having heard of AUTODIDACT (I had AUTO and the other checking letters but couldn’t guess it) or BIOASSAY. I’m ashamed to admit that the third one to catch me out was the hidden at 15dn.

    1. I had a similar experience to you, starting from about 1am your time. Finally got a 502(or 3?) at about 9am your time, which is a sensible error message and means a)it’s them and not just you and b)progress is being made. I could log on soon after.

      I don’t mind the site going down from time to time so much as not knowing whether it’s actually down or whether some cookie/cache problem is occurring at my end. A similar thing happened earlier in the week, but I logged on with no problem from another computer, returned to the first and got the parrot on the open box again. It then took me about half an hour of swearing and cursing to remove whatever was in the cache/temporay files/cookies that was causing the problem. Of course, this morning, when I think the site was really and truly down, I thought it was just my machine again and repeated the process in vain

    2. Vinyl1 posted whilst I was writing. It was down on my home computer at 05:00 and still at 07:00 on my work computer though it wouldn’t even give me a 404 by then, just a system message to say the page could not be downloaded.
      1. I couldn’t log in at all last night, jackkt, with any computer/browser. I dashed off the usual pointless email to “technical@” and am eagerly awaiting my reply (which should arrive around next Tuesday).
        1. Scrap that, I just got a reply.. “Unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control you may have experienced technical difficulties accessing our site.” etc.

          Stuff happens. I still wish they’d have a “site status” page somewhere on the main Times site so we wouldn’t waste hours trying in vain to log in.

          1. Thank you for your e-mail. Unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control you may have experienced technical difficulties accessing our site.

            However, the site should be fully functional so please do try again. Please do not used cached pages/favourites to access the site you require and you may need to refresh the page.

            Kind regards etc

            You are more patient than I am, sotira. I understand stuff happens but it shouldn’t happen every week and it’s the same problem every time, either unable to access Log In or it’s down for maintenance of the Log In system. And why are the problems beyond their control?

            1. I wish I were that patient. Last night I happened to have the first preliminary puzzles from the Championship still to solve, otherwise I’d have been looking for a virtual gun with which to blow that little yellow sucker’s head off. You’re right, of course – there’s no obvious reason why a stable system should repeatedly fail. If they’re doing maintenance, they should tell us in advance. I can’t help wondering if the Crossword Club section is outsourced in some way, as its operational state seems to be quite unrelated to that of the main Times site. Anyone know?
    3. I had a 404 this lunchtime, which after several attempts still hadn’t righted itself. I resigned myself to printing off the Guardian so I had something to solve over lunch. Immediately after printing it the Crossword Club mysteriously became available again. Coincidence ?
      1. 404s here in NZ from midday (midnight your time) for at least 3 hours. The same happened last Monday. I am getting a tad annoyed by it. Got the same unhelpful response to my e-mail enquiry.
        1. Same thing occurred when I tried to print the puzzle at around 9PM in the eastern US. Like jackkt, after a few tries I did arrive at the Crossword Club page, only to be bounced out as ‘session expired’. After another few tries, though, I again came to the Club page without passing through the log-in, and I tried “PLAY”. Lo and behold, the puzzle appeared! Then, on the “PLAY” page I tried the button for “PRINT CROSSWORD” and, lo and behold redux(!), out it came! I certainly can’t explain this, but was pleased at having finally wrested the puzzle out of the website.
          1. That’s a very handy thing to know. I’ll add it to my bag of workarounds. I had noticed that having been allowed to enter without showing my pass I was allowed to do some things but not others. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really stand the frustation levels induced by trying to create a comprehensive classification; indeed the classifications might change arbitrarily.
  10. as a consumer i think the service from the corssword club is diabolical. as others rightly say a message saying there are technical issues would help enormously…i still dont fully udnerstand why i cannot log on randomly and why clearing the cookies etc normally fixes it. i too wasted about 30 minutes this morning around 0600 trying to leg on deleting cookies etc. and we pay for it!
    anyway able to log on from a differnet computer just now and pleased to see that it ws the site not my pC

    having said that i thought that this crossword was hard. took ages to see Patch. once i had declaimed then the NE went in esaily. struggled with heteronym, bioassay and salutation…otherwsie some good word play and my COD is Trophy as it made me laugh on the central line near Holborn and i think its a clever clue!

    Come on Times improve the service on the crossword club!

    1. Just for the record I have never EVER cleared cookies in connection with the Times puzzle, and I have always accessed it via the Favorites or Bookmark menu depending on which browser I am using. And with the exception of the time my subscription expired and they screwed up my access for a week, I have never had a problem getting on to the site without later hearing that others had problems too. I don’t understand why they are running a system that is so unstable they think it needs such steps taken by the people who pay to use it. As you say, it’s shocking service.
  11. Glad it wasn’t my turn today, as I couldn’t get the crossword at all last night, and then my computer decided to load 12 updates to windows XP and I didn’t see the crossword until 9am my time (1pm UK). Then didn’t get uninterrupted time, and crawled to a finish.

    Very much liked 11ac

  12. I wrote in IMPARTIAL without understanding thw wordplay. I’m no wiser after reading the otherwise excellent blog. Can somebody please explain, e.g. what has “poet” got to do with it?
    1. Here’s an adapted version of a quote from Sherlock Holmes, for use with cryptic clues. He says: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. I say: When you have eliminated the definitely true parts of a clue and answer, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

      In this case, the “definitely true” is:
      just=IMPARTIAL
      one=I
      page=P, which is “included by” martial

      what’s left?
      poet=MARTIAL

      Type the bit that’s left into the Google search box and all will very often be revealed – in this case, the poet called Martial.

      Edited at 2009-10-15 02:04 pm (UTC)

    1. You’ve already got a type of grid named after you – the barry one as opposed to the blocky one.
      1. Actually, now I come to think of it I wouldn’t need to change my surname – WOULDHAM – which at first glance has lots of vowells, is an obscure town in Kent, and, dare I say it, has potential for a partial homophone. Pretty much perfect for the Times and I wouldn’t have to take up poetry.
  14. Thank you for that witty and clear explanation, Peter.
    That “Martial” was the name of a poet (especially a Roman poet) is, for me, the most obscure fact out of several (e.g. “fits” as pieces of poetry, “bench” as exhibiting in a dog show,….) needed today. Was it OTT?
    1. I guess it belongs in the “Classics” box which is used by setters much less than they used to, but still sometimes – watch out for Terence and Horace as other poets. Most of this stuff you can just gradually pick up, but there will always be things that are new, even after decades of solving – today’s meanings of “bench” and “saltation” were both news to me.
  15. Thanks again.
    This is one I knew! At the beginning of my PhD work I read a fascinating book by (Brigadier) R A Bagnold called something like “The Physics of Blown Sands and Desert Dunes”. As a soldier in North Africa in, I would guess, the 1920s, he had the time to ob serve the movement of sands and sand particles. The term “saltation” refers to the abrupt change of direction of individual sand particles when they collide. I cannot remember if he introduced this meaning or whether it predated him.

    PS I do know the names of Terence and Horace as Roman poets.

  16. I really struggled to finish in 34 min. (mind you, that was at 5am while the wine was wearing off). Felt that there were rather too many unusual answers and references for this to be a memorable puzzle. And am so grumpy about all the 404s that I am not even going to nominate a COD… So there!
  17. About 40 minutes for me. I echo the observations about the overdose of obscure words today: didn’t know BENCH, fit, Martial the poet, ARROWHEAD, saltation, PINTA or HETERONYM. With all those knowledge gaps, I eagerly grasped at ‘china’=’ally’, no problem. First in DOES, last entry BENCH. COD nominations to TROPHY and SOMERSAULT. Regards to everyone, except the administrator of the Club website, who should, I think, be alarmed at the chronic problems we all experience. I cannot recall any other site I use regularly having nearly as many technical failures as the Crossword Club.
  18. All this moaning about the Times Crossword Club makes me glad that I do the crossword in the old-fashioned way, even though it does cost me 90p a day. Quite often, if you read the newspaper first, there is an extra clue. Today, for instance, on the letter page there was a letter from someone who lives in Brill. Don’t tell me that that was a coincidence
    1. >Today, for instance, on the letter page there was a letter from someone who lives in Brill. Don’t tell me that that was a coincidence.

      Sounds a bit fishy to me.

  19. I knew I was on shaky ground when I said that. Thanks for the clarification. We in RSPSV can get carried away at times, as the great felt/felled rift in ’03 can attest to.
  20. I think the only word I didn’t recognize was ‘pinta’–is that the alcoholic equivalent of ‘cuppa’? I’ve seen ‘saltation’ in discussions of evolution, didn’t know about sand. And ‘heteronym’ for me only referred to the different names used by the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa–he insisted they weren’t mere pseudonyms but were actually different personalities.
    1. No booze here – I’m pretty sure “pinta” comes from an old advertising slogan – “Drinka pinta milka day” – see the third picture in this article for a picture of it as displayed on 1960s milk floats. Chambers and ODE have it as informal for a pint of milk (or some other drink in C), but I can’t remember hearing it without fairly clear reference back to the ads.

      (ODE = Oxford Dictonary of English)

      And you can’t really talk about “drinka pinta milka day” without mentioning the very similar BEANZ MEANZ HEINZ.

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