Times 24384 – How does your garden grow?

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 24 minutes

Music: Sibelius, Symphony #2, SchIppers/NYP

This easy puzzle threatened to turn into the blogger’s nightmare, where you simply don’t know the last answers, and the cryptics are not particularly helpful. I had all but five after 18 minutes, but I had to think carefully for a bit before I put in what proved to be the correct answers, two of which were plants.

Across
1 BUTTERFINGERS, B[are] + UTTER + FINGERS. Entered without bothering with the cryptic.
9 ATLAS, AT LAS[t]. My first in.
11 DEPOSITION, DE + POSITION.
14 NUMERAL, anagram of MANURE + L
16 KATYDID, KATY + DID. Put in instictively, apparently one of two references to childrens’ literature in this puzzle. It is a reference I did not know, but it didn’t hold me up. Cal’s wife was Grace, not Katy.
17 SAN REMO, anagram of RANSOME. I was wondering when the author of Swallows and Amazons would appear in some puzzle. As in the previous clue, he only supplies the surface, but some day a character or topic from the books may appear.
19 AGRIPPA, A + GRIP + PA. Fortunately Pompey didn’t fit, or I might have put him in.
21 METHUSELAH, double definition, since he can also be 6-litre bottle of wine.
24 ORPHANAGE, cryptic definition. Fooled me for quite a while, I was expecting some sort of guardian or trustee.
 
Down
1 BOARDING SCHOOL, double cryptic defintion. I admit, I was expecting either a rifle or a cathedral, so this took me a while.
2 TULIIP T(U[nusua]L)IP.
4 FLOATEL, FLOAT + EL. I think ‘float’ = ‘hang’, in the sense of hang in the air, is a bit of a stretch, but the clue is nicely deceptive. The primary problem may be for those who have never encountered the word.
5 NETWORK. TEN backward + WORK. When I solved it, I saw the ‘TWO’ in the middle and couldn’t figure out the cryptic, so I left it for the blog.
7 STARTED UP, S(urgeons) + TARTED UP.
8 FLOG A DEAD HORSE, anagram of FORGE A SHEDLOAD. Again, the cryptic is not really needed to solve.
13 STORKSBILL. STORKS + BILL, where ‘bill’ = ‘account’. ‘Storks’ apparently sounds like ‘stalks’ to someone, maybe one of those Dickens characters who called the justice ‘Your Washup’.
15 MONKEYPOT, MONKEY + POT, where ‘pot’ is jocular slang for a trophy in the form of a oversized cup. At least this plant can be easily gotten from the cryptic.
19 ATHLETE A +THE(LET)E, where definition by example is courteously indicated by ‘maybe’.
22 LINEN, LINE + N.

43 comments on “Times 24384 – How does your garden grow?”

  1. Hello vinyl. I don’t know who Katy is either, nor have I heard of a FLOATEL, but the puzzle didn’t give any real trouble. I went through in about 15 minutes. My first entry was the long 1A on the first read, which gave a quick start. There was a short holdup when I entered HIDE at 20, maybe having developed a Pavlovian reaction when this puzzle calls for a 3-letter fish that starts with a vowel. That got straightened out at the end to the clearly more appropriate HEEL, so I could then figure out MONKEYPOT, my final entry. I like the smooth surface in 11, DEPOSITION, so that’s my COD. Regards.
  2. Nothing to scare the horses here, although FLOATEL, MONKEYPOT & STORKSBILL were new to me. On the latter, the homophone is a one to one equivalence for me. METHUSELAH made me smile, so I’ll give it COD.
  3. Vinyl1, the puzzle number 24384.

    Much the same as the other contributors so far.I didn’t know any of the plants or FLOATEL and the wordplay in NETWORK baffled me. Never heard of Susan Coolidge but fortunately I knew KATYDID the insect. 30 minutes dead, so not a bad start to the week for me.

  4. My Chambers has definitions as follows…

    MONKEY POD – the rain tree.
    MONKEY POT – the round-lidded outer shell of the sapucaia nut.

    Each is two separate words, not hyphenated.

    MONKEY POT is NOT listed as a tree.

    I assume other dictionaries tell a different tale.

    Mike O, Skiathos

    1. It’s in Collins as MONKEYPOT with first definition as a tree.

      Can’t find it in COED but it’s in SOED as MONKEY-POT, again as a tree.

      1. Good old Collins! What would setters do without it? That said, MONKEYPOT is also listed under “trees” in the invaluable [Anne] Bradford’s Crossword Solver’s Dictionary, though STORKSBILL fails to make it in her list of “plants”, an omission I’ve now remedied by writing it in myself.
  5. It’s all been said after only five comments. A trivial puzzle, slightly complicated by a tree a plant and a grasshopper.
  6. – I think this puzzle is 24384, not 24394?
    – My 10th Ed Chambers has the same wording as Mike O’s, but the OED has “monkey-pot tree: a tree of the genus Lecythis or the family Lecythidaceae.”
    – the rCoolidge reference is to the author of What Katy Did, not to mention what she Did Next.. books I am familiar with from my youth, though probably it helps to have a sister…
  7. 20 mins and looked up the tree afterwards in Ch., refuse to get another dic. Interested to see two uses of “in” when the pieces of the clue do not contain each other. Solved rh half first, annoyed to be slow getting 1a but same thoughts as vinyl about 1d. Liked 14a, not 100% happy with storks/stalks, very close but not identical.
    1. You will be in for a hard time doing Times puzzles without a Collins to hand, Anon, as it’s the one that most often has a meaning or spelling not found elsewhere and it is one of the two official dictionaries referenced by setters (or so we are led to believe).

      I also had those thoughts about 1d and for a moment before I had looked properly at the number of letters available I was thinking RIDING SHOTGUN or something along those lines.

      1. I refuse to have anything to do with Collins dictionaries, which I regard (rightly or wrongly) as lacking in authority but strong on marketing. I can’t say its been a big problem relying on Chambers over the years. If the OED is the Rolls Royce of dictionaries, surely Chambers is the Mercedes, nearly as comfortable but far more practical? ..and well engineered, this analogy could run and run – and there is always the online OED available to all library members, if needed
        1. I wouldn’t advise people to buy Collins these days, either. Apart from some poor “packaging” which makes it unnecessarily difficult to tell which of their dictionaries differ from each other and how, their flagship dictionary doesn’t have the place it used to, for two reasons.

          First, it used to be the only long-standing one-volume dictionary with encyclopaedic content. The Oxford Dictionary of English (which fits between the Concise and Shorter Oxfords in size) now fills that gap too.

          Second, the encyclopaedic content isn’t what it used to be – the place names were dropped a while back.

          For someone looking for a single dictionary for xwd purposes, there are three serious contenders based on current Amazon prices:

          Concise Oxford English Dictionary – £17.35 – very good and a nice size and weight.

          Oxford Dictionary of English – £17.50 – more words than the Concise, and encyclopaedic entries too, but quite hefty. The best choice unless weight is a hassle or you’re doing barred-grid puzzles.

          Chambers English Dictionary – £20.97 – the only choice if you’re doing barred-grid puzzles, as they all use it as the main reference. In these puzzles, weird Scotticisms and Spenserian spellings will give you more trouble than place-names or “famous” people.

          Any of these will have enough of the answers in a Times (or any other daily cryptic) crossword to explain most answers. Obscure answers like today’s monkeypot should always have clear wordplay so it’s not necessary to own multiple dictionaries unless you want to be the first to say “It’s in Collins” in places like this.

          There are other dictionaries like Penguin and Bloomsbury which are perfectly sound, but are more expensive at present and not used as the standard reference for any well-known puzzles (Mephisto now has Bloomsbury as a prize but AFAIK still uses Chambers as its reference – not the first puzzle to deal in this kind of dictionary puzzlement and doubtless not the last).

          Edited at 2009-11-16 03:13 pm (UTC)

          1. On encyclopaedic content, it’s also worth mentioning The Oxford English Reference Dictionary, first published in 1995, with a second edition in 1996. Along with all the usual stuff you’d expect from a dictionary, it also offers “over 246,000 encyclopedic facts” (I have haven’t counted but that’s what it says on the dust jacket!)plus a 16-page World Atlas in colour.
            1. Still listed on Amazon in a 2003 revision of the second edition – unless the title has changed beyond recognition, not published since. The ODE claims 11,000 encyc. entries – how many facts they have on average is anyone’s guess, but it sounds like a subset of the 246,000.
  8. In my enthusiasm to submit Sunday’s prize puzzle I spilled a cup of coffee over my laptop. Some hours later I got it kind of working but without characters
    h g p G H P – # _ ? so comment arduously completed using insert symbol function and may be my last for a while as I try to fix or get a new laptop.

    But for the difficult STORKSBILL where I used an aid, would have been one of my fastest so far, 25 mins up to STORKSBILL. Guesses for MONKEYPOT and KATYDID so not hot on the old flora and fauna.

  9. One or two sticking points but the rest seemed very straightforward so I was still able to hit 7 mins.

    This is the second time I’ve encountered FLOATEL in puzzles recently – it seems to have taken over from BOATEL, which used to be more common. The Coolidge reference passed me by – have heard of the work but didn’t know the author.

  10. 4:42 but one careless mistake from corner-cutting – saw that FRONTAL fitted at 4D, vaguely remembered “hang” in the clue, thought it must have been “hanging”, and didn’t worry about the wordplay. So my nifty sub-5 time is fool’s gold.
  11. Like others, I found this easy apart from the plants, 16 mins. A lot of the acrosses went in straightaway.
    I did put GODPARENT in though first for 24 across. COD DEPOSITION.
  12. I finished most of the puzzle in 15 minutes, then stared at 5, 16 and and the first part of 13, bereft of ideas. I must have looked at it on and off for another ten minutes, when I realized that 16 must end in DID and then a dimly recollected KATYDID came to mind, which was the key to getting the rest. “coolidge’s girl” meant nothing to me except possibly to indicate an American word for a girl. FLOATEL was guess, though the wordplay did point to it.
  13. 23:45 – No real holdups.

    Nothing to add to what’s already been said. I didn’t know STORKSBILL, MONKEYPOT, FLOATEL or SAN REMO. Neither did I understand the Coolidge reference.

  14. It’s all been said, including that it’s all been said. I can only add that I’m mystified by the objections of Vinyl and one or two others to the STORKS/stalks homophone. To my ear the two sounds are as identical as makes no difference. How on earth do you chaps pronounce these two words? I’m all agog.
      1. Still more fascinating. Thanks, Sotira. What an educative tool this blog is! My COED tells me that, in phonetics, “rhotic” denotes a variety of English (e.g. in America and SW England) in which “r” is pronounced before a consonant or at the end of a word – roughly, I suppose, what we would call speaking with a burr. Do Americans really pronounce the “r” in “stork”? I guess they must, but I can’t say I’ve ever noticed it.(Unfortunately, my software wasn’t up to downloading the .OGG files with the spoken versions, but thanks for trying anyhow). When all’s said and done, I still think STORKS/stalks is a perfectly accptable homophone for xword purposes – rhotic or not.
        1. Enough Americans pronounce R’s that you and I don’t for the non-rhotic New England accent to be characterised by “pahk the cah in Hahvahd yahd”. If you recognise a word in someone’s “accent”, it seems possible to miss some of the differences in pronunciation – I failed to notice the similar sounds in some Americans’ “Maryland” and “Merry Christmas”, presumably because “Merryland” and “Mary Christmas” don’t mean anything to me.
          1. An interesting sidenote. William Labov produced a famous study of language and social stratification in New York which identified the use of rhotic sounds as a signifier of education and status – pretty much the opposite of the UK.
            1. Thanks yet again, and to Peter B above. All intriguing stuff. This could run and run. But it’s time for bed.
        2. It isn’t only America where the pronounciation of these 2 words differs. In Scotland, Ireland and many English dialects they are also very different. That said, speaking as one who pronounces the two words differently myself, I have no problem with the clue.
  15. Big mistake was seeing Man=Primate , Get out= Prize. So maybe there is a tree you can eat? I am almost too embarrassed to post this.What can I say? I had a heavy weekend … My mind was on other things… I am an idiot.
    So I was bamboozled by 24 and just invented a word.
    Go on , have a little titter , I don’t mind.
    1. Some sympathy from your colleague in idiot’s (or wounded hare’s) corner – I thought of mangetout briefly, saving my gaffe for 4D.
  16. 20 minutes and a by now familiar story. I do dislike clues that state things like “Coolidge’s girl….” – what a cop out by the setter and one either knows of this author (so where’s the challenge?) or like most of us one doesn’t – so guess or be lucky enough to have met a KATYDID before. Not good enough in my opinion.

    Homophones like stalk/stork never work for everybody. This one was close enough not to slow me down, just to irritate me in passing. Never heard of FLOATEL or MONKEYPOT either but got them from the wordplay.

    1. What struck me about the KATYDID clue was the oddity that “Katy did” is in the titles of the Coolidge novels but the clue itself splits the word into a Katy/Coolidge bit and an entirely separate bit for the “did”.
  17. 9:46 here, should probably have been faster too. The bottom half went in at first look, one after the other, with almost no hesitation (including the two obscure plants, as I had all the checkers by the time I looked at them. The top half took a little bit longer as I took a long time to get 1A, but once that was in the rest fell out nicely.

    I’m surprised so many people hadn’t heard of the Susan Coolidge books (What Katy Did, What Katy Did Next/What Katy Did At School). I never read them myself as a child (too girly) but was always aware of them. I think they’re considered classics of childrens’ literature still, although I doubt if many kids these days bother with them any more. Not quite the same as Harry Potter…

  19. 19 min here, slowed down by a couple of wrong entries thrown in without checking: IN THE KNOW and GODMOTHER. Stalks/storks no problem for me, but in the very deepest south of NZ, an elaborately rolled ‘r’ in stork would make for very different pronunciations. Was vaguely aware of “What Katy Did” from crosswords and other incidental references. On reflection, our childrens books (post WW2) were strictly BRITISH (Blyton, W E Johns …) I suspect American fare was regarded as too – well – American, unless of course it was LITERATURE (Twain, Beecher Stowe …).
  20. Maybe I should always solve these while I should be doing something else (I should be doing something else now, but one member of the team isn’t here). Well under 10 minutes, wish I had timed it, last in STORKSBILL, figuring that in order to make a homophone work, I have to say it in the most ridiculous accent imaginable (besides my own). Wonder if I can get the Granuiad done in the next 3 minutes?
  21. For most of us Murkans, stalks=storks would be a long time coming; I never got it (never having heard of the bird didn’t help matters). And for that matter, stalking isn’t quite the same as tracking down.
    The other kind of UK/US difference that also throws me off from time to time, and did with 8d, is when I forget that there’s a slight difference in vocabulary in fixed phrases (but/bar the shouting): I put in ‘beat a dead horse’, forgot to come back to check, and stared stupidly at 10 and 12 across for longer than I care to admit. If I had come up with ‘flog’ at first, those two of course would have been child’s play
    1. >”For most of us Murkans, stalks=storks would be a long time coming; I never got it (never having heard of the bird didn’t help matters).”

      So where do babies come from in America? I take it you have gooseberry bushes?

      Stork

      1. I’m not sure if the gooseberry bush explanation is (or was) current in the US; I had never heard it as a child. While Nyawk babies may be brought by the stawk, ‘stork’, for speakers of General American (the ‘standard’ US dialect), has an [r]. So, starting from ‘track down’, even if I had thought of ‘stalk’ (stawk in my dialect, stahk in Gen.Am.) I don’t think I would have found my way to ‘stork’.
  22. One might expect an East Londoner to pronounce STALK and STORK identically, but as one myself I can definitely detect an L sound in the former when I pronounce it reasonably carefully.

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