Times 24,385 Egad! Which Cinna was that?

43 comments on “Times 24,385 Egad! Which Cinna was that?”

1. 11.05 – slow start with 1A not falling on first look and an ill-advised punt on THE, pencilled over the top as the third word, in the hope of getting 5 and 6 cheaply from the initial letter. Should have given up wondering about 2.67 fathoms much quicker! Last in were a bunch in the SE corner – 15, 16, 23, 27, 25. I think blunder = ERR was the crucial thought that opened the gates.

   I guess the old-school Times interpretation is that as Shakespeare’s version has Cinna saying “I am not Cinna the conspirator”, the history is irrelevant. JC being outside my school Shakespeare range, that’s courtesy of Wikipedia.

2. Go on – put me out of my misery..
   1. I had ‘trap’ – double definition, where ‘mug’ = ‘face’ = ‘trap’.
3. I’d considered TRAP, but then dismissed it. “Shut your trap”, of course….
   1. I wasn’t totally convinced – in my memory, your mug is only your face, not your mouth. The Concise Oxford agrees, but Chambers and Collins have mouth too, and are supported by Eric Partridge’s Slang Dictionary.

      Edited at 2009-11-17 09:25 am (UTC)

4. 1d’s inevitable red gave 1a at once (from chuck down, twigged the legs after), then 2-7 down, after which a pause for breath! 10 mins later the last 4 remained, 13, the pair 17 & 27, & 18 – last in. Just under 20 mins. Had to admire 28 though quick to solve, and Holst was musical director at my school so always in mind for a 5-letter composer.
5. Much merriment in the 40 minutes or so it took me to finish it. I thought it was better than “standard”, although the standard is usually high. I was confounded by INSET but disparate websites seem to use the term, although I wasn’t convinced for some time that they weren’t just those fake ones which take any word you enter and somehow include it on their pages. 28ac was indeed a cracking anagram and there was much else to like, but COD to SPLICED; for a d.d. I thought it was pretty good amongst some very smooth surfaces.
6. Got off to a flying start and finished most of it in about 25 minutes but then ground to a halt, ran out of time and finished up using a solver to get 18ac with 17dn falling into place immediately after. Last in was 4dn where I binged in TRAP having failed to think of anything better. I’ve never heard if “mug” meaning “mouth” either.

   1ac reminded me of a quiz question about the cumulative total of legs present in “The 12 Days of Christmas”

   1. As I can’t edit from this PC please read “bunged” for “binged” and “heard of” for “heard if”.

      Forgot to say I didn’t know INSET either.

7. I’m with Koro in thinking this puzzle deserved somewhat more than the faint praise with which Jimbo damned it. Not hugely difficult, certainly, but some very nice clues. Among others, I liked GODDAM, CONFOUND, COSMETIC, TRIPPING and MERRIMENT. And PARTHENOGENESIS was a splendid anagram with a delightful surface reading, though arguably the price the setter paid for that was a rather too obvious indication of the definition part of the clue. For anyone not a teacher INSET was an absurdly obscure acronym, but not knowing it hardly mattered as there were other elements in the clue pointing to the right solution. I entered RAIN CATS AND DOGS almost straight off at 1ac but couldn’t decode the wordplay until coming here. Thanks, Jimbo. Gottit! Doh!
   1. It was not my intention to “damn with faint praise” so apologies if it comes across that way. I was simply trying to say this is about average fare for a Times puzzle (where the average standard is high)
      1. Fair enough. I withdraw “damn with faint praise”! For me, though, this puzzle nudges a little above average. One weakness perhaps was that one or two otherwise very good clues – e.g. the long ones at 1ac and 28ac – were too easily getable from definition alone.
8. I found this pretty easy and finished in 20 minutes. Perhaps I was on form, but the definition was enough for 1a, and the significance of “sixteen feet” followed after a few seconds’ pause for thought. Nor did I have to think about the very nice anagram for 28, the definition was enough. MERRIMENT was the slowest to come, even though I had ERR in mind for ‘blunder’
   I thought the clues were good on the whole, but felt that the definition for 18 was not very accurate (‘cosmetic’ implies an apparent, but not a real improvement) and that 14 needed a question mark for the cryptic definition. “It comes as” is a pretty wordy surface link in 15 but I suppose it’s OK. I don’t know whether it was intended to mislead the solver into looking for a noun answer, but it did mislead me briefly.
   1. Definitely threw me off the scent. I’m sure I would have solved “Surprise good news after prison escape?” much quicker.
9. 29 minutes but with soup interference. Perhaps they could make Cheltenham more entertaining for the observer by making contestants in the preliminaries solve whilst consuming a bowl of soup (without spillages) and have the finalists wrestle with a large donner kebab with everything.

   I knew INSET and Cinna (was he in another recent puzzle or was that a co-conspirator?) but not gam or parthenowhatsit.

   Was held up a bit by hug as I’d have said to caress was to stroke but the dictionaries seem to support it.

   COD to confound.

   1. We certainly had CASCA in a puzzle I blogged recently, but I’m pretty certain several of the conspirators appear on a fairly regular basis.
      1. I think both CASCA and CINNA appear pretty regularly. Both feature in Bradford’s list of conspirators/conspiracies.
   2. You need a soup therapy session.
10. It took me a long time to thing of the ones like ‘distiller’ and ‘cosmetic’.

    On the other hand, ‘parthenogenesis’ was the most obvious long anagram I’ve seen for some time.

    I think I might have solved this faster if I hadn’t been so tired.

11. 20 minutes, undoing myself by lunging in with HITCH UP and DRIVE and only correcting when it became obvious they didn’t work with the crossing clues. Until I can use a virtual pencil in the online puzzle, I shall have to live with doing this sort of thing, I guess.
12. 25:09 .. I must have spent a good five minutes staring at T_A_ for 4d before finally putting in TRAP with no confidence at all. Rather deflating to arrive here and find that Jimbo thought it too obvious to explain! Like Tim I gave myself a problem by throwing in ‘drive’ at 6d.

    A few weaker clues but mostly very enjoyable.

    COD 16d FORMATION. Pithy.

    1. Sorry about that Sotira. I seem to have a veritable talent for leaving out clues that people hesitate over. It didn’t occur to me that folk wouldn’t know mug=mouth=trap and as ever, I was wrong!
13. Just over 22 minutes – slightly faster than usual. Haven’t commented for some time as I find that everything I might want to say has usually all been said by the time I get round to doing the puzzle.

    I enjoyed this and found many satisfying clues.

    Although 1a and 28a had obvious definitions, I thought they were entertaining clues. I liked GODDAM, although I come across GAM for school more frequently in barred crosswords.

    I think parents of schoolchildren, as well as teachers, would know about INSET as INSET days are frequently taken at the beginning or end of terms or half terms.

    Last in was COSMETIC.

14. After yesterday was determined to get this one right. Took about 25 minutes for most of it , then 15 minutes on the last two – MASCOT and CRESS. I played about with ‘old woman’ being HAG or BAG or sucklike and GOT or BIT being ‘attracted by’. Eventually switched to the plant which took far too long to get.
    At least I recognised the tree today.
    27 was my COD and took me a few minutes to solve on it’s own
15. I found this very tough, despite getting (and understanding) 1 ac straightaway, 43 mins, with the SE corner proving hardest. I also thought it was an extremely good puzzle. COD FORMATION and also esp liked CONFOUND and RED FLAG.
16. I finished this quickly but could not believe three of my answers. Goddam would be more appropriate to the Private Eye crossword. I thought The Times only used words that might be used in polite drawing room conversation. Inset is in my copy of Chambers as INSET. I know some abbreviations and acronyms become words in their own right but INSET does not seem to have done this yet so I am surprised that it is admissible. Finally, I could not believe trap for mug but that was my fault because Chambers defines it as “the face, the mouth”.
    1. I’m with Duncan on INSET – enough people (pupils, teachers and parents) hear of these days for the word to be fair game.

       Edited at 2009-11-17 05:31 pm (UTC)

    2. Oh, and the “drawing room conversation” bit … seems much less important these days – and I think you’d struggle to find someone in any kind of room who would really be offended by “goddam”.
       1. 
          Agreed. The conversation in Lennyco’s drawing-room must be quite exceptionally polite.
          1. I am no prude. I enjoy doing the Private Eye crossword and, in that context, I know that gam means oral sex rather than a school of whales. In fact, one of the things that makes the Private Eye crossword so easy is its limited vocabulary. When solving crosswords you have in mind the possible vocabulary of that puzzle. If I am doing the Guardian crossword I expect references to Tony Blair but not in the Times while he is still extant.
             I was expressing surprise rather than shock. Today’s puzzle seems to me to have crossed two lines. This is a newspaper that still writes shit as s***. It probably would write goddam as g****m. On the acronym point, as a Silver Solver, without any grandchildren and no contact with schools, INSET still seems to me to be an acronym rather than a word. The conversation in my own drawing room is rather salty, but I am not The Times crossword editor.
             1. I often fail to follow the “read the paper as well” advice sometimes given, but the Times these days is full of shit, one might say. Trot over to http://www.timesonline.co.uk and try any four-letter word you like in the search box. They’re all there in full, with examples going back to 1995 if you use the “oldest” option for the c word. The crossword is just following the same trend at a slower pace.
             2. Point taken. Mine was a flippant comment. Actually, you’re one up on me: I had no idea that “gam” also had the sexual connotation you mention! Checking in my Chambers, I see that in Scottish English “gam” can mean “tooth, tusk or mouth”, which presumably explains the oral sex sense. You’re quite right that in recent years words have started to appear in the Times cryptic that would have been deemed improper/too risqué 10 or 20 years ago. I guess this is just a matter of The Times keeping up with the times, so to speak. I was only mildly surprised by “goddam”, but then of course I didn’t know all the possible meanings of “gam” (nor I suspect did the setter!)
17. Going back to Dictionaries, Chambers 21st century Dictionary seems to cope with words from The Times puzzle very well.
18. I found this very tough and clever. My actual time was an hour or so but fully half of that was spent on my last few entries: the long 1A, INSET, TRAP and SPLICED. I didn’t know that ‘chuck down’ was a UK reference to rain, until now, that is. I eventually consulted my UK slang website reference to get it, and entered the others. I didn’t know cricket bats were SPLICED either, nor INSET at all, but they went in from the checking letters. The rest of the puzzle was very good and well above average, I thought. (Sorry Jimbo!) COD’s to CONFOUND, MERRIMENT, FORMATION, OPPORTUNE, etc. Regards to all.
19. 19 AC: Deal is not “trading” “Dealing” is.

    27 AC: Is Mime really achievable as a play without more guidance?

    20 DN: “To”added into “Lies” does not explain the extra T

    25 DN: C is obviously fine for “about” but how does RAG work?

    1. 19 AC. Think of ‘deal’ and ‘trading’ as nouns, not verbs.

       27 AC. Think of ‘mime’ and ‘play’ as verbs, not nouns.

       20 DN. You insert ‘tot’, in the sense of ‘add’, into ‘lies’, not ‘to’.

       25 DN. A ‘rag’ is an elaborate practical joke or prank performed by students at Oxford or Cambridge.

20. 19a – grammatically you are probably right, but ‘deal’ is defined in Collins as ‘ a business transaction’ and in Chambers ‘trade’ is defined as ‘to have dealings with’, so I think their is an argument that ‘deal’ and ‘trading’ have a stronmg correlation.

    27a – first definition of ‘mime’ in Chambers (2003) is ‘a play withoput dialogue’. The nearest Collins gets is definition 3, ‘a dramatic presentation’

    20d – it is ‘tot’ meaning ‘to add’ that is included in ‘lies’ to form ‘litotes’ not just ‘to’

    25d – the reference is to ‘rag [week]’, in British Universities a period, usually a week, in which various events are organised to raise money for charity.

21. 29 min. Off to a quick start with the two long ones straight in. Then steady but not spectacular progress. Held up by the two strongly UK-centric answers (INSET and HOLST). They had to be what they were, but I coundn’t see why. To edify the locals, I don’t think HOLS for holidays has any currency outside the UK. Enjoyed this as meatier than yesterday’s, but no show stoppers. 28 Ac would have been COD if it hadn’t been lit up in neon. Instead, the much more subtle FORMATION.
22. After my post the other day I’m a bit reluctant to say unequivocally that anything is a definition by example, but it seems to me that ‘play’ leads to lots of things, one of which is ‘mime’, so this looks like one. Yes?
    1. See comment above, reply to anonymous.
    2. It’s worth saying clearly “No!” (and why). The rule before Richard Browne’s little local revolution was (assuming you count “mime” as a type of play) that using “play” in the clue to indicate MIME in the answer was perfectly OK, but using an example to indicate a class (e.g. “mime” in the clue indicating PLAY) was not OK, unless you included something like “for example” to indicate that mime was merely one of many possible types of play.

       It’s perfectly true that getting from the class name to the right example is often harder than getting from the example name to the class – “Feta”, “Edam” or “Brie” suggest cheese pretty instantly, but “cheese” suggests several things, even when you know it has four letters. And that’s OK, but it needs remembering when people say “but Edam is also a town” or similar.

       1. Thaks Peter, of course you’re quite right. I get awfully mixed up with these and keep seeing ghosts.
23. Thanks you for the feedback, whether good or bad. I do think that part of the job of a setter is to bring a smile, so I find the criticisms of 28A being a doddle mean-minded, especially if the puzzle as a whole takes an average sort of time. Perhaps some of you would like offer a better clue for parthenogenesis. I would also hope that Holst had an international reputation. That word ‘goddam’ is of course anything other than UK-centric and I’m surprised that our cousins across the pond didn’t therefore express more positive delight on this concession to their high culture. On the whole though you’ve been nice — so thank you!

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