Times 24387 – Do, do, do the funky historian

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : could not do this in one session. After about 15 minutes, had to put it down, get a few other errands done, and came back a few hours later, saw one or two more and was off again to a finish. Oh boy was there a lot of guesswork, words from wordplay alone, and head-scratching moments. I may be having a dense moment, but this was a real challenge. A few had question marks, and needed a trip to the dictionary before blogging. Now there is greatness in this, and 13 down is one of my favorite clues in a daily in a long time.

A postscript after I wrote the analysis – the more I write, the more I like this crossword. I feel pretty thick and illiterate after looking up all the ones I didn’t know from definition, but they were all obtainable from wordplay.

Across
1 HALF-TRUTH: since VERA is half of VERACITY
6 WAKES: double definition (though I tried to turn it into a charade by writing WAKEN in at first). Didn’t know of Wake’s Week, but now I want to go well dressing.
9 SHIMMER: H in SIMMER
10 RATTLER: L in RATTER – got this from the definition, but there it is in chambers – a RATTER is a killer of rats, esp a dog
12 SHOPLIFTING: S(quad), then LIFT in HOPING
14 (b)ENT,RAP: took a while to get the first half of this
15 ESC,ARGOT: my second last in, and one of two groaners here – ESC is the escape key
17 CROATIAN: (RAINCOAT)* – tricky definition, split being between Serbia and Croatia – as pointed out in comments, the city of Split is in Croatia
19 DENARY: A,R(epublican) in DENY – got this from the wordplay, had to look it up to see that it means having the number 10 as a basis
22 LE CORBUSIER: (C,ROLE)* then BUSIER. Another one I didn’t understand until coming to do the blog. I knew the name of the architect, but didn’t get the definition, until I read a little that he saw houses as “Machines a habiter”
25 BITTER,N: don’t know why I didn’t write this straight in, as the little bird has been to visit before
27 BOHEMIA: HEM,I in BOA – from the wordplay. Feel a little embarrassed now to not realise it was a reference to “The Winter’s Tale”
28 RANGY: ANGRY with the R moved to the front
29 MAN FRIDAY: I’D in FRAY after MAN(isle). OK I have read “Robinson Crusoe” or at least seen a film version.
 
Down
1 HOSE,A: another book I haven’t read
2 LAID OUT: AID in LOUT
3 TAM(e)-O-SHANTER: last part is (NORTH SEA)*
4 UPROOT: more tricky wordplay – ROO(jumper) in (PUT)*
5 H,ARMLESS: In the online clue, I think there’s a “be” missing, shouldn’t it read: “To be like the Venus de Milo is hard”?
6 W(a)IT: Edited – in a bad blog brain moment I had WIT(h) here for some reason
7 KILLING: double definition – make a killing
8 SP,RIGHTLY: the first part is P.S. reversed
13 FLAT-EARTHER: TEAR in F,LATHER. Great clue!
14 EXCALIBUR: sounds like EX CALIBRE
16 LABURNUM: A BURN in LUM – LUM is Scots for chimney. Wasn’t familiar with the tree.
18 OCCITAN: C in (ACTION)* – another one from wordplay, according to Chambers it’s another name for the Langue d’Oc
21 GIBBON: NOB,BIG reversed. Another one from wordplay, Edward Gibbon.
24 SHADY: SHANDY without the N
26 (r)ELY

39 comments on “Times 24387 – Do, do, do the funky historian”

  2. Good fun, this. I had to make an educated guess at DENARY, but the rest was fine. I thought the &lit at 29ac was a rather clever.
  4. I had made so little progress after about 15 min that I had visions of total disaster and started cheating. After using aids to get LE CORBUSIER and BOHEMIA, the clouds lifted, and I was amazed to find that I had finished in 30 min, albeit with some on a wing and a prayer (WAKES OCCITAN). COD: CROATIAN, although I believe it is not totally original.
  5. I couldn’t get this one to flow at all. After 30 minutes I had about two-thirds completed but there were still gaps all over the place. After an hour I still had three in the SW corner unfinished, the two anagrams and the designer so I resorted to on-line aids which rather surprisingly still didn’t reveal the answer to 18dn as neither Chambers Word Wizard nor Word Matcher finds OCCITAN. I then resorted to trial and error using a search engine.

    Although it caught me out for ages I’m not sure I agree with George that there is a problem with the clue to 5dn. It is a good challenging puzzle and I’m hoping the editor has chosen a nice easy one for tomorrow having tested us so thoroughly today.

  6. Not a good day for me. Finished in 40 minutes but with two wrong. I agonised over whether EXCALIBUR ended in AR or ER, pointlessly as it happens, and put DECARY at 19 (R in DECAY, what’s wrong with that, apart from the fact it doesn’t appear to be a word). Also wasn’t helped by getting LAID OUT and writing LAID OFF, getting WIT and writing WAG and getting CROATIAN and writing CROATION. That’s what comes of trying to do too many clues at once. Some great stuff here, as George has pointed out. I liked MAN FRIDAY & ESCARGOT but COD to HALF TRUTH.

    Hopefully someone will tell us how 5d works. To ARMLESS is H (added)? And isn’t Laburnum Wood within walking distance of Dunsinane?

    1. Your only defence against the ingenious invention DECARY is to ask whether this is the clue they’d have written. I think they’d have put “accept Republican” – using “a Republican” for R seems unlikely. But that’s easy to say in calm analysis after the event.
      1. In fact I made a mental note to quibble about that “a” at the time. I should know by now that that means I’ve grabbed the wrong end of the stick and now I’m waving it about shouting “I’ve got the wrong end of the stick!”. But you’re right. It’s amazing what you’re prepared to overlook when you can’t think of anything else.
  7. 13:35 – tough, but not as tough as yesterday’s for me.

    5D is fine as it stands – “like the V de M” = ARMLESS and “to” means “next to”, so it’s “Next to ARMLESS is H”

    No trouble with WAKES, as a son of a Lancastrian mother, but at 27 I was equally ignorant about Polixenes as a Shak. character, so had him down as some random classical geezer (though the locations involved in the play are equally unknown to me). Distracted by the other day’s border or similar = RIM, so took ages to see relatively simple wordplay for this. 3, 13 and 20 entered without full wordplay understanding.

  8. I thought this was another tough puzzle and I needed aids to finish the second half. Ignorance of the Good Book meant I didn’t get HOSEA so missed out on HALF TRUTH (my COD). Hadn’t heard of OCCITAN (got from the wordplay), Edward GIBBON or POLIXENES, the King of Bohemia. CROATIAN and EXCALIBUR both made me chuckle.
  9. 10:22 here – I didn’t find it too difficult at all, although I put a few in without fully understanding the wordplay or definition, e.g. WAKES, LE CORBUSIER, BOHEMIA. Still, two days on the trot faster than PB – can’t see it lasting.
  10. I guess I was the only one to stick in VICE VERSA for 1A at first read, without giving it much thought, and then suffer the consequences for ages after!!

    I think the logic was that tax evasion was the vice and that “Vera’s” is the scrambled VERSA, but how it hung together was anybodys guess.

    Other than that was pleased to finish in one sitting (about 30 mins) without any major hold ups, although correspondingly there were no purple patches either, just slow plodding to the end. Didnt know the whole logic of WAKES, LE CORBUSIER, GIBBON or BOHEMIA, but all had to be right and I wasnt too concerned about entering them.

  11. For the first five minutes this seemed like a catalogue of all the cliches that I have learned in the last year of doing this crossword: Esc-key, Split personality, book-Hosea, jumper-roo, see-Ely, chimney-lum, tongue-occitan. Likewise at 12, “Crime squad at first…” was obviously my old friend (S)peculating.
    I like to do puzzles in black ink so my next job was to find the Tipp-ex to remove speculating. After that, I realised the clichés were there just to give us an entrée into some brilliant and fiendish wordplay.
    Sadly, there were also three clumsy clues where the linking words came first: “From area…”, “To get into Yahoo”, and “To like the Venus de Milo”
    I also had a bit of a wobble about how to spell Excalibur. I considered ending it with –er. I was probably thinking of Kaliber beer but I got it right in the end.
    1. Linking words at the beginning: maybe not very elegant, but if this structure wasn’t allowed, the clues would be that bit easier!
  12. Good, varied, puzzle, with NE corner hardest, 25 mins.
    COD HALF-TRUTH with FLAT-EARTHER and KILLING also esp liked.
  14. 21:22 .. fun puzzle. Educated guesses for DENARY, WAKES and OCCITAN.

    COD 1a HALF-TRUTH – nice moment when the penny dropped.

    If Penfold’s around, perhaps he could check the Uxbridge English Dictionary to see if OCCITAN is indeed the skin colouration found among veteran welders.

    1. I am, and it isn’t, but it deserves to go in the next edition (are we talking Clydeside shipyards here?). Closest entries are OBOE (an American tramp) and OFFSET (the regulatory body that inspects badgers).
  15. I found this another tough one, but at least I finished without additional assistance, unlike yesterday. After 30 minutes I had 9 or 10 clues to go and became stuck, coming back to it later. Getting EXCALIBUR got me moving again because L _ /_ _ R etc had to be LE CORBUSIER, and I was familiar with his definition of a house. 50 minutes in all, and very satisfying to solve.

    I would say the clues were even better than yesterday’s, making this the puzzle of the week so far for me. My only minor query en route was the definition for 9. I think there’s a distinct difference between ‘shimmer’ and ‘glow’ but I shan’t let that affect my praise for a fine puzzle with some first-class clues.

    1. I thought that. I associate “shimmer” with some degree of movement which is lacking in “glow”. My editions of the usual dictionaries don’t link the words directly but Collins thesaurus does, and the SOED also.
      1. Yes, it was the flicker I had in mind. I always treat thesaurus entries with some caution; they are, after all, only loose equivalents, often more useful for the writer in search of “le mot juste” than the crossword setter in search of a precise equivalent, though the latter may well be nestling in the list.
        1. Indeed. And now I look again at SOED the noun entry is “A shimmering light or glow” which suggests that “glow” on its own does not convey the exact meaning.
  16. Tough but most enjoyable. 33 and a bit minutes.

    For Jack, Occitan comes up in onelook.

    Denary was fresh in the mind as someone on the Crossword Centre’s message board was asking about things and people that come in groups of ten.

    COD to excalibur with old big nob a close second and escargot, a horse I’ve backed in the National, trailing in third.

    Thanks to the setter.

    1. Thanks for that, Penfold_61, as it has drawn my attention to something I didn’t know before i.e. that Onelook has a wildcard search option.
  17. I endorse Dyste’s accolade above, though, for some reason, I didn’t find this puzzle especially difficult, possibly because, by pure chance, I happened to be familiar with the more abstruse references. About 30 mins. Among other really high-quality clues, CROATIAN, FLAT-EARTHER, HALF-TRUTH, KILLING, HARMLESS, MAN FRIDAY and ESCARGOT.

  18. Do I recall this as a clue within the last year or two, to which the answer was Ivanisevic? (And have I spelt his name right?)
    1. Not in the Times – Goran is still alive (but was born in Split, so the clue is very possible elsewhere). Your spelling is the normal one in English – it has a couple of diacritics in Croatian.
  19. Excellent puzzles two days running, we are being spoilt. 30 minutes for this one after golf in a gale.

    I didn’t have a clue who Polixenes was but solved from wordplay and checking letters. I thought HARMLESS brilliant and had heard of OCCITAN. For a mathematician DENARY held no problems (you must surely all have heard of binary for based on 2 so by extension…).

    Good luck tomorrow Jack!!

  20. In Jonathan Crowther’s A to Z of crosswords, the ‘Split Personality’ clue for Goran is attributed to Allan Scott I think (‘Everyman’ and Times setter?)
  22. 19 mins, couldn’t get the HOSEA/HALF-TRUTH crossing for some minutes at the end. Very good fun. I don’t think ‘from’ in 11A or ‘to’ in 2D and 5D are link-words, pace Lennyco.

    Tom B.

    1. I’d count 11A’s “from” as a link-word connecting wordplay with def. – it’s saying that from A and GO we get “ago”. But you’re right about 2D and 5D, in which “to” is a bit of “charade glue” saying that one component goes next to another.
  23. Regards all. Took me 40 minutes and I think all the very clever clues are mentioned already. DENARY, LABURNUM and OCCITAN were guesses from the crossers and def.’s, but I eventually figured out the rest. See you tomorrow.
  24. About 45 mins for me, not really in one sitting. I started in St Pancras and finished somewhere in the middle of the channel tunnel with some time to get from one station to train.

    The denary answer reminds me of a computer science joke (yes, there are such things). Why do computer scientists think Christmas and Halloween are the same? Because DEC 25 = OCT 31 (25 in decimal aka denary is the same as 31 in octal (octary isn’t a word I’ve ever heard but maybe it exists)).

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