Times 24396

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 55 minutes

Music: Dvorak, Cello Concerto, Starker/Susskind/Philharmonia Orchestra

Most of this puzzle was easy. I had gotten all but five answers after 20 minutes, but the remaining five proved very elusive indeed. I was interrupted as well, so I don’t think I was at peak efficiency.

Even when not barking up the wrong tree, some of the answers did not come easily to mind. I nearly had one wrong, but I didn’t like it and thought again for a while.

There are some good-quality cryptics in this puzzle, but the literal literals made most of the clues a bit obvious.

Across
1 BACKSCRATCHER, anagram of CRACKERS BATCH. I knew this was an anagram, and it still took a considerable number of checking letters to get it. .
8 BRAY, double definition. The Vicar of Bray was famous in song for his theological and political flexibility.
9 GOLD DIGGER, anagram of DOGGED GIRL. Not much misdirection here, filled in without bothering with the cryptic.
10 LIBERATE, L + I + BERATE. I don’t know if L + I is that accurate for £1, but the clue is not difficult.
11 LOLLOP, LOLL[ip]OP. This was one of the five that gave me difficulty, gotten from the cryptic because I had only vaguely heard of ‘lollop’.
13 QUADRUPEDS, QUAD + anagram of SUPER D. This gave me a lot of trouble, since I assumed the first ‘D’ was from ‘daughter’ and wanted to use a push bike, with all those nice crossing U’s. The old solver’s rule, ‘where you see a ‘U’, try a ‘Q’, saved me eventually.
18 ELEMENTARY, anagram of ALERT – ENEMY. I was expecting an obscure herb, and didn’t find out otherwise until I had several crossing letters.
22 OUTBREAK, O[ld] + U (TB + REA[lly]) K. A complex cryptic that most solvers will figure out from the answer, rather than the other way round.
26 VEIN, sounds like VAIN. This bothered me, because ‘vein’ is not exactly style, but has more to do with subject-matter – at least that is my excuse for not seeing it for a long time.
27 GOOD SAMARITAN, GOODS + A + MA(RITA)N. Another one where the cryptic was unnecessary for me.
 
Down
1 BARBITURATE, anagram of I ERR, A TAB, BUT. Rather obvious.
2 CLYDE, double definition, the Scottish river and Clyde Barrow. This proved quite elusive, and I had ‘chyne’ for a long time. Not a word, I know, I was thinking of ‘chine’.
3 SIGNATURE, S (I GNAT) URE. I wanted to use ‘ant’, which is close but no cigar.
4 RELIEVE, RE(LI)EVE. Straightforward if you avoid ‘old’ = ‘o’; a reeve really is an old officlal.
5 TIDAL, LAD + IT backwards. Seldom is ‘sex appeal’ fully spelled out, and it can be either ‘sa’ or ‘it’. I toyed with ‘astir’ before seeing the obvious answer.
7 RYE, double defintion with cross-reference, which is needed here.
12 OBSERVATION, anagram of SERB inside OVATION.
19 EGOTISM, hidden word in [i’v]E GOT IS M[ainly]. Given away by literal definition.
21 GRASS. I put this in as obvious without being sure why. Now I see that ‘weed’ = ‘grass’ = ‘marijuana’, which is different from the grass found in your lawn – at least, I hope it is..
23 RIVET, R.I. + VET. I had trouble thinking of this, looking for some sort of abbeviation for surgeon such as FRCS. I finally found a much simpler approach.

41 comments on “Times 24396”

  1. US OED has:
    2 [in sing. ] a distinctive quality, style, or tendency : he closes his article in a somewhat humorous vein.
  2. You left out the only one that troubled me … 16A: Score extra (4). I’m OK with the verbs “score” and “gash”. But I’d never heard of “gash” an an adjective (slang: extra, unnecessary) … found it at http://www.thefreedictionary.com after a Google search. I don’t think it’s common here in the U.S.
    1. I think (with no evidence what so ever) that gash is Services slang.
      Never seen bootless to mean vain before.
  3. To be pedantic 1 across is Backscratcher and not the plural. Good anagram though which had me stumped for the 35 minutes it took me to do the puzzle. last in was Vein! why bootless though?


  4. 22 minutes, which is about as good as things get chez Jackkt.

    Only two hold-ups. Firstly at 16ac going through the alphabet trying to find an alternative to GASH as I didn’t know it could also mean “extra”, though having since looked it up I’m almost certain it has appeared before, and possibly not too long ago. Secondly at 23dn/26ac where I took a while to remember what “bootless” means.

  5. I zipped around this until I hit GASH, RIVET & VEIN and stopped, more or less permanently. I couldn’t think of any meaning for bootless except “has no boots” and didn’t know gash could mean extra; I see that I’m not alone in either of these two respects. The only source I could find for gash=extra lists it as “mainly Armed Forces use”.
    1. My old Dad always used to ask “You got a gash fag?” I think he picked it up in the army. Chambers has “slang, orig and esp naut”.
    2. Gash/extra is in Collins and Chambers but the COED has it as (Br.informal) rubbish or waste, which I think is not quite the same thing. I also checked Chambers Slang Dictionary which doesn’t have the meaning required here but offers plenty of others which I rather wish I had not seen. I think I made the same mistake of looking there on the previous occasion this word came up.
  6. Like others raced through this but got stuck with a couple of little ones at the end.
    CLYDE was a penny-dropper which gave me BRAY to finish, but plumped for VAIN, so 1 wrong.
    CLYDE my COD simply for taking me so long.
    Needed vinyl1 for justification of GOOD SAMARITAN as obsessed with MARIAN as my girl.
  7. All but one done in about 12 min. Went absolutely blank over 13 ac, even with all of the checking letters in place. Finally cheated to finish in 15 min, and was embarrassed by how easy the last answer was. An odd puzzle in that all of the anagrams simply leapt out. COD: again the nemesis, QUADRUPEDS.
  8. 7:00 – pretty straightforward except for a minor pause on GASH for the end – decided in the end that nothing G?S? looked any better. There’s a general air of selfish human relationships with 1A, 9, Vicar of 8, bank-robber 2, an unused meaning of 21, 19 and 15. Is 27 there as a contrast?
  9. I found this very easy, having got 1ac and 1dn straight off.. one of my quickest in recent times, around 10mins.
    I thought a little about gash, but have heard of it as meaning not just surplus but off-back-of-lorry surplus..
  10. An easy puzzle – 15 minutes to solve. I think it’s all been said: easy obvious anagrams; easy definitions; a couple of unusual usages. GASH should be familiar to older solvers as it was common currency among our fathers and for us during our brief brush with the military.

    I’m intrigued by Peter’s analysis and wonder if it’s deliberate?

  11. Is 17a FAIR – can see the ‘ not cloudy’ definition but how does ‘Strong wind’ fit in ?
  12. I raced through the generous anagrams and definitions only to be left with a solver’s nightmare of 4 four-letter words and 2 five-letter words to finish. I ended with gash, which was the only possible answer that suggested score and also rang a distant bell in its slang meaning.

    Silver solvers may recall that I have been trying to promote accuracy as an alternative measure of performance for, possibly, more elderly solvers who cannot compete in the speed stakes. My performance for November is 23 all correct out of 25. My two failures were both a single answer: above the salt on Friday 13 and siesta on Wednesday 18. I ought to add that two of the Saturday crosswords took me until Monday to finish

  13. I made a good fist of this one, completing 25 of the 28 clues without aids before turning here to get CLYDE, VEIN and RIVET. I had RI??T but couldn’t think of any words that fitted or a short word for a surgeon. Thanks vinyl1 for explaining the construction of OUTBREAK.

    Re Lennyco’s “accuracy of solving” figures:

    I’ve had the Times cryptic bug seriously since last Christmas and have noted my daily ”% of clues solved without aids” figure most days since with the hope that practice and experience should lead to improvement. My figures for November month confirm my feeling that, for me at least, the easiest puzzles are on Mondays and the hardest are on Saturdays. Of the 25 Mon-Sat puzzles in November I solved 67% of all clues without aids: my best performances were on the five Monday puzzles (average 82%) and poorest on the four Saturday ones (45%).

    For me the distinguishing feature between the puzzles that I find easy and hard is that the easy ones, like today’s, have a lot more literal definitions that give two ways into the answer (definition and wordplay) rather than just one (wordplay). Who can forget FOUR POSTER defined as “crash site” in one of this month’s Saturday puzzles – fiendish!

    Daniel

  14. Very straightforward apart from the odd second definition for GASH (new to me). I thought I was in for time well under 20 minutes, but there were a few pauses for deliberation to get the final answers, 13 being the last despite the anagram fodder. Once I began to think of types of bike the answer came in a flash. 22 minutes in all.
    One of the reasons that this was a relatively easy solve is that once a scattering of answers was formed in the grid it was possible to complete other answers with only half an eye on the clues.
  15. I managed it in 13 minutes. Got off to a flyer with 1 across. I got a bit stuck towards the end with GASH, VEIN and RIVET. I did not know GASH can mean extra. Also I’m not entirely convinced by bootless =useless =vain as the explanation?

    COD: LOLLOP.

  16. Like others, I found many answers went in very quickly at first, but then the last few were much more difficult, 27 mins. COD (and my last answer), FAIR. Bootless = vain is in Collins, I thought of it as ‘unprofitable’. See it’s in COED as ‘ineffectual, useless’.
  17. 7 hours 31 minutes – fell asleep with all but QUADRUPED in, came to and looked again and saw it. BRAY from one definition, similarly GASH and VEIN.
  18. 33:40 Thought I was heading for a fast time, but like several others here, took a long time to get the last few. Had all the checking letters for the last 4 or 5, but it still took 10 minutes or so to get them all. Last ones in were 13 & 16.

    No new words for me today, but several new definitions – VAIN, GASH, BRAY

  19. 11.00 Easyish start to the week. Helped by knowing GASH. It is fairly well known up here in Central Scotland , meaning always spare/extra , rather than useless.Also got 13 by trying a Q after seeing that Super D had to make up the last part of the answer. Gave up trying to work out wordplay for 22 after a bit and just put in the obvious.
  20. Same story as many others: I had the puzzle done in 10 minutes save for GASH, VEIN and RIVET. After another 15 minutes I guessed at GASH, finally saw RIVET, and guessed again with VEIN based on the ‘style’ def. I had to go for aid for confirmation since I had no idea that ‘bootless’ had this meaning. Regards.
    1. OK so I have just realised that PEG is short for Margaret – Peking…days of yore? Mmmm
      1. I don’t have proof, but I wonder whether Peking and Beijing are simply attempts at representing exactly the same sounds in different transliteration systems. Chinese certainly has sounds which don’t exactly correspond to any of ours, so any attempt to “spell” them in the Roman alphabet has to be understood with the help of a crib to tell you that (e.g.) Q stands for a “ch” sound. This is without even worrying about tones.
        1. I checked with my Chinese history colleague, and he confirms that ‘Peking’ and ‘Beijing’ are both romanizations of the same 2 characters, viz. for ‘north’ and ‘capital’ (Nanking/Nanjing being ‘south’ ditto). (In Taiwan, they persist with ‘Peking’.)
  23. hi y’all what is 14d, i thought id joined the merry band of solvers today but hit a wall with 13a , 26 a & this 1! thanks in advance
  24. I don’t like the use of deceptive nouns from verbs which don’t really work. To describe a lollipop as a “sucker” seems wrong – lollipops don’t suck, they are sucked. Equally “banker” for river – rivers don’t bank. (Flower for river is OK as a river does flow.)
    1. In my (distant) youth in NZ, lollipops were always known as suckers. Indeed if you had used the term lollipop, you would have received some very askance looks. And banker for river is so entrenched in Times crossword lexicology that it has become almost definitive.
  25. I’ll go along with anonymous on ‘banker’, perhaps, but ‘sucker’ is what I, and most Americans, would call a lollipop, although ‘lollipop’ is also certainly used. And, now that I think of it, a sweater doesn’t sweat, either; or a porker pork, a slipper slip, a loafer loaf, …
  26. I stand corrected – COED has “sucker” as N Amer informal for lollipop, so it’s a real word not a flight of fancy designed to mislead.

    I stand by the principle though and still dislike “banker”

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