Times 24,403

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Time of 12 minutes, with the only delay caused by unconsciously putting a rogue S instead of N at the end of 29 across, which held up the SE corner. I’d describe this as straightforward Times fare, with the usual proviso that all questions are easy if you know the answer, and have the requisite background knowledge of artists, geography, cheese etc (though as in any good puzzle, wordplay will allow solving without necessarily having that specific knowledge). Your mileage may vary.

 
Across
1 SOLICITOR – SO + 1 in LICTOR; the lictors were the Roman officials who carried the fasces, which remain symbolically important today, of course.
6 BRAND – double def.; the “sword” meaning is classified as poetic in the OED, i.e. it’s unlikely you’ve ever heard it spoken unless someone was declaiming Tennyson at you.
9 ALCOPOP – (COLA)* + POP; generic name for a number of modern alcoholic drinks whose appeal lies in the fact that they don’t taste of alcohol.
10 LEAN TOS – (SLATE ON)*; like many hyphenated words, the plural looks odd, but I suppose it couldn’t really be LEANS-TO.
11 DUCAT – DUCT round A; I seeem to recall that pieces of eight are ducats, though I may have got that from a pirate film.
13 REMINISCE – RE + MINI + S(in)CE.
14 LOCALISED – (COLDALEIS)*.
16 WREN – R in (NEW)rev; can’t recall if we have a consensus on this, but while “R” can obviously be “Christopher’s end”, I’m not keen on it being “Christopher’s back”, which seems to me to suggest only reversal, not “the end” of something.
18 DUEL – DUE + (quarre)L.
19 ARLINGTON – this is Darlington, this is Arlington.
22 LIMBURGER – LIM(e) + BURGER; the cheese, happily, is not green, though some might claim it smells as if it should be.
24 AISLE – A ISLE (key in the “cay” sense); afraid I found this slightly jarring – after all, a bride doesn’t “come the aisle”, she “comes down the aisle”, doesn’t she? Though I suppose if “we” are “here”, in the vicinity of the aisle, the bride will also come “here”. Hmmm. Still not sure.
25 HAUTEUR – H(ollywood) + AUTEUR.
26 INGRESS – INGRES + S(tudio).
28 NAHUM – (HUMAN)*, not the best known of the prophets, but easily learned from this wordplay.
29 DIGITALIN – DIG ITALI(a)N, the drug obtained from the foxglove, which is the digitaliS.
Down
1 SCANDAL – SCAN + (LAD)rev.
2 LAC – from KeraLA Could, as in the predecessor of what we still call lacquer.
3 CAPITALS – cryptic def. which has you thinking the answer really should be something to do with the World Service.
4 TAPER – double def.
5 ROLE MODEL – E(uropean) MODE in ROLL.
6 BRAINY – B(ut) + RAINY.
7 ALTOSTRATUS – (STUARTSLOT)* under an A.
8 DISCERN – D(epartment) IS CERN.
12 COCKERMOUTH – OCKER M(ale) in COUTH, to give a name which will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s been paying any attention to the news from the north of England in the last month. “Couth” is one of those odd words where the antonym is used ten times as often as the word itself – see also “wieldy”, “ruly”, “gainly”…
15 STAGGERED – double def.
17 UNTAUGHT – (NUT)* + AUGHT.
18 DOLPHIN – DOH round L(ake) P(lacid) + IN.
20 NIELSEN – N(ew) + 1 ELSE + N(ame).
21 MUSEUM – MUM round USE.
23 RUING – RUNG round I.
27 EEL – (p)EEL.

28 comments on “Times 24,403”

  1. 34 minutes, so another fairly straightforward solve for me apart from finding one wrong at 22 on reading the blog. I didn’t think of LIMBURGER though I’m sure have at least met the word if not also tasted the cheese, and I’m afraid I bunged in LAMBURGER and hoped for the best. I suppose that would have had to be “lamb burger” anyway.

    I wonder if any other oldies immediately thought SABER/SABRE might be the answer to 6ac?

  2. A bit surprised to be the first to leave a comment.
    I found this easier than yesterday’s, taking 25 minutes, with a minor hold-up because I entered IDE for 27, which is a perfectly good answer -(H)IDE-, except that it clashes with the crossing clues. ARLINGTON was a guess, but it couldn’t be much else, and I didn’t know the sword definition for BRAND. I liked the clue to 13, particularly “since cutting in”.
    1. Also held up by putting IDE instead of EEL; as you say, it fits and is a common crossword fish.

      Harry Shipley

  4. This took me about 40 minutes, which puts it on the easier side, given my recent form. First in IDE at 27d as in (h)IDE, which rather halted further progress in the SE. It was only when I got DIGITALIS at 29ac that I fixed that particular problem, although I did wonder about the propriety of the a=an device. I didn’t know about lictors or nahums, but guessed correctly and got brand through brandish, which is what you have after a few brandies I believe. COD has to be COCKERMOUTH although I’ve never been there myself.
  5. Very straightforward and just beat the 5-minute barrier with 4:56 – 1A straight in, and all but 4D of its “danglers”, then all off 9 – 22 across on first look, with 6/7/8 down immediately after 10A and then 6A and 4 added to complete the top half. Minor slow-down at the bottom with 24, 26, 29, 17 and 20 putting up some resistance.

    “Pieces of eight” were Spanish coins worth 8 reales and bearing a figure eight. Sometimes called “Spanish dollars” though I don’t think the Spaniards called them dollars.

    Some really green cheese (apart from Sage Derby) is Sapsago from Switzerland.

    I’m gruntled to tell you that “couth” is actually a jokey back-formation from uncouth, which originally meant “unknown”.

    Similar mild bafflement on 24 but I guess you can read it as “Here arrives the bride” with come = arrive as in “Has the post come yet?”.

    Edited at 2009-12-08 12:27 pm (UTC)

    1. I didn’t even think about 24 not being strictly correct in terms of grammar and meaning. The Bridal March, popularly known as “Here Comes the Bride”, is traditionally played as she enters the aisle so the connection seemed perfectly logical to me.
      1. My objections are not strenuous and I would hesitate to do more than make a low-volume query; were I not blogging the puzzle and thus being somewhat more detailed in my analysis than usual, I wouldn’t have raised it in my comments for the day as any sort of issue of correctness. However, I’m still inclined to the opinion that in a Times puzzle particularly, clues tend to be more precise than simply making suggestions, and leaving you to fill in the logical leap, and “here comes the bride” is a debatable definition of “aisle”. Still, the ultimate test of any clue has to be “Is it fairly obvious what answer the setter expects from the solver?”, and in this case the answer is “Yes, it is”.
  6. This was a quick solve with many answers dependent on adjusting another word by just one letter. Some, such as hauteur and digitalin were quite clever. It was good to see (D)arlington and Cockermouth appear in a puzzle that can quite often be SE-centric. Cockermouth could have been difficult if it had not been in the news so recently.

    Altostratus and the sword definition of brand were new to me but I satisfied myself that they were the only alternatives. Last in was hauteur, which should have come quicker because it appears in the words of my old school song: “Bear without hauteur the laurels we’ve earned”, usually rendered as “Beer without water…”

  7. No recorded time but can’t have been much more than 10 minutes so a very easy puzzle.

    At 6d I though “bright” was doing double duty as both the def and the source of the B but thanks to Tim I now see that the B comes from “at the start but” which is a little odd.

    I already knew Cockermouth as the home of Jennings beers. The news with signing for the deaf must have been interesting during the recent floods.

  8. Top half done with cornflakes still crisp although wondered if WREN was just too obvious.
    Practically time for elevenses before finishing bottom half. (As an early riser I take elevenses at nine). Changing DIGITALIS to DIGITALIN helped. Only figured out (A)ISLE while waiting for my flu jabs. Unfortunately plumped for NUHAM for NAHUM so a failure despite promising start.
    1. Nahum Tate is the only other Nahum I can think of. His best-known verses are probably those for “While Shepherds watched”. Most of the others have appeared in the Times xwd.

      (Apologies for somewhat baffling text – my original heading was “Know your poets laureate”)

      Edited at 2009-12-08 05:20 pm (UTC)

  9. A bit rushed today. After more than three years of our lobbying we learned last night that Dorset Council have backed down and are not going to build a waste incinerator next to a children’s theme park and a school for autistic children – so mild chaos here today.

    Thankfully a very easy puzzle finished in between many interruptions!

  10. About 45 minutes, with half of that spent in the SE corner.

    No problems with Limburger. Knowing your Monty Python sketches is always useful for philosophers and cheese.

    I did struggle with Nielsen, though. The Python team never did a sketch with him in.

  11. I thought I was making heavy work of this, but once NIELSEN went in, only 12 minutes had passed. Felt good about getting COCKERMOUTH from wordplay, but some of the rest I had an advantage of – I was in ARLINGTON (the cemetary is large, but the rest of the town is pretty big, and the home to a lot of goverment centres that don’t fit in the overcrowded Washington D.C.) a few weeks ago. NAHUM and NIELSEN from wordplay. Liked the clue for DOPLHIN
  12. I found this fairly easy too, 22 mins. COD UNTAUGHT, also esp liked BRAINY which was my last answer once I saw the B came from ‘but’.
  13. brilliant performance from Peter and topical
    a strightforward puzzle
    my COD was Digitalin
    WCOD was in my mind Aisle as set out above

    Bring tomorrow’s on!

  14. About 15-20 minutes, finishing with the crossing of AISLE and NEILSEN. Had to correct DIGITALIS to DIGITALIN to get there, after earlier correcting IDE to EEL. Didn’t know ‘ocker’, so COCKERMOUTH (also unknown) was a guess at C_C_E_M_U_H from the reasoning ‘well, there’s a cocker spaniel, so there might be a Cockermouth, and the dog’s from the same area’. After checking I see that the answer is the right one, but that the line of reasoning was absolutely, entirely wrong. Sometimes you get lucky. Regards.
  16. Almost identical experience as Kevin_From_NY, but was well familiar with Ocker. My COD was TAPER. Rather clever of the setter to see that TAPER and FLARE can be both synonym (source of light) and antonym. Can anyone come up with a different pair of words with the same characteristics, and is there a word for this phenomena. (not contranym, which is a single word which can take opposing meanings – sanction, cleave, fast … etc.)
  17. A few years ago a couple walked away empty-handed from “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” when they, and the majority of the audience, thought the central part of a church was called the aisle. The correct answer was “nave”. I’m still confused.
    1. And with reason, it seems, as it appears that “aisle” finds itself applied to all the passages along the length of a church, when the central one is the nave, and only the ones at the side are actually aisles. So I presume very few brides actually walk down the aisle at all…

      The only defence would be that it’s been so wrongly used for so long by so many people that it’s become right!

      1. There are two types of aisle being confused here. In the “passage between seats” sense, the bride quite definitely walks down an aisle. Your average parish church has about four aisles of this type, two forming a NS / EW cross, and two parallel to the EW central aisle.

        As far as parts of the church go, the same “average parish church” will have a nave in the middle – the central part of the church between the pillars supporting the highest walls, including both the seats or pews there and the (seating) aisle between them. The name “nave” is from navis = Latin for ship, presumably from some likening to a boat which I’ve never completely understood. The areas north and south of the pillars are the north and south aisles, again probably containing seating aisles as well as seats.

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