Times 24411: homophony!

40 comments on “Times 24411: homophony!”

1. I lost count of the time taken as there were so many interruptions and distractions on my journey to work. I must have spent an hour with the puzzle in front of me but I wasn’t concentrating for some of that.

   In the end I resorted to aids for 1ac (despite having all the checking letters) and 5dn and was then able to complete the remaining half dozen clues. BTW, I say both Sheek (as in the song, The Sheikh of Araby) and Shake (as in Sheikh Mohammed).

   George, your take on 12ac is the same as mine and like you, I’m not sure I fully understand 26ac.

2. I think it’s three ways of defining JUMP

   Clear, leap, and start (as in frighten or startle).

   Michael

   1. Of course! Thanks.
   2. just to be 100% clear, the last one is “react as if startled” (“frighten or startle” could imply (probably unintenionally) that “jump” in this sense is transitive.)
3. Writing this in TextEdit then posting, to avoid reading the blog. The Times page has been showing the 404 Error since I got home this arvo: about 08:30 UTC. Anyone else in the same boat?
   1. It seems OK now (09:15 UTC). I printed at about 8:25 so you were unlucky.
      1. 404 error is back with a vengeance at 00:10 Friday and I was unable to access puzzle 24412 using Firefox despite closing and reopening it, clearing the cache etc. Yet it opened in IE without problems. Also the URL to the club login page copied from IE and pasted into Firefox still errors with 404.

         There is something seriously wrong that the club pages are so temperamental. I never experience such difficulties going to other regular sites many of which require user names, passwords etc.

4. 12ac – same again – (TIN = money) is definite, so (RAG = ensign) is what’s left over from def. and other wordplay. ODE confirms {red duster = red ensign} Here’s some other support which mentions naval flags being used as rags.

   Reasons for knowing about Knoxville: Civil War history, vague memory of a piece by Samuel Barber (though my memory told me Ives), and home of what we must apparently now call Mtn Dew.

   Other people called Margot include ballerina Fonteyn and sprint coach Wells.
   And to Brits alive in the late 1970s, Margot Leadbetter is hard to forget. (c. 4:10 in the linked clip)

   Final edit: fairly convincing red herring at 1A: THRONE = “thrown” = upset, if you’re prepared to see throne as some kind of associative adjective. Fortunately, O?S???E?E looked too improbable to keep it for long.

   Edited at 2009-12-17 09:42 am (UTC)

   1. And Margot Asquith – this story was always struck me as too neat to be true.

      Jean Harlow was at a dinner party and kept on addressing Margot Asquith (wife of British prime minister Herbert Asquith) as MargoT (pronouncing the ‘T’). Margot finally had enough and said to her “No Jean, the T is silent, as in Harlow.”.

5. Funnily enough I fell into exactly the same trap of writing NATURIST for 6d even though it is clearly NATURISM.

   Also, dont quite get 27 – the anagram suggests BEAT DOWN, which I dont see as hot, but if I was guessing I would say MELT DOWN, which I cannot parse from the cryptic.

   1. I think the setter is trying to get us to forget about the current grey skies and think of the sun beating down – the def. being “be very hot”
6. 17:21 here, although I’m claiming at least 5 minutes back due to tiredness, as I had to drag myself onto the 6:30 train this morning to get to an early meeting, and had a job to keep my eyes open. COD to 13A SKYE, as until 1995 the only way to get there was by sea, and it was often cut off in bad weather.
7. Much easier today. Didn’t like “beat down” much.. rain beats down as much as sun, doesn’t it, if not more?
   Bottoms yesterday, total nudity today, can’t wait to see tomorrow’s 🙂
   1. And more mooning in 15A! (Two other ASSes in the grid were differently clued).
      1. Well, we had BUM and DERRIERE yesterday and ASS today. It is said that the British are obsessed with bottoms and find them unendingly amusing – perhaps so.

         Wasn’t there a spate of rather more obscure bottoms in Mephisto a few months ago?

8. I found this extremely difficult for some reason. Oh well, the Graun fell in about 6 minutes.
9. …..at various times I had ‘affluent’, ‘Berlin’, and ‘Nashville’, all slowly corrected. For ‘magnolia’, I considered ‘yen’, ‘itch’, ‘ache’, ‘l’…..everything but the actually word the setter kindly provided.

   So my time was slow, but the puzzle got finished at least. My last in was ‘Skye/Knoxville’, but it took me a long time to see ‘sheikh’ and ‘hassle’.

10. I found this almost as difficult as yesterday’s. Maybe I’m a little slow today. Domestic, which George considers too obvious to blog, was slow to come. Also, I had done most of the bottom half before I got free association. Fortunately today’s tree and plant came easily. Like several others, I finished with sheikh. I don’t know why; it seems quite obvious with the benefit of hindsight.
    1. Yes, I’m surprised he didn’t mention ‘domestic’. It’s a triple definition, with one from police slang, right?
       1. Absolutely right – but I’ll admit to not noticing – if you’re in any kind of hurry, spotting two defs is enough and the whole clue can read so smoothly that you don’t notice that “row between couple at home” (part of this clue) can be two defs as well as one.
11. Not a good day for me and not being able to complete this was the icing on the bottom of the cake, or was it on the top but the cake landed upside down. Raised the white flag with 1ac undone, despite having gone through all possibilities three times. Apart from that I couldn’t see how 26 or 27 or 4 worked and overlooked the triple at 18. At 4, who precisely were the Has? And what was foolish about them? So, victory to the setter and hats off. Very much enjoyed FANDANGO, NATURISM and much else, in spite of myself. Another excellent crossword.
    1. You’ve been had…
       1. In triplicate.
12. 28 minutes, sheikh last in for me too. ?H?I?H just didn’t bring anything to mind for too long – I guess I was looking for the third letter to be a consonant and the fifth 21 across, rather than t’other way about.

    Can someone explain where the “go” comes from in 5ac?

    Agree that 27 is weak as I don’t think you can talk about it beating down without mentioning the sun.

    COD 13 for the same reason as linxit.

    1. Two choices: (a) go = “perform”, which matches the “function (of a machine or device)” def. in ODE. Then the fandango has to be seen as a “courtship dance”, and “going to” as “charade glue”. I don’t know enough about the fandango to be sure about this. If it doesn’t work, then I guess it must be:

       (b) “perform courtship” with = “go”, as phrases like “go with” and “go out with” mean “perform courtship with”, and fandango = “dance”, pure and simple.

       (Which I guess means that my question is “Where does the courtship come from?”)

       Edited at 2009-12-17 01:54 pm (UTC)

       1. I took it as (a) when solving, without thinking too much about it. The Free On-line dictionary has

          Noun, 1. fandango – a provocative Spanish courtship dance in triple time

          Triple time being the operative factor today, I think.

13. Look like I picked the wrong day to give up Ritalin. I started badly by throwing in WORD ASSOCIATION, which was only sorted out after a lengthy reverie about the lost Spanish city where they dance the Wandango. After half an hour the north west remained largely unconquered and I became hopelessly distracted by a large spider crawling across my bedroom ceiling looking for a place to expire. Which it duly did, poor thing.

    I fell asleep with SHEIKH, HASSLE and MAGNOLIA unsolved.

14. About 30 minutes, finishing in the NW with SHEIKH/HASSLE the final entries. I hadn’t understood 26 either: I was trying to justify getting the anagram fodder for ‘triple’ out of ‘appropriately’ by finding a ‘leap’ among the remaining letters to ‘clear’ out of it. Quite futile, so thanks to all for clearing it up. COD: SKYE. I was also surprised, like George, by the appearance of Knoxville. Not to put the place down, but it wouldn’t normally be thought of as an internationally known hotspot. Regards all.
15. The term curates egg was made for this melange. About 25 minutes lurching from “great” to “what tripe” and back again.

    SHEIKH is simply appalling, no other word for it. It’s no surprise so many solvers either had is their last (including me, on the grounds nothing else would fit) or just didn’t see it. FANDANGO is padded. BEAT DOWN has no satisfactory definition. KNOXVILLE is obscure to say the least (like Peter had vague memory of a battle, otherwise it would have been a total guess)

    On the other hand SKYE is brilliant (the island finally getting a road link not so many years ago) as is TRIPLE JUMP (very clever)and NATURISM (excellent surface reading).

    I ended up feeling irritated because the poor so detracted from the good.

    1. … for terminology that we can use to distinguish two types of padding.

       In the clue for FANDANGO, “going to” is not an essential part of the cryptic reading. If “Lover, desperate chap, perform courtship dance” made sense, I’m sure that would have been the clue. But “going to” is needed so that it makes sense. For me, “A going to B” is an acceptable way of saying that A and B are adjacent in the answer, and this kind of clue is OK. As far as I can tell, most Ximenean setters in the UK agree with me – I don’t know of any who can be relied on never to do this. If clues were disallowed for this kind of padding, I think we’d either have easier puzzles or less satisfactory surface meanings.

       If there are words in the clue which cannot logically play any part in the cryptic reading and are only there for the benefit of the surface reading, that’s what I’d criticise as “padding”. I think this kind is very rare in the Times cryptic puzzle.

       (I’m assuming that we’re all happy with “courtship dance” rather than plain “dance”, because at least for those who know their dances, it provides useful information.)

       Edited at 2009-12-17 04:53 pm (UTC)

       1. How about (with an inadvertent seasonal tinge) “stuffing” where padding can be the (at a push) acceptable side of it, where the extras have some tenuous purpose, whilst stuffing is just the unacceptable purposeless ‘stuff’ familiar of less renowned publications ??
    2. Appalling? And here I was chuffed at remembering that it’s pronounced ‘shake’ in the UK–or so I thought–and getting it in comparatively early. I gather there’s less than consensus in the UK about the pronunciation? It’s uniformly ‘sheek’ in the US, so far as I know.
       And for once being from the US seems to have been an advantage: I got ‘Knoxville’ even before figuring out why.
       1. I think you’ve put your finger on the issue – there is no consensus as to pronunciation and that’s what makes it a very unsuitable word for a homophone. I’ve personally always used “sheek”.
16. Very interesting topic. I think that the second type would mainly include ‘link-words’, and perhaps that term should stand. As an aside – and it would be good to hear from Mark Thakkar on this subject – it can be argued that ‘link-words’ are desirable in certain types of clue. For the first type, I think ‘padding’ is rather pejorative – which is not to say that I find all such words/phrases acceptable (‘pursued by’ is a bugbear). ‘Supplementaries’ perhaps? Or ‘ancillaries’?

    Tom B.

17. Hi, just wanted to say I’m new at doing cryptic crosswords and finding all your comments very helpful in getting me started.
18. Don’t like HASSLE – too American for me. I was also surprised to see ASS = Bottom in 15a… tsk, tsk…
    1. Not if you know your Bard: Midsummer Night, where Bottom the weaver gets a donkey’s head courtesy of Puck.
19. Anyone still reading will see the 404 went away, thanks to advice from Kororareka. By now (22:35 UTC), there’s not much to add really. Just a minor thing: was, um, nobody phased by “oddly taken thus” (28) to mean “oddly taken oddly”?
20. This appears twice (in 4dn and 15ac). In 4dn it has nothing to do with either arse or that character in MND. It is in 15ac that ‘Bottom’ indicates ‘ass’, but this is the Bottom in MND, who is changed into an ass (a donkey). The word for bottom is arse, and it is often not realised (particularly by Americans) that this is the case. Too many people get it wrong IMHO.
    1. Sorry, hadn’t read the title of the post (4dn). I was, of course, only referring to 15ac — where “Bottom” actually appears — and saw my reply as a continuation of the post where that is the last mentioned.

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