Times 24461 – Not one for the οἱ πολλοί

44 comments on “Times 24461 – Not one for the οἱ πολλοί”

1. ‘Hoi’ is the masculine nominative plural. Since there are four cases in Greek, it is one of 24 possible forms. Fortunately, we can guess where the setter came across it – if he had used ‘tais’ (feminine dative plural) solvers might be a little aggrieved.

   I was more annoyed at the time waster, because I was headed for a good time until I got stuck for ten minutes on ‘wine taster’ Until then, I was knocking off crossword cliches pretty quickly; this is a puzzle at which a beginner might make good progress before getting stuck with a couple at the end.

   I hope no one complains Marvell is a minor poet, for although his oeuvre is small, it is truly brilliant.

2. I had all bar two done inside 20 minutes which is lightning fast for me, but as ever the last two doubled my time. Any tips on how to get round this stumbling block will be gratefully received.

   Like kororareka I had trouble identifying the WINE TASTER, but the real sticking point for me was 18ac. STATER was one of the first ideas that came to mind, but I didn’t know the word and rejected it several times before finally realising that ‘say’ wasn’t a homonym indicator.

   I anticipate some very fast times by the experts. COD has to go to 11ac, I think.

3. whipped through this until mar ell and wine-taster. i spend ages trying to justify martial and when i got marvell could only think of dive master
4. 11 minutes. Piece of cake? Walk in the park? Tofu … anybody? And, no doubt, we’ll get complaints about 20ac. OK for those of us who glo¿al stop the second T and then schwa-ise the final vowal.
5. All completed within 20 minutes except 11ac which needed another 5 all to itself. There were too many options of words that fitted each part and the problem was finding two that went together to make sense of the clue.

   Apart from TOLSTOY and not knowing HOI all my difficulties were in the NW where I did not know HAYMAKER meaning a “blow” and I needed its K to bring KAFKA to mind at 4dn. I had heard of Andrew Marvell and was about to comment that he is still alive until I looked him up and realised I had been confusing him with Andrew Motion.

   McT, I think there may be a complaint about the excessive amount literary references today. But there are no old songs or music in general so I’m miffed too!

   1. The key difference between Andrews Marvell and Motion, of course, is that the former isn’t my first cousin once removed!
6. As a teetotaller, I shouldn’t be the one that got 11ac straight off the bat. Odd, methinks.

   I had REFORGING, and couldn’t justify RG but I’m not up on military stuff. For one who’s had much experience of old music groups reforming, I can tell you categorically that it does *not* always mean making better.

   (Solving time about 8 minutes, but one letter wrong.)

   1. You no doubt were thinking of the Royal Gurkha’s, as was I for a time, but they are officially RGR with an added Regiment, or so says Wiki.
      1. In all honesty I don’t think I was thinking of anything specific; it was just a case of “oh well, there must be a military group of some sort that is abbreviated to RG.” If I’d thought of REFORMING I would have gone with it without hesitation.
7. Is it usual to have a qualification such as “great” author. The “great” had me thinking all round this until seeing the obvious, which then gave me the troubling WINE TASTER. THIEVERY last in with what seemed superfluities in the clue. Otherwise quick, certainly compared to Saturday’s nightmare.
   Was I the only one to get a dodgy grid on Sunday?
   1. Barry, there are postings about the dodgy grid under the latest ST blog.
8. Thanks Jack. Not there when I looked first thing. I wonder if they will ever get round to correcting.
   Whilst on the Bulletin Board I note McText won the January Club Monthly. Congratulations (obviously far too modest to mention it himself).
   1. Modest … moi?
   2. Barry, I spoke on the phone to the Times xword department at 12.40pm today about the incorrect online version of the ST cryptic. They assured me they were “working on it”. They “only realised it was wrong when we came into work this morning” and they “hoped to have it sorted by the end of the day”! The problem seems to be not so much a dodgy grid as a completely wrong set of clues to go with the grid. It astonishes me(a)that such an error could go unnoticed in the first place – does no one do any proof-reading, or whatever the equivalent is for websites, in this department?, and(b)that it should take so long to correct.

      1. Thanks Mike.
         I think they have a corrections editor instead of proof readers these days.
         1. Wahteveer they call them, the don’t seem to be doing their job!
            1. Nor am I! Please read “whatever” as the first word above.
               1. Well at last it has been corrected but unfortunately for me, having solved all the wretched clues they put up yesterday and assembled the answers in the correct order (i.e. completely ignoring the published numbering etc) they now announce that they published the correct grid but the wrong clues. So I STILL have to solve the puzzle. And I thought I was due some Brownie points for using my initiative!
                  1. Tough luck, Jack. Fortunately I did the puzzle from the printed version, which was OK. Now I can submit it online.
9. I was all set to correct Barry, but by the time I had laboriously assembled all the various components of the necessary hyperlink, I found Mctext had already done it..

   Easy crossword this, c14 mins. Last in was 11ac, found using the old “alphabetic method”.. master, natter, pastor, ratter, tartar, aha! I wouldn’t make it COD though. Just a cryptic def. after all, I much prefer say 6dn, very neat..

10. 25mins which would have been my fastest time, if it weren’t for the tricky 11ac where “vice master” semed to fit the bill. i had become fixated that it had to start with vice. this is particularly galling as i have done a lot of wine tasting over the years, but it has to be cod.
11. I got Wine Taster quickly but I noted, in passing, that it was a weak CD since wine tasters tend to judge individual bottles rather than cases. Last in was the innocuous Reforming where there seemed to be several candidates for specialist troops.

    I knew that Hoi meant the because pedants are fond of pointing out the redundancy in the phrase “the hoi polloi”.

    1. Kingsley Amis, in “The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage”, his entertaining act of homage to the great Fowler, has a nice comment on “hoi polloi” under the entry “Greek remnants”: “Few people have ever learnt Greek or remember any. One phrase perhaps survives in ordinary talk: the ‘hoi polloi’ = the (vulgar) majority. ‘Hoi’ is itself a form of the word for ‘the’ but the accepted phrase, even among those who know this, is again ‘the hoi polloi’, pronounced hoy p’LOY. There are plenty of adequate synonyms in English.”
       1. I am delighted to see this (new to me) Amis piece, because I once failed to get top marks in a Times challenge involving picking out and correcting all the grammatical and usage errors in a piece of prose. I refused to delete ‘the’ from ‘the hoi polloi’ because I argued that this is the usual phrase – and indeed, so it is, among those who use it at all in its correct sense. There are after all those who use it to mean ‘the elite’, quite the opposite of its true meaning. It’s the same word as ‘poly’ as in ‘polymath’, incidentally.
          1. Well, the same root. ‘Poly’ (pi omicron lambda upsilon) is an adverb, ‘pollos’ is an adjective which is used as a noun.

             The elite would be ‘hoi oligoi’, or maybe ‘hoi kalokagathoi’.

12. DNF. Cryptic defs have been my downfall of late and I couldn’t make anything of WINE TASTER. Ran out of inspiration in the NW corner generally. Had never heard of HAYMAKER so that was blank and so too MARVELL, KAFKA (which I’m sure I’d have got with the starting K) and, lower down the grid, STATER. I found the other 26 clues straightforward and wrote a large proportion of them in on first look. Didn’t fully understand HANOI and TIGHTENS so thanks kororareka for explaining those.

    Daniel

13. After an hour I finished with what looked like plausible guesses – FIRMAND for 7 down (I would contend that there are hawks & doves in all walks of life). There seemed so many possibilities for 6 across including revise, resist, rebuff etc although I did settle on REFUSE without understanding why. 11 across I had RING MASTER as the judge and consequentially 3 down that mythical author MIRAGEL. New words today included HAYMAKER, STATER and HOI. Particularly liked THIEVERY.
14. Relatively straight forward today. Guessed ‘stater’ but seemed likely. I’m not sure I understand wine taster even now, any elaboration?
    COD Refuse
    1. Don’t worry, got it.
15. Much the same experience as quite a few others: clues fell quickly, and I even thought that, unusually, I was heading for a Jimboesque, “stroll-in-the-park” time of around 20 mins. But the top LH corner proved a stumbling-block, with WINE TASTER, KAFKA and HAYMAKER the last to go in, in that order. In retrospect, I can’t see any good reason why they caused so much difficulty. STATER was a guess from wordplay (I thought it might be some old Dutch coin) and HANOI just a guess from the available cross-checking letters (my half-remembered schoolboy Greek proved inadequate to the task, I’m afraid). Much of the rest of the puzzle was pretty easy, I thought. But some good clues: I particularly liked REFUSE and FORWARD.
16. 21 minutes. Like others I blitzed through most of this very quickly and then had to pick off the rest slowly, one by one, with wine taster and Tosltoy the last two and guesses based on wordplay for stater and Marvell and on def for Hanoi.

    I’m surprised that haymaker is unfamiliar to so many. I thought it was in common usage.

    Agree that refuse and forward were clever but overall I found that the mix of very easy and quite tough made for a rather uneven puzzle.

17. Definitely one for the old-fashioned classically educated, has a retro fell to it. How old is setter? I was once rather forcefully ticked off for “the hoi”, so to me it is always wrong however usual. Annoyed by two Roman numerals in one puzzle & two Eng Lit references, but not at all displeased with 9 minutes, last in wine taster.
18. A pleasant start to the week at under 20 minutes.

    No real difficulties; I had come across all the entries before, possibly only in crosswords though for STATER and [Andrew] MARVELL. I needed all the crossing letters to get WINE TASTER.

    Liked the clues for KAFKA and FORWARD

19. I sympathise on 11ac. It cost me a new “personal best”!
20. 7.40 Felt like a pretty speedy solve today. Last in was 6 where I didn’t fathom the wordplay. Hoi = The is what I learned today. Guessed HANOI easily enough after getting 24 quickly. Honours or Top Honours being A,K,Q or J is a useful one to remember. I had a bit of delay on 11 also and it was my COD.
21. Not a puzzle I liked very much. A lot of easy stuff. Too many literary references, superfluous words like “great” in 12D, and a very weak cryptic definition in WINE TASTER who, as has previously been noted, don’t judge cases. 20 unsatisfactory minutes.
22. Corrected Sunday puzzle now online in case anyone wants to know. Shouldn’t bother with it Jimbo. Same as today with a couple of nasties at the end.
    Still, might have a chance of winning if the paper had the wrong clues as well.
23. 5:28, presumably rather slower than talbinho. Short delay on 11A at the end, but probably wouldn’t quite have broken 5 minutes even with an instant answer. I don’t think I agree about what wine tasters judge: they may only use one bottle, but their assessment is of the wine, so “cases” seems perfectly logical.
24. I hope Monday isn’t about to become the day of cryptic definitions… couldn’t get to this until after lunch and made short work of it until TOLSTOY and WINE TASTER. Although if you have to sample a whole case, sign me up!
25. 17:34 .. Apparently this was full of cliches but they all felt new to me (again), so I found it witty and enjoyable. I liked the wine clue.

    It certainly gave me a break from frowning at TLS 818, my having been conned into taking up the TLS challenge by Tony and Linxit who sneakily began their blog series with a much easier puzzle.

26. What nobody seems to have had, as I did until checking it on an electronic thing, is WINE WAITER. I’m not quite sure of the significance of this.
    1. A different kind of judging, but if I were a competition referee, I think I’d give this one the nod as an alternative answer.
       1. Does that actually happen in competition then? Ie the judge or panel thereof deems a secondary answer to be acceptable also leading to two possible completed grids (or multiple perms if it happens more than once)

          I always thought this sensible for double spellings -er vs -or and s vs z but double interpretations is an interesting one.

          1. If the contestant with a different answer can convince the judge that their answer makes sense (or as much sense as the official answer), the judge can permit the alternative. I have known this to actually happen just once in my Times championship experience, at the first regional final I competed in.

Comments are closed.