Times 24485 – A feverish few minutes

Author   kororarekaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 65 minutes

A day of wine and roses, well plants, but you get the idea. Some easy and familiar gets, tempered by some not so. I eventually got stuck for a good 20 minutes on 17d, not helped by the fact that I had invented a new plural for seraphs. And so to the puzzle.

Across
1 PIPPED = like a Granny Smith, AT THE POST = examining mail; the whole being “finally defeated” having presumably led. The question mark apologising for the definition by example at Granny Smith.
9 RELEVANCE, being recce with the first c for clubs replaced by le = French “the” and van = leaders
10 MAPLE, being identified as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple minus the r
11 SEXIST, being s for son and exist = live; the “with” being a non-specific position indicator, as opposed to “on” which always means added on to the end unless it’s in a down clue, in which case it could also mean added on to the beginning.
12 SHUTTERS, a cryptic definition; lights being windows.
13 RETORT, being a double definition, both comeback and distiller’s vessel. When solving, I was happy to concede that a troter must be some kind of vessel. Mindset can be unhelpful at times.
15 UNCHOSEN, being punch without the p and an anagram of one’s (without the apostrophe).
18 SERAPHIM, being an anagram of E(for English) and harps (with perhaps as the indicator) represented with I’m = “the writer is”. There’s that “with” again, this time qualified. I had it as an anagram of ME + E + HARPS with “represented” as the anagrind. Hence, or otherwise, SERAPHEM, the plural of the already plural seraphim, perhaps. That more or less did for 17d.
19 OPORTO, being port = left inside rings = o and o, two o’s. ‘Porto is in Portugal
21 ABERDEEN, being a reversal of need = requirement placed by AB = sailor and E.R. = king, as in Edward Rex. “By” is another non-specific position indicator. The Earl of Aberdeen was another prime minister whose decision to take the country into war led to his downfall. Aberdeen was Foreign Secretary when William IV (aka the sailor king) was on the throne, but I’ll leave discussion of the implications of that to more serious students of history.
23 Deliberately omitted. Don’t be afraid to ask.
26 LATEX, being similar in sound to late = recent, ex = divorcee.
27 IGNORAMUS, being an anagram of “amusing, or” with “otherwise” being the witty indicator.
28 GOLDEN HANDSHAKE, being Golden Hind’s hake, with the I, for one, replaced with an “a”.

Down
1 PERUSER, being Peru’s Elizabeth Regina, perhaps.
2 PHLOX, being a perfect homophone of “flocks”.
3 EAVESDROP, being Eve’s hiding “a” plus drop = deterioration, with cryptic definition “not appear to hear”
4 Deliberately omitted. Ask if you still can’t see it.
5 TEETHING, being tee = support then article = thing.
6 Deliberately omitted. One of the colonists will surely put you right.
7 OPPRESSOR, being press = papers bound by an anagram of poor, indicated by “surprisingly”.
8 TREASON, being an anagram of “near to” arresting, stopping or holding S for head of State.
14 TORMENTIL, being tort = wrong around men = workers with il = Italian for “the” tacked on. If the answer had been Shepherd’s Knapperty, I would have got it much sooner.
16 HIPPOCRAS, being hippos around cr for creditor and “a”. Both Collins and Chambers have cr as an abbreviation for creditor as well as credit. Nothing to do with Keats’ Hippocrene, by the way, apart from the purple stained mouth.
17 LIVERISH, being liver, being a being, going over an anagram of “his”, indicated by “novel”. (Sometimes you have to wait a long time for the punchline.) With an “e” in second place (see 18ac), it could only be “feverish”, no matter how many different ways “being going over” could be parsed.
18 Deliberately omitted. Ask if you’re slow.
20 OVERSEE, being a reversal of rev = vicar in o for old, see = diocese.
22 DIXIE, being die = long outside or “without” IX for eleven, a cricket or sort of football team.
24 SIMLA, being I, for one, in reversal of alms = charitable donation.
25 ANON, being an = article about No = Japanese drama. I don’t know why the “written”, except that it might more often be seen in poetry. Although, “I’ll see you anon” is my preferred form of parting, often shortened to “See ya”, which I now write and say.

38 comments on “Times 24485 – A feverish few minutes”

  1. Nice blog, which resolved me on a few issues, including RETORT, for which I had, rather ingeniously, I thought, RETURN, as in a charade consisting of distiller=ret + vessel=urn. Didn’t know PHLOX, TORMENTIL or HIPPOCRAS. Nor had I heard of EMMET (6dn), for which, as I am sure I am not the only ignoramus on this parochial matter, I will provide the definitive wikipedia:

    “Emmet is a disparaging nickname that some Cornish people use to refer to the many tourists who visit Cornwall.”

    1. I did think twice about omitting that one, but my memory told me, while serving me badly, that it had been used to excess of late. It is an archaic and dialect word for ant, and Chambers says specifically in Cornwall, a tourist. Some find this offensive both to ants and the warm hearted generosity of the Cornish people. I have been to Cornwall on only one occasion and was treated with the utmost respect, considering I was dressed as an ant at the time.
  2. Found this quite easy and completed in 13 minutes. Liked the two different uses of “head of state”. Otherwise, not much to report except to say it’s good to be back in the cruciverbal universe.
  3. Also easy for me, but I confess I too had RETURN bashed in (with URN representing the vessel and the rest not really thought through). Took about 5 minutes, which seems quick for me. Not sure about PERHAPS as an anagram indicator – I think it is frowned upon in some circles.
      1. It is, but in selecting anagram indicators it’s rather harder to see why one is OK and the other not OK than with rules about things like tense, number and parts of speech.
    2. Glad not alone in finding it easy – for me 9m was great and close to pb. Helped by gk today, top down approach, last in Aberdeen.
  4. 35 minutes with the only hold-ups being TORMENTIL and HIPPOCRAS because I’d never heard of either. I also had a query about “to be written” at 25dn and concluded it may be yet another of those instructions to solver that crop up from time to time.
    2. Oh, yes. I keep forgetting that one, even though it seems to occur every second time I blog.
  5. 5:30 for this – quick start with 1A and then 1,4,5,6,7,8 down. Main reason for speed is probably plenty of short definitions – apart from cryptic ones, there are only about half a dozen longer than two words. Also knew the trickier words. Last in were 11 with “A with B” = B,A and 2D – ph = f homophones often catch me out.
  6. Toyed with RETORT but discounted because the previous clue solved at 14 also used TORT, so went for RETURN convinced by the vessel bit. Able to guess HIPPOCRAS and TORMENTIL, had forgotten the Japanese drama but pleased to remember EMMET from a recent puzzle.
    A bit slow today, in all senses.
    1. Well spotted on the TORT. It had completely escaped my attention. Unless I’m as mistaken as I usually am, that’s a signature of this setter, or possibly the cabal of setters that this setter belongs to, or just a coincidence, or…
      1. I have always had a lingering suspicion (now confirmed) that you were the secret avatar of Dudley Eigenvalue, the paranoid pyschodontist who “turned the world’s random caries into cabals”. šŸ™‚

        1. I plead total incomprehension of your assertion; it’s just the transmitter in my newly installed crown. This crossing partial words thing happens far too often to be chance. I’ve just this minute calculated the probability of a single occurrence as 1 in 10.36 gazillion, and it’s happened at least 6 times this year. And no, I can’t provide a single other example.
  7. This was a very quick solve, although I came here expecting to find that I had invented tormentil and hippocras. I had never heard of Lord Aberdeen although I readily accepted that there must be one. I also had to guess that Simla was an alternative version of Shimla. Iā€™m glad I did not think of return before retort because I probably would have been happy with it.
  8. Now I have checked in Chambers my small quibble is that the first meaning of latex is a natural product of the rubber tree (primary school memory), and only later an artificial substitute for that.
    1. True, but I don’t see the problem – if the artificial substitute meaning is there, why not use it? If words were restricted to one meaning each, cryptic crosswords would be rather a dull game!
  9. A straightforward solve in 25 minutes despite some unfamiliar oddities in 14 and 16. 6 was familiar enough from barred cryptics, but I don’t often see it in blocked daily ones. In general I prefer tricky clues for ordinary words to easy clues for unfamiliar words in daily puzzles. I liked the clues 13 and 15, but I disliked the definition for ‘eavesdrop’. “Not appear to hear” doesn’t mean the same as “to hear without appearing to” – the emphasis is on the wrong verb, it seems to me.
  10. A rather sluggish 25 minutes, not helped by writing OVEREEE at 20d which meant I discounted the thought that 27 was an anagram of amusing or. Also wasted time trying to find a a fish to be the answer to 28.

    Made a nice change for ER not to be her Maj.

  11. Slow of brain today and twice interrupted, so an approximate (perhaps generous) 20 minutes or so of solving time. Last in (just to show how great the proportion of mush to mind today) TEETHING and SHUTTERS Didn’t know 14 or 16, but the clueing was fair enough, so I’ve learned something which will probably help in a future Mephisto. It can’t be too often that we have two distinct solutions ending in “x”
    For a really obscure take on 13, GIRVAN is a distillery on the Lowland west coast and conceivably its reverse, a nav rig is a seagoing vessel?! Messes up the rst of the crossword, though.
  12. 11:30 with fairly steady progress. I entered quite a few on obvious definitions /some checking letters including 1d where the wordplay lost me. Last in RETURN or RETORT. Chose the latter but I can’t give a good reason why. Never heard of this definition , HIPPOCRAS also an unknown.
      1. I did work out that it couldn’t be a RET-URN wordplay but there seemed as much chance of the double definition being either return or retort as neither seemed a probable name for a vessel to me
  13. A quiet ramble through 20 minutes of largely familiar stuff with no startling moments of any description. Today’s general knowledge quiz for you is where along the English south coast do emmets turn into grockles?
      1. Yes, strangely, EMMET is confined pretty much to Cornwall. Then in Devon, Somerset and Dorset they become grockles. In the summer around here locals walk around wearing t-shirts with I’M NOT A GROCKLE plastered all over them.
        1. There’s a long entry on Grockle in Chambers Slang Dictionary with several suggested origins. Too long for me to type here I’m afraid. Wherever it came from it was popularised by its use in the film The System (1962) partially filmed in Torquay. This fits in with the time I first heard it on South Devon holidays. However at that time I understood from the locals that it was short for Grockle-minder or sometimes Grockle-monger, slang references to some sort of industrial process that they imagined their visitors busied themselves with when they returned to their cities, but I can’t find any support for this now. Indeed these words seem not to exist at all, but I know I didn’t imagine them.
          1. They’re both in Chambers, Jack. EMMET is also an ant – which may be why tourists are called emmets because they do resemble ants when they swarm all over the place. The origin of grockle is said in Chambers to be unknown. I’ve never heard of grockle-minder.
            1. I’m not sure Chambers is right about EMMETS – my Cornish friends say it’s not tourists, but busy-busy incomers that were originally emmets. On the other hand, as a Tuesday Elizabethan in Totnes, I happily joined in the sport of separating Grockles from their currency.
      2. When I was living in Totnes, we definitely had Grockles, not Emmets. Totnes is on the coast so long as you count the Dart estuary: Brutus the Trojan did. Otherwise, I would have thought it was halfway across the Tamar bridge.
  14. Regards all. About 30 minutes here, but I didn’t think it was all that easy due to the large number of things I didn’t know, like these meanings of EMMET and RETORT, HIPPOCRAS, SIMLA and TORMENTIL. Not to mention that I had never heard the 1A phrase, and wasn’t sure what happened to Granny at the post until I finally thought of PHLOX, that being a very nice clue, by the way. Best to all.
  15. Stumped by UNCHOSEN and LIVERISH but otherwise a straightforward 20 minutes. Got more than usual just from wordplay (ABERDEEN, OPORTO, TORMENTIL, TEETHING, PHLOX, HIPPOCRAS). LATEX made me chuckle and I liked PERUSER too.
  17. I somehow set a personal best at 17″, with only 13 misleading me, as I tried to justify RETURN until I finally freed myself of the association of distiller and whiskey. It would have taken me vastly longer, though, had recent puzzles not had EMMET & PIPPED etc. 22d was a bit of a disappointment (although perhaps being a Yank helped): with the E in place, I didn’t bother to read the rest of the clue past ‘Southern states’.

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