Times 24519 – A Hard Day’s Night

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I started solving this around midnight-thirty after having problems (yet again) accessing the crossword site. I can’t give a solving time because I was in bed and I nodded off a couple of times when I got completely stuck, but I very much doubt that it took me less than an hour.  I hope I am not alone in finding it the most difficult of the week by quite a long way, but if I am I shall put it down to being extremely tired after a hard day’s work and a heavy evening of TV watching The Great Debate followed by Question Time and This Week.  My next blog will be written on Election Night so that may also be a painful experience.

But anyway, back to this puzzle where there was little particular knowledge required but some of the wordplay was quite tricky and there were a few words such as “outwash” and “rangeland” that don’t crop up in (my) everyday conversation so didn’t leap out at me. I noticed a lot of “CA”s (6) and “O”s (17) in the grid.

Across
1 C(h)A,FF – CAFF (or CAF) is slang for café with the implication that it’s a cheap and cheerful sort of establishment maybe serving CHA so strong you could stand your teaspoon up in it.
4 HOW-DO-YOU-DO – I thought of this answer on first reading but didn’t write it in as I couldn’t see why it should be so. It eventually went in almost last when I had all the checkers and realised it couldn’t be anything else. On revisiting the puzzle to blog it I remembered HOW-DO-YOU-DO is rhyming slang for “stew”, an awkward situation or “jam”.
9 SPORTS,CAST – This is STROP, a fit of temper, reversed, then CAST (of a play).
10 C,ABS – I only know of this braking system having just bought my first car that has it and having read the handbook. I understand it comes from the German Antiblockier System but is generally referred to as the anti-lock braking system or ABS brake.
11 TI(NG)LE – The tile hat hasn’t made it to the COED which is rather surprising for a crossword puzzle favourite.
12 HEAD,REST
14 MARC(her) – Another old favourite is this  spirit distilled from the refuse of grapes.
15 NOR(THE)RNER – Article = THE  surrounded by an anagram of ERROR, N,N.
17 HIP,POD,ROME – An arena used by the Greeks for chariot-racing. In = HIP, school = POD (as yesterday).
20 Deliberately omitted. Please ask if baffled.
21 S(ummer),NO,WHOLE – NO as in Wrong!
23 O’NE,ILL –  The American playwright Eugene O’Neill 1888-1953. Once again the absence of an indication of the apostrophe delayed my seeing what should have been an obvious answer.
24 0,MEN – I think we have had this more than once before.
25 E,LAB,ORATOR – LAB is the abbreviation for the UK Labour Party.
26 PLAN,GENTLY
27 DYER – Sounds like “dire”.
 
Down
2 APPLICATION – Double meaning.
3 FO(RAGE, CA)P – This is a soldier’s peaked cap. I learned this morning that the C&A clothing chain took its name from the first names of Clemens and August Brenninkmeijer, the Dutchmen who founded the company as long ago as 1841. Although it still trades around the world it is 9 years since it withdrew from UK high streets.
4 HAS-BEEN – The reasoning here puzzled me for ages but I think it’s meant to be a homophone for HAS BEAN. If one is penurious one hasn’t got a bean so it follows that if one has a single bean one is only “almost” stony broke.
5 WE(ATHER, FORE,CA)ST – The furthest part of America rather depends on one’s perspective but as the Times is a UK newspaper I guess it’s fair enough to assume that West is the furthest away. This then goes round an anagram of EARTH (tremor, being the indicator), followed by FORE, the warning shouted when teeing off at golf (is it shouted at other times, Jimbo?) and another CA,  this time the abbreviation on Californian car number plates.
6 (m)OUT(WAS)H – I didn’t know this word meaning gravel or sand deposited by glaciers. Mouth is part of a harbour.
7 U(SAG)E – Flag = SAG enclosed by EU reversed.
8 ON,SET
13 SIERRA LEONE – Anagram of EARLIER ONES. It became a republic in 1961 which doesn’t seem “fairly recent” to me so perhaps this is  a reference to the re-establishment of democracy following more recent troubles.
16 (o)RANG,ELAND – I think last time ORANG came up without -utan there was a body of opinion against it, but it’s in Collins so should be okay for Times crossword purposes.
18 Deliberately omitted. Please ask if baffled.
19 E(CO)NO,MY – ONE reversed around CO then MY.
21 S(WOO)P – S is an official abbreviation for succeed, court = WOO and  P is indicated by “proceedings just started”.
22 O,MEGA – The last letter of the Greek alphabet. I can’t actually find MEGA meaning awesome but I believe it’s in the modern vernacular.

50 comments on “Times 24519 – A Hard Day’s Night”

  1. 22 minutes, a good deal of it wasted being determined the thrash 5dn without a lot of crossers. A strikingly difficult clue, I thought, given that the &lit element is rather weak. After that, it wasn’t too hard. Will Sierra Leone ever be clued via “two crap cars”?
  2. 34 minutes and two wrong – guessed Vans and panickily (?)threw in Ukase at the end without thinking. Now going to work biting my head off. Crossword well named.
  3. 10:55 for this one – so failed to notice any really serious difficulty.

    4A: I missed the ‘jam’ meaning completely and was left thinking this was a return of clues lacking any proper definition, as seen in Times puzzles of the distant past. I should have remembered the number Here’s a how-de-do in The Mikado. I can’t find any dictionary support for it being rhyming slang, though that would explain this unexpected meaning.

    The geomorphology half of my Geography A-level let me down for once on 6D – I’m usually sound on eskers, kames, moraines (lateral, medial and terminal), drumlins and other features of glaciated landscapes. This and RANGELAND – a new word for me, though soon seen once it was ????ELAND – were two sources of difficulty. So was an initial silly stab at NAAF for 1A from ?A?F, until I decided the NAAFI (famous for its tea) had to be complete. “very strong” may seem a bit weak(!) for the musical ff but “strong” is a valid translation of “forte” so it makes sense.

    5D solved without full wordplay understanding – the combination of “something inside WEST” and “what can come after WEATHER?” was enough.

    2. Thanks for the Mikado reference: I knew it was there or thereabouts but could’t pin it down – and a brief google revealed that how you spell the phrase is important, there being plenty of variations.
  4. 25 minutes, so by my measure the hardest of the week, and possibly the most enjoyable. Best clue HIPPODROME. though once I’d worked out why, HOW-DO-YOU-DO was a close second. Liked HAS BEEN too, for the back formation of almost penurious. I though a lot of these clues repaid extended thought, so perhaps not one built for speed. That’s my excuse, anyway!
    I wasn’t too sure about what is presumably meant to be the &lit of 5d: does the whole really mean “weather forecast”?
    1. No, not really. I guess the main point in the case for the defence is that with some checking letters and one or two of the four wordplay elements, you can guess the rest.

      For me, an example of the latitude given to &lit defs, which is sometimes taken a bit far. For that reason, I’d count this clue as inferior to one like 8D, where the humble charade is executed magnificently.

  5. The two Joe got wrong were two of the few I got right! Never got into this one – completing less than half of the grid. Hackers like me must cry “fore!” any time the ball is hit off line and may hit someone.

    Excellent blog, indeed, a mega effort (or “massive”, as David Beckham hs got everyone saying – what a horrid use of the word). You may want to insert ‘by’ at ‘followed FORE’, unless like the Romans leaving a flaw in their mosaics you wish not to incur the wrath of a higher power …

  6. I skipped this vicious old joke last time Stainer came up, but today’s surface reading in 27A is an excuse.

    “What do you think of Stainer’s Crucifixion?”

    wait for it …..

    “Bloody good idea”

  7. Quite a difficult puzzle nicely put together. 30 minutes of enjoyment. Thank you setter.

    “Fore” is short for “Fore Caddy” and was an alert to the caddies that stood down the fairway to find wayward shots (from the days of the Raj when golf was an exclusive sport and the long suffering Indian nationals were used to carry clubs, pour drinks and all the rest of it). Today it is used to alert other golfers that one has hit a wayward shot of any description. Anybody using it on the green is clearly having a difficult round.

    1. Hmmm – can’t find any support for this in dictionaries, including Hobson-Jobson, which records the language of the Raj around 1880. OED just has …

      Golf.

      [Probably a contraction of BEFORE.] (See quot. 1878.)

      1878 PARDON Football, etc., 82 Fore! a warning cry to people in front of the stroke.

      “PARDON” being …

      ‘Crawley, Captain R.’ (G. F. Pardon)
      Billiards 1856 (1859)
      The card player 1863
      Football, golf and shinty, hockey, polo, and curling 1878
      Hoyle’s games modernized 1863

      1. From Wiki

        “Foré!” is shouted as a warning during a golf game when it appears possible that a golf ball may hit other players or spectators. The mention of the term in an 1881 British Golf Museum indicates that the term was in use at least as early as that period.[1] The term means “look ahead”, and it is believed to come from the military “beware before”, which was shouted when a battery fired behind friendly troops.[1][2][3]

        Other possible origins include the term being derived from the term “fore-caddy”, a caddy waiting down range from the golfer to find where the ball lands. These caddies were often warned about oncoming golf balls by a shout “fore!”.[1][3] The Colonel Bogey March is based on the descending minor third which the original Colonel Bogey whistled instead of yelling Fore around 1914.[4]

        It also may have a contraction of the Gaelic cry Faugh a Ballach! (i.e. Clear the way!) which is still associated with the sport of road bowling which has features reminiscent of golf.

        1. Woody Allen had some fun at the expense of those of us who care about this kind of thing.

          I couldn’t get a link to work to the Google books entry for this, so I’ve put the text on my LiveJournal page. Just click my name to see it.

          1. I guess we have to accept that the origin of much slang and other vocabulary is lost in the mists of time – the OED approach is to insist on written evidence, but of course few people there at the crucial moment thought to ensure that the origin of a word was published in a book that would be read by contributors to a yet-to-be-invented dictionary.

            What bugs me (a bit too much) is folk etymology being converted by repetition into accepted fact – posh supposedly meaning “Port Out, Starboard Home” is the classic example. A holiday last year included a tour of the Queen Mary at Long Beach and I groaned inwardly when the guide peddled this old canard. He looked highly dischuffed when told that it was just a story, even though I waited until the rest of his audience had gone.

            1. I think that’s exactly what Woody Allen was parodying. I seem to recall Stephen Pinker having a go at the same target in The Language Instinct.
              1. So he is – and there’s another book I ought to read again. The trouble is that there are so many genuine (or at least accepted) word origins – e.g. for tawdry which seem just as fantastic as the ones that turn out to be nonsense.
  8. Struggling to see a definition for 5. And in 19, I can see the ONE rev and MY, but how does the CO wotk (careful?). Sorry, novice questions.

    Far too tough for me today.

    I wonder when we’ll see ‘App’? My Chambers ‘app’ gets used a lot; just hoping ‘Bradford’ bring one out soon. It would make the travel bag a bit lighter!

    Hopefully, one or two gentler puzzles sometime next week.

    1. Business (CO) is “saved” by ONE taken over (i.e. backwards (or in this case, upside down). Saved in this context just means “picked up by” “kept by” to indicate that you put CO in E-NO. One of those clues that, for full understanding, needed thinking through, so not an immediate hit.
  9. Like Andrew above, I found this puzzle extremely difficult. Two questions:

    1. 10A – I had ‘abs” in mind for the braking system, but I’m not sure how to get the ‘c’ from the rest of the clue?

    2. I need help on 20…

    Excellent blog today. Thanks, as always.

    1. NERD is the right half of children backwards (rejected). C(irca) meaning about, is a crossword standard, sometimes CA. So C is supplied with ABS, which you correctly spotted is the braking system. Cheers.
      1. Thanks for the help. But (and I’m sure that it’s just me being dim), how does ‘anorak’ = ‘nerd’?
        1. “anorak” is Brit. informal for “studious/obsessive person with largely solitary interests”. Possibly from the idea that gricers wear them.
        2. Long gone are the days when an Eskimo in his anoraq was the epitome of manhood. After these garments started to be made of synthetic materials, such as nylon, it wasn’t long before they became bywords for cheap and nasty items. I believe that in the 80s, ‘He’s an anorak’ was used for people of a left-wing tree-hugging persuasion. In a parallel development, thanks to John Motson and his endless football trivia, an anorak became someone who had never played football but knew all the Rothman Yearbooks by heart. (Ironic, that, since Motty’s garment of choice was a sheepskin jacket.) And so the word spread to trainspotters, computer geeks, film buffs, crossword fanatics (none of us, of course) – nerds, in general.
            1. Thought those of you who help might get a chuckle. At dinner tonight (with three Brits), I asked them for a definition of ‘anorak’. They ALL said ‘nerd” or ‘geek’.
  10. 10:51 for this, held up by putting USUAL in at 7dn without thinking, and pondering how on earth 12ac could end in -LST. Relieved to break the hour for the week
  11. This setter clearly does not take any prisoners. On the strength of one crossing letter A, I confidently inked in Western Seaboard at 5 and then found that the wordplay did not justify it. I had to do the rest of the puzzle with a column of Tipp-Ex® down the middle. There was lots to enjoy here, particularly if you are a masochist. Of the many clues I ticked I particularly liked the wordplay for plangently.

    Sportscast and rangeland were new to me but quite gettable. Outwash was also new to me and the wordplay gave me a struggle. The relevant bit of the Mikado suddenly came to me after much thought for 4A. My Chambers does not have the jam meaning for how do you do. Nor, for that matter, does it support WS Gilbert’s spelling having only how’-d’ye-do or how’dy-do for the jam meaning. Presumably some dictionary somewhere supports the setter’s spelling.

    When I eventually got 5 I thought, like others, that it lacked a definition.

    1. “Presumably some dictionary somewhere supports the setter’s spelling.”

      Yes, as mentioned above, Chambers Slang Dictionary has it for the jam meaning.

      1. I did not mean to imply that I had ignored your earlier note but I did not think that an entry in a dictionary of slang qualified a word for crossword inclusion. See the definition of how-do-you-do in the online urban dictionary.

        I was a bit rushed this morning but, since then, I have checked Collins and it does have this exact spelling for a difficult situation.

        Incidentally I think pickle would be a closer synonym and would not affect the surface of the clue.

        1. COED also attributes this meaning to “how-do-you-do” with hyphens.

          I can’t see any preference between jam and pickle here – COED has one as “an awkward situation or predicament”, the other as “a difficult situation” – different phrasing of the same thing for me. Collins has different wordings but the same effect.

      1. Mother to daughter (me) as she offers a ballpoint to Mum while learning how to tackle this lovely puzzle “It is intellectually arrogant to fill in clues in ink till the puzzle is complete”, closely followed by “And we do not say we are going to do the crossword – we say we are attempting it”
        1. Wise words from your mother and I suppose I have to plead guilty to, at least, second degree intellectual arrogance in that I always do, sorry attempt, my crosswords in ink. I’d be interested to know if other solvers feel the same. The only discussion I recall on this is Peter’s saying that you should always use a pencil and rubber at Cheltenham. Not a situation that is likely to affect me.

          I always a use rolling ball because I feel that my ideas roll with it. If I used a scratchy pencil I would feel that was scratching for ideas. I think I get answers visually rather than intellectually so, if the checked letters stand out boldly on the page, I am more likely to see the word I am looking for. In fact I have only recently weaned myself away from doing crosswords in red ink.

          If I make a mistake, I am happy to go over it in even thicker ink with the right answer. It is only on days like today when I have the intellectual arrogance to write in a 15-letter answer without bothering to justify the wordplay that I have to reach for the Tippex.

          1. I use both. A pen when I am sure that I am correct and a pencil when I am guessing. I live for the day that every square has pen it it – before coming here!
  12. Found this difficult but not impossible. once i had usage i was able to get the How do you do. thought weather forecast was a fiendishly dificult clue…got there in the end-around 55 minutes

    so pleased!

  13. 21:55 .. lots of smiles solving this. The anorak clue reminded me of my school days when many of us were at war with parents who were determined we would wear those hideous, thin, quilted anoraks with a diamond pattern, and most of us were equally determined not to. My parents generally won (which dates me, as do the anoraks).

    Last in: HIPPODROME.

  14. I was quite pleased with myself when I thought I’d finished this in about 20 minutes but a bit later realised I hadn’t put in 6, which took me at least another 5 on its own – one of the two or three terms I’ve never come across that show up in virtually every puzzle. However poor general knowledge is not always an impediment – I had no trouble with 4 (first in in fact) in spite of being blissfully ignorant of the Mikado reference. Forage cap on the other hand held me up for a while.
  15. My COD was 8dn, very neat indeed. I was quite surprised to have finished this one, having been stuck with about 12 clues left unsolved after more than an hour of hard grind. So I was a bit disgruntled to find on reading the blog that I’d got 24ac wrong, having written in OPEN in somewhat optimistically, then forgotten to go back to review it. Never heard of OUTWASH or RANGELAND, but managed to get them in the end from the wordplay.
  16. “well here’s a right how do you do”. What I’m looking forward to next is a bit of how’s your father!
  17. Rather a slog, and did not get cabs till here; rangeland new, outwash rang vague bell, and had to work a bit to get started after 4a went in easily. Thank goodness for the anagrams, a slow half hour.
  18. Went to the pub to buy myself a brain-stimulating pint to help finish off with about 6 clues to go and had a rush of blood to the head, got on a roll and finished the puzzle before my pint arrived. Mind you they aren’t always speedy in that pub. That was the last of several sessions over the day and made a change from much blank staring.

    A Yank in the pub looked at the puzzle and started talking about how different US puzzles are. We dissected a couple of clues and I told him about Kevin from NY on this blog. He said he liked puzzles. Who knows? Maybe he’ll become a convert. I also told him I am a no-hoper with American puzzles as my GK is pretty iffy.

    COD to 26 for striking a pleasantly mournful note. Tx to blog for explanation of 4ac. Best to all.

  19. I scrolled through today’s responses, and couldn’t see a rationale for ‘caff’…. maybe I missed it, but here’s my own two-cent’s worth:
    ‘Tea’ is Cha. Not ‘hot’, so take out the h = ca. Very strong in music, ff.
    Definition? It’s in the overall surface (hence the question mark)….. transport caffs stereotypically serving very strong lukewarm tea.

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