Times 24560 – Nag, Nag & Nag

53 comments on “Times 24560 – Nag, Nag & Nag”

1. 40 minutes to get two wrong. I invented the DUNBAR at 6, a chocolate coated Dundee cake in a wrapper, and at 14 couldn’t decide whether it was CESSA as in “cease” and something Latin for “fire”, or something Latin for “punch up the conk” and BELLI for “good”. In the end belli for belligerent might have led me to casus for cause. It’s easy to be wise after Uncle Yap has told you the answer.

   1. Ha! – I just sampled a delicious dunbar as well. It was brown too!
      1. I believe in Glasgow you can get them deep fried.
         1. I believe in Glasgow you can get anything deepfried
2. I got through this in under 15 minutes, quickest of the week; held up at the end at 6D, where I needed to remember that CUMBER is really a word, although not one you see very often at all. Koro, I also thought of Dunbar from ‘brown hamper’, but I kept trying since I couldn’t see any explanation for the ‘picnic’ part of the clue. Eventually saw CUMBER from the wordplay, but still hesitated a bit, since I thought it either obscure or archaic, but I don’t see it labeled as such. Thanks Uncle Yap. Regards.
3. Cracked the 10m barrier (just) today after spending ages just staring at yesterday’s puzzle. Strange how these things go. I’m sure there will be complaints about the chestnut factor later in the day — which is the only reason I did this relatively quickly.
4. Stumped for a time by 14 ending in i but got there in the end. 23 minutes, on my infinitesimally slow progress to an under-20. Good work-out (so to speak). Thanks to Uncle Yap, if he doesn’t mind being so addressed by one probably older.
5. I too had my quickest time of the week (58 minutes) and got two wrong (CAUSA put in stupidly instead of CASUS BELLI – shouldn’t really misspell anagrams – and subsequently SAUCY for SASSY).

   Last in CUMBER (guessed from ‘encumbrance’) and ILEUM (dredged up from O-level biology). COD to BUTTRESS.

6. Got through most of this pretty quickly, but then hit a wall on the eastern side. Slowly groped my way to REMISSLY – which must win an award as the ugliest word of the week – then fell into the same CAUSA/SAUCY trap as ulaca. Eventually sorted it all out though, after about 50 minutes.
7. 45 minutes for all but four in the NE corner. Eventually I worked out REMISSLY from the wordplay which gave the Y checker in 18ac and confirmed my suspicions that it must be SASSY though I had no idea why until coming here. I’m not sure I knew sissy as an alternative to cissy and I don’t think of SASSY as bold, more cheeky or impertinent as do Collins and Chambers, but COED has it.

   I needed assistance for the last two:

   I had a complete mental block at 11. Even with all the checkers in place (6dn not solved but B for British assumed as the first letter) I just couldn’t think of an Indian food that fitted. My first idea had been BALTI but solving 7dn had put paid to that. My only consolation is that when searching on B?A?I Chamber’s Word Wizard doesn’t come up with BHAJI either. Strange, because of the various possible spellings this is the one that’s listed as the main entry in my edition of their dictionary. There are lots of variants of HAJI too so there’s plenty of room for confusion if one doesn’t happen to know the one that’s needed on the day.

   As for 6dn I also thought of Dunbar and couldn’t see past it. It’s a pity when trying to remember things essential to a good picnic on a Summer’s day I didn’t get round to cucumber sandwiches. It might have prodded my memory.

   1. Indeed, it was these overrated items (give me cheese and pickle any day) that led me to ‘encumbrance’.
8. Steady finish after fast start. SYRINGA and ILEUM from wordplay. As others only real problem was jiggling the letters for CASUS until I sorted the difficult SASSY. Not much to smile at here.
9. 7:14 for this one. Last two answers were the MERCILESS/TOLERATION crossing of near-opposites, with the (E,LOT) reversal the key to getting them. Minor delay at 18 with “feeble person” = PUSSY (‘N Amer informal’ in ODE, though not in COED), with a one-letter change giving PUSHY=bold. But then knew that 19 had to be the old favourite ILEUM, even though I never saw the wordplay, so from PM??NESS for 18D, something had to give. Happy that the SISSY/SASSY change is specifically “one small change” because I and A can both mean “one”.
   Also had DUN??? as my first idea for 6D but it went nowhere.

   Moving on to the composers, I usually try to give you a clip of something you know. For César Franck (never heard of the other one!), you’ll all have heard Panis Angelicus, and concert-goers will probably know his Symphony. Bliss is trickier! His biggest public impact was possibly writing the music for the film Things to Come. I’d vaguely heard of his brass band piece Kenilworth – maybe I played it when I was briefly in a local band.

   1. Just on Monday, the HK Welsh Choir newsletter announced that we would soon start learning ‘Panus Angelicus’, rekindling the old argument on the corporeality of angels. ‘Panus’ is Italian for foreskin.
      1. I hate to spoil a joke but I think someone is pulling your leg. As far as I can tell, the Italian for foreskin is “prepuzio”. This bizarre bit of religious history from Wikipedia confirms that the Latin for foreskin is not ‘panus’ either.
         1. I was told this by our accompanist, who hails from Trieste, so, unless he was winding me up, I’d imagine it’s correct, even if it’s slang or dialectal.
            1. Dialect sounds possible. As far as I can tell from flicking through an English-Italian dictionary, standard Italian just doesn’t have words ending -us.
               1. The listing of Franck’s works gives the title as Panis Angelicus, bread of the angels. My wife hails also from the Trieste area, and has never heard of the word panus. I think the accompanist must have been having a laugh, based on the similarity of panis and, well, a similar word.
                  1. I’m sure the subject line was ulaca’s way of telling us he knows it’s really ‘panis’.
                     1. doh!
                  2. Sorry, that was me posting as Nonnie earlier. Interesting, Gradese. I’ll ask my friend Enrico what gives. Could it be Slovene? German? Serbo-Croat? Croato-Serb? Albanian?
         2. In case anyone’s stll following this esoteric discussion, Enrico’s replied as follows (I obviously misheard him in the car):

            “It’s Latin. If you want, the Italian “panuzze” can be derived from that, and it’s a dialect word for nappies. Panus can mean as well (in Latin) the part of the candle that collects the melted wax, but it is used for foreskin as well.”

            I have to say, not a Latin word I came across in Livy or Virgil, although there’s always a chance Catullus used it. Sadly, all our texts were expurgated …

   2. Perhaps someone should let the folks at ODE know that ‘pussy’ is rather more than ‘informal’, it’s taboo, even if used in the ‘wimp’ sense.Hell, you can’t even use it to talk about a cat.
   3. 7:40 for me. SASSY was the one answer that prevented another clean sweep as (with –S-Y in place) I too assumed that “feeble person” was PUSSY, and (in desperation) bunged in HUSSY.
10. Came up one short today (couldn’t think of anything sensible to fit M?R?I?E?S at 12) and had LUMBER wrongly at 6. Straightforward solve apart from those two. Enjoyed FALL OUT and DRESS CODE. BLISS and FRANCK from wordplays. RUNIC reminded me of Tolkien’s LOTR. Am puzzled how UNDER can mean “managed.”
    1. UNDER means “managed by”, i.e. Man Utd have done quite well under Sir Alex Ferguson.
11. 12:30 here, but definitely a puzzle of two halves, as I filled in the top half in about 3 minutes and looked set for a scorching time. However, the muse left me and the bottom half became a bit of a struggle. Nothing went in for a few minutes, then eventually I cracked BRIDLEWAY, which gave me YARDSTICK and then CASUS BELLI, and finished quickly from there.
12. last in 6d where i too thought of dunbar, having looked it up was certain i was wrong, and finally stumbled on correct answer. first in bhaji – perhaps cod 14d for a pretty tricky anagram.
13. 17 minutes; helped by several of the words having very recent personal significance. (Syringa, Franck, bridleway). The scientist in me says mere coincidence, but it can be quite unsettling when, as happened some time ago, half-a-dozen unusual and recently used words appear in the next puzzle.
    1. > The scientist in me …
       This should cause a few cringes then:
       http://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon
       1. Thanks for that. You probably know about the appearance of D-Day code words such as UTAH, OMAHA, OVERLORD, MULBERRY and NEPTUNE in the Daily Telegraph crosswords of May 1944, prior to the Normandy landings. This caused consternation in the British security services; though I believe a plausible explanation, other than coincidence, has recently been put forward.
          1. Not that recent, but I believe this gives the current state of knowledge.
       2. This phenomenon does seem particularly common with crosswords, but if you focus on a set of (often unusual) words on a daily basis it’s not really surprising that from time to time you’ve encountered one or two of them recently.
          It still feels a spooky though!
       3. I’ve always thought this was just a case of returns to the origin in a random walk. In a simple step up/step down random walk, the walk will return to the origin with probability one, but the most probable number of returns is 0. So, the walk spends a great deal of its time nowhere near where it started, but when it does return, because its local movement is to jiggle about with high frequency, it tends to hit the origin a few times before it moves off again. Watch the three little animated motes in the Wiki article. When they do bump into each other, which is rare, they tend to do so more than once in rapid succession. If you took an average number of bumps in a series, it might be near three. We’re all of just random walkers, when it comes down to it.
14. Obviously dim today – 25 m and last in 17d/20a – tenured as a special meaning new though got from wordplay. Also 8d, not a common adverb. Interesting grid – no really long ones, nice balance of clue types.
    1. Tenured Radicals is one of the more snappily-titled books I have read. Rather good too.
15. 15 minutes here – pretty straightforward for me, which was a relief after yesterday. I hesitated a bit about CUMBER but deduced it from “encumbrance” like others. I didn’t know Bliss the composer but it was obvious from the alternative definition. And the word “shrub” induced the usual panic but fortunately my fear that there might be another word fitting R?N? meaning “enclosure” proved unfounded.
16. This was a bit of a plod and I was slightly cumbered by some unusual words and alternative spellings. I had to convince myself that sissy was a valid alternative to cissy before doing the, to me, vaguely described substitution.

    I guessed the Jamaican home meaning of yard from the word Yardie. Chambers does not list this meaning but under the derivation of Yardie it has “Jamaican dialect yard a dwelling, home or (by Jamaicans abroad) Jamaica”

17. 13 minutes today,which was just as well as the Central Line was speeding to catch up time, hence some very shaky looking entries. Held up for a while on MERCILESS, trying to work out how ERIL could mean angry, before realising it was the other E. Glad to have the cluing for SYRINGA, or I’d never have sorted out the Y and I. I agree there were quite a few chestnuts, but I like meeting old friends!
    I did wonder whether there was a nod in the direction of the picnic essential cucumber, and indeed whether that might have been in the original clue. Glad I didn’t have to rule out dunbar – didn’t think of it. Favourite clue BRIDLEWAY
18. 10:07 .. Like linxit, a really fast start, but I seem to have lost the knack of finishing the thing – I start thinking about the end result and forget to do the actual solving. I fear I wouldn’t be much good in a penalty shoot-out (but then I am English).
19. Back to normal today, with no attack of anagrammitis! 20 minutes.

    Stuck only for a moment at 11a: BHAJI is a cracking clue and my COD.

20. a good sesnible puzzle. only oddities i guess were cumber which you could get from the word play and perhaps Sassy where i too went down the same route as Peter initially but i dont know many words that begin with Pm so abandoned that for the more polite Sassy…rather than Pushy from Pussy…
21. I found this the easiest of the week, finishing in 20 minutes, albeit with the invented DUNBAR instead of CUMBER (glad I was not alone in this).
    Some quite nice clues (19 appealed for it’s neat surface and wordplay). I’m not sure that ‘for’ is at all justified in 13. It’s obviously there for the surface, but it’s completely redundant in the cryptic reading, and arguably wrong as a link between definition and wordplay (whereas ‘needed’ can be justified).
    1. I’m inclined to agree, though I noticed nothing amiss in my speed-solving haste. The idea in the recent past in Times puzzles has been that the wordplay is for the def. (or the answer represented by it), not the other way round.
22. Went great guns through this, however came unstuck with 6d which I guessed wrongly (RUBBER!!!), and 14d where I could see the anagram, but had never heard the phrase so cheated rather than guessed. Apart from that the easiest for a while I thought.
23. 6:54 despite stupidly putting in BARTOK at 22 having got the K only. Helped by previous X-word meetings with CASUS BELLI and SYRINGA which are terms I otherwise wouldn’t know. I didn’t know Yard in the 29 sense although I now see where the term Yardie comes from.
24. 19 minutes but with one wrong. Like Koro I went with Dunbar, but I imagined it as a leather-backed tartan picnic blanket favoured by toffs.

    “Jeeves, I expect I shall get peckish whilst shooting grouse with Gussie and that insufferable galumph Spode. Is the picnic hamper sufficently provendered?”

    “Indeed sir, and as the grass may be somewhat damp following last night’s downpour, which fortuitously appears to have washed away your footprints from outside the library window, I have taken the precaution of packing Mrs Travis’s best dunbar.”

    I also caused myself problems in the NW corner by hastily plumping for REracted at 1ac. Syringa and casus belli from wordplay.

    I think I must have used up all my good sense tackling the 3rd qualifier immediately beforehand.

    1. Bravo! Worthy of PGW. And proving again that wrong answers are far more interesting than right ones.
       1. I’m afraid I don’t agree. PGW would never have used the word ‘fortuitously’ when the appropriate one is presumably ‘fortunately’. It is a very modern thing to confuse the two.
          1. I think Jeeves knew what he was saying in that the footprints were washed away by chance/accidentally. Bertie, though, will have taken it to mean fortunately.

             I do believe, however, that Aunt Dahlia’s surname is Travers, not Travis. Apologies to Plum.

             1. Yes fair enough. I could see that it might perfectly well have been fortuitously in the correct sense, but my point really is that this word is not really one that I associate with PGW. Too modern, although it probably isn’t.
25. What fun this blog is. By arriving late I have learned what isn’t the Italian for foreskin, what a dunbar is and a myriad of other wonderful information. Far more entertaining than the puzzle which I think was predominantly standard Telegraph fare and took 10 minutes without much thought needed.
    1. There is a parlor game where the players take obscure words that none of them know, and make up definitions for them. The judge puts in the real definitions, and then the players try to pick the correct definition from the full list. You get points by getting the others to pick your definition instead of the real one.

       Of course, this wouldn’t work for us, since we know all the obscure words.

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