Times 24571 – no football in the title …

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 14:30

Quite tricky vocabulary here, one of which I zoomed ahead with, and one of which slowed me down at the end. Just completed inside the 15 minutes that Sotira once mentioned as her idea of me driving out of bounds or putting a shot into the water. There’s a slight whiff of chalk dust about this one, with bits of school knowledge dimly recalled to help with a few clues, Cambridge exams and a playground game which I must have missed.

Across
1 HARD(COP)Y – minor ‘wordplay noise’ here from ‘about’ as a possible indicator of the central C.
5 TRIP(O)S – the Tripos seems to be the whole system of exams at Cambridge, but “exxamination” was a close enough def once I’d abandoned the hopeless dilemma of deciding whether the worst possible mark was E, F or U (unclassified, used when I did O-levels).
9 JU(n)G – I was going to leave this out but then wondered about the def a bit – I’d thought of a jug as similar to a wine ‘cooler’ or container for drinks called ‘coolers’, but I think it’s actually jug=prison=cooler that’s intended
10 CHIAROSCURO = (cash curio or)* – today’s foreign word import boosting Peter’s ego when easily seen from the fodder. Slightly naughty def as “painting” really means an effect in painting. If you call this answer obscure, you’re half right – chiaro = ‘clear, bright’, oscuro = ‘dark, obscure’
12 CATCHWORDS = (crowd’s chat)*
13 LECH = ‘look lustfully’, hidden in ‘pale chemise’. I wondered whether lech is a back-formation from lecher, but COED doesn’t say it is
15 C.(ANNA)E. – a battle and in combination with the unfamiliar 4D, the obscurity that slowed me down. When I listed possibles for the last unch in ?A?N?E, A was not one of my candidates.
16 CHARTER = formal grant – R for P swap in chapter=’clerical body’
18 (m)ARCHERS – potentially a bit confusing as ‘soldiers’ could convceivably indicate both marchers and archers
20 NULL = invalid,A,H – a nullah is a dry river-bed or ravine
23 BOYO=rev. of (o=old,yob) – not too hard if you remember that ‘yob’ comes from a reversal of boy.
24 CA(RAM=stuff,ELI=that priest again)SE
26 CON,FINE,MEN,T = ‘labour’ – I suspect the Labour/Conservative combination in the clue is an old trick for this word which I should have spotted more quickly
27 (f)IRE – similar potential confusion to 18, as IRE seems to match both ‘fury’ and (less exactly) ‘passion’
28 NOETIC = relating to mental activity or the intellect – one of those words which I knew was a word but had no real idea of its meaning. It feels like one that Mark T might have used when writing about some medieval thinker. Wordplay is a reversal of (CITE=quote,ON=about)
29 S(ituation),THE,LENS=glass – if you did really old-fashioned geography at school, you might remember that among the industrial towns of Lancashire, St Helens is where the glass comes from, so this is an all-in-one/&lit. Britain’s largest glass maker is still there, so for once the old geography lesson still works.
 
Down
1 HI=”high”=drunken,JACK=sailor
2 REG=man,A(TT=abstaining)A – “man abstaining” appeared to be the TT until AA=support group emerged, prompting a wordplay shortage
3 CACK-HANDED – hack* in (d-dance)*
4 PRISONER’S BASE = (soberness pair)* – a chasing game which was new to me. ‘prisoners’ gradually emerged from checkers, but ‘base’ felt so odd that I waited until I could find the 15A battle to write it in
6 (c)RUSH
7 PRUDE=’Victorian’,NT=New Testament=books
8 SHO(EH=what,O=over)RN – this took a bit longer than it should have done, from looking for a place to fit a reversal of ‘eh’.
11 REDUCING AGENT – def and cryptic def, solved from just enough O-level Chemistry to remember the reduction/oxidisation contrast
14 Today’s omission – the checking letters should be enough – I doubt there’s anything else (4,6) to fit
17 BAR=lawyers,BI(CA.)N – what a relief that my hasty BAR,RI(CA)DE failed to fit just before I concluded that RIDE=discard would have been a dud anyway
19 CA(YEN=desire)NE – ‘cayenne’ can mean cayenne pepper
21 A NIL(IN=home)E – I’d heard of aniline dyes but had no idea that aniline was oily or even liquid
22 SEVERS = splits – South for North swap in Severn=river
25 MINI = “Minnie” = mouse

51 comments on “Times 24571 – no football in the title …”

  1. I took longer than yesterday for this puzzle.

    Like yesterday the right half proved difficult.

    I didn’t have the answer for 29ac ST. HELENS and it’s understandable! I didn’t torture myself and simply gave up! I came here to see the answer.

    ‘Chiaroscuro’ is a word that I remember as the title of a column or the pseudonym of a writer in the now-defunct Illustrated Weekly of India. I must have checked this as well as ‘gallimaufry’ in the dictionary when I, as a 16-year-old boy, thumbed through the magazine with old British, pre-Independence connexions.

    8d SHOEHORN: I got the answer but didn’t see the anno beyond SHORN.

    23a BOYO: As you say, I remembered that ‘yob’ comes from a reversal of boy and it helped. But it’s rather an obscure word for me.

  2. I can see this one causing some problems. Without the benefit of and experience I think I would have struggled here.

    10A CHIAROSCURO has appeared in bar crosswords and there just aren’t that many 11 letter words that start C and end O (that I know of, anyway). I’ve also come across the battle somewhere and clued if I recall correctly in exactly the same way. I think I blogged NULLAH in a Mephisto a while back.

    The St Helens is really obscure I would guess for younger and overseas solvers. The game is just obscure – I’d never heard of it. I see a bit more science with REDUCING AGENT being obvious but ANILINE being a bit more obscure

    25 minutes for me today and I enjoyed the puzzle but I’m expecting some tales of woe on the blog

    1. 11 (C … O):
      CAPRICCIOSO CAUDILLISMO CHEREMKHOVO CHIAROSCURO CINQUECENTO COMPRACHICO COMPRIMARIO CONTINUANDO CONTRABASSO COUNTERMEMO
      With a little help from Smythe.
  3. 52 minutes. Liked the nod to Pilkington’s Glass in 29 ac.

    Aniline: I remember seeing a sort of lava lamp with droplets of aniline when I was studying O-level Physics centuries ago. It was mesmerising watching these little brown spheres travel up and down in a tall beaker of water.

    I just found a similar experiment that is still allowed today; so, contrary to what we hear, all the wonder hasn’t yet been taken out of school science by undue concern about safety!

  4. Finished eventually with some help. Struggled to see that ?T could be ST. Half-a -dozen from wordplay alone including PRISONER’S BASE. The kids’ games of choice – which didn’t involve a ball – where I grew up were Knock Down Ginger and Tin Can Lurky, which these days would result in ASBOs. Was looking at the wrong SHORN ie (S)HOE(HORN)and brain got stuck. Need something a bit easier please.
  5. Now that you mention it, I too must have looked at it as (S)HOE(HORN) and got nowhere!
  6. 28 minutes, held up by the obvious obscurities/unknowns: CANNAE, NULLAH, PRISONERS BASE and ANILINE. Should have known the last as my Great-Grandfather’s PhD research was instrumental in synthesising it. Not so much trouble with ST HELENS as we went there on a school trip once. The incredible thing is that they can’t stop the glass production process. If demand is down, the product is fed back in to the beginning, and so forth.
    Couldn’t parse SHOEHORN before reading Peter’s (as ever) informative blog. (Probably because there were three ways of reading SHORN in the final answer and I couldn’t make any of the remainders make sense. Many thanks.
  7. DNF entirely due to St Helens – no such luck with school trips for me. But quickish until the 17-18-23-28 group and aniline which it had to be though I did not know about the oily liquid definition, only the dyestuffs. Son played prisoners’ base at school – it does have other names. Cannae took a while to come from the memory bank, and I checked the meaning of noetic. Thank you PB for details – s = situation not a familiar abbreviation till I remembered SNAFU!
    1. In ST HELENS, as PB has mentioned above, S is not an abbreviation of ‘situation’ but the initial letter of S from ‘situation, originally’.
    2. I don’t think you should remember s=situation for Times xwd purposes. “Situation, originally” gives you the S. Being part of multi-word abbreviations, however well-known, is not enough to qualify – you will never see “fouled” (let alone the ruder alternative!) as an indicator for F in the Times puzzle.
  8. 18:00, with the last 9 minutes on 8dn, where I eventually gave up and wrote in SM[OTHER]Y.  I’m a bit miffed to see that the actual answer (SHO[EH+O]RN) is ungrammatically indicated by the wordplay (“what has over into cut“).

    Unknowns: NULLAH (20ac), ST HELENS glass (29ac), PRISONER’S BASE (4dn), BARBICAN (17dn), ANILINE (21dn).  CANNAE (15ac) was unfamiliar.  NOETIC (28ac) isn’t a word I’ve used myself, as it happens, but I’ve certainly come across it.

    The definition of CHIAROSCURO in 10ac is fine by Chambers (“a painting in black and white”); for me, what’s dubious is the anagram indicator “flogged”.  More importantly, though, this is a good opportunity to recommend the “Garson Hampfield, Crossword Inker” video to anyone who hasn’t seen it (as prompted by 4:11-4:17).

    Clues of the Day: 29ac (ST HELENS), 7dn (PRUDENT).

    1. I know “flogged” is a bit weird, but I admire the effort to find new anagram indicators. The problem is that because all the really convincing ones have been used many times, a new AI is almost inevitably a flaky AI. See how you feel in about 2030 …
      1. I take your point.  I think there’s still a usefully restraining role to be played by reactionary mutterings like mine, though.  (Assuming anyone’s listening, that is…)
        1. Yes, we’re listening Mark. I was quite taken by “flogged” as an anagrind, not least because the guy who adjudicates the monthly Times Crossword clue competition marked me down for using “knitting” as one!
  9. Another disaster but a different pattern emerged today. Often recently, yesterday for example, I solve about three-quarters fairly swiftly (for me) and am left with one quarter that takes ages. But today I rapidly solved the NW and put in a couple of other answers and then had to slog through the remaining three-quarters at snail’s pace until eventually giving up in disgust after 75 minutes with 8dn still missing, and resorting to a solver. I also checked a few answers along the way in a dictionary when I realised how badly things were going: PRISONER’S BASE (never heard of it and don’t recognise it from its description, though I played many children’s games at primary school), CHIAROSCURO (couldn’t remember the spelling), CANNAE, NULLAH, NOETIC and ANILINE.

    At 8dn, I just couldn’t see the answer even with all the checkers in place. I though of ‘what’ = EH immediately but my big mistake was taking ‘over’ to indicate its reversal. Then I noticed another possibility, that ‘over’ might = OTHER (as in left over) and thought of SMOTHERS which might have fitted with ‘squeezes’ but not ‘squeeze’. Then I thought of ‘squeeze’ = ‘girlfriend/boyfriend’ as came up recently but that didn’t help either. My reaction on seeing the answer was that surely the definition should be ‘squeeze in’ rather than ‘squeeze’?

    1. I agree about “squeeze” as a definition of SHOEHORN (8dn).  It’s hard to avoid this sounding like sour grapes, but I do think this was a poor clue – misleading for the wrong reasons, if you like.
  10. About an hour, including a twenty minute hiatus staring at 8d. O for over has only fairly recently appeared, I think, and it trips me every time. Like jackkt I wanted the EH to be upside down, but I was reasonably convinced SCOSHERE wasn’t a word, although with NOETIC at 28, did I really know, in any epistemological sense? In any case, I originally had ACETIC at 28 (well, most of the intellectuals I know are a bit vinegary) which made 17d BARBICNA, which again I wasn’t entirely convinced by, but with SCOSHERE at 8d…

    On the other side of the anna, I did get CHIASCURORO immediately, only to find I needed to revise the spelling at least 5 times with every new cross checker. My 3rd row across has more black ink in the white squares than the black ones. But a finish is a finish. COD to CARAMELISE, in spite of Eli.

    Oh, and you can count me amongst the ones who did really old-fashioned geography of the mother country, from the other side of the planet, so St Helens went in without too much difficulty.

    1. kororareka
      ‘On the other side of the anna,’ did you say? The coin is dead as a dodo in India; perhaps, as a numismatist you have hoarded one and now and then turn it this way and that?
        1. I guessed as much. Years of solving experience have made coin=anna a Pavlovian response for me. Too bad it doesn’t occur very often any more. Maybe it still does in your 8 year old Times puzzles? Welcome to the present day, by the way. It’s good to hear from you again.
  11. Well I got there in the end but it took a while! I hadn’t heard of PRISONERS BASE but PRISONERS jumped out of the anagram letters by thinking of the “prisoners dilemma” and I waited for the checkers for the BASE.

    The rest I knew. NOETIC was in a recent Mephisto, I believe. I understand that Hannibal’s tactics at Cannae are still taught in military college as exemplary.

  12. Since “noetic” derives from “noesis”, I wonder if we’ll ever see the latter. Or, indeed, the correlative pairs: “noema” and “noematic”.
  13. PS. According to the OED, LECH as a verb is indeed a back-formation from LECHER.
  14. I needed help at the end to get shoehorn and St Helens. It’s ironic that I got so many words that I had never heard of and failed on two that were well within my experience. I’m ashamed to admit that I used to work for Pilkington. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s a very good clue.
    1. ‘Pilkington’ is familiar to me, but not St. Helens. I have seen variations of this term marked on glasses in the Indian market. However, now the name that is often heard is Saint Gobain – who have a factory near Madras.
  15. I’ve no idea why I enjoyed this so much when I didn’t enjoy yesterday’s at all, but I did. And not only because I finished it: I never felt remotely like giving up.
    Too many to list were unknown to me so multiple leaps of faith this morning. By some miracle I got them all right, including CHIAROSCURO where I spent a long time working out all the possibilities once I had all the checking letters.
    I didn’t notice when solving but it does seem to me that there’s a rogue “‘s” in the wordplay for 8dn.
    1. “what’s over” does not represent “EH’S,O” but “EH has O”. As Mark T has already said, “EH has O into SHORN” doesn’t really make grammatical sense as an indication of SHO(EH,O)RN
      1. Ah yes, I see that now, thanks. It’s the surface that doesn’t make grammatical sense though isn’t it? Which I think is why it didn’t even occur to me that it was “has” not “is”.
        1. I can’t see anything grammatically wrong with the surface meaning, but that’s making the same distinction between grammar and semantics as is made when saying that “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is grammatically sound. I do struggle a bit to see what kind of “cut” you would squeeze “what’s over” into, but that’s semantics rather than grammar.
          1. Thanks again. As ever I have a firm grasp but it is of the wrong end of the stick.
            Semantically “is” seems marginally preferable to me (what you might do when you put a bit more TCP than you needed into the cotton wool to treat the graze…?) but it’s a stretch.
            Good old Chomsky. I’m cruelly reminded that at university my intellectual limitations were starkly exposed somewhere between his work (fascinating) and Derrida’s (impenetrable). These days I drift somewhere between Steven Pinker and Sesame Street.
          2. I think you mean “syntactically”. At least, that’s what Chomsky said! For him grammar includes semantics.

            1. I’m not sure I do. I’m trying to squeeze some sort of meaning out of a sentence that is syntactically coherent. I think.
              I’m very happy to be corrected though because I’m so very rusty on this stuff. These days Chomsky is better known for reasons that should not trouble this blog.
            2. You (mctext) seem to have the syntax of comments slightly garbled here. You seem to be talking to keriothe but judging by the indentation and colouring, you replied to my message.

              I think Chomsky agrees with my Concise Oxford that grammar comprises syntax (sentence structure) and morphology (word forms). I cannot see any reason from his own work to indicate that Chomsky uses any of these words with non-standard meanings.

  16. 29 minutes with last 8 minutes on SHOEHORN so similar to MarkT but a bit slower for the rest of it. I had ideas of EH reversed and maybe SHARE for cut and was thinking of squeeze=girlfriend which I have seen recently. Other than that a lot of tough ones. Taking Peter’s golfing analogy I would say that this was Pebble Beach on a windy day so a few out of bounds shots and lost balls were excusable. Don’t think I would ever have broken 20 minutes for this even on my best day and with all the luck in the world.
  17. 36 minutes, but one mistake: ST PETERS was a forlorn guess based on what I hoped was some forgotten New Testament reference to Peter liking a drink (crossing myself as I write).

    I refuse to be told that these puzzles haven’t become considerably harder of late. Is it our fault? I’m going to have to rethink my policy of solving these in bed last thing at night, which is too often turning into the early hours of the morning.

    I don’t think anyone else has said it, so I’ll whisper a quiet: Come on , England.

    1. There. All it took was a little gentle prodding and England played half-way well. And well done the USA (through gritted teeth).
  18. About half was straightforward, but with some unfamiliar expressions and/or tricky wordplay I found it a struggle to finish. “Prisoner’s Base’ meant nothing to me. I didn’t know ‘Barbican’ as anything other than a theatre and area of London, and the meanings of ‘noetic’ and ‘aniline’ eluded me. The latter, ‘shoehorn’ and St Helens were the last three to go in after a good 40 minutes.

    A nice challenge, with everything attainable from the wordplay.

    1. Here’s the missing Barbican connection. The London Encycopedia confirms that the ‘Barbican’ name precedes the modern estate by several centuries, though possibly not applying to exactly the same area [“Cripplegate Estate” was probably a non-starter].
  19. Good thoughtful puzzle. I liked 29 across; a friend of mine from the NW of England would point out to anyone who accidentally obscured his view of the TV “You weren’t made in St Helens, you know”.
  20. Two wrong (‘eretic’ for ‘noetic’ – which I should have got with my ancient Greek background – and ‘reducing cream’ for ‘reducing agent’) meant I stymied myself on four of the five I couldn’t get (17, 21, 24 & 29). Like others, I ended up putting in SMOTHERY in the NE. Enjoyed this, despite an effort that was part Robert Green (blunders) and part Jamie Carragher (soo slow).
  21. Like keriothe and others, I enjoyed this puzzle a lot. I thought ST HELENS and SHOEHORN were cracking clues and I had come across NOETIC and NULLAH in the Mephisto. We played PRISONERS BASE at school light years ago but called it Cops and Robbers!

    Wasn’t sure about CANNAE and ANALINE but couldn’t think of anything better. Altogether a lovely 45 minutes.

  22. Another for me to make a complete meal of. I had about 43 different spellings for 10 across, remembered the word vaguely, no idea on how to spell it (and thought it ended in an A). So that kept me going forever, but eventually got there in about four sessions. NOETIC, ST HELENS, CANNAE, PRISONERS BASE, all from wordplay alone. SHOEHORN without understanding the wordplay, similarly REGATTA. Given my run this week we should all be relieved it’s not my turn tomorrow.
  23. 28:20 here. Some of the same problems as most other people here – never heard of PRISONER’S BASE or ST HELENS glass, but I had come across NULLAH somewhere (almost certainly a barred cryptic), remembered CANNAE from Latin O-level, and knew NOETIC from an essay on Open Source software I read years ago: Homesteading the Noosphere by Eric Raymond. Last in was SHOEHORN, like other trying to work EH reversed into it, but eventually got there from cut=SHORN around (something).
  24. A fair start and then almost fatally held up by three or four toughies – glad to duck under the hour. If no-one has heard of Prisoner’s Base it seems questionable. Why o for over? And I agree about the dodgy surface meaning in 8. I suppose the what’s over/cut antithesis may have attracted the setter but it doesn’t seem enough. Otherwise a neat construction with that touch of razor-edge.
    1. Both o=over(s) (cricket scorecards) and prisoner’s base are in the Concise Oxford, which I’m happy to accept as a better guide than our collective memory, even if none of us have heard of “prisoner’s base”. But if you look carefully above, three of us have heard of it.
  25. I suspect this is a variant of the game that meant so much to me at a certain age, 1-2-3-Block.
  26. About 40 minutes, ending with SHOEHORN, and the crossing ANILINE/ST HELENS. Never heard of NULLAH, NOETIC, or the ST HELENS glass. The UKisms TRIPOS, I’d seen in these puzzles before, and CACK-HANDED I just didn’t know, so all the above from wordplay alone. The S, THE LENS wordplay in 28 was pretty clever, but before coming here I thought the def. was ‘situation’ as a place name. Seeing here that it’s a well known place of glass making, it’s a great clue, COD. I thought this a very good puzzle, although I agree with the slight early quibble that SHOEHORN means ‘squeeze in’, not merely ‘squeeze’. Thanks to the setter, regards to all.

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