Times 24584 – The Vale of Tempe

42 comments on “Times 24584 – The Vale of Tempe”

1. A bit on the tougher side for me, about 40 minutes. I agree with the anonymous parsings above for 5 and 8. I still don’t entirely get SLALOM; I don’t disagree with your expalnation Uncle Yap, but ‘slam’ doesn’t quite get me to ‘savage’, although I can’t see any other explanation, so I think you are correct. In that case I don’t think this clue is very good. On the other hand, there were many very good ones here, esp. DECIMATE. Held up for a time by entering STILLEST at 16, with ‘stil’ as the knife, but later correcting that when I finally saw CAP AND BELLS, not the most familiar phrase to us Americans. Regards.
   1. “Savage” => “slam” seems fine to me. Think book reviewing?
2. I think 5dn is a homonym of SEEK (look for) + WAKE (foamy water).

   8dn is ES (French 2nd person singular “to be” = art as in “thou art) + SAY + ITS around S.

   1. Agreed: that’s how they work. And 2dn is threaT plus an anagram of “absent”. Slight correction to 3dn: “tome”. And to 22ac: “pan” is just colloquial for “face”.
3. Came up just short on this, failing to get ALUMNUS, which irks, as I was working along NUS lines. Put ‘truants’ in in desperation to complete the grid; only I never quite completed it, as 5dn remained unfilled. I was thinking of -ucky and -unky as possible endings; I must store the “q before u” guideline away for later use.

   Took ages over CAP AND BELLS, which was a bit disheartening, as I had read the expression in a Yeats poem only yesterday. More fool I, I suppose. COD to STABLEST.

4. wasn’t there some discussion just the other day about Atlas having to hold up the Sky not the world but artists have depicted the latter out of convenience. A case of as above so below. Apropos nothing.
   1. The night sky has often been mapped onto the outside of a sphere like the globes that show the earth’s surface. In theory it is the same as looking up from the surface of the earth to the sky and overcomes the problem of not being able to see the interior of a sphere. The sphere that Atlas holds in most illustrations is one with the night sky depicted on it, but is often blank and people just assume it is a planet. But no doubt he’s ended up holding a growing number of little planet earths over the years due to the confusion.
5. I found this somewhat more challenging than the past couple of days and completed it in 53 minutes, however on going back to review the wordplay I discovered a couple of spelling errors.

   I thought I was in for an even harder time when I began by looking at the 3-letter clues and only solved one of them (23ac).

   I took for ever to get CAP AND BELLS and ALUMNUS was my last in.

   I was pleased to spot ES for ‘French art’ on first reading. I have been caught out by this so many times in the past.

6. I didn’t understand ‘antelope’, but what else could it be? Got everything else, although I took a while to understand the homonym they were after in ‘seaquake’.

   ‘Skivvies’ is an example of a word that means entirely different things in the US and the UK, but fortunately I knew the UK meaning. I had heard of the Vale of Tempe, but thought Arizona, not Greece. But all correct, no worries.

7. 12:02 here, with the last couple of minutes spent on CAP AND BELLS. For some reason I couldn’t get CUP AND BALLS out of my head, but knew it had to be wrong!
8. I was puzzled by vinyl1’s point about skivvies – m-w.com just had the meaning I expected. But the different meanings are discussed here.

   I was also a bit sceptical about ‘Hantsharing’. Adrian Room’s Dictionary of British Place Names links ‘Hants’ to Hantescire in the Domesday book, which in turn resembles ‘Hamtunscir’ in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle (apparently the Normans found the ‘mt’ hard to pronounce). This version matches a very similar story for Northamptonshire.

   1. I’ve done a bit of rooting around on Google. “Hantsharing” is a misspelling of “Hantshaving” in an answer to a question on answers.com. “Hantshaving” is also an error, and has only ever been the old name for Hampshire due to someone’s misreading of certain pages in the 1891 census.

      I’m from Southampton myself, and have heard of both Hamtunscir and the Domesday book’s Hantescire. We were taught those things in primary school.

   2. Not a word I use a lot, but my understanding/intuition was that it referred to both sexes. For what it’s worth, freedictionary.com provides some support for this: ‘a servant, esp. a female, who does menial work of all kinds’. I wonder if any of the heavweight dictionaries agree.
      1. Collins agrees – in fact, the definition you quote matches part of the Collins def. verbatim. ODE has “female” rather than “esp. a female”.
9. Slow going today, handicapped not just by a challenging grid but a noisily conversational Central Line: about 25 minutes total. I didn’t know TEMPE, and couldn’t parse CAP AND BELLS, but put them in anyway. Favourites were last in, the crossing pair of LEONARD and SLALOM, which I thought was brilliantly disguised.
10. This was a quite straightforward solve for me. It even had my name on it. I just needed a couple of minutes at the end to get seaquake. I should have remembered the old adage that, if you have a U, try putting a Q in front of it.

    I have fallen foul of French art, Romanian currency and the Valley of Tempe in the past so no trouble there. I did not know pan for face so I could not parse Cap and Bells, but it had to be.

11. Slow start then they just more or less fell in; 25 minutes-ish. Didn’t appreciate as much as I might have as hungover; it seemed a bit one-two-clunk somehow. Mildly surprised at the American pronunciation expected of Montana. Many many years ago saw a good clue for slalom, something to do with Chinese morals being backward. Doubt whether allowable now.
    1. Meant to mention that US pronunciation: it also hit me as mildly, but pleasantly, surprising, and more accurate than some of the sounzabitlike clues we sometime have.
    2. Probably went the way of all flesh at the samne time as Benny Hill’s Jiang Zemin lookalike, Chow Mein.
12. Apart from CAP AND BELLS (never heard of), raced through left side thinking this would be a doddle but then horrendous struggle for the rest. Wordplay for CAP AND BELLS, TEMPERATE, LEU and DENARII. Failed to lift and separate “graduate students”, thinking ALUMNIS must be plural of ALUMNUS and that I would worry about NIS later. 19th Century for LITTLE WOMEN I suppose is there just to obfuscate. COD to the brilliant SLALOM, my last in.
13. Left with SEAQUAKE undone. I should have followed the old adage – if you see a U try putting a Q in front of it. Otherwise a reasonably straightforward puzzle. I liked REDUCTION. Well spotted.
14. Started off very slowly – first in was 25ac, but steadily got easier as checking letters appeared, until after half an hour I ended up stuck on 15ac, 5d, 21d. Probably should have persisted, or put it to one side for a bit, but I’m afraid I cheated for the remaining three!
15. I took 40 minutes to complete this, periodically nodding off because I was so sleepy. I hope I would have been quicker had I been fully awake since it didn’t seem a hard puzzle in retrospect.

    I thought the definition for 17 was poor. To decimate is to destroy a tenth of, which proportionally is not a lot. It’s one of those words that is so often misused that the correct meaning seems to have been forgotten.
    I also didn’t like the homophone for 5 since the syllabic breaks of SEA QUAKE and SEEK WAKE don’t match.

    Otherwise the clues were rather good.

    1. The Concise Oxford says that the original meaning has been more or less totally superseded by the more general sense ‘kill or destroy (a large proportion of)’. It goes on to day “Some traditionalists argue that this is inforrect, but it is clear that this is now part of standard English.”

       1. In that case the setter is exonerated. I didn’t check COD, though I did check Chambers, which doesn’t go as far as that, but merely says “(loosely)” to reduce very heavily.

          Although I generally subscribe to the notion that English is a living language, and that usage does change over time, I also feel that a certain amount of resistance to change is sometimes justified, if only to preserve the richness and variety of the English language. There are plenty of synonyms for ‘destroy’, but none, as far as I know, for ‘decimate’ in its strict sense.

          However, it’s probably not a good example to make an issue over since it’s difficult to imagine a modern context in which ‘decimate’ in its original sense would be applicable.

16. Nice puzzle, which I solved top to bottom, NW to SE. About 40 minutes.

    Was surprised at 20d. I have never seen in the Times an example such as mon-TANNER: other than our US friends, I doubt whether many Times readers could relate to this homophone. Now I have probably set a false hare running!

    COD to (not 20d) ESSAYISTS.

    1. I can’t be sure that I’ve ever heard a ‘British’ version of Montana – I guess the expectation is that the last two vowels would match the British version of “banana”. I don’t think it takes too much knowledge of American speech to say it their way – I can’t imagine anyone saying Alabama as “Alabarmer”, for instance.

       (and any American-ness here is restricted to ‘Montana’ – the vast majority of Americans would pronounce the R in ‘tanner’)

       1. Never out-pedant a pedant: so I won’t! But I DO say Alabarma!!

          Hare cut.

       2. … of white Americans.
17. Unremarkable but pleasant puzzle solved in 25 minutes with no hysteria or pyrotechnics.
18. 19.20 First scan of across entries didn’t give but downs were a bit better. Seemed on course for a routine 12-14 minute solve but was held up by a the treble of 16,21 and 22. CAP AND BELLS was an unknown and even when I got it ( after working out the devilish SLALOM) I still couldn’t fathom the wordplay.
    Also took a while with SEAQUAKE , which only got after using the old “see a U and try a Q before it” trick
19. I was stuck on the NE corner, and decided to use my favourite web-aid to help with the last three answers. It has disappeared, up for sale. The other ones I tried were pretty useless. Can anyone suggest a good alternative to one across?
    1. try onelook, but you have to leave the gaps between words unlike oneacross.
    2. For me, nothing quite beats the 2003 CD Chambers: fully searchable, with Thesaurus and extras, and it does anagrams. You can query in the form ?x?x?, or even *xxx, where the * stands for any number of letters. I don’t usually use it for the Times, but for the Listener and Mephisto, it’s a great help. You might like to check PB’s review on Amazon
    3. There’s a little publicised one – just some uni researcher’s pet project, I think – that I’ve been using forever when I get stuck on the club monthly. It very sensibly uses a full stop for missing letters. The Mega word List is just that.

       It’s a gem:

       http://casr.adelaide.edu.au/craig/wow.html

    4. I always use Quinapalus Word Matcher. Its word lists are not quite as comprehensive as TEA’s, but it can link the results to Onelook for definitions. I only tend to use it for the Listener and Magpie, and then only if I’m away from home, but it’s the best online crossword aid I’ve found.
    5. These are the very type of resource I’ve been looking for. Tested each with s…u.k. and they came up trumps.
20. Uncle Yap, good to see you solving the Times, I encountered you first over at fifteen squared helping me to understand the Guardian. Just a picky point about Atlas, the poor lad was charged with holding up the heavens/sky not the world.

    I’ve only just discovered this site and as I don’t usually get around to the Times until late evening, after a glass of wine, I don’t often have the strength to check the answers.

    I’m still not sure about pan for face in 22ac.

    1. pan=face: this is in both Concise Oxford (as ‘US informal’), Chambers and Collins (just ‘slang’ in these two). That said, I’m not sure that I’ve ever come across it outside xwds. All 6 of the citations in the OED seem to come from the US. Our closest familiar link is probably “deadpan”.
21. Oh dear, needed assistance with two for the second day in a row. CAP AND BELLS which I hadn’t heard of and the head-banging SEAQUAKE – nice one. Also didn’t understand ANTELOPES and SLALOM, but they went in anyway. So 35 min. A quality crossword, so I am not picking out any particular clue. Thank you Setter.
22. Certainly more accessible than yesterday. I eventually yielded to CAP AND BELLS without knowing why (thanks!). The QUAKE part of the homophone eluded me as O was thinking of SEE not SEEK. I enjoyed 8d the most.
23. It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence that ‘ampshire is an anagram of seraphim could it? And are they the beasts covered in eyes in Revelation? Is that I’s? But what about extra letter? Isn’t it already pluralised? Oh it CAN be a coincidence…

    that held me up for a LONG time.

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