Times 24599 – Flattery will get you somewhere!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 33 minutes

Music: Mozart, Nocturnes and Serenades, Maag/LSO

This puzzle has a good mixture of straightforward and tricky clues. It is quite easy to get started, but it may not be so easy to finish. I had 3/4 of it in 18 minutes, and then had to think hard to get the last few.

Most of the problems come from tricky literals, but knowing this was in itself a bit helpful. There are only a few obscure words or allusions here, but if you don’t know them, you may be stuck.

Newcomers to this blog are reminded that obvious clues are not blogged.

Across
1 MONITORY, M + ON + I + TORY, where ‘warning’ is an adjective and not a noun.
5 ACUITY, A+ C(U)ITY, where those renowned centres of learning are reduced to two anonymous urban areas.
8 Deliberately omitted, you’ve got two out of three letters!
9 ADVERTISER, anagram of TRADE RISE + V. This is one of the easier ones.
10 FLATTERY, F(LATTE)RY. Where you butter someone up, one of the tricky literals.
11 NUMBER, double definition, a witty new variant on a cliched clue.
12 Deliberately omitted – this time you’ve got three out of four letters!
14 BASSOONIST, BA(S + SOON +IS)T. A similar clue appeared recently, those who solved that puzzle will jot this in at sight. I did.
17 OVERTAKING, OVERT + A + KING, another one of the easier ones to lull you into complacency.
20 Yep, deliberately omitted.
23 CHASER, double definition, one referring to a horse, the other to a drinker.
24 CANAILLE, anagram of ALLIANCE. If your vocabulary does not extend this far, you may get into difficulties.
24 CHIVALROUS, CHI(anagram of VALOUR)’S. At least ‘valour’ and ‘chivalrous’ come from different roots, but this is hardly a very deceptive clue.
26 Not only two out of three letters, but a cliched clue that appears often.
27 WEIGHT, sounds like WAIT. A homonym for all dialects, I hope.
28 TEASPOON, TEA + SPOON. My last in, a very annoying clue because there were so many possibilities. I tried putting ‘mess’ as the first element for a while, as the equivalent of ‘unit providing meal’. You do remember all the old golf clubs, don’t you, the mashie and the niblick? Well, I did…..eventually!
 
Down
1 MANIFESTO, anagram of AIMS OFTEN. Should have been easy, wasn’t.
2 NOT HALF, double definition, another obvious one I couldn’t see for a while.
3 TOASTY, TOAST + [Jul]Y, my first in.
4 RIVERBANK, R(I VERB)ANK. I saw this quite early, but didn’t put it in because it wasn’t what I was expecting, a bit too pedestrian.
5 ANTONIO, A + anagram of NOTION, a brilliant clue alluding to the plot of The Merchant of Venice.
6 URSA MINOR, double definition, a rather stock clue that most solvers will recognize instantly.
7 TARGETS, TAR + GETS. It’s the literal that will baffle you, the cryptic is very straightforward provided you see it – you just have to pick the right possibility. No, it doesn’t end in ‘SS’.
13 THRASHING, TH(RASH)ING.
15 SINGAPORE, anagram of GO + PERSIAN. I never saw the cryptic, just figured it out for the blog.
16 TITHE BARN, TITHE(BAR)N, at least I think so! ‘Tithen’ is given as a verb meaning ‘tax’ in Robert’s Middle English dictionary, but I am not entirely satisfied with this explanation. However, it is clear that you must lift and separate ‘tax shelter’. The correct explanation provided by mctext and George in the first two comments. However, as often happens with experienced solvers, I did have the correct solution.
18 VEHICLE, double definition, the first part of which is not clear to me. At least the answer was obvious, so I didn’t ponder it too much.
19 ABREAST, A B(R)EAST.
21 ALLEGRO, ALL + ERGO with the middle letters reversed..
22 Deliberately omitted – seek and ye shall find!

39 comments on “Times 24599 – Flattery will get you somewhere!”

  1. The lawyers are “the bar” and preserve is “tin”. Tax shelter in the sense of a barn where corn is kept so as to use it to pay duty (tithe, a tenth).
    There’s only one A in “bassoonist”.
    23 minutes here and COD to 5dn: simple but effective.
  2. 13 minutes for this, thought I might have gotten closer to 10 but the last few took me a bit to piece together.

    I think 16 is THE BAR in TIN – I got this from the wordplay… similarly MONITORY, CANAILLE and RIVER BANK.

    Is there a type of oil called vehicle oil?

    TOASTY was a funny one for me, it started out as CHEER,Y then became HEART,Y and finally TOAST,Y. I’m just all full of warm fuzzy words.

    1. I’m taking it that it’s vehicle in the sense of medium (“I use oil [paint] as a vehicle for my ideas”). So “oil” is a medium or vehicle. Just a guess but!
  3. Tricky but doable in 25 min. Vehicle no problem if you think of painting. Your vehicle (that which carries the pigment) will be water, oil, acrylic, egg white … whatever. CANAILLE unknown, but got lucky in descrambling. COD would have been ANTONIO, but I think I have seen similar clueing in the past, so instead: SINGAPORE.
  4. Just under the hour, with last in TARGETS. Not a lot to say that hasn’t been said. Am I right in thinking that the ‘in a way’ in 20ac means something like ‘with a different meaning / in a different sense’? Can’t quite see what it’s doing otherwise.
    1. I just assumed that “in a way” means one of the many ways of travelling on a river.
  5. Had a go at this just after midnight and wished I hadn’t because 20 minutes only achieved 7 answers in the SE corner and SOFT at 12ac. On resuming this morning most of it went in steadily in another 30 minutes leaving me with 1ac and 3dn to ponder for another 5.

    Having come here I find I had 1ac wrong. I had a query on it anyway as my answer MIN,A,TORY doesn’t account for ‘about’ in the clue but otherwise I think it works.

    1. Also put MINATORY, alhtough I had dallied with the correct answer. I assume that MIN for ‘minutes’ is dispreferred; ditto for A as an abbreviation for ‘about’ (rather than CA, C, RE etc.).

      Close, but no cigar, I am forced to concede.

      1. Actually MIN for ‘minute(s)’ is in both Collins and Chambers, and Chambers has A for ‘about’ too so I think there might be a case to be argued though that then makes ‘one’ superfluous. Not sure about Joe’s version below which relies on IN = ‘about’ either. No doubt Peter will give us a ruling later.
      2. The ODE makes a point of mentioning ‘a’ stands for ‘ante’ in reference to dates, although a1600 is not likely to be much more specific than c1600. I wonder what sense Chambers had in mind for a=about?
        1. Chambers doesn’t specify and actually it has a whole list of other candidates for ‘A’ as an abbreviation most of which are somewhat suspect in my view e.g. ‘acting’.
  6. I too put in minatory, without a second thought once I saw it: m + in [about] + a [one] + tory. But monitory better, alas. Slightly but significantly. 23 minutes with that error. Thought it went well so a bit fed up. Not significantly.
  7. fell into minatory trap – never even considered it might be wrong. needed an aid at the end. cod 24ac.
  8. 15 minutes, and would have been less if I hadn’t got hung up on RAFT, of all things: my inbuilt Thesaurus wouldn’t let it mean “a great deal”. As one who relies on a raft of funding support, it means interlocking, complicated and with several components but rarely “a great deal” – usually “not quite enough”! Lucky to plump for MONITORY first off, though I await final judgement on that one with interest. Didn’t know CANAILLE other than as a word with no meaning attached. CoD to TITHE BARN with happy memories of Cressing Temple’s two spectacular versions, even if they’re not necessarily tithe barns!
    1. I didn’t quite understand this either while solving the puzzle, but all three of my dictionaries (COD, Collins, Chambers) give the meaning “a large amount” for RAFT, which I’d never heard of before. But then, of course, it fits.
  9. Question marks beside RAFT & VEHICLE and ticks for FLATTERY, MANIFESTO & TITHE BARN. Trickier than your average Monday puzzle, whatever that might mean.
  10. I found this pretty easy, finishing in 20 minutes. MONITORY being the last in. CANAILLE was not familiar, but was the only likely candidate for a French word, though I did wait until I had a couple of letters confirmed before entering it.

    Weakest clue was 12 (obvious wordplay and unconvincing surface). Best for my money was 11.


  11. A decent enough time rendered moot by my never having encountered CANAILLE and by not stopping to question whether ‘canallie’ looked plausibly French. Oh well, or san ferry ann, as they say in Wipers.
  12. Completed this in my average time of 40 minutes with a pretty steady solve. Unlike Vinyl my last in was TOASTY and even then, I wasn’t convinced by it.

    COD to ANTONIO for the wittiest clue!

  14. About 20 minutes, last entry: MINATORY. I didn’t have a dilemma due to being unfamiliar with the word MONITORY, so my choices were limited. I agree the wordplay as parsed by vinyl seems to point most directly to the latter, but when you haven’t heard of it, you’re stuck. Beyond that, I liked TOASTY, FLATTERY and ANTONIO. Regards to all.
  15. This looked like the usual Monday morning doddle with answers such as Net, Soft, Raft and Goa going in with a groan. Then I hit a brick wall. Returning before dinner and fortified by a glass of sauvignon blanc I quickly chipped through the wall. I found this very enjoyable, as well as the wine. I liked the clues for Number, Teaspoon, Antonio and Vehicle amongst others. Sadly I also had minatory. When you find an answer that fits so well (pace Vinyl’s point about threatening and warning) you tend to look no further.

    I don’t think anyone has mentioned this but, in the clue for flattery, presumably the definition is interwoven with the wordplay “something made… with butter”.

    1. I think the def is just “butter” F…RY is cook and LATTE is the coffee made with milk.
      1. Yes, you are right. A closer look at the dictionary
        reveals butter as either a verb or a noun meaning flatter or flattery. Thanks.
  16. Tackled late as busy for a few days – 6:43, but another who put MINATORY based on vague recollection of the meaning and no memory of MONITORY. I’d love to be wrong, but suspect that in competition judgement, the a=about from Chambers wouldn’t be enough.
    1. It’s a comfort to see I was in good company with ‘minatory’. For what it’s worth, the shorter OED quotes Gore Vidal: ‘…the minatory rattle of a leper’s bell’, which certainly was a warning not a threat.

      15d ‘Persian’ is not grammatically within the scope of ‘astray’; shouldn’t it be, if we’re to take the clue as meaning (gopersian)*? (Cf., say, ‘See Persian go astray in Asian country’.) I’m pretty sure I’ve seen other clues like this, where I’ve felt there was a similar scope problem.

      1. In COED and Collins, I couldn’t find a definition for “in” to justify “about” in the clue meaning IN in the answer.
        1. Fair enough – though faintly surprised – as ‘in’ can be used for ‘in the matter of’ which is v. close to ‘about’. Someone told me that ‘a’ is never ‘one’ in Times puzzles, but I’d imagine that it could be nonetheless.
    3. If it’s any consolation, Peter, I made exactly the same mistake – my second in the daily cryptic this year (SCAMPER for SCARPER in No. 24466, another piece of damfool carelessness, was the first). I’d meant to go back and check it, but I got so bogged down trying to justify CHASER that I forgot to.

      At least we can both thank our lucky stars it wasn’t the championship.

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