Times 24601 – Locum Tenens

36 comments on “Times 24601 – Locum Tenens”

1. Rather pleased to find out the hotel I’m staying in has a printer, so got my crossword as I usually do and finished it in 13 minutes.

   Needed wordplay to get COLD WAVE, LINCTUSES and VIDELICET and for once everything went in with understanding of wordplay.

   I think 6 down is a double definition, centering on two meanings for BALANCE.

2. For some reason, I couldn’t work out LAID UP; and still don’t think it’s fair. If you have a dicky leg, is the leg laid up?
   1. No, but if you’re laid up you’re dicky. I spent too long trying to use GAME (meaning both “dicky” and “bet”,) but GAME UP just didn’t work!
3. This is also a DD. Geronimo was an Apache brave.
   Barbara
4. > if you’re laid up you’re dicky.
   Perhaps, but not vice versa; which is what the clue implies.
5. I am here (briefly) – just don’t have time to write a report. Solved in 16:23 here, also finding it quite tough, though partly from garbled writing of one answer, not spotted until stuck.

   Can’t see the problem with 18 – both can mean unwell. In COED “dicky” has a wider range of meanings, so there’s no “unindicated d.b.e.” problem.

6. I found this a real challenge, completing in ten minutes short of two hours, with four wrong. The NE proved the toughest nut to crack, not helped by missing the hidden clue – inevitable, I suppose, after inventing one yesterday. Without the ‘c’ that might have led me to VIDELICET, I plumped for ‘sidelight’ (‘sight’ around ‘deli’), attempting to convince myself about the former via the ‘something shocking or distressing’ definition (‘sight for sore eyes’). As a result of failing to get 4ac, I faffed around with all kinds of weird combinations of letters at 4dn, but couldn’t of course come up with anything. I will store away V for ‘see’ for future reference alongside ‘lo’.

   Kicked myself when I saw LAID UP, as I was so close with ‘paid up’. Thanks to Yap Suk, as always.

7. Just deleted my carefully written comment before clicking Post and can’t be bothered to write it all again. 55 minutes steady solve over three sessions. No aids. No errors.
8. Put me down in the struggled category. Last in CHOPIN! I seem to have forgotten not only the old maxim that says if a clue makes no sense at all then it’s probably the hidden word clue, but also the more recent maxim that says if you haven’t had a hidden word clue yet and you’re down to the last clue, then it’s probably the hidden word clue. The irony is I solved it by getting accepted=IN, which made the French opinion CHOP as in “Entrez pour votre chop”. Otherwise, I had a fine time. I liked VIRGINIA REEL and CATHERINE WHEELS.
9. A 20 minute stroll here.

   One could get a bit picky about some of this. I can imagine uproar in the nunneries about equating “virgin” with “young”. A cold snap isn’t unwelcome to everybody and can be beneficial in controlling bugs. At 5D “causing dismay” surely leads to “disheartening”. To go into debt is to lose ones positive balance – a balance can be negative, it’s just a balancing number.

   I note that the bi-centenary of Chopin’s birth finds its way into the Times but Darwin last year – no way!!

   1. Dismay as verb is OK, the words before “causing” bringing it about. For the other quibbles, surely it’s heavy-majority usage of the word or phrase that we go on; it would be too tedious to put a question-mark or some such qualifier in all the time. Darwin seemed to be all over the place last year – was he really forgotten about by ‘The Times’? I take the paper and certainly wasn’t aware of the omission. Sorry about this dj – generally I agree with you on everything!
      1. I don’t think they’re serious quibbles – just a bit loose for me

         No, Darwin didn’t make it into the crossword last year either in relation to his personal anniversary or the publication of “Origins” – a great shame in my view

   2. I was more concerned that after 2010, the Chopin clue will be obsolete, but they’ll probably print the puzzle in a book anyway.
      1. If this puzzle is included in a book of Times puzzles, there is the defence that (unlike most books of UK newspaper puzzles), the Times books always state the time period covered by the original publication dates of the puzzles.
   3. Re virgin, the Latin ‘virgo’ carried the sense of a girl of marriageable age. Of course, some men – as well as elderly nuns – may be up in arms about the “sexism” of the setter!

      According to Wikipedia, a cold wave (a mainly American usage, which I’d never heard of) is a rapid fall in temperature within a 24 hour period which can cause death and injury to livestock and wildlife. So, ‘unwelcome’ seems reasonable enough.

      Is ‘causing’ not acting as a link word meaning ‘resulting in’ or ‘leading to’?

10. 37 minutes; a good puzzle, I thought.

    I first met the term dicky, meaning mechanically unsound, as in “the carburettor is a bit dicky” (my first motor cycle) and later noticed it applied to someone who had cardiac problems, “He’s got a dicky ticker”. Fowler, in his entry on rhyming slang, writes that the term has its origins there but doesn’t give the exact derivation; he simply remarks that it has evolved into a colloquial term for unsound. Chambers defines it as shaky; not in good condition and suggests a possible origin in Cockney rhyming slang: Tom and Dick for sick.

    I’m not entirely convinced, and wonder if the rhyming slang might conceal a ruder term, though I cannot think what it might be. It’s just that Fowler mentions raspberry as an expression of disapproval (and that certainly has a rude derivation) next to dicky.

11. 24 minutes, last in Wren, that always brings to mind the wren-embossed farthings I used to spend as a boy. A competent puzzle, unsparkling somehow. Peter, do you have time to rule (so to speak) on the monitory/minatory discussion of the other day? I imagine a “minatory” challenge would not be accepted.
    1. Peter did comment on it at the end of Monday’s blog(he fell into the trap himself) and thought it very unlikely it would stand up in a competition.
       1. Ah, thanks.
12. No time today, but probably about 30 minutes in total over three uneven sessions, the last being entirely devoted to LAID UP. I’m amongst those who will only grudgingly accept dicky as a definition, possibly because, sadly, my mind was spinning round M Alphonse, the Nouvion undertaker and ‘is dicky tiqueur. Laid up he wasn’t, and I found it hard to match dicky with sick or incapacitated. Shaky, unreliable, unhealthy yes. Otherwise a decent challenge. COLD WAVE doesn’t really look like British English, and the online ODE suggests it’s an American import, perhaps balancing the Income Tax reference in 25. My knowledge of Chopin offline did not include the 200 reference, so took it on trust. Only the wordplay saved me from spelling VIDELICET with a third I, initially thinking illicit had something to do with it. CoD to FEATHER-BRAIN
    1. We have so many forms the whole alphabet is in use. Over here, Schedule D is used to enter your capital gains and losses.

       What is Schedule D used for in the UK?

       1. Schedule D is the tax status of the self employed
       2. I could claim to have been misled by Uncle Yap, who was complaining about parochial references to British tax codes (see above). I think I’m a British Income Tax D, being technically self employed.
13. Got most of it OK, but had a few stubborn ones. I really should have seen them, I don’t seem to be sharp lately. For the longest time I wanted to put ‘mistreated’ insteadl of ‘victimised’, even though it doesn’t fit the cryptic at all.

    This is the first puzzle I’ve ever solved while installing an operating system. As you may know, there are many long pauses while mysterious processes do something.

14. Ace = cool? Is this just teenage slang, in which case I don’t like it; or is there something I haven’t seen?
    1. Yes, teenage slang
15. I found it tricky in places and took some time to get VIRGINIA REEL, FEATHER-BRAIN and DISHEARTEN (no problem with the part of speech, though I was initially looking for an ING ending, then an ION ending. Too many interruptions to give a precise time, but around 40 minutes.
16. 30:30, with the Tyneside corner last to succumb. At 4d running through possibilities for “see” I suddenly remembered V. That gave me the vice part of videlicet and then, agonisngly, Chopin hiding under the piano was last in. Grrr.

    COD to feather-brain.

17. About 45-50 minutes, ending with the ‘dickey’ clue, amd held up there by not knowing the precise meaning of ‘dickey’ in the UK. Reading comments above leads me to believe there is no precise definition, and I was torn among ‘laid’, ‘paid’ and ‘hard’, and finally gave up and came here. Yes, ‘laid’ makes the most sense, but I hadn’t cottoned on to that sense while solving. So I am still 0-fer the week. Also had trouble with the unknown CATHERINE WHEELS, the Australian in 24, and the obscure to me LINCTUSES, but thanks for the US city. Over here, the COLD WAVE is usually called a ‘cold snap’, hence the ‘snap’ in the clue, I imagine, and unlike the ‘heat wave’, made famous in the Motown song, never referred to as a ‘heat/hot snap’. COD to GERONIMO. Regards to everyone.
18. This has been a tough week for me and today’s puzzle was another one that I had to keep on coming back to in order to finish. I finally realised that 7 had to be a hidden word since it did not make any sense in any other way. This gave me Videlicet and Vase to finish. Was anyone else, going on the wordplay, tempted by Duane for lazy person? Apologies to Duanes everywhere.

    Tomorrow, for a change, I’d like one that I can finish with my breakfast coffee.

19. Finally I have managed a grid in less time than Mr.B clocking in at 15 mins, although I suspect this was very much an off day for him rather than any great achievement from me. Nothing seemed to take overly long, but likewise nothing seemed to be an utter chestnut. First in 20A, last in 5D where I was looking for the name of a male painter rather than HEART for a little too long.
20. I am presumably missing something obvious, but why does see = V ?
    1. Yes, ‘v’ = Latin ‘vide’, but it entered the language as a footnote abbreviation, like ‘ibid’ and ‘op cit’.
       1. Ah, those pesky abbreviations! Thanks.
    2. v is an abbreviation for “vide” which is Latin for “see”.
21. Is this really a valid abbreviation? I know sometimes you just have to “learn the language”, but this gives absolutely no chance whatsoever to anyone not from the UK. Since it’s The Times crossword, that’s just about defensible, but what certainly isn’t is the fact that it also gives no chance at all to people like me who are from the UK but too young ever to have paid income tax!

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