Times 24605 – One for the ladies?

Author   kororarekaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving Time: 32 minutes

Mostly straightforward, but with some vocabulary and a foreign phrase which might put it beyond the entry level category. If I hadn’t attempted to start in the SW corner (where I eventually finished) I might have saved myself 5 minutes or so.

Across
1 AN NASH reversed with a 0 inside = HOSANNA. John Nash makes regular cameo appearances in The Times, so add him to your list, somewhere between Hawksmoor & Wren.
5 TIMBRE + L for pound = TIMBREL, an early tambourine.
9 AHA = AHAB . That’s Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab, possibly still searching for the great hypo-pigmented humpback.
10 CAPTAIN + COOK = CAPTAIN COOK, Middlesbrough’s most famous son.
11 MOLASSES = M.O. for Medical Officer + LASSES
12 RAN next to DO for make + M for millions = like, totally RANDOM
15 NOWT, sounds like KNOUT to Captain Cook.
16 DIM IN I for one SHED = DIMINISHED. My favourite today.
18 GRAVEST + ONE for individual = GRAVESTONE
19 BUYS, sounds like BYES; a cricketing allusion.
22 RELIED could be construed as “having lied again”.
23 (SMELLS AT)* = SMALLEST
25 LO AND BEHOLD = LOAN for overdraft, ‘s for has D.B.E. for Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (rather than Deadboy & the Elephantmen), next to HOLD for maintain. Phew!
27 Deliberately omitted. Ask the panel if you’re asleep, perchance dreaming and thereby in difficulty yourself.
28 AT FIRST with H for hard in place of F for female = ATHIRST, an archaic word for thirsty, as in Anatole France’s novel “The Gods are Athirst” (actually Les dieux ont soif, but “athirst” has a ring “thirsty” lacks, n’est-ce pas?) and not quite in Linda Gregg’s poem “A Thirst Against” in which she “presents modern readers with an age-old philosophical dilemma: draws examples from nature, and also includes an extended comparison to the characters in William Shakespeare’s drama Hamlet”, to come full circle.
29 DISUSED = DI SUED around S for son. The “for” meaning “having (the thing mentioned) as a purpose or function”? (I’m speculating.)

Down
1 EH for what reversed + ADMAN = HEADMAN
2 SWALLOWTAIL, the butterfly, and a reference to the Ouroboros, today’s hidden Masonic handshake. I spent a few minutes looking for the snake (Wallo? Llowt?), the circle and the female deers before twigging to the allusion.
3 NICEST = INCEST with the N for name ascendant.
4 APPRECIATE = (PIECE APART)*
5 THAI sounds like TIE. Is that our third homophone? Thai is also a short novel (THAIS ) by the aforementioned Anatole France.
6 MANDARIN = (RAN ADMIN)*.
7 I’m not including this one, but the clue does.
8 LIKED for enjoyed around MA for parent = LIKE MAD
13 DE HAUT EN BAS = (BASHED A TUNE)*, French for “from top to bottom”.
14 BIRNAM WOOD = MAN for chap, reversed, before WOO for court, all inside BIRD, cockney rhyming slang for prison. Again with the Shakespeare, this time from the play which shall remain nameless.
17 DEFER for put off around END for final = DEFENDER
18 GORILLA = GO for shot + A for ace around RILL for stream, with definition simply “heavy”. There are 161 words for watercourses in the English language, with no fewer than 38 consisting of 4 letters: beck, burn, rill, … I can’t think of any more off hand.
20 SATYRID = SAD for not happy around and about (TRY I)*, the second ‘s being short for “has” in the cryptic reading. A satyrid is “a butterfly of the family Satyridae, including the satyrs and wood nymphs” says thefreedictionary.com, although the ODE says there’s been a change in that taxonomy and labels them more prosaically as “browns”. Either way, The Gladeye Bushbrown is an example. Fortunately, thefreedictionary.com also says it’s an adjective meaning “of the aforesaid family”, otherwise the first ‘s is unexplainable. When solving I thought it was literally a wood nymph or similar.
21 G for good + LADY’S = GLADYS, our final femme du jour; I make that 6 if you count parent=ma at 8d.
24 BEN for peak + T for time = BENT
26 ASH = AS H for hot

27 comments on “Times 24605 – One for the ladies?”

  1. Just 18 minutes today with, to my ears [the mind is on holiday] anyway, SATYRID as the only obscure bit. Is 5ac an allusion to the less gifted percussionist brother of Jacques Rice? Some dictionaries even say it’s related to (possibly derived from) the word “timbre”. Nice thorough, informative blog as ever. But isn’t there an anachronism in placing Jimmy Chook in the Boro as such?
    1. You can take the boy out of the Boro but you can’t take the Boro out of the boy, even if it wasn’t there to begin with. No more anachronistic than saying he discovered Australia, I suppose, since it wasn’t Australia till 1901 and it had already been well and truly discovered when he set foot on whatever it was when he set foot on it.
  2. Had to read koro’s intro to learn that there was a foreign clue, to make sense of two two-letter words beginning with D_ (followed by a, e or u) and E_. Guessed the answer after that from my O-Level French and sped on to the finish.

    However … having got the French clue and BIRNAM WOOD (from the cryptic), it was somehow inevitable that I should let byes/buys through, especially after writing a dicourse on overthrows at the weekend for last Saturday’s puzzle.

    I didn’t get the ouroboros reference at 2dn, but know the creature from Eddison’s fantasy The Worm Ouroboros, which was quite an influence on CS Lewis and also highly rated by Tolkien. Didn’t know what a BUR was, but it was the only word that made sense on reversal. Joint CODS to DIMINISHED and ATHIRST.

  3. Lost track of time, but not less than one hour.

    I started this last night and made enough early progress to think I might finish it in 30-40 minutes, but it wasn’t to be. I hit a wall and nodded off. When I drifted back to consciousness I found nearly an hour had passed since I had started the puzzle and only about half was complete so I gave up. On resumption this morning I hoped everything would fall into place but this wasn’t to be either and I had to work things out very slowly one clue at a time.

    The main sticking points were SWALLOWTAIL (last in as the only thing that fitted the checkers and without any idea how the first part of the clue worked), SATYRID, DE HAUT EN BAS and all of the SW corner where I created additional problems for myself by writing TORT at 24dn.

    This was a strange mixture of gifts, obscurities and cunning misdirection.

  4. Would have been 15 minutes except for BUYS, which took several runs through the alphabet to uncover. Toyed with rues, believing rews might somehow mean runs (I can make rue mean pay the price, at least to my satisfaction), but have otherwise no excuse (such as not understanding cricket) for not getting it quicker.
    Now I understand how it works (thanks to koro) SWALLOWTAIL is my CoD, but this puzzle left me feeling dense.
  5. This was mainly straightforward but entertaining. I liked the clues for Gravestone and Birnham Wood, which I might have spelled Burnham if the wordplay had not been so clear.

    The SE was a different kettle of fish. I had to get Satyrid from the wordplay, where I was expecting a bird. Then I realised that the anagram at 13 had to be in a foreign language so I spent some time trying to render it into Latin before trying French. Finally I decided that Bur was the only possible answer to 27. This, to me, was an obscure spelling of Burr but maybe that is just a failing on my part because Koro considers it too obvious to blog.

    1. I’ve always spelt it with one R, except when it’s a brogue or “Burr! It’s cold!” but that’s probably more indicative of my ignorance than its lack of obscurity. The ODE seems to think bur is acceptable for almost all its many and varied meanings.
  6. Almost pleased with self for sublime error of Captain Hook. I keep doing this – filling in and assuming some arcane rationale, intending to return to it and forgetting to do so. Otherwise held up here and there, notably with Swallowtail and Athirst, both finally reminding me of the need to read and re-read laterally as it were. Enjoyed several of the clues; COD 16 not least for accurate description of self. 34 minutes.
  8. I found this fairly straightforward despite the French phrase at 13, which I knew, and the archaism at 28, which was my last entry (a neat clue, as were a number of others). BIRNAM WOOD dawned late for me.

    30 minutes, but a wrong answer at 29, where I entered RUES for “pays the price” without understanding the wordplay. Four-letter answers with two unchecked letters can be very elusive.

  9. I mis-parsed 29ac as S in SUE in DID, but the grammar seemed wrong. DI SU(S)ED works better, but does ‘took action’ = ‘used’?
    1. No, “took action” is SUED, which is used abused, in crosswordese. It’s the second S that’s the son. There’s obviously too many permutations in this one.
  10. Quite hot on the golf course today so I fell asleep before I finished this one. No reflection on the setter – quite a lively puzzle although an odd mix of very easy, clever and a bit obscure.

    Well done koro for rumbling what 2D is all about. My last in and filled in on the basis of the butterfly and checking letters. Didn’t see the rest of it at all. A nice start to the week.

  11. By no means a gimme, but a gentle intro to the week. I enjoyed it a lot.

    Pleased to finish in 25 minutes having solved SATYRID, SWALLOWTAIL(very clever)and GRAVESTONE all from wordplay. One of these for COD.

    Also liked BIRNAM WOOD although I didn’t recognise the spelling but did recognise the unmentionble play!

  12. About 40 minutes, held up by the French phrase, and by originally trying TORT. When ‘tort’ was proved wrong by LO AND BEHOLD, I guessed at BENT, which doesn’t really sound too criminal to me. The French went in after 4 or 5 checkers emerged, as the only use of the fodder that made any sense. Ended by also guessing BUYS, because I certainly didn’t know the cricketing meaning. I had started by entering most of the top half on first reading, but the entire lower half was a challenge. COD’s to DIMINISHED and GORILLA. Regards to all.
  13. I agree with Jimbo’s verdict – an odd but enjoyable mix of the easy, clever and erudite/obscure, which makes Peter B’s time extremely good, in my view. Around 30 mins for me. Curiously, BUYS at 19ac was the one that held me up and was my last in, after an inexplicable failure to spot the obvious cricketing allusion straightaway. I’d never heard of an ouroboros, but was aware of the swallowtail butterfly and then dimly remembered something about a mythical dragon that turned itself into a circle to eat its own tail. So that didn’t cause too much problem. Like some others, I briefly and mistakenly went for TORT at 24dn.GORILLA made me chuckle.

    On the Scottish play, I have just finished reading an entertaining book by Ben Crystal, “Shakespeare on Toast”, in which he mentions the following cures for warding off the curse said to fall on anyone who mentions its name outside rehearsal rooms or actual performance. You can either “leave the room or space you are in, close the door behind you, turn around three times, swear, knock on the door, and ask to be let back in” or, if you can’t be doing with all that, quoting Hamlet’s line when he sees his father’s ghost on the Elsinore battlements – “Angels and ministers of grace defend us” – will apparently also do the trick.

  14. As I recall, Moby Dick was a sperm whale, not a humpback; much better equipped for ramming and sinking a whaler.
    I was especially grateful for today’s blog, as I was totally unable to figure out why 25ac and 28ac were the correct answers. Never did get ‘buys’, but that’s all right, I don’t expect to get most cricket-related clues.
    1. I was wondering when somebody would pull me up on that particular piece of misinformation. Ironically, I live in council district called Melville.
  15. I’m normally just a lurker on this informative and enjoyable site but may I ask a question?
    How does “mythical snake does” give “swallowtail” (rather than “swallowstail”)?

    Ian

    1. I didn’t have a problem with the grammar there, although I can see your point. I presume its “It does swallow (its) tail.” rather than “It swallows (its) tail.” It’s not a question of what does it do but what it does. Does that do? Possibly not.
      1. Hello again

        Perhaps I’m mountaineering instead of digging for moles but to comply with your interpretation shouldn’t the clue be “… mythical snake does do…” rather than “…mythical snake does…”?

        1. I can’t fault your grammar there. Plural forms have sunk many a good clue, which is why “might” or “must” are often inserted. “Does do” is on the clunkier side of the “might do” fix and so probably wouldn’t do. I’ll declare it as one that snuck by the keeper, unless others want to jump in at this point.
  16. Very difficult. I was thrown by my wrong answer DOG at 26d. It fits the clue perfectly. “In fireplace it may be equally hot”. Obviously a fire-DOG or may equally be a hot-DOG !!

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