Times 24756 — A Süs Kind of a puzzle

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
A new user-pic, just for today!

Solving time: 27 minutes. Not a difficult puzzle over all. But there are some very smooth and potentially deceptive surfaces. Might have been a bit quicker but for the 18dn/30ac intersection. When you have ?E?S?E?? for one and ?A?T?? for the other and not a lot to go on, at first blush, from the clues — e.g., two defs/indications-by-example — things can get thorny. But that’s the point eh?

 

Across
 1 DO,SAGE. DO for ‘complete’ (as in ‘complete the puzzle’) is a bit loose if we think about all the possible verbs ‘do’ can substitute for. Hence the question mark?
 4 PERFUMED. She (F) is in PERU by the MED. Isn’t cruciverbal geography wonderful?
10 CROWS FEET. That would be ROWS (lines #2) and FEE (charge) in CT (for ‘court’).
11 R(O,MA)N. Had me wondering whether persons with Masters degrees are, strictly, academics. Neither necessary nor sufficient for that these days.
12 EXT(RAVAG)ANT. The wrapper is EXTANT (living) around ‘ravage’ minus the final E. Very smooth surface though.
14 One to leave out this morning.
15 INSIPID. Anagram of SIN; I (one), PI (religious) D.
17 T(HORN)Y.
19 AMORAL. Reverse of L, AROMA.
21 C(OGNAT)E. The contents are TANGO reversed.
23 Another one for omission.
24 TEN,DENTIOUS. Anagram of ‘united, so’. “Expressing or intending to promote a particular cause or point of view” (Mac Oxford).
26 S,WISH.
27 ADVI,SABLE. Anagram of DIVA.
29 STOCK,ADE. Sounds like ‘aid’.
30 CAR,TEL. Probably the most contentious of today’s offerings; so thanks again for the question mark. CAR is an indication-by-example from ‘saloon’. We’re used to ‘estate’ so probably OK. TEL is from ‘phone’, the abbrev. you see on biz cards, etc. The full def is ‘Ring’.
Down
 1 DECRE,PIT. Drop the final letter from DECREE (judgement) and add a hollow (PIT).
 2 SP,ORT. SP is the starting price (odds); the rest is from the final letters of ‘studiO afteR arT’. Sport, root, stockade … must be Australia Day. The perfume clues are, of course, from the common complaint: “You reek o’ Stockade”. Cf “You never wore cologne”.
 3 Can I leave this out as well please?
 5 ENTRANT. Trip the Light Inclusive.
 6 FORETHOUGHT. A more complex construction. We want a word meaning ‘anticipation’ and we get it by placing an O (love) into FRET (worry). Then we need UGH (exp of distaste) inside HOT (fervent). Phew!
 7 MEMORANDA. An anagram of ‘or man-made’. Another fine surface you’ve got us into!
 8 DON,ATE.
 9 HE(Ra)LD.
13 APPARATCHIK. The def is ‘official’; so lift and separate. It’s APPAL (minus L), RAT (traitor), C (caught), HI (greeting), K (for King).
16 SIMPATICO. Reverse M,IS (maiden is), then bung a C (about, circa) in your PATIO.
18 SE(ASH)E,LL. There are those lines again; and not a railway to be seen! And a further def-by-example; albeit that the scallop is probably the best known seashell.
20 LAN(YAR)D. Reverse of RAY (beam) inside LAND (verb: secure).
21 CLEAVE. Two defs which are effectively antonyms. Can we list these: ‘let’, ‘sanction’ … what else?
22 C,ENSUS. That is: ‘ensues’ sans E.
25 OR,BIT.
28 SPA. ASP with its head (A) dropped to the end.

 

36 comments on “Times 24756 — A Süs Kind of a puzzle”

  1. Lots to like here, but somehow not as much fun as yesterday’s, though I clocked in a little quicker, at 67 minutes. Not convinced SWISH means smart. Can’t find in Chambers; perhaps Collins or Oxford has it. I wanted to put ‘apparatnik’ at 13, and have at least learned today that this is a word of my own invention. Liked ‘alien’ as an anagram indicator and SIMPATICO seemed fitting after we had Rodolfo’s other half yesterday. Sticking with the operatic theme, COD to ADVISABLE, which caused a chuckle.
    1. More from the Mac Oxford:
      1 informal, offensive: effeminate.
      2 Brit., informal: impressively attractive and fashionable: dinner at a swish hotel.

      Chambers (1993), def #2:
      (slang) adj: smart, stylish.

      Edited at 2011-01-26 04:42 am (UTC)

  2. …Eureka, Sport, it is indeed Australia Day. Time to go to the “aid” of the “stock”. But be careful of a “root” in public. Australia is quite conservative these days. In The Times CC forum yesterday I suggested that Woolloomooloo be used as an answer today. Those who know their Monty Python may now break into The Philosophers’ Song.
          1. I’m curious.As it’s Australia Day,why is it, do you think, that no enterprising mayor of a seaside community in Australia has yet to rename their town “Girt-by-Sea”?
  3. This took me about 50 mins in front of the tennis, and might have been less had I not very early on carelessly penned in the snake rather than the spring at 25d. I don’t think we’ve seen such consistently concise and misleading clueing in a while. I’m in awe, but not shocked. COD to EXTRAVAGANT amongst some cracking clues. As for A Day in Oz, it’s all got a bit tendentious of late. Bir şeyi gösterişli bir biçimde sergileme ucuz olan dekorasyon ya da süs?
  4. Like VINYL1 and ULACA, I had problems with 13d in that I had always thought it was “apparatchNik”. Wonder if we’re due “nomenklatura” anytime soon?
    1. Wearing my descriptive linguist hat, both are of course okay, as Chambers confirms. But, wearing my much more comfy and well-worn snob/pedant hat, it must be scOllop.

      Here in Hong Kong, though, however clearly you order scOllops, you’ll always be served with scAllops. There’s just no learning some people …

  6. mctext, re 11ac, Cryptic #24754 had MA TU RE for “Academic workers about…”
    And that’s quite enough comments from me today…
  7. DNF for me today as I ran out of time on the commute. It was all flowing along very nicely in the top half (apart from 13dn)and some of the SE went in too, but I got stuck on COGNATE, CLEAVE and TENDENTIOUS in that quarter and I completely failed even to get a foothold in the SW. On arrival at work I cheated to get going again and finally the remaining few fell. A bad day.
  8. According to the timer on my cooker, spot on 30 minutes. Seemed to me to be a slightly different sort of puzzle today in which, for most clues, the definitions seemed immediately clear, prompting ‘correct’ answers: the biggest challenge was then fitting the answers to the wordplay. The principal exception to this was 21ac where I needed to resolve the wordplay to get COGNATE.

    Thanks, mctext, for the blog and the one-off user-pic (I hadn’t seen this before: perhaps not a Eureka moment for me but yet another nugget gleaned from this site).

  9. 20 minutes today, doing it the hard way because I started with 4ac and worked clockwise.
    Special appreciation today for the Tchaikovsky-like clues for FORETHOUGHT and APPARATCHIK – ignore the surface, work out what the building blocks are, and glue ’em together. Lovely surfaces, for all that.
    I think we’re just going to have to get used to definitions by example.
  10. A bit easier than yesterday, but probably because I don’t have to blog it. Just over 20 minutes to solve. It would have been faster but I too got stuck in the SE corner for a short while.

    Pretty much a standard Times puzzle I think. A pity about not just two DBE but intersecting ones at that. As to getting used to them, I’m with Edmund Burke.

  11. Clock says 82 Minutes but I was not looking at it all the while – Might have snuck under the hour. Some lovely clues with EXTRAVAGANT being my COD.
    Have a good A Day y’all – Dunno what Koro is on about; Google Translate gives “Cheap is a flashy way of displaying a thing or ornamental decoration?”
  12. Enjoyed this puzzle, but, yet again, was defeated by just one clue! Should have got the messenger, but was convinced it began with c(aught), and was therefore a word I was unfamiliar with… Understood wordplay/defs for all others, so, for me, more accessible that several of late.

    CoDs to 6d and 13d purely for the satisfaction of getting all the bits together and in the right order.

  13. After yesterday’s breeze I found this one very hard to get started on for some reason. Not wild about 9D: how is ‘with load of’ an indicator to surround Ra? Or am I being picky? Advice appreciated!
    1. ‘Messenger caught with load of radium’ : HELD (caught as in ‘Watson was well held by Prior’) filled (loaded with) with RA (radium).
  14. Did this pretty early (if the online system is to be believed I was the first to hit submit) so now it’s a little bit of a distant memory, but it was FORETHOUGHT that opened it up and I was done in 18:29. TENDENTIOUS and APPARATCHIK from wordplay, so relived when it came back as a correct submission.
  15. I knew simpatico from Italian, but have never heard it used in English. Could someone please explain 25 down as the synonym “bit” for “trace” is not actually in my dictionary?
    1. sorry, i take that back. i was thinking of the wrong meanings of “trace” and “bit”. stupido!
  16. 34 minutes. I found this tough, with numerous clues requiring a real focused effort to crack. Quite a workout.
  17. About 40 minutes due to being held up in the NW area, last entry HERALD. SPORT also held me back until I remembered the ‘starting price’ business from some earlier puzzles. Regards.
  18. Came to this late after a long long day starting at 3.30 a.m. to watch Murray awkwardly ease into the semifinals. About 45 somewhat interrupted minutes. Liked this one quite a lot, especially the crow’s feet. Foolishly stuck on sap for a while. Interesting to hear where some of you people hang out (above). I lived many years in India and today’s Republic Day there so it’s not only holiday time in the land of Oz!
  19. 45 min, so much harder for me than yesterday’s. Agree with the comment about getting answers first from the definitions and then trying to fit them to the wordplay – this always happens sometimes, but seemed to be very common in this puzzle. In fact I had to come here to confirm the wordplay for a couple of them. I did like 7d though – I’ve been the recipient of many MEMORANDA that could easily have been written by nonhuman organisms!
  20. 10:17 for me – but I expect the real speed merchants would have made short work of this one. I found it difficult to get on the right wavelength(which seems to happen all too often these days) particularly with SPORT (nice clue, but one I should have solved more or less instantly) and COGNATE.

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