Times 24865 – come fly with me

Author   glhPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time : well 18:23 on the club timer, but I’ve got two wrong. One was a typo, but there was one that I put in a rather spectacularly wrong answer, and I can now see what it should have been. This was a weird experience, one clue made me think that I was in the world of Mephistos and barred-grid puzzles, and then there was one clue where I have no hesitation in pulling out the term whirredploy. Some may find this pretty straightforward, but to me, it was a struggle and I was only occasionally on the wavelength of the setter.

I did learn a few new things from the wordplay, so an interesting challenge.

Away we go…

Across
1 APPEAL: Sounds like A PEAL. PEAL can mean the changes rung on a set of bells
5 BASALTIC: AS in BALTIC – figured what the wordplay should be but took until I got 5 down to see which sea went in the middle
9 CLOISTERED: S in LOITERED, next to C(clubs)
10 TOLD: Sounds like TOLLED – a mini-theme with the PEAL? Edit: misread the clue when writing the blog, it’s just two definitions of TOLD
11 PRIE-DIEU: PR(pair), I(in), then DIE(long) in EU(Europe). New word for me, pieced together from wordplay
12 SEXTON: Double definition (maybe a triple – was there a Blake who was a SEXTON?)
13 SCOT(t): I got fixated on the wrong Sir Walter for a while. It’s meant to be the one who wrote Ivanhoe, not the one with the smokes
15 ANISETTE: Meant to sound like ANNE’S ATE? I call whirredploy!
18 PLAYGOER: well someone who goes to a play could sit in the gods, but I don’t get the rest of the clue? mctext has it – GO in PLAYER
19 HIND: add BE and you’ve got BEHIND
21 A,MULE,T
23 AUTOBAHN: A then OB in (HAUNT)*
25 let’s omit this from the acrossings
26 REGRETTING: EGRET for A in RATING – this was the one that struck me as barred-grid style wordplay
27 UNDERLIE: double definition, and a nice one too, I like the idea of UNDER LIE as to tell the truth too much
28 MARTYR: T(from Tower) in MARY R (maybe a little naughty as “old queen” but nice surface)
 
Down
2 POLAR: double definition that it took me forever to spot!
3 EMINENTLY: MINE,N.T. in ELY
4 LATVIA: (VITAL)*, A
5 BERMUDA TRIANGLE: (A,DUMBER)* then TRIANGLE(figure)
6 SIDESLIP: ID ES(t) in SLIP – this was my downfall as I couldn’t get over SIN for fall and went for SIDESPIN
7 LATEX: sounds like LATE EX
8 ILL-GOTTEN: L,L(two pounds), in (GET,INTO)*. Edit: I originally had points instead of pounds, thanks for the correction
14 COLUMBIAN: BIA(s) in COLUMN – didn’t know this word, but it makes sense
16 and we won’t show this one from the downs
17 POST,URAL: CARRIAGE meaning STANCE in this case
20 ST,REAM
22 LEVEE: EVE in LE – never heard of this use of LEVEE as a morning reception
24 HONE,Y: HONE coming from EDGE as in SHARPEN

45 comments on “Times 24865 – come fly with me”

  1. Sexton Blake: the detective. And I’m pretty sure 10ac is just a double def. “Told” as in “telling”. And I guess the homophone has to be: Annie’s ate.
    1. Also, the wordplay for 18 is PLAYER (East, bridge) including GO (spirit, pluck …).
      1. I must have been seeing things when I was looking back at 10 across, for some reason I thought the clue had a homophone indicator.

        Thanks for picking up on 18… I’ll edit those two in.

        Even if it’s ANNIE’S ATE that’s a stretch

        1. My pleasure! Just in case there’s still a slight mystery about 12ac, the Mac dictionary has this for SEXTON:
          A person who looks after a church and churchyard, sometimes acting as bell-ringer and formerly as a gravedigger.
  2. After yesterday’s mind-bending excursion down memory lane, I think I got careless with this one.

    Two errors in my 17:56 – a careless COLOMBIAN and I plumped for HAND after pondering HIND. Didn’t know HIND as a rustic type and thought this was a convoluted cryptic around BEHINDHAND.

    Some people do pronounce ‘ate’ as ‘et’, but for the many of us who don’t the use of it in a crossword always feels like a stretch. Probably best avoided.

    COD: UNDERLIE. Lovely.

  3. 36 minutes with most trouble in the NW corner. Almost nothing there until I saw LOITERED. At 19ac: HAND was quite tempting but couldn’t be right. Still, it’s a nice instance of PB’s famous caution to the effect that the def isn’t always at the start or end of the clue.

    In 11ac, when I finally got there, isn’t the first I from ‘one’??

  4. I needed a pick-me-up after yesterday’s qualifier (just to qualify, I wasn’t actually qualifying) and I didn’t get it, needing aids for 4 clues: the loop-the-loop one – only aerial manoeuvre I know – the French kneeler, the colonnades one – as I would have it – and the French drink – I was across the Ligurian Sea with amaretto.

    Apart from that, I rather enjoyed it, despite walking right into the ‘Sir Walter’ trap and getting another Caledonian clue wrong, putting ‘hand’ for HIND. Tucked away for the future, that one is …

    1. Was ‘Mad’ Magazine available to young Brits 50 years ago? That’s how I knew–for all the good it’s done me–of the Immelmann Turn and the Luffberry Circle, from a lampoon of ‘Superman’. (More than 50, actually, but let’s not go there.)
      1. I was a Beano and Dandy man before graduating to Goal and Shoot! My knowledge of aerobatics is limited to Terry-Thomas and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines who went up-diddly-up-up before going down-diddly-down-down.

        Incidentally, I open my Shakespeare at As You Like It, and there’s a grumpy Orlando in Scene I moaning about his big brother making him ‘feed with his hinds‘.

      2. Mad available in Canada for sure…a favourite of my since 1952 when I was 10 years old and it was first published. I fondly recall POTRZEBIE and AXOLOTL…particularly potrzebie as a lot of Ukrainian and Polish spoken in our house.

        Then there’s this with apologies to Chaucer…

        Whon thotte Aprylle swythyn Potrzebie,
        The burgydde Pryllye gyves one hebijebie.

  5. I can’t believe I was actually faster than George & Sotira, but I somehow zipped through this in 16 minutes. Didn’t know ‘sideslip’, but luckily ‘sidespin’ didn’t come to mind. Also lucky that I finally remembered the Brit pronunciation of ‘ate’; as I suppose everyone knows, ‘et’ and ‘figger’ are both definitely gross solecisms in the States. I had thought that a prie-dieu was the knee-support in a church; but, as with AUTOBAHN & PLAYGOER, I just went with instinct and checkers. I needed the blog to explain it to me. I’m particularly proud of myself for FINALLY twigging to a ‘for’ clue, in 26.
    1. If it’s the pronunciation of ‘figure’ you’re referring to, I’m sure I’ve heard ‘figger’ in American films. Surely not always as a kind of shibboleth to identify an ‘outgroup’?
      1. Yep; absolutely always. Mind you, I wouldn’t be that surprised if a careful phonetic analysis of some standard American English examples of ‘figure’ might yield a [fIgr] here and there, but I know of no prestige dialect of US English where ‘figger’ is acceptable. (Ditto for ‘et’.) Show me a character in an American film saying ‘figger’ –and I’ll bet in every case he’s saying ‘I [or ‘ah] figger…’ rather than, say ‘figger 8’ or ‘figger of speech’–and I’ll show you a character who’s supposed to be a hick of some sort.
        1. I must have been living under a rock. How can you pronounce “figure” other than “figger”? I know the tendency in UK English is to pronounce unaccented vowels as a schwa whereas American English gives a vowel the full treatment, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say “fig-yure”. Or maybe I haven’t noticed. I’m confused.
          1. Oh, dear, I seem to have started something. 1) Actually, sometimes the schwa/full vowel difference is the reverse: e.g. ‘mobile’, which in the US is generally [mobl], but isn’t it [mobayl] in the UK? 2) Anyway, ‘figure’ is in fact generally pronounced in the US with a ‘y’; not with a full vowel following, but with, in effect, a schwa: [fIgyr].
            (UK ‘figure’ is actually exceptional, since g/k+u normally takes a y in both UK and US dialects: regular, cute, etc.; cf. news, stupid, dune.)
            1. Last word to the marvellously prescriptive Fowler: ‘While it is pedantic to pronounce figure otherwise than as fi-ger, it is slovenly to let the natural English laxity go to this extreme with the less familiar figuration, figurative, figurant, figurine, etc.’.

              I wonder if the educated American’s animus towards ‘figger’ has anything to do with its closeness to the dreaded ‘n’ word?

              1. Oh dear, I’m a linguistic sloven. For me it’s CONFIGGERATION and FIGGERINE. Am I alone in that? Or is it just Estuary English?
                1. Me too.
                  Don’t worry about Fowler. He’s more a figyure of fun than anything else these days.
        2. You piqued my interest sufficiently to check Merriam-Webster, which describes the pronunciation fi-gər as ‘British & often US’.
          1. Absolutely. But of course M-W, like most dictionaries (aside from the American Heritage, with its ‘usage panel’ of soi-disant authorities), aims at descriptive accuracy. My point was that the pronunciations ‘figger/et’ in the US are considered not OK. There are plenty of Americans, and Britons no doubt, who say ‘Febyuary’ and ‘liberry’, and for all I know M-W includes those pronunciations; but people who pronounce the words that way probably pay a price.
  6. sould someone please explain the wrodplay. understand the SLIP around IDES how is that incomplete airman?
    2. Definition is “move made by airman in bank”. It’s ID ES(t) in SLIP
  7. Flashed down the right hind (sic) side (apart from ANISETTE, which gave me pause) and then couldn’t get a single clue on the left, apart from KIEV and PRES-DIEU (which I wasn’t sure about). Finally limped home with PLAYGOER last in, just behand (sic) LEVEE, in which the cryptic grammar is surely incorrect, unless you interpret LE to be a plural L and E rather than singular. COD to PLAYGOER just ahead of UNDERLIE, both of which gave me a lot of trouble.
  8. Solver for PRIE DIEU. Have seen die for long before but it hasn’t registered. Otherwise average time for me but 10 minutes post-solve on some of the wordplay failing with PLAYGOER (my second in after SCOT). We all say “et” where I wos brung up, eg “I et my bread and dripping”.
  9. Add me to the growing list of HANDymen. After a long struggle at the end with UNDERLIE and PLAYGOER, I forgot to go back and check that one. Even if I had, I’m not sure I’d have got it.
  10. 45 minutes yet again, but no need for aids other than to look up a few things after completing the grid.

    I also put HAND with a big question mark against it to remind me to revisit it and fortunately worked out it had to be HIND despite not actually knowing the required meaning.

    SIDESLIP, LEVEE and BASALTIC all from wordplay alone. RH much easier than LH as it was opened up early on by the long gift at 5dn.

  11. At long last (more than half a century), tedious study of that overbearing French king, Louis XIV, has produced a result: LEVEE was my first in! According to online OED, ANISETTE has a mid nineteenth century origin and, as such, could not have been consumed by Louis XIV: my last in. COD: BERMUDA TRIANGLE.

    Thanks, George, for the blog; and thanks, too, to the setter for a demanding, but reachable, challenge – it makes a change from some recent offerings.

  12. Safely negotiated all the traps, despite nearly falling into all of them, in a tad over 16 mins. I thought of SIDESPIN but couldn’t justify the P, so had another think. I actually put in HAND but changed it almost immediately to HIND. ANNIE’S ATE sounds exactly like ANISETTE in my accent, so no quibble with that one.
  13. 16 minutes, but another HANDyman. I’ve never ever come across that definition of HIND, didn’t split “this” from farmworker and smudged the rest.
    Are we being given a bit of a slap over the wrist for querying the “foreign” word HWYL? We had three French, one German, one Scottish (I looked up HIND) and arguably one Greek in MARTYR today.
    Otherwise, lots of entertainment, and CoD goes to UNDERLIE, which was chucklesome despite a whiff of conker (should that be marron today?) about it.
    The proximity of TOLD and SEXTON is surely no coincidence.
  14. 17 minutes here, for a puzzle that felt a bit more difficult than that.
    Like linxit I narrowly avoided SIDESPIN because I couldn’t justify the P. When you have an apparently superfluous bit of wordplay like this you’re invariably on the wrong track. Likewise I paused on HAND.
    My problem with ANISETTE is that I’m pretty sure the pronunciation (derived from “anis”, which is pronounced ANEESS) is such that ANNIE SET would be a valid homophone but ANNIE’S ATE is dodgy whatever one thinks of ET/ATE. Am I imagining this?
    1. ANNIE’S ATE provides the requisite ‘z’ sound of the English pronunciation. (Both C and Oxford have an-i-zet, at any rate.)
      1. Fair enough. I happen to have access to a Petit Robert at the moment and it turns out this is the French pronunciation too. Clearly I’ve either imagined the alternative or heard it mispronounced. Not exactly a word I hear every day!
  15. Bit of a stretch to get some of these and also fell into the HIND/HAND trap so DNF. Also agree with earlier comment about latex, where the synthetic bit threw me until towards the end when the crossers left no alternative.
  16. Am I wrong in pointing out that latex is anything but “synthetic” rubber – it’s what comes out of the tree and congeals into natural rubber ? Or does “synthetic” refer to the “making” of the word from its components ?

    Jim

    1. Chambers gives both meanings (a) the sap and (b) a synthetic version used to make rubber products
  17. Under 20 minutes but with 2 wrong – SIDESPIN (I always did get flying and snooker mixed up) and, unaccountably, SAXTON.

    I interpreted the whirredploy as Anne is et (eaten).

    I had no idea how playgoer worked and had never heard of thedesk which I assembled from wordplay and bits of old French I had lying around.

  19. Got a bit dehydrated on the golf course today so naturally had to correct that position and then struggled a little with this.

    I’m going to underlie and say the homophone is the worst we’ve had for some time. Surely a rather risky choice of clue type for such a word – pronounciation is bound to vary hugely

    Quite enjoyed the rest of it, even if it was a bit of an uphill battle

  20. Needed aids for PRIE-DIEU, ANISETTE and PLAYGOER, and failed to notice the superfluous P when I entered SIDESPIN, so nothing to write home about. Not the setter’s fault, I hasten to add.
  21. A slow start but got there in the end in 33 minutes with one careless mistake – I’d put EVIDENTLY instead of EMINENTLY. Got 11a and 18a from definition only. I couldn’t see DIE as “long” although I knew PRIE-DIEU and I couldn’t connect PLAYER with “east”. Nice to see a reference to Sexton Blake at 12a which, together with TOLD at 10a reminds me of the famous lines about a dead sailor:

    His death, which happened in his berth/ at forty-odd befell/ They went and told the sexton/ And the sexton tolled the bell.

  22. A late, and totally gratuitous correction to the blog: 8d, L, L =two pounds not points
  23. 9:49 for me (for the second time this week), with 2 or 3 minutes wasted agonising over SIDESPIN – but eventually giving up and realising that SIDESLIP made much better sense. (Phew!)

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