Times 24948: Queer as a butcher’s hook

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 27 minutes.

Back on the horse after taking my Spring break. Made heavier weather of this than was necessary. Out of practice? My Lack Of Intelligence this morning extended DEEP DOWN. But my COD goes to 18ac by a short chalk.

Across
 1 NUMBER. Extend the abbreviation ‘No.’ and you get this. Latin numero, ablative of numerus, ‘number’.
 4 OR,CHAR,D.
 9 GE(NE)T. “A nocturnal, catlike mammal of the civet family with short legs, spotted fur, and a long bushy ringed tail, found in Africa, southwestern Europe, and Arabia”. (Literary reference avoided!)
10 IS,HER(WOO)D. Christopher. Not my favourite writer. His Berlin Stories were the basis for Cabaret. Famously gay, as was 9ac.
11 TAIWANESE. Anagram, ‘wet in a sea’.
12 FI,SHY. A favourite (because short-titled) poem in crosswordland, ‘If’.
13 LOG,E. Last letter of ‘sleevE’. A private box in the theatre.
14 BAND,LEADER. Homophonic for BANNED LIEDER. With a few crossers only, I was looking for TALETELLER.
18 BIG B(R)OTHER. !!
20 Omitted.
23 LODEN. Anagram of the middle of ‘bLONDEs’. A thick waterproof cloth.
24 ENDEAVOUR. Two defs; one re yachting. Oops, it’s space-shuttling (thanks to Paul McL). Either expensive endeavour is a challenger to my ken.
25 ANY OLD HOW. Anagram of the first two words of the clue; though the deception is that it could be of the second and third.
26 AD(D)-ON. First of ‘Depth’ in A DON, the quiet flower.
27 EXP(I)RES. Almost ‘expresS’.
28 EMERGE. EG REME, reversed.
Down
 1 NIGH,T(CL)UB.
 2 MINCING. Egregious pun on ‘camp’; see 12ac.
 3 ENTRAP. Reversal of ‘partne{r}’ — butty as in off-sider; not as in chip.
 4 OC(H)RE. The hands are the CRE{w}.
 5 C,A,REF{e}REE.
 6 A,RO(USE)D. Fluked this one when my TALETELLER suspicion at 14ac suggested AROUSAL. A rare case of the Pencilled Guess Gambit paying off.
 7 DI(DD)Y. Two Daughters in Do-It-Yourself.
 8 CI-D,EVANT. The cops and the odd letters of ‘lEaVe A uNiT’. The def. is ‘former’.
15 DEEP DOWN. Two defs; one a ref. to quilts and such. (If you’re on a high roof with only an umbrella, a bottle of beer and a duck, how do you get down?)
16 REAR,RANGE. The answer to 21 completes the definition.
17 W,R,ANGLE,R.
19 GIDDY,UP. The rider is UP; a smart double duty.
21 Omitted. See 16dn.
22 SALA,A,M. Reverse ALAS.
23 LEAVE. Walt Whitman (who occasionally turns up here) wrote Leaves of Grass; and may have been gay.
24 E,THOS.

32 comments on “Times 24948: Queer as a butcher’s hook”

  1. Well over the hour for this one with 8dn unsolved until I came to the computer to cheat and found the blog already up. Didn’t know CI DEVANT, LODEN, the Whitman reference, nor the meaning of ‘butty’ required here. I’m amazed I was nearly finished before I spotted NUMBER at 1ac and MINCING as something possibly done by a camp butcher! Not a good day for me.
  2. 33:33 .. I found this really tough and had to guess at a couple, especially ENTRAP.

    Solved while very tired which probably explains why it just felt like hard work.

  3. I thought endeavor was the space shuttle that replaced challenger after it’s loss. Or maybe it really is to do with yachting.
    1. It really is spelled with a ‘u’, as the Americans named it after Cook’s ship. And since it had its final ‘voyage’ this May, has gone to meet its maker and is now an ex-shuttle, it may now be safely included in a Times puzzle!
  4. I’m wondering if this is a new setter. I found it very difficult to get on his/her wavelength and didn’t recognise the style.

    I struggled for a lot of the time and had the easy lights dotted all over the place before going back and working on the missing ones. 30 minutes in all and it felt like hard work. Agree 18A is good.

  5. Fortunate as my last action was to change LEDON to LODEN, just on plausibility. Same thinking for CI-DEVANT, GENET and ENTRAP. Hard work but made worthwhile by BANDLEADER, BIG BROTHER and MINCING.
  6. DNF (glad to see jimbo found it tough): most of the NW proved too difficult. Decided to abandon ship having painfully parsed 8dn (and trawled my O-level French) for CI-DEVANT (surprised to find this in OED online) and guessed LODEN and LEAVE (Whitman reference unknown). Thanks, mctext, for a good blog which made clear that, overall, this was both a challenging and fair puzzle.
  7. I plugged away at this doggedly but still came up short after more than an hour and a half. Even thinking of CID- at 8 was no help, as I’d never heard of the French expression and couldn’t think of anything starting “ci-“. Stymied myself further west by putting ‘Nimrod’ at 1ac, a mistake which at least gave me the “m” by which I got MINCING.. Only knew butty in the “connie butty” sense of the word, so that was also left blank.

    Despite my travails, a fine puzzle, with ticks beside 7, 9 and 18 and COD to the Larry Graysonesque butcher.

    1. That would be the conny-onny butty surely, Tosh? I was weened on them.

      Edited at 2011-09-07 10:00 am (UTC)

  8. 42 minutes with many unknowns: butty, CI-DEVANT, LOGE, REME, DIDDY, Whitman’s LEAVES & LODEN; but only the last undid me. There was much to enjoy here, not the least the very smooth & concise clueing. 18ac was exceeding good, but lost on one who couldn’t remember if Balthasar was in Much Ado or not, so COD to NUMBER. Thanks McT for much illumination.
  10. We didn’t find this too bad (bout 50 minutes) except for 20 across, which our otherwise brilliant blogger omitted Please someone put us out of our missery!
    2. Its a hidden word (workin)G-IN-A(uction) with “houses” as the containment indicator.

      The positioning of “auction” with “houses” adds a level of difficulty and is typical of this puzzle overall. Never forget when in trouble “Lift and separate” every phrase

  11. Is it just me or has the vocabulary in the daily gone up a notch? It could be a statistical outlier over the last few weeks, or that they are words that only I find rare, but without any change in the overall complexity of the clues, I am finding myself looking up more of what I think of as barred grid type words recently. Today was LODEN, LOGE, GENET (at a push) and CI DEVANT, maybe even SALAAM.

    Also there seems to be an above average amount of stickiness in the NW corner – is this a ploy, since the average solver always starts there?

  12. This ate up all of my lunch hour and then a fair bit of the evening. Even then I needed help from my very low-tech copy of Hamlyn’s Crossword Dictionary to find GENET and unblock the NW passage. Excellent blog, mctext.
  13. I seem to be out of synch with most on this site. Yesterday I really struggled with a puzzle everyone else found straightforward. Conversely, I found today’s far easier, though not a romp, admittedly. I proceeded at a steady pace without major hold-ups, finishing after 40 minutes with 6dn, where I’d toyed for far too long with PE for ‘exercise’.

    8 had to be of foreign origin with the two-letter element ending in I; once Id worked out the -EVANT it wasn’t hard to get the answer, though it’s not an expression I often come across. LODEN was completely unfamiliar, but it sounded more likely than LEDON.

    Quite a lot of literary references here, which suits me rather more than sporting ones.

    I liked the clues. A very minor query concerns 1ac, where ‘No’ ought to have a full stop after it to mean ‘number’. It’s probably legitimised by the all-encompassing ‘setter’s licence’ to omit punctuation, though most people would object to the omission of an apostrophe to deceive. However, to give the setter the benefit, it can be argued that as ‘No.’ is an abbreviation of ‘numero’ a full stop is not necessary (in common with other abbreviations where the last letter is also the last letter of the full word).

    1. In a change from the previous edition Collins’ latest permits ‘no’ and ‘nos’ without full stops.
  14. 35 minutes for everything except 1a and 2d. Then it took another 15 minutes for these to fall! I really enjoyed this puzzle in spite of the problems it threw up. I got GENET from the cryptic but had to dredge the word from my memory. The rest of the vocabulary was familiar. I had lunch this summer in Loden-Frey in Munich, the shop which gave its name to the cloth and the colour “loden green”. CI-DEVANT took me back to my teenage addiction to all things Scarlet Pimpernel. I still have the US edition of “Leaves of Grass” which was the very first book I ever bought with my own pocket money. (Looking back, it strikes me as a strange choice. I think I was too young to understand it properly!)
  15. 21 minutes for this. Rather like yesterday, I found this tricky and was a bit surprised it didn’t take longer. And unlike yesterday I had a stinking hangover to contend with.
    I agree with Jimbo that the style of clues here was a bit unusual. Lots of unknowns (LOGE, butty, the Whitman poem, LODEN) but all fairly, if cunningly, clued. It’s fortunate that the slightly-less-likely-looking LEDON wasn’t the right answer for 23ac.
    CI-DEVANT is about as English as CONTE. No problem for me but I hope they don’t start doing this with German!
    Didn’t understand NUMBER, so thanks for that.
  16. ‘Entrap’ my first in – having previously lived in south Wales, where ‘Butty’ or ‘Butt’ is the favourite term for a pal or mate. Came from coal-mining jargon originally. This was a very hard puzzle, I thought, taking me over an hour (usual time around half this).Thought all clues were fair and gettable, although Loden, Genet, Loge, ci-Devant and the Whitman reference had to be confirmed afterwards.
  17. 29 minutes with 2 wrong that I still can’t see even after coming here – must be the weather. You never know when Alevel history will come in handy. Our year did the French Revolution as special subject so ci-devant no prob.
  18. I seem to be in the minority in not having too much trouble with this – 12:31. I was lucky in that I’d looked up CI-DEVANT a couple of days ago or I might have struggled with that, but I was OK with the rest of the vocab.
  19. 2hrs 39mins for me ( I think) and held up, as were others, by the NW corner. Thanks, mctext for the explanation of 1ac and also 23d. I agree that 2d was a bit egregious. The best I could come up with for 3d by trawling through dictionary.com was “buttinski” so thanks to Anonymous for the Welsh derivation. D’oh moments with 1d and 18ac but the latter was very clever as was 8d. Unlike others, I had no problems with “loden” as my mother was Austrian and had a Loden coat. The “court” element in 10ac was clever as I was thinking of an abbreviation like “ct”. 28ac had me thinking “corps” = cor!” = “crumbs!”, backwards. COD shared by 1d and 18ac.
  20. Even guesswork couldn’t quite get me across the finishing line today. Not really on my wavelength.
    Louise
  21. Did not finish, first in a long time and now feel very silly, unable to get 1 across and kicking myself for not seeing MINCING. Fail utter fail!
  22. I found this quite tough as well, particularly the NW corner, and finished in 14:27. Most enjoyable though, so if this really is a new setter (and I’m not convinced that it is), than I offer him or her my congratulations on a fine start.
  23. Hmm, if George couldn’t finish it, a man who solves Mephistos on planes, then it must have been hard. I certainly found it quite hard and after 30mins had to put it aside and come back to it later.. nothing to complain about though, it is all good stuff
  24. Only 8 months for me! (found it barely started during a clear-out)
    A most enjoyable puzzle with some excellent misdirection making finishing all the more satisfying
    For me the “banned lieder” homophone made 14 the best of the day

    JB

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