Times 24,995 Nothing to do with King Arthur

Author   dorsetjimboPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time 20 minutes

An interesting puzzle that may cause some problems for overseas and younger solvers. I suspect one clue in particular is going to give some grief, involving as it does a mixture of Irish mythology and the obligatory obscure poet. A lack ok knowledge of school practices in the 1940s and 1950s is however not so difficult to overcome.

Across
1 CASUIST – CA(US reversed – I)ST; exponent of plausible but false arguments – any politicians come to mind?;
5 DEPOSER – two meanings; the first is Henry IV (Henry of Bolingbroke) who deposed Richard II in 1399;
9 BLACKBURN – B-LACK-BURN; not have=LACK; long really=yearn=BURN; British=B;
10 LOGIC – COL reversed contains GI;
11 SOLVE – SOL(V)E; crack is definition; “well” is padding;
12 HEROIC,AGE – H(EROICA-G)E; Beethoven’s iconic 3rd symphony=EROICA; one of the 5 ages of man;
13 WILLOW,PATTERN – (cricket) bat=WILLOW; blue “chinese” design on English china;
17 PERMANENT,WAVE – contracted to “perm” in common parlance and Perm is a Russian city;
21 OSTRICHES – (choirs set)*;
24 CARVE – CA(R)VE;
25 KNAVE – K-NAVE; lift and separate!;
26 OMISSIBLE – O-MISSI(B)LE;
27 TWADDLE – (let)* surrounds WAD-D;
28 MYSTERY – expertise=mastery then change “a” to “y=year”;
 
Down
1 CUBIST – CUBI(S)T; a CUBIT was an Egyptian measure of about 53cm based on the length of a man’s forearm; Picasso, Braque, et al;
2 SHALLOWER – S(H-ALL)OWER;
3 INKWELL – cryptic definition; it’s true, biros were banned and every desk had an INKWELL;
4 TOUGH,LOVE – bad luck=TOUGH (slang); nothing=LOVE (tennis score); curing addiction by enforcing abstinence upon the sufferer;
5 DONOR – DO(N)OR;
6 PALMIST – PAL(e)-MIST; a casuist;
7 SIGMA – bad mark=stigma then remove “t” (the second letter); character abroad is the definition;
8 RECREANT – REC(RE)ANT; Royal Engineers=RE;
14 POTASSIUM – (assumption without “n”)*; K is chemical symbol for POTASSIUM;
15 EXECRABLE – EXEC-RAB(b)LE;
16 SPROCKET – S(PR)OCKET;
18 ANISEED – (te)A-N(IS)EED; Pernod anybody?;
19 ACCOSTS – AC-COSTS;
20 HERESY – HERE’S-Y; Y sounds like “why”;
22 TZARA – T(Z)ARA; “place of Irish kings”=(Hill of) TARA in County Meath (Irish mythology); Tristan TZARA was a obscure poet 1896-1963; Tristan is far better known as a Knight of The Round Table and lover of Isolde; an awful clue IMHO;
23 HOOKE – HOOKE(d); Robert Hooke 1635-1703 discovered law of elasticity and had rows with Isaac Newton;

44 comments on “Times 24,995 Nothing to do with King Arthur”

  1. I came home in just under the hour on this one. There were several unknowns including the city of PERM and the poet. A lot of other words or meanings were towards the edges of my knowledge and didn’t come readily to mind: CASUIST, DEPOSER/testifier under oath, BURN/long, KNAVE/servant, NAVE/body, SOCKET/hollow, TARA and RECREANT.

    I thought there had to be something more to 3dn INKWELL than just the simple cryptic. I remember desks with holes for inkwells to slot in but I assumed they would have been for use with scratchy dipping pens whereas we all had fountain pens filled from a bottle of Parker’s Quink. I think was taken as read that the use of ballpoint pans was considered beyond the pale so the question never arose.

  2. Phew – that was tough! 34 minutes, but it felt a lot harder than that. I only had about five answers after my first pass through all the clues, so I knew from the off that I was in for a struggle.
    I enjoyed the fight, but there’s a lot of pretty arcane stuff in here. It’s for the most part entirely fair with a couple of possible exceptions:
    > I can vaguely remember the term “perm”, but I had no idea what _A_E would be. Fortunately it’s guessable, otherwise this would be a case of unfair age discrimination
    > Even if you know TARA, there could easily be an obscure poet called TXARA or TYARA (I ruled out TNARA quickly). This is one of those double-obscurities that usual irritate the hell out of me. However I knew TARA and managed to guess the correct unknown and can therefore declare the clue entirely fair.
    I’m in no position to complain anyway because the one error I did make was stupid: MASTERY. I was worn out by then.
    Pernod? No thanks.
  3. Guessed the right unknown for TZARA.
    According to the club site I got one wrong. Unless there was a typo I am guessing it was because I chose MYSTERY over the plausible MASTERY in which case keriothe has it right and the rest of us has it wrong?
    1. I think “puzzle here” indicates the answer to be entered of the two. If not, it’s a very misleading clue.
    2. No I think it has to be MYSTERY. There are plenty of other opportunities for error in this puzzle! For example, I had OMISSABLE (black = sable, spelling = not my strong point) for a while.
      1. You are dead right, and you got the right misspelling. Not so much misspelled as careless. Had SABLE written in for black, entered the front part later once parsed but failed to change the a to i. Still at least I got MYSTERY right. Also got HOOKE and POTASSIUM so Jimbo will be proud of me.
  4. DNFWA. Thought I was over the worst with the top half, as often seems to be the case, but ground to a complete halt in the SE and would have entered TYARA as the most likely guess. I didn’t help myself by misparsing 23 to mean “expedition” (why is the word there anyway?) and therefore HASTE, with no clue as to how the rest of it worked. Well done Jim on your 20 mins – I guess K for POTASSIUM dawned quicker on you than for us hopeless romantics!
    Is a cave a gap in a rock? Is Cubism still modern art? and in this company, is INKWELL somewhat feeble?
    Too grumpy for a CoD.
    1. Yes, all of those letters like K shout “element” at me before I consider anything else

      INKWELL is indeed feeble and requires arcane knowledge anybody younger than 50 is unlikely to possess. The same could be said of “perm”

      Is Cubism art?

      1. I meet the criteria for remembering inkwells, not least because they introduced me to the concept of cheating. In a test, we were required to estimate the diameter of the thing, and got the exact answer of 1 1/2 inches by surreptitiously sliding my ruler across. Happy days.
        Cubism thought it was art.
  5. Really enjoyed this puzzle, despite a couple of mistakes, and several going in with a ?:

    I had mastery, harpic age, and traya. There was no way I was going to get the last one, but I feel the other two were gettable…

    Thanks for unravelling a couple which I could not fully parse (PALMIST, PERMANENT WAVE), and confirming definitions which I kind of half knew (DEPOSER, RECREANT, eg).

    Thought OSTRICHES was a fantastic anagram, and despite seeing it first off, couldn’t get it till nearly the end.

  6. I seem to be the only person so far who’s heard of TZARA the poet, but it didn’t help me much. 80 minutes, with a long delay at the end on CASUIST and HERESY.

    Isn’t the point about a CASUIST that he’s a false debater, rather than a fine one? Or perhaps it amounts to the same thing. At any rate, I wasted a lot of time trying to force an F into the answer.

    1. I agree with you about the casuist – I always thought he was akin to a sophist. Never heard of the Russian city or the poet. 30 minutes, a good 10 of which were spent staring at a blank grid thinking dnf.
    2. Doesn’t a casuist has to be both? False reasoning isn’t casuistry if it’s not fine, and fine reasoning isn’t casuistry if it’s not false.
  7. Well over an hour for the first. Brain was still on hols I guess. Then back home to finally … just … figure out TOUGH LOVE, HEROIC AGE (couldn’t see the cryptic for the life of me), HERESY and KNAVE. The latter required Chambers for both the “servant” and the “body” meanings. So a technical DNF. Lost my crossword mojo, I fear; and with a blogging day coming up. Does this happen to others? Is there a Lancet article about it?
  9. The poet TYARA, author of “The Mill on the Bog”, “D’ye Ken Jimmy Saville” and “Ode to an obscure clue in a crossword” was my undoing. Better luck tomorrow.
  10. around 28 minutes .. Intricate but doable.

    Unfortunately I blew it in predictable fashion by spelling it OMISSABLE, which, come to think of it, I likely would outside a puzzle.

    Last in: HERESY

    COD: WILLOW PATTERN, for the penny-drop moment

  11. Lots of tricky but enjoyable stuff. After about 25 mins I decided to Google to find the Tristan ref. I think 22D TZARA is a very clever clue, Isolde being an Irish princess, but it’s in the wrong crossword – better in Mephisto/Listener or might have won an Azed competition prize. Didn’t know the meaning of RECREANT but, though <50, I remember inkwells.

    Tom B.

  12. A 38-minute grapple but I had to cheat to get Tzara and casuist, being familiar with neither the debater nor the eye disorder. I had no idea who Bolingbroke was but guessed that he had deposed someone and that the other def had something to do with depositions.

    There was some neat stuff in here like tough love and twaddle but the high arcanery count spoiled it for me. Was that really the best treatment the setter could come up with for permanent wave?

    Well blogged Jimbo, can’t have been easy.

    1. It’s a hair treatment that processes a permanent (until it grows out) crimp in your hair and is often referred to in brief as a perm. I remember my mother doing the home version when I was small and the smell was vile. I didn’t know Perm the city. Apparently it was called Molotov during the Soviet era – presumably after the cocktail guy.
  14. Well done blogger, and thanks. Agree with the arcanity count…..inkwell not a problem, but Tzara dead over 50 years and hardly well known…Bolingbroke too

    Loved heresy though, a real doh moment.

  15. 17:50, which doesn’t count as I also blundered into MASTERY without checking I’d picked the right alternative. Went for TZARA purely on the grounds that it sounded more likely than TXARA or TYARA; also felt that while arcane knowledge is fine (after all, amongst other things this sort of crossword is supposed to be a test of a wide range of knowledge, not just Things Tim Already Knows And Can Recall) the wordplay didn’t make it utterly unambiguous in the absence of that knowledge, thus somewhat unfair.

    Shame as it was a good puzzle otherwise. No problems with INKWELL; I have a little way to go to hit 50, but the desks at my school were considerably older than me, and had long-disused dry ones…

  16. The function of the hole for the inkwell was to provide a place where a marble could be dropped into the desk during a lesson, and roll down the ramps of carefully arranged books inside until it emerged at the bottom, just before the teacher figured out whose desk was making the noise.
  17. 45 minutes steady slog but got there in the end. I’d never heard of the poet but knew TARA from “Gone with the Wind”. Scarlett O’Hara’s dad named their family seat after the home of the Irish kings. TZARA sounded more likely than TYARA. I go every 10 weeks for a PERMANENT WAVE (without it I look as if I have no hair!) and can’t believe that there’s a generation that doesn’t know what a perm is. I knew the Russian town as well so that one was easy for me. I’m also of the INKWELL generation. In my primary the ink was in powder form and if it wasn’t mixed thoroughly you got lumpy bits in it. It was brought round in a kind of teapot and poured into the china inkwells set into the old wooden desks. The pen was a wooden shaft with a metal nib. Fortunately, by the time I got to grammar school they had been superseded by fountain pens and Quink.
  18. I’ll adopt the z8 abbreviation from above. Over an hour, and no way to finish as I had no idea of TZARA (although I knew Tara right off), CAUSIST, and I screwed up with MASTERY. PERMANENT WAVE from crossing letters and ‘Hairstyle’, and I still don’t get the wordplay. So I was thoroughly beaten today by more than one. That cricket bats are made from willow must have come up before, but it still took me a while to dredge that up. Whew. Thanks to Jimbo for the blog, as some of the wordplay was tough to crack (HEROIC AGE). ANISEED, POTASSIUM and HERESY are all very good, though. Regards to all.
  19. Add me to the list that don’t understand permanent wave solution. I get that it is a hairstyle and I get that it can be abbreviated to perm which is also a Russian city but what’s the – anent wave piece?
    1. There’s simply no more to it than that. The -anent wave piece is what you leave out when you abbreviate the hairstyle to PERM.
  20. I seemed to solve most of this quickly (for me). TZARA… hm?! I’m definitely in the post-inkwell generation.
  21. 18:11 for me – slow time largely down to tiredness.

    At least TZARA was an easy win. Once again I find myself amazed that people haven’t heard of someone as well-known as him. (Look at the length of his wikipedia entry for heaven’s sake.) I sometimes feel as if I’m living on a different planet from everyone else.

    1. Maybe not everyone else, Tony, but a different planet from me: I simply hadn’t heard of him and, despite the length of the Wiki article, I’m not sure I’ve missed much. There’s a very interesting contrast between the length and character of the Tzara entry you cite and the one for Bill Tutte, of whom I know a little and of whom I really ought to know much more.
      1. I quite agree with you about Bill Tutte, whom I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t heard of until the recent TV programme. Or if I had heard of him, I’d forgotten all about him – it’s a long time since my maths degree. Tommy Flowers was more familiar as an important name in the computing world (which is where I spent my career).
        1. To my utter shame, until the same programme, I couldn’t have put a name to Tommy Flowers. I was aware of ‘a man from the GPO’ building Colossus but no more. I suspect this reveals far more about me (as a long-ago History graduate) than I care to admit. But at least the Times crossword (and this site) help to put some small things right …
    2. “Once again I find myself amazed that people haven’t heard of someone as well-known as him. “

      LOL!

    3. Well, sorry Tony but that might prove nothing beyond the fact that he was appreciated mainly by people with verbal diarrhoea.
      I observe that the entry for Euclid is only about a fifth as long, so evidently Tzara is five times more important, or well known, as Euclid?
      I am quite familiar with both Tutte and Flowers (and how sad to see the state we have let most of the Bletchley Park huts deteriorate to) so I guess we must be on different planets 🙂
  22. Interrupted by ‘a man from Porlock’ (well, actually, Peterborough) when about halfway through this morning so didn’t get round to completing (I thought) until this evening. I shared most of the difficulties and pleasures mentioned above: so particular thanks, jimbo, for a fine blog which put me right on the wordplay in a number of places and also wiped out my smugness by showing that I had guessed the wrong unknown in TZARA and had carelessly entered MASTERY.
  23. Came to this late after a long day’s driving, took it slowly and finally got there. Very tricky, some of this. I don’t remember seeing or hearing the name Tzara (and kobi is Bengali – though I am not – for poet). 20 minutes seems a pretty good time – mine was about an hour. I remember the inkwell and fancy that early on in secondary school it supported an ink container, before the Quink packet took over. This was a great puzzle.
  24. 54′, with, I’m embarrassed to say, HOOKE my LOI; don’t know why it took so long to remember him. I agree with Tony about TZARA; you don’t have to like his stuff, or Dada in general, to know his name. And whether you know him or not, you might enjoy him as a character in Tom Stoppard’s ‘Travesties’, also featuring James Joyce and Lenin.
    I thought 3d (my first in) was hardly cryptic, and certainly not obscure, at least for someone, like me, over a certain age. My elementary school desks had inkwells, although they weren’t used.
    1. Assuming that all those who were silent on the subject had heard of him, 60% of contributors here had never heard of this chap. Perhaps we’re an unusually ignorant lot and you’d get a different result from the public at large.
      Having said that I got quite heavily into Stoppard at school so I had heard of him and just forgotten.
  25. As a 6-letter word, the heart of RABBLE must be BB. Disheartened would leave RALE. Half-hearted would be better wordplay (though wouldn’t fit the clue as written).

    GRRR

    Rob

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