Times 25,007 A Potpourri

Author   dorsetjimboPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time 20 minutes

I enjoyed this puzzle, which has a little something for everybody. There are a couple of unfamiliar words and a less well known area of Germany. The scientific content is quite high but nothing too esoteric.

Across
1 FEVERISH – F(EVER)ISH;
5 SASHAY – S(ASH)AY; Quentin Crisp perhaps;
8 RYDAL,WATER – (try + read law)*; Wordworth’s favourite spot;
9 AUNT – (h)AUNT;
10 HAMMER,AND,TONGS – two meanings 1=Smith used these 2=energetically;
11 RICHEST – RI-CHEST; RI=Rhode Island;
13 EGGHEAD – EGG(on)-HEAD(master);
15 TIMOTHY – OMIT reversed – THY; Berners-Lee perhaps (inventor of the world wide web);
18 SMIDGIN or SMIDGEN – S-MIDGI(e)-N; SN is chemical symbol for Tin; a midgie is a Scots midge or gnat;
21 COPPER-BOTTOMED – Bobby=policeman=COPPER; weaver=BOTTOM; Teddy=ED; the phrase derives from the practice of protecting the underside of British warships with copper plate in the 18th Century;
22 SNAP – PAN’S reversed;
23 WHITE,METAL – (time the law)*; generic term for a family of alloys with various uses;
24 TUAREG – TU(ARE)G; the Saharan Berbers;
25 MEASURED – reverse “Jerusalem” gives “melasurej” then omit “j”=judge and “l”=left to give “measure” then add “d”=died;
 
Down
1 FARTHER – FA(R)THER; pop=slang for father;
2 VADE,MECUM – VA(D(esirabl)E-ME)C-UM; a pocket companion – now electronic one suspects;
3 RELIEVE – RE(LIE)V-E(vensong);
4 STATANT – STAT(istic)-ANT; heraldic term meaning standing on all four feet;
5 STRATAGEM – MEG-A-TART’S all reversed;
6 STAUNCH – two meanings;
7 AMNESIA – (is a name)*;
12 SCHLESWIG – (wigless)* surrounds CH=church; slightly obscure German location;
14 ERGOMETER – OGRE reversed-MET-ER; more science, the erg is the unit of work;
16 INCONNU – IN-CON-(o)N(c)U(e); the fish meaning is new to me;
17 ON,PAPER – (propane)*;
18 SCOTTIE – SCOTT-IE; at last, an author;
19 ISTHMUS – I-ST-HM-US; way=street=ST; HM=Her Majesty; liked the “Panama perhaps”;
20 NODDLED – ON reversed-DD-LED; DD=Doctor of Divinity; it means to nod!;

42 comments on “Times 25,007 A Potpourri”

  1. Held up mostly in the SW corner: 16/22/24; esp. the aptly-named INCONNU. (Are we being had?) Quite a few unknowns: WHITE METAL, TUAREG (thought it was a car), said fish, and NODDLED. But as Jimbo often reminds us: you don’t have to know the word (and can’t complain) if the cryptic gets you there. Not helped by a bit of 7dn (AMNESIA) about 2dn (VADE MECUM).

    At 18ac, I had S(MIDGE)N; which seems to be the standard spelling.

    1. I think I prefer SMIDGEN at 18A and that is probably what the setter intended. My version would sit beeter in a Mephisto
      1. So the force of the ‘of’ would be something like ‘consisting of’? And see my comment below re the part of speech of SMIDGEN.
  2. Nice to see a good scientific showing today.. we shall have the Times readership scientifically literate in no time!
    Schleswig known to me only because of the Question
  3. I thought I was wavelengthing this one and timing all my leaps as the rollers broke around me, looking at a 30 minute finish, with all bar 4 or 5 in the SW and the heraldic one up top done in 25 minutes, but then I was swamped and washed away.

    While I got Cornwall done eventually, I hazarded ‘sealant’ for STATANT (d’oh!) and managed to invent a new form for the ‘tiny’ clue, quite an acheivement given that it already has at least three acceptable variants, ending -en, -eon and -in. However, until I’m put straight, which is virtually inevitable based on past experience, I’m holding out for my ‘smidgyn’, on the basis that, however you spell the word, it is a noun meaning ‘small part’ and therefore what we have is ‘midgy’ (‘of insect’) inside SN.

    As Jim suggests, a really good puzzle, full of interesting things and with very few of the answers going in from definition alone.

  4. I agree with Mctext on SMIDGEN. I don’t know if ‘smidgin’ is an alternative or about ‘midgie’ but the definition is ‘tiny part’ so there’s no instruction to shorten the contained word.

    35 minutes with the last 10 spent in the SW where there were two unknowns TUAREG and INCONNU. Didn’t know WHITE METAL (also called ‘antifriction metal’ apparently, hence the clue) or NODDLED or STATANT, but SCHLESWIG was no stretch as surely the state ‘Schleswig-Holstein’ is widely known?

    1. NOAD has:
      smidgen |ˈsmijin| (also smidgeon or smidgin)

      and

      ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: perhaps from Scots smitch in the same sense.

      So maybe Jimbo has a bit of the Scot in him??

      1. Jimbo is the product of a cockney mother and a Canadian father conceived in Scotland but born in the City of London – make what you will of that melange
              1. The former. I wasn’t kidding, and after my day it was just what I needed.
                Perhaps one day I’ll come round to typing that thing with the colon and the bracket. Not yet.
  5. “Of” is just a linkword; like “from”. X (“Tiny part”; def); linkword (of); Y (“insect trapped in tin”; cryptic).

    On edit: sorry a deleted comment intervened.
    This was supposed to be a reply to ulaca (below).

    Edited at 2011-11-15 09:12 am (UTC)

    1. I think we mean the same thing, but ‘consisting of’ is perhaps too sustantive for the linkdom I was trying to express.
  6. Came in on a wing and a prayer in 34 minutes. This stretched the vocabulary-net: a crafty delight.
  7. 15 minutes, including some well-crafted clues for the jamais couché avecs for me at NOODLED (looks a bit of a portmanteau), the unknown fish and the charming (I looked it up) mere. How pleasant it is to be educated on a poet by Jim!
    Lots of good stuff here. I quite liked the (intentional?) repeated word in the AMNESIA clue, and (if I remember correctly) it gets my CoD
    Do we know which SMIDG_N is preferred online?
  8. 32 minutes, and would have been a lot quicker if I hadn’t spent so long looking for an anagram of ‘Smith used these’ at 10. My inconnus were the fish and the heraldic term, which was my last in.
  9. Thoroughly enjoyable and essentially straighforward until I came to STATANT (well over half-a-century since I was taught heraldic terms and not in everyday use since then), INCONNU and TUAREG. Got there in the end but needed, post-solve (or post-guess), to check validity of each of these.

    Thanks jimbo for an entertaining blog. COD to MEASURED; not because it was difficult (it wasn’t) but because of what it revealed about the devious working of a setter’s brain! Extraordinary to be able to spot the substantial reversal of ‘Jerusalem’ and then compose a clue with a credible surface.

  10. Well, I found this quite tricky, but persevered, and got there in the end through laboriously working out the wordplay, as I had several unknown bits of vocab today (I think they’ve all been covered by comments above). I agree with Jack that it has to be SMIDGEN as the definition is ‘tiny part’, not just ‘tiny’.

    MEASURED also gets my COD today.

  11. 14:22 here, with the unknown INCONNU (geddit?) last in. I agree with martinfred about MEASURED, great spot from the setter.
  12. Help…
    I have set up a Live Journal name, password etc. When I come to post a message, there are 2 boxes next to the Live Journal drop down. I have tried password and username in each, but neither seems to work. What do you put in each box?

    And also, how does “to be buried” translate to “lie”?

    Thanks

    1. It’s quite common to see ‘Here lies John Smith’ on a gravestone, meaning ‘Here is buried John Smith’.
    2. This nearly always happens to me too. I’ve found that if, when you get the “password incorrect” box or whatever, you simply reenter your user name and password it works. A case of second time lucky!
  13. 34:01 – But very pleased to finish in a reasonable time all correct and without aids, despite a total of 7 unknown words which all had to be deduced from the wordplay.
  14. Noddle as a verb was new to me (and one I won’t be using – very unpleasant) and having only approached the High Atlas from the Moroccan side, Tuareg took a bit of time to pop in but otherwise a fairly straightforward and fun puzzle – about 28 mins. I quite enjoyed Sashay just because you don’t hear it very much but no COD for me today. Measured came closest.

    Anon, you need to log in in the boxes top right of today’s blog home page and only then go to the comments page. Took me ages to get sorted out in livejournal too. Not very user friendly.

  16. As with others I relied on the wordplay for a few unknown or vaguely remembered words but nothing there to quibble about.

    I’m sure I’ve seen a very similar clue for STAUNCH more than once in the past, not necessarily only in The Times.

    CoD to MEASURED from me as well. Even solving at speed I can appreciate the crafting of the clue.

  17. Another one completed in 20 minutes – that’s 2 days on the trot.
    Either the puzzles are getting easier or I’m getting better. Probably the former!

    Darryl

  18. 18:59 .. struggled a bit on vocab. and GK.

    Put me in the MIDGE camp on the grounds of simplicity (me and the clue).

    I did a brief double-take at STAUNCH for ‘stem’ at 6d, having been taught that ‘staunch’ is the adjective, ‘stanch’ the verb, though the distinction seems to be going the way of infer/imply. Given the etymology, perhaps it was always a fallacy. Who knows? I don’t.

    Pass me my vade mecum …

  19. This was a rather fun one, and I’m glad the wordplay was so clear, because I needed it for STATANT (my last in), VADE MECUM, WHITE METAL, INCONNU and SCHLESWIG. Did this between breaks in pub quiz, where my team fell from second to nearly last on the final round. Gins and tonics may have been involved.
    1. Managed to win our pub quiz last night in spite of copious quantities of alcohol. (37 out of 40 – two wrong sports questions plus we didn’t get which English pottery popularised the “Willow Pattern”. I expect lots of people here would have got that one!)
  20. 40 minutes for me, of which 15 spent in SW; pleased I wasn’t alone in that struggle. Despite being an occasional angler INCONNU was new to me as well. I wonder if I caught one and didn’t know! Thanks for helpful blog.
  21. An enjoyable 21 minutes. Some unfamiliar vocab but all gettable from the cryptics. Didn’t know the fishy meaning of INCONNU and never knew that NODDLED was a real word. I remember back in the New Year of 78/79 being stranded in Berlin in a blizzard and watching news on TV about a train stuck in a snowdrift in SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN. I’d never heard of the place before. Now I associate it with snow rather than livestock!
  22. About 20 minutes, and very enjoyable. There was a lot of reliance on wordplay, as others have said, to produce some unknown or unfamiliar words: INCONNU, VADE MECUM, NODDLED, STATANT, TUAREG. But overall, the wordplay was clear, and the surfaces today were quite admirable. My COD to ON PAPER for the surface, but there are several other good ones, so hats off to the setter and thanks to Jimbo for the blog. Regards.
  23. 21 minutes.
    I enjoyed this a lot in spite of tackling it at 6am. Lots of constructing INCONNUs from wordplay.
    I had a confident RADLY WATER for a while. If I knew my scientists like Jimbo knows his poetry, just think what I could achieve…
  24. One unknown. Since no one else seems to have been held up by it, I’ll spare my blushes…
  25. A very large number of inconnus in this one, including INCONNU, COPPER-BOTTOMED, STATANT, RYDAL WATER, WHITE METAL, NODDLED, actually, if I come to think of it, very few connus. Still, solved correctly after 42 minutes, excellent for me, as the wordplay was usually quite clear and there was really nothing else that made a good guess except the correct answer. CODs to STRATAGEM and MEASURED, but there were other good clues (and just a few poor ones, FARTHER for example a bit trite).
  26. 7:19 for me, slowed by STATANT and INCONNU (particularly the former), which I faintly remembered, and NODDLED, which I don’t recall coming across before.

    I didn’t mind this puzzle, but I’m slightly surprised that others were quite as enthusiastic, since most of the wordplay seemed either trivial or familiar (e.g. 5dn, a variant of STRATAGEM as a reversal of grandes cocottes).

  27. [url=http://gucciwallet-outlet.blogspot.com/]Gucci Man Wallet[/url]
    [url=http://mensguccibagsale.blogspot.com/]Gucci Sale[/url]
    [url=http://newguccibags-2012.blogspot.com/]Gucci New Bags[/url]
    [url=http://gucciheritageprint.blogspot.com/]Gucci Laptop Sleeve[/url]
    [url=http://guccidiscounthandbagsuk.blogspot.com/]Gucci Discount Handbags[/url]
    [url=http://2012guccibags.blogspot.com/]All Gucci Bags[/url]
    [url=http://guccihandbagfactory.blogspot.com/]Gucci Socks[/url]
    [url=http://newguccinewyork.blogspot.com/]Gucci Mens Sandals[/url]
    [url=http://guccimessenger-bags.blogspot.com/]Gucci Slippers[/url]
    [url=http://lastseasonguccibags.blogspot.com/]Gucci Duffel Bags[/url]

Comments are closed.