Times 25114 – Let spades be Trumps, she said, and Trumps they were!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 35 Minutes

Music: Moeran, Symphony in G, English Sinfonia/Dilkes

Here is an easy puzzle if you’re thoroughly familiar with the rather old-fashioned subject matter, so I was right on the setter’s wavelength. It was
only at the end that there were a couple of things I couldn’t quite see, and had to ponder a bit.

I quite enjoyed the music, haven’t played this one for a while. You would think composers like Bax, Moeran, and Rubbra would turn up more often in puzzles. Instead, we get Arne and
Holst over and over again.

Across
1 HOBBLEDEHOY, HOBBLED + E + HOY. I never heard of ‘hoy’, in English anyway, but to quote the Wikipedia “A hoy was a small sloop-rigged coasting ship or a heavy barge used for freight, usually displacing about 60 tons.”
7 Omitted.
9 TRIBESMAN, anagram of BRAIN STEM. The Tribe of Dan, somewhere in the northern reaches of Canaan.
10 GLEBE, hidden backwards in [th]E BELG[ians]. We are firmly pointed towards previous centuries, although apparently parsons were only deprived of their glebes in 1978.
11 CONTACT, double definition.
12 AQUATIC, A(QUA[r]T)I + C. I was stuck on this one for a while, until I remembered the old ‘where you see a U, try a Q’.
13 Omitted.
15 SHORTFALL, SHORT + FALL, where ‘Broadway’ is only used to indicate an American season.
17 POLYTHENE, LOP backwards + Y(THE N)E. The only modern thing in the puzzle, although the Beatles were 40 years ago.
19 JUNTA, JUN[e] + TA, a starter clue.
20 CURLING, double definition, one disguised. I spotted right away that ‘shock’ = ‘mop of hair’, and still was stuck for a while. Since it crosses ‘triceps’, your mind might jump to ‘biceps’ and cause you to think of it.
22 VAMOOSE, V + A MOOSE.
24 OMBRE, [s]OMBRE. The game Belinda and the Baron are playing, which probably has not been played much since.
25 MILTONIAN, anagram of IN MAIL NOT. This was not the answer I was expecting as I tried to make the anagram describe the Samson in the closet drama.
27 SHE, SHE[d]. Our favorite novel, the one that no setter or solver has ever actually read. Probably just as well.
28 STATE OF PLAY, double definition. I had a lot of trouble with this until I saw the simple interpretation of the clue.
 
Down
1 HAT, double definition, where one who wears many hats performs multiple roles.
2 BAIRN, BA(I)RN. Another archaic word, one that has only survived in daily use in Scotland.
3 LEEWARD, LEE(WAR)D[s].
4 DEMITASSE, anagram of MISSED TEA. An obsolete custom that has left us with useless china and spoons.
5 HENNA, H + ANNE backwards. Usually a hair dye, but here going back to its source.
6 YOGHURT, GOY[a] backwards + HURT.
7 EYESTRAIN, E(YES)TRAIN. I put this is from the literal, and it took me a minute to figure out the cryptic for the blog.
8 FRENCH LEAVE, jocular cryptic definition, where Nancy is a town and not a girl.
11 CONSPICUOUS, CON’S + PIC(U + O + U)S. A compendium of cryptic cliches, five in one clue!
14 TOLERABLE, anagram of BEER TO ALL. I think this is more than tolerable, I’ll have an Old Peculier, please.
16 Omitted.
18 TRICEPS, sounds like TRY CEPS.
19 JUMP OFF, JUMP + OF F[avorite]. I didn’t get this for a long time, and thought that ‘start’ as a verb indicated ‘jump off’, as in a jumping-off point. Now I see ‘start’ as a noun = ‘jump’, and the literal is ‘deciding round’, presumably in either equestrian sport or track and field.
21 GAMBA, GAMB[i]A. A viola da gamba is a baroque stringed instrument, where gamba is the Italian for ‘leg’. To call one simply a ‘gamba’ manifests a fine disregard for etymology, but it is done.
23 ORIEL, OR + IE + L.
26 NAY, N(A)Y, i.e. ‘area’ inside of New York. My last in, I had to think about this for a while before deciding that ‘and even’, and ‘nay’ were equivalent bits of conversational filler. At least that’s my theory for now.

34 comments on “Times 25114 – Let spades be Trumps, she said, and Trumps they were!”

  1. 34 minute for this, not helped by writing in ‘huckleberry’ at 1ac and then re-enumerating it with only ten letters which rather nobbled my attempt. Once that was sorted out, TRIBESMAN was last to fall. Anyone on the Israel-Lebanon border might like to try the fish restaurant there called Dag Al Ha’Dan.

    Just as well Francis Howerd wasn’t setting this, or we’ll have had five doses of 26 dn. And isn’t ‘nay’ better rendered, as ODE has it, by ‘or rather’ than by ‘and even’?

    I would guess the reason that one gets Arne, Elgar, Holst, etc. rather than Bax, Moeran, and Rubbra is that the setters and editor try to stick to musicians that people have heard of.

  2. Couple of notes.
    • “Bairn” is also found in the NE of England. I think it got a mention in S. Fry’s “language” program last night.
    • NAY can certainly be “and even”=”and more than that”. “He was slightly eccentric. Nay, a complete crackpot”.
    • Finding “drink”=QUART in 12ac is a bit of a departure from the usual drinks maybe?

    Agree that this was quite easy, except that 1ac isn’t at all obvious to many. Including myself. Good job the downs hanging from it were so.

    1. Sometimes the distinction between ‘and’ and ‘or’ is difficult to establish and this exemplifies that. Like Oxford, ‘though, I’d still tend towards ‘or’ rather than ‘and’, and this is given some support by the suggestion of contradistinction carried by the negative in ‘nay’, no?
      1. Indeed it is. What I had in mind was Harvey Sacks’s work on how “additives” and “replace-atives” (yuk!) get conflated.

        Another — better? — way of thinking it would be to hear “or rather” as a self-correction such that the second term intensifies the first. That way, “or rather” and “and even” (“and more than that”) would do exactly the same work.

  4. 22 minutes, so top of the declared times for the moment!

    I can find no justification whatsoever for ‘quart’ = ‘drink’. We are used to ‘pint’ of course (as in ‘he’s gone for a pint’) because that’s in general usage but I don’t believe anyone has ever said ‘he’s gone for a quart’ to convey the same meaning.

    GAMBA is sanctioned by all of the five dictionaries I consulted.

    Edited at 2012-03-19 06:28 am (UTC)

    1. Forgot to say that SHE is very much in my mind at the moment. The book was mentioned with Rider Haggard’s other most famous work King Solomon’s Mines in the latest programme in Jeremy Paxman’s series on the British Empire. I am also currently working my way through 40+ episodes of Rumpole of the Bailey whose good lady wife he always refers to as “She who must be obeyed”.
    1. There’s been a fair bit of discussion about this the past few days, but basically they’ve changed the URL. Strangely, while I needed to add a new Favourite on my home computer, the office one “self-corrected”.
  6. Although I felt 4 down could have been clued more succintly as “Missed tea, ground coffee cup”
  7. 26 minutes. I found this tricky, nay devilish.
    There was quite a lot of arcane vocabulary in here, but I did actually know most of it, largely from crosswords of course. Strangely I had the most difficulty where I saw the answer immediately but couldn’t justify it for one reason or another: HAT, NAY, CONTACT, JUMP OFF, AQUATIC.
    1ac HOBBLEDEHOY is not really a fair clue, because you need to know one of two, um, unusual words. After mulling it over I put “hoy” at the end but I don’t really know why.
    I didn’t know that FRENCH LEAVE could be unauthorised, as opposed to unannounced. In French of course it’s “filer à l’anglaise”.

  8. A gentle half hour start to the week – very welcome after Saturday’s stern test. FOI Elf, LOI Vamoose. Held up towards the end with Gamba / Miltonian where I’d taken a first punt on Ghana thinking there might be an old instrument called Gihana or Ghania.

    Hobbledehoy was a new word for me but guessable from the wordplay.

  9. Felt good getting 14 minutes on this – though I’d have added at least 5 mistyping minutes online for sure.
    Can I be the first to say that I have read She, with a certain grim determination, and, come to that, both Paradises of Milton. I’m happy to be the one, so that no-one else has to bother.
    I liked this puzzle: it had a neat, classical feel to it with lots of classic indicators for the seasoned solver: shock=hair, volunteers=TA, educational establishment=Eton, the old=ye, Dan…?=tribe and of course novel=She.
    One query on 8d: I wasn’t clear as to where the “LEAVE” bit came from, once established that Nancy is the town. Perhaps a bit of a smudged clue.
    On the other hand, I liked the tidy collection of no less than 5 standards in 11 down, making it conspicuously my CoD.
  10. 26 minutes, so definitely an easy one for those of the HOBBLEDEHOY era. FRENCH LEAVE on the other hand, I had no idea about; sounds like what we call a sickie and yes I did wonder who Nancy was. I’ve also never heard a GAMBA referred to as such. COD to VAMOOSE, for no good reason.
  11. For once in a while a good day for me in a bright and sunny Darlington with a surprising 16.20 today. I only hesitated over 26 down and the quart in 12 across. ‘Going for a pint’ and ‘ having a gallon’ are common idioms in these parts. ‘Quaffing a quart’ anyone? My COD to 28 across for the neat surface. Thanks for blog – I could not see where the ‘right’ fitted into 7 down but now clear.
  12. 11 minutes, got the HOBBLEDE part before HOY, last two in GAMBA and FRENCH LEAVE, the former from wordplay and the latter with a shrug and a hope.
  13. Albeit with a typo in 21 – GSMBA instead of GAMBA. Fat fingers! I found it pretty straightforward. I didn’t know OMBRE, GAMBA or FRENCH LEAVE, but all were easily deduced from the wordplay.
  14. A quick solve for me too today…

    Like z8, I’m still a bit unsure as to where the LEAVE bit of 8dn comes from. Unknowns today: HOY, SOMBRE, GAMBA, GLEBE, but all gettable from clear cryptics.

    Thanks for parsing HOBB.., and EYESTRAIN

    LOI: CONTACT

    1. Forgive me if I’m being obtuse or providing what an old teacher used to mark in the margin as CGO (Crashing Glimpse of the Obvious), but, if Nancy is functioning to situate the action of the clue in France, then FRENCH LEAVE is a whimsical expression of the type of unauthorised absence you might find if you travelled to Lorraine. Nancy it/her-self is doing a kind of double duty, as Joekobi notes below, but doesn’t the LEAVE bit just come straight from ‘absence’?
  15. 16 minutes. Which is a fast time for me. I was greatly helped by the presence of such a lot of crossword cliches and no unfamiliar vocabulary. I would query the definition of QUART as “drink” but, apart from that, there seems little to comment about. There’s an old-fashioned feel to this puzzle. Strangely, although everything went in smoothly, I found it a bit boring. (Yesterday I did the 11th March Sunday Times cryptic. It was a lot more fun but took a lot longer to complete. I was too busy to comment but it was the usual goodie I’ve come to expect from that setter. Time isn’t everything.)
  16. Anyone who ‘goes for a gallon’ or ‘quaffs a quart’ I’d expect to address me as ‘Squire’.
  17. ….in the heading. Oh, and how do you get from “biceps” to “curling”, in the comments for 20a?
    1. A curl is an exercise for the biceps, where one lifts the weight by raising the hands to the shoulders.
      I did this one in well under 20′–one of the few times I did one online–and spoiled everything by forgetting to correct 21, where, rather like Daniel, I’d thrown in Gunea, knowing it had to be wrong but in a hurry to get somewhere else.
      1. I also had ZAMBIA which eventually led to GAMBA and thought of HURLING for a while.
        I’d always thought HOY was a barge until Wiki filled me in on the sloop-rigged bit.
        30-35 minutes…much quicker than this past Saturday’s slog.
  18. Like everybody else strolled through this listening to the birds singing in the sunlight. 15 minutes to solve.

    Agree about “quart” and could do without yet more obscure composers thanks very much

  19. Half an hour, before returning to finish the last 2 clues, had to look up ‘ombre’ (I thought it was a fish, which it is, apparently it’s also a 17th C card game and a fashion style, dyeing your hair lighter at the ends, if you have hair). Surely in 19d ‘start’ and ‘jump’ are synonymous verbs not nouns? A few weak clues (like hat) but generally a fine puzzle.

    Edited at 2012-03-19 03:17 pm (UTC)

  20. Was going well till the last; took me three full minutes to clear ‘contact’. Still round in 19 min. In 8 I don’t think there’s a specific take-up for ‘leave’ beyond the definition; I see a nice switch from the town to the girl there. Nay seems a natural for ‘and even’. (Seems? Nay, is.)
    Have just clicked your title vinyl1, from ‘The Rape of the Lock’ (20). Might they have been playing ombre on the barge?

    Edited at 2012-03-19 06:03 pm (UTC)

  21. Not too successful for me today, 19 correct, lots of unknown words and references for me, but the clues I got seemed not too difficult to obtain. Got 28A incorrect which stalled progress. I still don’t really understand the clue, prevailing conditions=STATE and Hamlet=PLAY but what has Denmark got to do with it?

    Edited at 2012-03-19 07:08 pm (UTC)

    1. prevailing conditions=STATE OF PLAY, and Denmark is the state of the play, ‘Hamlet’; so I guess that’s a dd?
  22. Ten minutes for me – did Milton at A level and was familiar with a lot of the other ‘old-fashioned stuff’ which probably helped me no end.
  23. 8:13 for me. Was there really a lot of “old-fashioned” stuff in this puzzle? I hadn’t noticed.

    I’d be delighted to see BAX, RUBBRA and MOERAN appear the Times crossword (I’m very partial to the music of all three), but I expect there’d be howls of rage from the usual subjects.

    QUART for “a drink” seems OK to me – I don’t imagine that the likes of Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch ordered measly pints.

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