Times 25162 – Have a go, don’t be shy!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 49 minutes

Music: Bach, Cello Suites, Janos Starker

I was not in good form on this puzzle, and botched up a number of clues that should have been easy. For example, I thought of ‘rain’ right
away for 1 across, but didn’t get it until nearly the end. For 18 down, I tried, ‘Sleepy’, ‘Grumpy’, ‘Dopey’, and then gave up that idea. I even had a lot of problems with the obvious hidden plant name. Well, at least I put in ‘freesia’ almost right away, so the plants didn’t totally defeat me tonight.

I suspect this should be a puzzle of no more than moderate difficulty for most experienced solvers. There are a few tricks that might trip up beginners, but most of this is fairly standard stuff. There are a relatively large number of letter substitution clues, the most I’ve seen in any one puzzle.

Across
1 UKRAINIAN, UK RAIN + IAN. I wasted a lot of time with Russian diminuitive nicknames, while the answer should have been obvious.
6 BIPED, B.(1 P)ED. The Bachelor of Education, a degree that is not accorded much respect nowadays, when even kindergarten teachers are expected to have an MA.
9 KINGDOM, it’s Isambard KINGDOM Brunel, ‘Kingdom’ was his mother’s maiden name.
10 VERBENA, hidden in [disco]VER BEN A[lligin’s].
11 Omitted, an easy one at last.
13 INGENUOUS, INGEN[-i+U]OUS, where the trick is to understand the sense of the literal ‘green’.
14 TRENCHANT, TRE(N(CH)A)NT, where CH = Companion of Honour, and the river is our old favorite the Trent.
16 Omitted, another easy one.
18 BISH, BISH[op]. Easy enough if you know the slang term, which is not common outside of the UK.
19 BARBARIAN, BA(R)BAR + IAN, lift and separate ‘elephant man’.
22 SARCASTIC, SAR(CAST)I + C[ostume]. Either I don’t understand this clue, or it is flawed. It looks like you need ‘Indian costume’ for ‘sari’, which means you can’t use ‘costume’ again to get the ‘c’. Comments invited.
24 ANNAM, MANNA backwards. An area in SE Asia.
25 FREESIA, FREE + S(I)A, where ‘SA’ is clued as ‘appeal’ instead of ‘it’.
26 DIE-HARD, D + I.E. + HARD.
28 LENIN, L[-i+E}N[-e+I}N, a very easy clue because of the obvious literal.
29 EARNESTLY, EAR(NEST)LY, another rather easy one.
 
Down
1 UNKEMPT, UNKE(M)PT. I admit, this one gave me more trouble than it should have, but that was probably because I did not have ‘Ukrainian’ when I solved it.
2 Omitted.
3 INDIRECT, INDI(RE)CT, just bunged in from the literal by me.
4 IAMBI, (-b+I)AMBI. I suspected ‘iambi’ as soon as I saw this clue, but it took me a while to realize the deer was Bambi.
5 NAVIGATOR, anagram of TO A RAVING.
6 BARONY, B(AR)ONY, where AR is RA backwards.
7 PREPOSITION, P[u]R[g]E[s] + POSITION. The literal is ‘one is’, a slight definition by example, but a well-constructed clue.
8 DEAD SET, D(E)AD + SET, not the usual answer for ‘old man’.
12 TREE SURGEON, anagram of RESENT ROGUE. Good deception in the literal.
15 ARBITRATE, A (R) BIT + RATE.
17 JAVANESE, J(AV)ANE’S E. I wasted a lot of time trying to justify ‘Batavian’.
18 BASHFUL, BASH + FU[e]L, with ‘bash’ in the sense of ‘have a bash at’.
20 NAME DAY, N(anagram of MADE A)Y. As you enter from Connecticut on I-84, you are greeted by huge signs ‘Welcome to New York, The Empire State’.
21 PARSON, P + ARSON. I don’t know how I missed this for so long, but ‘crush’ is a bit misleading.
23 CEDAR, C(ED)AR, another rather easy one for hardened solvers.
27 AFT, [r]AFT.

49 comments on “Times 25162 – Have a go, don’t be shy!”

  1. My take on 22ac is: “sneering” (def); “about” = C; then ((pause)) “for a start” (in front of the C), one should write “actors”(CAST) inside SARI. Admittedly, it’s strange to find the first 8 of the 9 letters being “the start”.

    Romped through this, with the many gimmes. Only held up a bit by JAVANESE, given the plethora of women’s names. JANE was the last one I could think of.

    Edited at 2012-05-14 02:39 am (UTC)

    1. … where’s the “hidden” indicator in 10ac? Is “discover” doing double duty?
      1. I’m not a big fan of clues like this, but I think you should take “Discover Ben Alligin’s” as meaning something like “possessed by Discover Ben Alligin”. Maybe some people would be happy with just having “’s” meaning “has”.
        1. Yes, I think I go with the ‘has’ interpretation, which is how I probably parsed it when I solved it and before I satrted thinking about it too much!
      2. If the literal is ‘plant’, then ‘flowering’ must be the ‘hidden’ indicator, I suppose, in its blooming or developing/unfolding sense?.
  2. 38 minutes for me. Thinking that 26ac was (4-3) until very near the end didn’t help.

    I agree that the definition in 7dn is ‘one is in’.

    I think 22ac is supposed to be about=C then SAR(CAST)I goes at the start.

    I think 28ac should be LINEN with the I and E swapped.

    1. These substitution clues can be tricky to get the right way round, but here I think the answer must be LENIN, as ‘for’ means ‘representing’ or ‘giving’, as in ‘F for Freddie’.
      1. I’m not disagreeing that the answer is LENIN. The blog seems to be saying that we take the word LININ and change the first I to an E. Apparently LININ is a word, but I don’t think it can mean ‘bedding’.
        1. But the ‘at first’ in the clue needs, I believe, to be taken as an instruction to take the first letter of ‘ease’, so that you just switch the two vowels in ‘linen’.
          1. That’s what I also think the ‘at first’ in the clue means.

            vinyl1’s blog says:
            28 LENIN, L[-i+E}NIN, a very easy clue because of the obvious literal.

            The pupose of my original comment on this clue was to say that I don’t think this is a correct explanation.

            1. Many apologies. The only explanation I can offer in my defence, besides early onset dementia, is that I usually interpret capitalised words as the target word (i.e. correct answer) and was thrown by ‘LINEN’.
  3. I thought this was particularly easy, apart – naturally – from the omitted across (16), which was my last in, as ‘duke’ in the sense of FIST rang only the faintest bell and there’s a lot to choose from when you have the pattern _I_T.

    ANNAM was also a potential trap, as ‘Assam’ is a more obvious region and answer. After I’d sorted that out, PREPOSITION and finally the ‘mitt’ fell, occupying around five minutes between the three of them.

    BTW, Vinyl, the literal at 7dn is ‘one is in’.

  4. 16:41. I looked long and hard at 28ac, trying to figure out whether it was LENIN or LINEN; I always have trouble with this type of clue. It also took me a while to come up with ‘bony’=emaciated. FIST, on the other hand, was easy: was it only in American westerns and such that characters were being challenged to ‘put up yer dukes’? On UKRAINIAN: I got this from the definition before parsing it: ‘Little Russia’ is an outdated–and to most Ukrainians, offensive–reference to Ukraine.

    Edited at 2012-05-14 05:01 am (UTC)

    1. Presumably not Kevin, since “dukes” is cockney rhyming slang, albeit of a more than usally opaque nature. The ODO says:
      “from rhyming slang Duke of Yorks ‘forks’ (= fingers)”
      2. I struggle to imagine anyone saying “put up your fingers”. However there’s more on the subject here and it does seem to be the best available explanation. Not necessarily convincing, but the best available.
  5. Today was an interesting experiment. I set the timer and tried my hardest.

    After 10 minutes I had only the UKRAINIAN/NAVIGATOR crossing, and I was expecting the worst.

    Somewhat unbelievably, after about 35 minutes I was down to just a few niggling crosses left in the SW and NE. After a long hard stare I unscrambled SURGEON (my anagram brain has gone to bed already I suppose), and finished the SW. Now the clock was around 50 minutes.

    Finally I realized POSITION was the ‘office’ and finished most of the NE. Now I was at the hour mark and after 10 minutes of staring at 13a and 16a I gave up and came to the blog.

    Little did I know I’d screwed myself by entering IAMBS (I wondered how DEER = LAMBS), so I was never going to get 13a, even though I’m sure I considered the correct answer at one point.

    As for the omitted clues, I still don’t understand RUN and FIST. If someone could explain I’d be most grateful.

    All in all I’m glad I pushed myself for time today. I feel pretty confident that on a good day I might even be able to hit the half-hour mark.

    Cheers!

    1. I suppose I should add that KINGDOM, BISH, and ANNAM were my unknowns today. I was so nervous about time that I hardly had time to savor any clues, but I think BARBARIAN might have been my favorite, simply for the appearance of a surprise elephant.
    2. RUN is a double definition, ‘manage’ and ‘freedom of access’ as in to give somebody the run of the house.

      FIST is also a dd, ‘dukes’ being a slang term for fists, and ‘handwriting’ apparently although I didn’t know that meaning.

      1. Thanks! I guess I did know ‘put up yer dukes’ but it never came to mind… I assumed it was going to be a person I didn’t know, like Isambard Brunel!

        Could somebody show me FIST = handwriting in a sentence?

        Thanks for the alternate meaning of RUN.

        1. From the OED:

          The ‘hand’ that one writes; handwriting. Now only jocular

          1864 Derby Day i. 8 Your friend writes a tolerable fist.

          Essex Man

  6. This was easier to solve than to spot all the wordplay correctly and it had something of a sting in its tail for me as 7dn, 17dn and 24ac between them added 9 minutes to the 15 I had taken previously. Also I spent nearly a minute of the solving time reading and re-reading 13ac to make sure I had the unchecked substitution correct as I have been caught out by many similar clues in the past.

    My DKs today were VERBENA, ANNAM (and ‘manna’ as ‘spiritual’ fodder), NAME-DAY (it’s not hyphenated in any of the usual sources) and FIST as handwriting (the two ‘official’ Times cryptic sources don’t have it but it’s in Chambers and SOED).

    I agree with mctext’s and others’ parsing of SARCASTIC and beauvis’s apostrophe S = ‘has’ at 10ac. I came across P,ARSON in a rare excursion into Jumboland at the weekend.

  7. Found this really easy, except for the last three: got PREPOSITION (thought the definition ‘one is in’ was very good), then hazarded a guess at ANNAM (as others, I was debating whether or not to put in ‘assam’), then finally, in desperation, wrote a list of words that could possibly go in at 16ac, from which I threw in FIST, before coming here to find it was omitted! Aargh!
  8. Sluggish today, but managed 20 minutes.
    For 19, I assumed the elephant was spelt BarBar and “man across river” was a previously unknown euphemism for a Scotsman, Scotsmen always apparently being called Ian. How fortunate that one can be so completely wrong and yet come up with the right answer.
    I’m slightly alarmed to see that we must now add ‘s as a containment indicator, since nothing else seems to account for VERBENA. As if we haven’t got enough trouble already.
    I liked the definition for TREE SURGEON, but my CoD goes today to PREPOSITION for that “one is in” definition hidden is plain view.
  9. Thanks, vinyl, for parsing JAVANESE (‘certain’ that this was the answer, I gave up disentangling possibilities in the wordplay) and putting me right on the parsing of INDIRECT (I was with keriothe on this). Overall an enjoyable Monday morning’s offering which came in under 30 minutes.
  10. 23 minutes for this. It felt like a little bit of a struggle so I was surprised it didn’t take longer.
    My last in was FIST. I saw it immediately but have never come across it meaning “handwriting” before. BISH and ANNAM also unknown.
    Thanks for clearing up INDIRECT. I just bunged it in too, and when trying to work it out post-solve I was sure it was IN,DIRECT and (unsurprisingly) couldn’t see how it worked.
      1. Doesn’t work though, does it? The definition has to be “not straight about”, and “in” has to be, er, “in”. All in all far from satisfactory. vinyl1’s parsing is clearly correct.
  11. A very sluggish 35 minutes, never really getting out of first gear. BARBARIAN was my last in, having somehow managed not to have Babar anywhere near the top of my list of elephants. But I had managed to make the B of ARBITRATE look like a D, so was looking for a DURMBO word for some time. COD to NAVIGATOR.
  12. Surprisingly easy one for me, 15 minutes, with Javanese and Annam (guessed from knowing Manna) the LOI. Either Mondays are easier, or I’m less dim at the beginning of the week. CoD for me was IAMBI which I got before seeing bambi was the deer, an old favourite from the days of Babycham advertising… and I agree, it’s LENIN.
  13. 16:42 .. with quite a lengthy period of frowning before settling on JAVANESE. I’m still a C- for geography, at best.

    FIST for handwriting I’ve heard fairly often, especially from a family friend who is a former naval officer and fond of shootin’ and fishin’, a snifter at sundown and a good plate of rations or tuck. “Sorry ’bout the scrawly old fist.” Like that.

  14. 15 minutes but there was a time when I had hardly anything in the SE corner and thought I was going to have to give up.
  15. Does anyone here really consider giving up if they are stuck with fewer than 15 minutes on the clock?
    1. I suppose my comment doesn’t make sense, does it? I solve all the daily cryptics, doing the Times at lunchtime and if I can’t solve it then I do usually return to it later. What I should have said in my original post was that I didn’t think I was going to get anywhere with the SE corner at all.
  16. A pleasant jog of a puzzle – 20 minutes after 9 holes of golf, the last 4 in yet more ******* rain. This is the wettest drought I’ve ever lived through.

    I have to moan about the DBE (estate for car) but the rest of it was fair enough

  17. Very frustrating, I thought I would finish this because I was solving quite quickly until I hit 16A and 24A. I stared at them for ages but nothing was coming. What is 16A? Edit: so it’s FIST. Didn’t help knowing neither of the definitions and being left with ?I?T.

    Edited at 2012-05-14 03:32 pm (UTC)

  18. 12 minutes, nothing particularly out there, though FIST went in with a shrug. I rather liked the clue for JAVANESE – and down in the left hand corner we get to BASH the BISH. Hmmm…
  19. A slightly weary 27 minutes. I’ve always been soemwhat amazed by Brunel’s first names. Like Ezra Pound calling his son Homer Shakespeare…
  20. About 15 minutes. I didn’t have any problems except for FIST, which was my LOI after a short bit of pondering, based on the aforementioned ‘put up yer dukes’ phrase. The handwriting meaning is new to me, although I am familiar with FIST being the signature of the individual style of a telegraph or signals operator. I’ll agree that the most enjoyable clue today was PREPOSITION. Also, I’m quite familiar with the ‘Welcome’ sign you describe, vinyl, on the NY/CT border. It makes its counterpart ‘Welcome to CT’ sign seem like a model of understated simplicity. Regards to all.
  21. 22 minutes. It took 2 mins for the proverbial penny to drop for JAVANESE, which was my LOI and in retrospect a very nice bit of clueing. I had a bit of a ponder at INGENUOUS and LENIN, wondering whether I had them the right way round. In the event they were both OK. There was something comfortingly familiar about this puzzle – just what I needed as I battle the sneezes!
  22. 29.52so just in under 30 for once. No problems today and no unknowns with COD to PREPOSITION for the nice disguise. Thanks for blog as 19a was beyond my knowledge.
  23. 9:02 for me – slower than it should have been, but not a total disaster. (At least I managed to type LENIN in correctly this time.)
  24. I despair. This was an easy puzzle – 14 minutes including checking and double thinking the substitution clues. What are all of these comments about?
    1. They’re not compulsory reading you know. If you’re not interested then find something better to do with your time.
    1. I doubt you have but your posting did sound a bit dismissive of our efforts which I hope was not the intention, and if that’s correct then my response should have been more diplomatic.

      We have contributors of widely differing levels of experience so I would not like to think that anyone would feel discouraged from posting their queries or opinions just because the some of the old hands rattled through the puzzle in 5,10 or in your case today, 14 minutes.

  26. “14 minutes … what are all these comments about” strikes me as rather rude and dismissive indeed. Perhaps if you DID bother to read them you’d understand what they were about. Just a thought 🙂

Comments are closed.