I completed most of this within 25 minutes but then became bogged down in the remaining 8 clues in the lower half with 13dn, a word I’ve never heard of, as the main sticking point. I eventually finished in 50 minutes exactly.
Across | |
---|---|
1 | IMPOSTURE – 0, ST (no way) inside IMPURE (sinful). Assuming a false identity. |
6 |
JAPED – |
9 |
ALI BABA – ALIB |
10 | UNDERGO – dd – one vaguely humorous. |
11 | EDITH – EDIT (change) + H(usband) |
12 | ALMSHOUSE – Anagram of HAULS SOME. Not the usual meaning of hospital here but an earlier one, a charitable institution for the needy. |
14 | WAG – dd. WAG is an acronym from ‘Wives And Girlfriends’ relating originally to sportsmen, I believe. If when going on tour or to a function ‘WAGS are included’ then their wives and girlfriends may go too, hence ‘accompanying lovely’ as one of the definitions here. |
15 | PANIC BUTTON – Cryptic definition |
17 | TOMMY ATKINS – 0, MM (no MM – Military Medal) inside anagram of TINY TASK. TOMMY ATKINS is a slang term for the common soldier in the British army. |
19 | Deliberately omitted – our second cricketing reference today. |
20 | RIGOLETTO – RIG (set up) followed by LETT (European) inside OO (spectacles). The opera by Verdi. |
22 | GHOST – G (grand) + HOST (anchorman – on TV). Wasn’t there a song by Frankie Laine called Ghost-writers in the Sky? Perhaps not. |
24 | HIND LEG – The obvious answer when one has thought of the expression ‘ talk the hind leg off a donkey’ but unfortunately I didn’t for ages and this was my last one in. |
26 | AUTOCUE – Sounds like ‘auto queue’. |
27 |
DEARY – D |
28 | BREADLINE – Anagram of IRELAND BE. |
Down | |
1 | IRATE – RAT (animal) inside I.E. |
2 | PAIRING – AIR (song) inside PING (sound as a bell). ‘Belting’ is the containment indicator. |
3 | SLAP HAPPY – SLAP (make-up) + HAPPY (Doc’s colleague in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). |
4 | UP AGAINST IT – Anagram of PUTTING ASIA. |
5 | EMU – The flightless bird and the Economic & Monetary Union currently in the process of crash-landing. |
6 |
JUDAH – JUD |
7 | PARQUET – Supposed to sound like “parky” only unfortunately it doesn’t – on edit, please see my reply to martinp1 in the comments below. Used for flooring. |
8 | DO ONE’S NUT – DONE (finished) with 0 inside it (empty) + TUNS reversed (upturned casks). This and ‘go spare’ are alternatives meaning to become 1dn. |
13 | MACHICOLATE – MA (mother) + CHoCOLATE (brown) with its first O replaced by I. This was unknown to me. It means to construct openings at the top of medieval fortifications. |
14 | WATERSHED – H (usband – again) inside TERSE (brief) all inside WAD (sandwich). This use of WAD is army slang as in the expression ‘char and wad’ meaning tea and sandwich. |
16 | UNSIGHTED – SIGH (exasperated noise) replaces the I in UNiTED (football team). |
18 | MAGENTA – AGENT (spy) inside MA (clever chap, but not necessarily so in my experience). A battle in the 2nd Italian War of Independence – 1859. |
19 |
BRONCHI – BRONC |
21 | LULLY – Jean-Baptiste LULLY 1632-1689. Another late entry in my solve. |
23 | Deliberately omitted |
25 | GOB – GO (turn) + B(lack) |
Regarding the non-homophone, it’s only a matter of years until we can have ‘Chat show host sounds chilly’.
Sheela
it sounds like machicolations are just what are needed to repel unwanted callers. Not sure pouring molten lead conforms to OH & S regs, though.
Seriously, though, I don’t quite go for the reverse U thing. After all, it’s the ‘lower’ classes who predominantly give the anglicised pronunciations of words like ‘buffet’. A whole sitcom in the 90s was devoted to the single joke of a social climbing, wannabe U woman determined to get people to call her Bouquet rather than Bucket, no?
Edited at 2012-06-29 09:41 am (UTC)
No idea about the MacH-thingy (13dn); but I shall try to get it into the conversation at tonight’s sundowner (yes, a third meaning for that word).
EMU: could you blokes stop nicking the names of our animals? There’s also the EURO, another name for the wallaroo. It’s bad enough that you don’t have a flag of your own and have to nick the little bit out of the corner of ours!
Oh and … liked 19ac, having done the puzzle just after selling my vintage Mustang bass.
Edited at 2012-06-29 06:15 am (UTC)
In my neck of the woods, PARQUET is often pronounced “laminate flooring”, but parkay is what I’d hear it as.
Any Times Crossword that includes GOB doesn’t deserve a CoD.
– artic is part of traffic
– le (in article) a homophone for letter L, the back of tail.
– articles are broadcast in broadsheets, f’rinstance.
Rob
But did not enjoy this crossword, and DNF.
Some of it is good – I liked “accompanying lovely” for WAG. But if I pronounced PARQUET as “parky” my French family connections would disown me! Never heard of LULLY and 13D is a good Mephisto word which leads to a train crash of a clue. 25 minutes including looking up both the composer and the MAC-rubbish.
I even wrote down MACHICOLATE but just couldn’t for the life of me how the rest of the clue could be any kind of definition, and I was convinced the gallery was TATE.
The rest of my unsolved clues were in the SW. I’m sure I’d have got there eventually but I lost the will to live.
All in all a miserable experience. I’m off for a game of croky.
Put me in among those who don’t think that PARQUET sounds like parky. Odd, because in the Midlands and the North, a word such as “garage”, say, is usually anglicised in pronunciation to “garridge,” and to those of us who still use the term, a “char-a-banc” is always a “sharrabang”; so I really don’t know why I should be a “par-kay” man.
I often think that if Nigel Farage really wanted to demonstrate his UK credentials he would insist on being Nigel Farridge.
I had a vestigial memory of 13d having been dragged around countless stately homes and monuments as a kid. 24 minutes.
‘Machicolate’ turns out to be a casualty of the in-progress revision of the OED. Previous editions had an entry for the verb (to furnish with machicolations), but the supporting quotations all involved the adjective ‘machicolated’, so OED3 has rebranded the entry as ‘machicolated, adj.’ (provided with machicolations). Ironically, however, OED3’s definition for ‘machecole’ is still ‘to machicolate’, which unwittingly provides their sole attestation of ‘machicolate’ as a verb.
All very interesting, if you like that kind of thing, but what it’s doing in a daily cryptic is anyone’s guess.
Edited at 2012-06-29 12:59 pm (UTC)
Didn’t manage to parse RIGOLETTO or PAIRING, and hadn’t heard of MACHICOLATE or (battle of) MAGENTA.
Tough puzzle. AUTOCUE made me smile.
great unwashed: bunch of flowers
aspirant middle classes: careful French bou-kay
aspirant upper classes: archly casual French – b’kay
proper toffs: bunch of flowers
I imagine it’s much the same with parquet/parky.
It’s how the English ruling classes kept their heads when all in Europe were losing theirs.
The pronunciation of a French word or words should, when the language of conversation is English, avoid any attempt at exact French pronunciation, which can hinder the flow of talk. At the same time, a speaker will not pronounce every French expression as if it were English. To do so is all right for some French words, like those in ‘tour de force’, which a sensible English-speaker will pronounce without any French sounds whatever. But many others would sound so non-English that some compromise seems called for, like ‘tant pis’ or ‘aide-de-camp’, which are unintelligible as English noises.
Unfortunately, Kingers doesn’t include either “bouquet” or “parquet” in his list of recommended pronunciations of French words, so we are left none the wiser on that score.
Definitely parkay in my part of Yorkshire.
Am I surprised that people haven’t come across LULLY before? A bit, particularly given that he appeared as recently as No. 24,590 (15 July 2010) as the answer to “Composer puts brief pause before end of symphony (5)”. I’m not sure what those unfamiliar with him would make of this DVD of Atys, but if you like that sort of thing then it’s definitely the sort of thing you’d like – though sadly it currently costs £10 more from Amazon than it did when I bought it at the end of last year. Still well worth the money though!
However on looking it up later I found that according to Collins a WAG is the wife or girlfriend (of a famous sportsman) and its etymology is a back formation of an acronym for w(ives) a(nd) g(irlfriends). So WAG is singular and if you want the plural you put an S on the end.