Times 25,211 She Who Must Is On The Warpath

Author   dorsetjimboPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time 20 minutes

A puzzle in which a number of clue constructions were wasted by being accompanied by very obvious definitions. No real obscurities except perhaps for the trip to Medina and an old word for leaving ship. Other than that standard stuff with the exception of 6D which caused some offence chez Jimbo.

Across
1 HEGIRA – HE(GI)RA; the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 and of this setter if my wife catches him;
4 ACCORDED – (s)AC(k)-CORDED; gave respect for example to say the older generation;
10 LYING,DOWN – false=LYING; feathers=DOWN;
11 DEBUT – D(ocksid)E-BUT;
12 FALL,ON,DEAF,EARS – (fans of real ale + d)*; d from d(rinks); requests to bankers perhaps;
14 TURPS – TU(R)PS; short for turpentine, used to thin paint;
16 AUBERGINE – AUBERG(IN)E; in my pretentious youth I called my house L’Auberge;
18 ECOSPHERE – (hop)E-CO(S)P-HERE; small=S; solved straight from definition;
20 DOGGO – DO-G-GO; what the setter should do until ‘er in doors calms down;
21 A,SHROPSHIRE,LAD – (hardship so real)*; Housman’s 60+ poems; solved from definition and 1,10,3;
25 ADORN – sounds like “a dawn”;
26 BRITANNIA – BA surrounds (train in)*; Roman province of England and symbol of Great Britain;
27 TAKE,A,BOW – two very obvious meanings;
28 STRIFE – S(enate)-T(ackle)-RIFE; with “trouble”=wife and setter will find out why if my dutch finds ‘im;
 
Down
1 HOLY,FATHER – sounds like “wholly farther”; Innocent perhaps;
2 GRILL – G(R)ILL;
3 REGIONS – (organise without a=area)*;
5 CONGA – hidden (musi)C-ON-GA(me); what grandmothers still manage to dance;
6 OLD,DEAR – (el dorado without o)*; about as patronising and disrespectful as one can get of my missus;
7 DEBARKING – DEBAR-KING; more usually disembarking;
8 DATE – (man)DATE;
9 WOOD,SAGE – WOODS-(EG-A reversed); a medicinal plant; I’m told some grandmothers struggle out to play bowls;
13 SECOND,RATE – transfer=SECOND; judge=RATE;
15 ROOTSTOCK – O(r)-T(uber) surrounded by ROSTOCK; again, solved straight from definition;
17 BLENHEIM – two meanings 1=battle 2=dog;
19 PIRANHA – A-HIP reversed surrounds RAN;
20 DORMANT – DO-RMA-N’T; RMA=Royal Military Academy=Sandhurst;
22 PABLO – BAP reversed-LO; Picasso presumably;
23 LUNGI – LUNG-I; better known as a sarong;
24 CAST – two meanings;

31 comments on “Times 25,211 She Who Must Is On The Warpath”

  1. Ta for the economical blog, Jim. Only stuffed it in the SW with a mis-spelling of PIRANHA; leaving 25ac my LOI and no idea about A_O_A.

    Didn’t know ROSTOCK, CAST (qua squint).

    Let’s hope some posts a YouTube mix for 1ac.

  2. 29 minutes with the last 6 (!) to get cast. Man of La Mancha seems too definite to be vague, so to speak; I had Quixote’s loyal ally [Sancho] Panza, as I remember him, in doubtfully for a time. If I were a granny and called such, I think 6 would get my goat. But presumably an old dear wouldn’t be up to doing anything but the easiest crosswords. Watch it, setters.
  3. 24 minutes, still feeling sluggish. ECOSPHERE went in without any idea of the parsing, and hoping it wasn’t some other sort of sphere. DEBARKING last in, finally ceasing to look for rubbish enclosing some sort of leader.
    Like a lot of imported Arabic words, so useful in Scrabble, HEGIRA has any number of possible spellings – Chambers lists 5 without blinking, so the cryptic merely confirms which one to use. Perhaps it’s time for a convention on such spellings to be introduced – has the Académie française had a go yet?
    A E Houseman’s magnificent poetry was well enough disguised – I needed checkers to break it open. Is there a better expression of childhood nostalgia than this:

    Into my heart an air that kills
    From yon far country blows:
    What are those blue remembered hills,
    What spires, what farms are those?

    That is the land of lost content,
    I see it shining plain,
    The happy highways where I went
    And cannot come again.

    1. I wouldn’t get the Académie Française involved if I were you: judging by the number of French people I hear saying “courriel” or “fin de semaine” they aren’t very effective.
      1. Fair comment, and redoubled by the absence of any English “guardian” to even try. Does anyone know why Arabic/Islamic words worked into English allow so many variations, while (say) Indian ones don’t?
        1. Don’t know, but can make some guesses: Arabic uses a different alphabet, not matching the roman; traditionally, arabic doesn’t specify the vowels in writing; there are many different colloquial arabics; and I suppose there bave been arabists from different European countries, who would introduce different spellings via their own languages. Some of these apply to Chinese and Indian too.
          1. I think you’re right with respect to the routes by which Arabic comes into English: a quick and unscientific survey of Hindi and Chinese words in English shows much less variation, perhaps reflecting the more secure Empire and trading routes by which they were introduced. Hebrew, of course, finds standardisation in English through Bible translations, despite the alphabetic similarities to Arabic.
        2. I suspect that it is borrowings from the various Indian languages which are the exception (for their stability of spelling) among transliterated loan words. Antiquity and the British Raj doubtless have a lot to do with that.

          Incidentally, I believe AUBERGINE is ultimately derived from Sanskrit, although via a most circuitous route.

    2. No, one would say there never will be either. If only the the moderns could carry something over of the modesty and self-effacing skill of the older poets.
  4. Well, I must be living in a different ecosphere than Jimbo! Of the three that our eminent blogger got straight from the definition, one (ECOSPHERE) was last in, another (the unknown ROOTSTOCK) near last – I was saved by my vaunted knowledge of European places derived through football (Lodz and Craiova anyone?) – and A SHROPSHIRE LAD (a latecomer – was anyone else put off by the ‘book’ in the clue? I hadn’t realised it was a ‘cycle’, even though I’d read parts of it once).

    I also completely failed to parse DATE, which makes me feel even more witless, were that possible.

    55 minutes – which I was quite happy about. A defiant COD to ECOSPHERE.

    (Picasso did a nice sketch of Don Quixote de la Mancha, but I think ‘of la Mancha’ just means look for a Hispanic name.)

  5. 20m. A curious puzzle this, I thought. I whizzed through most of it but then was left with a couple of real dilemmas at the end:
    > 1ac. With H_G_R_ the soldier must be GI, and the obvious goddess to fit H_R_ is HERA. But that gives HEGIRA. If in doubt go with the wordplay, I know, but that is just like so obvs not a real word.
    > 24dn. How many words are there that fit _A_T? There must be lots. CAST means “shed”, but does it mean “squint”? I suppose it might, and if I try and go through the alphabet I’ll be here all day. Sod it, here’s Waterloo, let’s bung it in.
    Quite surprised to find they were both right.
  6. 40 minutes, with a number going in by cryptic alone (the aforementioned HEGIRA and LUNGI) or by definition alone (DATE – for which explanation thanks Jimbo). To me, rootstock is what you graft onto rather than a rhizome, although the ODE is unequivocal on the equivalence. Held up in the end by CAST & ADORN. COD to DOGGO.

  7. 32 minutes with 16 and 9 as the last two in.

    HEGIRA from wordplay and then vaguely recognised from a past puzzle. Its only previous appearance here seems to have been in cryptic 23878 in April 2008 but I’m sure I have met it since then. WOOD SAGE and ROOTSTOCK also from wordplay.

    Edited at 2012-07-10 10:16 am (UTC)

  8. Just over the 13 mins although I wasn’t entirely sure that HEGIRA was a real word but the wordplay was very clear so I wrote it in. Not a granny yet but I do support Mrs Jimbo in her grrr at 6d.
  9. Well, Jimbo, I certainly hope you told the little lady not to worry her pretty head about it. Then again, you appear to be still breathing so perhaps you didn’t.

    18:02 .. I agree that the wordplay was often redundant, but I still enjoyed this one. Like others, I had to persuade myself of a few solutions before clicking ‘submit’.

  10. Something of a mish-mash puzzle, with little sense of cohesive style. Blogged with aplomb, although I would venture that “chez jimbo” is no less pretentious than L’Auberge!
  11. Completed with a couple of guesses. Query re 13d…..why does “second” equal “transfer”?

    Thanks.

    1. Because of a job transfer….you know when you see the link just after you press the “Post comment” button?
      Doh.
  12. Got interrupted by a few text messages and had to put this down for a while this morning – ROOTSTOCK from checking letters, didn’t really understand it at all but seemed to be the only word that fit. DORMANT from definition without understanding wordplay.
  13. Hmmm…got stuck in top right, with gaps at ACCORDED, CONGA, and DATE (but that was because I had ‘debar’ at 11ac. I also had ‘pond sage’ and, bizarrely, ‘hegiro’.

    Bit of a spaniel’s dinner today, really…

  14. Well, I’m not rounded back into form quite yet. This took about 50 minutes, ending with WOOD SAGE, as a guess, not understanding why ‘woods’=’bowls’. Other difficulties: ‘cast’=’squint’?; ‘roll up’=”pab’, or ‘bap’?; LUNGI?; and, even though it has appeared before, DOGGO, because I don’t remember what it means. We don’t shorten ‘turpentine’ over here, so TURPS also seemed weird, but clearly correct, puzzlewise. And it also took me a while to believe that ADORN was what was needed at 25A, since ‘dorn’ does not sound like Dawn, even in my NY ‘r’ dropping way of speaking. Nevertheless, happy to have gotten through it, despite the time. COD to ACCORDED, which seemed quite clever to me. Regards.
    1. In the game of bowls (bowling balls along a ‘green’ to try and hit a small white jack ball) the large bowling balls are called woods because they used to be made of a dense wood, lignum vitae.
      1. We call game that bocce over here, since the Italian descended folks are really the ones who keep it up.
  15. Jimbo: ‘dormant = ‘don’t’, with R(oyal) M(ilitary) A(cademy) inside.
    I only struggled with ‘second rate’.
    Nikki (frequent interloper on this site now I have discovered it!)
  16. 34.23but should have been a sub30 as I had the more obscure ones early on but found I had misspelt turps making 15d impossible for 5 minutes! Grr! AUBERGINEtook me back to my youth and losing a rugby semifinal when a line out call went badly wrong – the secret code was any fruit or veg beginning with O meant the ball was thrown to the back and any with A was thrown to the front and the skipper called AUBERGINE ….! Happy days long gone as are most of the players.
  17. My first puzzle for a couple of weeks – the elapsed time between times.co.uk subscription expiring and a birthday present of a year’s subscription to the Crossword Club starting at the weekend. Am looking forward to stretching myself with Mephisto and Club Monthly puzzles.

    No major problems today but had several gaps in the NW corner until I twigged Holy Father. POI Wood Sage and LOR Hegira, both from wordplay.

    1. Good luck with Mephisto. The blog will help and don’t hesitate to ask questions – they’re an acquired taste but very satisfying to solve once you get the hang of it. You’ll need Chambers.
      1. Thanks Jimbo. I’ve got Chambers 9th edition. You couldn’t send me a link to your “Beginner’s guide to Mephisto” could you? I remember you described your solving method and how the puzzle contains starter clues.
        1. At the top of the blog click on memories and then on solving tips. The puzzle was 2493 of 15th June 2008

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