Times 25334 – A mixed bag

35 comments on “Times 25334 – A mixed bag”

1. 1dn The voiced version would be ‘did for dad’.
   1. Thank you but what an absolutely crap clue. Utter garbage!
2. Similar experience to Jack, but failed also to get BATMAN (never heard of Bateman) and ABEYANT w/o aids. Liked THIRD-RATE when I finally saw it. Also TENDERLOIN. Thanks to Jack for explaining 28ac and 19dn.

   I had a query about 4dn. Is BACCHANAL being used here as a noun or an adjective (meaning the same as ‘Bacchanalian’, ‘characterized by or given to drunken revelry’)? On the nounal interpretation, as I see it, the definition would be ‘drunken revel’ and the ‘during’ would be functioning rather awkwardly as a linking word, as a substitute for ‘in’. On the adjectival interpretation, the literal would be ‘during drunken revel’, which seems just about possible.

   1. I read it as “During (this word meaning) drunken revel (BACCHANAL, noun) composer (is) dipping (his) toe into water”.

3. I thought it was pretty creative when I finally saw it. Makes a change from dodgy homophones at any rate.

   All rather academic, as the literal and enumeration hand it to you, anyway.

4. Game of two halves for me; quick left, slow right. Thanks to ulaca for putting me out of parsing misery re TIT FOR TAT — which we also had in the 3rd G. Final puzzle, with an even more obscure clue.

   Knew NUCLEOTIDE from reading that seminal work of sexism and misogyny, The Double Helix — but agree that it’s a bit chewy given the vagueness of “woman” in the clue.

   Afraid I was fooled by the “stops spots” device at 28ac, expecting some kind of container/contained thing.

   6dn is pretty good, I thought, and gave me all sorts of trouble.

   5ac: H.M. Bateman. May be claimed as English, but he was born in NSW.

   Edited at 2012-11-30 05:59 am (UTC)

5. 29 minutes, but I don’t see why voicing turns ts to ds.
   1. It may phonetically be more a matter of aspiration than voicing, but conventionally [d] is seen as the voiced equivalent of unvoiced [t].
6. Nucleotides are the biological molecules that are the basic constituents of the nucleic acids DNA and RNA. Now that I’ve helped with that could somebody please explain 1D to me in simple terms that I can understand. Comments made so far are more confusing than helpful. At the moment I’m 100% with Jack – it’s rubbish!

   Also not keen on 28A. Shouldn’t it read “defeats stops and spots perhaps”

   Most of it was comparitively easy – 20 minutes to solve with what amounted to a pure guess at 1D based on checkers and “retaliation”

   1. At the risk of being obvious, a voiced consonant is one made using the voice, an unvoiced one witthout it. T is made by placing the tongue against the teeth and removing it while expelling air but with no voice, D is made in the same way but with the voice ( both are dental plosives in linguistic terms). Similarly B and P are the unvoiced and voiced (respectively) bilabial plosives. F and V are the unvoiced and voiced fricatives.
      1. Many thanks anonymous – couldn’t have been clearer. With that explained – which is scarcely any more specialist than ‘nucleotide’ or a host of others we take in our stride – I rather like the clue’s touch of wit and its deftness.
      2. Thanks for this nice clear explanation. Greatly appreciated because I’m another who solved without underwtanding.
   2. Well, ‘did’ becomes ‘tit’ when you change the consonants from the voiced one ‘d’ (put your fingers on your windpipe when you say ‘did’ and you’ll feel a ‘buzzing’ – this is the vibration of the vocal folds) to the unvoiced one ‘t’ (ditto and you won’t); likewise, ‘dad’ becomes ‘tat’.

      Never thought I’d get to explain something (vaguely) scientific to Jimbo!

      1. My thanks to ulaca and anon – I now understand what this is all about and have concluded that the clue is rubbish.
7. Spent about 2 minutes on REVERSES, my LOI, which eventually went in purely on the definition. Thought in general that this was a good puzzle, with reservations similar to the above about REVERSES and TIT FOR TAT.
8. More time than I care to mention, with TIT FOR TAT and REVERSES (quite clever, that one) entered without understanding, and NUCLEOTIDE looked up.
   BRONZER provided the most explosive D’oh moment, but there were a lot of clues that required grade A solving – THIRD RATE, TENNIS, BACCHANAL. ESAU was amusing in an otherwise fairly po-faced bunch.
   While I get the Turkish connection with in ABEYANT, I did wonder whether the clue quite worked. BEY is not a direct equivalent of “Turkish”, and “a Turkish governor ant” is even more surreal than crossword convention usually allows. Not ungettable, but not elegant either.
   CoD to ZODIAC for being a clever clue I could actually solve and for opening up the NE corner.
   1. I think BEY is being used as “Turkish male” – Chambers (2002) has it as being the (modern) Turkish equivalent of Mr.
      1. Cheerfully conceded – I didn’t know the contemporary use, despite working with Turkish female staff. Mind you, they were definitely beybs.
9. 46m. I did about half of this very quickly but found the rest extremely tough and a bit of a grind. I didn’t understand REVERSES, or TIT FOR TAT. On the latter I’m in the “rubbish” camp I’m afraid.
   The rest of it was the kind of puzzle I usually enjoy a lot, but you can have too much of a good thing.
10. …as I finished most of it in 40 minutes and then got thoroughly stuck. Only after a long struggle was I able to see ‘tennis’, ‘nucleotide’, ‘batman’, and ‘abeyance’. But my last in was ‘reverses’, which is very obvious – once you see it.

    I am willing to accept that phonology is just as much a science as cell biology. You won’t get very far in philology without understanding the basics. All that stuff about Verner’s law, breaking, and i-mutation depends on it.

11. 22:32 (I’m forgiving myself a straight typo with ACCRIE) .. whipped through most then struggled over REVERSES, BATMAN and THIRD RATE.

    TIT FOR TAT is ingenious and neatly done, but does revolve around what is likely to be seen as specialist jargon. If you happen to have studied phonetics/phonology, ‘voiced’ and ‘unvoiced’ are old friends. If you haven’t, the enumeration may have been the only way in. But the pity is that this should be regarded as specialist stuff. We routinely teach this kind of thing to foreign learners of English. Why not to native speakers?

    Really liked the reversed hidden 1a.

12. I can’t parse ORDINANCE. Shouldn’t it be “Regulation requiring guns to carry one.” ?
    1. I thought of it as “one” (being inside) is carrying “guns” (on the outside).
13. I agree with jacket, 1d is rubbish. Tit for tat is voiced as such. No D in it.
    1. Martin, I’m afraid I don’t understand your objection. TIT FOR TAT is obtained by replacing the voiced Ds of DID FOR DAD with unvoiced Ts (using the conventional definition of voiced and unvoiced consonants).

       I’d be interested if you could find time to explain why you find the 1dn rubbish either here or in response to my latest blog entry.

14. About 25 minutes, ending with REVERSES which I didn’t understand until coming here. I agree that Jimbo’s wording would have been more sensible. TIT FOR TAT went in immediately from the enumeration and the fact that I saw 1A straight off, and I therefore had the initial ‘T’. But I had no clue as to the wordplay. Now that it’s been quite clearly explained above, I join those already in the Rubbish camp. But that’s probably because I have no familiarity with phonetics/phonology (thanks Sotira). On reflection, there’s no real reason that phonetics should be off limits while NUCLEOTIDE is fair game. Except, of course, that I knew NUCLEOTIDE but had no idea of the ‘voicing’ aspect of 1D. Unvoiced regarts to all.
15. I made extraordinarily heavy weather of this, particularly the SE corner where I spent a miserable 10-15 minutes on FETCHING (a clue I’m sure I’ve seen before), ACCRUE (I keep forgetting the significance of “picking up”) and REVERSES (any answer starting ‑E‑E‑ gives me the heebie-jeebies), and just scraped home under the half-hour in a desperate 29:08.

    I didn’t twig 1dn until after I’d finished, but once light dawned I raised my hat to the setter. Unlike others, I think this is a brilliant clue – my COD by a street.

16. This is the first time I’ve ever taken just twice as long as Tony to solve a puzzle — I’m not in his league at all and usually it’s more like six times. I found this a somewhat irritating puzzle, starting off to be very easy and then finishing with some extremely dirty (but rather enjoyable) clues. LOI was REVERSES, since it took me a while to spot the relation between stops and spots. TIT FOR TAT was obvious but it took me nearly till the very end to understand why it was right. As for NUCLEOTIDE, I had NUCLEOTIDA at first (and ADAMANT for 7 dn), although neither seemed to make much sense and I was itching to put “raw” = NUDE to good use. My problem was too much Turkish: ADAM means “man” in Turkish but eventually I did realize that no Times setter no matter how perverse would expect anyone to know that!

    Edited at 2012-11-30 11:46 pm (UTC)

17. I had resigned myself to a DNF until I started typing, and then ABEYANT finally came to me. Hopefully, I’m too late to provoke any response, but I don’t see anything rubbishy at all about 1d. If one accepts e.g. ‘detailed’ as ‘deprived of the final letter’, then ‘deprived of voice’ is fine for me for ‘devoiced’. And if one accepts that a solver should have some knowledge of the sciences, so that NUCLEOTIDE is not a rubbishy clue, then I don’t see why an everyday term from linguistics–the most advanced of the cognitive sciences–should be seen as ‘rubbish’.
    1. Not too late to provoke a response from me, Kevin – and it’s one of thanks for defending the clue to TIT FOR TAT so eloquently.

       I’m intending to devote my blog entry this week to defending this clue, and would like to quote you, if you’ll allow me.

       1. Don’t know what’s meant by “my blog entry” so can you post a link to it please, Tony?
          1. You’ll find my blog here, Jack. It’s next-to-bottom in the list of “Other crossword sites” in the panel on the right-hand side of the TftT blog (at least that’s where is appears for me).
             1. Thanks, Tony, I had been there but when I looked there earlier the latest entry had been about a fortnight ago so I wondered if you were referring to a different venue.

                There’s little if anything to be gained by pursuing the point any further but I suspect my initial reaction to the clue might have been less extreme on a non-blogging day when I wouldn’t have felt obliged to spend the best part of an hour trying to work it out only then to find that it relied on knowledge of a subject completely outwith my experience so I was never going to get it anyway.

                Edited at 2012-12-03 07:02 am (UTC)

       2. By all means! I must confess I was a bit surprised by the vehemence of some of the comments.
          1. In the end I posted my blog entry before I’d heard from you, but I was relieved that someone was standing up for 1dn against the barrage of brickbats.

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