Times 25,337

13:58 on the Club timer. Nicely put-together puzzle, where a couple of gaps in my knowledge were filled by wordplay.

Across
1 HALT – double def. (I shudder when guards – sorry, train managers – inform me of our next “station stop”. Though this is as nothing to my irritation when they tell me that we’ll be “arriving into” our destination.
3 DAMASK ROSE – DAM + ASK + ROSE. A particularly fragrant example of the species.
9 GO TO POT – double / cryptic def.
11 ALAMEDA – A LAMED Adult; I didn’t know the Spanish for “promenade”, but the word seemed familiar, possibly because of the Californian city of the same name.
12 CAT OF NINE TAILS =CAT OF NINE “TALES”.
14 MESON – SO in MEN.
15 INSOLVENT – Very in INSOLENT (=fresh).
17 DO A RUNNER – (ORDERANUN)*. The surface suggested by this tickled me.
19 CAPRI – CAPRICE without the C.E.
21 GRAND NATIONAL – GRAND(splendid) + NATIONAL(subject, as in “a British national”). I presume even non-British residents are familiar with the steeplechase?
24 UNBOWED – double def.; “pizzicato” is the musical instruction to play a string instrument by plucking, rather than with the bow.
25 PENDING – Piano + ENDING.
26 STARRY EYED – Right in (YESTERDAY)*.
27 WRIT – WRIST without the Small.
 
Down
1 HIGH COMEDY – HIGH + COME + DumpY. As opposed to the base sort.
2 LITOTES – TOT in LIES; understatement as a figure of speech e.g. “not half bad”.
4 ATTENTION=”A TENSION” .
5 APART – APARTMENT. More than half, five-ninths to be precise.
6 KHAKI ELECTION – cryptic def. Any election where war is an issue, or the votes of returning soldiers are key to the result, first used to describe the 1900 election (fought around the Boer War), but also applied to those of 1918 or 1945.
7 OVERSEELOVE ERSE English.
8 ELAN – IrELANd.
10 PENINSULAR WAR – (ALIPWARNNURSE)*. I saw an interesting documentary recently which suggested that victory in Spain was achieved by the British having better wagons, while the French supply chain was fragile, so despite his fighting prowess, Wellington’s real gift was for logistics.
13 STRIP LIGHT – TRIP in SLIGHT.
16 SORB APPLE – (POPLARBEST)*. Having never heard of it, I tried to justify STAR APPLE at first, before sorting out the wordplay, which was pretty clear when combined with the checkers; somebody with green fingers might know more about one of the three sorts.
18 ALGEBRA – (ALEG)* BRA.
20 PANNIER – ANN in PIER. I started by thinking the girl was Annie, and was wondering what Wigan had to do with PR…
22 DODGE – Defendant in DOGE.
23 LUGS – double def.

29 comments on “Times 25,337”

  1. 28 minutes with time wasted working out the anagram at 16dn in my head instead of writing it down, miscalculating the letters remaining and then wondering if SERBAPPLE might be the fruit in question. MESON also caused a delay but I had a vague memory of meeting it before. ALAMEDA was the final hurdle. Other than that I found it dead easy with surely one of the lowest word-counts we have had in a set of clues for a long time.

    Edited at 2012-12-04 06:11 am (UTC)

  2. A Severine time for all bar six or seven clues (mainly in the NE), but then got held up by the foreign stuff up there (as well as APART), to finish in 33 minutes. Then I came here to find that chopping off the wrong bit of ‘best’ had resulted in a new breed of apple, the ‘sort’ at 16dn.

    Edited at 2012-12-04 02:35 am (UTC)

  3. So bugger me — no, ’ang on, don’t — there’s a KHAKI ELECTION. I rather wish there wasn’t. With that and ALAMEDA crossing, I could have gawn for a DNF in a tarxi carb. The clue (6dn) was as obscure as the arn-swer (he said, trying to be a bit suvvern a-gin).

    [Well, you suvverners can write “oop” for “up” when you know damn well that “oop” is a cockney “hoop”. Eh?]

  4. 15 minutes but with a careless ATTENSION (Sergeant Major pronunciation and evidence of a gift for inadvertent irony). Very neat puzzle.

    I share Tim’s shudders over ‘station stop’ on trains, even though there is a dreary logic to it. But given that a station without buildings can be called a HALT, do branch line guards ever announce that “Our next halt stop is…”?

    Edited at 2012-12-04 03:07 am (UTC)

  5. I think I must spent at least half my time on DAMASK ROSE, ALAMEDA, APART and ELAN (where I tenatively had FIRE for a while). The rest was really pretty easy.

    I did wonder if the DAM in 11 is meant as one of the Australian variety, that is, something you fall into rather than fall off.

    Derek

  6. As others, paralysed in NE, to finish in 28 minutes. Would prefer a single demand in 24.
  7. 19m, but with EUAN at 8dn, thinking there must be some sprite or fairy I’d never heard of. I considered ELAN, but thought “that doesn’t mean spirit”. It does, of course. And Euan is a Scottish name. Sigh.
    I detest the phrase “station stop”. I see it as a cynical ploy by train companies to improve the perception of their services. Rather than actually trying to make them efficient they try and get people used to the idea that lengthy stops in places other than stations are perfectly normal.
  8. Straightforward 20 minute solve of an artisan puzzle.

    I share McText’s dislike of 6D which I solved from K?A?I and the word “vote” in the weak clue. Thankfully no longer have to subject myself to train managers and their strangled announcements.

    The point aboiut Wellington is interesting. A school friend of mine went into the army and told me that as officers they had to study and contrast Wellington and Napoleon. Wellington comes out streets ahead on both logistics and power of delegation. Apparently had Napoleon’s subordinates had more delegated power and been better organised, Waterloo would have been a different story. The same lessons can I’m told be drawn from Nelson at Trafalgar

  9. Two errors today (Intention at 4 down and Cat O’Nine Tales (sic) at 12 across) which meant I didn’t therefore get Damask Rose or Khaki Election. Surprised to see Capri again after its appearance yesterday in Capriccio.

    I was in Paris for a few days’ holiday last week and did last week’s puzzles over the weekend. Enjoyed reading everybody’s comments about them – thank you. “Oink” was a particularly memorable clue.

  10. Quite a few really obvious solutions and then held up by the promenade, the election and the apple, but they must have all been hiding in the back of my brain somewhere as I finished in a very respectable 11 minutes.
  11. You’re going to have to explain this one to me please……

    Whatever way you look at it – Cat-O-Nine-Tails is NOT Cat of Nine TALES. Is there an expression Cat of Nine Tales? I’ve never come across it, but am happy to be corrected.

    Seems to me that yet again a crossword compiler has applied his own “rules” to the English language.
    Another example would be Flower for river – Um? Yes, a river flows, but is it really a flower? It doesn’t appear in any dictionary as such.

    1. I just ‘investigoogled’ and you can have a cat OF nine tails – indeed you can apparently get one on Ebay for £7.49! I would imagine that flowers and rivers have been linked cryptically since cryptic crosswords – definitely for over 40 years to my knowledge.
      1. It’s a soundalike clue. The setter is indicating (via the phrase ‘stories to tell’, or to put it another, more way, ‘stories, we hear’ or ‘stories for an audience’, etc.)that we’re looking for a word that *sounds* like a word meaning stories. Hence ‘tails’ (sounds like ‘tales’).
    2. No, but CAT OF NINE TAILS sounds exactly the same as CAT OF NINE TALES, which is what the clue indicates (I am in transit, so can’t look at it to cite the part which indicates this – can anyone help me out?)

      As to flower = river, my understanding is that a cryptic crossword involves using the wonderful complexity of the English language in order to create a challenge for the solver. There are conventions, if not actual rules, and as long as the setter plays fair, he or she is under no obligation to be literal in how the clue is constructed. By their very nature, you won’t find cryptic definitions, or charade type definitions, appearing in the dictionary.

      Describing a river as a flower, or an anaesthetic as a number, is no longer innovative and witty, though it certainly would have been thought so when someone came up with the idea, I expect. However, it’s certainly part of the standard grammar of cryptic crosswords. If you don’t like it as a device, that is purely a matter of taste (others dislike definition by example, or cryptic definitions, or homophones, or Herbert Beerbohm Tree), but I don’t think it disqualifies the device from being a valid part of the setter’s armoury.

      1. Anonymous should also look out for ‘banker’ meaning river, which no doubt will distress him/her even more.
    3. Thanks for the Christmas shopping tip, Sue!

      Anon – ‘flower’ for river is a morphological pun. Not a great one, but a pun nonetheless. And puns are part of the territory, as in CAT O NINE TAILS / ‘cat of nine tales’.

  12. Two or three perhaps weaker offerings in this, but overall a rather nice set that took me 37 minutes.

    Thanks for your blog Tim, much appreciated.

    Chris G.

  13. Neat, if not particularly hard, puzzle with lots of elegant surfaces in the clueing. I don’t understand the objections to KHAKI ELECTION, which seems to me a perfectly respectable, indeed rather good, clue. I assumed that “raise the wind” at 15 ac was a slang term meaning something like “to scrape the necessary dosh together”. Is that right? It’s not a phrase I’ve met before.
    1. I think the objection is to a pure cryptic definition for an uncommon term: if you don’t know it you’ve got no chance. I only know it from crosswords.
      1. Point taken. I agree that if you’ve never heard of a “khaki election” there is no alternative wordplay route into the solution. I happened to be familiar with the phrase so that objection didn’t occur to me.
  14. About 30 minutes, held up at the end by the short ones at 1A (HALT or HOLD?) and 23D, where my mind wouldn’t go past TUGS. I did guess right at HALT, but I couldn’t think of anything else at 23D, so an error for 2 days in a row for me. LUGS means ‘carries’ as opposed to ‘pulls’ to me, and I’m not familiar with lugs as ears, so it didn’t come to mind. Everything else went in fairly easily, though I hadn’t heard of the SORB APPLE. I was familiar with the KHAKI ELECTION, at least the first one, but I had to rely on the wordplay to find the meaning of ALAMEDA. Regards.
  15. This may be a stupid question, but could someone explain why so is “very tiny”.

    Thanks.

    1. ”Tiny’ is part of the definition: tiny particle is a meson. ‘very’ equates to ‘so’ as in ‘I am so hungry’ or ‘I am very hungry’. Thus a very good example of the Jimbo advice to lift and separate.
  16. 36.45 for me with a real struggle in the NE and only wild guesses at the election and the wind in the end. Pity about the election clue as the rest was neat and tidy.
  17. 6:51 for me. I’d have been quicker if I hadn’t dithered over HALT, which (having just done the T2 puzzle) seemed barely cryptic.

    I rather liked KHAKI ELECTION. (If you hadn’t come across it before, then you have now!)

  18. 43 minutes (super for me, and of course about six times Tony’s time), a very easy puzzle despite the usual two or three problems. DAMASK ROSE came in very late, but it gave me KHAKI ELECTION (which I had never heard of) and enough of APART to get it as my LOI. SORB APPLE was the only possible anagram after deciding it had to be some kind of apple and GO TO POT was one of my first clues solved, although I didn’t know the snooker table was called the pot. I nearly put in TUGS for 23 dn, but it didn’t seem to fit “ears”; I had to convince myself that LUG involved pulling as well as just carrying something heavy. CAPRI seems to be making frequent appearances in the puzzles these days.

    Edited at 2012-12-04 11:40 pm (UTC)

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