Times 25,404 – Light & Easy

34 comments on “Times 25,404 – Light & Easy”

1. This took me bang on an hour. Fortunately, as it turned out, I had some irritating matters to attend to (AKA work) after 50 minutes, when I had been becalmed for 15 minutes with seven unsolved, mainly in the snowy Arizona corner. Coming back to it after a break, I polished those off in ten minutes, SCRAPES being last to fall.

   If the hallmark of a good puzzle is that you can put very few in without working out the wordplay, this passed with flying colours, as only 21 (and 20) went in without parsing.

   I’m assuming that 20ac is EARN, with the literal being ‘[to] make money’, but any help on the rowing front would be appreciated.

   Edited at 2013-02-21 02:20 am (UTC)

   1. EURO, I think. More of an instruction than an invitation, I would have thought, but apparently it’s correct.
2. I also had EARN but realised afterwards that it must be EURO. I have to say that the homophone doesn’t quite work for me.
3. ….make the same stupid mistake! I had ‘earn’ too, without thinking much about it, but it is obviously euro, or ‘your row’.

   A nice little puzzle, without any cliches, but the prominence of the literals made it easy. I wasn’t too sure of ‘scrip’ and ‘sapid’, but the cryptics clearly pointed to them.

   But COD to ‘synagogue’.

4. Given that the ‘mandated’ – and I think most common among speakers of Standard British English – pronunciation of ‘Euro’, according to Oxford Dictionaries, is /ˈjʊərəʊ/, where ʊə is a diphthong, while ‘you row’ would be /juː rəʊ/, and given too the fact that each word of the instruction/invitation would be stressed, as in ‘YOU ROW!’, whereas only the first in Euro would be, I have to say I don’t go a bundle on this clue, dodgy-homophone tolerant as I usually am.

   On the other hand, if only I had extended my square brackets thus, ‘with the literal being “[to make] money”,’ I might have been on the money.

   Edited at 2013-02-21 03:16 am (UTC)

   1. Doesn’t the pronunciation of Euro depend on which Johnny Foreigner is saying it? Personally, I try not to, but if I’m talking to my nearest euroneighbour, it sounds a bit like air-o.
5. Once again I completed most of the daily task in well under 30 minutes but the last few stretched my solving time to nearer 40. On this occasion all my problems bar one were in the NW where a few known, but rarely used (by me) words were lurking either as the answer or as part of the wordplay.

   We have three coins today, LEU, PIASTRE and EURO, or four if you count ‘mark’ at 6ac. I also had EARN for a while at 20ac but a last minute second thought saved me from an error. Like others I don’t think much of the homophone there, nor do I care for the coin-passing nonsense at 4dn, but otherwise this was an enjoyable puzzle that took me several wasted moments to get started.

   Edited at 2013-02-21 05:40 am (UTC)

6. And still don’t understand the “literal” for 4dn.

   SHEWING brought memories of Wittgenstein who liked to spell it this way — so within living memory — or was it his translators? And we get his college at 26ac.

   No problems with the homophone. We’ve had worse.

   1. Unfortunately I think there’s nothing more to it than Uncle Yap has explained above. I suppose it might apply if one is careless eating the traditional pudding on Christmas Day!

      Edited at 2013-02-21 07:11 am (UTC)

      1. Then it is just bloody awful! I’m now, unfortunately, contemplating all the other bits of the body said coin must pass through. And they could be clued thusly too. Conclusion (of my thoughts and the passage of the coin): pants!
7. Another nice little EARNer today, so it’s probably best I was distracted from checking my end time (probably less than 15 today). I had a query against EARN because I couldn’t understand (obviously) the oarsman bit, and wasted time wondering if SCRAPED was wrong. That Uncle Yap decided the thing was too obvious to blog was therefore a bit of a surprise. I contemplated the extreme stretch of making earn sound (in a strong wind and crashing waves) like the “in” of “in-out”. It doesn’t help that the literal appears to be “to make money”, and with several coins already passing through (ugh!) it barely occurred there might be one more – this is not a Grauniad themed puzzle, after all. Another example, perhaps, of the answer looking so right that the cryptic can go play on its own for a while.
   Of the rest,my approbation falls on STATELIER because of the wrong-footing pronunciation of the cryptic bit: only when I wrote it in did the penny progress rapidly through the digestive system (ugh again!).
8. It’s a while since we had a really awful clue and now, rather like London buses, two come along at once

   I can’t imagine what the setter was thinking of at 4D ILEUM. The fact that cryptic refers to “eating” as a containment indicator is not for me sufficient to justify a definition of “coins’ll pass through here then”. Pants is a good description.

   EURO for “you row” makes me wonder quite what dialect of English the setter speaks

   At 6A SHAWM is I think an obsolete instrument and is obscure enought that it should be signalled as such.

   20 minutes for this about 5 of which were spent on ILEUM and EURO.

   1. So now you’ll have all the shawm players after you! What do you mean, obsolete? You can order one on eBay.

      Check out this thread, and note the list of instruments at the beginning:

      http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=498332

      When they give us the ‘qanun’, then we’ll be in trouble.

      Edited at 2013-02-21 12:16 pm (UTC)

      1. Indeed, and shawms were featured in a televised Prom concert last year.
   2. Shawm is rather obscure but there’s a moulding of an angel with one in Tewkesbury Abbey and I made a mental note of it for the time one would turn up in a crossword and today, at last!!!

      I didn’t mind the ILEUM clue, the only slightly iffy thing about it to me being the rather obscure LEU with only one cross-checker in the middle. But it couldn’t really be anything else.

      I hear people say “You row” for “EURO” a lot, tho’ it wouldn’t be how I’d pronounce it admittedly

   3. The setter obviously speaks the same dialect as me. EURO was one of my first in and exactly as I pronounce it, except that I don’t accent the second syllable. Ann
9. Thought the vocab in this puzzle was a little more obscure than normal (I didn’t know SAPID, SECTARY, or SCRIP), which helped convince me that EARN must sound like some boatie terminology I didn’t know – it was something of a disappointment to find that the correct answer relied on perhaps not the strongest of homophones. Otherwise I thought this was an enjoyable puzzle.
10. 
    Ooops… quite a few wrong today: SHAWM (never heard of either the wood or the instrument), EURO (yep, went for earn with a ? too), ILEUM (I had sort of worked out the cryptic, and had iliam, with li(re) being my foreign coins. Thought it could be an alternative spelling). And had a blank at 9ac.

    SAPID and SCRIP were unfamiliar, but gettable.

11. Slaughtered in NW and finally finished in 54 only to find Earn wrong. I’m not usually homophonobic but Euro appears a poor one. On the other hand 4 while a trifle weird does work I’d say. ‘Light and easy’? Not for some. (If ‘your row?’ had been suggested, ‘question put to oarsman…’ or somesuch, it might have worked a little better.)

    Edited at 2013-02-21 10:39 am (UTC)

12. I didn’t even think of EARN, as ‘oarsman’ made it obvious that –RO was needed, and I do pronounce it YOU ROW, as I’ve never conversed on the subject with any of the relevant native speakers.
    About halfway, whole of NW was blank: after seeing TYPISTS wouldn’t work, had a fixation on -ISTS for 1ac, and wasn’t convinced that SAPID could mean ‘exhilarating’, as I only knew it as ‘tasty’. Finally had to resort to aid for the 3dn anagram, and the rest came eventually.
13. I enjoyed this puzzle, despite having EARN (knowing that it couldn’t be right) instead of EURO at 20 ac. There’s never going to be agreement among us on homophones – but for me euro/you row seem quite close enough in pronunciation for cryptic purposes. I even, dare I say it, liked ILEUM, my LOI, which seems to have caused some degree of apoplexy in other solvers. Quite chuckle-worthy, I thought.
14. Fell into the earn trap here. Oh well… Lot of the ol’ religion in this one.
15. Agree with mctext, four down is ‘bloody awful’. More in the habit of spending coins than swallowing them but, even so, the digestive system has more than the part clued. All would pass a new penny and a pound coin but possibly baulk at ten pence and definitely reject an old half crown. Suspect solvers, who experienced chanting at, for example, Wembley, will not be belly aching about translating Euro as ‘you row’ . Congrats to the blogger. Your time impressed me.

    Enigma

    1. Must listen out for the chants of ‘Come on you Euros’ or ‘The referee’s a Euro’ at the next World Cup qualifier…
16. “If the hallmark of a good puzzle is that you can put very few in without working out the wordplay, “

    I don’t think that’s the hallmark of a good puzzle at all actually – not that puzzles like that need not be good. Seems a waste of wordplay in that case. And I thought this WAS a very good puzzle, with several obscure-ish (to me) words for which I needed the wordplay (see above).

    I fell for the EURO/EARN “trap” (surely unintentional). EARN is plainly unjustifiable, although the clue doesn’t read all that logically to me, not that that is any excuse for putting in a wrong answer.

    1. Well, don’t leave us in suspense – tell us what your hallmark is. 🙂
       1. Sorry I misread the original comment as meaning clues where one doesn’t need the wordplay.
          I don’t really have a hallmark 🙂
17. 25m. I enjoyed this, because I like working out words I don’t know from wordplay, and there was lots I didn’t know in here, or at least lots that was unfamiliar.
    I didn’t know SCRIP in this sense. The one sense of the word I do know is “scrip dividend”, which isn’t in Chambers.
    I know some people who pronounce EURO as “you row”, which is good enough for me. And I rather liked 4dn.

    Edited at 2013-02-21 02:41 pm (UTC)

18. I had SPIKY for this to begin with. It seems to work perfectly well.
19. Sadly didn’t manage a 4th sub 30. Had all but 4d and 6a after 30 but didn’t get to ILEUM and have to agree with the pants verdict on that clue though there is an evident surface connection between the two parts of the clue I had not spotted.. Pity because the other obscurities were well clued and gettable from the cryptic.
20. I came all correct in about 45 minutes, but that was with correcting ‘earn’ to EURO after finally getting the cryptic. Didn’t know of SHAWM, not familiar with SAPID in this sense either. And further delayed by originally misspelling both PIASTRE (with “er”) and, ridiculously, SYNAGOGUE (with “gouge”). ILEUM went in with a raised eyebrow and the thought that there must be another UK slang meaning for ‘coins’. Apparently not, from the comments here, so I apologize for attributing that to the UKers. Regards to all.
21. A rather sluggish 9:54 for me, wasting far too much time trying to justify EARN before finally giving up and looking for an alternative. Absolutely no objection to any of the clues. I actually quite like 4dn (ILEUM).
22. I actually thought this was quite a clever clue, using ‘eating’ in both a cryptic and literal sense. Indeed, ingested coins would pass through ones ileum barring prompt endoscopic or surgical intervention. I, too, had EARN but didn’t like it. Hadn’t heard of SHAWM, but I enjoyed the puzzle a lot.
23. Being an Aussie, I pronounce it U Row. Is this not correct?

Comments are closed.