Times 25416 – A Sense of Deja Vu

45 comments on “Times 25416 – A Sense of Deja Vu”

1. Lots to like here and a few quibbles. E.g., not very fond of the indicators in 11ac and 15dn (swelling, with crooks). Took a while to figure OBLIGE as “press” (12ac). And LOI was GO,OF,ED (20ac). Agree with UY that the light inclusive (8dn) is well disguised.

   Figured the def at 25ac is just “shifts”, with “method of working” = MO.

2. 49 minutes including a major hold-up in the NW trying to justify ‘bear up’ or ‘back up’ at 1ac before the checkers came to my rescue. I think at 2dn E (European) has to be parsed separately from MP (parliament member) as a ‘European parliament member’ would be an MEP.
   1. I think I have seen EMP as an abbreviation for that important office.
      1. I’m surprised because it would be wrong at least as far as the UK is concerned where a member of the European Parliament (or equivalent words in any order) is designated “MEP”.

         Edited at 2013-03-07 06:55 am (UTC)

3. A thunderously good puzzle, I thought, the excellence and spirit of which justifies for me the almost literal stretch at 11 (‘swelling’). ‘With crooks’ as an anagram indicator gets a pass from me too, as the idea of bent entails suffuciently the sense of rearrangement.

   Like Yap Suk, I was stymied by my inability to see the excellent hidden at 8, meaning I had to resort to aids for four in the NE.

   I thought the 19 pair were particularly good, BEER KEG getting my nod as COD for the setter’s skill in making more difficult the type of clue normally made easy by the enumeration. Am I the only one who was puzzled by the definition ‘hit’ for belabour? I was under the misapprehension that belabour meant the same as labour, as in ‘labour the point’ – which it apparently can, or used to, do.

   ‘Shift’ and/or ‘motor’ meaning to drive fast may catch one or to out, if, as I suspect, it is a largely Commonwealth usage. Thanks to setter and blogger.

   1. Interesting double meaning here (NOAD):
      1 argue or elaborate (a subject) in excessive detail: critics thought they belabo[u]red the obvious.
      2 attack or assault (someone) physically or verbally: Tyndale seized every opportunity to belabo[u]r the Roman Church.

      Where’s Bill T. when you need him?

   2. Obviously known to the Americans:
      • informal, run or move as fast as possible: he had motored along to second base on a passed ball.
      And my dear old Dad (GRHS) — hybrid scouse and Scots — used “shift” in exactly that way. “He wasn’t half shifting like”.
      So probably well known beyond the Commonwealth — wherever that is these days!
      1. So you have to be both an American and a Geordie to understand the clue?

         No wonder I put it in from the cryptic and didn’t worry about it.

         1. Geordie??
   3. It makes perfect sense to me too and indeed it is listed in the most recent Chambers’ section on anagram indicators.
      1. No problem with “crook”. Here it means “ill” or “sick”. But “with crooks”? That’s another matter eh?
         1. In my book “with crooks” = “crooked” i.e.Bent from a straight form; twisted, awry (SOED).
4. ….writing in wrong answers and unreadable letters right and left. If you can’t tell your ‘n’ from an ‘h’, how are you going to get the next clue?

   Would you believe ‘a shed job’ and ‘no eyes’? Well, I didn’t either, and erased them. How about writing in ‘belabour’ from the cryptic and then erasing it because you can’t see what word it is? And so on, und so weiter, et cetera, kai ta alla! No wonder my time was bad.

   But all solved and mostly understood eventually. Whether it was an excellent puzzle or not, I’ll leave to others.

   Edited at 2013-03-07 03:55 am (UTC)

5. The postmodern title for Othello?
6. I don’t want to belabour the point …. but can anyone suggest a cicumstance where belabour and hit are synonymous?
   1. See reply to ulaca’s main post above.

      Edited at 2013-03-07 08:29 am (UTC)

   2. These four examples from literature are interesting insomuch as the first three are from English translations of foreign works, where the translators may be straining for the requisite effect by taking recourse to a word that was already at the time of translation rather archaic. (If the Cervantes quote is, as I suspect, from the famous Charles Jarvis/Jervas translation, that would date it to the mid 18th century.)

      It is, at any rate, noteworthy that the citation from the only English-original work, Jane Eyre (from a century later) instances a figurative, rather than literal, use of the word.

      1. On reflection, I suspect the more Anglo-Saxon phrase “bash away at” captures both senses rather nicely.
   3. Or more physically, she belaboured him across the shoulders.
      Please don’t put those eyes on your posts.
7. 
   … as I only had one wrong LETTER (!) today! I had belamour (ooh, no even autocorrects it to the right word!), thinking it must have been a nickname for Bartok. There was lam in it for hit, and I didn’t think too much about where the e came from.

   Otherwise, all good. Finished with the OBLIGE/EYELINER pair, closely following GOOFED, which I couldn’t really parse. Nor could I parse TRAINING or EXEMPTED, but they had to be.

8. Another good crossword, I thought. No problem here with belabour = hit (ODO gives it as the first meaning, with loads of examples) or with “with crooks,” which just means “badly.” (ODO says: “bad, unpleasant, or unsatisfactory”). And I’m pretty sure that 2dn is E + MP and not EMP.

   I notice that in 8dn, the hidden word is indeed the exact centrepiece of the phrase, as claimed, so no need to hunt for it 🙂

   Good stuff, setter..

   1. I think it’s a wee bit of a stretch to work from the adjective ‘crook’ (defined in the way you quote as Antipodean informal usage, incidentally) to a cognate adverbial usage for the phrase ‘with crooks’.

      Similarly, the example given to illustrate ‘belabour’ as ‘attack physically’ (‘Bernard was belabouring Jed with his fists’) sounds like an invention of the lexicographer rather than an attested example. A quick Google search would appear to confirm this. 🙂

      I think John from Lancs is onto the right idea with the Thatcher example, although, again, it’s more the sort of thing someone might have written in the 1980s than what journalists actually did write, the word having long since slipped out of usage in that sense for most people.

      Edited at 2013-03-07 10:21 am (UTC)

      1. It seems a bit hard to rely on the dictionary for a meaning of “crook,” and then refute it for “belabour!”
         I think both words are in fact in reasonably common use here in the UK, but your mileage may vary 😉

         1. It’s really the armchair citation I’m dissing, nay, belabouring, now I know the word! The lexicographer, should I ever meet him or her, I’ll be sure to belabour in person. -:)
            1. A favourite book is The Ginger Man, superbly crafted English language start to finish. I’m sure “belabour” appears in it in the “hit with blows” meaning, but can’t find it on Google.

               Rob

9. 27m. I thought this a very fine puzzle. Some of it was arguably a tad stretchy but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of originality and everything was perfectly clear. For instance I was a bit puzzled by “helmet” for BEARSKIN but even if it’s a rather loose definition (and no doubt someone will find a dictionary in which it is so defined) it’s perfectly clear what’s going on and it makes for an excellent surface. So fine by me.
10. Hard work, but well worth the effort; took me fifty minutes. Convinced myself that the second word in 5 down was “Moses”, so that took a while to sort out.

    BELABOUR: this word always conjures up for me a mental image of Margaret Thatcher beating some hapless member of the opposition round the head with her handbag.

    An excellent mid-week puzzle, I thought, so many thanks to the setter.

    1. Glad I wasn’t alone but I had no idea what could possibly precede it and the second S was ruining the idea of an anagram at 24 so I thought it through again.

       Edited at 2013-03-07 01:41 pm (UTC)

11. I always like Uncle Y’s jokes. This one reminds me of something that actually appeared in an affidavit filed in NY Federal court years ago where the person attesting said “I refute the allegations and the alligators who made them”. 28 minutes and I enjoyed this one.
    1. Love it! Ann
12. LOI for me, too – was about to reach for aid to find a word to fit the checkers, when I suddenly saw it!
    A rather unhelpful grid today, as solving one corner didn’t give much help with the next.
    1. hear, hear. A real stinker today – but in a good way, I have to admit. Astonished Uncle Y can get the faraway idioms, and still keep his good humour after such a slog. BTW, 16d: actually it’s ‘obit’ that means ‘he died’.
13. Found this a bit of a slog. Any offers as to what the insertion indicator is in 2D (“Spared one from Left becoming European Parliament member”), or am I reading it wrong?

    Edited at 2013-03-07 11:45 am (UTC)

    1. It’s not an insertion it’s a substitution: I (one) from EXITED (left) becoming E,MP.

       Edited at 2013-03-07 12:14 pm (UTC)

       1. So it is – thanks.
14. Tricky but fun. 18 minutes but at the end the only one I couldn’t see completely was my last in EXEMPTED which went in from definition alone. Nice one, setter
15. 21:27 for a very fine puzzle indeed. There were some exquisite, well-disguised definitions (e.g. many landed on beach then, coast in snowy weather), some cracking surfaces (such as the toboggan clue) and much more besides (Man of the Match in particular).

    Thank you to the setter.

16. Good to see this distinctive grid again – with its two distinctive Es and two fully-checked words.
    Came up two short today, missing the Oblige/Eyeliner pair. UY – thanks for explaining Goofed and A Good Job – didn’t understand either of those two. FOI Poker Face.
    The SE corner took a bit of unpicking after I’d carelessly written in Sri Lanka for 23ac based purely on the initial S?I !!
    I love doughnuts so COD to 15dn !
17. “berk” ain’t an idiot. It’s rhyming slang: “Berkshire Hunt”.
    1. Quite right… nothing idiotic about a Berkshire Hunt 😉
    2. Yes, this seems to be accepted by all reputable sources but there’s no explanation as to why the rhyming slang isn’t then pronounced “bark”. Perhaps one must assume as them thar Cockerneys don’t no ow to pronounce Berkshire (or Berkeley) properly.

       Edited at 2013-03-07 04:18 pm (UTC)

    3. Whilst that may be the original derivation of the word I’d venture that its usage has evolved so that in common parlance it refers to something closer to an idiot than a ****.

       Whilst I have no paper dictionaries to hand my iPod Chambers defines a berk as a fool.

       As ever in crosswordland the dictionaries trump what you, I or the man on the Croydon supertram think a word means.

18. I thought this quite tricky and very good. Took me 45 minutes, ending with EYELINER. I couldn’t parse EXEMPTED, so entered from the def. alone there. I hadn’t known that ‘shifts’ means MOTORS, so wordplay only on that one. I also hadn’t heard of the MONUMENT… fellow, but with some checkers it became apparent. Honestly, I don’t know what we call that guy here in the states. Some very good stuff today, including ‘man of the match’, NO JOKE, GOOFED, and the entirely plausible surface for SANDBAG. Thanks to UY and the setter.
    1. 62 minutes. Quite a toughie I thought. Why do people show they know the derivation of berk at every opportunity when surely “you berk” is widely accepted as “you idiot” – ? I like new anagram indicators that work, as ‘with crooks’ does nicely, ‘with twists, bends’. Also the swelling inserter. Must be getting late.
19. 14:15 for me, plodding away steadily (after a slow start) before slowing badly in the NE corner. A most enjoyable puzzle.

    BELABOUR = “hit” is familiar enough, particularly from Edward Gorey’s The Gorey Alphabet:

    The Keeper, when it’s time for luncheon,
         Flings down his charge upon the bed,
    And taking out a home-made truncheon,
         Belabours him about the head.

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