Times 25425 – A song and a dance

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 38 Minutes

Music: Clannad: Crann Ull

This puzzle did not seem difficult at first, as I raced through the top half in about ten minutes, expecting a good time. While I found quite a few obvious answers in the bottom half as well, I started to slow down and then came to a complete halt for a while. Some of the clues in the lower left required careful analysis of the cryptic and the literal, something I had not been doing. I had to push a bit to finish, but in the end I entered a flurry of answers that should have come quicker.

Well, at least I finished. After last week’s ‘halma’ puzzle, I was afraid there might be something that I just did not know, perhaps a plant. Fortunately, I was able to write in my last answer, ‘aspidistra’, from the literal after getting all the crossing letters, and only then worked back to the cryptic.

As a side note, those interested in the sociology of crossword solving should read this important article. Perhaps Sotira could include something along these lines in her next annual survey.

Across
1 TERPSICHOREAN, I CHORE in an anagram of PARENTS. Rather obvious from the enumeration and the first letter, I thought.
8 GRUB, G + RUB. I had originally put in ‘grid’, but the crossers showed that this is not what the setter had in mind. If you don’t see the literal, look again at the whole phrase ‘table needs’.
9 NAIL BITING, [compositio]N + AIL(BIT)ING.
10 TAXI RANK, TAX + IRAN + K.
11 ERRATA, RE backwards + RAT + A[rea]. The answer was obvious, but it took me a while to figure out the cryptic for the blog. Now are the ‘slips’ the errors themselves, or the errata slips that printers used to insert into the book?
13 ASPIDISTRA, A + SP[ecies] + anagram of DIARIST. Tricky cryptic, but gettable from the literal.
16 Omitted!
17 QUIT, QUI[e]T. Strangely elusive until I thought of ‘Q’.
18 OPEN-HANDED, O(PEN HAND)ED, our old friend the Oxford English Dictionary.
20 PESETA, PE(SET)A. I understood ‘out of date bread’ fairly early on, but still struggled, trying to work in ‘gel’.
22 OSCULATE, O[fficer]S + CU + LATE, put in from the definition by me.
24 PEJORATIVE, PE + J(anagram of ROTA)IVE. A tough one, I was thinking of ‘unpleasant’ in a different sense, as in ‘disgusting’.
26 E-FIT, anagram of T[h]IEF.
27 ANDREW MARVELL, anagram of WANDER + anagram of REVAM[p] + LL. One of the most popular poets in the world of crosswords.
 
Down
1 TARTAR SAUCE, TAR + TAR + SAUCE. My first in, just a bit obvious.
2 RABBI, I B(B)AR upside down.
3 SAN MARINO, SAN + RAM backwards + IN + O.
4 CRICKET, double definition, where ‘short leg’ is a cricket fielding position.
5 OMBRE, hidden in [classro]OM BRE[ak].
6 ENTERTAIN, ENTER + AT backwards + IN.
7 Omitted – you have five guesses!
12 TERRESTRIAL, T(ERREST?)RIAL. Many will not see the cryptic, but it’s not really needed.
14 IN THE MOOD, anagram of HIT, DONE + M[iller’s] O[rchestra]. A fine &lit.
15 A THICK EAR, A(THICKE[t]A + R, where AA = Alcoholics Anonymous.
19 EGOTISM, E.G. + [c]O[s]T(IS)[u]M[e].
21 AMAZE, AMAZ[on] + [guid]E. I understood the clue well enough, but couldn’t think of the right river.
23 LIEGE, L(I)EG + E[nergy].
25 ERA, [th]E [amateu]R [dram]A.

29 comments on “Times 25425 – A song and a dance”

  1. Very similar experience to my fellow Monday blogger, but throw in the towel after 49 minutes, several of which had been spent on PESETA. Like Vinyl, I was quickly onto the slang meaning of bread, but was still looking principally for fruit as the literal. As Vinyl says, quite a few from the literal, but OSCULATE and E-FIT (is this like an identikit?) had to be worked out from the wordplay.

    COD to LIEGE; the ‘faithful’ adjectival meaning derived from the idea of owing feudal allegiance didn’t immediately come to mind, but I thought it a fine clue.

  2. 10 minutes – spotted early on the pangram possibility which helped with PEJORATIVE. Fun puzzle.
  3. So proving that Mondays aren’t always that easy. One of those puzzles where you know the answer from defs and/or checking letters then have to work out the cryptic bit later. TERRESTRIAL was a case in point: “ERREST (thou)?” doesn’t spring easily to mind. Didn’t know that TERPSICHOREAN (a la THESPIAN) could be a noun, even though I lived just off Terpsichore in New Orleans for a while. They have a great way of pronouncing the Muses down (up?) there.

    I’m giving this a double tick for cryptic deviousness.

  4. Another sub-30 for me. 25 minutes to be exact. Already everything’s been said, I think.

    Vinyl, your Down omission should be 7 not 8.

    Edited at 2013-03-18 02:16 am (UTC)

  5. Not very happy about pea = fruit, in my book a favourite vegetable rather than fruit.
    Another case of never mind the clue just put in the answer. I got “AZ” as the guide with “ame” as the middle (more or less) of Thames though couldn’t see the direction to discard “Ths”
    1. Collins has: Fruit (4) any plant product useful to man including grain, vegetables etc.
  6. Just read the advertorial Vinyl links to.

    My response, as a married Brit, to the challenge of the title, ‘Brits prefer online crosswords to sex’, would be simply, ‘Depends who with’.

    Edited at 2013-03-18 08:39 am (UTC)

  7. Two missing today: the unknown TERPISCHOREAN, which was certainly not at all obvious to me! (couldn’t think of CHORE), and TAXI RANK. Bit of a block on -A-I words… doh! Had I realised that it was a pangram, I may have got there…

    Hadn’t come across OSCULATE before, and couldn’t work out the wp for A THICK EAR, so thanks for that.

  8. 24m. I found this tricky. When the J from PEJORATIVE went in I thought “I wonder if this is a pangram”, but then I forgot the thought and it took me forever to see QUIT and TAXI RANK, my last two in. I also slowed myself down by bunging in TERRITORIAL.
    I didn’t know OSCULATE.
    I read the literal for 8ac as just “table”. Chambers has “supply of food, entertainment” and Collins “food as served in a particular household or restaurant”.
    Have a closer look at the picture in that Express article. I think it’s joekobi’s son solving.
  9. 24.09 with the last 8 minutes on peseta and amaze. Re 11 ac. if the slips aren’t the errors themselves they’re scarcely defined enough by the clue but it’s a nice thought. An easy-going pangram, rather impressive in its way. An unfortunately ugly word, osculate, like pulchritude – any others?
    On edit – yes, that’ll be him, nicking the best pen in the house and ruining the grid with a private jabberwocky. It still hurts…

    Edited at 2013-03-18 09:41 am (UTC)

  11. Held up by being one of many (it seems, according to the OED) who thought that PEJORATIVE is spelt PERJORATIVE. TERPSICHOREAN existed only in the dimmest recesses of my mind but utterly clear word play brought it to the surface. Oblivious (as always) to the pangram. Enjoyable, but not too difficult, challenge.
  12. A standard Monday time of 25 minutes for me. This seemed an excellent example of a relatively easy puzzle (though I note some didn’t find it that easy). There were mostly good surfaces throughout and cryptic constructions that often avoided the obvious. I particularly liked 1 ac, 9, 14 and 21. I didn’t initially understand 21, which was my last solve, and threw in AMAZE to complete the pangram, which I’d noticed earlier.
  13. If only I too had noticed the pangram coming along, I might have got 21d earlier than I did. Still a nice Monday time of 9 minutes, although there were a few where I put the obvious word in and then checked the wordplay to make sure.
  14. 13:46 so no problems. Like others I finished with Peseta (via a process of running through ex eurozone currencies) then amaze. Nice disguise on the latter. Hands up everyone else who was looking for a word meaning guide with a final R chopped of to make a surprise.

    Terpsichorean often came up in Radio 4’s baffling Round Britain Quiz so I remembered it from that.

    Osculate was a new one on me.

    1. I joined you on your search for a a guide with an R chopped off. Why do we make things more complicated than they need to be?

      Osculate appears quite a lot in crosswords so I am surprised you didn’t know that one.

      Edited at 2013-03-18 01:19 pm (UTC)

  15. Similar experience to others. Solid puzzle that simply required application. I also thought IN THE MOOD very good
  16. About 30 minutes for a puzzle that doesn’t fall into the easy Monday category. My LOI’s were the TAXI RANK/CRICKET crossing, proving that despite all the cricket references that appear here, I’m dense enough to have trouble with a clue that requires that answer of CRICKET itself. And we call them ‘taxi stands’, usually. My COD goes to TERRESTRIAL for the ‘errest’ trick, outlandish enough to make me smile. Regards.
  17. Sped through this online, getting everything but 24ac and 26ac in maybe 24′, then stopped, gave up at 30′, and was going to call it a DNF, but then before breakfast took another look. PEJORATIVE suddenly appeared, although it took a minute for me to parse it–I hadn’t thought of ‘jive’ as a dance. I’ve never heard of E-FIT, but figured it was more likely than e-tif; and oddly enough, I was right. I thought some of the surfaces (eg, 15d, 13ac, 22ac) were rather ugly.
  18. Had problems with AMAZE. I put it in from the definition but didn’t spot the Amazon connection. I was thinking of A-Z as the “guide”. I would have been more certain if I’d clocked the pangram. I also did a double-take at “pea” being defined as a fruit. Anyway, I finished with all correct in 22 minutes which is quite a good time for me. Ann
  19. I have NUN for 7d but not entirely sure of parsing other than a nun is a sister.

    I have AIRY for 16d first class=A1 and RY is an accepted crossword abbreviation for railway in the UK.

    1. ‘Part of speech’ = NOUN and ‘not over’ indicates removal of the ‘O’. Your take on AIRY is correct.
  20. 8:39 for me. A similar experience to others, with the top half going in quite briskly, so that for a time I was hoping for a clean sweep. But then I stuck on A THICK EAR (not an approved punishment nowadays, I imagine!), and things went downhill. Without any crossing letters in place I bunged in OUTRE for 21dn (R with OUT [= missing] on + E). However, the real killer was PEJORATIVE where I was spooked by all those vowels, and the word DEMORALISE kept coming to mind to describe what they did to me.

    Nice puzzle though, and the clue for IN THE MOOD a gem.

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