Times 25461 – Say what?

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 75 rather grumpy minutes

Music: Brahms, Violin Concerto, Grumiaux/Davis

A rather unsatisfactory puzzle for me. While I was off to a reasonable start, I was not on the setter’s wavelength at all. I had to get some of the answers from the cryptics alone, without really being able to make head or tail of the literal. Then I got stuck for almost 30 minutes in the NE, taking 12 across every way but the right way, and finally banging in the answer from the literal, causing the whole
corner to yield its remaining secrets almost at once.

But I was still left with the mysterious 22 down, for which there are only two words that fit. While it is possible to build one of them out of the cryptic, that leaves the question of the literal. Perhaps the clue is defective, or something very obscure is going on. Audience participation time!

This is, roughly, the end of my fourth full year as a TFTT blogger. I hope everyone has found the quality of the work satisfactory, since in any case we are not in a position to offer a money-back guarantee. On the other hand, our subscription price of zero pounds a year is quite attractive, and probably half the readers can beat my times. Cheers, all!

Across
1 CLAMP< C + LAMP. I haven’t a clue about the literal. If you Google ‘Murphy’s pile’, the result comes up that it is a crossword clue for ‘clamp’. Unfortunately, I knew that already.
4 AMBROSIAL, AM(BROS)IAL, an anagram of A MAIL being the encloser.
9 INTERBRED, INTER(B)RED. One of the few easy clues here.
10 SKIFF, SKI + F[ine] F[ollowing]. I wasted an immense amount of time looking for something ending in ‘-ivy’. I needed all the crossing letters to finally see it.
11 BANGLE B + ANGLE. Horsa and Hengist, they knew all the Angles.
12 LANDLADY, L + AND + LA(D[uke])Y. I just figured out the cryptic, but was quite happy at the time to get this from the literal. I tend to think of a ‘letter’ as the tenant and not the owner – things are a bit clearer with ‘leasor’ and ‘lessee’.
14 BASSET HORN, anagram of BARS, HONEST. I wasn’t helped by putting in ‘harp’ for the second element, only to realize much later there is no ‘P’ in the anagram.
16 BILL, double definition, where ‘demanded’ appears to be some sort of filler. Further discussion invited.
19 Omitted, ask if puzzled.
20 IMPAIRMENT, anagram of MITE IN PRAM. A lot of anagrams in this one.
22 APERITIF, APER + I + FIT backwards.
23 PURPLE, double definition. The emperor is a type of butterfly, where the purple is one of the varieties.
26 CADIZ, CADI + Z. I carelessly put in ‘Xerez’ at first, making the corner more difficult than necessary.
27 NEWSHOUND, N + E + W + S + HOUND, where an ‘Afghan’ is a breed of hound.
28 ARROGANCE, anagram of ON CAR RAGE.
29 SEEDY, SEE + D[eaner]Y. I wasted a little time with ‘ch’ and ‘CE’.
 
Down
1 CLIMBABLE, C(LIMB)ABLE. ‘Ben’ is an Celtic word for a mountain, so therefore climbable.
2 ACTIN, ACTIN[g]. I was helped a bit by the ads for “fast actin’ tinactin”, which is actually tolnaftate, and has nothing to do with actin.
3 PARALLEL, PAR + ALL + EL. ‘Match’ should be taken as a verb.
4 AURA, A + UR + A. Ah, an easy one!
5 BAD HAIR DAY, cryptic definition that I saw immediately.
6 ONSIDE, ON + SIDE. Very difficult for me, because I thought it was a double definition, instead of ‘superior to’ = ‘on’ and ‘arrogance’ = ‘side’.
7 IMITATIVE, EVITA + TIM + I, all upside down.
8 LEFTY, LEFT + [moresb]Y. Another one I had trouble with. In the US, a ‘lefty’ usually means a left-handed person.
13 CHAMPIGNON, CHAMPI(G [positio]N)ON.
15 SURRENDER, S(U[niversal] + R + R)ENDER.
17 LATTER DAY, LATTE + RD + AY.
18 DRAUGHTS, a homophone clue for the game that is called ‘checkers’ in the US. In the UK, ‘checkers’ are what you need to finish the puzzle!
21 ZIGZAG, Z + [s]IG[n] + Z + AG. My first in, but not that easy a clue.
22 ACCRA, A/C + CR + A[ppeased]. Yes, that fits the cryptic quite well, but where’s the literal? The other possibility, ‘aecia’, seems highly unlikely. Discussion invited.
24 PLUME, double definition, la plume de ma tante, no doubt.
25 Omitted, look for it!

49 comments on “Times 25461 – Say what?”

  1. But not terribly satisfied for the reasons mentioned by Vinyl. Murphy’s pile (1ac) completely unknown. And equally baffled by the literal at 22dn: just assumed the word “capital” was missing from the start or the end of the clue. As for 16ac, I guess the “demanded” is there to mean “is the answer required” or some such. The only construals I had to write out were ZIGZAG and APERITIF. Couldn’t get into the SW corner for quite a while.

    I imagined all the FUN GALS from Friday singing “We Are The Champignons”!

  2. Just found this in Chambers (clamp 3):

    a stack, as of brick for burning peats etc; a heap; a heap of root vegetables covered with earth or straw to protect it in cold weather.

    So “Murphy” = potato, then it just about works on def 3. (But also a possible connotation of the association between the Irish and peat burning on def 1?)

    1. CLAMP was quickly first in. I know a “clamp” as a heap of stored root vegetables, and “Murphy” is slang for “potato”. I don’t think we need to resort to peat for the answer

      Derek

      1. I’m not “resorting” to that (peat) as a possible key to the actual solution and, as you can see, I affirm what you say via Chambers’s 3rd definition. The “peat” thing is a merely interesting possible overtone or resonance. I like such things — multiple hearing/readings — that English tends to afford, no matter how slight. Otherwise, I wouldn’t do cryptic crosswords!

        Edited at 2013-04-29 06:02 am (UTC)

        1. Point taken. I agree about the interest in overtones – I thought “disTRESSing” in 5dn might be an additional gratutitous reference to the subject of the clue.
  3. Hmmm… two blanks after the hour, and a lot of ?s… Although I knew of the Murphy=potato, couldn’t fathom the ‘pile’ bit at all, nor could I really see how ONSIDE worked, and ACCRA went in on the cryptic. Very unsatisfactory if there is a word missing, but this has happened not long ago…

    My two missing were PURPLE and PLUME, where, in each case I was looking for references to historic figures, an emperor and a writer.

    PS Many thanks for your four years, vinyl. Much appreciated!

    Edited at 2013-04-29 05:20 am (UTC)

  4. Very familiar with potato clamps from my youth, but haven’t seen one for many years now. I too have entered Accra on the assumption that clue is defective. Congrats on 4 years.
  5. 40 minutes plus extra time looking for other possibilities at 22dn having already identified ACCRA as fitting the wordplay and accounting for every word in the clue, but wondering what the literal was. In the end I concluded that something is amiss. Incidentally I have since checked the epaper online where the clue is the same; I had thought the newspaper might include an extra word and my money, like mct’s, was on “capital”.

    Didn’t know the potato reference but I knew CLAMP as a mound so 1ac didn’t delay me long. My only other problem was with the “emperor” reference at 23.

    Nice puzzle.

    Congrats on your 4 years, Vinyl!

  6. Wearing the idiot hat today. Working online and struggling in the SW, threw in APETISER for the drink (ape=copy, tiser=resit backwards) despite the fact that a)it’s spelled wrong, b)it really needs work to make it fit the clue and c) it messes up CHAMPIGNON, which I would have noticed if I’d been working on paper.
    Otherwise a curiously sluggish sort of solve, with CLAMP/ACTIN bemusing to start with and arrogance=side (6d) a bit of a head scratcher. I now have to readjust my understanding of the phrase “there’s no side to him” not to mean impartiality.
    1. 31 minutes with my last two in the ‘ornate’ pair Janie was missing. Didn’t know actin or clamp, but both very getable. Accra cos it had to be. Loved ‘onside’, though I know it more as meaning pretentiousness or fakeness than arrogance.

      Nice Monday puzzle barring the shipwreck on the west coast.

  7. wiki.answers.com : “Roman emperors wore the tunic and toga just like any other man. The difference was in the fabric and in the purple coloring”.

    So, admittedly in a very loose sense, the description of a certain (Roman) emperor might be “he’s the one wearing purple”.

    Am I too imaginative?

  8. Pretty annoyed about Accra, if it is, as squinted at it for several minutes after finishing the rest in case it wasn’t, or was for a reason. Otherwise a nifty number which took about 23 minutes. Apart from Accra parallel last in. Liked plume somehow.
  9. Shared everybody else’s unease with ACCRA but went in on the basis of (i) wordplay elements and (ii) what else could it be? Some hesitation over ONSIDE but in general a gentle Monday morning solve. Congratulations, and many thanks, vinyl.
  10. Exactly half an hour, with a good five minutes spent on 22 down. Eventually decided that the answer had to be ACCRA. I seem to recall a piece in the paper by the then crossword editor, many years ago, about allowing clues such as this, where the word play points exactly to an answer but there is no definition, not even an “& lit”. I don’t think I’ve dreamt this, but it was a very long time ago.

    CLAMP was first in. My family grew a lot of potatoes in the 1950s, and that was how we stored them: dry them off, cover them in straw and bury them under a mound of soil to keep out the frost.

    1. In ’75 Years of The Times Crossword’ with a puzzle for each year from the very first on Feb. 1st 1930, there are quite a number of finally undefined answers at least in the earlier examples. E.g. (1940) ‘What to do between I and K (8)’. Tell you if you like.
      1. I think I’ve got it: POPINJAY? (Took a while to see it.)

        Now you mention them, I too recall clues like this in older puzzles; that must be what the article I vaguely remember was all about.

        1. Exactly! Quite fun in their way. But one has to be ruthless with the piteous cries of the modern mind for the two-way route it can’t do without. I recommend the book (a Times publication). So difficult as to be virtually impossible at times; but a fascinating path to step on and off of the clue’s gradual evolution.
  11. Happy 4th birthday! 22dn is the sort of thing which dampens any crossword celebration, though I at least successfully extrapolated the missing definition (if the checkers had left more possible answers than the single plausible one which turned out to be correct, I imagine I would have been proportionately more annoyed).

    I can also tell anon. that he or she is not alone, as my first thought for 23ac involved the classical world. Children of traditional ruling families were said to be “born to the purple”, i.e. destined to inherit imperial power, as indicated by the very expensively dyed togas which accompanied it. I imagine some future social historian will draw a parallel with the Bullingdon Club’s (not actually purple) tailcoats.

  12. 15 minutes for most of this, puzzled by CLAMP and ACCRA. But in the next 15 minutes I failed to get anywhere near PURPLE or PLUME. I came here expecting a major doh! moment but I wouldn’t have got PURPLE in a million years, as I didn’t know either the butterfly or the phrase “purple passage”.
    I guess I might have got PLUME with the checking P but without it, well, I didn’t.
    Harumph.
    But congratulations and thanks to vinyl1. No requests for a refund from me!
  13. Like Tim, the classical connection was straightforward – but also, as the ‘New Town’ pubs are all named for lepidoptera, the Purple Emperor isn’t far away.
    I didn’t waste very much time on 22dn, as nothin else fitted the cryptic, so just assumed the clue had been truncated somehow.
  14. Purple. The FT’s wine correspondent, Jancis Robinson, has her tasting notes on a site called purple pages, which is a good example of the latter use in 23ac. I too thought the first was a classical reference. Congrats on your four years vinyl, this site is a boon to us cruciverbalist rabbits.
  15. On the whole a straightforward and enjoyable puzzle, the unknowns (e.g. CLAMP) eminently get-able via the cryptic route. But like almost everyone else so far I entered ACCRA at 22 dn as the only solution that seemed to fit the wordplay. If there is a literal lurking in there that we’ve all somehow missed, I think the setter should put us out of our misery or explain himself/herself!
  16. 31:34 .. of which a good chunk was spent trying to untangle 22d. I thought there had to be a famous or infamous creditor, perhaps biblical, whose name was escaping me. In hindsight I was a bit slow to consider that there might be shome mishtake, especially with the obvious connection between ‘creditor’ and ‘capital’.

    COD to ZIGZAG.

    Congrats, vinyl, and thank you – for the blogs and the music.

    1. This is quite irrelevant to today’s crossword but I’ve just been looking at an amazing photo of Nova Scotia taken 45 minutes ago by Col.Chris Hadfield on the International Space Station. I follow his pics which he posts on Facebook. Such an interesting ZIGZAGy coastline. (The designer should have got an award for it – cf Norway in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) I don’t know how to do Facebook links or I’d send it to you… Ann
      1. Thank you, Ann. I tracked it down and yes, it’s an amazing photograph. It’s very disorienting at first because it’s upside down – except that where he is there is no upside down! – and it makes me see it differently. It is a wonderful coastline. Driving anywhere along it takes forever, but it’s a lovely way to spend forever.
      2. Oh, and I love how he says “the land showing the first green of spring”. He clearly wasn’t looking at our garden – nary a bud in sight!
  17. 35 minutes. I didn’t spend much time on 22dn, as I could think of nothing other than ACCRA, which fitted the wordplay, even if there didn’t appear to be a definition. Perhaps a bit more difficult than the usual Monday offering, but I thought it mostly straightforward, 23 and 24 being tricky exceptions. After going through various French authors in my mind, PLUME came in a sudden flash.
  18. About 20 mins, must be on the right wavelength. I was waiting for a train that came in 20 mins and I had all except ACCRA by then (well, I had ACCRA too but like everyone else worried that I was missing something)
  19. A tricky one for a Monday, I thought. It took me 18 minutes, quite a lot of which was spent peering at the NE Corner, and like everyone else, wondering what ACCRA was all about. Mr CS and I were only discussing potato clamps yesterday so that one went straight in.

    Congrats to Vinyl on the blogging anniversary.

  20. I found this mostly straightforward but after 25 mins I was getting nowhere with the 23a/24d pairing so resorted to aids. In hindsight they were both fair clues that I would have got had I given them a little more thought, but by then I had decided that it wasn’t worth the effort because of 22d. I was pretty sure that ACCRA had to be the answer and had entered it, but as plenty of you have commented there is no obvious definition.

    Andy B.

  21. the Imperial Purple was a colour reserved in Rome only for the emperor. Nothing to do with butterflies, perhaps, though I confess I don’t know what the “certain” is doing there. Only the setter will know for sure..

    Well done, Vinyl! do you know how many blogs that comes to?

    1. I think the primary reference is to butterflies, with a nod to Imperial Rome. Besides the purple emperor, there’s the lesser purple emperor, the tawny emperor and the hackberry emperor – maybe more besides – so that would account for the ‘certain’.
  22. Much the same as everybody else. Had a vague memory of CLAMP but looked it up to check. Got PURPLE from “ornate passage” and have no idea what ACCRA is all about.

    Well done Vinyl – a LEFTY over here is also a boxing term for a southpaw and I don’t think we would use the word in a political sense. He’s a bit left or leftwing we would say.

    1. “Trendy lefty”, used derogatorily, is in quite common usage, I think. Or was.
    2. Jeremy Hardy is definitely a Leftie (which is how I would spell it).. there’s lots of them about, Jimbo!
  23. Struggled with this one and had six missing at the end (Imitative, Lefty, Bill, Purple, Plume, Accra) and a wrong Landlord for Landlady. That was a silly mistake.
    Thanks for explaining everything vinyl1 and for your four years’ blogging. Keep up the good work. No complaints from me!
  24. Clamp my first in, ACCRA my last with no understanding why, as above, on a roll, done in 15 minutes. I assume Monday is easy and it goes faster!
  25. Belated anniversary congrats to a fellow Gothamite! Not sure where you are (I’m on the stuffy old UES) but I think you may be more Southerly. Thanks as always for the blog. I didn’t know the Murphy thing either. Accra occurred without too much of a struggle and I clocked in just over the 20 minute mark.
  26. Congratulations to Vinyl from a fellow US guy, who realizes how odd it is at times to solve without intimate knowledge of all those British slang words. Not to mention cricket terminology. I figured something like that must have been at work today at 22D, so after scratching my head, I resorted to aids, and still couldn’t get a satisfactory answer, so it remains just A?C?A. The rest had gone in fairly quickly, say 15 minutes, even the unknown CLAMP. Regards to all.
  27. Got 1ac from the cryptic, otherwise never heard the term. Liked 6dn and agree with Mctext about the added “distressing” touch. No idea on 22dn. I appreciate the setters throwing us Yanks a crumb from time to time, thank you!
  28. A depressing 29:07, with nearly 20 minutes spent on 22dn trying desperately to avoid a stupid error because I was missing something obvious. I was very slow to get PURPLE and PLUME so my time wouldn’t have been particularly fast anyway. A disappointing start to the week.
  30. 28 minutes, including 5 minutes trying to think of alternatives to ACCRA. First one in CLAMP. I don’t know about onions but I know my potatoes. I didn’t think of butterflies for PURPLE. Just that it was an imperial colour in ancient Rome. The reference to purple passages was a giveaway. Late posting because of other people sharing my PC and a pub quiz to follow.
    (Lost on a tiebreaker – a football question.) Bah. Ann
  31. I thought 22 down had to be ‘accta’ to make it fit creditor as the literal – but I couldn’t find it in any reference book. I considered Accra but there’s simply no definition. Scorpion
  32. 1. Across – “Clamp” is an agricultural term for a mound of root vegetables ( potatoes = murphys ) covered up for storage purposes.

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