Times 25464 – Wife No Longer

52 comments on “Times 25464 – Wife No Longer”

1. Isn’t the definition at 15 ‘play king’? Anyway, it took me just over a half-hour to give up on 20ac; totally on the wrong track, and I doubt I’d ever have come up with the correct answer. I also think I put in ‘amah’ for ‘ayah’, never having heard of a yah. Still, it was enjoyable.
   1. Another amah/ayah here. “Mah” and “yah” for a toff seemed equally plausible and it’s nice to be in good company.
2. 23:58 .. yes, I’m sure it’s “Play King”.

   A few going in with fingers crossed today, but not AYAH, which I’ve known for all of about 24 hours (still smarting over that PAPAYA).

   COD.. DOUBLE FLAT. Love it.

   1. Yes, double flat is also a belter. It wasn’t on my original list only because I had failed to understand it properly. (Thanks to Jack for that – if anyone else is still wondering, think ‘flat broke’.)

      Thought you’d enjoy ayah….

      Edited at 2013-05-02 04:36 am (UTC)

3. Sorry UY, too late to help today. But, yep, it’s PELT. For “fell” NOAD has:

   An animal’s hide or skin with its hair (archaic).

   Can’t say enjoyed this and was, as so often, stuck in the SW for a great deal of my time. MINARET purelly from the def sorted that in the end.

   1. Thank you for that mctext.

      That is a terrible clue! “Having” is superfluous and unfairly misleading, and the second definition is an obscure archaism. I couldn’t get the answer from either definition – kudos to those who did.

4. 40 minutes excluding 13ac which I failed to solved. There are at least 90 words that fit and nothing obvious by way of solution that I could see. Having wrongly thought that the setter had misdefined OBERON as a play* I wasn’t prepared to waste any more time thinking about it. Nice puzzle otherwise.

   Re 12ac,it’s not mentioned in the blog that utterly = FLAT.

   *Thanks to kevin gregg for pointing out my misunderstanding in his comment below.

   Edited at 2013-05-02 02:59 am (UTC)

5. Just a double definition. Pelt is run fast and skin.
6. Thanks, Kevin, I have amended my original comment accordingly. I never heard of YAH either but AYAH as nursemaid came up in 1ac only yesterday so it was fresh in my mind.
7. I thought this was a very fine puzzle, although I share the misgivings about 13ac. I got the right answer but only by imagining that ‘pelt’ was an archaic variant past tense/past participle form.

   But the positives far outweigh the negative: ABRACADABRA, where I was looking for a double ROO; the types with us no more/longer; the requirement NOT to lift & separate at 15; ‘close to retiring’ (1ac) in a clue where ‘blue’ and ‘down’ were crying out to be the second word; the ‘term’ rather than the era reversing in the MINARET. Thanks to the setter and Yap Suk for sorting out the last named.

   DOXY added to my list of harlots. 69 minutes (including 9-10 on 13ac).

   Edited at 2013-05-02 04:26 am (UTC)

   1. I’d thought it was a mistress; I see why Bishop Warburton was said to have lowered his voice when saying, “Orthodoxy is my doxy.”
      1. It seems to have descended towards the gutter as these words tend to. ODO has ‘lover, mistress’ as the primary meanings, with prostitute as the secondary, while noting that it was a slang use from the start (16th century) with derivation unknown.
8. You have a wonderful site here that was a quality read for me. Good info! Thanks!
   1. You’re very welcome. Feel free to join in!
9. Thanks, yfyap, for an excellent blog especially explanation of DOUBLE FLAT which I entered, but did not understand at all. I wasn’t convinced that to ‘win 0’ is to ‘lose everything’: but I enjoyed the clue and, of course, there’s the saving ‘?’ at the end. I was with Sotira in finding it helpful to have had AYAH yesterday!
10. 37 minutes after being flummoxed by assuming drop letter box…finally got the accidental and the correction. I see nothing wrong with 13; ‘Having’ is good for the surface and not inapposite otherwise. I do have a slight misgiving about a ‘yah’ as a Hooray Henry type. Good fare overall. CoD 12.
11. 36 minutes,befuddled by doctor’s prescription, so fighting through reading numbers and words wrong, misallocating entries and not thinking.
    I have BELT for 13, concious that we had this discussion for 25429, just over a month ago where a triple definition left no (or not much) doubt. I put PELT then. Here, I submit, M’lud, there is distinct ambiguity and I can’t see how BELT can be ruled wrong (Chambers gives “to move very fast” and “to hit hard”). Simply not enough in the clue to be definitive.
    Synonyms for stew and bother (28 and 2) required visits to the same page on the mental Thesaurus, with plenty of options, slowing my already slow reflexes and prompting some dodgy guesses until light dawned. I nearly got the wordplay to give DISPUTE at 2 until the Play King went in.
    Did not know (or had forgotten) LEISTER and (A)YAH as a separate noun. CoD to bb.
    1. How do you get the “fell” bit?
       1. “Fell, v to cause to fall, to knock down” – as good a connection as many we see.
          1. Hmm. “Hit hard” and “knock down” seem quite distinct to me. But I’m sure I’m only saying that because I happened on the right answer!

             Edited at 2013-05-02 10:04 am (UTC)

             1. Quite – it’s one of those where if you hit on BELT first it’s perfectly satisfying, especially given the relative obscurity of the skin version. As I commented, it was marginal a month ago when the clue was “Run for trophy and fall hard”. BELT was thought to be the lesser possibility then too.
    2. I tried to justify WENT. As in “went (ran fast) like the clappers”, and “the last two wickets went (fell) cheaply”.
       And I can’t even blame it on the drugs!
12. 20m. This was a bit like the experience Tim described yesterday: it felt really tough but the answers kept coming.
    There was a bit of a Mephistoish feel to it with tons of obscure/arcane/unfamiliar/interesting (delete according to taste) terms: DOUBLE FLAT/accidental, PELT, LEISTER, HELOT, BOWDLERISE, AYAH (although not if you did yesterday’s), NUGATORY, DEAD LETTER BOX. Edit: oh, and DOXY
    My geographical ignorance roams far and wide, so I was very unsure about LEISTER. I knew there was a rugby team called Leinster but if you had kept a straight face and bet me £100 it was in Wales I wouldn’t have taken the bet.

    Edited at 2013-05-02 11:13 am (UTC)

13. Just under three-quarters of an hour for this absorbing and witty puzzle. The only serious delay was caused by trying to work in HIGHBALL instead of SNOWBALL. I always think of the latter as a 1960s drink that is best forgotten, though people tell me that it has recently become popular again.

    I was back home too late to comment on yesterday’s puzzle, but ought to say that it too was a cracker, similar in difficulty to today’s and likewise packed with clever clues.

    I’m trying to work out why I know the word “fell” as an animal skin. The term “fell monger” is rattling round my brain, but I don’t remember where I met it. This will occupy my mind for the rest of the day and send me rummaging through my books, when I ought to be strangling weeds in the garden.

    1. I had a great grandfather who was a fell-monger; a dealer in sheepskins. Came in handy today.
    2. You may remember fell as animal skin because it has come up here before, and not that long ago.

       Unfortunately the word itself is too commonly used to be able to track down its last appearance here in the required context. Also unfortunately (for me) I had forgotten about it until I read the explanation posted by Anon (above)and then it came flooding back.

       1. Yeah, I remember that clue too. Maybe a Saturday puzzle?
       2. Found it at last! The trade of fellmonger appears in London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew. The section Of the Street-Sellers of Eatables and Drinkables contains a detailed description of a fellmonger’s business in Bermondsey, where the trotters from over one million sheep per year are prepared, cooked and sold wholesale to street vendors at “five a penny.”
          1. From a 2003 Guardian article:

             There is a precedent for the BBC acting as a commercially-minded developer. Before it occupied the whole of Broadcasting House, the idea was to let out space to pay for the running costs of the building. In a delightful Reithian touch, the BBC drew up a list of prohibited lessees: “Slaughtermen, sugar baker, fellmonger, beater of flax, common brewer, quasi-medical or quasi-surgical establishment, brothel or bagnio keeper.”

14. 
    Two left blank, and several ?s for me today. Blanks: hadn’t heard either or a LEISTER, nor of the Irish province, and didn’t know that a fell = a PELT.

    Lots of good clues today, and lots of misdirections, very enjoyable.

15. I enjoyed this puzzle. I could have fallen down on Ayah but it was fresh in the memory from yesterday and I was happy enough with ‘yah’ as an upper-class person, Leister was trawled from deep in the memory banks (I tried to make harpoon work as soon as I saw the first two words of the clue but obviously couldn’t), I thought Oxymoron was excellently clued, ‘Play King’ was a devious definition, Exigent and Nugatory took me longer to solve than they should have done, and Pelt was my last in. I had a vague memory that one of the definitions of fell is a skin so I went with it. 19 mins.

    Andy B. I may set up a proper user ID one of these days ……………

16. …although I completed the left half fairly quickly. I got so stuck I had to take a shower and wash out my brain, and then I was able to start solving again.

    ‘Leister’, ‘like a charm’, and ‘the lot’ were brilliant – in fact the whole SE corner was very good, although quite difficult. For a long time I thought ‘oxymoron’ must start with [s]expot or something like that. I struggled home eventually, though.

17. I got WENT similarly to galspray’s reasoning – although ‘fell’ as ‘hide’ (and ‘moor’) crossed my mind, neither seemed to lead anywhere.
    Thanks for parsing of 2dn which I only had from definition and checkers!
18. Sharer of the Keriothe Experience, though this seemed in general very good. 57 minutes, with DOUBLE FLAT nosing out some other rather fine clues.

    Many thanks setter and blogger.

    Chris.

19. Another mix of the straightforward and the tricky. Mostly completed in 50 minutes, but left with 13 ac. I nearly entered BELT, then waited until I got to my computer and checked all words ?E?T; once I saw PELT I chose that, though I wasn’t familiar with that meaning of ‘fell’.
    I’m not sure that “win nothing” is the same as “lose everything”, but that’s a minor quibble, and possible comes within the scope of setter’s licence.
20. PELT: double def, run fast / animal skin
21. 10 minutes for most of it apart from four and a half in the NE. Came back two hours later and finished it off in about 4 minutes. I do love the way some deep dark part of the mind carries on solving the clues while you do other things.
22. This took me most of lunch, and it was rather a lot of fun – loved ABRACADABRA, DOUBLE FLAT, “play king” for OBERON and the wordplay for BODY BLOW. Nice one, setter!
23. 37 minutes for me today. I have a question mark by DOUBLE FLAT. I put it in almost straight away because I could see a DOUBLE “utterly” and “accidental”. I put in DOUBLE FLAT simply because DOUBLE SHARP didn’t fit! What I can’t see is how the word “utterly” can mean “flat”. (Only in the sense of “flat broke” – but surely this is an exceptional use) Another query with ADJOIN. Why the apostrophe “s” in “neighbour’s”? I’m obviously missing something. Probably a few brain cells… Btw, Mr Bowdler is buried in one of our local churchyards – a very dubious claim to fame. Ann
    1. Neighbour [‘s = is] post etc.

       Re “flat broke”: Passing one substitution test is surely sufficient. “I’m flat/utterly broke” works so why would we need to look for more examples?

    2. I give a flat negative to the idea that there is only one use of “flat” to replace utterly. And that’s flat 🙂
       1. But in neither of your examples could you substitute the word “utterly”. So is it an acceptable definition? It’s not a proper synonym IMO. Am trying to think of other examples apart from “flat broke” – so far without success. (Just got one: “I’m FLAT out of ideas”.) I still think it’s a good job we had the rest of the cryptic to help us. Would any of us have come up with FLAT = UTTERLY without the rest of the clue? Ann
          1. I must say I’m struggling to see how you’re struggling with “flat broke” and “utterly broke” as synonyms. Equally “flat out of ideas” and “utterly out of ideas”. They seem perfectly synonymous to me.
24. 30 minutes all except 13 ac, still can’t see why BELT is a worse answer although the meaning of FELL for a skin was unknown. Spoilt the puzzle somewhat. I lived in Dublin for 10 years so Leinster was an early get. Liked the ‘landlord no longer’ clue the best.
25. As has been said ‘belt’ doesn’t mean ‘knock down’. A flat negative is an utter negative not utterly: I think falooker has a point in that there would seem to be very few uses where it works. But ‘flat broke’ and ‘flat out of ideas’ – brilliant! – are enough surely. Fell for skin seems easier to me than leister for fishing spear. Just finickily musing.

    Edited at 2013-05-02 08:49 pm (UTC)

26. A sluggish 12:13 for me after another horribly slow start.

    PELT went straight in without any checked letters in place (I’m pretty sure I’ve met the clue before) but I have to admit to feeling slightly nervous about the scary ‑E‑T when it was confirmed, particularly as I’d thought of TAKE IN for 5ac without any checked letters, and wasted ages on it before light eventually dawned. However, I’m with those who reckon BELT isn’t really a goer.

    I don’t recall coming across OUT OF ONE’S HEAD before (rather than OFF ONE’S HEAD or OUT OF ONE’S MIND), so although I thought of it straight away as something that would fit the wordplay, I didn’t dare bung it in. With the N in place, SINK seemed a faint possibility for 23ac, but I wisely resisted the temptation to bung that one in. If I remember rightly, LEISTER used to come up regularly at one time, so no problem there.

    Another fine puzzle. I just wish I’d felt a bit less dozy.

    1. “I Think I’m Going Out of My Head” – originally by Little Anthony and the Imperials. US for sure.

       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq204wG8UfA

    2. Good point, and one that I had intended to raise, however SOED supports it as a North American colloquialism for “crazy”. Its more usual meanings are given as (a) from one’s own invention and (b) forgotten by one.
    3. I had OUT OF ONES ???? for a long time before the crossers confirmed it. The D wasn’t much help. I’d only ever come across the “mind” version but the wordplay strongly suggested “head” so I waited for the E.
27. I’ll submit that BEAT works too – better, in that it uses ‘having’.

    What I dread is the day I face the clue “Fall fell” and have to remember this moment.

28. I missed “double flat.” Having read the blog and the comments, I still cannot get the math straight. If utterly = flat AND accidental = flat, then “Utterly, utterly accidental” = “flat, flat, flat,” which is TRIPLE (not double) flat.
    1. Accidental is the definition. Utterly, utterly (= flat, flat = double flat) is the wordplay.

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