Times 25601: Long time parsing

Author   mctextPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 28:45

Then a fair while after that sorting out my missing parsings: IN SUM, MASSEUSE and VOUCHSAFED. So a puzzle where a lot of the literals (sometimes with checking letters) give a reasonable shot at the answer but where the cryptics aren’t always so obvious. (Yes, I know a certain colleague says we shouldn’t solve this way, but many of us do!) Most of the trouble came in the SE corner where I’d never heard of 17dn, was looking for the wrong literal at 24dn, and thought 27ac and 25dn a bit unfair. Only a bit but.

Slightly off the topic: just looked up a few articles in the Liverpool Echo and chanced upon the fact that the inventor of the crossword, Arthur Wayne, was an expatriate Scouser. There’s hope for me yet!

Across
1. STICK. Three literals, the middle one being ‘put up with’.
4. LIKE A SHOT. Anagram of ‘leak is’ + HOT (piping).
9. UPS-A-DAISY. UP (in court). SAY (judge, loosely) inc DAIS (platform). The literal is the first four words.
10. CHIMP. CHI (Greek letter), PM reversed.
11. RUMBLE. Two meanings: a street fight and to discover (be wise to) something — usually something not very nice!
12. STEP DOWN. STEP (rung, of a ladder), DOWN (depressed).
14. PLAYGROUND. Straight charade. P (pressure), LAY (set), GROUND (broken down).
16. CLIO. nOtInLuCk. (Reverse alternate letters). The muse of history.
19. GOLF. The radio call for the letter G, which appears twice in ‘gigs’.
20. SCOTCH MIST. Reverse ‘to’ and CS (tear gas used to control a 11s) + CH{e}MIST (dispenser).
22. MASSEUSE. I take this to be as follows. ‘Very widely employed’ means ‘in MASS USE’. So into those letters you insert E, the last letter (tip) of ‘maintenancE’.
23. FO,REST. Here’s our often (and recently) used FO for Foreign Office.
26. BLU(E)R.
27. FOR TOFFEE. Cf ‘He couldn’t shoot for toffee’ = ‘… to save his life’ (used frequently of Everton strikers). This is: FORT (keep), OFF (away from) + E, E (tablets). It’s the last bit that I think is a bit off.
28. LAY HOLD OF. LAY (not cloth, clergy) + LD (for ‘Lord’) in HOOF (boot).
29. TONAL. ON (leg side) in LAT{e} reversed.

Down
1. SQUARE PEG. S (succeeded), QUA (as), REP (salesman) EG (say). Great headline for a bad performance of Arthur Miller: DEATH OF A REP.
2. IN SUM. Had me going for a while, looking for an ALL-deletion. It’s just a homophone: ‘inn some’. Darn!
3. KIDOLOGY. Anagram: look G (good), DIY.
4. LAIR. ‘lethaL’ + AIR.
5. KRYPTONITE. Anagram (signalled by ‘Barking’ = mad): pretty OK in.
6. ACCEPT. ACT inc CEP. ‘Mushroom’ in the clue is often CEP in the answer.
7. HOI POLLOI. ‘monarcH’, OI and OI (repeated calls) inc POLL (election). A term which has undergone semantic reversal in some parts, thus meaning posh folk.
8. TAP-IN. TA (I’m obliged, thank you), PIN (nail).
13. VOUCHSAFED. V (very, in small form, abbreviated), OUCH (I felt that!), SA (it, sex appeal), FED (was satisfying). Yet another straight charade that I failed to spot after assuming the ‘small’ = S.
15. AYLESBURY. Anagram: surely by A{ccident}.
17. OUT AT HEEL. O (old), U (university), THEE (you) inside TAL{k}. No idea why this took so long except that I didn’t know the phrase. The cryptic is plain enough.
18. SHOOT-OUT. Can be split as SHOO | TOUT.
21. WEIR,DO. Don’t understand why there’s a question-mark.
22. MABEL. Drop the first L from LABEL, replace with M (married). My dear old grandma’s name (GRHS) what was born opposite Anfield football ground.
24. ELFIN. The literal is ‘slight’; hidden reversed in the clue. Another moment of stupidity on my part, looking for a word for ‘slight exaggeration’.
25. PROF. P (piano), reverse FOR. ‘By implication perhaps hostile’ appears to mean ‘the opposite of FOR’. Dodgy or very clever? Up to you. Oops-a-daisy! As Anon points out, it’s easier to parse this as: PRO-F could imply CON-P, where F=forte (loud) and P=piano (soft).

28 comments on “Times 25601: Long time parsing”

  1. I started well on this but the wheels came off once the top half was completed. Never heard of OUT AT HEEL and am not sure exactly what it’s supposed to mean. If it’s the same as DOWN AT HEEL then it doesn’t make sense to me as I can’t visualise the literal meaning to which it’s referring (a heel hanging out?).

    The PROF clue was very strange I thought but SCOTCH MIST was excellent. Also didn’t know UPS-A-DAISY now I come to think of it as I’ve always said and seen OOPS.

    1. Found this in the FreeDictionary:

      out at the heel/heels
      1. Having holes in one’s socks or shoes.
      2. Rundown; shabby; seedy.

      Still … I agree, it’s a bit outré and complete news to me.

      Edited at 2013-10-09 04:19 am (UTC)

      1. Ah, socks rather than shoes! That makes sense. I have since found it in Chambers but I still never heard of it and am pleased to note that I am not alone in that. Glad to see the simple explanation PRO-F. I think I was a bit shell-shocked by the time I got to it.

        Edited at 2013-10-09 07:10 am (UTC)

  2. Loved this one – so much imagination (eg FOR TOFFEE and PROF – no problem at all with either) and fun. COD to KIDOLOGY, as it sums up my attempts at DIY and is a word that was once much used en famille. On another personal note, after missing out on my muse on Monday, I was pleased to nail Clio today…as it were.
  3. You appear to be over-egging the analytical pudding on 25D. It’s simply “pro F” (which is equivalent to “con P”…).
    1. Thanks Anon. Over-egged indeed! Now corrected. (I have a tendency to cock up the answers that are closest to home!)

      Edited at 2013-10-09 04:03 am (UTC)

  4. After a good hour, I still had 2 and 2 halves missing: CLIO and VOUCHSAFED, and SCOTCH and SHOOT.

    OUT AT HEEL took a long time to get, never heard of that expression, but I did like FOR TOFFEE, which also took an age.

    COD to GOLF, or maybe PROF. Liked the fact that it included ‘by implication’ in the clue which doesn’t always seem to be the case in clues like this.

    Thanks for parsing MASSEUSE, and TAP IN. Couldn’t work those out.

    Edited at 2013-10-09 05:24 am (UTC)

  5. What a contrast to yesterday. This is inventive and difficult because the cryptics are hard to fathom with some interesting words and phrases such as KRYPTONITE and UPS-A-DAISY. I can’t imagine what our US friends will make of FOR TOFFEE!

    Apart from the unknown OUT AT HEEL (where the cryptic is quite clear and precise) there are no weird obscurities, just clever misdirections.

    Well parsed McT, not an easy one by any measure, and thank you setter for a first class puzzle

    1. Jimbo
      You’re definitely right – FOR TOFFEE was impossible (or, a guess). UPS-A-DAISY also needed the crosses (we have a definite “E”, as in UPS-Y or some “EE” thing in the middle of our pronunciation – I’m not fond of these less-standard words). More confusion because for Americans “RUMBLE” would suggest West Side Story – which is set in a different part of NY from Harlem. I thought DOWN AT HEEL was another American problem, but it looks as if everyone else had it too, so maybe not. And SCOTCH MIST isn’t common in the US, nor is AYLESBURY. But, as you note, most were gettable from the wordplay. More education for me, I suppose.
  6. 52:00 .. I had an enforced break mid-solve but it would have been well over the half hour anyway. Not one to solve after a very late night. The NW I found hellishly difficult to get started on.

    I suspect this is a brilliant crossword but I’m feeling too dozy to tell. I’ll assume it is and thank setter and blogger alike.

  7. 30m for this. Did this puzzle get accidentally switched for one in the Guardian? It seemed to me the setter was taking rather a lot of liberties, and clues like 22ac MASSEUSE or 27ac FOR TOFFEE are not very Times-like.
    Having said that I really enjoyed it: it’s highly inventive and there were several clues I stared at for ages without a clue how they worked. Nice to get one that forces the brain out of habitual thought-patterns.
    By the way I think I read 22ac slightly differently: the whole phrase “E [tip of maintenance] very widely employed” can be translated as “mass e use”.

    Edited at 2013-10-09 08:22 am (UTC)

  8. 42 mins. I was so far off the setter’s wavelength the radio was in a different house, although that was my problem and not the setter’s because the cluing was fair.

    FOR TOFFEE was my LOI after I finally saw PROF.

  9. Tricky one, with a couple of minutes at the end spent on the FOR TOFFEE/OUT AT HEEL crossing.
  10. Nice to hear from the setter.
    29/32 today, so a better effort than recent days. Rumble, Vouchsafed and For Toffee were the three to elude me. Thanks mctext for filling in those gaps.
    Loved the Superman reference and the inclusion of Kidology.
    I don’t know how many times I looked for Elfin knowing it was a hidden clue and not spotting it until I had the N in Tonal to anchor it!!
  11. I can answer that!
    The clue originally was “Crank’s function on river dam” the last 4 words arguably defining a WEIR DO. We felt it was fairer to split the bits up as “DO underneath WEIR” – and the question mark was accidentally left in.

    I’m slightly amazed no one has heard of a OUT AT HEEL, even the reigning champion it would seem.

    Anyway, I have fond memories of this puzzle at least – much of it was composed, coincidentally, at a 14ac.

    S. Etter

    1. Thanks for clearing that up. Just one character — and a punctuation mark — but it had me confused as the clue seemed very straightforward. Thanks for the puzzle BTW.
  12. SE corner very recalcitrant today: eventually decided to take half an hour off for a cuppa. (It’s all counted against my time, though)
    OUT AT HEEL was my LOI too, as the phrase was unfamiliar – it seems to me to be a conflation of the better-known ‘out at elbow’ and ‘down at heel’.
    Thanks also for parsing several clues, where I could only see roughly how they worked.
  13. Just me or are things getting trickier lately? 28 mins with considerable Tippex involved!
  14. 26 minutes, not quite getting the literal of FOR TOFFEE (thanks for education) and as for everyone, it seems, OUT AT HEEL looked innovatory. Lots to like, very little obvious, tough enough, at the time of writing, to exclude Neutrinos from the leaderboard (or has there been a revolution?). Thanks to S. Etter, not least for the insight into the editing process.

    Edited at 2013-10-09 12:14 pm (UTC)

  15. My Crossword Club login seems to have been blocked – although it is paid for until June next year. Cue a fight with Customer Services!

    Solving in the newspaper, which I suppose is good practice for the Finals day the weekend after next, I finished in 16:45, so a tough one. VOUCHSAFED was my LOI – could not find any word that fitted even with all the checking letters.

    I think I have come across OUT AT HEEL in the past, but it did not come readily and had to be composed from the cryptic part of the clue

    Edited at 2013-10-09 12:25 pm (UTC)

    1. >My Crossword Club login seems to have been blocked – although it is paid for until June next year.

      That’s truly unjust, Simon, given that my extension (from when my sub expired on 2 July) was supposed to finish at the end of September, but I still have access (though I’d be grateful if you didn’t quote me to Customer Services ;-).

      I’ve noted your time for my neutrino-free leaderboard.

  16. Never heard of OUT AT HEEL but liked many of the others . Time probably slow due to the sheer pleasure of lounging around on a beach on the south Turkish coast.
    Bigtone53
    It seems that doing this on iPhone has lost me my dog!
  17. 25:43 with pretty much everything on the right going in very quickly and the left hand side proving a lot trickier.

    No problems with the inventive devices which I felt were much more Timesian than yesterday’s heartbroken and which I enjoyed very much. In fact, for toffee get my COD nod.

    Thanks for the explanation of tonal. I had the L as left leaving TA to satisify “unpunctually briefly” and TA(rdily) seemd a bit of a stretch.

  18. About 35 minutes, ending with FOR TOFFEE and OUT AT HEEL, both guesses from the wordplay, and both entirely unknown. Very clever all around, with perhaps the exceptions of the two obscure (at least to me) phrases above. COD to SQUARE PEG, with a reminder to myself to watch out for ‘qua’ in future. Thanks to S.Etter and mctext, and regards to all.
  19. No time as done in bits. Lovely to meet ‘for toffee’ again for perhaps the first time since childhood. No trouble with ‘out at heel’ which if a rare bird nowadays hardly seems an alien. In sum a deft and challenging number.
  20. Another very enjoyable puzzle with some clues I really enjoyed, like 5d, leading to ‘kryptonite’ and 27a ‘for toffee’. To be nit picking, I remain uncomfortable with abbreviations that are not indicated, like 10a ‘chimp’ and 25d ‘prof’, but this practice seems to be becoming more prevalent, so I’ll just have to live with it (like apostrophes not indicated in numeration).
    Grouse over and, as I said, overall I liked the puzzle.
    George Clements
  21. 14:23 for me, which perhaps wasn’t too bad considering I’d had a long and exhausting day and could just about keep my eyes open!

    A hugely enjoyable puzzle. I raise my hat to the setter.

  22. I parsed differently and saw it as a dd – one being you have to tap in a nail. However like mc’s reasoning – roger

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