Times 25605 – A groats-worth of wit….

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 48 minutes

Music: None, golf on TV again

I was not giving this puzzle my full attention, as I watched Koepka throw away the chance to win the very first PGA tournament he ever played in. I put in a lot of answers from the literals, including a careless ‘exemplar’ that held me up at the end. I was left stuck in three of the four corners, and had to crack down and concentrate. My last in was a bit of a guess, but a fairly confident one.

The puzzle was, I think, only of moderate difficulty for skilled solvers. Many of the literals are evident enough, and for the others the cryptics point the way. Little esoteric knowledge is required.

Across
1 VERMICELLI, [o]VER + MICE + I’LL backwards. A term that varies widely by region, as dialect maps will show. I suppose the Philadelphia/South Jersey equivalent, ‘jimmies’, would confuse many UK solvers.
7 OXEN, N + EXO[tic] backwards. The ‘a’ in front of ‘quarter’ threw me off for a bit.
9 MISPRINT I M[ile] backwards + SPRINT.
10 TANNER, double definition, the second referring to the old slang term for a sixpence. Although shilings and pence are no more, the bob, the tester, and the half-crown will live on in crosswords.
11 POLITE, POL(IT)E. During WWII, exiled Polish airmen had quite a reputation among the young ladies.
13 EXEMPLUM, EXE + M + PLUM, where ‘flower’, as usual, is a river.
14 CURRENCY UNIT, CUR + anagram of N[ew] CENTURY I.
17 PUT THE WIND UP, PUTT + HEW + IN DUP[e], where trap has the sense of ‘deceive’.
20 NUTRIENT, NU + TR(I)ENT. What nutrias eat?
21 PREFIX, P + REF + XI backwards.
22 ZAMBIA, Z(AMBI[t])A, my first in; not too many countries start with ‘Z’ and end in ‘A’.
23 ALL ROUND, [schoo]L in anagram of OUR LAND. ‘Special measures applied’ seems to be just an anagram indicator – alternate interpretations welcome.
25 TYKE, hidden in [identi]TY KE[ighley]. My last in, since I didn’t know the meaning of ‘tyke’ as a speaker of broad Yorkshire, but what else could it be?
26 ENDANGERED, END + ANGERED, a simple clue that took me a long time to see.
 
Down
2 EPILOGUE, EP + I + LOG + U[s]E[d]. I wasted some time on variants of ‘soliloquy’, which clearly does not fit.
3 MOP, M/O + P, our old friend modus operandi.
4 CHIVE, C[old] + HIVE. I interpreted ‘leaves’ as a verb for a while, missing the obvious.
5 LOTTERY, L(OTTER)Y.
6 IN THE KNOW, [m]IN(THE K[arate])NOW. The cryptic is difficult to see, and hardly worth bothering with given the enumeration and definition.
7 OMNIPOTENCE, anagram of INCOME around NET OP upside down.
8 EREBUS, SU(BE)RE upside down. Putting this in from the literal enabled me to spot ‘exemplar’ as a wrong ‘un.
12 IRREPARABLE, IR + REP + ARABLE.
15 NOTRE DAME, NOT(R[oquefort])E + DAME. There are various minor-league cheeses called ‘La Dame’, but I can’t really explain the second element. The answer, however, is obvious. NOT(R[oquefort] EDAM)E. Much better, thanks, Derek.
16 JULIENNE, JU(LIEN)NE, a brilliant clue, completely fair. Those who only vaguely remember the soup (like me!) can use the cryptic as a guide to the correct spelling.
18 HATBAND, anagram of BATH + AND.
19 QUEASY, [li]QU[or] + EASY. I saw early on that ‘queasy’ would fit, but I couldn’t make it work, not understanding that ‘belly’ is not part of the literal.
21 PYLON, P[ower] + anagram of ONLY.
24 ORE, [c]O[u]R[s]E, the Swedish currency unit.

40 comments on “Times 25605 – A groats-worth of wit….”

  1. Interrupted by a bloke who came to fix my ceiling after the roof leaked during our record wet. But a bit over the 20 minutes I’d guess. Several unknowns today but, as Vinyl says, aided by the cryptics.

    Food …
    1ac: no idea the pasta could also be chocolate.
    4dn: never heard of “chive” in the singular.
    16dn: no idea the strips of veg could be soup. (“It chops, it slices, it juliennes…”.)

    10ac: “heads and tails here” looks a bit vague to me.
    23ac: the anagram indicator must be a first.

    5dn: a documentary I watched last week (on The Hebrides) clearly showed that otters spend most of their time on land. So they’re no more aquatic than a keen human swimmer. Which I’m not.

    18dn: “joining device” for AND is a new kid on the block too.

    And … it’s a pangram I think. That’s what got me the J for my LOI: 16dn.

    Edited at 2013-10-14 03:20 am (UTC)

  2. A bit of a foodie theme here. I was unfamiliar with VERMICELLI as chocolate (?!) and JULIENNE as soup.

    I think 15dn is R+EDAM in NOTE. It reminded me of a a French advertisement I saw years ago for Roquefort (“la reine des fromages”) with a picture of a rather daggy ewe and the title “La Reine Mere”.

    1. Well spotted. That would be right. We had the same answer recently (still under wraps) but with, I think, a hyphen. Which is correct?

      Edited at 2013-10-14 03:25 am (UTC)

  3. In answer to vinyl’s question at 20ac – presumably so, and also the nutria itself, when eaten.
  4. Öre for Sweden. Øre for Norway and Denmark. So … could be any of the three I suppose.
  5. A public holiday in HK, so did this online on the PC. NOT a good idea, as I took ages (75 minutes), got one wrong and it’s all on the Club website. So, please get along there and tip me out of the top 100. And I can’t even pretend that ‘irreperable’ was a typo…

    Excellent puzzle. Similar to my esteemed Monday colleague, I was left with something in each corner, finishing with ENDANGERED of all things. Didn’t know the Scandinavian currency but TANNER brought back memories of pocket-money. (Unless you know something I don’t, Jonathan, I think you mean ‘tanner’ rather than ‘tester’ – now that really would be esoteric…) Flirted with ‘dermicelli’ at 1a, but decided it sounded too much like a disease. Speaking of which, COD to QUEASY, with MOP coming a close second.

      1. Thanks, Jerry. Teach me to limit my investigation to a one- page Google search and the ODO. Apologies to J.
  6. I found this hard as there were so many unknown shades of meaning, all of which have already been mentioned by others so at least I’m not alone in that.

    I actually got one wrong, at 23ac where I hastily wrote in ‘all-found’. I was unable to parse it, so I really should have looked for an alternative answer but my solving time was just past the hour at that point and I had lost interest. I spotted the pangram quite early on but it didn’t help me.

    Vinyl, we still have pence.

    1. jackkt, I also initially put in ALL FOUND and only changed it when I realized that I needed and ‘r’ to parse the clue properly.
      Like others guessed then parsed Julienne, not knowing it to be anything other than food chopped into strips.
  7. 34:23
    There were some traps here for those who scribble things in without fully parsing. EXEMPLAR, MONETARY UNIT, OMNISCIENCE. All corrected but slowed me down. Vermicelli to me is a pasta and Julienne finely-sliced vegetables. I liked 19d
  8. … A term that varies widely by region, as dialect maps will show. I suppose the Philadelphia/South Jersey equivalent, ‘jimmies’, would confuse many UK solvers …
    Grateful to anyone who can translate this explanation for me
  9. 23 minutes, forgot to check IRREPERABLE at the end. I knew there was one I hadn’t parsed properly, in addition to ALL ROUND, which still puzzled me and shouldn’t have. Helped to JULIENNE (chopped veg, usually carrots, in my recipe book) by the pangram. I blinked at CHIVE for plural leaves, but apparently it works.
    I can’t remember seeing “belly” as a middle letter(s) indicator before, and its placement was clever.
    I seem to remember that a couple of years MacDonalds believed two TANNERs make a pound. How we love confusing foreigners!
    Good puzzle.
  10. 19 mins for a puzzle which wasn’t my cup of tea because, as has been said elsewhere in this blog, too many of the answers could be solved from the definition alone. 14ac, 17ac, 6dn, 7dn, 8dn (my LOI) and 15dn all fell into this category.

    Having said that, I needed the wordplay to get the correct spelling of IRREPARABLE, and also to get EXEMPLUM. I had the same knowledge gaps as some of you with VERMICELLI and CHIVE, but I did know JULIENNE as a soup.

  11. Took about an hour or so, so not at all quick for me, but all correct in the end…

    Didn’t get the coin meaning of TANNER (was thinking along tanning salons etc…), or of ORE (thinking along iron ore etc…); realising (for once) that it’s a pangram helped with QUEASY and PREFIX; TYKE was LOI (didn’t know that meaning); same as others for incomplete understanding of VERMICELLI and JULIENNE.

  12. 21m, and glad to find I’m not alone in the IRREPERABLE club. Back to school for me.
    I had lots of questions marks. See all of mctext’s comments above, and also:
    > I had no idea why a Pole specifically might want “it”
    > There are quite a few rather unfamiliar and/or oblique definitions: fell for hew, trap for dupe, minnow, “in production” (as opposed to fit for production).
    > I had no idea about TYKE
    Nothing wrong with any of it but it was a rather confusing solve. It just goes to show that you can get all the answers right even when you don’t understand half of them. Provided you can spell, that is.
    1. Well, to paraphrase the bloke on the telly looking ahead to the crunch WC qualifier tonight, maybe all that kitchen-fitting gives them a healthy appetite. Maybe they’ll have to remake ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’.
  13. A zippy 13:50, but with incomplete knowledge (like lots of other people, there were a few clues where I didn’t know that X could mean Y – mostly where X was food related, now I look at again, despite that normally being one of my strong areas for “obscure” knowledge – but the wordplay always seemed pretty clear, even if it involved taking a bit of a leap of faith).
  14. Put in wrong country here – thinking there was a group of extremists calling themselves the Grand Army or the like. I usually notice pangrams, but not this time.
  16. 11:23 for me. I did know the vermicelli but like others thought julienne were just strips of veg.
  17. 17:20 here. What happened to easy Monday puzzles?

    No prob with Tyke: for one thing the RU team here in Leeds, Leeds Carnegie, used to be Leeds Tykes.

    The single/plural issue at 4d didn’t throw me but chives being leaves did a bit. I’d say they were more stalks/stems/tubes. Chard was my first thought for that one.

    As with others a lot of the longer answers went in without full (or indeed any) appreciation of the wordplay but I enjoyed this on the whole.

    1. You could be on to something here: I’m not sure they are leaves. According to Wiki the bit we eat is a “scape”, which is “a long internode forming the basal part or the whole of a peduncle.” Obvious really, when you think about it.
      1. My chives have sprouted purple flowers on top, so I’d gofor calling the bit we eat stalks.
        Rob
  18. While lacking the long experience you guys have of crosswords, I am still surprised nobody else is complaining about Erebus.I assume “be” is taken to mean “to remain”? While I could construct a sentence where either word/phrase could be used, “to remain” adds far more meaning and is so is not really synonymous.
    So for future efforts, can I assume that being merely able to create a sentence where either word can be used is sufficient?

    Thanks.

    1. I was a bit puzzled by this but one of the definitions of “be” in Chambers is “to remain or continue without change”. As in the phrase “leave it be”, I suppose.
      In this clue I was even more puzzled by the wordplay, where I find the insertion of the word “having” clumsy at best.
    2. The key test really is whether the link is supported by the dictionaries. In my iPod version of Chambers the 6th definition of be is remain.

      Whilst it’s often tempting to argue about true synonyms, common usage etc, what really matters in the crossworld is what the dictionary says.

  19. Came up one short today for the third day running. I couldn’t get the Unit bit of Currency Unit.
    Liked Misprint for ‘…bad spell…’.
    I’m with others in not knowing today’s meanings of Vermicelli and Julienne.
    Vinyl1 – thanks for explaining In The Know and Put The Wind Up. I couldn’t work out the wordplay for those two.
  20. Nothing new to add. A lot entered from definition and then reverse engineering the cryptic – hence no problem with EXEMPLUM for example

    Reasonable puzzle that I thought of about average difficulty

  21. A nice one today, with some odd words, but all fair. Fell into the IRREPERABLE trap, and wondered why I couldn’t parse it. (Hiding my knuckles, Sister will be round with her ruler shortly!)

    And is Edam really a cheese? Even in crosswords? Really?

      1. Well, I like Edam. 27.44. Some nice definers. But one or two a touch dodgy I thought. Mission = end? No doubt it’s in the dictionary, but I always feel another criterion’s absence in such cases: is there an interchangeable use?
  22. 45m about for a tester for me but eventually all negotiated though in an unusual pattern as I had 2 blanks in each quarter. My COD to QUEASY but there were other fine clues too. I am though in the ‘ chives aren’t leaves’ camp. Otherwise thanks to blogger and setter.
  23. About 25 minutes, much the same experience as cited above. Didn’t know these meanings of JULIENNE, VERMICELLI, TYKE or especially my LOI, the coin aspect of TANNER. I enjoyed the ‘belly’ indicator, so thanks to the setter for that. This was one where the wordplay led to a lot of unfamiliarities, such as EXEMPLUM and CHIVE (leaves? singular?) but blind faith paid off. Regards to all.
  24. 13:56 for me. I suspect this is a particular setter I always find tricky because of the unusual definitions used in the wordplay, but I still made heavy weather of some easy clues.

    I didn’t know VERMICELLI as chocolate, and I’m only vaguely aware of EXEMPLUM. By the time I had the Es and the P in place for the latter, I was beginning to panic in case the final checked letter turned out to be A and I had to make a choice between EXEMPLAR which fitted the overall definition and EXEMPEAR which sounded highly implausible but which fitted the wordplay!

  25. times-xwd-times.livejournal.com is the perfect blog for anyone who wants to know about this topic. You know so much its almost hard to argue with you (not that I really would want…HaHa). You definitely put a new spin on a subject thats been written about for years. Great stuff, just great!
  26. Couldn’t get to this one until nearly 11.30pm, but my mind must have still been pretty alert as I managed to complete without aids within the half hour, which is good for me. I have to confess that I did not parse every clue: as others have said, many of the solutions were fairly obvious from the definitions once the checkers were in place, even if those definitions were sometimes a little obscure. And so to bed.
    George Clements

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