Across
1 FELLOW-TRAVELLER – term originally used by Trotsky to describe a clandestine supporter of the revolutionary cause. An early RLS book was called ‘Travels with a Donkey in Cévennes’.
9 EXONERATE – ‘clear’; the wordplay is EX + ON + E (last letter of ‘false’) + RATE (‘charge’).
10 GOODS – ‘commodities’; O (first letter of ‘ordered’) in GODS (‘gallery’).
11 SLYEST – not actually that cunning: S+L(YES)T.
12 STANDARD – I rather liked this: a song by Cole Porter or the Gershwins, say; I always felt for the poor sod who had to carry a flag rather than a rifle into battle.
13 WAITER – the allusive reference is to the two fellows who were waiting for Godot.
15 PRESTIGE – anagram* of last letter of [sette]E + GP TRIES.
18 RIPARIAN – ‘living by the river’; the Scotchman is almost always Ian, since not many words have Iain in them; it seems that some people, Americans, amongst them, pronounce the first two syllables of ‘riparian’ as ‘repair’, which accounts for the ‘go, say’ part of the clue, as in ‘I will repair to the bar’. Me, I don’t think I’ve ever said the word…
19 BODEGA – reversal of AGE + DOB. In Crosswordland, plonk is seldom sold from an off-license or ASDA.
21 BROWBEAT – ‘bully’; ROW (‘set-to’) in B [and] B (‘overnight accommodation’) + TEA*. My last in.
23 ESTATE ‘condition in the past’ (ie an archaic usage, think ‘the holy estate of matrimony’); our old friend ‘French art’ = [you] are = es makes an appearance alongside our old friend the TATE gallery.
26 UPPER – ‘superior’; I have just learnt that ‘upping’ is the coralling of swans on the Thames for ID purposes; cygnets are matched with their mum and dad and their beaks nicked with a sharp knife wielded by the ‘upper’.
27 OUTRIGGER – O(U)TRIGGER.
28 DOUBLE-BARRELLED – a somewhat convoluted clue referencing a character in Wodehouse I’d never heard of; the literal is ‘like Fink-Nottle’, with the wordplay breaking down as 7 = lookalike = DOUBLE + BARRELLED (the sort of thing a Wodehouse character might have done, I suppose, in their Bentley). Being of the double-barrelled persuasion myself, I was recently sent a list of cuttings from a Canadian paper’s wedding announcement page; my favourite (some are unsuitable for a family blog like this) celebrated the union of AIKIN-JOHNSON.
Down
1 FRETSAW – FRETS (think one of McT’s instruments) + A[djusted] + W[ith].
2 LOOPY – O in PLOY*.
3 OVERSTEER – the last letter of delinquenT in OVERSEER.
4 TRAP – a horse-drawn conveyance I have heard of…
5 APERTURE – APE + RR (‘Right Reverend’) around TU (‘Trades Unions’) + E (‘note’).
6 ELGIN – EL + GIN; I was going to say you have to have all your marbles to get this one, but on reflection I don’t think I will.
7 LOOKALIKE – a charade of LOOK + AL (Capone) + IKE (Mr President).
8 RESIDUE – RE (Royal Engineers) + SID(U)E. 3-0 away to Villa is a step in the right direction.
14 IMPROMPTU – ‘off the cuff’; ‘I’m prompt!’ + another U. Worth a groan or three.
16 SCOTS PINE – anagram of T[hriving] + IN COPSES.
17 CATACOMB – CAT (clued by ‘queen’, as so often recently) + A[nne] + COMB.
18 REBOUND – double definition, one (doubly) figurative.
20 AVERRED – ‘maintained’; A + REV reversed + RED.
22 BERYL – RY in BEL, which is ten decibels, apparently. If you’re going to name a unit after a bloke, surely you don’t cut him off in his prime. Hertz was lucky, but the same thing happened to Volta. Oh well, win some, lose some.
24 ANGEL – N[ew] in AGE + L for the kindly theatrical philanthropist who now exists only in Crosswordland.
25 STAR – I’m not sure how ‘rats’ equates to nonsense, but I am sure that elucidation is not far away. Thanks to Nonnie in the comment on p. 2 for citing the OED, which has ‘rats’ as an exclamation meaning nonsense.
That one mistake stuffed up 27ac and 28ac — the latter being essential for a completion. I remembered the Wodehouse character had a “face like a fish” so I was looking for something fishy. (Shootin’ fish in a double barrel?)
Loved the ref to swan upping at 26ac. Not yer actual scouser practice. The Mersey swans died out long ago from choking on the goldfish. But the Stanley Spencer fan in me came out for a moment. Cookham is the Pool of the south I reckon. Always felt welcome there for some peculiar reason.
BEL: my bit of DNK-GK today. The “deci-” version being the usual form.
OK, Ulaca … now you have to tell us your surname. Colmondeley-Smythe?
Edited at 2013-12-16 02:07 am (UTC)
“The English, it has always seemed to me, have a certain genius for names. A glance through the British edition of Who’s Who throws up a roll call that sounds disarmingly like the characters in a P. G. Wodehouse novel: Lord Fraser of Tullybelton, Captain Allwyne Arthur Compton Farquaharson of Invercauld, Professor Valentine Mayneord, Sir Helenus Milmo, Lord Keith of Kinkel. Many British appellations are of truly heroic proportions, like that of the World War I admiral named Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfulry Plunkett-Ernel-Erle-Drax.
The best ones go in for a kind of gloriously silly redundancy toward the end, as with Sir Humphrey Dodington Benedict Sherston Sherston-Baker and the truly unbeatable Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraduati Tollemache-Tollemache-de Orellana-Plantagenet-Tollemache-Tollemac he, a British army major who died in World War I ….
In the realms of nomenclature clearly we are dealing here with giants.”
Edited at 2013-12-16 02:26 am (UTC)
Still … the Oxfords have: |rʌɪˈpɛːrɪən| vs |rɪˈpɛː|
Edited at 2013-12-16 02:32 am (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonsense_rat
How strange!
I’m thinking Peanuts, except that it’s a dummy expletive there?
Do we have the new “pants” on display?
At 28 I had a vague idea that Fink-Nottle’s name was Gussie so I was looking to work that in until I twigged to the reference to 7dn.
The puzzle was pretty easy, and I hesitated to put in some of the answers thinking there must be a trick somewhere.
I grew up on a river island. Every couple of years, for a week or so, most of the island would disappear and we would actually live on the river.
See you there!!
Fink-Nottle was the newt fancier – though I don’t think his smallest one was called Tiny.
I took the soundalike RIPARIAN with a sniff – I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it pronounced on the BBC so it might just as well be that. The use of my first name to answer to Scotsman sort of niggles. I’m not one, and maintain the true Scottish version has the extra I.
UPPER was a pretty whimsical clue, my favourite of the day. LOOK, AL, IKE! a close second.
Those of us that do the TLS have discovered that Stevenson’s donkey was called Celestine (TLS 1000). Even he didn’t know that.
Edited at 2013-12-16 09:40 am (UTC)
“No one said “Rats,” though Clovis’s lips moved in a monosyllabic contortion which probably invoked those rodents of disbelief.”
Riparian One of those words used regularly used by land-drainage experts but mystifying to the rest of us. When I first heard it from such an expert he pronounced the first syllable “rye”.
Was looking for something to do with newts at 28.
Very enjoyable start to the week and at under 20 minutes a rapid solve for me.
“The Angels List, which is administered by Society of London Theatre, puts private individuals who have expressed an interest in investing in London Theatre in touch with Producers who are seeking investors for new productions.
The Angels List Service is only available to Producers who are members of Society of London Theatre, and potential investors are appraised of the considerable risks that go with investing in commercial theatre before they are accepted for inclusion on the List. For further details please contact Emily McDonald.”
I recently heard a BBC site where if you type in a word, it will say the BBC-accepted pronounciation of it. I will see whether I can find it. I am backing rye
Well, shame on me, I was familiar with NONE of the references, and got DOUBLE-BARRELLED thinking F-N was some made up name, FELLOW-TRAVELLER as it fit the crossers (didn’t know the Sevenson ref, either), and had ‘writer’ for WAITER as I was thinking of Lolita!
I’ve no idea how to pronounce RIPARIAN, but it appeared very recently in Azed so it came to mind easily.
I had no clue about Stevenson’s donkey, and only the vaguest memory that FELLOW TRAVELLER had some sort of left-wing connotation, but nothing else was going to fit those checkers. I also didn’t know anything about ELGIN beyond the Earl and his marbles.
‘rats’ didn’t give me pause as I’d come across the interjection used in that sense before.
BERYL: although Bell was cut short, Ampere wasn’t – though he is informally. Farad(ay) gets it both ways: is he the only person to have had two different units named for him?
I’m sure Riparian has cropped up in a Times puzzle before (and I didn’t get it then) so when I read ‘living by the river’ and saw the Ian bit I put it straight in.
… as I put in writer at 13ac. Lots went in without fu, so many thanks for shedding light on APERTURE (didn’t know RR), FELLOW-TRAVELLAR (not familiar with the lit ref), ESTATE and others.
COD RIPARIAN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcHKm0cm-jI
A somewhat LOOPY crossword, maybe not of the SLYEST. Nice surfaces for the French art gallery and the U-boat interceptor, though. Never heard the word RIPARIAN spoken by anyone of any class, region or educational background – perhaps it’s a secret shibboleth for a coterie of post-Mitford true believers …
jfr
28a Why ‘drove very fast’?
Barrelled = drove very fast
As I’m in a grumpy mood, I’ll also quibble about “STAR” – “rats” doesn’t mean “nonsense”, however you slice it, so this one was written in despite, rather than because of the clue. On the plus side, there was a refreshing lack of obscure words, apart from 6d (the Scots have an administrative centre? Who knew?).
Still, the advantage of being grumpy is that you get to take it out on the customers (sorry, patients. No – wait – they’re stakeholders this week). To be fair, today’s lot mostly brought it on themselves. Not one interesting, challenging or even amusing injury between the lot of them. People just don’t make the bloody effort these days.
And since the subject of English names came up (and since, as I may have mentioned, I am in a very, very grumpy mood), why don’t we have a law in this country regarding permissible names for children? I believe they have such a law in France (although it inexplicably allows “Kevin”). Today, I had a Jade, a Jadenné (no, seriously) and a Chantelle. Chantelle is all well and good as a name, but not when it’s bracketed by “Oi!” and “come back ‘ere now or else.” Or else what? Once you’ve named a Norfolk girl “Chantelle”, what threats are left?
I do sometimes wonder whether A&E oughtn’t to be giving natural selection a helping hand.
Expressing frustration, disappointment, or annoyance; ‘drat’, ‘blast’; (also) expressing incredulity or disagreement; ‘rubbish’, ‘nonsense’.
1914 G. B. Shaw Misalliance 23 Mrs. Tarleton. Dont boast, John. Dont tempt Providence. Tarleton. Rats! You dont understand Providence. Providence likes to be tempted.
2003 C. Birch Turn again Home ix. 122 ‘I don’t feel like going out,’ Nell said. ‘It’s ruined everything.’ ‘Rats,’ said Kitty briskly. ‘Do you good to get out.’
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Intentional double-entendre?
For some interesting names watch American football (gridiron):
Knowshon Moreno
Marshawn Lynch
Lesean (L’ Irish Sean) McCoy and his team-mate
Desean (D’ Irish Sean) Jackson
LeGarrette Blount
Jacquizz Rogers
BenJarvus Green-Ellis
Arian Foster
Jermichael Finley
Joique Bell
Marcedes Lewis
Le’Veon Bell
Tashard choice
Knile Davis ad infinitum
I failed to parse it, but having decided “go” was Rest In Peace”, and the name was Ian, simply said “ooh” to the “ar”.