Times 25718 – Ever increasing circles?

Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
36 minutes, but one wrong (D’oh!). The left hand went in quite smartly, the right rather more slowly. An enjoyable start to the week, on a par in terms of difficulty with yesterday’s mild Dean Mayer. Saturday’s Prize, on the other hand, was a different kettle of fish entirely.

Across

1 WATER-WHEEL – a sort of double definition, one part descriptive, the other functional.
6 HOOP – [w]HOOP; what American golf spectators do when they’re not hollerin’, I guess.
10 OPOSSUM – PO inside OS (here ‘outsized’; sometime ‘ordnance survey’ or ‘operating system’) + SUM.
11 COHABIT – CO + H[elp] + A BIT; the literal is ‘what some items do’, where items means ‘lovers’ (more or less).
12 LANDOWNER – N[ote] inside LAD + OWNER (where own means to own up to).
13 DITTO – I (one) + 2 x T (for time) in DO.
14 NIECE – N + [p]IECE.
15 MATRICIDE – an anagram* of A TERM I around CID (‘dept. investigating’); the literal is murder.
17 TASK FORCE – T[hey] + ASK FOR + CE for a group set up when either you already know what you want or you need to play for time.
20 LAPPS – sounds like (‘to get a hearing’ is a neat homophone indicator) lapse = ‘failing’.
21 RADON – A D[aughter] in RON (our arbitrary 3-letter geezer du jour).
23 SPLENDOUR – I wanted to get UR in there somewhere, but in my impatience wanted it to be bunged in early doors; it’s SPEND + O[ver] (an over is 6 balls in cricket) + UR around L[ake].
25 OFFBEAT – the literal is ‘wacky’ and the rest is an impish way of referring to policemen who have a desk job.
26 VERDICT – quite a bit of European culture today (deftly balanced by Preston); this time it’s Giuseppe VERDI before CT (court).
27 SIDE – double definition; SIDE for affectation is coming up these days almost as much as ORBIT[AL] (see 7d).
28 ROUND DANCE – ROUND (canon in musical terms) + C[hapter] in DANE.

Down

1 WHORL – R[ook] in WHOL[e] (‘almost complete’) to give the ring of leaves; the first of today’s two unknown/forgotten botanicals (ODO has ‘a set of leaves, flowers, or branches springing from the stem at the same level and encircling it’)
2 THORNLESS – TORN LESS around H.
3 RUSH ONES FENCES – SHUN FORCES SEEN*; not sure I’ve ever come across this before either.
4 HOMONYM – HO[use] + MO (Medical Officer) + NYM (a character in Henry V, if memory serves).
5 EXCERPT – if you see ‘save’, think ‘except’; it’s this around R[esistance] for the ‘part of article, perhaps’, which has also been popping up a lot of late.
7 ORBIT – R (‘king put down’, I take it in the sense of ‘rendered in written form’) in OBIT (‘death notice’).
8 PATRONESS – PRESTON AS*.
9 RHODE ISLAND RED – last time I blogged, we had RI; this time we add the ‘red’; it’s RHODE (‘vocal way’ – another neat homophone indicator) + I SLAND[e(uropean)]RED.
14 NOTORIOUS – NO TO RIO = ‘rejection of port’ + US (Uncle Sam).
16 IMPLOSION – IM = I’M = ‘writer’s’ = writer is + PL[ace] + O (cricket again thanks, Zed – it’s O[ld]) + SION.
18 RISOTTO – SIR reversed + OTTO von Bismarck.
19 ENLIVEN – with an N (knight in chess notation) for L in NEVILLE (Chamberlain) reversed.
22 DYFED – D[or]Y + FED (intransitive, as in ‘Baby has fed – now we’re putting her down’). I put ‘Dafyd’!
24 RATHE – a literary word meaning ‘blooming early’; hidden nicely and the surface is rather good once you latch on to the mild expletive in ‘blooming’ and the use of ‘centre’ as shopping mall.

44 comments on “Times 25718 – Ever increasing circles?”

  1. Like the dastardly thing on Friday, my LOI was the light inclusive, RATHE. As someone said, always a sign of a good puzzle. And this is.

    COD to NEVILLE in reverse gear.

  2. I did this at lunch, but probably squeezed in under the half-hour by a wee bit; although that included checking for DYFED, which I should have known.DNK RUSH ONES FENCES. I’ll join Mctext in giving 19d the COD.
  3. Only one minute under the hour for me, so not easy by any means. I always find puzzles with so many wordy clues intimidating at first sight.

    Like mct, the hidden answer was my last in.

    Boys in blue, Pen-pushing, Beat! The setter must be thinking of the George Dixon era.

    Edited at 2014-02-24 07:16 am (UTC)

  4. Just under 20 minutes, which for me is astonishing. Like all the above, 24d unknown and LOI. Was there a rotational theme: 1a, 1d, 6a, 7d, 28a plus rather an unusual number of “O”s?
  5. 12’56”, with the usual pauses for retyping misapplied letters.
    I don’t think there’s any cricket in 16: I think its just O(ld). Having said that, I didn’t know Sion as any kind of Swiss town, old or new, just as an alternate spelling of Zion (which it probably is, in Swiss).
    Nominate 1ac for barely cryptic of the day, and hooray for chickens I know!
    That inclusion was pretty good, though RATHE is a bit of a Mephisto word, marked in Chambers as archaic (or Miltonic). Good way to start the week, though, not too tricky but no gimme either.

    Edited at 2014-02-24 07:52 am (UTC)

  6. 16m. I found this mostly very easy but got bogged down in the SE. The chicken took me far too long to see.
    I didn’t know that LAPPS were nomadic hunters. According to Wiki they’re semi-nomadic, and called the Sami nowadays.
    ROUND DANCE, RUSH ONES FENCES, SION and RATHE also unknown.

    Edited at 2014-02-24 07:57 am (UTC)


  7. And that one was 4dn, where I had hominem (unparsed), which is, I guess almost a HOMONYM itself…

    All went in in 30 mins or so, until I came to a halt at the SE. Finally limped home with LAPPS, RATHE and ROUND DANCE in just under the hour.

  8. 18.20, last in rathe, which I knew as quick or early from reading old English literature. While I like the word I doubt its present-day imaginable use in the normal run of things, no criterion for the setter of course if it’s in the dictionary, but perhaps it should be.
  9. . . .and probably a PB given the slowing-down effect of solving by iPad.

    Did not know RATHE but clear from the clue and seeing crosswordland’s favourite chicken helped. Also, in a previous existence (ie working), I was involved in setting up an office in Sion so no problems there.

    Edited at 2014-02-24 12:19 pm (UTC)

  10. Much in this puzzle was easy – a relief after Saturday’s toughie – but there was also enough difficulty to provide an enjoyable challenge. I took a long time to get THORNLESS and WHORL, my LOIs. My COD vote went to RHODE ISLAND RED.
  11. On the difficult side I think today, 25 minutes with some reservations

    We seem to be getting more of the 1A type nonsense – I wonder why? At 7D “put down” is padding – remove the phrase and both definition and the cryptic still work. Then two real obscurities in SION as Swiss town and RATHE.

    RATHE is a poor clue. It ignores the Mephisto convention that archaic words are signalled by indicators like “once” or “old” and it contains padding of “in the year” – again definition and cryptic work without this phrase.

    25A shows a woeful ignorance of modern policing as Jack has said. We’ve been talking to our local Police and Crime Commissioner about giving every officer a portable computer.

    1. I agree with this except “in the year” being padding as the COD definition of RATHE is “blooming or ripening early in the year” so the setter has lifted it pretty much verbatim. Collins has “early in the season” which amounts to the same thing.
  12. Just under 15 minutes for a nice start to the week. RATHE felt a bit Mephisto-ish to me as well, though it was made pretty obvious from wordplay, which is fine; fairly sure it’s new to me (though not so sure that I didn’t check Google before writing this, just in case I said exactly the same thing six months ago…)
    1. You said pretty much the same thing in April 2010 when blogging 24,522 🙂 Magoo’s comment when blogging it in January 2007: “I find it very peculiar that it’s permissible.”
      1. Excellent 🙂 My quick search was complicated by the fact Google didn’t much like the word either, and insisted I must mean “rather” or “rate”. If it was 6 months ago, I’d worry, but I’ll forgive myself not remembering 2010 (a back of a fag packet calculation suggests I might have solved around 35,000 clues since then…crikey, no wonder I haven’t got much else done).
        1. I’m the last person who should be pointing these things out as my own memory threshold is somewhere around the 6 week mark max.

          Not sure how you were searching, but I tend to get the best results using the “site:” specifier within Google to restrict the results to just this site.

          1. Should have remembered that, but I thought including “times for the times” in my parameters would have a similar effect (it clearly didn’t). Anyway, I have decided that these lapses are good, as it enables one to discover interesting new words over and over again, and I look forward to having this conversation again some time in 2018.
            1. Regarding memory – mine’s probably less than 5 weeks: can do a crossword in The Times while traveling, then tackle it again back home 5 weeks later and be half-way through it before recognising it as one I’ve already done.

              Whereas Tony Sever, reading between the lines, seems to remember every single clue he’s ever solved (or at least every clue in the past 10 years). Gets angry at himself when he can’t remember a clue from 5 or 8 years back.
              Rob in Oz

  13. 13 mins and no quibbles.

    I’m another whose LOI was RATHE, which I finally saw after I entered the ENLIVEN/ROUND DANCE crossers. I’m annoyed that it took me longer than it should have done to see the reversed “Neville” in the clue for 19dn.

    I think we can expect more, not less, clues like 1ac under the new crossword editor if what he said after he was appointed is to be taken at face value.

  14. Flummoxed by RATHE, and missed (but should have got) ENLIVEN and ROUND DANCE. Thanks, Ulaca, for highly informative blog – much appreciated. The save/except convention was a new one to me (obvious when you think about it, but penny had not dropped: now in the toolkit…)

    Good to see Preston getting an outing – vale Sir Tom Finney.

  15. Two missing today and both unknown (Rathe and Round Dance). I got the other unknown (Rush Ones Fences) from the wordplay. FOI Hoop.
    Had no objections to Water Wheel or Offbeat.
  16. Really enjoyed this one, 70 minutes of fun. Especially enjoyed Neville backward, good clue.

    Nairobi Wallah

  17. Definitely no gimme, but an intricate slow solve in the doctor’s waiting room this morning, finished off over tea at home, say 50 minutes in all. “Sion” as a Swiss town and RATHE unknown to me, but the way the clues were pointing, couldn’t be anything else. Sion probably fair enough as GK, but Rathe?

    FOI the write-in RISOTTO, followed by RUSH ONES FENCES – always a shudder of apprehension when a long clue falls to am easy anagram.

    May have been just me, but today’s clueing seemed rather clunky and the whole exercise rather joyless.

  18. About 35 minutes but undone by 27A where I had SUDE, on the basis that it sounded like PSEUD thus fitting the pretentious part of the definition but otherwise making no sense.

    My thanks to Ulaca for explaining why this was actualy SIDE. The increasing use of this to mean affectation has passed me by thus far but I shall hope to remember it for next time!

  19. 17:02. I had most of this knocked off steadily in about 10 minutes but really had to work at it to get the last handful in the SE. When I finally put ROUND as the first word of 28 I didn’t really expect it to be right.

    I took 1a to be a CD rather than a DD.

  20. Not as gentle as some recent Mondays, with RATHE, ROUND DANCE, and RUSH ONES FENCES all unknown/forgotten, the last requiring a pencil/paper interlude. SION came up in a Sunday puzzle last month but may also be familiar to football fans for fielding a bunch of ineligible players in a Europa league tie against Celtic a couple of seasons ago.

    COD to 14D – liked the NO TO RIO device.

  21. Like Penfold, I wrote in ROUND without expecting it to be right but wasn’t sure it could be anything else. 9:45 with nothing much to grump about.
  22. 35.30 here so a bit harder than average – I have similar thoughts on the 1a and the archaic or obscure words. But it must have been well constructed as I had it all correct despite reservations.
  23. I think that it is “spend” for pass rather than “send” as otherwise you have not accounted for the p in the answer.
  24. Some nice clues- enliven was very clever, and liked rhode-island-red. Hadnt heard of round dance, nym, sion or rathe. The increasing GK in the times is making it ageist (against youth) in my view- perhaps I’m wrong, but I’d have thought it would be a struggle for under-30s and dispiriting for those trying to pick it up. Hopefully they’ll find out about this marvellous site quicker than I did 🙂
    1. Solvers of my generation will remember when The Times crossword regularly included straightforward quotes with a missing word. At least we have moved on from that! I suspect that there is a balance somewhere between younger solvers not necessarily having all the GK and the older ones having forgotten it.
      1. And I think the GK is broader based. It was very slanted towards mythology, literature and the Bible. Much improved since then thank goodness.
      2. Bigtone, I am certainly aware that crosswords in the past required a great deal more GK- the pleasure of the modern cryptic crossword surely exceeds a general knowledge test and hopefully no one would want to go back to that. My personal view is that more progress could be made to make crosswords more accessible- I think the GK requirement of the times could be reduced. I’m 36 and when I attended the very enjoyable crossword celebration at Penderel’s Oak-it seemed like there was hardly anyone younger than me- perhaps that was unrepresentative, but I wonder if younger and less knowledgeable solvers (i’m probably in the latter category) might be put off?
        1. I agree that there’s a little bit of an ageist slant in some of the GK that turns up here (I’m also a relative young’un at 41!) but I think this is only natural given the average age of setters (and solvers). Besides, I find that the volume stuff I don’t know because of my age is dwarfed by the volume of stuff I don’t know because I’m generally ignorant.
          I for one wouldn’t want to see the overall level of GK reduced. Deducing things you don’t know from wordplay is a skill you have to acquire if you want to solve these things regularly, and it’s very satisfying. And it’s good to learn stuff. Much of my knowledge of classical mythology comes from doing these puzzles. And pretty much all my knowledge of plants.

          1. I take your point, Keriothe about lack of knowledge not necessarily being age related. I agree that it’s also a skill and enjoyable to deduce things you don’t know. The times setters do a very good job of allowing you to guess unknown definitions from the cryptics, but I think sometimes there are the odd clues that don’t seem so fair- I think round dance today for instance. But my general point is that I think the GK balance might be wrong if 36 and 41 year olds are relative young’uns!
            1. I agree that the Times is very good from this point of view: the odd lapse is inevitable. I take your point about ROUND DANCE: I didn’t have a problem with it because I’m familiar with canon = round, but this is something I only know from crosswords!
              I think the fact that 36 and 41 year-olds are relative young ‘uns is just in the nature of crosswords. They’re never going to be a yoof pursuit, and it does take a few years to get the hang of them.
  25. Hello all, same experience here as seems to have occurred to others. DNK RATHE, RUSH ONES FENCES, Sion or the ROUND DANCE, but threw them all in after some headshaking, or in the RATHE case, after I finally saw the hidden. Oh, I never heard of DYFED either. About 30 minutes all told. Regards.
  26. 9:01 for me. Did I have a narcoleptic episode in the middle of solving? I thought I’d been 2 or 3 minutes faster, and I’ve no idea where the time went as I found this all pretty straightforward. As a member of the English Folk Dance and Song Society and the Early Dance Circle I had no problem with ROUND DANCE. And in my younger days RATHE cropped up regularly, typically clued as

    “Bring the — primrose that forsaken dies” (Milton) (5)

    in the days when Times crossword solvers were assumed to be thoroughly familiar with Lycidas.

  27. Silly mistake in 14d caused me all sorts of problems. Somehow I knew Sion and Rathe. It was easier things I got wrong.
  28. Best part of an hour for me, all of which I enjoyed. Never heard of RATHE, but got it and assumed it must be some obscure Norfolk term for a snowdrop or the like. ROUND DANCE likewise was put in without recognising the term. DYFED was also a bit of a guess, but I figured it was exactly the way the Welsh would spell something; no doubt it’s pronounced “Doofie” or the like. They only do it to annoy, you know.

    Not sure about PATRONESS – I imagine many women would feel patronessized by that one.

    Regarding the above comments on GK – I do think things have improved since I started failing to finish the Times cryptic. There’s still a heavy reliance on cricket, and far too many foreign place names for my liking, but at least the numbers of biblical and Shakespearean references seem to have declined (NYM being an exception).

    I do still feel, though, that there’s a general disregard for anything we’ve learned or invented in the last 100 years – the Times cryptic is still not really of this age.

  29. All o.k. once I’d got my spelling sorted out (I always have problems with the number of ‘p’s and ‘s’s in ‘opossum’ for some reason). I was fortunate with the general knowledge, but, perhaps, general is not quite applicable here.
    I sympathise with the younger solvers, but look on the ‘bright’ side, in due course you will be as geriatric as the rest of us. Thankfully, children, and now a grandchild, have kept me at least a little in touch with yoof culture and the wonderful world of children’s literature.
  30. Didn’t finish this until this morning due to the SW. The reason being I’d put faux in as 27ac thinking this was a good answer – air of (sounds like) competing players = foe = faux = false/pretentious. Ho hm. Thanks for the real answer.

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