Times 25,875

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
It’s been a while since I got that horrible sinking feeling, when it’s blogging day and you quickly realise you’ve drawn a tough one (I know editors insist it doesn’t work like that, but my alternate Tuesday rarely seems to offer the greatest challenge of any given week). Anyway, with a bit of head-scratching and some educated guesswork, I managed an All Correct inside the half-hour (just) and based on the times so far on the leaderboard, I reckon anyone else doing likewise can feel pretty pleased with themselves.

I even managed to successfully parse everything. Eventually. All in all, I think I’d have to say this was a challenge, but a pretty fair one; and that the setter, with their use of some well-concealed definitions and lift-and-separates, is a devious so-and-so.

Across
1 SUPPORT – SUP, PORT; “second” as in “back”.
5 GODSEND – GO=”work”, vacated DoubleS, END=”tip”. Surfaces don’t actually mean anything, of course, but it’s a tip which is very true based on my experience of office life.
9 AIR POCKET – AIR=”put out”, POCKET=”small isolated area”; leaving the rather quirky definition “in Jumbo, one giving you sinking feeling?”. Not sure it’s literally accurate (you know, there aren’t bits of the atmosphere which don’t contain any air in among these bits, which do) but this is indisputably a colloquial term for clear air turbulence, as in the sort of thing which might inconvenience/terrify you if your plane, whether a Jumbo or some other airliner, encounters it…
10 SWISS – SWISH=”smart”, remove the Husband and add Son to get the Central European native.
11 ADIEU – DIE=”fail” in A University.
12 INSTIGATE – IN=”home”, [Island, G(literally the middle of niGht)] in STATE=”say”.
13 MODUS OPERANDI – often abbreviated to the initials M.O., a quality it shares with Medical Officer.
17 CONSIDERATION – CON=”criminal”, RATION=”helping”, includes(i.e. “cops”) SIDE=”bank”.
21 UNCONCERN – UN=”a” to a Parisian, CONCERN=”affair”.
24 PLATH – Line in PATH=”passage”. Sylvia, author of The Bell Jar.
25 INNER – S(front of Soldier) removed from SINNER=”reprobate”. At first I had a T as the first letter, which made me wonder if there was such a word as TOSER, and the wordplay worked the other way round. Luckily I thought again.
26 PRIVILEGE – (GRIPE)* around VILE=”dreadful”. The liberty to say something, say in court or Parliament, rather than the sort of privilege which people on the internet sometimes ask you to check.
27 TROTSKY – TORT(rev.), SKYe; a tort is a basic legal wrong, encapsulated in a word which goes back to the Old Norman. A beautifully constructed surface which achieved what was doubtless its objective, of making me think of islands used by exiles, and whether there might be one called Malmsey or something similar. Trotsky’s actual exile was in Mexico rather than an island, of course.
28 FUDDLED – i.e. swap the F for an M, female for male, and you get MUDDLED, so it remains much the same thing.
 
Down
1 SEAMAN – SEAM=”where gold may be”, A New. I think anything that comes from a mine can be a seam – gold, coal, diamonds.
2 PERSIMMON – (REP)rev. + [Mango in SIMON].
3 OROTUND – (OUR,Time,DON)*.
4 TAKE ISSUE – TAKE=”draw”, ISSUE=”result”.
5 GATES – reverse hidden in upSET A Graduate.
6 DOSSIER – Investigated housed in DOSSER=”derelict” gives the file.
7 EVITA – E is literally the letter/character seen most in “clever”, followed by VITAl=”animated”.
8 DYSLEXIA – XI=”team” in (DELAYS)*.
14 PLAINTIFF – PLAIN=”bald”, TIFF=”difference of opinion”.
15 NONPAREIL – [ON=”cricket side”, PAR=”average”] in NEIL.
16 ACQUAINT – A Conservative, QUAINT=”unusual”. I went down a blind alley with ACCUSTOM – thinking of CUSTOM as unusual in the sense of custom-made, and had to disabuse myself of that idea.
18 IGNORES – (REGIONS)*, as in “cuts dead”.
19 IMPLIED – Millions inside I PLIED.
20 SHREWD – Wife in SHRED.
22 CANTO – very devious, where “Noel’s play”=Christmas show=PANTO; change the first letter to get the more literary term for a verse stanza or section of a long poem. Another misdirecting surface, where the answer had nothing to do with Blithe Spirit or Private Lives.
23 EMPTY – i.e. alternate letters in tErMs PeTtY.

34 comments on “Times 25,875”

  1. Thanks for the parsing of 17ac where I was unsure how the SIDE bit worked. Also had a bit of trouble with 9ac where I thought POCKET was just “small” (cf. “pocket rocket”). But agree that, either way, the “in” is quite wrong.

    Another problem may be the “dogging” in 21ac. Surely it must mean “following” in the sense of “pursuing” or “tailing” (“follow that cab”) rather than in the sense of “coming after” (“y follows x in the alphabet”).

    With Tim, found this hard but mostly fair and a really good challenge.

  2. A very fine puzzle which required much teasing out of the wordplay before entering solutions, only two clues 9a and 7d) allowing post-solve consideration. COD to PLAINTIFF if I was pushed.

    One quibble: a canto is a division of a long poem (eg Divine Comedy, Faerie Queene).

    1. I think that’s sort of what I meant to express but good point, I have re-written using a clearer word than just “verse”, which can mean almost anything in that sense.
    2. I imagine you’d have been held up by bunging in the obvious 9-letter word for “best cricket side”?

      Understandable mistake.

      1. I did waste about five seconds trying to shoehorn ‘South Africa’ in. A lesson there in reading the enumeration carefully.
  3. Excellent challenge. Thought I wasn’t going to finish but got there in the end. Took ages for some reason to get SHREWD and EVITA with all checkers in place.

    Really good surfaces again. COD candidates everywhere, but I’ll give my vote to EVITA.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

  4. I agree this was quite a tough workout. My overall solving time was 62 minutes but I was fully unconscious for a period in the middle, probably as a result of getting stuck after making excellent progress in the top half. I missed that the hidden was hidden though and arrived at the correct answer by other means.

    NONPAREIL came up in the puzzle I blogged last Friday.

    It took me a while to see what was going on at 22 but I had discounted any Coward reference immediately as his first name requires a diaeresis on its E.

    1. So, I believe, does the proper spelling of the Christmas term. Or at least, that’s how I sing it in the carols!
      1. That’s true however it’s also the case that in usage over time the Christmas term has increasingly dropped the diaeresis and this is reflected in dictionaries, though the original spelling remains as an alternative. But I’d argue that the correct spelling of a name is determined by its owner and since Coward always used the diacritic it’s not correct to omit it.
  5. A slow finish to this one, with EVITA causing me several minutes of head-scratching at the end as I was pretty sure it was right but couldn’t see any wordplay justification. Also spent some time considering Eliza (Doolittle). Don’t think I’ve seen this device before so, for novelty value, it gets my COD.
    1. If you mean the ‘E’ thing, it’s not a million miles from the ‘I’ device in yesterday’s puzzle at 17ac and it was remembering that helped me to the answer.
  6. 38′: a bit of an ice bucket. Evita went in on a wing and a prayer. 3 brought back memories of Cloudcuckooland.
  7. Best puzzle for some time with excellent definitions and clever wordplay. Loved every second of a 35 minute tussle with quite a bit of reverse engineering to fully understand the clues. Thank you setter and well done Tim.
  8. 22.45 so only slightly slower than yesterday’s for an excellent and tougher puzzle. Several were seen from definition and checkers and went in unparsed and EVITA was chosen in preference to ELIZA for no conscious reason.
  9. 40m. I can’t really say I enjoyed this, because I was (am) feeling very fuzzy-headed this morning so I had been hoping for a gentle one. It’s first class stuff though, with a lot of cleverly deceptive clues and a few original touches: F/MUDDLED, M.O., ‘character seen most’.
    I’m glad I got 25ac before coming to 16dn: I’m not sure I’d ever have questioned ACCUSTOM. It looks so right that I started to question INNER instead, until I (eventually) remembered the old ‘try a Q’ rule.
    My only real complaint is the damned iPad software which made a crucial word in 10ac look like another word by concealing the end of it. I even checked whether any dictionary gave ‘small’ as a definition of ‘swish’ after solving and only saw the light on coming here.
    1. Sadly, I got ACCUSTOM first, and was so sure of it that the others were impossible. I was also stuck on PLATT so 20d was equally so. Great puzzle, though.
  10. 39 mins. I struggled to get on this setter’s wavelength and I had the LHS completed long before the RHS finally fell into place. Having said that, all the cluing was fair if more than a little devious in places, as others have already noted. I missed the “Noel” meaning in 22dn so CANTO had gone in from definition alone, and I only parsed GODSEND post-solve. I had the most trouble in the SE and the FUDDLED/SHREWD crossers were my last ones in.
  11. After a 45 minute initial stint I finished the left hand corner in snatches so somewhere around the hour all told.

    Like keriothe it took me some time to finally try a Q in AC_U_I__, but when I did the ACQUAINT/TROTSKY crossers finally fell into place.

  12. This may have been a tad tougher than Monday’s holiday puzzle, and I find I’m correspondingly slower, though not by much. But another good piece, where (as yesterday) aspects of the clueing, though entirely fair, warranted a little extra care before banging ’em in.

    Thanks setter, thanks all.

  13. Tough puzzle, with much intricate wordplay and quite a few definitions that required more than the usual degree of lateral thinking. All correct in the end, but without fully understanding how some of the clues worked. Thanks, Tim, for explaining the parsing of GODSEND, MODUS OPERANDI and EVITA, all excellent clues.
  14. A 25 min struggle with the SE corner taking the longest to capitulate. I expect it is in all the dictionaries but I took a while to accept that a shred was a spot (or vice-versa).
  15. A truly enjoyable workout. 28 min in total, in two parts: all bar 13a and the whole of the SE in 19 min. Walked the dogs (in the pouring rain!)to clear the head, saw 13a as soon as I restarted and the rest dropped out smoothly, with only the 24a/20d crossers causing any delay at all. Some top rate, deceptive clues, as others have indicated, particularly 7d, 14d, 1d(for its ultra smooth surface) and my COD,5a. By the by, I don’t really understand the problem with “in” in 9a: “In Jumbo, one giving you sinking feeling” seems a fair and clear definition of “air pocket” – it just doesn’t work without the “in”. Or am I missing something?
  16. Came to this earlier than usual for a Tuesday because golf was rained off, flooded after 4 holes, so I was looking for an enjoyable challenge, and I got it! 42 minutes to complete, trouble with SW* and NE sectors, TROTSKY my LOI and some like EVITA went it not really parsed. Well done Tim, I hope tomorrow is less of a blogger’s headache.
    * not helped by at first entering 16d ACCUSTOM instead, before getting INNER sorted out.
  18. Agree with Sue, not convinced shred = spot. But otherwise excellent challenge. No problem with “in” as per Chris.
    1. Chambers Thesaurus has it, but I reasoned it (slightly less than convinced) as replaceable in “not a shred of evidence”
  19. 50 min: I couldn’t decide between ELIZA and ERICA, so eventually went for latter, thinking it came from ‘American’ somehow 🙁
  20. A very rare afternoon solve as AM spent picking up the females in my family from Heathrow. They arrived but their luggage is still in Boston. Good old BA.

    A most enjoyable puzzle I thought.

  21. I raced through the left side of this only to come to a grinding halt after about 15 minutes. Finished an hour later! LOI was EVITA. Apart from reservations about SHREWD, a very fair puzzle. Ann
  22. Too difficult for me today. I had several gaps. Misspelling Persimmon as Persimmom didn’t help either. Thanks Tim for explaining everything.
    Today there were several instances (usually it’s none or one) in which on the iPad puzzle (the way I solve) the final letter(s) of the clue were obscured by the question mark in a circle (which becomes a tick when you solve the clue). Made it tricky to be exactly sure of a couple of clues!
    1. Agreed. Especially annoying when the covered letters are part of an anagram. Not sure where to raise this though.
  24. Sorry to be late. Struggled through in 40 minutes or so, ending with EVITA, which I wouldn’t have thought was widely regarded enough to be defined simply as ‘film’, or am I missing something? Overall, though, a very chewy puzzle that stretched the mind. A lot. Thanks to the setter and Tim. COD I thought to PLAINTIFF. Regards.
  25. 17:59 for me. I was feeling tired and struggled even with clues I’d managed to parse correctly: 10ac (SWISS), 21ac (UNCONCERN), 1dn (SEAMAN) and 7dn (EVITA – my LOI) among them.

    I too was fooled by 22dn (CANTO), particularly as “Spirit of Noel (6)” had come up in the archive Times crossword I tackled on Saturday.

    A very fine puzzle. My compliments to the setter.

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