Times 25880 – Patristic Potpourri

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
A bit of a churchy theme for Labor Day in a nod to the Pilgrim Fathers. With Vinyl deep in celebration mode, it has fallen to me to man the barricades today, for a crossword which is not as hard as some of its parsing would, um, intimate, but chewy nonetheless. 42 minutes.

ACROSS

1. PIGSTY – ‘dump’ and 6 letters should suggest ‘pigsty’ but not to me; I had to go the long route: it’s GS in PITY.
4. SUGGEST – ‘intimate’ should trigger is it a noun, an adjective or a verb, but not today. One of my last in as I never thought of the verbal sense; the wordplay is as abstruse as it comes, if I am on the right track: SUG (‘celebrated knight getting lost’ ie SUNG without N – knight) + GEST (‘romance’ in its ‘adventure tale’ sense). I reckon the ‘starts’ means that we should be thinking of the GESTE (rather than the GEST) spelling of the word, and should give all the starting letters (but not the ending one)?Thanks to Jack: ‘starts with’ indicates that ‘celebrated knight getting lost’ constitutes the first part of the solution
9. LIANA – I was desperately racking my brain for this word, so I wouldn’t have to get ir from wordplay. I finally managed to. It’s A + NAIL reversed.
10. BARBARIAN – BAR (‘ban’) + IAN (Crosswordland’s sole remaining Caledonian) around BAR (‘pub’).
11. MOUSE HOLE – I still tremble whenever faced by the word ‘Spooner’; this one takes a bit of working out / many crossers + a bit of lifting and separating; HOUSE (‘domestic’) + MOLE (‘animal’) with the first letters swapped to give the ‘damage to skirting board’ sense required.
12. HOURS – no, it’s not Nicole Kidman with the enormous proboscis; it’s the seven times of the day laid down for the recitation of the prayers of the divine office. A hidden answer.
13. CREW – I failed miserably to lift and separate here; the literal is ‘gang’ and the wordplay simply [s]CREW. Tres elegant, oui?
14. OVERSTRESS – OVERS (‘maybe [cricket] maidens’) + TRESS; ‘weight’ as in accent in phonetics.
18. LIGHTER+MAN
20. OPAL – I got into a right tizwaz about this one too; O (in front of, AKA ‘on the western edge of’ in an across clue) + PAL. Another elegant clue.
23. PANDA – this type of clue always does for me; it’s P AND A, P & A being the two letters that make ‘dad’ appear. Boom, boom, as Baldrick might put it (with endless repetitions). On edit: Apparently, some are unaware of the work of one of our finest war poets, S. Baldrick. Here he is reading ‘The German guns’
25. FARRAGOES – the first of a few tricky ones at the end of the acrosses; ‘motley collections’ (you can spell the plural –os or –oes, which is handy if you are Dan Quayle); RAG in FAROES, whose football stadium is not a happy hunting ground for the land of Ians.
25. SLEIGHING – SLING (‘shy’ as in ‘throw’) around EIGH[t] .
26. HIPPO – HIP + PO for Saint Augustine (the fifth century hell-raiser turned church father, best known for his Confessions and his City of God).
27. HELOTRY – this can mean ‘serfs or slaves as a class’ as well as ‘serfdom, slavery’; provided here by HE[n]RY around LOT.
28. SPIRIT – IR in SPIT.

DOWN

1. POLEMICAL – POLE + CLAIM* (anagram).
2. GRANULE – a bit of a weird surface, this, to derive ‘a tiny bit’; it’s GRAN + [y]ULE.
3. THAMES – I was trying to fit Strand in. A nice little cryptic definition.
4. SPREE – PR (‘pair’) in SEE ‘observe’); that’s easy enough but, unless you are a German, ‘Spree’ does not suggest itself as the most likely ‘flower’. But then, just the other day I learned courtesy of a George MacDonald novel that there are rivers called both Avre and Arve in France, so one lives and learns.
5. GRAPHITE – HIT in GRAPE.
6. EPICURE – E + PIC[t]URE for the food buff/bluff.
7. TUNIS – I (‘island’) in TUNS.
8. ABSOLVER – A + B + SOLVER; setters get a bit of a kick out of calling us ‘you’ or more rarely, as here, ‘solvers’, while reserving ‘setter’ and ‘I’, ‘me’ + derivatives for themselves.
15. ROAD RAGE – RAG (‘paper’) in ADORE*.
16. SPLASH OUT – SPOUT around LASH.
17. STRAIGHT – ‘straits’ are dire difficulties, so ‘strait’ might be one of them.
19. GENTEEL – a very rarely used word these days – ‘affectedly polite’; GENT + [f]EEL.
21. PROSPER – P in PROSE (‘writing’) + R (‘reading at school’ – coz it’s one of the 3 Rs).
22. WASH UP – ‘had little husband got out of bed?’ = ‘was h[usband] up?’; I’m getting a real work-out this morning.
23. PASCH – an old word for Passover or Easter; PAS (as in ‘de deux’) + CH.
24. FAIRY– a tricky little one to finish; F (‘female’) + AIRY (‘delicate’) for a sort of all-in-one; Collins has the second adjectival sense of ‘fairy’ as ‘resembling a fairy or fairies, esp in being enchanted or delicate’.

41 comments on “Times 25880 – Patristic Potpourri”

  1. Struggled with this one, not knowing SPREE, HELOTRY or PASCH. Was unable to parse SUGGEST or WASH UP, so many thanks to the U-man.

    My solving usually goes downhill from Monday onwards, so this could be a long week. Or perhaps it’s a reversal of the trend. We’ll see.

    I’m trying to avoid the excuse of feeling absolutely miserable health-wise, but if you search for “Manflu – the truth” on youtube you’ll get some idea of what I’m going through. Brutal.

  2. Had to look up GEST at 4ac. Otherwise, not too difficult. Had a slight smile at the HOUSE MOLE. Off to reacquaint myself with Augustine.

    Wonder if the ALEMAN was deliberate??

    Hope galspray gets better soon.

    Edited at 2014-09-01 04:58 am (UTC)

  3. At 4ac I think ‘starts’ is doing nothing more than intimate that the answer to the next part of the clue goes before the bit that ‘romance’ is cluing. I took forever to parse this one and in the process considered whether a reference to Beau Geste was involved, but eventually discounted that theory. I also didn’t know GEST as a word, which didn’t help matters.

    I wondered whether I would ever get started on this and took the best part of 4 minutes to write in my first answer, OPAL, at 20ac. After that I made fairly steady progress but still required 55 in all to complete the grid with the last 10 spent on PASCH (never heard of it but eventually decided it had to be, based on ‘Paschal’ which I did know) and HELOTRY (where I had LOT early but the heartless king eluded me for too long).

    I don’t know why the SPREE, the river on which Berlin stands, should be less familiar than the Seine in Paris or the THAMES in London but for some reason it is. HIPPO was easy to solve but not to parse without specific and somewhat arcane GK. Having looked it up later I’ve a horrid feeling that a very similar clue appeared here before, not that long ago, and I didn’t know it then either.

    Did Baldric really say ‘boom boom’? I thought that was Basil Brush.

    Edited at 2014-09-01 05:41 am (UTC)

  4. 27.55. Pasch from Paschal. I like the wearily unsympathetic tone in 22. A decent standard puzzle with a quietly exhilarating energy to it.
  5. Not as much trouble as some others with a steady 25 minute solve working top to bottom. I felt it was average and largely undistinguished with a couple of oddities.

    At 12A I assumed “of prayer” was padding, not being familiar with longer definition. Knew nothing of HIPPO. I’m not sure 28A works – how does being in the middle of a spit of rain create a shelter?

    1. Maybe the setter thought it would be too non-PC to have an Irishman ‘sheltering IN a drop of rain’!
      1. Well – at a stretch – and all surfaces have a stretchability gene – the rain’s all round it but not on it – it shelters (as it were somewhere] within it. Hmmm. Having said that, wouldn’t like to defend it in a court of law.
  6. 20m. I found this a bit odd: most of it was very easy, but then I got bogged down at the end with what turned out to be a bunch of gratuitous obscurities.
    Once again the damned iPad software caused me a big problem by obscuring a letter in a clue. This time it was the last letter of the word ‘celebrated’ in 4ac, so I spent ages trying to come up with a word that would fit SIG_E_T.
    All in all a bit of a harrumph from me this morning.
  7. 9 mins. Having read what the rest of you thought of it I must have just been on the setter’s wavelength. LIANA was my FOI, the L checker gave me POLEMICAL, and more helpful checkers meant I fleshed out the NW first. I then worked down the rest of the LHS, went across to the SE, and finished back up in the NE. SUGGEST was my LOI after GRAPHITE, and although I had to check GEST post-solve the wordplay was clear enough.
    1. I considered this (first) but discounted it because it doesn’t make much sense of any but the final word of the clue. At least FAIRY has component parts F and AIRY as described above.
      1. I meant to mention that I don’t think any adjectival sense of FAIRY is required here. Isn’t it a straight &Lit?
        Female = F
        that’s = ‘that has’ [next to it]
        delicate = AIRY
        Definition: ‘female that’s delicate’ = FAIRY (noun).
        Not sure how FRAIL works!
          1. So it is: you live and learn, particularly around here. Incidentally Chambers has it as ‘old’ rather than US.
        2. I’ve never especially associated fairies with the the female, so I think that influenced my interpretation of the clue. I was looking at other interpretations, but they are more suited to a Private Eye puzzle.
              1. Presumably the same people who think Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare.
                But I was thinking of Oberon.
                1. Also Puck.

                  And in response to anon who suggested FRAIL, as far as I’m aware there’s no rule that there can’t be alternative and valid answers to a clue so long they can be distinguished by checked letters, in which case FRAIL falls by the wayside on this occasion and no carelessness is involved

                2. I’m one of them. If you’re interested, Diana Price’s ‘Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography’ may turn you into a thinking person on the subject.

  9. All correct in about an hour or so, but with several unknowns (SPREE, PASCH, HELOTRY, GEST, HIPPO, FARRAGOES) forcing me to put my trust in the cryptics. Finished in the SW with the crossing of two of the unknowns.
  10. 15 minutes, all done by then except HELOTRY where I had H_LOT_Y and went for aid. parsing of SUGGEST had to wiat for the blog, thanks.
  11. Solved comfortably in forty minutes, but with a few question marks and an error that slowed me down. I didn’t understand the HIPPO definition, and GEST was unfamiliar, and, like dj, don’t see how 28 works. Surely the clue needs ‘sheltered by’ for the cryptic part to work.

    My error was to write GLOBULE for 2, thinking a ‘glob’ might some slang word for a narrative (relation). As I struggled to think of a climber, L_O_A, I saw my error.

  13. I thought I was in for some traditional Monday fare when the NW answers went straight in but eventually ground to a halt with FARRAGOES, FAIRY, SUGGEST, SPREE and GRAPHITE all unsolved.

    So my worst effort for a long time – roll on tomorrow!

  14. 18:17 with hippo, gest and helotry unknown.

    For the latter, having decided I was looking for a known unknown, I almost went for HELOTOD with Herod the eponymous king.

    Tricky for a Monday I thought.

  15. Agree with penfold that this was a bit chewy for a Monday, at least for quite a few clues. 26 min all told, so very impressed by Andy’s and Sue’ times. Didn’t know the St Augustine link; I now know that St. Augustine of Hippo is the patron saint of brewers because of his conversion from a former life of loose living, which included parties, entertainment, and worldly ambitions – a man after my own heart!
  16. 13 minutes for this, back on paper and analogue timed. I think I’m quicker on paper, even if, in obscuring the number at 23d I try to fit in 22d, which has everything wrong about it. It also meant that it was my last in once I’d stumbled on the real light fro 22dn.
    We all have esoterica in out GK and vocab, I suppose. The weirder bits of this one were all matched by my collection, so just lucky? Certainly fortunate to have all the checkers in place for FAIRY: I’m inclined to agree that FRAIL is very seductive. As a noun, I’d have put it firmly in Sam Spade territory.
  17. Baldrick recited a poem in the last series called The German Guns. See youtube for a treat!
  18. Well I finally finished, but without really understanding why SPREE and SUGGEST were right (my loi). I played with HALOTRY for a while, with HARRY as my king of choice, and had to look up the right answer when I found no such word existed, or at least, not one with any relevance to the clue.

    I like Spoonerisms, so my foi was the HOUSE MOLE, although I wasn’t confident enough to write it in boldly.

    Good, if slow start to the week. Thanks blogger for helping with the mystery parsing.

  19. . . . with the same iPad problem as keriothe, namely bits of the clue being covered. At least today, it was not anagrams that were covered but so unnecessary.

    Despite that, I enjoyed this slightly more crunchy Monday offering.

    PS How can a guy (one of us?) be at the same time The Times Crossword Champion and The Times Sudoku Champion? Awesome!

    1. Well – the sudokus are more of an insult than a challenge (one of the reasons I have moved on to the crosswords). I bombed out horribly on this one though, despite knowing some of the ones others found obscure (pasch, spree and hippo). I too went the wrong way with the spoonerism, confidently putting in house mole. 🙁
  20. Two sittings to get through this and relieved to find it was all OK since there was an awful lot from wordplay – HIPPO, PASCH, SPREE.
  22. Pleased to finish in 40m after failing to do so every day last week! Had no idea why HIPPO was right beyond ‘it fitted the cryptic’ and needed the blog to explain parsing of others such as SUGGEST so thanks for the blog.
  23. Another one initially seduced by frail until the checkers pointed to fairy. ‘Hey bird dog get away from my frail’ (if I remember the lyrics correctly) – shows I’m really ancient.
  24. I see that Google searching shows that the ‘Bird Dog’ lyrics have ‘quail’ rather than ‘frail’.
    My mistake.
    1. My first thought was (the even more ancient) Minnie the Moocher, who, if the song is to be believed, was not just a lowdown hoochie coocher, but the roughest, toughest frail.
  25. A disappointing 12:35 for me. Despite feeling desperately tired, I started off well; but then exhaustion overcame me and I struggled with easy clues. At the last hurdle I spent simply ages on SUGGEST, which for some reason I just couldn’t see. (Sigh!)

    No complaints about the puzzle itself though.

Comments are closed.