Times 25882 – foot off the pedal?

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
After a series of testing days, especially last week, I found this a much easier romp, all done in 15 minutes with only one word a little obscure but evident from the checkers and anagram. My worries about getting two blogs up in good time on the same day, were – this time – unwarranted.

Across
1 CARD – Double def. Diamond = card, a dealer deals cards. Until I did the easy 2 dn I was thinking ‘loup’, but that was too logical. And it’s spelt ‘loupe’.
3 SILLY-BILLY – Yes, it was that simple.
10 NUMERATOR – Def. superior figure, the one above the line in a fraction. NUM = miners, ERA = a long time, TO, R = respect at first.
11 SCREW – Double def., slang for prison officer, and what a screwdriver turns. Another quickie-standard clue.
12 ELYSIAN – ELY = city, SIAN = Welsh girl’s name, def. ideally happy.
13 DINGHY – DINGY = of shabby appearance, insert H for heroin, def. boat.
15 BENJAMIN BRITTEN – Put JAM = preserve into BENIN = African country, then BRITTEN sounds like Britain.
18 REPRESENTATIONS – Def. statements of opinion; RE = concerning, PRESENTATIONS = theatre shows.
21 BOVINE – B = foremost of beasts, OVINE = like sheep; def. like cattle.
23 ORIGAMI – RIG = fiddle, inserted in O (old) AMI (French for friend); def. Japanese art.
26 OBESE – OB = ex-pupil, old boy; ESE = alternate letters of fEaStEd, def. so (as a result of feasting).
27 SCHOLIAST – Anagram (THIS ALSO C)*, def. historical annotator. A word I didn’t know but now do.
28 FLEETINGLY – (LIFE GENTLY)*, def. not for very long. Nice surface.
29 MAID – I (one) with MAD (crazy) about it, def. domestic servant.

Down
1 CANTERBURY – ANT = worker, inside CE = church; R = right, BURY = part of G. Manchester; def. see, as in bishopric.
2 RUMMY – RUM = spiritous liquor, then MY = motor yacht; def. game, a card game.
4 INTENSIVE – (EVENT IS IN)*, def. sort of farming.
5 LURID – Hidden word in reversed part of clue, LAN(D I RUL)ED, def. sensational.
6 BASENJI – BASE = bed, then J = judge in NI, def. dog. A breed of hunting dog originating in Africa.
7 LARGHETTO – LA (Los Angeles), R (Republican), GHETTO (slum), def. rather slowly. I’m not sure all who live in a ghetto would agree with SLUM as a descriptor, I thought a ghetto was a city area populated by an ethnic minority, not necessarily poverty-stricken.
8 YAWN – YAW = go unsteadily, N = north, def. boring idea.
9 TROIKA – R (runs) OIK (yob) all inserted in TA (army), def. horse-drawn vehicle.
14 UNASSISTED – UNA’S = girl’s, SISTE(R) = sibling mostly, D = departs, def. without aid.
16 NIPPONESE – NIP = pin up, PO = river, then (SEEN)*, def. Asian. Another term for Japanese.
17 BETROTHAL – Def. engagement; BE (a) TROT, HAL, would be telling Prince Henry to become a Trotskyite.
19 EXIGENT – GEN = general, senior officer, inside EXIT, def. pressing.
20 TRIFLE – Double def; TRIFLE can be a verb or a noun.
22 ESSEN – E (English) SEN (nurse once, State Enrolled Nurse) around S (south), def. German city.
24 AQABA – Q (question) A BA (a graduate) under A, def. Middle East port; it’s in the Red Sea on the Gulf of Aqaba opposite Eilat, where I once had a grim week in Club Med.
25 LOAF – Double def; a bloomer is a kind of bread loaf, and to loaf about is to be idle.

57 comments on “Times 25882 – foot off the pedal?”

  1. Phew! An easier one for a change. Got to AQABA and counted up the letters. So where was the missing Z to go? Nowhere! Only remedies I can see would be IONIZE or IODIZE at 21ac. Any others?

    11ac reminds me to recommend Witold Rybczynski’s “One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw”.

    Not sure about the first def at 20dn; but let’s not argue over trifles.

    Edited at 2014-09-03 07:48 am (UTC)

  2. Major distraction mid-solve, so I don’t have an exact time, but it seemed to be on the easier side.

    Many half-knowns, including ELYSIAN, TROIKA, BASENJI and LARGHETTO, a couple of unknowns in SCHOLIAST and AQABA, but all fairly clued.

    Slowed myself down by inventing investite farming, which doesn’t even fit the anagram, but it all came out in the wash.

    Perhaps I should alter my habit of referring to the English-dominated and non-slummy northern suburbs of Perth as “the ghetto”? Perhaps.

  3. Yup, nice ‘n’ easy does it, 11.48 with a last minute (few seconds?) revising 8d from YAWS to YAWN. YAWS was from “go unsteadily north” or SWAY upwards, but I couldn’t make that work with the definition (what’s yaws? – thanks, a pint of best please).
    SCHOLIAST from the dusty dictionary corner, AQABA from similar memories of a stay in Eilat watching the planes coming in low over the sea to the airport. And of course remembering that Q and K are infinitely exchangeable in Arabic transliterations.
    KG on the Club reckons NIPPONESE is offensive. Surely not? Antiquated, perhaps, but more authentic than Japanese.
  4. Too easy really with a great deal going in from obvious definitions or simple wordplay. 15 minutes and never getting out of second gear.

    No problem with ghetto (didn’t know North Perth was mirror image of Earls Court).

    Very puzzled by editorial strategy that presents 5 really quite difficult puzzles one after the other and then gives us 3 consecutive dolly drops

    1. I think you’re perhaps a bit out of date there. I’m reminded of a spoof UK immigration form for Aussies that was doing the rounds a few years ago and it included something like:
      What is the main purpose of your visit to the UK?
      a) Visiting family
      b) Studying
      c) Working
      d) Hanging around in Shepherd’s Bush Walkabout moaning about the weather

  5. Raced through today in well under 30mins, even with the unknown BASENJI, but had a blank at 9dn. Thought (incorrectly) it was another unknown, and so gave in. Should have looked at it a bit longer.
    1. 13.10, my first sub-15 for a while. Vaguely surprised to find presentations apparently more likely theatrical than factual. Re-(honestly)reading H.IV pt.1 at the moment and enjoy the comment maybe from a modernised cynical Falstaff. Otherwise a bit of an 8.
  6. Done in less than half my typical time so it had to be straightforward. DNK SCHOLIAST but sorted out from the anagram. LOI ELYSIAN where for a while I was toying with ????WEN (Blodwen?) from Cobbett’s description of London as The Great Wen.
  7. 11m. No problems today, even with the slightly unfamiliar AQABA and SCHOLIAST.
    I would certainly associate the word ‘ghetto’ with poverty and the dictionaries seem to agree. ODO defines it as ‘especially a slum area’, Chambers says ‘esp poor’, and Collins defines it as ‘a densely populated slum area of a city inhabited by a socially and economically deprived minority’.
      1. An intriguing idea but it can’t be true: I checked the definitions of ‘thatcherism’ and ‘neoliberalism’ and the word ‘evil’ doesn’t appear.
    2. I have a cutting from the Daily Mail from about 10 years ago where it refers to the estate on which I live as a “wealth ghetto”. In truth it’s nowhere near as bad as that makes it sound – it’s not even gated!
  8. 9 mins. My only slight hold-up was in the SE for my last two, BETROTHAL (only parsed post-solve) and the unknown or forgotten SCHOLIAST from the anagram fodder and checkers. It mightn’t have been the most difficult of puzzles but it was still an enjoyable solve.
  9. 14 min – a rare sub quarter hour for me: I started with PACK at 1ac, but saw it was wrong as soon as I got on to the downs. Post solve I did notice the missing Z, so had passing doubts about an error, but solution was OK.
  10. New schedule, in the States, means I’ve been getting to the weekday puzzle intermittently and often with little time when I do, so I really notice the difference between the recent killers and today’s cakewalk. About 30 minutes and all complete; the several well-hidden definitions didn’t quite balance the too-direct definitions. Is my = motor yacht well known, or was that to help with the surface?
      1. Thanks, Jim. Interesting all the bits of trivia (NATO alphabets, seven abbreviations for doctor, not to mention the queen cat) that we carry around from this pastime. Its a bit like my still being able to look at a resistor and read the bands without thought, or knowing the (big) difference between an SN7401 chip and an LM741 – 35 years after leaving the lab bench behind I guess.
    2. MY is the part of the name of motor yachts, similar to the USS in USS Indianapolis and the HMS in HMS Victory.

      Edited at 2014-09-03 11:11 am (UTC)

  11. 36 minutes here with BASENJI and SCHOLIAST unknown and I needed all the checkers in place to remember AQABA. I couldn’t believe the obvious simplicity of 1ac so didn’t write it in until I’d confirmed the checkers by solving 1dn & 2dn
  12. 23 minutes, but might have been quicker. I was wondering what all the discussion about ghettoes was about till I realised I hadn’t bothered to parse that one. Last in TROIKA.

    I knew Aqaba as the place Lawrence of Arabia told Omar Sharif he would attack by land as the Turks had all their guns facing the sea. Big mistake.

  13. 7:57 – although given where I am solving this, I really should have got (and therefore finished) 1d a lot earlier than I did. AQABA appears quite a lot in cryptics and I am sure YAWN turned up elsewhere some time last week.
  14. 11:28 with hopeful stabs at scholiast and aqaba.

    Basenji no problem as I can remember coiming across one in a book as a child, the notable thing being that it has no bark.

    Re 3, in what context does silly = stunned?

    Thanks for the parsage of betrothal which passed me by.

    2. Knocked silly, too. I thought it was a reach, ditto with intensive as a specific kind of farming – I’d thought more of an often applied modifier, but I didn’t want to be a bad sport.
  15. Couldn’t decide on SCHOLAIST & AQIBA or SCHOLIAST & AQABA. The latter seemed to fit ‘a graduate’ better but I preferred SCHOLAIST in the former. True to Murphy’s Law I chose the wrong pair.

    Other than that rather too easy compared to recent offerings. I did like 1D though where I was misdirected to look for a place in Greater Manchester.

  17. Not as fast as you slickers, but complete and satisfactory from my pov.

    I struggled most with the NW, and even after getting the ones (my loi’s can you believe), I got 1d for the wrong reason. Church worker I initially parsed as Canter, thinking cantor and spent a few minutes wondering if there was an alternative spelling before I spotted the ubiquitous ANT in the equally ubiquitous CE.

    I also didn’t know SCHOLIAST, and played with SWAY going north for 8d, but quickly saw the light.

    Edited at 2014-09-03 12:14 pm (UTC)

    1. Funnily enough I put in GOOF initially, but then changed it, I think because I thought that it had to be ‘goof off’.
      Chambers has ‘to waste time, behave idly, etc’, and doesn’t specify that it’s American. I can’t really see how it could be disallowed.
  19. 25 minutes. Even easier than yesterday’s, I thought, though I could see potential problems. TROIKA came up in a recent Listener so that was familiar, and although I’m not a dog-lover I do remember BASENJI from a past Times. SCHOLIAST was the only unfamiliar word.
    With Times puns you either love’em or hate ’em 17 made me groan, I’m afraid.
    10a and 4d struck me as problematic. NUM must surely be regarded as a single unit, whether as an abbreviation or in it’s expanded form, so ‘take’ is surely a grammatically incorrect verb form in the cryptic syntax (which is what matters). In 4dn ‘turmoil’ appears to be a noun anagrind. I know the nounal anagrind has its advocates, though I’m not one of them. It’s true that Chambers give an unusual dialect intransitive verbal meaning (to toil)but a dialect or archaic meaning for an anagrind seems unlikely in a daily blocked puzzle.
    1. Neither 10a nor 4d worried me. Fowler has “Let us hope that the Ministry of Defence ARE on our side this time.” as a (correct) example. The use of “turmoil” as an anagrind seemed quite clear, which is what matters.
      Just over the half hour, with the last six minutes spent trying to believe that there was a battle in the German valley of BETRO-THAL.
    2. I must be a simple soul because I really can’t see any problems with 10ac or 4dn. In crossword usage NUM = miners just as NUT = teachers and NUS = students and it seems perfectly natural for them to be followed by a plural form of verb. As for “noun anagrinds”, I read them as a sort of shorthand as in newspaper headlines where the meaning is clear without every last nicety of grammar being strictly observed. I think there’s sometimes a danger of over-analysing these things.
      1. In any cryptic clue there is the surface sense and there is the cryptic coded instruction to get the answer. I’m all for convincing surfaces, but if the cryptic grammar is faulty then the clue is not sound. I think your reasoning that NUM = miners is unsound. NUM means the National Union of Miners, and ‘union’ is singular. ‘Miners’ is the surface word that tells us that NUM is part of the answer. But I’ll move away from that example, since some might argue that NUM, being an abbreviation, is three letters, rather than a single word, so could take a plural verb(perhaps that’s this setter’s justification). For a better example of what I’m getting at, take the simple abbreviation T, which can be indicated by ‘ton’ or ‘tons’. If a clue has something like “…tons are moved back” to indicate T is moved to another part of the word, then it’s cryptically faulty, because it’s effectively saying, “T are moved back” instead of “T is moved back”. It’s nothing to do with over-analysing; it’s a question of sound cryptic clueing. I recommend Don Manley’s Crossword Manual, which has lots of excellent stuff on cluemanship, and Don is also a Times Crossword setter.

        I’m sorry for my rather lengthy reply, but you seemed to be saying that if the verb form is appropriate to the surface then that’s all that matters. I’ve written about 1,500 clues in the time I’ve been setting, and if I were of that persuasion many of them would have been rejected by the editors (and the solvers who tackle my puzzles).

        1. As soon as you move away from the example, I for one agree with you! But as jackkt and keithdoyle say, this is an instance of the common use of plurals with collective nouns: the NUM are on strike, the government have decided, Arsenal win the match, my family are awful and so on.
        2. Don’t know if you’ll see this…
          Agreed on verbs matching nouns, and that NUM is singular. In this clue I could offer an alternative justification: A lift and separate between miners and take. An implicit “you, the solver, must” before the word take.
          Superior figure miners take a long time to respect at first
          Superior figure miners (pause) you, the solver, must take a long time to respect at first

          20:15 with a few minutes at the end to get scholiast & Canterbury – scared I might have been looking for some unknown part of a provincial English city.
          Rob

  20. As one who is learning how to do cryptic puzzles on the Times Quick Cryptic, I had some spare time today and thought I’d have a go at this “grown-up” puzzle too. I was really pleased to get 22 of the 30 clues correct, including SCHOLIAST and BASENJI so having an “easy” one is good for the learners / improvers.
  21. Welcome jucrow. Good luck with all this. I got through this in 15 minutes, held up at the last by the TROIKA/ELYSIAN crossing. Beyond that, not much causes comment. Regards to all.
  22. A relative stroll at just on 13 min, with no real holdups and not much stretching of the GK – like others, SCHOLIAST and AQABA the only two to cause any doubt. Absolutely agree with Jim’s query re the strategy of a string of (very enjoyable)stinkers followed by a string of pretty easy (and much less enjoyable) fare.
  23. 19 minutes for me, of which two were spent explaining that I was doing something important, and that a little bleeding would help flush the wound out. Definitely a walk in the park compared to recent puzzles.

    That said, I had qualms over SCHOLIAST (never heard of it), and wasn’t sure of my spelling of either LARGHETTO or AQABA, the second of which crossed with the shaky SCHOLIAST. Still, it all worked out in the end and, as they say, any operation you can walk away from is a successful one; even more so if the patient can too.

    I didn’t notice the “NUM=miners” problem, and it doesn’t bother me greatly but only because I got the answer. Perhaps it could have been avoided by replacing “miners” with “mining group” or some such, albeit a little clumsily. I can imagine being peeved if I had been misled by it, since I always assume that the grammar is absolutely rigorous and to be taken at face value. So, I’m with [dyste] on this one, although I don’t think this example is too great a transgression.

  24. 25m today but went for SCHOLAIST and AMIBA – all well good but neither exist! Otherwise enjoyable solve in that I had hopes of a sub30 from early on!
  25. What a relief after the last few days to find that I can still complete the big one. Thanks setter for restoring my flagging enthusiasm.
  26. 6:56 for me after a nervous start. Like jackkt, I was worried that CARD was a little too obvious, and I even agonised briefly over it when I had the checked letters in place. I bunged in SILLY-BILLY straight away, but then took a few seconds to work out why “stunned” = SILLY.

    10ac (NUMERATOR) is just fine for the reasons that jackkt, keithdoyle and keriothe adduce.

  28. As I’m usually a day behind with the puzzle, I don’t often post, but I still follow the blog avidly. It has definitely helped me since I started doing the Times crossword three years ago, as I managed a PB of 21 minutes today. I flirted briefly with SWAY up but soon plumped for YAWN instead. SCHOLIAST and BASENJI were unknown but easily constructed. LOI TROIKA which held me up for a minute until Prokofiev came to the rescue. Thanks to Pip for today’s blog and regards to all.
    John D

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