Times 26083 – Ten men, ton men, pen men, pun men!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 38 minutes

Music: Bruch, Scottish Fantasy, Grumiaux/Wallberg/New Philharmonia

This one looks like another rather tough Monday puzzle to me. There are still a couple of clues I haven’t parsed as I start the blog, and my LOI was very tricky indeed. I can only hope my answer and explanation are correct.

My method of solving by bunging in the obvious answers did lead me astray in one instance, when I saw ‘girl and I’ and entered ‘tie the knot’ without examining the clue too closely. Only when I got the rather chestnutty ‘chinchilla’ was I forced to analyze the clue to validate the only other possibility.

After writing the blog, I still think that ‘chinaman’ and ‘iron’ are probably the correct answers, but how exactly the cryptics work is still a bit unclear. Our chorus of commenters is hereby invited to toss in their two cents.

Across
1 NEWSPRINT, NEW + SPRINT.
5 TOP-UP, TO PUP.
9 IVAN THE TERRIBLE, reverse anagram clue of HAVEN’T I.
10 HATRED, HAT + RED. A rather loose clue, where a crown can be a hat and a cardinal is red.
11 CHARTISM, CHA(R[eformist]TI)SM. One I put in from the literal alone, but the cryptic is not difficult.
13 INELIGIBLE, I.(anagram of BEING ILL)E.
14 IRON, the obvious answer. How the cryptic works is an open question. I have ruled out [ch]IRON and IRON[ic]. Alec has it in one – fee reduced to Fe, the chemical symbol for iron.
16 CORN, double definition, one referring to an ear of corn.
17 CHINCHILLA, C(H)INCH + ILL + A, a bit of a chestnut.
19 EAU DE VIE, sounds like ODOUR + VIE, one of two atrocious homophones in this puzzle.
20 ONE-TWO, double definition, I believe, although it might be a cryptic definition as well. Boxing experts are invited to comment. And a contribution from Paul: the cryptic is O(NET W)O. This leaves ‘exchange of passes’ as the literal, which I would imagine still refers to boxing, although the whole clue is a bit &littish. Part two: Per Alec below, I seem to be the recipient of a combination play, as the literal refers to football and not boxing. Evidently, I understood little of this clue, but had I passed in my solution at a solving contest I still would have scored 28/28.
23 EVENING PRIMROSE, EVEN + anagram of MORE SPRING I. A fine and original clue, and a plant I have heard of too!
24 TESTY, TEST + [penalt]Y.
25 REMINISCE, anagram of SINCERE, I’M.
 
Down
1 NEIGH, sounds like NAY, a non-outrageous homophone.
2 WEAR THE TROUSERS, W(EARTH)ET + ROUSERS.
3 PATHETIC, PATH + CITE upside-down.
4 IDEA, hidden in [ins]IDE A[mazing].
5 TOE THE LINE, TO(ETHEL + I)NE, surprisingly straightforward.
6 TORERO, last letters of [bullfigh]T? [s]O [fa]R [on]E [o]R [tw]O.
7 PUBLIC RELATIONS, PUBLIC([o]R[w]E[l]L)ATIONS, another one I wrote in and figured out later for the blog.
8 PNEUMONIA, sounds like KNEW MOANIER. I would suggest we enter this one in the most-outrageous-homophone competition. Now who can we put on the jury?
12 FISH FINGER, which is cryptically defined as DIGITAL IN COD[e], with ‘not quite’ as a letter-removal indicator in the definition, rather than in the answer. My last one in, and a very clever clue.
13 INCREMENT, IN C(R)EMENT. ‘Setter’ has been ‘cement’ quite a bit lately.
15 CHINAMAN, CHIN + A MAN…I think. The literal refers to a particular type of cricket bowling. I’m not sure about ‘chin’ = ‘hit’, comment invited.
18 VERITY, VER(IT)Y.
21 OBESE, OBE + S[outh] E[ritrean].
22 DRAM, DRAM[a], where the literal refers to a small drink.

41 comments on “Times 26083 – Ten men, ton men, pen men, pun men!”

  1. Reduce “fee” to “Fe” — symbol for iron. And you’re right about the chinaman — “a ball that spins from off to leg, bowled by a left-handed bowler to a right-handed batsman”. The term is rarely used these days for obvious reasons. (And I think you mean “homophone”??)

    Edited at 2015-04-27 02:23 am (UTC)

  2. I actually managed to spot one of the quasi-homophones, PNEUMONIA, but only after ‘seeing’ the word from the P E M. The EAU DE was beyond me (and the pale). Incidentally, am I the only person who pronounces ‘rhotic’ to rhyme with ‘exotic’? I just discovered that the coiner of the term, the phonetician J.C. Wells, intended it to be ROH-tic. Anyway, IRON was also beyond me, but as vinyl says, it was the obvious answer. COD to Ivan.
    1. I’d never stopped to think about it, but yes, I suppose it should be a long O as the letter is usually spelt that way by the Greeks, and Chambers only gives that pronunciation. But then the Greeks didn’t think the sky was blue. And look where that’s got them.
  3. I thought net = score, as in football, w = with in o o. Otherwise agree challenging for a Monday.
    1. Not boxing (as per the blog). In this specific case, real football with a round ball. One player with the ball gets around an opponent by passing to another on his side who then passes back to the first after he’s gone around said opponent.

      Edited at 2015-04-28 02:08 am (UTC)

  4. An excellent and cheerful puzzle that I enjoyed a lot and completed in 28 minutes. I like outrageous homophones such as the two complained of here, but not inaccurate ones or those that rely too much on specific accents. COD jointly to 14ac (IRON) and 12dn (FISH FINGER) for their splendid inventiveness.
  5. Cheerful is a good description of this crossword. Liked the homophones, a gimme or two and almost everything else about it. Took a relaxed 25 minutes or so to enjoy. COD to NEIGH. I’m another stymied by IRON so thanks to mctext for putting us right.
  6. 33 minutes, which isn’t bad considering I’m heavily sedated with a touch of Verlainitis.

    Quite a bit of biffing, which suited my mood perfectly. I’m not sure that 8d really works, as ‘more grumbling’ is a noun phrase and ‘moanier’ a comparative adjective.

    Chinaman has an interesting history, but, brought up in a cricketing family, I always knew it as the left-armer’s googly – rather than ‘leg-break’ – a usage which is referred to in the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-arm_unorthodox_spin

    1. Chambers has ‘grumbling’ as an adjective in addition to a noun. Looking this up in the Shorter Oxford just now a very rude word caught my eye and I learned a new bit of CRS which I trust I shan’t need for crossword purposes in the Times, though possibly in Private Eye!
  7. 24.20, and I think I can count the number of gimmes for me in this one on the fingers of one cod. Most enjoyable, though. IVAN and ONE TWO stayed opaque to me, though the tsar one is my favourite kind of clue. On a blogging day (or when I wasn’t so conscious of time whizzing by with excessive enthusiasm) I would have stopped to look. I had to do that with FISH FINGER, because I had RING as the biff.
    I’m all for gruesome puns. Where’s the fun in these things without them? Even as I wrote in TESTY, the words “David cum Sybilla” flowed freely on (I’m rehearsing the Verdi Requiem at present).
  8. 10m. I liked this one too. If a homophone doesn’t make you groan a little bit, what’s the point?
    The fact that CHIN is synonymous with LAMP makes me smile.
  9. 31:00. I found this to be at about the level of difficulty I enjoy best with a good mix of clues which required some thinking without ever leaving me feeling completely stumped.

    Ironically I put in TOW THE LINE initially, having recently had to correct a colleague who had written this, explaining to him why it is TOE.

    Clearly the COD has to be FISH FINGER!

  10. 14 mins. Definitely chewier than some Monday puzzles. My LOI was a biffed IRON but I looked at the clue again before I came here and saw how it worked. Very clever. I’m with Z8 in really liking the IVAN THE TERRIBLE type of clue.
  11. Agree that this was a very pleasant 10 minutes on a Monday morning, though I freely admit it would have been quite a bit longer if I’d been blogging and wanted to be closer to 100% certain about the parsing of IRON and FISH FINGER than my actual status of “well it has to be…doesn’t it?”
  12. About 40mins. All correct, many biffed and worked out post-solve, but still needed the blog for IRON. Very clever.
  13. 23 min – IRON was biffed, so thanks for explanation. LOI was 12dn: took a while to parse that.
    At 10ac, a cardinal’s HAT is RED, so clue isn’t too bad.

    Edited at 2015-04-27 10:33 am (UTC)

  14. 37m for this chewy but enjoyable puzzle. I also BIFD quite a few without much understanding so thanks to blogger and the supporting cast for he explanations. LOI Inevitably was 12d though not BIFD merely it was all I could see that fitted the lights. I like IRON now I understand it so it gets my COD but posthumously.
  15. …and totally unbiffed. Nice lively puzzle to start the week.

    Agree with Ulaca, when I grew up a chinaman was a left-handed wrong ‘un, but more and more it’s being used to describe the stock delivery of the left-handed wrist-spinner. Then someone like Brad Hogg confuses things by bowling more wrong’ uns than leggies, so call it what you like, just watch it carefully out of the hand.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

  17. 15:10 with iron not parsed (for which thanks to McT) and a big COD tick, appropriately enough, for fish finger.

    For a short while I though Ivan The T was going to be the answer for both 9a and 2d (“take the lead” suggested that VAN had to be in there somewhere).

  18. 19:43 … a good five minutes or so spent on FISH FINGER, which I saw as soon as the checkers were in place then promptly dismissed as making no sense, spent some time trying to construct an anagram out of “this digita”, then gave up and bunged in FISH FINGER after all with little idea why.

    Very enjoyable puzzle, anyway. IVAN THE TERRIBLE raised a chuckle (which he probably didn’t do that often while alive), but COD to IRON because I got it, which I might not have done a few years ago.

      1. Thank you 🙂

        Verlaine started this avatar-changing vogue, and I decided that I was fed up of being stereotyped on account of my pigtails and ribbons and being a rabbit.

  19. Solved in 11 mins sitting in the garden in glorious sunshine. I did like 12d which was my LOI.

    Back to work tomorrow but at least there’ll be Tippex on hand should it be required.

  20. 25 minutes, done and understood, with Fe = iron a gimme for us chemists, and lots of smiles for a Monday. LOI TORERO from last letters and a guess it had somethig to do with bulls.
  21. Back in action after a week in Languedoc “sans wifi” trying to make our recently acquired holiday home habitable. We should be able to occupy it by mid-May and hopefully get the wifi up and running pdq so I can get my daily fix. A leisurely 25 mins today with a few biffed including of course IRON.
  22. I too will confess to biffing IRON and FISH FINGER. A comparatively chewy offering for a Monday puzzle. Regards to all.
  24. Found the blog at last after sitting on a stationary train at Waterloo for an hour. Getting here took longer than solving the puzzle. Glad to say all my parsings were bang on.
  25. One hour and forty-seven minutes, but that included about an hour spent playing with my birthday present (a remote video drone, no less – second childhoods are great) during which I left the timer running, and a few minutes to band-aid the propeller cut on my finger.

    I failed to parse a great many, including IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PUBLIC RELATIONS, EVENING PRIMROSE, IRON and TORERO (which was my LOI). I think that if I’d got these from the wordplay I’d be impressed by the clues. As it is, I felt as if I’d been let loose in a giant maze only to discover that you could get out through gaps in the hedges.

    Still, it was definitely chewy and enjoyable.

  26. Seems everyone came a smidge unstuck on the same clues. Just over the hour mark, interspersed with feeding children and getting them off to bed. Being from Belfast, the homophones can test me some times, and I needed the blog to assist with EAU DE VIE. FISH FINGER came to me just before I looked at the blogs, but IRON had me stumped. Anyhoo, it was a full house albeit with a few unparsed.
    1. I’d love to head down the local for last orders, but the wife assures me if I act on my impulse I’ll get chinned.
  28. 3hrs for me with one error,PROM instead of DRAM.What does ‘biff’ mean in the context used here?My Oxford says ‘hit'(old-fashioned and informal)(ONG’ARA,NAIROBI)
  29. 19 ac

    ‘Eau de’ is a homophone (Odour)
    ‘Vie’ = struggle. (Not part of the homophone)

    14 ac (Iron) & 12 d (Fish Finger)
    These were my last two in.
    Having started doing Times crosswords only a year or two ago, I noted when the penny dropped, that I must shorten Fee to Fe in the clue itself – and that I had never before seen a clue where I must do this before. I then realised that 12d is just the same. I had to shorten ‘code’ to ‘cod’ IN THE CLUE.

    Norman

  30. For anonymous: Biff, Biffed or BIFD refers to an answer being “Bunged In From Definition” alone, i.e., without properly understanding the cryptic aspect of the clue.

    I can’t even claim to that for Fish Finger, since I could work out neither a cryptic nor standard definition in the clue. 10 minutes cycling the alphabet & I couldn’t come up with anything else that fitted with the checkers, so this one was very much a case of just bung it in and hope!

    Only now I’ve come on here can I see how clever the clue is, albeit was wasted on me.

    Really enjoyed this crossword – a pleasing 70 minutes for me.

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