Times 26125 – Leave me to heaven

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Definitely on the meaty side for a Monday, with one Shibboleth clue (15a) to sort out the men from the boys. I was a boy…51 minutes for my very untechnical Did Not Finish.

ACROSS

1. RUGGED – RUGGE[r] – twee word for rugby – + [en]D.
4. WARDRESS – double definition (near as dammit) with the true definition playing on our inbuilt chauvinism/common sense (delete as appropriate). Nice clue.
10. ANGLOPHILES – like, I hope, many of the colonials that visit this site; anagram* of ALSO HELPING.
11. RED – alternation in fRiEnDs.
12. SPONDEE – SPEED* around ON; a type of metrical foot – consisting of too long syllables. Other members of the stable include Iamb, Trochee, Dactyl, Anapaest and Tribrach, but Spondee seems to serve setters best.
14. VIOLIST – V (‘see’ from Latin ‘vide’ > V) + I (‘one’) + SOLTI* (ex boss of Chicago Symphony, if memory serves).
15. DISPATCH RIDERS – ‘couriers’ (AKA maniacs on two wheels, distant relations of the flip-flop wearing Hong Kong sub-species); the Shibboleth clue. As one of those kneeling down to drink, I salute all those who stayed on their feet and lapped it up like a dog. We get the solution from DITCH (‘drop’) round SPA (‘part of [a modern] gym’) + RIDERS (‘small weight positioned on the beam of a balance for fine adjustment’).
17. SLAP ON THE WRIST – the literal is the slightly strained ‘light substitute for carpeting’; NOW ARTIST HELPS* (the anagram indicator is ‘refit’).
21. MISS OUT – the setter is harking back to days of yore when teachers were ‘Sir’ and ‘MISS’ + OUT (‘blooming’).
22. SENEGAL – LANES reversed around EG (‘say’).
23. RYE – town in East Sussex – one of the cinque ports; we have our old friend Jane Eyre, still smarting after being downgraded from governess to housekeeper in a recent puzzle, reversed and de-tailed.
24. EMBROCATION – MB (‘doctor’) in ER (the US word for Casualty > Accident and Emergency) + [v]OCATION (‘calling, first off’).
26. MITHERED – ‘flustered’ – what Northerners get up to, apparently; today’s word that sounds like it has no right to be a word, and one to remember for Scrabble. MD around IT + HERE.
27. SENECA – ACE + NES[t] reversed; as Nero’s tutor and advisor, it’s small wonder that he chose Stoicism as his branch of philosophy.

DOWNS

1. ROADSIDE – ‘by the way’; [b]ROADSIDE. Nice clue.
3. GAG – ‘funny’ (Collins has the noun sense ‘a joke or witticism’); GANG (‘team’) minus its N (‘not bottom of division’). Not my favourite.
3. EXORDIA – ‘parts of speeches’ – the beginning parts, to be precise; EX + OR (‘Other ranks’) + AID reversed.
5. ALL OVER THE SHOP – top expression for ‘here and there’; LOVER (‘fan’) in HOTEL HAS* + P.
6. DISCORD – DISCO + RD.
7. EAR-PIERCING – double definition; the first is akin to ‘ear-splitting’, which I very much wanted to work in, even though it didn’t fit, while the second is one for the ladies (and of course New Men – Verlaine?, Penfold??), referring to what Oxford calls the ‘ring or post worn in a pierced ear to keep the hole from closing’, or ‘sleeper’.
8. SEDATE – SE (Kent is situated in the South-east of England) + DATE.
9. CHIEF CONSTABLE – a highly biffable clue, but biffers are likely to shove in ‘chief inspector’; I in CHEF + CONS (‘does’, i.e. tricks) + TABLE (‘food’).
13. OBSOLESCENT – ‘past its sell-by date’; the first letter of O[ffended] and B[y] + SOLE SCENT (‘smell of fish’). Is it just me or is this a bit forced?
16. ATALANTA – hidden in cATALAN TAles; for me, she’s no hunter, she’s the football team that plays in Bergamo, famous also for producing a large tenor with a white hanky and a sublime voice.
18. PHONEME – another prosodic clue; the literal is ‘sound’ and the wordplay a sort of morph of PHONE (‘mobile’) + the outside letters (‘casing’) of M[obil]E.
19. WANNABE – my biggest biff, if not my only one; the literal is ‘ambitious sort’, and the wordplay is BE (‘live with’) + W + ANNA (‘with girl, primarily’, where ‘primarily’ means put before the BE bit). Thanks to Kevin for straightening me out on the function of ‘primarily’.
20. AM-DRAM – ‘local theatre’, this popped up quite recently; two AMs (‘American duo’) around D[irecto]R.
25. ICE – ‘diamonds’; I (one = ‘single’) + E (‘East’, bridge player) around C (‘Clubs’).

40 comments on “Times 26125 – Leave me to heaven”

  1. Isn’t it just W + ANNA come before BE? hence ‘with girl primarily’? he asked. Or is that what you said?
    1. Thanks, Kevin. No, it isn’t what I said (or meant to say) and I shall revise accordingly. I knew my little brain was frazzled after all that time post-solve spent decoding the couriers.
  2. I don’t suppose it signifies, but ‘help’ shows up three times (10ac, 17ac, 3d). I immediately twigged to 9d and flung in ‘chief inspector’, don’t ask why; and of course Gresham’s Law helped keep me from remembering the correct word. DNK MITHERED, and quickly gave up on parsing DISPATCH RIDERS. Strictly speaking, a phoneme isn’t a sound but a mental representation that can take one of various spoken forms; but wotthehell.
    1. /t/ is a phoneme. Yes? What would a mental representation of that look like?
      1. Well, actually, /t/ is a written symbol for a mental representation (whereas [t] is a written symbol for one of the forms that /t/ takes when uttered); and I have no idea what the mental representation–any mental representation–looks like.
        1. > I have no idea what the mental representation–any mental representation–looks like.

          So clearly, you’d have to be on the Bloomfieldian or anti-mentalistic side of linguistic theory. In which case, a phoneme must be a physical sound. (Perhaps you were trained in the Chomskian school?)

          1. A phoneme is not a physical sound: it is an abstraction, one unit in a construct that accounts for the significance of the speech sounds to a speaker of the language. To treat it as something mental is a further (not unreasonable) step.
          2. I don’t see why you’d infer anti-mentalism. I meant, literally, that I have no idea what mental representations look like, and nor does anyone else, I might add.
    2. That may well be – according to some systems, at any rate – but the dictionaries ignore the distinction.
  3. 27 minutes with 15ac biffed and still unparsed by the time I came here so I was lucky to have chosen the required spelling of the first word. I haven’t sent foot in a gym since I was last forced to in 1964, and I had no notion that SPA would have fitted the gym reference if I’d spotted it in the answer.

    Several other answers were on the fringes of my GK but I’m not over familiar with them, starting with SPONDEE. SENECA, EXORDIA and ATALANTA were other examples. All apart from SENECA are underlined in red as I type, so I don’t feel too badly about that.

    I wasn’t aware that ‘funny’ could be the noun it needs to be in context here, and despite my comment yesterday about riddles I don’t feel comfortable with EAR-PIERCING addressing solvers as ‘I’ at 7dn.

    Edited at 2015-06-15 04:43 am (UTC)

    1. I seem to remember my (scottish) Dad referring to The Broons and Oor Wullie in the Sunday Post as “the funnies”.
  4. 23.28, amongst the early leaders (just). I started this one feeling as if I was on the wavelength of a tricky setter, with the NW falling quickly. Thereafter slowed, with CHIEF INSPECTOR and EAR SPLITTING getting in the way of authentic solving.
    DISPATCH RIDER went in with a bit of a shrug and a note to open/join discussion of why it could be spelt with an E. DI(/E)SPATCH being drop in the sense of “terminate with extreme prejudice” and riders being those little weights that you might see in the weighing room part of a gym meant I didn’t see the need to explore further. The clue felt unsatisfactory, not least because it didn’t discount DESPATCH, but not so much that I looked for another construction. SPA? Humbug. Probably shows my unfamiliarity with gyms.
    ATALANTA – that’s the one with the apple fixation isn’t it? Surprised Freud didn’t honour here with her own complex.
    AM DRAM prompted by a recent Saturday, where it caused me much grief. Couldn’t have told you what EXORDIA meant, other than a decent score in Scrabble™, and had SENECA down as a dramatist. PHONEME? Something to do with noises is all I knew, and quite a clever bit of cluing, too.
  5. 10:18 .. which included a break to remove cat + ‘gift’ (shrew, deceased — sorry) so I seem to have been unusually well tuned in.

    No humdinger clues, but I always enjoy small, perfectly formed clues like WARDRESS and SEDATE.

  6. 19m. Tricky one. Like Jack I was lucky to pick the right spelling of DISPATCH because I didn’t have a clue about the parsing. Defining SPA as ‘part of gym’ is very odd: I’d have put it the other way round. Generally though an enjoyable puzzle requiring attention to the wordplay.
    1. It just occurred to me–I didn’t try to parse this one–is ‘spa’ not also used to refer to a Jacuzzi-type individual tub? Or is that a US usage? Or did I just make all this up?
      1. Yes, I think it is, although I wouldn’t expect to find one in a gym. Mind you the gym I go to (occasionally) isn’t very smart.
  7. Just under 9 minutes, just as well considering that I really should be unscrewing table legs and boxing computers before the removal van shows up. But priorities.

    Had a shudder of dread as I went to check the leaderboard because I’d biffed in DISPATCH RIDERS and couldn’t be sure it wasn’t DESPATCH. But all turned out for the best in this the best of all possible worlds.

  8. Two wrong ‘uns today: I had rearside and distance RIDERS (what even are distance riders???), but at nudging the hour, I was happy to fill in the blanks without due regard to either wp or definition. Silly me.
    1. DNF for me too with DISTANCE RIDERS. Thanks for the correct answer ulaca. Would have been 39:20 without that error. Held up for a while by having SOLOIST for 14a, thinking ‘see one facing’ referred to the initial letters and had never heard viola players referred to violists. Convinced otherwise when I got 5d. Mind you, I dare say it could also be used for the players in a consort of viols. A few other words I didn’t know, EXORDIA, ATALANTA, and MITHERED (my LOI) but I was thanking my latin lessons for knowing my spondees from my dactyls.
  9. 23 mins. I couldn’t decide if I wasn’t on the setter’s wavelength or it was a trickier than usual puzzle, and I’m none the wiser based on the various times and comments above. Count me as another who biffed DISPATCH RIDERS, although I went for I rather than E because I was sure “ditch” was the “drop” part of the wordplay even though I couldn’t see how the rest of the clue worked. It took me way too long to get GAG because I had a blind spot about “funny” being a noun, and it was only once I got it that I saw ANGLOPHILES. I finished down in the SE with SENECA after WANNABE.
  10. Like Janie, I went for a very unconvincing DISTANCE RIDERS. Meant to go back later for the parsing and forgot to do so. I saw the correct answer after submitting, but still wasn’t able to parse it.

    Well done setter and blogger. Solver, not so much.

  11. Came to a screeching halt at the axis of this and AM-DRAM. We had the latter some time in the last couple of years but it took a lot of dredging. For the future I need to put it in the same folder as aga saga. Why is MD a boss? I dithered over this. 20.31
    1. Managing Director, Olivia. Might be Chairman of the Board in America? Not sure.

      Anyway I twigged to MD immediately but still couldn’t convince myself that MITHERED was a word.

  12. 27:22. I found this fairly tricky and with no idea of the parsing at 15A I hesitated at the end being unsure whether it was DESPATCH or DISPATCH. Plumped for the latter just on the basis that it sounded more right.
  13. I would put the US equivalent to MD as CEO (Chief Executive Officer), a different beast from the Chairman of the Board, at least in Dow Jones US multinational for which I slaved for 23 years.

    Edited at 2015-06-15 10:46 am (UTC)

      1. In Australia the distinction lies in whether or not he or she sits on the board of directors, although that distinction seems to be becoming more blurred, especially as both roles are often performed by the same individual.
  14. Thanks galspray – must have the Monday slugs because all I could think of was medical doctor.
  15. Tricky for a Monday, but got through in 40 minutes or so, LOI WANNABE, with 15a biffed and MITHERED confirmed as a Northern type word by Mrs who hails from those parts. I understood the crossword much better than I understood all this lingistic mumbo jumbo from the eggheads above. Where are the chemistry clues?
  16. All went well until the SW corner, which flummoxed me completely. Had I got one of AM DRAM, RYE or MITHERED I like to think there was a sporting chance the other two would have also fallen. But I didn’t…

    Thanks for explaining 15ac – bunged it in but the parsing went right over my head.

    Dead chuffed to learn that knowing “sleepers” qualifies me as a New Man – I shall update my CV immediately!

    Edited at 2015-06-15 11:46 am (UTC)

  17. 11:52 mainly because although I knew a spondee and a phoneme, I needed to make sure that the wordplay for exordia produced a word that made sense. Another one to add to the knowledge banks.
  18. 16:24.

    You can put me down for not knowing all of the unknowns, apart from mithered. Based on my experience of living in a couple of bits of Northern England it’s more akin to bothered than flustered, both in the sense of “stop mithering me while I’m doing t’crossword,” and “I can’t always be mithered to do t’Jumbo.”

    Regarding Ulaca’s query as to my new man-ness, I have no piercings (or indeed tattoos) missen, but Mrs Penfold and the Penfold daughters have 7 holes between their 6 ears. Or possibly 8.

    Like just about everyone else I had to biff the couriers. Whereas Pootle thought “DISPATCH” sounded better, I thought it looked better. I’d be interested to know from the experts which of us made our decision based on a phoneme. On second thoughts, no I wouldn’t.

    I had no problem with funny as a noun. A while back on Anax’s clue writing competition site I awarded first prize to 7dPenguin’s “Drink from funny taps (5) in the contest for PUNCH (PUN +C +H).

    2. What a family! Not only northern, but with an indeterminate number of ears. There must be a phoneme to describe that.
  19. 12:59 for me.

    I dithered far too long over 15ac, unable to find anything that looked like part of a gym in the answer. I doubt if former Regimental Sergeant Major Watt, who took us for gym at Dotheboys, would have recognised SPA in that context! Eventually I spotted DITCH (thus eliminating DESPATCH – phew!) and finally remembered what a RIDER was. (There actually was one of those in the Dotheboys gym since that’s where we were weighed and measured each term.) That and WANNABE held me up badly at the end.

    I’ve been told that MITHERED is found in Yorkshire, but I’ve never heard it used where I was brought up so perhaps it’s confined to the more southerly parts.

    1. MITHERED was familiar to me because my Dad has always said it, but he’s from near Stamford. Make of that what you will!
  20. Well, bless my me! By some stroke of fortune, I am under 2 Severs for what I think is the first and last time. 21 minutes, finishing with AM-DRAM and RYE, and correcting my earlier dithered to MITHERED.

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