Times 26131 – Me, I’m blaming the set-up

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Similar to Verlaine on this one, with one wrong. I may have taken a little longer, though, with half of my 47 minutes being taken up by a very tricky NW corner.

Now to discover which of this excellent set rolled off the centre of the fairway and into the gravelly bunker…

ACROSS

1. RUNABOUT – what a top-class clue to tee off with, requiring precision and positively discouraging the biffers; ‘light car’ is the slightly odd literal (ODO has ‘small car or light aircraft’), derived from AB (‘sailor’) in (fielded by) RUN OUT (‘dismiss’). [see Galspray below for an alternative parsing]
5. SCREAM – SCRAM around E; the literal is nounal, as in ‘Monty’s a right laugh’ / ‘Aye, he’s a scream’.
9. COMPENDIA – ‘summaries’: Collins has the required sense, ‘a concise but comprehensive summary of a larger work’; O[ld] + MP (‘member’) + END (‘last’ – again Collins is helpful: ‘the last section or part; (as modifier) ⇒ the end office’) in CIA.
11. HOOTS – ‘impatient cry’: typically of a Scotch person or a stage Scot; SHOOT with the S moved to the end.
12. THROWER – T(HR)OWER.
13. SUBSOIL – SUBS (‘sub-editors’) + OIL.[amended – thanks to anon]
15. NEXT TO NOTHING – give this a good biff and you’ll reach the short par 4 12th in 1; N + EX + anagram* of NOT TONIGHT.
16. PRONOUNCEMENT – another biff will get you to the short par 4 16th; E MEN in PRONOUN (‘what may be their’) + CT.
20. GNOCCHI – last letter of [reachin]G + COCHIN*.
21. FREEBIE – a reversal of E[uropean] + BEER in IF.
23. ADIEU – U[niversity] with A DIE (‘pass’); the word that triggered one of the all-time great lyrics: ‘adieu, adieu, to yieu and yieu and yieu’.
24. GUILTLESS – I[rish] + L (‘lad originally’) in GUTLESS (‘chicken’).
25. SIMPER – simply SIMP[l]ER . Very nice.
26. ADJACENT – A + DJ (‘club employee’) + CENT.

DOWNS

1. RECITE – as we turn for home, the tee-shot is arguably more demanding than the first on the outward 9; the literal is ‘deliver’ and the cunning wordplay takes the form of a pesky substitution, requiring the second C of RECCE (to ‘case’ the joint) to be changed to IT. Projected to play the hardest hole on the course today.
2. NAMUR – I had my Poulter moment here, driving out of bounds and endangering the guard on the freight train chugging by, putting ‘Numar’, even though I parsed it correctly, because I just can’t think upside down; yes, it’s a city, county and province in Wallonia and R[ugby] U[nion] MAN reversed. An excellent clue of its type, i.e. where those like me who don’t know the answer can get it via clear wordplay. Maybe…sometimes.
3. BEESWAX – BAX (the English composer Arnold) around EESW (different quarters); literal ‘polish’.
4. UNDERSTANDING – I drove straight into the fescue grass typing ‘over-’ in confidently. The literal is ‘perception’ and the wordplay is worthy of the worst 70s’ British sitcom.
6. COHABIT – ‘live in sin’; first letters of C[onfusing] O[ne’s] H[usband] + A BIT.
7. ECONOMIST – I took out the driver and wellied this down 18; we get John Maynard from SIMON (‘simple chap’ of nursery rhyme fame) reversed in E COT (which can mean a shelter for livestock or indeed for humans, as in modern ‘cottage’).
8. MISALIGN – ‘dress badly?’ is the literal, with dress in its sense of soldiers coming into line; IS (‘one’s) in MALIGN.
10. ABSENCE OF MIND – I’m not sure I’ve ever some across the opposite of ‘presence of mind’; anyway, it’s M in BOND’S FIANCEE*.
14. NEOLOGISM – I was thinking numismatically, but I guess we were mint to; ON LIMOGES* for a word coinage.
15. SPYGLASS – I can imagine Basil Brush delivering this line: SPY LASS around G[oldfinger].
17. OCCLUDE – not a word I use every day, but I imagine the Romans used it quite a bit; OC (‘Officer Commanding’) followed by LUD (‘law lord’, who has come off the bench quite a lot recently) in CE (‘church’).
18. ELECTRA – ‘complex woman’; LATER* around EC.
19. BEDSIT – ‘pad’; BEDS (abbreviation for Bedfordshire) + IT (‘exactly what’s needed’, as in ‘Jordan Spieth has really got it’).
22. BREVE – ‘long note’; two semi-breves, in fact, not unnaturally. Not used in musical notation much these days, but if you want to see how it is represented, check this out. The wordplay is B[achelor] + REV + [wrot]E.

49 comments on “Times 26131 – Me, I’m blaming the set-up”

  1. A solve in two halves. Got through most of it quickly enough before getting bogged down for ages in Blogger’s Corner. Eventually COMPENDIA fell, after which all was revealed.

    COD predictably to 1ac. U, I parsed this slightly differently, taking “dismiss sailor fielding” as a whole. Mind you I would have clued it as “what India needed to do to beat SA in the World Cup”, which is why I’m not a setter.

    Thanks setter and blogger. Sorry I missed the end of the golf, sounds like it was an incredible finish.

    Edited at 2015-06-22 04:11 am (UTC)

  2. I don’t quite see how your parsing works, but that may be my tiredness. I have, however, revisited my rendering of the clue to account for the ‘light’, which I had omitted.
    1. The way to dismiss the sailor (or de Villiers or Border) when fielding is to run AB out.
      1. Isn’t ‘fielding’ a little awkward in that parsing? Not that it isn’t a little Yoda-ish in mine.
        1. I would contend that it’s a bit Yoda-ish in my parsing, but that the clue doesn’t quite work otherwise. Agree to disagree we may.
            1. I parsed it Galspray’s way but I can’t make any sense of the surface reading.
  3. 36 minutes for this one. Only one particular hold-up, at 24ac, where I originally biffed GUILELESS.
  5. A perfectly average 17.35 for me, with NAMUR going in unparsed ondistant recollection of bits of Belgium. Post solve, looked up Mr Ruman Hooker, the celebrated chemist/golfer or something, and anything to do with angling. While solving, I was strangely tempted by NAMER, on the bizarre assumption that hook and name might be equivalent.
    This was a decent not-easy solve, elegantly and entertainingly blogged (though I’m still not clear which one was the bogey adding 1 to an otherwise perfect round). I’m more familiar (in many ways) with “absent minded” than its nounal equivalent in this grid, but heigh ho.
    1. I not only managed to get the capital of Wallonia wrong, I also managed to get wrong which was my wrong one, writing down the right answer.

      Thanks for saving my blushes so tactfully.

      Ulaca – more JB Holmes than Jordan Spieth

  6. … your regular Monday stroll to the 19th. Had all sorts of trouble with HOOTS, trying to make “sprig” = HOOT. Wonder if anyone ever says “hoots” these days. Don’t ask me; the “Mc” bit is two generations and several continents away from Scotland.

    Saw RUN(AB)OUT as per our Gal. Though I might have liked “… sailor WHEN fielding…” a bit better.

    Great win for Australia over Brazil. Furthest an Australian football team has ever gone in a World Cup.

    1. The last recorded example must surely be Lord Rockingham’s X1, with its moose, loose aboot this hoose. Worth checking out for the Joyce Grenfell lookalike on the organ looking completely out of place but entirely at home.
      1. I got it from the Tiger magazines (Tiger and Hurricane? Tiger and Jag?) that we subscribed to as kids. In those stories all Scotsmen said “hoots mon” as often as the Aussies said “strewth” and the Frenchmen said “sacre bleu”.

        Don’t know what the Welsh said, but I recall they were all named Taffy.

      2. What a fabulous link! Thank you. Especially liked the wee slipped-in “Och Aye” and the unpredictable key changes. The first, at about 10:15:21, took me by complete surprise. Quite a difference from the Tavener/Isserlis cello stuff I’ve been listening to all day so far.
      3. Also, as it turns out, the Dictionary of the Scots Language (Ulaca to note: not SCOTCH) reveals very little that might be authentic:
        http://www.dsl.ac.uk

        Edited at 2015-06-22 08:16 am (UTC)

  7. 35mins here. With the last 5 spent on BEDSIT. Biffed in RUNABOUT, as I knew if it needed even a smattering of cricket nous, I was never going to work it out from the cryptic. Unlike the u/k NAMUR, which only fell once I’d remembered that a hooker played rugby, not footie. namaf didn’t look right, either.
  8. 12m here. NAMUR the only unknown. Not much to say really, just quite standard, very enjoyable stuff.
  9. Back to about average today with 20:48. I held myself up slightly in the SE by putting BELIE in 22D. It didn’t fit with the definition but I wanted ELI to be the priest. Before I got ELECTRA the anagram in my head kept coming out as TREACLE, which fitted the definition of a woman in Cockney speak, but possibly not the sophisticated.
  10. Steady finish in 25 minutes, tempted by NAMOR (Roman nose = hooker, reversed?) but Namur then rang a bell. I’ll ask my Scottish friend shortly if he ever says Hoots mon, I suspect not, but he knows stuff. CoD 1a. Luckily I had a flutter on Spieth doing it again, although to three putt the last, I know how DJ must feel.
  11. 15 mins. I started quite slowly on this one, but once I got going it all fell into place fully parsed, although it took me a while to see the wordplay for HOOTS and it was my LOI.
  12. 17:33 for me. I had to do 2d on the wordplay, not knowing much Belgian geography. Like others, my favourite was 1a when I finally got it. FOI 14a and then most of the bottom half slipped in quite quickly. Good to see Arnold Bax in 3d. I can think of only two other composers with a name ending in ‘x’ who’s music I have performed or heard in concert – Robert Fayrfax and Jean Françaix. Anyone know any more? LOI SPYGLASS, trying to hold the top of telescope as well as Goldfinger.
        1. Sam Fox had a couple of records in the 80s. I’m doubtful she composed them though.
    2. Back in the day, I came across an album of the music of Johann Joseph Fux, a pleasant enough baroque composer and (it turns out) author of Gradus ad Parnassum, on counterpoint, the only surviving book of J.S. Bach’s personal library of theoretical works. Had to have his music on my shelf just to annoy some people and amuse others.
      A search for the characters x ( in Wiki’s list of composers reveals 20 composers that end up in the “times”, among them Karl Marx, who by sheer serendipity taught music theory at the Johann Joseph Fux Conservatory in Graz from 1939 to 1945. There is also, rather splendidly for our purposes, French opera composer Xavier Leroux.
      We do the research (or at least crib stuff from Wiki) so you don’t have to.
  13. Would have been 10 minutes, except that I submitted with one clue completely untackled. This after I’d just submitted the Concise… with one clue completely untackled. (When I went back to look at it I got the missing answer in a few seconds.)

    I hope I’m not getting black/white colour blindness! That would be a pretty big handicap in the October competition.

    1. Yes anon, you are right. To be honest I didn’t look at the blog in that much detail, for which I apologise to Ulaca.
      1. No need to apologise – I count it as a bonus when people who don’t need the parsing read the explanations.
  15. 14:10, and quite an interesting experience with many clues taking a while to crack but looking easy in hindsight.
    1. That’s almost exactly what I was going to say, except that I solved it in 7:50
  16. Enjoyed this one – all clear and the only one that went in from wordplay alone was NAMUR (Belgium has parts?).
  18. 42minutes, so fairly average for me. I knew of NAMUR because that is where Tristram Shandy’s uncle Toby was wounded in the groin. The widow Wadman spends most of the book trying very delicately to find out how serious the injury is before deciding whether to marry him.
  19. Apologies if I’ve got this wrong…. In 16 ac isn’t ‘their’ a possessive adjective? I think ‘theirs’ is a pronoun, but not ‘their’. Maybe I’ve missed something in the parsing.
    1. The word ‘pronoun’ is like a broad linguistic church, covering a multitude of functions, and in some approaches to categorisation, ‘their’ is classified as a possessive pronoun rather than a possessive adjective. ‘Determiner’ as a descriptor has become popular during the last 30 years or so.

      Edited at 2015-06-22 04:39 pm (UTC)

      1. Thank you Ulaca – appreciate your reply. As a French teacher, I’m comparing ‘their’ and ‘theirs’ with their French equivalents, where ‘le leur’, ‘la leur’ and ‘les leurs’ are pronouns meaning ‘theirs’, whereas ‘leur(s)’ meaning ‘their’ is a possessive adjective, rather than a pronoun, as it doesn’t replace a noun. If you consider the sentences ‘Our house is big, but theirs is bigger’ and ‘Their house is big but ours is bigger’, you can see where I’m coming from: in the first sentence one of the houses is replaced by ‘theirs’; in the second sentence the house that they own is still denoted by the word ‘house’ rather than being replaced. Instead, it is qualified by the adjective ‘their’. But hey, it’s just a crossword clue – maybe I’m overthinking it! 🙂
        1. This also crossed my mind. The OED has “their” as an adjective, and so does the British Council, so I’d tend to go with that.
  20. About 25 minutes, ending with ABSENCE OF MIND because I had misread the enumeration and was trying to find a (4,2,7) combo. RUNABOUT certainly outstanding today. Thanks to the setter and ulaca.
  21. What a delightful puzzle (and strangely enough, for me, I was able to finish it in 44 minutes). Many very enjoyable and amusing clues and I didn’t really find them hard. COD to PRONOUNCEMENT, but other good ones were UNDERSTANDING, SCREAM — I am planning to give a lecture on cryptic crosswords to a German audience (which will require explaining all of the odd meanings English words can have), and this puzzle has many wonderful examples I can use for that. No problem with NAMUR (I once knew someone who lived there), but my LOI was BEDSIT. I know where Luton is (my aerial destination when going to London), but not which county it’s in — still, the Luton area didn’t seem far enough away to be NW or such.
  22. 24 minutes but had NAMOR for the unknown Belgian part – being ROMAN (nose and so hooked) backwards. Hence I have for once to disagree with our esteemed blogger about how helpfully this word was clued!
  23. 10:37 for me, eventually getting going after another depressingly slow start.

    There was a time when NAMUR seemed to come up pretty regularly in the Times crossword. In fact I think that must be where I first came across it many years ago, before I read Tristram Shandy, whose characters also made regular appearances.

  24. Enjoyed this one, although a bit meatier than a typical Monday. Thrown by having to do it in the evening due to child and dog duties but no problem with NAMUR though as a 30+ year veteran of the middle of the front row.

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