Times 26163

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Another of those puzzles which at first read over the tea and toast looked rather impenetrable, but once the unscrambling began it flowed well and took me half an hour or so without rushing; one or two needed a second look to get the parsing right. With Q and X early on I thought it might be a pangram but there’s no Z.

Across
1 LIMITED – LID = hat, around MITE = small child; def. defined.
5 TERMINI – TERM = name, I, N = name, I; def. extremities.
9 FIX – Double definition.
10 LEMON SQUASH – LEMON = a feeble sort, SQUASH = game, def.drink.
11 INCIDENT – CIDE(R) = short drink, inside INN = pub, before T = start of ‘the’; def. event.
12 PINTER – NT = many books, inside PIER = mole, def. dramatist, Harold.
15 MINX – MIN(I) = short skirt, wanting I, X = kiss; def. hussy.
16 ETON JACKET – I’m not happy with this clue. I had STUN JACKET, not properly explained, until Anon below put me right, as ETON reversed = NOTE = reminder. JACK = rating and ET = extremely EleganT. If I’d been to Eton I might have worn, and so known of, an Eton Jacket. Item of clothing seems a bit loose for something so obscure.
18 CHAIRWOMAN – CHARWOMAN = daily, insert I, def. leader of meeting.
19 SNUG – GUNS may be called ‘heaters’ in the USA; reversed, def. small bar. For non-UK solvers, the snug is a separate, cosy part of the bar in an old British pub, where regulars often sit. Or maybe there are snugs elsewhere?
22 OPEN UP – O = old, PEN = writer, UP = standing; def. pioneer.
23 MITIGATE – MATE = partner. Insert II (eleven) and G (middle of night). Insert T (time) into that. Def. temper.
25 ANYTHING BUT – (AT NIGHT BUY)*; anagrind ‘new’, def. certainly not.
27 ADO – Hidden in heAD Off; def. trouble.
28 ERASMUS – SUMS ARE reversed, def. famous scholar.
29 EMPATHY – Insert MP A into (THEY)*; def. fellow feeling.

Down
1 LEFTISM – MS = documents, I, reversed, under LEFT = abandoned; def. political views.
2 MEXICAN WAVE – Anagram of (MANIAC WE’VE X), the X = by, def. moving crowd.
3 TOLEDO – TOLD = ordered, insert E, O = round; def. Iberian city.
4 DOMINATION – I MOD = one government department, upset = DOMI; NATION = country; def. tyranny.
5 TUNA – NUT = buff, as in expert, reversed = TUN, A = second of waves; def. swimmer.
6 REQUITAL – RE = on, QUIT = leave, AL = odd letters of ABLE, def. amends.
7 IDA – AID = help, the A moves ‘south’; def. girl.
8 INHERIT – Anagram of (IN THE IR), the A being removed from AIR (no answer’); def. be left.
13 TAKING APART – Def. criticism; taking a part is what an actor hopes to be doing.
14 INSATIABLE – (BANALITIES)*, anagrind ‘used originally’, def. someone who is gannet-like.
17 BROUGHAM – A sort of carriage; apparently pronounced ‘BROOM’ by those who know about these things.
18 CHORALE – CHORE = what needs, alas, to be done; insert AL = a line; def. hymn. This was easier that I’d feared at first, as I had begun to remember names of hymns from my religious upbringing.
20 GREGORY – GREY = gloomy, insert GO = game, R = rook; def. chap.
21 TIP TOP – POT, PIT would be shoot, quarry; def. of the highest order.
24 ONUS – BONUS would be extra, remove opening B, def. responsibility.
26 YEA – YEA(R) = 3/4 of year, sort of nine months; def. emphatic agreement. Right on!

48 comments on “Times 26163”

  1. 12:36 here, solved online for a change after printing it out to do on the train, only to find that they’d all been cancelled due to a fatality on the line at Leighton Buzzard.

    16ac ETON JACKET was my last one in, needed all the checkers to see it.

  2. 19:49 … your description matches my experience precisely, Pip — seemed hard but flowed once a few were in, which is maybe as a good cryptic should be.

    Last in ADO, a red herring and a half.

    COD … MINX, just because it’s a brilliant word. On which, is there a Ximinean reason why it has to be “one kiss” rather than the more natural “a kiss”?

    I assume the “broom” pronunciation of BROUGHAM is how the right sort keep the great unwashed out of their carriages: “If you don’t know how to pronounce it you are certainly not getting in it.”

    2. Hi Sotira. Its “short skirt wanting one” to clue MINI minus the final “I” then X=kiss
    3. Reminds one of W.S. Gilbert’s quip when he was standing on the steps outside his London club one rainy evening when another member mistook him for the doorman and shouted at him: “Call me a cab!”. Quick as a flash, Gilbert replied: “Certainly, Sir, you’re a four-wheeler”. “What do you mean, you impertinent fellow!”. “Well. Sir, you asked me to call you a cab, and I could hardly call you hansom!”
  3. I knew of Eton collars–ugly things (one of the reasons I never went to Eton)–and the K seemed to require JACKET, so… Only afterwards did I parse it. Biffed PINTER as well, and GREGORY (knew Gloomy Gus; wondered if there was a Gloomy Gregory as well).LOI was MEXICAN WAVE, which I’d never heard of; and the X was a long time coming. Also didn’t know anything about gannets and their desires. A number of COD candidates: 12ac, 16ac, 6d, 8d.

    Edited at 2015-07-29 08:31 am (UTC)

    1. Mexican wave was my FOI. I think they caught on during/after the World Cup in Mexico in 1986. I thought they were common at US sports events Kevin. Do you not go or are they called something else?
      1. I do not go–for one thing, I’m in Japan–but in any case we call it The Wave, punkt. Never came across the Mexican part.
  4. Another straightforward puzzle that gave no problems but provided a gentle canter

    ETON JACKET is obscure but crops up reasonably often and “rating extremely elegant” is a giveaway for JACKET so not really difficult. Never even considered “stun jacket”

    All a bit homogenised though – no stand out clues

  5. 18.40 and put me in the slow starter camp too, with only the bottom line going in on first read through the across clues. Worked my way steadily upwards after that but was delayed by a knee-jerk Eton collar. An enjoyable puzzle with some neat clues.
  6. Untimed but about 30 minutes. Some I do faster, some slower but this for some reason my Goldilocks level of satisfaction (puzzle rather than time). Managed to get out of Stun into Eton Jacket though first time for either. It’s about as known as the Eton Crop hairstyle I’d have thought which is enough. Loved your ‘def. of the highest order’ for 21 pk, an unintentional with which I concur.
  9. My COD to 27a as well.

    I spent too long trying to stick a letter on the front of ail or ill to mean in the centre.

    1. I didn’t see the hidden word and got to the answer via DADO minus the first D. A dado rail in the centre of the wall?? 🙂
  10. Bit of a slog for me but steady progress kept me at it and I was pleased to get there eventually. REQUITAL seemed unfamiliar though I am aware of other derivatives of ‘requite’. SOED has it as Scottish and ‘rare’.

    I don’t recall seeing ‘eleven’ cluing II before but it’s so obvious a device it surely must have come up. Using it in ‘between eleven and midnight’ is a great idea though and makes this my COD.

    Edited at 2015-07-29 08:35 am (UTC)

  11. Comfortable middle-of-the-road solve. Surprised that ETON JACKET gave trouble. As already noted, it’s not all that uncommon, and the clue is very fair. INHERIT and ERASMUS have great surface readings but ADO for COD.
  12. 17 mins. I thought this was a well-constructed puzzle that didn’t lend itself to a lot of biffing. I completed the bottom half a lot faster than the top half, and I finished with LEFTISM after LIMITED. I had absolutely no idea that BROUGHAM was a homophone of broom.
  13. My laptop decided to make things interesting for me by giving me a 3 second delay between keypresses and anything appearing on screen – correcting typos was a massive pain! Enjoyable puzzle despite the uphill struggle and at least having to slow down a bit means I didn’t submit with any silly errors again.

    I never would have guessed BROUGHAM was so pronounced. Can one catch a brougham to Frome?

  14. 22:13, using my usual technique that if I cannot see anything immediately at the top, I start from the end. Pleasant enough once started and always a pleasure to see my fellow alumnus Erasmus.
  15. A slow start (my solving isn’t going well this week due to a heavy cold) but I speeded up towards the end, finishing in 11:48.
  16. 34:39. A fairly sedate solve in part due to trying to keep one eye on the cricket after our great start this morning.

    LOI was BROUGHAM. I’d got as far as it sounding like broom but had never heard of the carriage so the spelling was a lucky educated guess!

  17. Same as a lot of above: started slowly (ADO), dnk pronunciation of BROUGHAM, toyed with stun before seeing ETON. All parsed except for CHAIRWOMAN, where I assumed daily=CHAR, and I didn’t see where the WOMAN came from. Doh!
  18. 14:01 with a nagging doubt that either or both of Gregory and ado (!!!) might be wrong as I couldn’t parse either. D’oh.

    Didn’t know a mole was a sort of pier. Is the QM sopping that being a DBE?

    1. I didn’t know a mole was a pier either, but then when I decided that no other playwright would fit I heard the very faint tinkling of a bell. Sure enough, last time it came up (a couple of years ago) I commented:

      this was a puzzle that I hope will have cemented some half-knowns in my memory: “mole” (which appeared recently)…

      No such luck.

      Edited at 2015-07-29 03:43 pm (UTC)

      1. I just looked back myself and curiously I didn’t say anything about pier. What is even more curious is that I said I’d remembered “restharrow” from a previous puzzle. If you asked me today I’d swear I’d never seen the word before. There’s no hope for some of us.

        Edited at 2015-07-30 07:40 am (UTC)

  19. Fortunately my uncle had a Holden Brougham when I was young. We pronounced it “brahm”, but it didn’t take much of a stretch to solve it.

    My major hold-up was having AIL at 27ac. Just took it for granted that one of the many four-letter words ending in AIL could be twisted to mean centre. Eventually revisited it after staring at G_E_L_Y for far too long.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

  20. I think Sotira’s right about this being a shibboleth word so it goes in the dodgy homophone file (slash U-pronunciation). I’ve also heard it pronounced BROME and BRAWM. Unfortunately the grandmother who could have put me right is long deceased. And speaking of things U – I believe those jackets are known as bum-freezers in that particular institution. No explanation needed. It used to be that you could only graduate from them to the tail coat when you reached regulation height – thus prolonging the agonies of adolescence for the late developers. P.S. 15.41 so on the wavelength.

    Edited at 2015-07-29 12:24 pm (UTC)

  21. You are not alone re CHARWOMAN Janie. I’d like to think it means I am getting less sexist with advancing years.
  22. “A rough, dough-faced ploughman went coughing and hiccoughing through Scarborough, and took a Brougham to where a dreadnought was anchored in a lough.”
    This is supposed to contain all the possible pronunciations of “ough”. Or have I missed one?
  23. 19.10. Like others I started very slowly, and only had MINX and EMPATHY after my initial run through the acrosses. This puzzle allowed very little biffing, but rewarded diligent attention to the wordplay, which is just my kind of puzzle. I finished with a big doh! moment when I finally realised that 27ac was a containment clue.
    Good stuff, thanks setter.
  24. Sotira, did you realise that Henry Brougham (1st Baron Brougham and Vaux) was the first to use “the great unwashed”?

    If we think “Brougham” is difficult to pronounce, try “Vaux”.

    1. Extract from Wiki:

      Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton PC (25 May 1803 – 18 January 1873), was an English novelist, poet, playwright, and politician. He was immensely popular with the reading public and wrote a stream of bestselling novels which earned him a considerable fortune. He coined the phrases “the great unwashed”,[1] “pursuit of the almighty dollar”, “the pen is mightier than the sword”, “dweller on the threshold”, as well as the infamous opening line “It was a dark and stormy night”

      1. I’m pretty sure that was Snoopy. 😉

        Edited at 2015-07-29 03:35 pm (UTC)

    2. By George, I didn’t ! And this is marvellous stuff, right up my street. I see Jimbo’s champion, Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton, has the more solid claim. Old Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux, has only an unsubstantiated claim to “The Great Unwashed”. They are approximate contemporaries, so the two of them are presumably still having a rather grand ding-dong over it somewhere ‘up there’. Assuming they made it ‘up there’.

      Either would be a worthy originator of such an unashamedly snobbish line. Both have what Bill Bryson in his essay on British nomenclature called “a kind of glorious redundancy” in the names. Nice to see Bulwer-Lytton going in for triple redundancy, while Brougham counters with not one but two names guaranteed to cause maximum social embarrassment to the unwary (or indeed, unwashed) — Brougham and Vaux. Lytton has to make do with one: Bulwer.

      Talking of all this stuff, before commenting this morning I checked to see if Brougham had made it into any U/non-U classifications (like Olivia, I was thinking shibboleths) and was surprised to learn that Nancy Mitford nicked the term from British linguist Alan S. C. Ross. He wrote, among other things, How To Pronounce It, which sounds well worth digging out —http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/books/2013/03/how-to-pronounce-it-u-and-non-u/ (third paragraph is terrific. I feel posher already).

      Edited at 2015-07-29 05:12 pm (UTC)

      1. Thanks to Jimbo. You are undoubtedly right.
        It’s 45 years since I did History A level.
        Thanks to Sotira for the website – my mouth is aching from saying “soulful dolphin”.
        I still won’t get me onto a brougham.

  25. 46:29. I found this a bit tricky, but at least I got there without aids. I spent ages towards the end trying to find the Z to make it a pangram. I found the NW corner the trickiest – not helped by biffing OPORTO for 3d. 2d had me baffled and I wasn’t sure LEFTISM was a proper word. Count me as another who had no idea that was how the carriage was pronounced…. I thought it was pronounced ‘bruffam’. 20d my COD.
  26. No time to report, but overall of mid range difficulty, I thought. LOI was GREGORY, which obviously had me flummoxed until I realized the game was ‘Go’. COD to ADO, well hidden in plain sight. I thought the carriage was pronounced BROME, since in the 60’s-70’s US car companies used it to name models, such as the Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham (brome). If the MEXCICAN WAVE is the phenomenon where spectators stand sequentially around a stadium at a sporting event, we in the US have always called it just ‘the wave’. I never heard of a MEXICAN WAVE. I thought it originated in Seattle. Regards.
  27. An early evening solve (wanted to follow the cricket through undistracted for obvious reasons). 21.31 my time, mostly spent on the lower right, where (IMHO) the clues were particularly complex. “Between eleven and midnight” one of those you know is going to be jolly clever long before you have enough help to solve it, ADO brilliantly hidden, GREGORY reverse engineered to be sure.
    I saw no particular reason why BROUGHAM shouldn’t be pronounced brush, or hoover, which would also do. Other languages just can’t cope with the genius that is English as she is spoke.
  28. 10:40 of me – not a disaster, but, looking back, I can see how much faster I ought to have been as this was very much my sort of puzzle.
  29. Why does the clue say ‘… one seen by first article …’ when it could just as well say ‘one’? Or does that make the surface unsatisfactory?

    And I was surprised to see that nobody has complained in 23ac about g = midnight, which I thought fell foul of the Gateshead issue.

    1. It’s a perfectly precise wordplay indication, and it improves the surface reading. So why not?
    2. Many weeks later, I’ll complain. Not just the midnight = g, but also the 11 = ii which as Jackt says is original; and I mean that as the worst sort of insult, it’s very Grauniad. This crossword has gone to the dogs in the past year or two: dumbing down, and getting loose.
      Grumpy in Oz, AKA Rob
    1. If the answer is an anagram of BANALITIES + U, you have too many letters, and there is no instruction to remove an I. So the only way for the clue to work is to take ‘used originally’ as the anagram indicator.
      1. Thanks for that Keriothe – I should have spotted there were too many letters!!

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