Times 26257 – Period Piece

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Standard Monday fare, with a somewhat loose definition cum somewhat tricky anagram indication at 6d holding me up at the end and causing a brief panic, as I considered I might be in unknown word territory. 30 minutes.

ACROSS

1. SLALOM – LO[t] in SLAM.
5. GREENERY – GREENE + RY.
9. WISTERIA – ‘climber’; WIT about S + AIRE (river in a minor English county).
10. INNATE – INN +AT + E.
11. TERRACOTTA – ‘statue’ (the most famous being in Xian); anagram* of TREAT ACTOR.
13. LAYS – ‘poets may write them’ (especially if he’s long-winded and called Macaulay); sounds like ‘laze’.
14. STAY – SAY around [lu]T[on].
15. AGGRESSIVE – ‘fierce’ (the animal is a mere…); ASS around GG + RE + IVE (‘the writer’s’, as in ‘the writer [of this] crossword has enjoyed himself’, which translates in Crosswordspeak to ‘I’ve enjoyed myself’). Time for a lie-down.
18. CROSS-BENCH – basically it’s just CROSS + BEN (our ‘fellow’ – Bill’s mate) + CH[eck], and not ‘upper-house’, which wouldn’t have a hyphen anyway. Well, not unless you wanted to use it as a noun modifier…
20. JEHU – EH in JU[ry] for the Lewis Hamilton of his day, who would have been done for dangerous driving causing death, except that Jezebel was already dead when he drove his chariot over her.
21. ESSE – ‘existence’ (hidden); Oxford defines ‘esse’ as ‘essential nature or essence’, so I’ll leave it to Nietzscheans and the odd Wittgensteinian to knock each other about their noumenal heads over this one.
23. REGENERACY – REGENCY around ERA.
25. VIENNA – VIE + ANN reversed.
26. CREDIBLE – CR + EDIBLE.
28. FLAMENCO – FLO around AMEN + C.
29. AUGURY – A + U + R in GUY.

DOWNS

2. LEICESTER – ‘city’ (famous for crisps, curries and Michelle Lineker’s ex); LEISTER (a pronged spear handy for catching salmon if you don’t have a grizzly bear to hand) around CE.
3. LITURGY – LURGY around IT.
4. MAR[ch]
5. GRAFT – double definition.
6. ELIZABETHAN – ‘historical’ doesn’t seem enough to indicate the period; BLAZE IN THE A*.
7. NONPLUS – N + ONUS around PL.
8. RATTY – ‘short’; RAY around TT.
12. CHAMBERLAIN – does any PM have a worse reputation? MBE in CHAR + LAIN.
16. GEN – double definition.
17. VEHICULAR – A LURCH IVE*.
19. STERN+UM
20. JAR+RING
22. SPILL – double definition (a spill is a thin strip of wood for lighting fires).
24. GECKO – G + K in ECO.
27. ETA – reversal of ‘ate’ (‘worried’).

35 comments on “Times 26257 – Period Piece”

  1. Didn’t parse MAR, didn’t know JEHU or the other meaning of SPILL, but still a bit of a walk in the park. As it should be on a Monday.

    LOI ELIZABETHAN, same as our worthy blogger. Thanks setter and U.

  2. Not rising to the bait … sorry. Perfectly good clue I thought and interesting how the Latin infinitive has become a noun.

    But agree … classic Monday stuff. Even the unknown biblical king, the ancient hoon, was obvious from the cryptic.

  3. I imagine we’ve had JEHU before, or I don’t think I’d have known it (it’s also a common noun, derived of course from the Bible guy). Slowed down a bit by the enumeration of 11ac–I’d spell it as two words–and by not figuring where to divide REGENCY. WISTERIA appeared suddenly to me from checkers; it took me a bit after that to see badinage as the definition of WIT. ESSE is yet another NYT standard.
  4. A couple of minutes over my target half-hour for this one in which there was a fair amount of biffing going on followed by reverse engineering.

    REGENERACY is a bit of a mouthful and I can’t be sure I have met it before, but having spotted REGENCY it was just matter of finding a three-letter word for ‘time’ that made sense. I didn’t know JEHU, but then neither did I on the last occasion it appeared in October 2013! The time lost trying to justify LANCASTER at 2dn lost me my target.

        1. We Lancastrian alumni calculate our importance by our James May number. The degree of separation involves being mentioned on a website (not established by oneself) along with JM. That’s May #1 (degree of separation). A link from there is #2 … and so on. At least we don’t have funny handshakes. Anything like that for Reading?
          1. No idea about Reading, I’m afraid – only visited the place a couple of times during the course of my PhD.

            Oxford, on the other hand…well, handshakes were the least of it.

            1. From what I remember of trundling down the A4074 to Reading Uni in the sixties, the parties were less decadent but the girls were less pretentious. Ulaca I am trying to relate to “handshakes were the least of it” … thankfully nothing comes to mind.
  5. 11m of iPad-fumbling, so pretty straightforward. Past crosswords gave me ESSE and JEHU: these things do stick occasionally. I didn’t have a clue about LEICESTER: I think I vaguely remember seeing the spear before now that you mention it but I didn’t see it while solving, or the slightly unusual CE for ‘engineer’. I suppose the idea of a church running into a spear didn’t really work.

    Edited at 2015-11-16 07:55 am (UTC)

  6. Usual 30 minutes. Lancaster, Castlereagh, Geneva? …. and then it is so hard to get them out of your head. COY (Clue of yesterday) to Dean’s 12d.
  7. . . . with distractions in the areas of FANDANGO and WISTARIA, although the latter was sorted out by actually reading the clue. I knew ESSE from the latin but not its meaning here. Otherwise, steady Monday stuff.
  8. 30mins or so, so about average here…

    LEICESTER was biffed (never heard of the spear, don’t think I’ve come across CE for engineer), and dnk JEHU. All others fine… lots of familiar crosswordese here: lines=RY, green=ECO, for example=SAY to help things along.

  10. 19.18, which includes an interruption from a cold caller who was pleasant enough for me to be mellow. So not the most sprightly of solves, with the main issues around ground covered above.
    I knew Jehu well enough, not least because I can remember from my youth all the gory/sexy stories from the Scriptures that God put there specifically to embarrass Sunday School teachers, but I wonder if this is the last place on earth where the once-common use of biblical archetype characters is still happening?
  11. 17:03. 11a and 6d my last two in…. I knew the former was surely not TETRACATOR. Thanks for parsing 15a. I’d not heard of a LEISTER, but I could see the Chartered Engineer, and didn’t remember what JEHU was famous for. Typical Monday fare, I think. 12d my fvourite.
  12. 26 minutes, so pretty straightforward Monday fare,with a fare number solved in the first ten minutes. I struggled a bit at the end to get 2 and 9. For some time I thought the city was LA and the answer was a spear. When the penny dropped I did recognise the spear.
    Chamber defines ESSE as ‘actual existence.’ From my somewhat rusty recollection of University days, I think Sir Thomas Aquinas is more relevant than Wittgensetin or Nitsche, distinguishing between ‘being’ (esse) and ‘essence’.
  13. I meant ‘fair number’, of course. We didn’t have any ‘fare numbers’ today, though I suppose 2 could have been a cheese, but I didn’t solve in the first ten minutes.
  14. A little under 8 minutes for what was a straightforward but still intelligence-necessitating Monday puzzle.

    A bit red-faced that I was thinking to myself “what is a nat and who would lodge in one? Oh well, it’s surely right” even as I pressed the submit button, but the penny did drop shortly afterwards.

  15. Drive Like Jehu was a San Diegan post-hardcore band in the early 1990s, by the way, so no one has any excuse for not knowing it really!

    Edited at 2015-11-16 12:52 pm (UTC)

  16. Couldn’t parse LEICESTER and saw it very late given that I grew up there. I thought 18 might be FRONT BENCH for a while until I realised that I didn’t know any bones that fitted with the resulting N_E_N_M crossers. Altogether about 50 minutes, but needed aids to check the legitimacy of JEHU
  17. Glad to have made the acquaintance of Jehu – sounds a bit of a lad: fortunately the wordplay was a gimme. Wasted time early on thinking SLALOM must be wrong on the basis that 2dn had to be based around a harpoon, but then when 14 and 18 went in rapidly, everything else fell into place, albeit the Leister was unknown. All pleasant enough.
  18. Not too taxing despite not knowing the spear, the required meaning of SPILL or who JEHU was. About 25 minutes to finish. I was held up also, dyste, thinking of LA the city and looking for a spear as the definition. Regards.
  19. 10 mins, with the last couple of them spent on the ELIZABETHAN/INNATE crossers. I’ve come across LEISTER a few times in puzzles, and because a lot of you don’t seem to have seen it before I can only assume it was in the Guardian and/or the Indy.
  20. Solving time: 38 minutes
    Drink: yes
    Music: no

    I racked up two DNFs over the weekend, attributable to the enormous gulf between the size of brain I have and the size of brain needed to get all the answers. So, I was relieved to finish this one in a (for me) acceptable time.

    I took a long time to spot TERRACOTTA, and was convinced that a TETRACTORA was one of four caryatidesque figures at the corners of a square building. NHO “leister”, but I shall be sure to take one with me next time I go salmon fishing.

  21. A very Monday morning effort from me. 18 minutes but with VIENAA — which is exactly how Midge Ure sang it, isn’t it?

    Struggled mightily with REGENERACY, ELIZABETHAN and TERRACOTTA. But I was rejected by Reading University, so what can you expect?

  22. Thought for a while that I might be on for a PB, but then got distracted by a phone call from an offspring (which I promptly passed over to the boss) and then got a bit bogged down. Oh well.

    Edited at 2015-11-16 07:32 pm (UTC)

  24. 9:35 for me. I started out with hopes of a clean sweep: 1ac and 5ac went straight in, followed by the rest of the NW corner (no problem with LEISTER – an old friend). However, 5dn brought the attempt to a juddering halt: I couldn’t see any remotely feasible answer. Continuing with the downs, I had no problem with 6dn (ELIZABETHAN) but 7dn and 8dn both yielded nothing obvious.

    It wasn’t until some time later – when I realised that the answer to 7dn really had to be NONPLUS – that I realised that RYEGRASS (RY + E + (Gunter) GRASS), which I’d taken to be the rock-solid answer to 5ac, must have an alternative.

    In case anyone isn’t familiar with “double entendre” clues, I’ve written about them here. It’s comparatively rare to find such a perfect example.

    I’ve known about JEHU since the days long ago when we used to sing The Darkie Sunday School on coach trips. I somehow doubt whether it’s sung nowadays, at least not with that title and the original chorus! It included the following verse (according to the version I knew):

    Jehu had a chariot, 92 horse-power,
    He drove it round the Holy Land at 90 miles an hour,
    But he had to go more carefully when passing through Jezreel,
    ‘Cos little bits of Jezebel got tangled in the wheel.

      1. I don’t understand your reasoning. You seem to be implying that the clue “First-class accountants climbing tree (6)” (to take a recent example from No. 26,257, 20 August 2015) should have read “First-class accountants climbing type of tree (6)” or “First-class accountants climbing tree? (6)”.

        In case you’re doubting that ryegrass can be classified as “vegetation”, I cite the first example under “vegetation” from ODO: Clear all grass or other vegetation from the area that you have selected.

        1. to clarify, what I mean is that while ‘greenery’ is defined (in ODO, for example) as ‘vegetation’, ‘ryegrass’ is merely a type of grass.
          1. Ryegrass is grass; grass is vegetation; ryegrass is vegetation. Where’s the problem?

            (There is absolutely no rule which says that definition part of a clue must appear verbatim in the definition of the answer as given in some dictionary. While unindicated “definition by example” is generally frowned on, this would not be the case here: “ryegrass” is not being used to define VEGETATION.)

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