Times 26949 – oh God it’s Scottish but not a God

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
To say I struggled with this would be an understatement. As usual, ninety per cent of it went in pleasantly in fifteen minutes or so. I was left with a few blanks scattered around the grid, notably at 9a, 13a, 23a and 4d. I suddenly saw how 23a worked, having been trying wrongly to reverse the whole word. Then 4d was sorted with uxorial aid. I had never heard the expression (now obselete I guess) used in 9a, but what else could it be? But 13a, totally evaded me. I am ashamed to say I had to resort to crosswordsolver.org to check my guess from wordplay. In my opinion obscure Scottish dialect words with no current usage should not be answers in the world’s best daily crossword, but maybe that’s because I’m not Scottish. We did try haggis, neeps and tatties last week, but we shan’t be making that an annual event either. I like a drop of a good malt though and the golf courses are pretty good.

Across
1 Councillor keeps coins out of circulation (6)
CROWNS – CR = councillor, OWNS = keeps.
5 Search and take from island for armed soldier (8)
RIFLEMAN – RIFLE = search and take from, MAN as in the Isle of.
9 Gay arrest traditionally undertaken by women (4-6)
PINK-COLLAR – As mentioned in the blurb above, I didn’t know this variation of blue-collar and white-collar, but eventually decided it must have been once used as an acceptable term, if not nowadays. COLLAR colloquially means arrest, and PINK pride is Gay pride so pink must mean gay.
10 Dodge Oscar in Strand (4)
PLOY – O for Oscar, inserted into PLY for strand, as in wool.
11 Virtually useless, I’ve dropped out (2,6)
IN EFFECT – INEFFECTIVE = useless, drop the IVE.
12 Edison with eccentric characters working for same goal (6)
ONSIDE – (EDISON)*.
13 In Scotland, divine drop of essence added to bath (4)
SPAE – Add E from Essence to SPA = bath. I was looking for a Scottish God or a dialect word meaning holy. But apparently it means to tell the future, divine in that sense. See above for this week’s rant.
15 Wary learner gets stuck into jumbo after six (8)
VIGILANT – VI = six, GIANT = jumbo, insert L.
18 Commiserated as Tory Party came first (8)
CONDOLED – Go down a snake if you first thought CONSOLED. CON = Tory, DO = party, LED = came first. Ive never seen it as a verb, it’s usually ‘give condolcences’, but no reason why not.
19 Come across notes, second turned over (4)
MEET – ME and TE are tonic notes, reverse the TE.
21 Sportsperson who might make pounds? (6)
FENCER – Cryptic DD, a fencer could build a pound to keep sheep in for example.
23 Coins with wrong edging recalled — disorder results (8)
NEUROSIS – Wrong = SIN, reverse it and insert EUROS = coins. Took me too long as I was thinking disorder in the sense of entropy or chaos, and trying to insert some coins which were also reversed. Overthinking.
25 Tool for trimming notices picked up (4)
ADZE – homophone, sounds like ADS = notices.
26 Cross Yellow River to the west to make complaint (7,3)
CHICKEN POX – CHICKEN = yellow, cowardly; PO = river in Lombardy, X = cross.
27 Save to join forces, pocketing rupees ruthlessly (8)
BRUTALLY – BUT = save, except; ALLY = join forces; insert an R for rupees.
28 Good man killed after reversing railway vehicle (6)
MARTYR – RY = railway, TRAM = vehicle, reverse all. Nice definition and easy to think the def. was a vehicle and good meant G.

Down
2 Step down, freeing son to take command (5)
REIGN – RESIGN = step down, lose the S.
3 All those running after train in northern city (9)
WAKEFIELD – I put in FIELD for all those running, and went through my limited repertoire of cities oop north; Shef, Hudders, Chester, then wondered if Wakefield was indeed a city not a town. As WAKE could just about mean ‘TRAIN’. Apparently Wakefield has been a city since 1888, so up till now I have been underestimating its glory.
4 Hot fruit loaf, only one left (6)
STOLEN – I thought Stollen was a sticky pastry thing, but Mrs K assures me it could be called a fruit loaf. Delete one of the L’s.
5 Weight ratio needs revision in Einstein’s theory (8,7)
RELATIVE DENSITY – Insert (NEEDS)* into RELATIVITY, a fascnating subject on which Albert Einstein had two theories, Specific and General, dealing with different topics. RD is the ratio of the density of a substance to the density of a standard, usually water for a liquid or solid, and air for a gas.
6 Leave hard-water deposit beside provincial lake (8)
FURLOUGH – FUR deposits in your electirc kettle, and a LOUGH is a lake in Northern Ireland, as opposed to a loch in Scotland.
7 Narthex possibly housing public displays (5)
EXPOS – You don’t need to know that a Narthex is a church porch, this isn’t the Mephisto; the answer is a hidden word NARTH(EX POS)SIBLY.
8 Skipping gap between two articles on church (9)
AVOIDANCE – VOID being a gap goes between A and AN then CE for church.
14 Food bound to be consumed by traveller under pressure (9)
PROVENDER – P for pressure, ROVER = traveller consumes END = bound. End as in limit.
16 One taking off criminal on parole grabbing maiden (9)
LAMPOONER – (ON PAROLE M)*.
17 Caller troubled guards in charge of minister (8)
CLERICAL – Insert IC (in charge) into (CALLER)*.
20 Union men originally supporting place to drop off rubbish (6)
BUNKUM – U M initial letters of union men, after BUNK a place to drop off i.e. sleep.
22 Contrasting temperatures worry trickster (5)
CHEAT – C for cold and H for hot, EAT for worry.
24 Once a key constituent in vote opposed radical youth at first (5)
IVORY – Initial letters of In Vote Opposed Radical Youth.

49 comments on “Times 26949 – oh God it’s Scottish but not a God”

  1. I’m Scottish and I’ve never heard of ‘spae’. Even the website spellchecker doesn’t recognise it.
  2. Seems I found the hard ones easy and vice versa. Held up by CROWNS and PLOY, in retrospect inexcusable.
  3. 20:40. I thought this had a bit of an old-fashioned, fusty feel to it, and I found it a bit of a grind.
    To me ADZE is rather an obscure term, so cluing it with a homophone seems a bit mean-spirited. However no-one has mentioned it so I assume it’s perfectly familiar to everyone else. It’s actually perfectly familiar to me, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across it outside crosswords.
    SPAE is at least as obscure of course, but the wordplay led you to the answer.

    Edited at 2018-01-31 03:56 pm (UTC)

  4. Didn’t spot the Nina in today’s QC and didn’t get very far with this.
    12 clues solved, mainly on the RHS and including Consoled.
    Spae brutal if you don’t have any of the letters to start with. David
  5. I can’t remember my time, but I had mixed feelings on this puzzle – loved the clue for RELATIVE DENSITY, and I live in Buncombe, so BUNKUM was a write-in, but surely there was a better option than PINK-COLLAR, which was my last in.
  6. 53:30 similar hold-ups as others. Pink-collar eventually went in on the basis of blue or white collar and if a gay pound is a pink pound then a gay arrest must be a pink collar. Reliant on fairly sure-footed word play for Spae. Furlough took a while as did my last two bunkum and chicken pox.
  7. 37 minutes (in my world that’s good), and of course I had to put in SPAE from the wordplay. The last few minutes were spent being careful (NEUROSIS, not NEUROTIC and PINK-COLLAR finally seeming much more likely than MINK-COLLAR or SILK-COLLAR, which otherwise would have fit the checkers). Otherwise pretty straightforward.

    By the way, there obviously must have been CROWNS once upon a time, but all I can remember when I first came to Britain were half crowns. How very British to have just the halves but no longer the wholes.

    Edited at 2018-01-31 07:47 pm (UTC)

    1. In modern times Crown coins were minted to mark special occasions e.g. the Coronation in 1953 and the death of Winston Churchill in 1965, but nothing after 1981, the wedding of Charles and Diana. Since then we’ve had the Golden and Diamond Jubilees without further Crowns so it would appear a decision has been made to drop the idea.
  8. I tried PLENUM instead of BUNKUM first (it fits the wordplay (U+MEN* supporting PL), shame about the definition). Also not heard of PINK COLLAR but it was clearly correct. SPAE was not a problem – not an everyday word but I have come across it in literature a few times.
  9. Oh dear, oh dear. I’m sure it speaks volumes about my own NEUROSIS that, when I finish in a decent time I conclude that it was an easy puzzle, but when I DNF I attribute it to lack of brain.

    In fact, this was less of a DNF and more of a DNEGC. 1ac, 9ac, 3d, 20d… more white-space than an estate agent’s smile.

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