Times 26953 – Great is Truth, and mighty above all things

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Being a bear of average brain, I rather like puzzles that are on the easier end of the scale. They make me feel a little brighter, and they reduce my SNITCH, while also reducing the difference between my time and that of the speedsters. They are, in a sense, the cruciverbal equivalent of false discriminators in language testing, i.e. items that are often solved correctly by people who do not think and incorrectly by those who do. This appeals to the contrarian in me, not to mention the nasty side of me, which enjoys taking a ringside seat and listening to the bleating of The Hopelessly Unstretched Genius (or THUG).

I jest, of course. But what an opportunity today’s admirable setter missed! With the full resources of various Jewish and Christian Holy Books and Apocrypha to choose from, how disappointing that he (or she, of course) picked the minor prophet of doom, the marvellously named son of Beeri, when s/he had the likes of Eldad and Modad hanging around in the wings, waiting for their day in the sun.

It was nice, though, to see my favourite healthy pre-prandial snack at 17 across. I say “healthy”, because (truth be known) my real favourite are those TERRA chips made from taro, yam etc. which con you into believing they are healthy. Well, they con me, anyway, and sometimes, contrary to Esdras – quoted above – Truth is not so great, and a bit of self-deception is the order of the day.

24 minutes.

PS congratulations to the Eagles for a great victory in the Super Bowl. I managed to catch the second half streaming, and was delighted not only by the plays but by the fact that the commentators seemed as clueless about the rules as I am.

ACROSS

1 Primate’s ring inspiring major portion of old German troops (10)
CHIMPANZEE – PANZE[r] in CHIME
6 Powder originally applied in sympathetic support (4)
TALC – A[pplied] in TLC
10 Old Frenchman’s article, say, about his wine (7)
ANGEVIN – AN + EG reversed + VIN
11 Pound for one publication: one’s opening it (7)
IMAGIST – MAG + IS (one’s) in IT
12 Warwick, maybe, famous for manufacturing rulers? (9)
KINGMAKER – a reference to the 15th century’s Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick – a right
busybody, if ever there was one
13 Recognised monastic office picked up by listeners (5)
KNOWN – sounds like NONE – an alternative for the more common NONES, which is the fifth of the
seven canonical hours of the divine office
14 Upland area with river in flood (5)
DROWN – R in DOWN
15 Small cup doctor set aside, containing mocha primarily (9)
DEMITASSE – M[ocha] in SET ASIDE* (anagram)
17 Nut’s facial hair changing character at the start (9)
PISTACHIO – PI for MU in MUSTACHIO
20 A second set of books about head of Cheltenham racecourse (5)
ASCOT -C[heltenham] in A + S + OT
21 That which chokes English grain (5)
WHEAT – E in WHAT (that which)
23 Bachelor digested very little, being on this? (9)
BREADLINE – ah, you see, if a university student was lazy and digested only a little of his (or
her) set text, he (or she) might have only read one line; so B + READ +LINE!! And if they ate only a
little food (because they spent all their grant on grog), then they might be on the breadline – even if
it was their own fault. Possibly. Is anyone still at fault these days?
25 Points introduced in characteristic passage (7)
TRANSIT – NS in TRAIT
26 Scandinavian lodging-place adopted by swimmers (7)
FINNISH – INN in FISH; well, for my money, a Finn (unless s/he is an ethnic Swede, I suppose) is
Nordic rather than Scandinavian, but no doubt some dictionary, somewhere out there, refers to the
“incorrect” usage that has now attained acceptability.
27 It may convey water for cleaning stockings (4)
HOSE – DD
28 Offer head fond affection (10)
TENDERNESS – TENDER + NESS

DOWN

1 Eccentric Conservative with official position (5)
CRANK – C + RANK
2 Naïve, ditching university for one? Brilliant! (9)
INGENIOUS – replace the U in INGENUOUS with an I
3 One who creates images on flags? (8,6)
PAVEMENT ARTIST – flags here being paving stones
4 Presumably rough adult embracing Poles (3-4)
NON-SKID – NO KID around our friends N and S
5 European lightweight absorbing sanctimonious maxim (7)
EPIGRAM – PI in E + GRAM
7 Travel with Parisian friend to find one in Madrid (5)
AMIGO – AMI + GO
8 One commanding regiment at last, concerned with holding grand function (9)
COTANGENT – a leetul beet tricky to parse, as David Brent might say: CO (one commanding) +
[regimen]T and then G (grand) in ANENT (ancient word for about or ‘concerned with’)
9 Greek trader, man in turmoil, grower of fruit and veg (6,8)
MARKET GARDENER – GREEK TRADER MAN*
14 Finally spend time in Suffolk port obtaining lighting accessory (9)
DIPSWITCH – [spen]D + T in IPSWICH; you know, it’s embarrassing, but I never knew Ipswich was a
port. I thought the main ports in Suffolk were Lowestoft, Felixstowe and Harwich. Oops! Embarrassing
again…
16 Give up bag, if carrying rupees and diamonds (9)
SACRIFICE – SAC + IF in R [rupees] and ICE (diamonds)
18 Frequent visitor slightly in the shade? (7)
HABITUE – A BIT in HUE
19 Position of G-man’s boss taking too many courses? (7)
OVERFED – if you were a G-man’s boss, you would have a Fed under you. Figuratively, one hopes,
otherwise we have a whole new MeToo thing on our hands
22 Welshman’s commercial vehicles, needing key to start (5)
EVANS – E + VANS
24 Characteristic spirit displayed in film and book (5)
ETHOS – ET + HOS (Hosea)

62 comments on “Times 26953 – Great is Truth, and mighty above all things”

  1. Fairly Mondayesque, although the Bible book was a bit of a surprise. I was trying to think of an IN-/UN- pair at 2d, until I got KINGMAKER. Is ‘anent’ dead? My Japanese-English dictionary has it as Scottish (McPhee uses it in “That Hideous Strength”).
    1. Well, Oxford does say ‘Scottish archaic’, but since CS Lewis uses it in his wackiest book, I think we should revive it on this site, along with Esdras and co.

      Edited at 2018-02-05 01:16 am (UTC)

    2. There is something very crosswordy about someone using a Japanese-English dictionary as a way of checking etymology of English words!

      Maybe we need a new version of resorting to aids, for people who use the most difficult aids around

      1. Not particularly difficult: I have a Japanese electronic dictionary (made by Casio) on my desk next to my desktop where I usually do these, so it’s handier than anything else. A year or so ago I bought an updated model, which has about 30 or so dictionaries in it, including the UK and US versions of ODE. I carry it with me wherever I go, but I didn’t bother to go to the living room and pull it out of my bag to look up ‘anent’.
  2. Shoot, I forgot to parse COTANGENT, though it was maybe the most interesting in this rather easy outing. I wouldn’t call “anent” archaic, quite yet, though it is rarely heard these days. If I’ve ever met Mr. Warwick here before, I am sorry not to recall, but I see that, if you know him, that clue’s as straightforward as the rest.

    Edited at 2018-02-05 04:13 am (UTC)

  3. 27 minutes got me home ahead of target for once, due in part to writing in CHIMPANZEE (guessed from spotting the reference ‘Panzer’) and PAVEMENT ARTIST which immediately gave me a lot to build on. And MARKET GARDENER was not far behind. Only ANGEVIN, IMAGIST and COTANGENT put up resistance, the last of these because I had not heard of ANENT.

    Harwich is actually in Essex, U.

    Edited at 2018-02-05 04:59 am (UTC)

      1. Ah, I see what you meant now!

        I’ve just been checking my past record on today’s unknowns and it doesn’t make for encouraging reading.

        ANGEVIN has appeared three times (2012, 2015, 2016) and I claimed not to know it on all three occasions.

        ANENT has appeared five times. I didn’t know it in 2009, didn’t mention it in April 2013 and was pleased to remember it in June that year, but 4 months later in October 2013 I didn’t know it again. On its last appearance before today, when ulaca was again on blogging duty, I still didn’t know it. Perhaps there are some words that simply won’t stick! Maybe if I’d ever blogged ANENT it would have done.

        Edited at 2018-02-05 06:29 am (UTC)

        1. Whenever I come across a word I don’t know (not that often, these days) I look it up and read the entry in OED or Chambers. Helps it to stick..
  4. 30 mins – back to the usual: yoghurt, granola, compote, banana. Tasty.
    Not much to add. Trickiest bits for me were the last two: Known/Cotangent. It had to be Known, although I am still not familiar with all the monastic offices (shame) and the Anent bit was unparsable.
    Thanks setter and Ulaca.

  5. … all but COTANGENT in 25 mins, but then was thrown by the unknown/forgotten ANENT. Didn’t get the parsing for BREADLINE. Not a great cryptic imo.

  6. …. so the easiest to me for quite a while. I wrote the first dozen answers straight in and fleetingly imagined what it would be like to finish in 5 minutes.
  7. Easy one today, I started by trying to go all round the outside but couldn’t do 14dn or 8dn without any checkers. Finished in the NE corner which had some chewy bits… imagist, amigo, cotangent, known ..
  8. …God’s ethos, according to the relevant prophet. Only one of those two fitted into 16d though. I guess a secular interpretation would be “try a little TENDERNESS”. Hosea very nearly made it all the way into 27 across too. Found this straightforward, finishing in 18 minutes. I’ve got to make COTANGENT COD as without any crossers I saw the word ‘function’ and cot theta ( I can’t find the Greek symbol on my iPad) appeared before my eyes. TALC, KNOWN, DEMITASSE and ASCOT immediately followed. Thank you for a good start to the week, U and setter.

    Edited at 2018-02-05 09:23 am (UTC)

  9. 13.49, so relieved to remember what the function was in 8d, I quite forgot to work out where all the letters came from. Anent which…thanks U for taking the time to sort out my missed parsings (DEMITASSE was the other one) and adding extra wisdom.
    Should I get to know more Ezra Pound? I’m sure he was an imagist because it says so here, but I couldn’t give you a sample.
    My last in and favourite was the innocuous TALC, when a stab of revealing light disclosed what three letter word meant “sympathetic support”. Cute.
    I flinched a bit at the singular NONE, but I’ll take it on trust it’s dictionaried somewhere.
    And I can now spell mustachio and cognates. I will try to remember you can just leave out the O if you want to.

    1. ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ is well worth a look though it’s more “full on” maybe than would be suggested by the poet’s imagist reputation.
      1. Well, I tried, and I shall try again, possibly with the benefit of looking up some of the references.
        My mother in law was an Auschwitz survivor, so I may struggle to appreciate much of Pound’s work, though I can personally forgive almost anything from a man who championed Henri Gaudier-Brzeska to the extent of commissioning a portrait bust: the image leaps out, instantly recognisable, from Pound’s Wiki page. Now there was an artist.
        Thanks for the suggestion, I shall persevere, though whether I ever get round to the Cantos remains to be seen.
        1. My mother lost all her clan, bar her parents and brother who got out from Poland in time, to the same agency. The Cantos make considerably more noise than sense, apart from fragments here and there. The sculpture seems typically self-serving to my mind, though of course it’s vigorously talented. One thing Pound wasn’t was il miglior fabbro as Eliot calls him. Personally I think his most telling contribution was the aphorism ‘Make it new’. And his weirdly gifted touch in cutting down ‘The Waste Land’.
    2. …one that perfectly exemplifies the school.

      In a Station of the Metro

      The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
      Petals on a wet, black bough.

  12. Not much to add – easy canter

    Surprised U didn’t know Ipswich as a port because it’s on the river Orwell and I’d have thought the literary connection would have triggered a memory

    Warwick was the great survivor, switching allegiance and surviving until fate finally caught up with him at the Battle of Barnet

  13. I blitzed through this in a mere 19 minutes, only to blow it with a tyop in PAVEMENT ARTIST. I biffed without parsing in a few cases (COTANGENT, BREADLINE and ETHOS spring to mind), but that seems fair because I put in a few NHOs (ANGEVIN, IMAGIST) from parsing alone.
  14. Would have been well under 6 minutes but I had a last minute crisis of non-mathematician’s confidence and I decided I really needed to be sure COTANGENT was a real thing – and of course it would be the trickiest parsing in this puzzle. Good puzzle though, and would have been just for containing my man Hosea and obscure poetic references… just the ticket first thing on a Monday morn.
  15. This was my FOI and I thought bound to be COD. Unfortunately, following the example of cappuccino and macchiato, I turned μstaccio to πstaccio. Mamma mia, this left me with C_B_T_E for my LOI, or as it turned out DNF. Oh the vagaries of foreign words in English!
    This was my sort of crossword. Thanks. Peter
  16. 13 mins. I made heavier weather of this than I should have done because I was slow to see CHIMPANZEE and PAVEMENT ARTIST. Like a few others COTANGENT was the LOI, in my case after IMAGIST.
  17. 13’, had to be COTANGENT but nho ANENT. Very Mondayish, lovely. Thanks ulaca and setter.
  18. 25m so for once under my target 30m. Like others hereabouts, I spent 10m of that time on the NE before I took the plunge with KNOWN and eventually cotangent which was the only word I could think of to fit. Thanks, therefore, to our blogger, because where there was darkness there is now light, though I suspect like Jack, by the time the words come round again all will be dark once more! Enjoyable puzzle and entertaining blog, so thanks to both providers.
  19. with most of the time spent trying to unravel the last 3 in the NE. Never thought of our friend Mr Pound till I came here, and didn’t know what he did anyway, and TALC would have helped finding COTANGENT. Again another curate’s egg for me, very easy apart from the very hard bits.
  20. 17’01. I too wondered about None for Nones. I like V.’s ‘would have been well under six minutes…’ There’s a story by H.G.Wells where time is slowed down for a particular individual so that he can for example nip over and twitch someone’s tie out of position between two notes of a concert being played and they don’t notice him. Such is the gift.
  21. 10:45, all pretty straightforward if you’ve been around the crossword block a few times.

    Congratulations to Jack for probably setting a new record for never having heard of a word the most times.

    1. If we get another Jack on the site, our original will have to be known as “Jack the Anent”.
  22. Nice Mondayish puzzle with a few things that gave me brief pause for thought – my knowledge didn’t previously extend to whether Ezra P. was an imagist, but it certainly seemed plausible, and None would have been trickier if we hadn’t had the plural version only last week.
  23. A pleasant start to the week, with only ANGEVIN unknown but construct-able, and COTANGENT known, but its component ANENT nho(I think!). Even Hosea sprang to mind without a pause. TALC was my FOI and the NW was the last sector to yield, with INGENIOUS the final entry. 21:41. Thanks setter and U.
  24. Under 10 minutes but I can’t spell gardiner (told you).

    Thanks to jackkt for the entertainment and for making us all feel better

  25. 7:04. A curious puzzle, this, containing quite a lot of obscure vocabulary and tricky wordplay but nonetheless very easy. A MER at 26ac: the Finns certainly don’t think of themselves as Scandinavian. However Collins disagrees so the setter is forgiven.
  26. I thought I might be in for a rare sub-10 but slowed slightly in finishing with IMAGIST, COTANGENT and KNOWN in that order. KNOWN had been pencilled in early on but I couldn’t parse it so needed the crossers to be sure.
  27. 16 mins but I confess to not having a Scooby what ANENT was so technically a DNFC (did not fully comprehend).
  28. Harwich is in Essex; Ipswich is inland but on the river Orwell, navigable, I think, from the North Sea
  29. 46 minutes, still cloudy with man-flu, so I count that as a pretty decent time, especially as I found this one quite hard, with a lot of question marks in the margins…

    FOI 20a (definitely hard to find a way in!) LOI… not sure, actually, as I was so foggy this morning I forgot to come here and post while it was still fresh in my mind! Something in the NW, anyway, probably the unknown ANGEVIN. Apparently I liked 18d.

    Thanks to setter and Ulaca.

    1. Thank you! Unlike everyone else I found it quite hard too and finished in a very similar time. Guessed 11a was something to do with Ezra Pound but don’t know what an imagist is and cotangent and talc took some time to work out
  30. NHO? I can’t work this TLA out 😉 Please could someone clarify?

    The crossword? Fun, and I only got stuck on 8 down. I never time myself – no point. I’m just happy to get a good chunk of the grid filled! PSB

  31. About 15 minutes, ending with the curious clue for BREADLINE. Everything else OK except not recognizing the book in ETHOS, but with the checking letters it couldn’t be anything else.

    Anon above: NHO usually means “never heard of” around here, and it seems to mean that today in earlier posts. What’s TLA?

    Regards.

  33. Many thanks Kevin:) I knew I’d seen it before often enough, just couldn’t remember what it meant. TLA = three letter acronym: it always makes me chuckle as i guess it’s an &lit of sorts! Cheers, Pen
  34. 43 minutes today, nothing really difficult, but I did enjoy many of the clues (NO*KID and T*LC, for example, to point out the bits I liked). I can’t resist adding something about Japanese dictionaries, something which has nothing at all to do with this or any other crossword. Some twenty years ago, I bought a cheap English-Japanese dictionary which had been printed in 1957, but was a reprint of a 1937 edition. For each English word it had a sample sentence, and the back of the book is cracked so it tends to open to a particular page, the page for the words “fair” and “fairly”. And believe it or not, one of the sample sentences for “fairly” reads: “Don’t torture me, but kill me fairly”. Really. Must have come in handy if you ran into Japanese people in 1937.

    Edited at 2018-02-05 07:29 pm (UTC)

    1. “Kill Me Fairly” would make a decent film noir title. Nice anecdote, demonstrating the cultural-linguistic interface very deftly.
  36. Probably would have been a PB at 10m 32s, but, in search of speed, I biffed ‘ingenuous’ at 2d instead of the correctly clued ‘ingenious’. I don’t suppose I’ll ever learn, and I continue on my miserable run of ‘one wrong.’
  37. Scottish and Irish Presbyterians will be familiar with it as it appears multiple times at every General Assembly (Synod) when the code of the church needs to be legally changed. I have attended dozens of such gatherings but not being a lawyer, never really knew what it meant!
  39. just under an hour, with the usual daily biff. This time it was KNOWN, if I had guessed this weird use of “office”, then I might have got it. But thank god not too punishing.
    COD: PISTACHIO/MUSTACHIO. very nice. It would be cool if XISTACHIO, LAMBDASTACHIO etc were things too.

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