Times 27,179: Gee Officer Cryptic

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Some toughish vocabulary here but the wordplay was on the easier side for a Friday I thought – 1ac and 5ac went in very quickly here and I had the whole thing done and dusted on the good side of 6 minutes. Yesterday’s puzzle was much more conventionally Fridayish, I thought.

I think my favourites were the long across clues in the middle – 13ac in particular had a satisfying concision about it. And I really liked the definition part of 22dn, and learning something new in 20dn as I hadn’t previously known what a “stere” was. Thanks setter!

ACROSS
1 Investigator probes organised crime using evidence (7)
EMPIRIC – P.I. [investigator] “probes” (CRIME*) [“organised”]

5 Fire getting cold and greyer (7)
CASHIER – C [cold] and ASHIER [greyer]

9 Accelerate in front of athlete who moves arms (9)
GUNRUNNER – GUN [accelerate] in front of RUNNER [athlete]

10 Mass of rock crystal usually keeps hidden (5)
TALUS – hidden in {crys}TAL US{ually}

11 Old name for soldiers sometimes showing character (5)
THETA – or THE T.A., former name for the part-time soldiers now known as the Army Reserve.

12 Maybe broody old dignitary, a sour drunk (9)
OVIPAROUS – O V.I.P. [old | dignitary] + (A SOUR*) [“drunk”]

13 Person who’s decorated not one ring of gold (5,8)
NOBEL LAUREATE – NO BELL AUREATE [not one | ring | of gold]

17 Player given hand aligns with person on the right film (4,4,5)
WEST SIDE STORY – WEST [player given (bridge) hand] + SIDES [aligns] with TORY [person on the right]

21 Weapon the German clutches doing wrong (9)
DERRINGER – DER [the German] “clutches” ERRING [doing wrong]

24 Counted the minutes to retreat or resign (5)
DEMIT – reversed TIMED [counted the minutes]

25 Juvenile article in Paris Match is a scoop (5)
LADLE – LAD [juvenile] + LE [article in Paris Match]

26 Sample by writer, one who’s not very good (9)
POETASTER – TASTER [sample] by POE [writer]. Definition also refers back to “writer”.

27 Sort of material from one who’s ineffectual and uninteresting (4-3)
DRIP-DRY – DRIP [one who’s ineffectual] and DRY [uninteresting]

28 Cry to encourage friend in hot pants (5-2)
TALLY-HO – ALLY [friend] in (HOT*) [“pants”]

DOWN
1 Top important figure (6)
EIGHTY – {w}EIGHTY [important, “topped”]

2 Writer brought back offended, eponymous hero (9)
PENDENNIS – PEN [writer] + reversed SINNED [offended]. Novel by William Makepeace Thackeray.

3 Regret vocal jibe in stage whisper (7)
RHUBARB – homophone of RUE [regret, “vocal”] + BARB [jibe]

4 Petted dog, holding head (9)
CANOODLED – CAD [dog], holding NOODLE [head]

5 Animation about heraldic colour that’s a palace favourite (5)
CORGI – CGI [animation] about OR [heraldic colour]. Famously Her Majesty QE2’s favourite dog breed.

6 Trouble is after having favourable prognosis (3,4)
SET FAIR – (IS AFTER*) [“trouble…”]

7 Northern home‘s inviting empty room (5)
IGLOO – I{nvitin}G + LOO [room]

8 I’m not sure about feminist opponent (8)
RESISTER – ER reversed [I’m not sure, about] + SISTER [feminist]

14 Rating new filling dessert, able to take a lot in (9)
ABSORBENT – AB [rating] + N [new] “filling” SORBET [dessert]

15 Lack of balance provoked two lots of my tears (9)
ASYMMETRY – (MY MY TEARS*) [“provoked”]

16 Son moved awkwardly, restrained (8)
SWADDLED – S WADDLED [son | moved awkwardly]

18 Pay bonus money through post (7)
STIPEND – TIP [bonus money] “through” SEND [post]

19 It’s weird not having a partner round (7)
ODDBALL – ODD [not having a partner] + BALL [round]

20 Amount of volume by orchestra’s principal music player (6)
STEREO – STERE [amount of volume (= 1 cubic metre)] + O{rchestra}

22 Mostly, broadcaster and I spoke and spoke? (5)
RADII – RADI{o} [“mostly”, broadcaster] + I. Radius is a spoke, radii multiple spokes.

23 Fish very quietly bound by rope (5)
GUPPY – PP [very quietly] “bound by” GUY [rope]

51 comments on “Times 27,179: Gee Officer Cryptic”

  1. Despite not knowing TALUS, OVIPAROUS, DEMIT, PENDENNIS (I’ve not even got around to Vanity Fair yet…) or “stere”, I breezed home in 38 minutes, which might be my fastest time of the week. Very satisfying when you can piece together the unknown from the wordplay and vague fragments of other knowledge.

    FOI 1a EMPIRIC, LOI CASHIER, shortly after finally figuring out that 6d SET FAIR was an anagram, and then remembering it from an earlier puzzle.

  2. Same unknowns, same re-sister and wondering why I’m not sure was there, same speedy finish a tad under 20 minutes.

    Straw poll: How do you pronounce sorbet?
    When I was growing up the final T was pronounced. My first dictionary, circa 1980, has that as the only pronunciation. Then sometime in the 1980s the yuppies laid waste to this country and decided to pronounce it as if it were a French word. That prevailed, and is how *everyone* in Australia pronounces it now, sorbé. What’s the situation in UK? USA? France? Hong Kong?

    1. Sorbet *is* a French word, so only ever pronounced sorbé in my experience .. in Spanish it is sorbete, though and in Italian, sorbetto
    3. Sorbay’s the only way I’ve heard it pronounced. How do they pronounce buffet down under? It’s pofay in Hong Kong.
    4. Always been sorb-ay here. I wonder what year it was when people in Britain stopped calling the large confectionery company Nestles, and switched to that fancy French version Nest-lay, with the accent and everything? (This has sent me down a YouTube rabbit hole watching every Milky Bar Kid advert ever made…)
        1. Lots of discussion of this to be found on language forums across the world; interesting (for some values of interesting) to see how the pronunciation has varied over the years, and yes, apparently it’s quite different depending on whether you’re in Murca, Britain or Oz…
            1. Sorbet actually comes from an ancient language from which it has been mis-translated as ‘palette cleanser’. In fact, it is an artist’s term for ‘palette cleaner’.
      2. I’m with Kevin on pronunciation . In the US there was advertising jingle which went

        “N-E-S-T-L-E-S
        Nestles makes the very best
        Chocolate”

        The pronunciations were Nest-leez and Chock-let.

  3. Very much back in the mainstream today after yesterday’s mental bashing. Very enjoyable top to bottom solve with no queries or doubts.
  4. 35 mins with yoghurt, granola, blueberry compote.
    Not much to say about this except I now know what Stere means.
    And we have had 26ac very recently (maybe in a prize one).
    Thanks setter and V.
  5. Much more like it after yesterday’s pummelling.

    COD: NOBEL LAUREATE.

    I don’t know if it was intended but ring of gold suggested marriage to me, and the second word is -a-r-a-e. Excellent misdirection. Plus not one ring = no bell, is also clever. Really nice clue.

    Edited at 2018-10-26 07:37 am (UTC)

    1. For the ring of gold, I got hung up on Wilson’s Disease, even though it wouldn’t fit. Turns out it was a Kayser-Fleisher ring I was thinking of. I’ve probably watched too much House.

      Edited at 2018-10-26 03:56 pm (UTC)

  6. DNK CGI, but that didn’t really slow me down. What did slow me down was 1d, where I never got the wordplay and just went with ‘figure’ and the checkers. A bit surprised to see PENDENNIS.

    Edited at 2018-10-26 07:48 am (UTC)

  7. The one at 5D, or the booby- trapped one in 4D ?

    FOI CASHIER

    A few DNK’s – PENDENNIS (wasn’t there a columnist with that epithet at one time ? It was THAT bell that tinkled faintly !), “cgi” although the dog was a shoo-in, and “stere”.

    LOI LADLE

    Seen off successfully in 12:40, which suggests that I’ll need Verlaine to commit another typo tomorrow week if I’m to earn a Final spot.

    COD NOBEL LAUREATE, but also liked THETA.

    1. Jason and Magoo and Mohn (oh my!) are much better at just knocking down these (relatively) straightforward clues as soon as they look at them. I’m hoping for some really tortuous ones if I learn my lesson and make the finals this year, it’s my best hope probably!
  8. The calm after the storm, really, coasting through in 20 minutes. STEREO of course went in with crossed fingers and no alternatives, and PENDENNIS, on loan from the TLS, known in much the same way as Poldark, except he hasn’t so far had a TV series. Come on ITV, you’ve done Vanity Fair, what’s stopping you?
    THETA (spent ages trying to understand why O(ld) soldiers were MEGA) and EIGHTY my last two in: I never think of figures as numbers.
  9. A very good workout containing a few unknown words/meanings, OVIPAROUS, TALUS as rock and STERE. Missed a parsing detail at 8dn where ‘about feminist’ led me to RE, SISTER without the need for understanding what ‘I’m not sure’ was doing there, and another at 25ac where ‘juvenile article in Paris’ led me to LAD, LE without worrying about ‘Match’.

    I think this may be the first time a setter has recognised the departure of TA as a current abbreviation for the army reserves, but regulars here may already know that I believe quite strongly that it’s not usually necessary to go to the trouble of reflecting such changes in clues.

    Not that it affects the clue at 5dn, but I believe I’m right in saying that the Queen no longer has any corgis and her surviving pets are of a different breed.

  10. 14:42, which is my quickest for a while. My unknowns today were TALUS, DEMIT and STERE, but they didn’t hold me up much. We’ve had POETASTER and CASHIER recently and RHUBARB not so long ago, so that helped. STEREO my LOI. OVIPAROUS my COD. Thanks V and setter.
  11. 44 minutes for this. Maybe I was missing yesterday’s quirky excellence.

    Smashing time, V. (He’s far too modest to mention he was well under 6 minutes.) I shudder to think what you might do on Monday…

  13. …the version of ‘While shepherds washed their socks by night’ I was brought up with. 45 minutes with LOI EIGHTY after I finally conceded that it was THETA and not OMEGA along with ‘eggnog’. I thought they were still called the TA, or maybe the Home Guard. I don’t think I’ve ever called a cubic metre a STERE but it had to be. Liked OVIPAROUS, as I knew it, but COD to NOBEL LAUREATE. At my school, the bell between lessons was abandoned when the Head decided we’d go for the Nobel Peace Prize. WEST SIDE STORY has me singing ‘There’s a place for us’ in the style of P J Proby, an unforgettable interpretation, however hard you try. Decent puzzle. Thank you V and setter.
    1. Oh no! N-o-o-o-o-o! I’ve got that P J Proby sound in my head now and I cannot rid myself of it. [Deep raspy tremulous crooning voice] “Hold my hand and I’ll take you there…”

      Edited at 2018-10-26 09:59 am (UTC)

  14. 31 mins. Unlike Thursday’s puzzle, this was not a true Friday puzzle. But most enjoyable nonetheless. Bunged in STEREO without recognising ‘stere’ and NOBEL LAUREATE without lingering to parse it. POETASTER was right there in my mental foreground — too soon for the setter to re-use it. I really liked the RADII clue. DEMIT gave me trouble. I didn’t really know the word (but post-solve could see the morphology) and tried hard to take the Ms out of some word meaning ‘counted’. EIGHTY was my LOI: I hunted only for a cube, hexagram, torus, ellipse, or whatever.

    Thanks, V, for your explicatory blog. Thank you, setter.

  15. STEREs and cords are used to measure loads of firewood around here and tend to turn up in the NY Times puzzles. I was another “omega” at 11a for a while but that produced “eggnog” at 1d so a re-think was called for. I learned that a GUPPY isn’t a tadpole after all. 15.34
  16. Nice non-Fridayish Friday puzzle. Add me to the general ignorance of the STERE and the TALUS (bone yes, stone no), and I also remembered PENDENNIS as the newspaper column, so figured it must have been named after some sort of literary character. Always nice when ignorance isn’t actually a bar to finishing the puzzle correctly, so you feel as if you’ve had a good morning solve and learned* something into the bargain.

    *until the next time it comes up and you claim never to have heard of it, and thus have to “learn” it all over again

  17. A bit less challenging than yesterday’s offering. Despite not knowing TALUS as a stone, STERE, DEMIT and being only vaguely aware of PENDENNIS, I was able to put this to bed in 23:55. I also tried to shoehorn MARRIAGE into 13a, but thought better of it. Yet again the NW refused to yield anything at first pass and I moved on to the NE and SE for my foothold. An enjoyable puzzle. Thanks setter and V. Looking forward to seeing some of you at York.
  18. Thanks for the blog V. Definitely a better puzzle than yesterday.

    Lots of good clues, but COD to 22d.

    Apparently, stere and stereo both come from the Greek stereos, meaning solid.

  19. Got to yesterday’s late, and too exhausted by the end to get the first of all, Baftas, even though sensed the fab/baf from the outset. The rest fell fairly steadily though, with an array of unusual quirks that I thoroughly appreciated. Here all went smoothly enough in a little under 25 min. though unaware of CGI and stere. Agreeable but forgettable; yesterday’s definitely the better for me.
  20. Managed to limp through this in under an hour (just). Still, easier than yesterday, which took several sessions to complete, along with some help from Mrs Rotter. Outstanding time V. I was pleased to get the unknown PENDENNIS from word play alone.

    Edited at 2018-10-26 11:13 am (UTC)

  21. I found this a crossword of two halves. I solved the bottom half really quickly but only had CASHIER, IGLOO and TALUS in the top half for quite some time. Once I had solved 1a EMPIRIC, where I spent too long trying to solve the anagram of crime and DI, things began to improve. I still needed 3 reveals to complete. The culprits were NOBEL LAUREATE (too clever by far), PENDENNIS (DNK) and OVIPAROUS where I was missing the VIP.

    Edited at 2018-10-26 02:01 pm (UTC)

  22. Well, work has been seriously interfering with my crosswording of late, and this is the first in a long while that I’ve actually started and finished on the same day. I found it distinctly tough going, and it took me a little less than an hour to hack my way out of it.
  23. Nice to have first word I put in TALUS as a DNK. Trouble at the end seeing CANOODLED and POETASTER despite the last being the go to word for any setter these days. If you want an earworm, what about “Hitler has only got one….”.
  24. This lasted 30 minutes, held up by OVIPAROUS (a guess, really, from wordplay), and PENDENNIS (also from wordplay but it certainly looked right). I didn’t know ‘stere’ as a volume either. And over here, RHUBARB is more of a melee than any kind of whisper. Regards.
  25. 29:30. Nice to have something a bit gentler than yesterday’s (one of those a week is plenty for me) whilst still providing a satisfying challenge. Oviparous and Nobel laureate took a while to come (funnily enough today’s Talos puzzle in the TLS requires you to fill in the blank in a quote from the much-heated-discussion-generating 2016 Nobel laureate, not sure if that’s his first appearance or not but surely an accolade to cherish just as much as the Nobel). I was also slow to see Pendennis (or rather, the work being unfamiliar, I was slow to see the reverse sinned supporting pen). I didn’t immediately connect dog with cad in 4dn, so that one also held out a little longer than I would have liked. COD 22dn for the Def.
  26. I associate RHUBARB specifically with baseball (arguments); US actors making crowd noises traditionally used ‘avocado’.
  28. Slept the sleep of the just having finished in 40 mins last night but means nothing for the lady wife and I to ponder over this morning. Did not knowTALUS or STERE but were able to parse these. Nice crossword, setter!
  29. In 8dn I didn’t see where “I’m not sure” came in since “about” is sufficient for RE. And in 6dn I couldn’t see what the “trouble is” since “after having favorable prognosis” is sufficient clue, so failed to see any anagram.

    from Jeepjay

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