Times 27,341: Dot Your Wyes ‘n’ Grit Your Teeth?

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Totally called it: after a week of fairly relaxed cryptics chez the Times, along comes one that is pretty tough by any standards, with some quite non-obvious wordplay and tough vocabulary including two words that I wouldn’t have been surprised to come across in a Monthly Club Special (23ac and 16dn). In practice this didn’t take me *too* long, 1ac and 10ac going straight in to be followed by quite a few clues largely biffable from enumeration (12ac, and 20ac and 3dn, neither of which I felt any need to parse until after submission), so the psychological 10 minute barrier, after which all is despair, was not exceeded.

I fully expect some stern diatribes including the words “not in my accent, it doesn’t” and some gnashing about 16dn, which I must admit I initially hazarded as being WEANDOTTY; I also stuck MARDI in at 7dn until it became clear that 11ac would work better with an H, so thank all the saints that middle letter was not unchecked. But overall I very much enjoyed this, my favourite clue today being I think 3dn, with its very satisfying “ETHEREAL M”. Thanks vey much to the setter for the 23ac!

ACROSS
1 Tags celebrity, one quitting exercises (10)
NAMEPLATES – NAME [celebrity] + P{i}LATES [“one (I) quitting” exercises]

6 Take lead from great boss (4)
UMBO – {j}UMBO [great, minus its “lead”]

10 Small film of chief criminal (5)
FICHE – (CHIEF*) [“criminal”]

11 A canine companion I must follow: one impressing audibly (9)
CHIHUAHUA – CH [companion] I must follow + maybe a homophone of WOWER [one impressing]?

12 When to pay for past 24 hours of audit? (3,2,9)
DAY OF RECKONING – or, literalistically, DAY [24 hours] | OF | RECKONING [audit]

14 Love-potion, extremely acidic, taken by Ulstermen off and on (7)
PHILTRE – PH 1 [extremely acidic] + {u}L{s}T{E}R{m}E{n}

15 Disaster team stopping to drink (5-2)
SCREW-UP – CREW [team] “stopping” SUP [to drink]

17 Nuts about old exhibit, sculptor’s first (7)
CASHEWS – CA [about] + SHEW [old (word for) exhibit] + S{culptor}

19 Make up for mistake by Head introducing one (7)
EXPIATE – EX = X [mistake], by PATE [head] “introducing” I [one]

20 Note Universal about to secure bold double act (6,3,5)
LAUREL AND HARDY – LA U RE LAND HARDY [note | universal | about | to secure | bold]

23 Bewilderment caused by this 60s rebel doing a U-turn (9)
PUZZLEDOM – PUZZLE [this] + reversed MOD [60s rebel]

24 Dutch painter has time for second mistake (5)
BOTCH – BO{s->T}CH [Dutch painter (Hieronymus), with “time (T) instead of second (S)”]

25 Bombshell removed from casing for show (4)
EXPO – {s}EXPO{t} [bombshell, removed from its “casing”]

26 Lying PC number twenty-two, extremely corrupt (10)
PROCUMBENT – (PC NUMBER T{wenty-tw}O*) [“corrupt”]

DOWN
1 Crass family, friends and neighbours at the outset turned up (4)
NAFF – take the first letters of F{amily}, F{fiends} A{nd} N{eighbours} and reverse.

2 The details for workers on estate? (9)
MECHANICS – or workers on estate (as in car).

3 Noble exercises for rising when received by exquisite maiden (4,2,3,5)
PEER OF THE REALM – PE [exercises] + reversed FOR, “received by” ETHEREAL M [exquisite | maiden]

4 Damn charger lifting tail (7)
ACCURSE – an ACCUSER is a charger; “lift” the last letter a couple of positions.

5 Shows hosted by Angevin, c’est-à-dire (7)
EVINCES – hidden in {ang}EVIN C’ES{t-à-dire}

7 Nice day for reporting religious leader (5)
MAHDI – dodgy homophone of MARDI [a day in France, including Nice]

8 General depot, but not housing, developed in Seville cover-up? (6-4)
ORANGE PEEL – (GENERAL {d}EPO{t}*) [“developed”]. The outer covering of a Seville orange.

9 Handle collection (9,5)
AUTOGRAPH ALBUM – cryptic def, relying on the fact that a “handle” can also be a name.

13 Dance, lifting bottom in mock revelation (10)
APOCALYPSE – CALYPSO [dance, “lifting bottom (letter to the top)”] in APE [mock]

16 Yawned, struggling to eat too much chicken (9)
WYANDOTTE – (YAWNED*) [“struggling”] to “eat” OTT [too much]

18 False report by Brit, maybe doffing cap (7)
SLANDER – {i}SLANDER [Brit, maybe “doffing cap”, i.e. losing its top]

19 Death tally rising after hospital goes from a local area?
ENDEMIC – END [death] + reversed C{h}IME [tally “after hospital (H) goes”]

21 Open University taking lead on nuclear energy (5)
UNZIP – U [university] + N{uclear} + ZIP [energy]

22 Tea-time waffle? (4)
CHAT – CHA T [tea | time]

58 comments on “Times 27,341: Dot Your Wyes ‘n’ Grit Your Teeth?”

  1. I really enjoyed the challenge, though a few bits of wordplay were beyond my grasp (thanks, v, for explaining ENDEMIC and PROCUMBENT, which I ultimately just biffed and hoped on).

    I did complete the grid in about 30 minutes but with AMBO instead of UMBO. I knew there was something wrong there but by that stage I was feeling like Neil Robertson after 20-odd frames against the tactical torments of John Higgins. I just wanted out of there.

    This is definitely a wheat / chaff sorter. Me? Chaff.

  2. There was indeed some Monthly Club Special about this brute!

    (I note that so far no one has responded to last month’s MCS! No takers?)

    My main difficulties were 2dn MECHANICS, 10ac FICHE, 14ac PHILTRE, 23ac PUZZLEDOM (I wanted BAFFLEDOM) and especially 13dn APOCALYPSE. Calypso is far more the song than dance!The Dictionary of Caribbean English (Allsopp, OUP) makes the dance element somewhat secondary.Foul ref!

    FOI 24ac BOTCH

    COD WYANDOTTE no trouble with spelling thanks to Player’s cigarette cards, no foul.

    WOD 1dn NAFF

    SNITCH @ 126 a bit low IMHO!

    Edited at 2019-05-03 07:53 am (UTC)

    2. April’s MCS I could take or leave but May’s is a work of art. I hope everyone can hold their breath for that long!
  3. 53 minutes. It got easier once I decided that 13 down was John of Patmos’s hallucinogenic vision and not a dance I didn’t know. PHILTRE, CASHEWS, PUZZLEDOM and EXPO then fell into place. LOI was WYANDOTTE, the only word with crossers I could come up and keep OTT intact. Never heard of it nor knew PROCUMBENT, which I assumed bore some relation to ‘recumbent’. I didn’t parse ACCURSE. I liked NAMEPLACES, CHIHUAHUA, LAUREL AND HARDY. ORANGE PEEL and COD BOTCH. It’s probably the DAY OF RECKONING for Wanderers today, when we will seek to EXPIATE our debts in Administration. A hard puzzle with some great clues. Thank you V and setter.

    Edited at 2019-05-03 07:57 am (UTC)

  4. DNF while enjoying toast and sublime, superlime, Gin&Lime marmalade.
    I gave up after 50mins and it wasn’t the minidog, the chicken, the potion or puzzledom that did for me. It was the Apocalypse/Cashews crossers. And I think I remember another Calypso-based apocalypse not that long ago. Doh!
    A benign MER at the choice of ‘tally’ in 19dn. It works, but ‘toll’ looks more obvious.
    Thanks very tricky setter and V.

    Edited at 2019-05-03 08:14 am (UTC)

  5. Thank you Verlaine for explaining PROCUMBENT, APOCALYPSE, MECHANICS, LAUREL AND HARDY and CHIHUAHUA.
    I thought MAHDI was an OK homophone but not so (Chi)HUAHUA.
    Sawbill mentions a Nina and keriothe agrees. Sorry, can’t see it!

    Edited at 2019-05-03 08:18 am (UTC)

    2. Perhaps the subject line of my first comment at the start of the blog above may help?
      2. Only just came here to check all the clues that I’d question-marked yesterday. I still can’t get your nina – in spite of the Scottish hint. (Btw, 34 minutes with a lot of biffing) Ann
        1. Ann

          The middle line across spelled OCH AYE and the vertical middle line spelled THE NOO.

  6. Sorry if this has been covered already but I’ve been away. They let you out once a day and the food’s okay though.

    Until very recently one could put, say, FICHE into the search box, and get a list of crossword-related items, to wit the blogs that contain that word. One could then maybe find where that word has been clued before, and even see the clue, or at least know the number of the puzzle in which it appeared. Now it seems one cannot do that, getting instead a seemingly live-journal-wide list of irrelevant items.

    Does anyone know if this is a permanent change, or just a temporary glitch of some kind? It is a fun-reducing fix for sure, and I am almost beside myself.

    1. jackkt mentioned this the other day. At the moment I’m reduced to searching Google with the name of this site (as times-xwd-times) plus the word in question, which is fairly effective.

      I used it today for WYANDOTTE, which I knew had come up before, though the only results I got were for a Mephisto and for a ST in 2007: https://times-xwd-times.livejournal.com/114378.html

      Edited at 2019-05-03 08:35 am (UTC)

  7. Well, I finished, but not convincingly, and over 32 minutes. No idea about either of the 19s, both guesses, so thanks for the parsing – I had maybe X was ‘by’ (times) but had never seen ‘E’ for mistake. Nor EX, come to that. Also unknown was MAHDI. WYANDOTTE rang a faint bell, so it must have come up before.
    Overall I liked it, even the the cryptic definition. A rigorous test.
    1. I rationalised EXPIATE differently, taking the definition as “make up for mistake” and then by (as in gone by) EX and I (one) into PATE head. But ho knows what the setter was thinking?
      1. I thought the same, although I didn’t think about it much at the time and now it doesn’t make much sense to me.
        Perhaps it’s EX = former partner = mistake!

        Edited at 2019-05-03 09:01 am (UTC)

        1. Might well be! But I still think if we are expected to read “mistake” as X and then spell it as EX that makes even less sense. Whatever next? Pronounce huahua as wower and pretend that’s a word?
          1. It could also be EX = X = (multiplied) by. I’ve really no idea which option makes the most/least sense!
      2. I though EX = X = mistake felt a little bit off, so on balance I think I might like your parsing better. Though would EX = by ever pass the simple substitution test itself?
  9. Count me along with Sotira as giving up right at the end. I’d even spotted that 26a was an anagram by the 88th minute, but I’d rather lost the will to live by then, so shoved in PRECUMBENT and had done with it. NHO that one, PHILTRE, WYANDOTTE, MAHDI, and probably some others.

    It probably didn’t help that I’m also still only three quarters through yesterday’s Guardian puzzle… There’s only so much PUZZLEDOM one can take!

    Thanks for working through this one and enlightening me on quite a few chunks of the wordplay! Excellent NINA. Wish I’d been looking for one; it might’ve actually helped me with 26a!

    Edited at 2019-05-03 08:45 am (UTC)

  10. 27:35, so very slow but I got there in the end. There’s some really nasty wordplay and hopelessly obscure vocabulary in here, but in the end I think it all qualifies as just bloody difficult, rather than unfair.
    WYANDOTTE, for instance: people often complain about foreign words being clued with anagrams: this isn’t, but it might as well be. But I felt reasonably confident about where to put the letters, albeit only once I had all the checkers.
    I didn’t understand CHIHUAHUA. The way I say it the last bit sounds like a guitar effects pedal (think the beginning of Voodoo Child) but I guess ‘wower’ is a common enough variant so fine by me.
    On the homophone front 7dn is also stretching things a bit: take a French word and an Arabic word, anglicise them both, and hope for the best. But I didn’t have a problem solving it.
    I often moan about the requirement for biblical knowledge so allow me to say for once that the equivalence between ‘revelation’ and APOCALYSE is something we can reasonably be expected to know. It’s at the ‘these stories are culturally important’ end of the scale, as opposed to the ‘name the birthplace of each individual character in this particular story’ end.
    Anyway, many thanks to the setter for what in the end is I think a brilliant puzzle. It’s good for us to have a proper stinker like this from time to time. Just not too often please.
    2. I did actually get my Cry Baby wah-wah out of the cupboard in response to my interpretation of the homophone this morning. Sadly I’m not good enough to play Voodoo Child…
      1. Someone nicked my Cry Baby in about 1995 and I replaced it with another brand which turned out to be rubbish (more of a whimper-whimper pedal). As a result I just stopped using it, a state of affairs that persists 24 years later. I really ought to have just bought another Cry Baby.
    3. 7d is also dodgy in my book because it’s one of those that could go either way: you have to have the checked H to confirm it’s not the equally plausible MARDI

      Edited at 2019-05-03 09:24 am (UTC)

      1. I don’t have any problem with clues that require crossing letters to be solved confidently. All in the game, yo.
  11. Just thankful to get through it, but actually at 45 minutes my time wasn’t bad at all considering my target is half-an-hour.

    I missed some of the wordplay so I’m pleased I wasn’t on blogging duty, but if I had been I expect I would have put in a bit more effort and risen to the occasion as it’s very rarely I have to seek help from the forum on my blogging days. There were a couple of unknown words but the wordplay was helpful, or I guessed correctly for once.

    A word like CHIHUAHUA is sure to have different pronunciations, and not just depending on the solver’s particular dialect, so it seems a little perverse to clue it as a homophone. In any case I can’t see any logic in pronouncing the second HUA differently from the first, so I’d have thought most speakers would plump for WAH-WAH or WOW-WOW rather than WOW-(W)ER as we are apparently expected to do here.

    Edited at 2019-05-03 08:09 am (UTC)

    2. I don’t know exactly how it works, but I looked up the pronunciation in the dictionary the there were definitely different little umlauts and squiggles (fear my mastery of the terminology!) over the final two syllables.
  12. Funnily enough (as I was saying before my comment suddenly disappeared forcing this retype) I was about to say this had more than a hint of the Monthly, with words trawled from the murkier depths and some fiendish wordplay, when V said it for me, adding some excellent explication.
    A lot of this was guessed and sometimes subsequently confirmed by the wordplay, but my fingers were crossed so often it’s amazing there were no typos.
    Just to add to the elevated eyebrow count, are NAMEPLATES tags? I’d hate to have one sewn into my underpants!
    27.27, which is beginning to look rather good.
  13. And why not. It’s the name of a Native American tribe though how they got to be chickens I’ve no idea. It’s also the title of one of James Fenimore Cooper’s unreadable novels. And now I’m off to Grand Central to get the train to another Native American name – Poughkeepsie. My brain waited until today to kick in this week – good timing because this was hard. 23.59
  14. I would have shifted this brute a tad quicker had I not entered “mardi” and caused myself additional difficulty in sorting out the appallingly clued dog. An otherwise excellent puzzle tarnished I’m afraid.

    Other hold-ups caused by playing with “ac” as “extremely acidic”, and by the crossers at 19 which I couldn’t initially parse, so didn’t enter the answers which were both correct.

    FOI DAY OF RECKONING
    LOI CHIHUAHUA
    COD AUTOGRAPH ALBUM
    TIME 24:18

  15. Isn’t the definition ‘Make up for mistake’ and then ex = x = by?
  16. One of those puzzles where I could feel everything (quite slowly) clicking into place, even while thinking “Blimey, that’s a bit tough”, so I was obviously on the setter’s wavelength. Unsurprisingly, I’m in the “hard but not actually unfair” camp at the end of it. My only quibble was that I also thought the homophone pretty clearly suggested MARDI, not MAHDI, so that went confidently in on first reading, and needed undoing later. I also failed to completely parse PUZZLEDOM before coming here, having overlooked the small but crucial “this”, which meant I had to wait for checkers before being sure there wasn’t such a word as DAZZLEDOM (there isn’t). Nice Friday stuff.
  17. 46 minutes, though had to resort to aids with SW blank after half an hour – that showed me 13dn wasn’t SPECULATOR – the only word I had from the checkers, though it wouldn’t parse.
    Thanks for explanation of 11ac for which I’d have said WAH-WAH: my take on 19ac was same as wilransome’s,and knew 16dn in same way as horryd.

    Edited at 2019-05-03 11:57 am (UTC)

  18. I broke the back of this getting all the four long answers quite easily; and if I get 1a and 1d, I think I’ve got a good chance of finishing. In the end though I came here for enlightenment with about half done. A very difficult puzzle and thanks for the blog.
    I was another MARDI ; had BENT = Corrupt in 26a and also had AC waiting in 14a. David
  19. DNF, and not really ashamed about it considering the level of difficulty. I liked a four long ones. I didn’t know Mahdi, so stuck in Sunni, as in sunny day (a better homonym than wow wer) and ignored the bit about needing to be a leader and not just a member of.
  20. Had to leave this part way and go shopping for 2 hours, but overall a good work out probably an hour. Had to check guesses on the chicken and the love potion were correct, as DK the words. Good tough puzzle to end a mild week, thanks V and others for explaining EXPIATE the ex bit of which I didn’t parse. Also 2d.
    I believe pedants would say a cashew is a seed not a nut but I wasn’t bothered.
  21. Got there in the end but I did begin to wonder. Like a lot of others, I found the hua-hua homophone unconvincing. Definitely more of a wah-wah pedal person. And Wyandotte I had to check. Several others I did not fully understand till reading the blog, for which thanks.
  22. My 3 hours plus won’t be attracting any attention, but as a six week old beginner, I’m pleased to have finished, having largely understood all the parsing, with no unknowns.
    1. 3 hours not bad at all for a beginner. Keep doing them and you’ll speed up.
  23. French phrases in clues? Whatever next?! Seriously though, très chic!

    Solving this with aids (i.e. dictionaries). Without dictionaries would not have completed it I think as there were a number of DNKs. Plenty of stuff here for OneNote.

    FOI 1D. LOI 4D.

    Ton of biffers with this one. COD was 25 – genius.

    3 month challenge: 14/16.

    Thanks to all!
    WS

  24. Finishing this was a challenge, indeed, and took a while. PROCUMBENT is new to me, and so is WYANDOTTE. I’ve never had a reason to be familiar with chicken breeds, and I’m not planning to start. PUZZLEDOM actually came quickly, and so did APOCALYPSE because I biffed it to spare myself the time that would have been taken with parsing it. Regards.
  25. Got it done in a couple of stints, but it took a while. WYANDOTTE – crumbs. Thanks, v.
  27. I also had “precumbent”, having muffed the agranam. “Precumbent”, of course, is a term describing someone who’s about to have a lie down. It’s right up there with “precidivist” (someone who will doubtless do it again).
  28. Lost the will to live at the end of this one although my excuse is that it is very late and I’m tired. In the end there was only one error – ESPY for EXPO. Too many dodgy clues for me already well argued over above.
  29. I’m really glad that I didn’t try to fit this in before I went golfing. I checked the SNITCH and decided I wouldn’t have time. I was right. I also decided to go to the folk club at The Cleveland Bay in Redcar this evening, so I didn’t start the puzzle until after midnight when I got home(a la Verlaine:-)). Strangely a lot of the NW slotted in quickly, and PEER OF THE REALM was biffed, giving plenty of crossing letters to work with. NAMEPLATES was my FOI. CHIHUAHUA caused a MER, PROCUMBENT was unknown, but confidently entered from the anagrist, UMBO was remembered from previous puzzles, APOCALYPSE was guessed from checkers and then parsed before submission, EXPIATE raised a MER for where did EX come from? WYANDOTTE also unknown. PUZZLEDOM helped me get UNZIP. All in all I quite enjoyed this and having submitted with all correct at 40:12, find that I am still 76 on the Leaderboard! Strange Times indeed. Thanks setter and V.
  30. Thanks setter and verlaine
    Took over an hour and a half across several days to get to the finish and got rolled with the UNCAP / PICKLEDOM crossers that were both unparsable and should have woken up to something not being right.
    Afraid that dictionary help was required for a number of new terms – WYANDOTTE, PRECUMBENT and PEER OF THE REALM. Had the same minor concerns as others with the sound-alike dog, the NAMEPLATE and to a certain extent of the EX part of EXPIATE (which I ended up going down the EX = past = (gone) by path).
    Found it a good exercise that produced my first error in a Times puzzle for quite some time. Finished in the SW corner with those wronguns and the EXPO (which was quite amusingly clued) in between them.

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