Times 27436 – a shell game?

66 comments on “Times 27436 – a shell game?”

1. I don’t know the Hebrew alphabet, so I guessed LADETH. So DNF. Otherwise pretty easy.
   1. I had LADETH as well. But, unlike you, I didn’t find it at all easy. It was 10 minutes before my first answer went in. Then another 30 mins to finish. Ann
2. I loved 1ac, particularly as “will” at the start of the clue looked so like a noun.
3. 50 minutes with the LH side proving much more resistant than the RH. My FOI was CURRENT ACCOUNT so I was solving on the back foot, so to speak, for most of the puzzle.

   TINAMOU was unknown so taken on trust. Apologies to Hebrew speakers, but for me that alphabet counts as a foreign language so I’m going to have another of my usual moans about foreign words being clued as anagrams. I happened to guess DALETH correctly first time, but it could just as easily have been LADETH (as mentioned by Paul above) or TALEDH for that matter – in fact that looks more likely than the actual answer now I have come to think of it.

   Not sure I have met CHIMAERA spelt with AE.

   Are we missing something at 1dn? I get ‘A typical ball he tossed in order’ but wonder what the rest of the clue is about.

   Was I the only person when parsing 2dn to think for a moment that the setter was referring to his employer’s newspaper as a ‘rag’?

   Edited at 2019-08-22 06:24 am (UTC)

   1. in 1dn the def. is “in order that most of us follow.” I observe that “most of us” is in alphabetical order, not sure if that if what was intended

      Edited at 2019-08-22 08:44 am (UTC)

      1. Thanks, Jerry. I realised when solving that the definition is intended to be everything from ‘in order’ onwards and George has it underlined in his blog by way of confirming that, but ‘most of us follow’ seems at best feeble and at worst redundant unless there’s something more to it that hasn’t been spotted so far. Your explanation offers some hope of that, but if that were the intention wouldn’t we need to read ‘most of us’ as a single entity in which case it would take the singular verb? Or am I simply over-thinking this? No need to answer that!

         Edited at 2019-08-22 08:59 am (UTC)

         1. No, George neglected to underline “in.”
   2. I can’t get any farther in the Hebrew alphabet, but since no one seems to have mentioned it, Alpha Beta Gamma Delta / Aleph Beth Gimel Daleth.
      1. I memorised all of the Greek alphabet while I was doing my A Levels, but the only one in the Hebrew alphabet I’d come across before was Aleph, and that was only in one of these crosswords. It didn’t help that when I looked up the Hebrew aphabet, Wiki gave Daleth as Dalet 🙁
   3. A nice thought about ‘the rag’, but I assumed all the setters were contracted on a freelance basis? It’s the only way to explain the inconsistency across all of the word puzzles.
4. Auxillary, Chimeera, Ad Nauseum and Ladeth, (changed at the last minute from Daleth). All in 30 mins.

   COD: Airfield.

   1. I’ve gone down the Nauseum route before (despite being a Derek & Clive fan) so I nailed that one but I’ll join in the auxillary fun and add TALEDH and RHYMAERA
5. A spectacularly ironic DNF today, as I finally threw in the towel at the end of my hour with 2d still incomplete. It didn’t help that I wasn’t sure enough about 1a to know whether they were ancillary or AUXILLARY. (I’m from one of the generations where English lessons focused less on the technicalities of parsing and the parts of speech…)

   Why ironic, you ask? Well, I had to stop at the end of my hour as I have to head off to the Bristol Royal Infirmary for someone to do some 2d on my left foot. D’oh.

   1. (D’oh. I meant AUXILIARY there, of course. It’s too early for spelling! My sympathies to our illustrious blogger…)

      Edited at 2019-08-22 07:36 am (UTC)

   2. We were taught English Grammar as a separate subject back in the 1950s but if ever AUXILARY VERBS were mentioned I can’t have been paying attention.
6. 11.06, with even the tricky ones worked out from wordplay, so in theory a good day.

   Sadly I can’t tell my knitting from my programming, so an unfortunate pErlieu kind of took the shine off it.

   Edited at 2019-08-22 06:28 am (UTC)

7. So the definition is “in order that most of us follow.”
8. 40 mins pre-brekker.
   I found this very chewy – and I think it is fair to moan about cluing a Hebrew letter as an anagram.
   OWAA! (Obscure word as anagram)
   Taledh did look good, but plumped for Daleth.
   NHO Tinamou.
   Mostly I liked the Airfield.
   Thanks setter and G.
   1. DALETH might be more fitting as something from science fiction, what with Daleks and Darth Vader.
      1. Yes – there was ‘The Daleth Effect’ by my late friend Harry Harrison.
         1. We all loved Harry… I still treasure a letter from him thanking me for sending him a cutting from my local paper which reviewed his famous novel, “The Stainless Steel Prat”.
   2. Given we are discussing DALETHS, would that be OWAA the lads?
      1. Good one.
   3. Just so you know, M., the Test Match Special commentary team is currently filling the time in between overs and rain showers with a detailed discussion of the merits of Fat Rascals.
9. It seems from the early entries we have a rash of pink squares, to which I can add an inexplicable X-YAYING (particularly successful radiology?) in just over 14 minutes.
   I too think CHIMAERA looks odd, and agree with George that there was a touch of Mephisto here, most deceptively at 1ac where Will might have had a Shakespearean connection, such that I was looking either for a quote or typical Bardic eccentric spelling.
   Be warned: my copy of Chambers might not be the current go-to dictionary, but it does have the Hebrew alphabet in the appendix, and (which would sink me) the Arabic. “Dad Jim lam sad nun shin” gives you advance warning and setters ideas you might wish they didn’t have.
   1. What a bizarre Inclusion in an English dictionary. Mr Grumpy
10. I only just avoided “coming a perler” myself!
    1. (That was me, by the way. Apparently my iPhone isn’t logged in to LiveJournal)
11. I had a colleague who claimed to live in Riddlesdown, a place only to be found on a knitting pattern, It was plainly Purley. 25 minutes with LOI AIRFIELD. Fortunately, I know the first four letters of the Hebrew alphabet so DALETH wasn’t a biff. I always rejoice in being so old that I did formal grammar in English at school, although I had to think twice between ancillary and AUXILIARY. I nearly put in X-rating before Billy Connolly came to my rescue. The spelling of CHIMAERA was a novelty to me. DNK CARET or TINAMOU but what else? COD to the verbs. Enjoyable puzzle. Thank you George and setter.
12. …but a couple solved through using aids. Yes, I put X-RATING!
    I think Kevin G must have gone off in a huff as the club leaderboard says he made three errors!
    In 1ac I thought the mention of Will meant we were looking for something Shakespearian and I worked hard to find a word to go with PLAYS.
    1. And none of them even typos. I vant to be alone.
13. Very good crossword. COD a toss up between the VERB and the AIRFIELD. Only clue I didn’t like was DALETH which I guessed correctly but dislike for all of the regularly voiced reasons.
14. Overall an easy puzzle with a number going in straight from definition.

    Like Jack I’m not keen on the definition at 1D – “dictionaries follow” maybe but not “most of us”. Usual gripe about 15A which I looked up. AIRFIELD very good clue indeed.

    1. I observe that “most of us” is in alphabetical order, not sure if that if what was intended though
       1. If that was the setter’s intention then I think the phrase should be longer – at least five words. Also wouldn’t that make the answer ALPHABETICAL rather than “…ALLY”
15. Hmm, well, all correct anyway. I am not particularly familiar with the Hebrew alphabet but I knew Aleph and Beth and Daleth seemed to fit best. Wikipedia I notice calls it dalet not daleth.
    Tinamou has appeared here four times before, one of them a jumbo.
16. 9:57, but with exactly the same error, for exactly the same reason, as our blogger.
    Quite annoying after successfully navigating the twin heffalump traps of PURL not PERL and DALETH. I think we’ve had teth or heth (or possibly beth, seth, peth, leth, keth or meth) before so that seemed the likeliest ending. Not a good clue though.
    I put the answer to 8dn in without looking at the clue. What word for that should we put in our glossary?
    EGGSHELL featured in a recent ISIHAC episode, defined as Sean Connery’s favourite spreadsheet.
    Kids are taught formal grammar again in schools these days, thankfully shorn of all the spurious nonsense about ‘errors’ (split infinitives, dangling participles, ending sentences with prepositions usw) that was a feature of much grammar teaching in the past.
    1. I’m with you on split infinitives and prepositions (applying Latin rules to a German-based language), but dangling participles (though from the same prescriptive stable) can lead to misunderstanding and are in a different class for me.

       You ewolled (entered without looking – an ewol) the clue, perhaps? Sure someone can come up with something better.

       1. That is sometimes true but it’s a question of style rather than grammar.
          1. I can’t find anything ungrammatical with the following sentences, produced by native speakers of English:

             Although only 2 months old, Mr. Arcaro said the system is “still a white elephant”.

             Bound, gagged, and trussed up nude in a denim bag, with plugs in her ears and tape over her eyes, Linda Sharpe told yesterday how she was kidnapped to Florida.

             For over a half-century Rumplemayer’s has been one of New York’s most popular ice-cream parlors. Decorated with cuddly stuffed animals and trimmed with large pink velvet bows, you feel like you’re sitting inside a present.

17. I managed to avoid the bear trap at 1A by changing the second L to an I as there wasn’t room for both. Fortunately I knew DALETH, although I struggled to remember the word at 19A, initially thinking PUTZCHAH, but that didn’t look very likely. I liked AD NAUSEAM. Thanks George and setter. 16:39
18. There was some nice stuff here (I thought 1ac provided a very satisfying PDM once I’d got the bard out of my head, likewise the PA people). However, put me down for the usual harrumph at 15ac, regardless of the fact that I guessed the right possibility.
19. ….about the BALANCE in his CURRENT ACCOUNT ?

    I made heavy weather of this by entering “chimeara” (despite being familiar with CHIMAERA), so that 25A appeared to be a really weird sort of fish that I hadn’t heard of. Once I spotted my slip, it was soon sorted out.

    Furthermore, there were EIGHTEEN holes in my logic process at 13A, and I consequently struggled with HEREUNDER and my LOI (which I’m grateful that George parsed for me, since I was totally bewildered by that point).

    I was another to be briefly led down a Shakespearean blind alley, which I escaped from quickly upon solving X-RAYING.

    Whilst I can’t claim to know them ALPHABETICALLY, I’m familiar with the Hebrew letters, as so many of them crop up while playing Words with Friends, and GrabbyWord. Thus I was able to impose a “taledh ban”. I’m sorry, I’ll get my coat.

    FOI PLANE TREE
    LOI AIRFIELD
    COD AUXILIARY VERBS
    TIME 12:03

20. Another AUXILLARY here, and I looked up my LOI, DALETH. As Jerry mentions Wiki gives it as DALET, so I missed it there and used a word finder instead. A good puzzle, but I was left with a sense of irritation at my LOI, and even more annoyed with myself at 1a, where I also wasted time trying to shoehorn the Bard in. Just as well the TINAMOU was a hidden! 47:38, WOE, with 15 of those wasted trying to solve 15a without aids before giving up. Thanks setter and George.
21. 17 mins.
    We had chimaera with an added a not so long ago, iirc.
    Guessed daleth correctly, but this practice really isn’t on. If we’re going to have an obscurity let’s have some proper wp to clue it. Thanks George.
22. Put me down as another AUXILLARY. 14m 39s with that error, and it would have been two errors if I hadn’t had a lucky result in “guess the foreign anagram” at 15a.

    AIRFIELD & EGGSHELL took me at least 4 minutes, as I couldn’t parse the ’round’.

    COD for me is AMISH.

23. Here in Patagonia, the Elegant Crested Tinamou is a common sight, chimaeras, less so.
24. I had to wait for the checking letters for BALANCE to drop in. I don’t think I’d heard of the tightrope walker and I’d confused the name with Blondel, the minstrel who serenaded Richard I, so couldn’t see what balance had to do with it. DALETH was vaguely familiar although I wasn’t sure if he was an alphabetical or a biblical character. I never learned any English grammar, just French and then Latin and Greek, but that verb thing did enter the consciousness somewhere along the line. I know it’s a perfectly fair crossword convention but I always get tetchy when a tree is called a plant – if it’s a plant it’s one that got too big for its roots. 18.11
25. 25 minutes – knew DALETH & TINAMOU, but held up for a while on 12ac as ‘enclosed’ convinced that N.Y. had to be outer letters.
    Having biffed X-RATING at 2dn, only went back to look at parsing at last minute when asked if I wanted to submit, so must remember to do that (too often I’ve gone ahead, in aid of recording a good time – then spoilt by typos)
26. Exactly. Although if I were an editor I would change all of them!
27. As above, I got EIGHTEEN as well, especially having just come from playing that many, so my AIRFIELD didn’t go in and was looking for an alternative. Stuck also on CARET and the AUXILIARY VERBS, although an alphabet trawl on -e-bs would have got me there had I tried it.
    The rest was quite easy, which added to the frustration.
28. Several NHOs (or HO once but have since forgotten): TINAMOU, PURLIEU and DALETH. The first two were clear from the wordplay. For the last, I decided that no reasonable setter would expect a solver to know more than the first few letters of Hebrew, and therefore that DALETH was more likely than “ladeth”.

    Nice to see a trio of vaguely medical clues. LEECHes are sadly underappreciated: they are still used in a small number of cases and, unlike most things in medicine, are quite unlikely to kill you.

    4d gets my CoD.

    1. A leech is, in fact, an archaic term for surgeon or physician. I first came across it in the works of Patrick O’Brian: one of his minor characters was assistant to a horse leech in Boston. Quite a mental picture! Nicky
       1. Quite so, the physician being named after one of the few reliable things in his toolbox.
    2. I’ve read of leeches being used to treat a black eye Dr Thud. Was that ever true?
       1. Seems like a waste of a good leech, but quite possibly true. Leeches have very good anti-clotting agents in their saliva and are good at hoovering up blood from burst (as well as clogged) capillaries. They’re used now mainly after surgery where there’s a problem with blood flow, for instance after re-attaching a severed finger. So, if you’re planning to take up competitive chainsaw sculpting or knife-juggling, keep a few in your fridge.
          1. Thank you – I think! Actually I do occasionally use a mandoline for cooking and it’s almost scarily easy to slice off a bit of your finger along with the veg so the odd leech in a mason jar might be just the thing…
29. DNF in 28:39 with one error. Don’t know my Hebrew alphabet so in what came down to a straight shoot out between daleth and ladeth I went for ladeth. That aside I quite enjoyed the mix of interesting vocab. COD 1ac.
30. Nothing too difficult here except DALETH which I guessed once all the checkers were in

Comments are closed.