Times 27,533: Vernacular Spectacular

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
A third easier-than-average Friday in a row – what is the world coming to? I rate this a difficulty 2 of a possible 5. FOI 1ac, LOI 14ac once I finally ruled out FIRE. WOD definitely BROMANCE at 2dn, and I guess that makes that my COD too, as it did raise a smile when the penny dropped.

I thought for a moment, early on, with ARACHNE and ALBERICH in that we were in for some kind of Nina involving setter sobriquets, but I didn’t spot any more candidates.

With not much else to say about this puzzle I’ll tell you something that my other half Alison noticed as a spectator at the Times Championships last weekend: she observed that most people’s hands were shaking as they held their numbers up but that Magoo’s were absolutely steady. That quality is clearly what separates the creme de la creme from the mere creme!

ACROSS
1 Hard to fathom good man getting right into obloquy (8)
ABSTRUSE – ST + R [good man | right] “into” ABUSE [obloquy]

9 I’m sorry copper in restaurant rendezvous with secretary (3,5)
MEA CULPA – CU [copper] in MEAL + PA [restaurant rendezvous | secretary]

10 Matey only accommodating one in taxi (8)
SOCIABLE – SOLE [only] “accommodating” I [one] in CAB [taxi]

11 Bookless characters felt line should be banter (8)
RAILLERY – {b}RAILLE [characters felt, minus B for book] + RY [line]

12 Instruct colleague in the vernacular (10)
INFORMALLY – or INFORM ALLY [instruct | colleague]

14 Message that was sent with passion (4)
WIRE – or W IRE [with | passion]

15 Under Scots mountain hate festering (7)
BENEATH – BEN [Scots mountain] + (HATE*) [“festering”]

17 Conceited weaver revolutionary artist spots astride horse (7)
ARACHNE – reversed RA [artist] + ACNE [spots] “astride” H [horse]

21 River in countryside with source hidden (4)
URAL – {r}URAL [countryside, minus its first letter]

22 Legal document that might be a trap? (10)
CONVEYANCE – basically a double def, as a trap is a vehicle is a conveyance.

23 Works caught on — sure success one concludes (8)
CONCERTI – C ON CERT + I [caught | on | sure success | one]

25 Time to restore confidence having lost one small gem (8)
TREASURE – T [time] + REAS{s}URE [to restore confidence, minus one S = small]

26 Lag having arrived behind schedule holds us back (8)
INSULATE – IN LATE [having arrived | behind schedule] holds reversed US

27 Denied having eaten pig inside (8)
DISOWNED – DINED [having eaten], SOW [pig] “inside”

DOWN
2 Bishop with Catholic church in which men connect (8)
BROMANCE – B + ROMAN CE [bishop | Catholic | church]

3 Paintings to appear in learned book perhaps that’s hard work (8)
TOILSOME – OILS [paintings] to “appear in” TOME [learned book perhaps]

4 Take lead from large boss (4)
UMBO – {j}UMBO [large, minus its first letter]

5 Stone me — man beheaded outside! (7)
EMERALD – ME, with {h}ERALD [man, “beheaded”] “outside”

6 With yam and fertile ground, here one may trace roots (6,4)
FAMILY TREE – (YAM + FERTILE*) [“ground”]

7 Bachelor getting into beer with wealthy old dwarf (8)
ALBERICH – B [batchelor] “getting into” ALE [beer] + RICH [wealthy]

8 Smitten gay men date heartless Trojan hunk (8)
GANYMEDE – (GAY MEN*) [“smitten”] + D{at}E

13 Bone a fish discovered in tin? (10)
METACARPAL – A CARP [a | fish] “discovered in” METAL [tin?]

15 Obscene flaw in such valued stock? (4,4)
BLUE CHIP – or taken separately, BLUE [obscene] + CHIP [flaw]

16 Well-ordered condition of the pure in spirit? (8)
NEATNESS – or else neat spirits are pure, as in undiluted

18 Powerful feller Bond consulted (8)
CHAINSAW – CHAIN [bond] + SAW [consulted]

19 Rap performance overheard offers dark scene (8)
NOCTURNE – homophone of KNOCK TURN [rap | performance]

20 Encouraged to have wickedly divine time (7)
INVITED – (DIVINE T*) [“wickedly”]

24 Cricket side succeeded, showing staying power? (4)
LEGS – LEG S [cricket side | succeeded]

46 comments on “Times 27,533: Vernacular Spectacular”

  1. I thought I was on course for an on-target 30 minute solve but hit a brick wall in the NE segment with ALBERICH, GANYMEDE, ARACHNE and WIRE holding me up. I just love having to find a word ?I?E as my last one in! 45 minutes in all.

    My brain may be a bit slow as I have not been to bed yet, but how does ‘restaurant rendezvous’ = MEAL?

    1. I guess just, “we went out for a meal”. It’s unarguably something people meet up to do together at a restaurant!
  2. I didn’t find this easy. And I took forever on the same LOI, WIRE, having to do a full alphabet trawl with many words fitting the checkers but not the clue.
  3. Difficult to finish, but WIRE went in early. It was bromance, metacarpal, conveyance and informally that held me up. Informally was a senior moment, knew the word I was looking for but it wouldn’t appear; while conveyance I completely missed the horse carriage, so just a guess.
    Really enjoyable crosssword, if a bit classical for me: didn’t know who Arachne, Alberich or Ganymede were.
  4. Yeah, not too hard. I can’t remember exactly who Alberich was, though, have to look it up now. My LOI was, of course, BROMANCE.
  5. Not only was my hand shaking when I raised it in the second heat, but I forgot to hold the paper up. The sympathetic collector thought I needed some kind of help.It was pleasant chatting to your other half, I guess that, unlike myself, you got the email about guests.
    1. Unspammed. Full-stops need spaces after them in Live Journal, Tom, otherwise it treats the message as suspicious and casts it into limbo.
  6. Thus concludes a bad week’s solving. I stymied myself for some time by entering METATARSAL, thinking tarsa sounded like a fish. With hindsight I think it’s tetra that I had in mind. Anyway, I was pleased with myself for spotting my error only to then put in CONVEYANCY. And after several alphabet trawls I ended up with FIRE instead of WIRE, figuring fire could be passion but obviously not parsing the clue. Roll on next week!
    2. I didn’t get a chance to do the puzzle yesterday so I’m very late to this but just had to say – snap! I bunged in METATARSAL, thinking tarsa sounded like a fish, and then realised I was thinking of tetra, the crossword fish.
      The other very crosswordy word in here is UMBO: one of those clues that would be baffling to any normal person but are a write-in for an experienced solver.
      Other than that I found this quite easy, 8:51.

      Edited at 2019-12-14 10:15 am (UTC)

  7. Missed my target of 6V after a slow start but very enjoyable with lots of wit and some nice surfaces. COD and WOD for me RAILLERY. LOI as for many others was WIRE: I seem to have a blind spot for with = w. Thanks setter and Verlaine and commiserations for being pipped again by the mighty Magoo after flying all the way over!
  9. I never did get the ‘characters felt’ thing at 11a, eventually deciding I’d better check my half-hazarded ROISTERY. Disappointingly, the dictionaries have overlooked the word — I’ll write a stern letter.

    Even more disappointingly, after learning what an obloquy was (and how to spell it) on November 18th, I didn’t know what it was again on December 13th.

    COD definitely BROMANCE. Great word! I just looked up its etymology, which Wiki has as: Dave Carnie is credited with coining the term as editor of the skateboard magazine Big Brother in the 1990s to refer specifically to the sort of relationships that develop between skaters who spent a great deal of time together. But of course. That’s like totally rad, bro.

  10. 26:24. Stuck at the end for about 5 minutes and reduced to an alphabet trawl to find BROMANCE, otherwise no particular difficulties apart from slowness of brain after too little sleep. I liked EMERALD. Thanks V and setter.
    1. I think the beheaded man in 5 dn is GERALD rather than a HERAlD who could be female.

      from Jeepyjay

  11. 41 minutes, which could definitely have been worse, but I seemed to be on the wavelength once I finally found my 24d LEGS. From there I worked my way through the bottom half, including ARACHNE (does it count as a Ninja Turtle if I know the name only from regularly seeing her byline on Guardian puzzles?)

    The top half was a bit trickier, but the wordplay for the unknown dwarf was clear, and at least the Trojan hunk had the decency to have a moon named after him. COD 11a RAILLERY once I figured out what the “characters felt” was all about. As with several other folk, it seems, LOI 14a WIRE.

    2d BROMANCE not a problem; I’ve just finished watching all eight seasons of Psych, which is basically a bromance in 120 episodes. I wouldn’t recommend it, per se, but it’s exactly the kind of pabulum that gets me through sessions on the exercise bike.

    Edited at 2019-12-13 09:26 am (UTC)

  12. Just my sort of puzzle with all the classical stuff and not a Higgs or a boson in sight. Having just seen it, I would add ‘Chernobyl’ to Matt’s BROMANCE TV series. What a show (always excepting episode 4)! And the science delivered in bite-size chunks that even I could understand.

    Edited at 2019-12-13 10:45 am (UTC)

  13. ….and no paper to hold up. Alison’s observation is interesting V – I may watch out for it next year, assuming I finish my puzzles ! Did she notice whether the tendency diminished as more time passed ?

    Apart from having to work round the optimistically biffed “metatarsal” (I’m not carping), there was nothing to worry me here.

    FOI MEA CULPA
    LOI CONVEYANCE
    COD BROMANCE
    TIME 10:09

  14. 30 min: 8d LOI, as I’d imagined him as rather effete, having been chosen as a cup-bearer. At 20d, biffed INCITED – not parsed, but it was almost completely checked – and the anagram fodder wasn’t noticed.
  15. Right up my (classical) street, and also had me convinced this was going to go Full Setter Nina; sadly, no Gordius etc. Managed to avoid FIRE, but took a while to work out why it was WIRE, despite many years of trying to coach myself into spotting that easy-to-overlook “with”=W device. Nice stuff.
  16. A pleasant half hour solve, should have been better but I went astray with TIRESOME at 3d which had to be corrected before my LOI 10a and 2d were possible. Also flirted with METATARSAL at 13d until I caught the CARP. Liked 4d for being a funny word, and 15a for misdirection making me look for a word meaning festering. No problems with WIRE or the classical people in 7d and 8d, once the checkers were in. I can see why Verlaine found it 2 out of 5 for difficulty, I’d give it 3.
  17. Couldn’t do this online, as I had work to do, so instead I spent a leisurely hour over postprandial drinks enjoying the clues. I spent some time vainly trying to make STUD work at 4d before I finally remembered UMBO (having the U and the B helped). I wondered why ARACHNE was conceited; no doubt there’s something in the myth that explains that, and that makes the definition go without saying for classicists like Verlaine. [ON EDIT: 9bloodyac: I think all these years, and there are many of them, I’ve been confusing Arachne and Ariadne.] But I will lift my eyebrows to their height when it comes to our ‘hunk’ GANYMEDE, as phmfantom notes. Ganymede is the source of English ‘catamite’, and it certainly wasn’t for any hunkish attributes that Zeus grabbed him from Troy was it? and took him into service. As it were.

    Edited at 2019-12-13 12:36 pm (UTC)

  19. Bad error biffing METATARSAL and thus inventing TENDERANCE instead of CONVEYANCE.. Liked BROMANCE.

    Thanks verlaine and setter

  20. FOI, EMERALD, LOI CONVEYANCE. No trouble with WIRE. BROMANCE, TOILSOME and NOCTURNE took a while. Staying up until 4:30am has given me a fuzzy head, so this can’t have been too difficult. Had heard of GANYMEDE(as a moon) and ARACHNE(as somebody in mythology) but NHO ALBERICH(helpful wordplay). 26:46. Thanks setter and V.
  21. Also up v. late watching the land being rescued by Sir Galaboris, and surprised to find the puzzle relatively easy in 15’15. Wire last in as with many. Amused by 8. joekobi
  23. I really enjoyed this. I didn’t know the classical references but the wordplay was generous (and amusing) for each. Another BROMANCE fan and a couple of others I liked were the ‘Bookless characters felt’ at 11a and the maybe all too true surface for CONVEYANCE.

    My four-letter nemesis and LOI was LEGS. How could ‘on’ have an ‘e’ in it?

    Finished in 37 minutes.

  24. I enjoyed this too, despite coming unstuck at 13a, like so many others. Wire was one of the options – I also considered bite, fire and line, but, unsurprisingly, couldn’t make any of them fit. W = with: I REALLY must remember that!

    I was pleased to work out quite a few from wordplay – abstruse, toilsome, Alberich and metacarpal for example – rather than just biffing or semi-parsing. I really liked conveyance, emerald and family tree, but didn’t parse raillery, so thanks Verlaine for the explanation.

    FOI Mea culpa
    POI Insulate
    COD Bromance
    DNF in about 40 minutes – I took it the wire!

  25. … and their daughter Anna. An even later arrival at the cruciverbalists’ ball today, after a late arrival of the paper, an early and lengthy meeting (with two lawyers this time) and then falling asleep while doing the puzzle after a surfeit of politics overnight. So no sensible time to offer, as I don’t know when I fell asleep. I knew GANYMEDE as a moon, ARACHNE as a phobia and ALBERICH as a name I might have seen somewhere before but I know not when. COD to NOCTURNE. Thank you V and setter.
  26. I didn’t find this all that easy (had to think about *e*s before coming up with LEGS and I spent time trying to put “art” in TOILSOME) but it was certainly within my ken. The bookends of BROMANCE and GANYMEDE in the Northern sector was quite a hint if you happen to know the old story. I’m wobbly on Wagner but did know ALBERICH and it reminded me of the MR James ghost story Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook. Nice one. 20.23
  27. Plenty of NHOs here and biffing METATARSAL didn’t help with CONVEYANCE. I must live a sheltered life as I had no idea what BROMANCE meant.
  28. Witty, fast surfaces, plus I was considerably faster at filling in the grid than I normally am on a Friday. Enjoyable stuff.

    Note to Verlaine perhaps Magoo does not drink as much as some other competitors.

  29. Despite staying up to see the election results till past 3.30, surprisingly sprightly crossword completion today. Finished in 16 minutes which for a Friday I’m pleased with. A few classical allusions to set the ball rolling and then steady progress. Last one in was raillery which for a while I thought might be a tiger trap, fortunately inspiration arrived just in time.

    Here’s to next week.

  30. This was tough. The classical stuff was kindly clued but the NW was hard to break down – it was SOCIABLE that suddenly swam into view on the hour giving TOILSOME and showing where to stick the saint in 1a.
  31. Somewhat sluggish today, biffing METATARSAL and AMICABLE (for SOCIABLE), both of which held me up, and then struggling to find WIRE. Not a bad puzzle but I felt some of the surface readings were a little crosswordy.
  32. ‘Guilty copper in restaurant rendezvous with secretary’ might make more sense? The surface as it stands makes no sense at all. 13d needs to end with a ‘perhaps’ perhaps? Mr Grumpy
  33. Sometimes the failure of others is the only commiseration, despicable though that may be. So it was for me with WIRE.
  34. 29:23. Late commenting after the office Christmas party. I should’ve been much quicker on this. I knew Wagner’s dwarf, the spinner at 17ac and knew Ganymede as a cup bearer, Did wonder about how hunky he might’ve been but not for too long. However I needed an alpha trawl and no little discipline and inspiration to discount fire and enter wire. A biffed metatarsal also gave me problems. I eventually parsed it properly and managed to get conveyance soon after. Very enjoyable if slower than necessary.

Comments are closed.