Times 27633 – easier to solve than to explain, perhaps.

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Phew! that wasn’t too hard to get finished, but deciphering the nitty gritty of my ‘must be that’ answers for the blog took longer than the solving. For some reason I couldn’t get started anywhere near the top and had all of the lower half done before moving to the NE and finally getting 1a, guessing 2d and working out 4d before checking to see if such a crossbred instrument existed. I get the feeling this one was created by one our more Classicist setters, as to do it without guesswork you need to know a bit of Latin and about very early Greek scripts. Oddly enough even as a non-Classicist, I did, but not being tuned in to rugby, I missed for ages the clever definition in 1d. No doubt different folks will find it easier, or harder in different parts. Anyway it makes a change from gardening.

Across
1 Political party putting approach in writing once (6,1)
LINEAR B -Put NEAR (approach) into LIB short for Liberal.
5 Malfunction of set roughly turned the wrong way (3,2)
ACT UP – PUT CA reversed, where PUT = set and CA = circa, roughly.
9 Scottish town to impose restrictions on very loud music? (5)
BANFF – BAN FF. Not the Canadian Banff, the original one, not far from my son’s hoose.
10 Port to sink before consuming four fifths of a pint? (9)
DUNKERQUE – DUNK = sink, ERE = before, insert QU being two fifths of a QUART, so four fifths of a pint. Groan.
11 Cure not originally presented is easily best (7)
TROUNCE – (CURE NOT)*.
12 Agreed to gorge, maybe, after getting round brief food shortage (2,1,4)
OF A MIND – FAMIN(E) = brief food shortage. Insert into OD = overdose, gorge maybe.
13 Charity fete closing early upset alderman, perhaps (4,6)
CITY FATHER – (CHARITY FET)*, where FET = fete closing early.
15 Breathe in sharply when visiting doctor (4)
GASP – when = AS, insert into GP.
18 Boy, one often contemplated endlessly when reflecting (4)
EVAN – One may contemplate ones NAVEL, so delete the end and reverse it.
20 Found warm clothing for parachutist (4,6)
BASE JUMPER – Found = BASE, JUMPER = warm clothing.
23 Old earl turning red, inflamed by absorbing strip (7)
WARWICK – RAW (red, inflamed) is reversed and added to WICK.
24 Light-hearted son having to bear constant struggles (7)
JOCKEYS – Light-hearted = JOKEY, insert C the speed of light in a vacuum, add S for son. Jockeys for position, for example.
25 Legendary female cook ill right after baking (9)
FOLKLORIC – (F COOK ILL R)*, where F = female and R = right.
26 Not appropriate one should have dozed at audition (5)
INAPT – Sounds like “I napped”.
27 Piece of music and somewhere to play it (5)
RECIT – REC = somewhere to play, IT. A Recit or recitative is a voice piece in an early opera, for instance.
28 Aggressiveness greeting bishops at one’s Mass (7)
YOBBISM – YO, greetings as in Yo, bro prehaps; B B bishops, I’S M for Mass. I’m not sure yobs are always aggressive, no doubt Jimbo could clarify. (Not saying he was!).

Down
1 Determined to support policy that involves jumping forwards (4-3)
LINE-OUT – a rugger clue that took me an age to understand, not beinf a rugger b*gger myself. Policy = LINE, OUT = determined. e.g. out to win.
2 Trifle with unpleasant smell and lacking taste (8)
NIFFNAFF – This too had me stumped for too long, it’s an expression I didn’t know I knew, and even if I did, I expected it to be hyphenated or two words. Apparently it was in use in Victorian times, so not an Americanism this time. NIFF = unpleasant smell, NAFF = tacky.
3 Frenchman, perhaps, with British army corps (5)
ANDRE – Not a great clue IMO, think of a French male name. AND (with) RE (Royal Engineers).
4 Enjoyable novel, left for Yankee music maker (9)
BANJOLELE – I surprised myself by working this out and then finding it was correct and did exist! Take ENJOYABLE, replace the Y with an L, and make it an anagram. (ENJOLABLE)*. No doubt, with a banjo style body and fretted ukelele neck, it combines the best of both, but still sounds grim.
5 Guitarist celebrity Times article recalled (6)
AXEMAN – Fortunately we’ve had AXE or AX for guitar recently in these columns, in a puzzle I blogged, with some debate I recall, so it was easier than it might have been (not that I could recall any celebrity American guitarists that fitted the space). All reversed, NAME (celebrity), X (Times), A (article.
6 Leaves, retaining what might be continental, almost, in spirit (7)
TEQUILA – TEA (leaves) insert QUIL(T). Quilts used to be thought Continental, before they were duvets.
7 Revolutionary deserts his ship, ultimately presenting poser (5)
PSEUD – Deserts = DUE, as in ‘getting his just deserts’. Add S P, the untimate letters of his ship, and reverse that.
8 Let alumni say nothing about head of Latin (8)
OBSTACLE – OBS = alumni, old boys, TACE is Latin for ‘he is silent’ i.e. say nothing; insert L being the ‘head of Latin’. I found one reference to TACE meaning silent in Engish, as a variant on tacet or tacit, but it’s not in Collins or Chambers online except as a piece of armour. Anyway I biffed it and then reserached it.
14 Novelist of note eclipsing mediocre one, some hope? (9)
THACKERAY – TE a note, goes around HACK a mediocre writer, then a RAY of hope.
16 Beneath airborne soldier, spot a drone? (8)
PARASITE – PARA (airborne soldier), SITE (spot).
17 Veg from animal park, essential with joint, reportedly (8)
ZUCCHINI – A homophone clue I’m just getting comfortable with as I write this. I get ZU sounds like ZOO. Then CCHINI pronounced KINI? Ah yes, it sounds like KEY KNEE, essential joint. Zucchini is American or Italian for courgette.
19 Medium lycra pants and cape for one to wear (7)
ACRYLIC – (LYCRA)* then I C cape for one. Painting medium.
21 Reduced prize for entering afternoon heat in advance (7)
PREWARM – REWAR(D) goes inside PM.
22 November leaves intense, rich in colour (6)
VIOLET – VIOLENT (intense) loses its N, to give a rich colour.
23 Biscuit ends in hollow area of the floor (5)
WAFER – last letters of hollo W are A o F th E floo R.
24 Bill arriving in post for father of twelve (5)
JACOB – AC (account, bill) inside JOB (post).

​

74 comments on “Times 27633 – easier to solve than to explain, perhaps.”

  1. I think 26A has to be I (normally) and then sounds like “napped”. The first syllable of INAPT can’t sound like “I” surely.

    I’d never heard of NIFFNAFF, but I had heard of NICKNACK so it seemed likely. I also worked our the BANJOLELE and wasn’t entirely sure such an instrument would exist, but that’s about the only way you can put the letters once you have some checkers.

    5D a famous guitarist with “times” = X in surely is HENDRIX. Nope, one letter too many before even looking at the rest of the wordplay.

    I liked the four fifths of a pint (once I worked out what was going on, anyway)

    1. I see you point, it’s not EYE-NAPT, but it’s not pronounced ee-napt either. It’s IN-APT. The clue only works if you don’t look too closely?
      1. Isn’t it–and I assumed that this is what Paul was saying–that ‘one’ gives us I (the letter I), and ‘dozed at audition’ gives us NAPT, and Bob’s your etc.?
  2. Not too hard to get finished, he says! Well, in a way it wasn’t; I went offline at about 40′, with maybe 5 clues left, and over lunch got them in 5-6′. But it was a hard 40 minutes. DNK LINE-OUT, NIFFNAFF, BASE JUMPER, RECIT, continental quilt, TACE, BANJOLELE; quite a lot of ignorance for one puzzle. ON EDIT: Didn’t Bertie Wooster play the banjolele, to the displeasure of his neighbors? I liked DUNKERQUE & PSEUD, among others.

    Edited at 2020-04-08 05:43 am (UTC)

    1. More important, to the annoyance of Jeeves. The consequence was that Jeeves was not around to keep young Bertie out of trouble, so that all manner of problems could develop before Wooster gave up the banjolele, Jeeves reappeared, and order was restored.
  3. 49:42 for me but clearly very on wavelength with a WITCH of 67 for a puzzle currently showing the toughest SNITCH for almost two years.

    I generally solve by guessing and then decoding, and lots of these came as first guess, though the SW corner slowed me right down as I tried to shoehorn in EGAD and fell for the deception of 27a, searching for a musical venue not a park. NHO NIFFNAFF or BANJOLELE (which Chambers has as banjulele) but wordplay was clear enough.

    Thanks Pip and setter.

    1. Thanks for doing the leg work on the SNITCH! I was interested to know when we last had one rated this difficult. Like you I was on the wavelength today with a WITCH of 70.
    2. Not sure I have ever seen ‘banjulele’ before but as a portmanteau word it makes good sense, being a combination of banj{o} and {uk}ulele. But then as we learned very recently ‘ukulele’ can now be spelt ‘ukelele’ so I guess it all comes down to usage and ‘banjo’ with ‘lele’ tacked on the end is more straightforward.
  4. Surprisingly, my first all-correct solve of the week, especially considering the question marks in my margin are into double figures. FOI 1a LINEAR B, LOI 18a EVAN, which certainly needed some contemplation. 41 minutes didn’t seem too shabby for this beast.

    BANJOLELE known from Thank You, Jeeves, where it’s the instrument of quite some rift between Bertie and Jeeves. FOLKLORIC just pipped it to the post for WOD, though.

    Edited at 2020-04-08 07:33 am (UTC)

  5. 68 minutes with LOI VIOLET after Richard of York finally didn’t give battle in vain. I didn’t enjoy this, as I’m not a good anagram solver and so both BANJOLELE and FOLKLORIC were major irritations. I didn’t understand the ‘wick’ in WARWICK either, nor why the parachutist was a BASE JUMPER. I wondered if it was a baseball term. CITY FATHER also sounds more like an Americanism to me, while we had aldermen in the towns and counties I lived in in my earlier days. I’ve never heard of NIFF NAFF either but somehow I didn’t mind that. I got ACT UP early and then tried to think of a guitarist beginning with A. It took a couple of attempts to remember AXEMAN. Thank you Pip and setter.

    Edited at 2020-04-08 10:59 am (UTC)

  6. A toughish pangram. NHO niffnaff, NRHO (not really heard of) BANJOLELE (read too quickly and put BANJOLEER in for a while).

    22dn – is the ‘rich’ part of the intense rather than the colour? VIOLET doesn’t really mean rich in colour. Shades of 23ac with two words for raw.

    COD 1dn LINE-OUT for the jumping forwards.

    Yesterday’s answer: the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists is the 100th livery company in order of precedence, the first is the Mercers. Inspired by GOLDSMITHS. A dispute as to whether the Skinners or the Merchant Taylors should be sixth or seventh (and so they alternate each year) is apparently the origin of the phrase ‘at sixes and sevens’.

    Today’s question: can you name three songs whose titles are Bakerloo line stations? If you feel moved to reply, please give a cryptic clue to the answer rather than the answer!

    1. Well I’ll start the ball rolling with the obvious one, the single on which Bob Holness famously didn’t play the saxophone. I mean, obviously Bob Holness didn’t play the saxophone on lots of records, but you know what I mean.
      1. I think Napoleon must have met his match at one, and is there a song about a cricket club where bacon and egg is served?
        1. Only realised that Bakerloo is a portmanteau word today, referring to the stations it runs between, which led me to wonder what the rest of the lines would be on a similar basis, all aboard the Aldsham line?
          1. People (especially Americans) are already fascinated that the train from Heathrow normally has Cockfosters as its destination.
    3. All the artists’ names have double letters in them but only one of them is a palindrome.

      Edited at 2020-04-08 12:09 pm (UTC)

      1. Which artists? I spotted some double letters going on but couldn’t see any pattern to them.
          1. Sorry if we were at cross-purposes as I thought I was responding to a point about the puzzle but it seems you may have been referring to something else.

            The puzzle has double letters in BANFF, ZUCCHINI and YOBBISH and having noticed that whilst solving I was looking for more, or perhaps even a double pangram.

      1. This bespoke crossword blog is being despoiled by multiple meaningless guesses – a separate blog please angus!
  7. Gave up on this with two or three still to go after a valiant struggle. There were far too many obscurities of words or meanings for me to understand fully what was going on and with 7 or 8 notes in the margins highlighting things I would need to look up afterwards I simply got fed up with the whole thing.

    I don’t know about Bertie Wooster but George Formby’s ‘banjo’ was a banjolele.

    I don’t think anyone has mentioned it’s a pangram.

    Edited at 2020-04-08 07:02 am (UTC)

  8. Well, I found that tough and was happy to get through it unscathed. I’m still trying to work out if I liked it – the clues, once elucidated, were very tight. But it was hard work on some of the required knowledge: “tace”, for example, which I deduced from tacit, etc. I was also suitably smug to have worked out “QU” as a portion of a pint.

    Thanks, Pip, for the excellent blog and (I think) to the setter.

    1. I’d assumed tace! would be some well-known-but-not-to-me schoolboy Latin along the same lines as cave!; I’m gratified to find other people also had to conjure it up the same way I did…
  9. This was a struggle from start to…..RECIT!! Why not RONDO? According to Ambrose Bierce, a Rondo is ‘a Condo in the round.’

    I did like that 7dn PSEUD was in a corner – a nod to Lord Gnome? – nice one setter!

    I had to give up becoming bored by the whole thing.

    I believe that both The Duke of Windsor and Ian Fleming played the Banjolele. But IF did not knit!

    FOI 16dn PARASITE

    (LOI) VIOLET

    COD 1dn LINE OUT

    WOD 3dn NIFFNAFF

    At 25ac FOLKLORIC – I really thought, when I saw ‘Legendary female cook’ beginning with an ‘F’, that FANNY Craddock was in our midst – sadly not. The story of her and the ‘F’- word is legendary indeed! But is certainly not relatable hereabouts. Poor Johnnie!

    Edited at 2020-04-08 08:46 am (UTC)

  10. One of those rare “on the wavelength” occasions when you can tell that a puzzle is probably quite difficult, but you’re still spotting all the devices and have nearly all the requisite knowledge (rugby union, some Latin, working knowledge of Bertie Wooster etc.) That still left one complete unknown, but with N_F_N_F_ in place, it really had to be that odd-looking child of nick-nack and whiff-whaff. A good struggle today.
  11. That was most enjoyable. LINEAR B was a write-in from the length of the 2nd word. I studied it many moons ago. BANJOLELE I dredged up from somewhere, and NIFF-NAFF was obvious enough from the wordplay. I just think that was a great show of excellent clueing throughout. COD to 22dn for the wonderful misdirection. TACE, by the way, means “be silent”, not “he is silent”, which would be TACET.

    Edited at 2020-04-08 09:26 am (UTC)

      1. Only because no one has yet deciphered Linear A! Maybe I’ll make that my lockdown task…
      2. As a youth, I read a book called The Decipherment of Linear B. Didn’t understand it.
  12. 41:26. Wow! That was a struggle, but I got there in the end. I took ages to remember the script at 1A, NHO BANJOLELE or NIFFNAFF. Pennies dropped very slowly for lots of the others too. I felt a sense of achievement in finishing all parsed and without aids. Plenty of great clues, but the one that made me smile most was ZUCCHINI.
  13. Very much not my cup of tea. Some poor clues and obscure references. QU clued as four fifths of a pint is poor practice. QU is two fifths of the word “quart” not of an actual quart.

    A yob is lazy, slovenly, ill mannered but not particularly violent. I was a Teddy Boy but never a yob.

    1. The clue doesn’t say ‘violent’, it says ‘aggressive’, which as a father of a 15-year-old boy who is often the latter but thankfully never the former I can assure you is not the same thing!
  14. 24:24, tough but enjoyable. I didn’t know what TACE was doing in OBSTACLE, failed to see what sort of DUE was in PSEUD and had to assume that NIFFNAFF and RECIT were both a “thing”.

    I’d heard of the BANJOLELE and agree that the definition for LINE-OUT was very good.

    There were some very unlikely looking letter combinations on show, NFF, FFN and OLKLO among them.

  15. 12:24. I loved this one, a fact perhaps not entirely unrelated to the fact that I was clearly on the wavelength with a WITCH of 58. But generally I do like puzzles with a wide range of references and a few funny words indicated byclear wordplay.
    I didn’t know that BANFF was a Scottish town but it’s not exactly a massive leap to assume that a town in North America might be named after a British one.
    TACE in 8dn is the sort of thing that can really irritate me but in the context of the definition the answer is obvious and then it’s not hard to deduce what it must be from ‘tacit’. You need an ability to make that sort of connection in your solving toolkit.
    Has anyone come across NIFFNAFF before?!

    Edited at 2020-04-08 09:54 am (UTC)

  16. 45.15 after obsessive parsing efforts for the odd clue clearly right e.g. zucchini. Enjoyable but while I knew the Latin ‘tace’ it’s surely an obsolescence too far. I’d say there is a defining touch of aggressiveness in yobbish behaviour even if it’s no more than a kind of brute ego. As for ‘qu’ one has to allow a setter a licence to pun. I’d recommend Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’ as a good read for these extended times.
  17. 41:29 Tricky. The snitch is interesting; at 169 (at the moment) this is one of the three trickiest ones since December 2018. The other two have been in the last 6 weeks (both 171). Four fifths etc. – well, what can you say? Jim called it right, I think. Thanks pip.
  18. Didn’t think was as hard as others recently, but I agree that there are a lot of obscurities but most could be worked out. NHO AXEMAN and I do play the guitar, so there’s something new to describe myself as. And then there’s the other instrument that I don’t play… Thought about WIFFWAFF but that’s table tennis, so ended up with the unknown NIFFNAFF. COD, in fact COW or even COM LINE-OUT.
    1. Axeman does not apply to most guitarists: only those who play thrash and heavy metal. Segovia and Julian Bream do not count.
      1. Careful With That Axe Eugene. Axe for guitar has been around a while. But although I am one I have never heard Axeman. To me this epitomised this rather unnecessarily fiddly, puny, scratchy, bitey, pathetic little crossword. No thanks Setter.
      2. BB King did neither thrash nor metal, but I’m betting you would agree he was an axeman (Lucille) par excellence.
  19. Well, that was an hour and a bit of intensive effort. I started off with PSEUD, but couldn’t parse it. Then got GASP, which I could and then made some progress in the SE before jumping hither and thither, trying to pick up crumbs. FOLKLORIC irritated me for ages before I found the correct anagrist. OBSTACLE obstructed me, NIFFNAFF, my LOI confounded me. I managed to finish with no errors, but it was more of a chore than a pleasure. LINEAR B was eventually remembered from previous puzzles. Took me forever to discount (p)RESERVE at 11a, but I finally saw TROUNCE and then saw the anagram, to the sound of a wet fish being slapped across my forehead. 62:10. Thanks(I think) setter and Pip.
  20. ….using Jack’s method of giving up an unequal struggle after 21 minutes and coming here. Thank goodness for Pip’s (as ever) excellent blog.

    PSEUD totally defeated me, as did the NHO RECIT, but VIOLET was a SHAG (Should HAve Got). I particularly needed Pip to decipher DUNKERQUE, on which I totally agree with Jimbo.

    Also NHO LINEAR B, and thought that a BASE JUMPER was one of those smartarses who leap from roof to roof without a parachute – one thing I’ve learned today at least.

    FOI BANFF
    COD LINE-OUT

  21. A batter can do this in baseball if he hits a line drive that’s caught by a fielder, but I was pretty sure the setter meant some other sport which I DNK. Speaking of bats, I got LINEAR B right off one and then stalled for what seemed like ages. I reckoned that if you could have riffraff you could have NIFFNAFF. Finally dredged up RECIT from long ago choral music but it took a while. ACRYLIC was good. A hard fought 29.51
  22. I gave this a good go but retreated here for enlightenment as we are cleaning the patio this afternoon.
    FOI was BANFF. Amazingly I remembered LINEAR B from a previous puzzle. Thought I might make some progress,but it did look difficult. Another HENDRIX? at 5d. HIBBISM? at 28a- Scottish football fans can be aggressive when there’s no sunshine on Leith. OBSTRUCT at 8d -where does the L go?
    And so on.
    I considered Dunkirk for the port but it’s not spelt like that is it?
    David
    1. DUNKERQUE is the French spelling and should have been indicated as such, in my view.
  23. I thought this was a really good test but I had to admit defeat after 45 minutes, frustrated by recit and violet. Probably should have seen the latter, but violent as an alternative to intense escaped me. Recit didn’t even come close, though it will next time. Ah well, there’s always tomorrow.
  24. I’ll settle for that. Was pretty testy at times but it’s possible that I may be distracted by TMS commentary Headingley Test from last year currently playing as live online.
    1. I’m enjoying that, too. Hope rain doesn’t continue to spoil the game, especially as I reckon Ben Stokes is due another big performance.
  25. Thank you for those explanations – I finished it by guesswork, and was surprised to find no mistakes, despite not really understanding several clues.

    TACE is in Chambers, as an imperative (of course), with citation of the weird phrase ‘tace is Latin for a candle’.

  26. many obscure words needed imho. Back to self isolation until tomorrow’s paper then
  27. Too much I didn’t know:

    LINEAR B
    TACE
    NIFFNAFF

    and an obscure Scottish town.

  28. 8D
    TACE is the imperative of tacere – to stay silent –
    thus
    TACE means SAY NOTHING

    Let alumni say nothing about head of Latin

  29. A struggle. I can’t say I enjoyed this but it whiled away 55 minutes. NHO NIFFNAFF. I didn’t like FOLKLORIC as a word and thought that the clueing for the QU in DUNKERQUE was needlessly convoluted – especially since the DUNK bit was obvious and, that given, there was only one possible answer. Ann
  30. Was feeling good about cracking this and then had a typo in BANJOLELE. Oh well.. better luck tomorrow!
  31. DNF. I found this a brute and tough as old boots. I struggled with it for a little over an hour. Got really stuck on violet and recit at the end. Submitted to find I had an incorrect Esau instead of Evan. I suppose in fairness the clue said boy and Esau, he’s more of a man, an hairy man in fact if memory serves.
    1. Alan Bennett twice in a week!
      First verse of the fourteenth chapter of the Second Book of Kings: ‘And he said, “But my brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man.”‘ Perhaps I might say the same thing in a different way by quoting you the words of that grand old English poet, W.E. Henley, who said:
      “When that One Great Scorer comes
      To mark against your name
      It matters not who won or lost,
      But how you played the game.”
  32. Did this as a late evening warm-up for my fortnightly midnight challenge, and got through in 26 minutes, so just outside my average.
    Almost my last one in was RÉCIT, a desperate guess, but the only piece of music I could think of that fit. I found out from Chambers afterwards that it’s also “a swell organ” and thought that might be somewhere to play your récit, and didn’t twig that it was IT until Pip’s admirable exposition.
    For my next trick, I’ll see if I can find an entertaining blind alley to swan down in tomorrow’s.
    Apart from that, enjoyed this one with its rather quirky take on using all the letters.
    1. It’s stretching it a bit far to say that the recitative in early opera is a piece of music and I’ve never heard any of my musician friends refer to a recit.
      Study fits the clue perfectly – which to my mind makes this very poor clueing.
  33. Didn’t like this crossword. It is Dunkirk if you are English, and also courgette.
    Both inexact and obscure.
  34. I liked it, some for the vocabulary (Pseud, Linear B), some for the clues (Line-out, Obstacle). Not sure I’d have appreciated it as much if I wasn’t semi- locked down, and therefore having plenty of time to spare. Nice blog, Pip.
  35. was actually the father of thirteen. Apart from the twelve sons which we all remember he had a daughter, Dinah (Gen XXX 21.)
  36. The main trait of Yobs is their lack of manners and culture – like Yahoos. Aggressiveness may be displayed as a result but certainly does NOT define yobbism.
    All in all some very poor clueing and not much fun. MDB as my school reports used to say.

Comments are closed.