Times 27,683: The Teeth Of God Grind Slowly, But They Grind Exceeding Small

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I found this adequately challenging in the solving – nothing equiterrible, but certainly some twists and turns to negotiate – but a little disappointing to write up the parsings for, with an array of what you’d have to call simple anagrams, and two examples of a clue type I’ve always had an irrational prejudice against, where one letter must become a random other. (It’s actually quite a useful cluing device, I expect, but it just seems… imprecise somehow?)

FOI 10ac, LOI 23ac, favourite probably 7dn for the unexpected lift-and-separate component (“little” and “boy” going together like peas and carrots in crossword clues). I also liked “six feet” as the definition of 15dn and the shout out to Thomas Tallis from whose eponymous school in Kidbrooke I lived just round the corner until 2018. Than you setter for these toothsome things!

ACROSS
1 Publication by students with classy, clean content, fantastic achievement (6,4)
MAGNUM OPUS – MAG by N.U.S. with U, MOP content

6 Youngster swallows large part of tooth (4)
PULP – PUP swallows L

8 Where some are playing football, or riding around (8)
GRIDIRON – (OR RIDING*)

9 Lights finally low, central heating on, kiss and cuddle (6)
SMOOCH – {light}S + MOO + C.H.

10 Corpse is gory: look out (4)
BODY – BLOODY minus LO

11 A reminder of the late quality of wine (10)
GRAVESTONE – or GRAVES’ TONE

12 Scrub fork clean for a bit of breakfast (9)
CORNFLAKE – (FORK CLEAN*)

14 Refuse hard slog (5)
MARCH – MARC [refuse] + H

17 Burned remains after emptying secret store (5)
STASH – ASH [burned remains] after S{ecre}T

19 Loss of earnings shocking to Mexican (6,3)
INCOME TAX – (TO MEXICAN*)

22 Two obstacles, very large: it’s for a Russian invasion (10)
BARBAROSSA – BAR + BAR + OS + S.A. [it]

23 Creed not one to criticise harshly (4)
SLAM – ISLAM minus I

24 Dish youngster eats sport being over (6)
TUREEN – TEEN eats reversed RU

25 A chronicler’s first to be replaced — his charges can be stinging (8)
APIARIST – A + DIARIST with its first letter changed

26 Caught, not many would quarrel at length (4)
FEUD – homophone of FEW’D

27 Router sends digger round Bath (10)
DISPATCHER – DITCHER round SPA

DOWN
1 Be getting on motorway over part of England to make fortune (9)
MEGABUCKS – reversed AGE [be getting on] on M, plus BUCKS [part of England]

2 Smile, darling, although missing a tooth (7)
GRINDER – GRIN, DE{a}R

3 To take a rich husband, they say, may be a bloomer (8)
MARIGOLD – homophone of MARRY GOLD

4 Pay attention: after nip, as it were, I burn (3,4,4,4)
PIN BACK ONE’S EARS – PIN BACK [nip, as it were: reverse cryptic] + ONE SEARS

5 Worked out divided county has ended up different (6)
SUSSED – SUSSEX [divided county] with a different ending

6 Lying for the country has caught ambassador finally (9)
PROSTRATE – PRO STATE [for the country] has “caught” {ambassado}R

7 Saying little boy almost in shape for ice cream? (7)
LACONIC – LA{d} + CONIC [in shape for ice cream]

13 See blonde squirming: why is she red in the face? (9)
NOSEBLEED – (SEE BLONDE*)

15 Hotel inside western city a mile and six feet (9)
HEXAMETER – H, plus, inside EXETER, A M. Six *metrical* feet.

16 Portrait of animal so original (4,4)
MONA LISA – (ANIMAL SO*)

18 Speak badly of drug, taken regularly in tiny amount (7)
TRADUCE – D{r}U{g} in TRACE

20 Composer reaching height? Rather unlikely (7)
TALLISH – TALLIS [Thomas, 16th century composer] reaching H

21 Palladium, introducing old character, cut back (6)
PRUNED – Pd “introducing” RUNE

68 comments on “Times 27,683: The Teeth Of God Grind Slowly, But They Grind Exceeding Small”

  1. Fun puzzle. About 45 minutes for me, with too much spent trying to find something in for TUREEN given that I’d typed PRUDED instead of PRUNED. Once I got that sorted out, I deduced that there must be a composer called TALLIS that I don’t remember anything about to put in TALLISH for my LOI. I wasted time on GRAVESTONE by the “obvious” fact it started GRAPE…
  2. Quick for a Friday; some biffing helped (MAGNUM OPUS, DISPATCHER). BARBAROSSA took some time, both because I tried to use DAM, and because I was thinking of an invasion by Russia, not of. DNK, but inferred, the abbreviation for palladium. FOI PULP, POI GRAVESTONE, LOI PROSTRATE. Liked GRINDER for its surface, INCOME TAX for its definition
  3. 2d being the stable genius’s recent instruction to Melania.

    Embarrassingly, the fact that “income tax” was an anagram was completely missed. Why it should particularly bother Mexicans was a mystery until reading the blog.

    Edited at 2020-06-05 02:54 am (UTC)

  4. Wasn’t sure I was ever going to get properly started on this one with odd answers dotted around the grid for far too long, but eventually I built up steam and finished in 45 minutes.

    Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) was prolific as a composer of church music but his name is perhaps most widely known these days in the context of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’. His setting of Psalm 67 aka ‘Tallis’s Canon’ was adapted as a hymn tune known to churchgoers and generations of schoolchildren who sang ‘All praise to thee, my God, this night’ or perhaps ‘This spacious firmament on high’ at morning assembly. There’s a rather fine arrangement of the former here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYJ8SneHfT4

    Edited at 2020-06-05 05:39 am (UTC)

  5. It seems I was on the wavelength at 36 minutes, with no great hold-ups anywhere, though I never actually SUSSED out 5d as I’d misread “county” as “country”. Glad I chose toast this morning, as I imagine the alternative of crunchy nut CORNFLAKEs would’ve made it even more galling that it took me a long time to see 12a.

    FOI 1a MAGNUM OPUS, LOI the unknown invasion at 22a. Now I’ve seen the parsing, COD has to go to 4d, but it took me so long to get 1980s CB slang “get your ears on” out of my head I was just glad to write the answer in unparsed when I saw it…

  6. …Our rank Feud.
    25 mins pre-brekker.
    OK once I got started. I toyed with Clarettone being an obscure word for a eulogy until MariGold fixed that.
    I’ve been trying to say sentences including Few’d, but they don’t sound convincing. They come out as Few-ud.
    Thanks setter and V.
        1. “Few’d have bothered to take it further”. It’s just another dialectical difference of the type that makes 95% of homonymic clues something of a lottery. It works for me, but I think I understand why it doesn’t for you !
  7. Fun puzzle except I decided a bee keeper should be called an AVIARIST – brain fart of the first order…
  8. I found this straightforward for a Friday. A nice steady solve.

    If you haven’t heard of Operation BARBAROSSA I do urge you to read about it. A major turning point in WW2 and one of the greatest atrocities. I think its still the largest invasion force ever launched. The anniversary will occur later this month.

  9. 32 minutes, a good Friday time and it looked harder than that to begin with. LOI and COD to GRAVESTONE. I liked INCOME TAX too, the first time I’ve ever said that. There were good clues all over the piece, apart of course for the lack of ‘American‘ in front of football, which I believe to be mandatory for any publication in this country to avoid confusion with a game played with the feet. But good stuff, particularly with the Nat King Cole ear worm. The real King Nat can be seen above this contribution. Thank you V and setter.
  10. Good for a Friday, so a good week overall in terms of timings, but two errors, one a typo.

    COD: LACONIC for the brilliantly hidden join between definition and wordplay, spent ages thinking of sayings.

    Yesterday’s answer: Scotland is almost exactly 60% of the size of England, larger than most people think, given it has almost exactly a tenth of the latter’s population, so it’s a sixth of the population density.

    Today’s question: who is the song Common People by PULP allegedly about, and to whom is she married?

    1. How fitting that our comments are adjacent to each other as we’re Snitch twins today!

      (For the avoidance of doubt that isn’t a cryptic answer to the Pulp question).

      1. Great minds think alike? And our average is only one second different too!
  11. 16:28. It was the NE corner that held me up. LOI PULP, which I somehow didn’t know was the name for the inside of the tooth and I took a while to suss the divided county. COD to INCOME TAX.
  12. I found this enjoyable in a mystery tour sort of way, going down strange paths by refusing to read the route map.
    For example, if I’d properly read the clue, I wouldn’t have gone via
    PIN YOUR EARS BACK and
    PIN BACK YOUR EARS before finally remembering it’s always ONES’S.
    Jim might like the fact that I visited Dorset before Sussex: if you squint at the clue, Dorset morphs into SORTED, perhaps better than Sussex mangles itself into SUSSED.
    I spent quite a while wondering whether GRAVELINES was a thing to do with wine before realising the def/wp was the other way round.
    So a rather entertaining 23 minutes. Next time, maybe I’ll use the satnav.
  13. 14:02 and I very much enjoyed unraveling the sometimes far from obvious wordplay.

    I felt pretty much on wavelength and liked the inclusion of non-crosswordy words like megabucks, gridiron and cornflake.

  14. 20.37 but much quicker than I thought I was going to be on first reading. FOI grinder, LOI March, not sure continental distillers would consider their product “refuse”.

    Standouts for me were gravestone, who can resist a bit of black humour? traduce and sussed. All in all, a pleasing end to the week.

        1. To be fair most of the marc I’ve drunk would have been better treated as refuse!

          Edited at 2020-06-05 12:15 pm (UTC)

            1. I once bought a couple of bottles of marc made by Domaine de Vogue, which is a very smart Burgundy domaine. That’s probably as good as marc gets and the best you could say about it was that it wasn’t utterly revolting.
              2. The old rule: if they offer marc, and it sounds like a good idea, you’ve already had too much to drink
                1. 🙂
                  I used to think the same about grappa but it can actually be very good.
                  1. Me too, until I moved into a flat where the previous tenant had been an italian with good taste in wine, who left a very nice half bottle. Presumably by accident, but it was an education here.
  15. Happy with my time but then I had to put in sussex instead of sussed. Not the first time I’ve been so fixated on the cryptic part of a clue that I’ve shoved that in by mistake. Loved six down for its clever surface. Grinder (without the e)has a different connotation today for the social media-savvy.
  16. V your remark in the preamble about a clue type you’ve always had an irrational prejudice against: good that this comes from someone who carries a bit more weight than I do. It’s always struck me as a cop-out (although it does make the setter’s life easier). Not an irrational prejudice at all in my opinion.
    1. In general I agree with the various contributors’ views on random letter substitutions but in this case I think the setter set a rather devious trap for those getting their birds and bees confused. I made exactly that mistake in a recent puzzle (a QC I believe). Fortunately not today though.
  17. Not a Friday beast (unlucky again, V.) but quite satisfying, especially when the penny dropped at the end with regard to the definitions for APIARIST and LACONIC.
  18. MAGNUM OPUS was my FOI, but then I floundered around for the next 20 minutes or so, with isolated entries around the grid, then it all started coming together after I changed PIN ONES EARS BACK to PIN BACK ONES EARS, having spotted CORNFLAKE. This allowed me to get GRAVESTONE, which led to LACONIC, which led to MARCH which led to HEXAMETER as I’d already decoded the surprised Mexican. Once I’d filled in the rest of the less intractable clues, I was left with BARBAROSSA and finally APIARIST and sumitted at a, reasonable for a Friday, time of 34:41. Thanks setter and V.
  19. I made incredibly heavy weather of the NE corner, having convinced myself that some version of MARRIWELL (with a letter taken out) would be the answer to 3d, and misreading county as country (as always) for 5d. Once those two were sorted, the rest came fairly quickly, but overall I think 15m 29s should have been a lot faster.

    Verlaine, I share your prejudice against the random replacement of one letter with another. Incomplete… and, dare I say it, a little lazy.

  20. Nice one but one minor quibble (unless there’s something I’m not seeing which is always a possibility). In 4d we have SEARS for burn with no S on the end. Glad it wasn’t too hard because I’m taking an early train down to NYC for the first time in 2 months – got things to do. I hope our area isn’t too noisy tonight. So far it hasn’t been but our elder daughter’s quiet brownstone neighbourhood in Brooklyn has been on the route to a rallying point so she’s had the helicopters and sirens going all night for several days. And our niece in midtown said shops around her had been looted. 19.51
    1. I think it’s “I burn” = “one sears” rather than treating each word separately.
      2. In my (admittedly secret) notation, I would separate them with a pipe character (“|”) if they weren’t meant to be taken together. And in this case I did not!
    2. Yes that bothered me when solving but I’d completely forgotten about it by the time I came to comment.
  21. Used to see Jarvis in the supermarket occasionally when he came back to Sheffield. Seems like a nice bloke.

    I’m with the consensus today – it seemed a lot easier than a normal Friday.

    All correct in 35.30.

    Thank you to setter and blogger.

  22. Another enjoyable puzzle, this one taxing but not too hard. Loved APIARIST, TUREEN where I was looking for food, and especially LACONIC. Thought there was an error with sears but Verlaine and Mauefw explain it impeccably. And learnt the real meaning of pin back one’s ears. I’m sure in this part of the world it is used in the sense of accelerate and run at top speed… like the fawn and white greyhounds in this picture.
  23. 32’41, a touch tricky at times. The laconic clue is a gem. I’m another who doesn’t really go for the ‘any letter but’ pointer.
  24. Very happy with that for a Friday, although clearly not a nasty one. As others, I very much enjoyed LACONIC. LOI was MARIGOLD, not because it was particularly hard but because I consider any kind of flower or plant a blind spot so I expect to have to end up guessing. Not this time, fortunately. Good stuff.
  25. 15:53. What’s the point of checking your answers if you’re going to do it in such a way as to fail to notice that you’ve written CORNFLAKS? Grr.
    Interesting puzzle. Add me to the list of those who made trouble for themselves by bunging in PIN ONES EARS BACK, and to the apparently quite long one for people who aren’t too keen the random-letter-substitution trick.

    Edited at 2020-06-05 11:38 am (UTC)

  26. Very pleasant puzzle, 30 minutes, no issues. 27a my LOI. I don’t dislike clues with a one letter change like 25a, if I can solve them.
  27. Well I for one thought this beastly. It didn’t help that, like Z above, I threw in PINS ONES EARS BACK very early on, which left me with several impossibilities. I also think that this wasn’t a puzzle for a non drinker, as I had no idea about MARC and GRAVES, and NHO TALLIS either. Finally confused by DISPATCHER as I thought it was spelt DESPATCHER, which also held me up for ages. Ah well.
  29. ….despatcher, I’ve always worked on the principle (despite most dictionaries dumbing down) that one who sends or transmits is spelled with E, whereas a DISPATCHER kills people. It is therefore as well that I was careful with the wordplay.

    FOI SMOOCH
    LOI LACONIC
    COD GRAVESTONE
    TIME 13:05

    1. E or O in the killer. They have to be different

      Edited at 2020-06-05 06:11 pm (UTC)

  30. IMHO one would never say “pin back one’s ears” though the parsing made it obvious
    1. Yes, it’s a quirk of crossword puzzles that expressions that most usually in speech contain the word ‘your’ substitute ‘one’s’ when they appear in the grid.

      Solvers of a certain generation may recall the catchphrase made popular by the comedian and Odd Odist, Cyril Fletcher: “Pin back your lugholes’.

  31. In my summer holiday job at Hallmark Cards you despatched with dispatch or got shouted at.
  32. It’s close to being my favourite song but I did not know this! Clearly her thirst for knowledge did not end when the song did…
  33. Spent too long on “feud” but otherwise not bad for a Friday. We had “Marc” as an answer in a recent puzzle, I think?
  34. I agree with the tone of the “random letter switch” discussion. It’s always better if the new letter is indicated.
    In my vocabulary “Pin Back Your/Ones Ears” means to beat about the head, perhaps to nail the (still attached) ear to the wall. Perk/Pick/Prick Up One’s means what this clue indicates.
    Good thing I know how to spell Satarist, otherwise his stinging charges would have held me up for a long time.
    Thx, Ver
  35. Nice enough puzzle. Fell asleep for a bit while I was solving it, but that’s no reflection on the setter.
    Thanks v.
    1. “fell asleep for a bit while I was solving it”. Well, I’m glad to hear I’m not the only person who does that. Quite frequently, actually, it’s very restful.

      Edited at 2020-06-05 10:03 pm (UTC)

  36. A pedestrian 40-ish minutes only to let myself down with a rash despatcher. I liked 1ac. I really struggled to see what was going on with the Mexican loss of earnings and the tureen. In 18dn I couldn’t see past being “on” something for regularly taking, as opposed to just using every other letter of the word drug, so I was sure it was going to end -one. Considering the obvious definition, hexameter had me foxed for quite some time too.
  37. As usual all clues went well except for the last two, so I took just over an hour. But it would have been 45 minutes or so if I had heard of Tallis and had had the courage to put in SUSSED sooner (I didn’t know Sussex comes in two parts). But at least I finished and without mistakes.

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