Times 27,731: One Who May Resist A Parsing

89 comments on “Times 27,731: One Who May Resist A Parsing”

1. Unlike V, I hope someone (besides me) wrote ESTOPPAL; I’d feel less like a fool for not checking the clue. My LOI was FIRST-CLASS MAIL; feeling again like a fool, I couldn’t for the longest time get past MAID. (Well, I’ve never lived in a place where mail was delivered to the front door; but still.) Where I come from, and more to the point where ODE and Collins come from, LAMPREYS is pronounced [læmpriz] and not [læmpreiz].
   1. I did write ESTOPPAL, and had FIRST-FLOOR MAID for the longest time. It’s 92 degrees Fahrenheit in here, and that’s my excuse.

      Edited at 2020-07-31 05:46 am (UTC)

      1. I toyed with first-floor maid, but hesitated because I had never heard the expression in all my years of reading Victorian and Edwardian literature. They were call parlour maids, weren’t they? Anyway, it all became academic when I remembered where the badger lives.
2. ….eventually, but I was not on the wavelength at all. The right half was very difficult, and I could not see the obvious in 5 down.
3. Kevin you might appear less of a fool if you changed your avatar. We Brits like our mail through the front door so that ‘Bonzo’ can get bite Postman Pat’s fingers.

   No problems here and further note the SURFEIT of LAMPREYS, King John’s dinner at Swineshead Abbey, then on to Sleaford Castle where he was nauseous, and died the following day in Newarke Castle. And he’d already lost his treasure in The Wash. A bad week for BKJ. But the word APRICOTS did not appear so no NINA.

   18dn ESTOPPEL hereabouts.

   FOI 1ac RESIGN

   LOI 1ac REFUSE

   COD 22ac Robert OPPENHEIMER the ‘Atom Bomber’

   WOD 8dn SELENIDE sounds most unpleasant

   Thank you Lady Olivia for yesterday’s filum clip!

   1. I thought it was Henry 1. I’m sure lots of American houses have front-door mail slots, but my own residences haven’t had one. In any case MAIL should have come to mind sooner.

      Edited at 2020-07-31 06:08 am (UTC)

      1. BKJ was done for by dysentery, which was variously attributed to ‘poisoned ale, poisoned plums or a surfeit of peaches’.
         It was indeed Henry I who supposedly died after eating a ‘surfeit of Lampreys’.
         Interestingly (at least to me!) King John is at one point during his reign supposed to have fined the City of Gloucester for failing to deliver his Christmas lamprey pie. A very Bad man indeed 🙂
         1. Edward I died of dysentery too, Solway Firth from memory.
         2. Oh, not at all .. given the opportunity, I would do just the same. Local councillors have to be kept in their proper place and after all, they were clearly at fault…
4. I found this one irritating and finally threw in the towel by chucking the vowels at 13a in any way that I could and coming here to find out what the right answer was. DNF in 44 minutes. Bah.
   1. We’ve had DICOTYLEDON before. I’d learned about them, and monoditto in junior high school (and forgotten what I’d learned before reaching high school).
      1. Still, if you don’t know it, you’ve got little chance of getting the vowels in the correct order. You should be able to deduce obscure words from the clueing imho
5. Grr! An ‘estoppal’ for me, the ‘pa’ for ‘physical activity’, thinking that ‘exercising’ in the word play would make PE too obvious, so a DNF in 44 minutes. OPPENHEIMER (my COD) who probably had an IQ of about 5,329, would never have made the same mistake. BTW, remember the TV miniseries. It was ‘pretty when (not) cut’ good.
6. 43 minutes with one wrong.

   Having two obscure answers in a weekday puzzle,both clued as anagrams in the same quarter AND intersecting is bad setting in my view. I took a punt at them, got lucky with 5d but managed to misplace 4 of the 5 unchecked letters in 13ac.

   Earlier I lost a bit of time from putting FIRST CLASS POST at 5dn, but spotted the error soon enough. I remembered the correct spelling of LAMPREYS from a previous encounter.

   1. Perhaps you meant 8dn not 5dn was obscure, Jack? It wasn’t to me, Selenium being an element and all, but I know many know nothing about the science their lives and health depend on.

      Sorry, not meaning to be getting at you at all. It was a general lament that people who would rather die than admit ignorance of Shakespeare are apparently quite happy to know nothing about how their own oven works

      1. Thanks for correcting my typo, Jerry. Yes, I meant 8dn. My knowledge of lesser-known elements relies mainly (though not entirely) on the Tom Lehrer lyric, and perhaps unconsciously that’s why I went for SELENIDE as the best option from the anagrist available. I did get a decent O-level grade in Physics back in the 1960s so scientific matters are not entirely off my radar.

         Edited at 2020-07-31 01:20 pm (UTC)

7. …Bringing the cheque and the postal order
   30 mins to leave Veronica and the OWAA (Obscure Word As Anagram) – very unfair, I thought, for non-gardeners.
   Didn’t know an Egg was a bomb – I assume it is like a pineapple? Which reminds me of that great clue which (I think) Pootle brought to our attention ages ago.
   Pineapple rings in syrup (9)
   Thanks setter and V.
8. A bit of a slog but got there in the end. The RAITA clue is just wrong isn’t it? I knew the plant from O-Levels but support the gripe about such words clued as anagrams. Loved the OPPENHEIMER clue.
9. Straightforward but, fortunately, I knew all of the vocabulary. Not a great lover of cross referencing and would prefer it not to become commonplace.
   Even didn’t mind the antelope. COD to LIE-ABED.
   1. Agreed. For those who like cross-referencing there are Guardian puzzles.

      But in defence of the setter, a fabulous clue for OPPENHEIMER.

      And no bloody birds!!

      1. I don’t suppose Selenide held you up for long, either 🙂
10. I’m a physicist and a gardener, not a botanist. DICOTYLEDON somewhat spoilt what was otherwise a good puzzle. 29 minutes with the one wrong. I thought it sounded too much like a dinosaur. I didn’t parse BAGGED either. I learnt most of my elementary history from 1066 and all that, so LAMPREYS were top of my mind after SURFEIT was solved. COD to FIRST-CLASS MAIL, even though it was a linked clue. Otherwise, a good puzzle. Thank you V and setter.
11. I can’t spell DICOTYLEDON it appears, getting the E and Y the wrong way round. Oh well. Average time for me but it felt longer. MER at alleged spiciness of RAITA.

    COD: LIE-ABED for neat join between rousing and song.

    Yesterday’s answer: a nightjar is also known as a goatsucker even though it is probably a myth that it sucks goats’ milk.

    Today’s question: from what work is Oppenheimer’s quote ‘I am become Death, destroyer of worlds’ from? A challenge to clue that one!

    1. A bad TV gig – A-ha playing ‘Scripture’ (8,4)
       1. I am working on a hidden clue … I may be some time?
          1. I’m with you, Titus. Might just step outside.
             1. … could you take that ****** religious text with you?
       2. Didn’t we have this in Monday’s general knowledge crossword?
    2. The trick to remember where the Y comes in DICOTYLEDON is to remember it works the opposite way to ATALANTA IN CALYDON, as regards proximity to the delta. Hope that helps!

       Edited at 2020-07-31 04:24 pm (UTC)

12. As Jackkt and others, managed to make a complete hash of the plant-like thingy. Shame because, at 45mins for a Friday I was very happy. Til I came here. Bah. I agree with V that RAITA should help to cool a curry or spicy meal being essentially yoghurt with cucumber and/or onions. Anyway, COD to 5d. I enjoyed the puzzle so thank you V and setter.
13. Sorry setter, but dicotyledon is just bang out of order. Usual reason.
    Raita – what jim said.
    Thanks v.
14. 17’13”, after carefully musing over several spellings. Only know of cucumber raita, definitely not spicy.

    Once again, have to call for a ban on pejorative words about sex workers. In this day and age, fhs.

    Thanks Verlaine and setter.

    1. Couldn’t agree more – feels like something from the 1980s, and always leaves me uneasy.
    2. …how about paperback raita?

       and ditto regarding the other point; imo this let the puzzle down even more than the planty thing

15. Agree about the cross-referencing comments. Not sure about egg as bomb; what is the context here I wonder? The multiple vowel placement options in 13ac were a bit irritating, especially as I chose the wrong ones! I think obscure words should always be gettable from the cryptic so an anagram here is perhaps not the way to go. Otherwise a fine crossword so thanks to setter and Verlaine for his usual wit and wisdom.
    1. I believe it’s RAF slang in origin, presumably because an aircraft dropping bombs resembles a chicken laying eggs.
       Apparently the WW! Germans had the Eierhandgranate, the egg grenade, so I suppose there’s previous.
       1. Thanks; that makes sense.
       2. It’s also show biz slang where bomb=dud, as in possible Variety headline “Lloyd Webber lays egg with Jeeves”.

          1. So it is. I hadn’t thought of that, though the quoted headline is more likely on your side of the pond!

          2. Thanks for this. I checked quickly in Collins but didn’t find it and hesitated!
16. 12:04. I took care with a few of these to make sure I got the spelling right: ESTOPPEL, for instance, or SELENIDE.
    No amount of care was going to guide me safely to the plant though. I recognised it (presumably from past puzzles) but had no idea which order to put the E and Y in, so I looked it up. I’m calling this one a setter fail though.
    And as others have noted a RAITA doesn’t contain spices and is if anything the opposite of spicy.
    1. To pick a nit, it’s not a plant, it’s a (huge) class of plants, including daisies and oaks. It’s one thing to clue a (to many of us) obscure plant with an anagram, but DICOTYLEDON is more like ‘vertebrate’. I learned about them in 8th grade, in a run of the mill junior high school.
       1. Nit noted, but it’s plainly a more obscure word than ‘vertebrate’ and should not have been clued like this. I studied biology all the way through school and even if I came across it (I’ve no idea) I don’t think we should be expected to remember every scientific term we may have seen in a textbook several decades ago.
          I feel I should add that apart from that lapse I thought this was a really good puzzle.

          Edited at 2020-07-31 08:36 am (UTC)

          1. I was going to say, when I mentioned ‘vertebrate’, that we’re naturally more familiar with animal words than plant words. I was mainly just surprised that so many of us found the word so obscure. Maybe Miss Gustafson was an unusually gifted biology teacher. You remember xylem and phloem?
             1. I do. Some stuff sticks!
                I had a terrible biology teacher who disliked me intensely and thought I was an idiot (to be fair biology was not an important subject and I did very little work). The night before my exam (for the baccalaureat), in desperation, I decided to pick one model exam answer (you could buy books of them) and learn it by heart in the hope that at least one or two of the questions (out of a total of 5) were reasonably likely to come up (the exams were quite repetitive) and I would be able to scrape a few marks. They all came up and I got 18/20. The look on the face of my teacher when I told him is one of my most precious memories.
                1. I found biology and botany as dull as ditchwater both as a child and as an adult. I like the colours but otherwise just cannot be bothered.

                   Nevertheless, this mess of a word did not make it into the mine of useless information upstairs.

                   For me, simply an obscure word badly clued.

       2. Update: from a search of TfTT it looks like we haven’t had DICOTYLEDON before, so perhaps I did remember some school biology after all.
          We did have DICOT once, and you commented that they were also known as DICOTYLEDON, so that may be what you’re remembering.

          Edited at 2020-07-31 09:24 am (UTC)

17. …I can spell ESTOPPEL but not LAMPREYS!
    As part of my A-Level German course many years ago, all 5 of us attended a performance -in London- of the German play “In Der Sache J Robert Oppenheimer”.
    I always knew that might prove useful one day…
18. I had no chance with the plant, and if we’ve had it before either it was properly clued to avoid mistakes, or I was absent. The Chambers definition, accessed via the brilliant anagram function, told me “often shortened to dicot a plant of the dicotyledones or Dicotylae, one of the two great divisions of Angiospermae, having embryos with two seed-leaves or cotyledons, leaves commonly net-veined, the parts of the flowers in twos, fives, or multiples of these, and the vascular bundles in the axes usually containing cambium.” I was so unimpressed I copied into the grid wrong, so I can tell you that it’s mostly green with a pink spot.

    I only got RAT when I worked out that the setter has never had RAITA in their* life, so to that extent the cross reference stuff was helpful.

    And another thing: round here we have 1st class POST. Took me a while to work out that no homophone of post gives you anything remotely he-ish

    * local circumstances dictate I’m having to work on my non-binary pronouns. Is it any wonder I’m a bit cheesed off?

19. …was my incorrect guess at filling in the blanks with the five remaining letters for a word I didn’t know. This explains. Shame I didn’t get to do ‘O’ level biology. I liked LAMPREYS, though. 17:47

    Edited at 2020-07-31 08:07 am (UTC)

20. A surfeit of lampreys and cotyledons, back to O Level days (pre-GCSE, kids).
21. I suppose it’s all a matter of how well one knows things. But I’d only just, in a very vague way, heard of the answer at 13ac and agree with everyone who dislikes the clueing of this by an anagram. No excuse for DECOTYLEDON, though.
22. Plant wrong (had the i in the right place). Didn’t even notice the RAITA clue was wrong. Not enamoured of even a single cross-reference, loathe 3. A good puzzle ruined.
23. An easy Friday, apart from the ‘guess the vowel’ contest at 13a. With DECITYLODON I only scored 40% on that one. 7m 35s with that error.

    OPPENHEIMER was very nice, COD for me.

24. 33’26. I echo the outcry against guardianista cross-referencing but not against the plant which I’d say is narrowly the acceptable side of the GK fence, given a faint whiff of the more likely spelling of the kind of word it’s going to be. But I am up in arms about the far-off homophone as it seems for [lam]preys. Also for the dozen years I lived in India raita was never spicy, anything but. And I’d heard of tweens but not till now tweenagers. Nevertheless, such mers and sers (serious or severe) apart, a deft and enjoyable puzzle. joekobi
25. ….because at that point I gave up. I had no idea about the ridiculous anagram at 13A, MER at the “spicy” RAITA, but…

    ….I could honestly have believed that the paper boy had brought the Grauniad. THREE cross-referenced clues ? A complete load of b*l*o*k* in my opinion, and not what I pay my subscription for. I like a difficult puzzle, but not artificially difficult.

    1. To be fair they are only artificially difficult until they become artificially easy.
    2. I’m not sure we should be criticising artifice of any kind in our puzzles – we’d be in a pretty pass if we had to look to nature only for our crossword supply…
26. Interesting puzzle, even if it perhaps relied too much on obscure vocabulary. I agree with Verlaine that the purpose of “raita” is to counter spiciness — so an ingredient of a spicy dish but not a spicy dish in itself.

    Thanks to blogger and setter.

27. I suspect I have had enough experience of getting crosswordy words like ESTOPPEL and DICOTYLEDON wrong to have an instinct for the correct spelling by now. My only MER, as a frequent cooker of Indian food, was the RAITA; even if I regularly add a pinch of mustard seed or cumin, it’s still basically yoghurt – there is a distinct difference between a food which is (lightly) spiced and a spicy food, I think…
28. Hmm, I liked this one, possibly it was geared towards the older ones amongst us. Dicotyledon one of a large and apparently increasing number of words I know perfectly well, provided nobody asks me what it means.
    Selenide cannot be considered obscure unless you prefer to be wilfully ignorant of science. Selenium is an element after all, and Selene, Greek goddess of the moon (as opposed to the Roman Luna)
    And Oppenheimer too, so a good day for science..
    Raita however is about as spicy as a raw potato

    Edited at 2020-07-31 12:02 pm (UTC)

    1. Easy for you to say, but my fundamental beliefs are:
       1. All elements ending in IUM are metals (hello, helium)
       2. No metal has an -IDE: Cupride? Ferride? Potasside? Magneside? No!
       But it turns out selenium isn’t a metal. So there you go, wrong again. Who’s surprised?
       1. My household astronomer sometimes claims to me that all elements are (in some sense) metals apart from hydrogen and helium…
29. It’s a lovely, sunny, Yorkshire Day Eve so I’ve taken the day off and did the puzzle in the garden. Shame it was spoiled by the plant etc.

    Have I spotted a trend where adjectival or adverbial definitions are close enough to clue nouns? I’m talking the clue for 1st class mail today (should there be an “it”?) and fjords yesterday (“they are familiar…”?)

30. After a stupid recent spelling mistake I’ve been proofing before submitting and was glad I did because I found I’d reversed the Y and the I in the plant thingy. 21.57
31. Well, if you have never heard of the 11-letter word and you have 5 vowels to fit in the five uncheckers, how the devil etc?

    Otherwise this was pretty straightforward, even the vague ESTOPPEL and PROEM fitting in cryptically rather than through any knowledge.

32. Unlike others I thought this perfectly fair. Anagrams should be long to make them challenging, and DICOTYLEDON basic botanical knowledge. Nice lot of science clues, with Oppenheimer a stand-out. ESTOPPEL didn’t look right, but had to be from the parsing.
    36’25”, so twice as quick as yesterday, after initially fearing that as a Friday it might be even harder!
33. Botany was a schoolboy hobby, so 13a was FOI !
34. 20.17 with a lucky guess on the flower. To be honest I’d give myself that one anyway. I refuse to accept defeat due to not knowing a word and there being no way of getting to the right answer without knowing it- so there!
    Not as demanding as a Friday is traditionally held to be but a good puzzle. FOI eland, LOI “ the flower”.

    Liked lampreys, bagged and estoppel.

35. So is Joekobi the only one besides me who sees a homophony problem?
    1. The homophone works perfectly for me Kevin, and I have an utterly boring and neutral English accent
    2. I have always pronounced it ‘lamprays’, and I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it pronounced that way by others. Not that either occurrence is very frequent, mind.
       It’s a word that most people will never hear in a day-to-day context, so they will pronounce ‘a surfeit of lampreys’ as it appears to be written.

       Edited at 2020-07-31 02:41 pm (UTC)

       1. But does it rhyme with comfreys/palfreys?
       2. If you and Jerry pronounce it ‘lamprays’, I’m sure lots of others do, too; but then the dictionaries should indicate that. As I said, ODE and Collins only give ‘lampree’.
          1. If our pronunciation is widespread I expect they will eventually. At the moment though it’s probably considered a solecism for the reasons I mentioned.
    3. And me. Predictably. The only thing more predictable than that is the predictability of dodgy homophones in The Times crossword. I just don’t understand why The Times, the newspaper of record and maintainer of correct English, should choose to engage in this dubious practice? And as I know they’re quite keen on using the dictionary as a crutch to fall back on for definitions, why not use it for correct pronunciations too? Mr Grumpy
       1. There’s no such thing as ‘correct English’.
36. A DNF in a little over 28 mins and yes my downfall was the anagrammed plant where, to paraphrase Eric Morecambe to Andre Preview, I had all the right letters, just not necessarily in the right order. GK or not, this solver needed more assistance with that one. Didn’t particularly like the cross references, rarely do. Some decent stuff apart from that. Liked the Oppenheimer clue. Right I’m off to order a surfeit of lampreys from Deliveroo and I think I’ll wash it all down with a butt of Malmsey wine.
37. Held up at the end by RAITA which worked cryptically…otherwise I enjoyed this, even the references for a change. I blame my slow time for the fact that I am sitting on a rocky beach on the Menai strait and can hardly read the screen because of the sunshine. Happy days!
    1. Ah, whereabouts? I have very happy memories of staying in Conwy a year or two back. Fine area, provided they can be bothered to speak English to you
       1. Directly opposite Caernarfon castle. Just cross the bridge and turn left!
          1. I grew up in Fflint, and often looked westwards for castly entertainment, so know this part of the word well!
38. Did this this morning but only just got round to posting – anyone there?

    I knew it was going to be a DNF as soon as I got to 13a. I’m usually ok on plant names, but from the gardening POV, rather than botanical. NHO the word before, never want to see it again 😳 Funnily enough, although not remotely scientific, I got selenide quite easily – it’s probably courtesy of all those recommendations to eat Brazil nuts for the selenium you see in the lifestyle pages.

    I mostly enjoyed this, but never got a good run at it due to constant interruptions.

    FOI Speed
    COD Oppenheimer
    DNF

    Thanks setter and Verlaine

39. No issues for me, selenide was a write in (like a sulfide but selenium is the next element in that group). RAITA indeed is not spicy, as said. NO issue with the DICOTYLEDON clue here. 23 minutes.
40. rhymes with freeze not frays or praise.

    And why does egg mean bomb?

    1. Dictionary says yes
41. Raita isn’t spicy.
    ‘Replace the Tory involved in shocking procedure’. No need for ‘found out’. Mr Grumpy
42. But apparently it rhymes, or can rhyme, with ‘osprey’: ODE gives ospree, ospray, US Oxford gives ospray, ospree.
43. Didn’t get round to this until this morning due to being fried on a golf course yesterday. 33:07, but guessed and checked the unknown plant(I’d reversed the I and E,) before submitting. Sadly I was sucked in by the PROPELLOR, so all in vain. No issues on the other stuff, apart from agreeing that RAITA is not a spicy dish, it’s an accompaniment to one. Thanks setter and V.

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