Times 27,839: Enough Of Your Sass

Author   VerlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Mostly straightforward for a Friday though there were a couple of unusual vocabulary words and some interesting cryptic devices to push my time firmly over the 5 minute solve mark. FOI 1ac, LOI 23ac with a cry of “jacta est!”. WOD 15ac which I always think ought to mean “mournfully” due to Too Much Classical Education. I thought the more fun and challenging clues were mostly in the lower half of the grid and particularly liked 28ac; always great to see punctuation used as a cluing device, and the surface paints an attractive picture as well, so that’s my clue of the day. My thanks to the setter, and a merry Christmas season to all of the rest of you at home!

ACROSS
1 Temple, a divine one, toured by old man (6)
PAGODA – A GOD, “toured” by PA

5 Fresh sailing just off the south coast of England? (8)
INSOLENT – if you are IN (the) SOLENT, you are somewhere near the Isle of Wight

9 E.g. stealing bit of crockery with a single dirty spot (10)
DISHONESTY – DISH with ONE STY

10 Hood to intimidate moll, ultimately (4)
COWL – COW + {mol}L

11 Attendant‘s uniform in my bank (8)
COURTIER – U in COR! TIER

12 Turkish hostelry welcomed by pilgrim — a retreat (6)
IMARET – hidden in {pilgr}IM A RET{reat}

13 Cheese not lasting long, for the most part (4)
BRIE – BRIE{f}

15 King leaves great conductor very regally (8)
MAESTOSO – MAEST{r}O + SO

18 German’s a mug or a genius (8)
EINSTEIN – EIN STEIN [German’s a | mug]

19 Decisive blow spinning ruminant round (4)
KAYO – reversed YAK + O

21 Part of hands holding small book (6)
PSALMS – PALMS holding S

23 Blue put on a green space, which is random (8)
ALEATORY – TORY [blue] put on A LEA

25 Person returned to office after business school (4)
COMP – MP after CO

26 Backing one-pound operas is foolish (10)
BLITHERING – reversed 1LB + THE RING [(Wagnerian) operas]

27 Two versions of this person’s books about to arrive (8)
IMMINENT – I’M [this person is] + MINE [this person’s] + NT

28 One on the pull at Christmas — the Queen? (6)
DASHER – DASH [-] + E.R. “Dasher” as in one of Santa’s reindeer

DOWN
2 A fighter, old ally abroad (5)
AMIGO – A MIG O

3 Quality of alien with soldiers clutching the head (9)
OTHERNESS – OR “clutching” THE, + NESS

4 A Welsh girl possibly penning English epic (6)
AENEID – A + ENID “penning” E. Enid was the wife of Geraint in Arthurian legends, so pretty Welsh.

5 Case: it involves singular person on the fiddle? (15)
INSTRUMENTALIST – INSTRUMENTAL + IT “involving” S

6 Lazybones fencing yard in daring jumper (8)
SKYDIVER – SKIVER “fencing” YD

7 Fabric a group of stars used to hem cape (5)
LYCRA – LYRA “hemming” C

8 State evidence of recent clothes-shopping trip? (3,6)
NEW JERSEY – double def

14 Minor star playing in very poor conditions (9)
RAINSTORM – (MINOR STAR*)

16 Alternate representation of Turkestan (4,5)
TAKE TURNS – (TURKESTAN*)

17 Able to feel bliss, even not very upset (8)
SENSIBLE – (BLISS E{v}EN*)

20 Routine drug overdose (6)
METHOD – or METH O.D.

22 Renaissance painter is cheeky in speech (5)
LIPPI – homophone of LIPPY

24 Hastened, say, to return in Sierra? (5)
RANGE – RAN + reversed E.G. [say]

73 comments on “Times 27,839: Enough Of Your Sass”

  1. Alas, it was too good to be true. Racing home on a Friday, only held up slightly by COMP and DASHER (thanks V for explaining that one!) — only to discover I’d put in RAITSTORM. (‘T’ and ‘N’ are neighboring keys on the Dvorak layout.)

    Why is an MP one *returned* to office?

    1. A return is “an election to parliament” according to the Chambers. Any election, even the first attempt, not specifically a re-election.
      Sorry, it’s a verb: Chambers has return is “to elect to parliament.”

      Edited at 2020-12-04 02:39 am (UTC)

      2. Had not thought about it before but that is why the Returning Officer announces the results.
    2. I have been Dvoraking myself lately… my typing speed is still only about 50 on it, but I’m hopeful I can improve! I’m still too scared to do the Times crossword using it.

      Edited at 2020-12-04 07:10 am (UTC)

      1. I’ve been typing on Dvorak for almost 20 years now, far longer than I ever typed on QWERTY. Interestingly, though, I can type just about as fast on QWERTY, despite never using it. I think I still do it because it really does feel more natural and elegant; conceptually it surely is; and I enjoy watching people get confused when they try to use my computer.
  2. I figured that “returned to office” is another name for elected. But it could also be “PM” (prime minister, which is an office) “returned”. I wondered at the time.

    I was all correct around 30 mins. It took me a moment to see the “—” at the end. I was sure it was something to do with crackers, since they are pulled at Christmas, but it’s too many letters. IMARET was my only unknown but clued as hidden it had to be.

  3. No real problems here.

    Saw the hidden yet unknown Turkish hostelry with the checkers in place.

    The musical direction followed the cryptic.

    Only really held up by ALEATORY at the end – hit-and-hoped without being sure of what it meant.

  4. FOI PAGODA, LOI (taking the last 3’+) COMP; had to do an alphabet trawl, yielding COMP, COOP, before I finally realized COMP could be ‘comprehensive’. I needed the Y before I could come up with SKYDIVER, and only then remembered SKIVER. I started to write in IMARET–a rather obvious definition–and then spotted the hidden. Once again I was fooled by punctuation, wondering until I got here where DASH came from. My COD.
  5. Under 18 minutes, so on the easy side for me. Comp vaguely guessed from comprehensive, aleatory remembered as a word but not its meaning, instrumental case unknown, imaret had to be, LOI Lyra NHO. Loved Dasher, stopped for 30 seconds or so mid-solve before the penny dropped. Also quite liked range and blithering.
    Thank-you setter and blogger.
  6. 35 minutes but a DNF as I gave up on 4dn. I guessed from ‘epic’ that it was going to be something from the Classics but they are not my strongest area of GK so nothing came immediately to mind. Going via wordplay I thought Agnes might count as a Welsh name but that led me up a blind alley. I’d never have thought of ENID.

    Other unknowns were ALEATORY (knew the word but not what it meant), IMARET, LIPPI and LYRA as stars, but managed to work my way around all of them.

  7. This week I have been reading all about The Kaiser’s appalling behaviour at Cowes in 1895 (von Eckardstein) – thus 5ac INSOLENT was my COD. (I did not realise that behaviour is spelt differently abroad! Non-u!)
    28ac DASHER was just tu-tu (Dancer?) obvious (obvios?) as the m-dash was quite long.

    FOI 1ac PAGODA

    LOI 4dn AENEID

    WOD 26ac BLITHERING – is this only applied to fools and idiots?

    Time: just over the hour

    1. It’s the -our words–labour, glamour, rancour, etc.–where Murcan spelling has dropped the U.
      1. The Space Shuttle ‘Endeavour’ managed to retain the ‘u’ as does flour sour, dour, hour etc. I see you like to add a ‘u’ to get ‘Murcan’.

        Enjoy your Bourbon!

        Edited at 2020-12-04 07:10 am (UTC)

        1. As a classicist I am sporadically irate that the English saw fit to add u’s into perfectly good Latin words like color, honor, &c…
        2. Meanwhile, in Australia, the left of centre party is the Labor Party. They dropped the U. But across the ditch here in NZ, it’s the LaboUr Party. Odd
  8. I was slightly concerned by all the unknowns I’d pieced together on submitting today – IMARET, MAESTOSO, LIPPI – and I was right to be, as the other one – AGENTORY – I had invented. I’d taken the space to be EN, which just left me with G for green. Admittedly I’d never seen G for green before but it seemed feasible. Ho hum.
    1. Purely coincidentally, but I’ve just started playing a YouTube video of Chopin’s Piano Concerto Nbr 1 and the musical direction is given as MAESTOSO. I’ve also discovered that applies as well to Elgar’s “Land of Hope & Glory”.
  9. I took a wild stab with COOP (a kind of school?… though I know that O can’t mean “office” or P “person”!) instead of COMP.
    If I’d only taken a few minutes to reconsider before coming here. Oh, well… I was impatient because I haven’t gotten to the blog until the next day lately.
    (I see now that I never filled in _ O _ P.)

    Edited at 2020-12-04 07:03 am (UTC)

  10. Very pleasant puzzle but my blind spot today is INSTRUMENTAL = CASE. I’m obviously missing something very obvious.
    I thought INSOLENT was very good but COD must go to DASHER, as Verlaine says.
    1. Now that someone else has raised this I’m happy to add my name to the request for an explanation. I thought it was just me!
      1. Chambers has “The instrumental case or a word in this case (grammar)”, where as an adjective it’s “serving to indicate the instrument or means (grammar)”. I’d never heard of it. There are some example on Wikipedia.

        Edited at 2020-12-04 07:56 am (UTC)

          1. And to me too (I like the way V just assumes that we will all know). And no explanation really makes it very clear without almost immediately going off into languages that I don’t understand. I think I understand it now, but that’s after spending ages.
            1. I will admit freely that the instrumental case is only the 8th most well known in grammar (even less well known than the vocative and locative, which are bloody obscure)!
              1. The only ones I knew were from Latin classes 64 years ago. Nominative vocative accusative genetive dative and ablative, with locative added later. Never did learn until today about instrumental. Got the answer straightaway but spent many vain minutes making something around rum for singular
      2. The Instrumental Case also still exists in Russian – but I always referred to it as the sixth case ( sixth in the list, after Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, Ablative) – so it took me a long time to cotton on today.

        Edited at 2020-12-04 02:00 pm (UTC)

    2. Bloody linguists!
      If it had been ablative it would make sense but I was unaware that we had names for English cases so very different from the ones I know from a couple of years of Latin (at which I was very incompetent.)
      Andyf
  11. 36 minutes. We did Aeneid Book 2 for our seen translation in the 1961 JMB Latin O level. What makes you think I learnt it by heart? COD jointly to BLITHERING and DASHER. LOI LYCRA, about par for Friday. Thank you V and setter.

    Edited at 2020-12-04 07:50 am (UTC)

    1. I think I did a bit of that too, something about a games, fiery arrow, rowing competition? Didn’t learn it by heart though, got a 4.

    2. Higher Latin for me in 1972 – timeo Danaos etc. Plenty of musical references to keep me happy.
      1. ‘There are tears at the heart of things’ is Seamus Heaney’s translation of the first three words. Very true, but would have been wasted on the 15 year old me (we had a trans stream that did O levels a year early). But that’s Book I. We only had a passage in Book II.
    4. I knew that Latin O Level would come in handy one day. We also had to study the Aeneid, not that I can remember any of it now, of course!
      I was blathering for a while, which held me up in the SE corner, but all done and dusted in a respectable time. Makes a pleasant change for a Friday!
  12. A quick start followed by an increasingly slow struggle. 51 minutes, with the pleasingly penny-dropping 28a DASHER to finish. Just had to trust the wordplay for MAESTOSO and IMARET, but at least I knew the other words.
  13. It’s nice to finish a challenging puzzle on a Friday, until you look at the point score. Nho or dnk LIPPI, ALEATORY, IMARET or MAESTOSO. Another why INSTRUMENTAL? Dithered over spelling of AENEID, despite above comment.

    COD to BLITHERING.

    Time to roll out the intro to ‘Rudolph the….’, it’s beginning to feel like Christmas, even though we’re only six days into Advent.

    22’35”, thanks Verlaine and setter.

  14. 15:46 Held up at the end by METHOD and DASHER, which I failed to parse. Biffed INSTRUMENTALIST too, not knowing the case, so thanks for explaining those, V and Matt. COD to BLITHERING, a word always prepended to the word “idiots” by my Dad.
  15. Twixt cowl and Lippi.
    40 mins struggling with Imaret, Maestoso, Aleatory. Good grief.
    Thanks setter and V.
  16. 20 minutes with the devious COMP last in – I went back to it several times during the solve. Lots to like here: BLITHERING, INSOLENT (an oldie?) DISHONESTY and DASHER all raised an appreciative grin. I half remembered IMARET, but knew ALEATORY from a youthful interest in John Cage et al. MAESTOSO easy for anyone who sings stuff.

    I don’t think I worried about the long case once I realised what the definition was. I only remember 6 of them from Latin O&C O-level, which also never required us to translate much Virgil.

  18. Good time for a Friday, nearly put ARECTORY instead of ALEATORY but the latter rang a vague bell. NHO IMARET but clear from clue.

    COD: DASHER, festive.

    Yesterday’s answer: the first number containing a d is ‘one hundred’ by my reckoning.

    Today’s question: New Jersey is the most densely populated US state; what is the second most densely populated?

      1. That made me laugh – thanks Kevin. I think GA and MS could run it close. P.S. Apologies, I didn’t know one could like one’s own comment…

        Edited at 2020-12-04 10:58 am (UTC)

      2. How did Mississippi lose the top slot? I guess they’ve at least changed their flag now…
    2. I would contest that ‘minus one hundred’ contains a ‘d’ and if you are counting upward, comes before ‘one hundred’…. 🙂
  19. 35.53 but one wrong. NHO aleatory and plumped for arectory which I thought a decent creation but sadly inaccurate. I found the puzzle an odd mix today, some blindingly obvious and some -pace aleatory, requiring a lot of effort.

    FOI pagoda, LOI method. The SE corner took me an age or so it seemed. COD blithering, kept thinking about Captain Mainwaring.

    So a disappointing end to the week with a fail but didn’t feel too bad . If it’s a NHO there’s always a lottery element in finding the correct option.

  20. Zooks! I always want to put an A in AENEID (probably because of Aeneas), and somehow between my brain thinking ‘put an E in ENID’ and my fingers typing AENAID this instinct intervened.
    15:14 apart from that. Fra Lippo LIPPI from Browning, IMARET from wordplay.
    The equivalent ‘aléatoire’ is quite a commonly-used word in French which helped me with the much less commonly-used English equivalent. Not for the first time, if I’m not mistaken.
    EDIT: As I suspected, ALEATORY has come up before, the last time in puzzle 26811 in August 2017. I made a very similar comment then about the French version.

    Edited at 2020-12-04 12:20 pm (UTC)

  22. Also like Olivia, but LOI was the unknown IMARET deduced from must be a hidden.
    Liked BLITHERING and the reindeer. 19 minutes.
  23. Pleasing, with all the pauses to think being followed by penny-drop moments, especially when I twigged what was being asked for in 28ac, and spent some time wondering “but how on earth do I get DASH from that clue”? Possibly more of a “D’oh!” moment than a penny-drop, now I think about it. Our blogger is quite right about MAESTOSO, which always catches me out becuase it doesn’t mean what (I think) it ought to mean.
  24. The answer to yesterday’s other question regarding the last coup d’etat in the USA was 13 April 1945 – 24 April 1945 when Eisenhower refused to tell Harry Truman what what exactly was going on in Germany for ten days. Then Stimson finally let on that the Allies had an Atom Bomb and Hitler was sorted!
    Truman never forgave Ike: when the handover occurred in January 1952 the two never spoke or even had coffee at the White House, but they did arrive in the same limo for the ceremony.
  25. 28 jolly minutes, with today’s wild – and happily correct – surmise being “aleatory”.
  26. An enjoyable solve in 26:30 with PAGODA FOI, but sadly, LOI ARECTORY. NHO ALEATORY, but deduced it from the pink squares and a quick rethink. Drat! Thanks setter and V.
  27. Just shy of 40 minutes, I was definitely not on the wavelength. Surprised to see it’s only 101 on the Snitch. For me it felt a lot harder. COD Dasher
  28. ….once described me on a school report as “indolent and INSOLENT”. I found it hard to disagree, but my dad was predictably unimpressed.

    Biffed INSTRUMENTALIST, and DNK IMARET which was easy enough to spot once I had NEW JERSEY.

    Enid Smith was my supervisor for a year in the 70’s. We didn’t like each other, and she was from Bolton rather than the Valleys, so the Welsh element was unknown to me.

    FOI PAGODA
    LOI ALEATORY
    COD DASHER
    TIME 10:08

  29. An instrumental case is what I’d put my cello in if I had one.
    As for the aleatory spelling in English, it may have something to do with ‘ the great vowel shift’ which occurred a few centuries back. There’s a marvellous podcast ” The History of English” which discusses this in current episodes. The pronunciation of most vowels changed, but often the spelling didn’t. Hence the disconnect between written and spoken words. For example Labour may have originally rhymed with Flour, the vowel sound changing in the former but not the latter……anyway, the podcast is thoroughly recommended.
    19’22’ for a clear round this week, after a previous month horribilis
    1. Indeed, the podcast is excellent, even if it is a bit disconcerting to hear someone with a Virginian accent trying to pronounce Middle English or even worse, Anglo-Saxon. But his presentation is superb.
  30. Like others, I mulled Agentory, Agemtory, Arectory and even Afentory before settling on Aleatory.
    Took longer over that one clue than Verlaine on the entire puzzle!
  31. LOI DASHER put DUSTER at first, not being very well up on reindeer names, till the punctuation dropped. POI COMP, which I don’t like as a word, but then I went to public school….
  32. 54 minutes, once I checked the reindeer (and the punctuation), and DASHER would be my COD with BLITHERING a close second (although I saw that much quicker). No problem with INSTRUMENTAL, which I know from Russian, but I did think it might be a bit obscure for the cryptic crossword. And no problem with ALEATORY — I used to compose probability theory problems for my students which played in Aleajacta, declared to be the capital of Estonia (the main characters in these little stories were of course named Monte and Carlo).
  33. I was held up due to having put BALLPARK in 23ac B for blue, ALL PARK green space, though maybe a ballpark estimate need not be random.

    from Jeepyjay

  34. 46.19. I seemed to have run out of puff on this one after a good week of solving. It certainly felt harder to me than its moderate snitch rating. The insolent / lycra crossers held me up for far too long at the end. I liked the alternate representation of Turkestan, very simple without being immediately obvious (to me anyway).

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