Time taken: 8:25. I thought this might have been the stinker after the last few days (and since there have been several Thursday stinkers recently) but that may be saved until tomorrow. This is a pretty breezy puzzle, and I suspect there will be some slick times. I was only slowed down by making sure I could spell 3 down and piecing together 24 down which turned out to be the obvious.
How did you get along?
| Across | |
| 1 | Hint received by an old cleric who may be Victorian (10) |
| ANTIPODEAN – TIP(hint) inside AN, O(old), DEAN(cleric). Guilty as charged, as I was born in Melbourne | |
| 6 | Beastly European’s left dry (4) |
| BRUT – BRUTE(beastly) minus E(European) | |
| 10 | French soldier following horse and carriage (7) |
| HACKNEY – Michel NEY(French soldier of the Napoleonic wars) after HACK(horse) | |
| 11 | Bell possibly attached to head of awful monster (7) |
| CHIMERA – CHIMER(bell, possibly) and the first letter of Awful | |
| 12 | Good person spoke — had trouble with speech (9) |
| STUTTERED – ST(saint, good person), UTTERED(spoke) | |
| 13 | Bit to eat, not cold, before a dance (5) |
| RUMBA – CRUMB(bit to eat) minus C(cold), then A | |
| 14 | Beautiful female bird crossing sides of lake (5) |
| HELEN – HEN(bird) surrounding the external letters in LakE | |
| 15 | Treated like little piggies etc.? (9) |
| PEDICURED – cryptic definition of little piggies referring to toes | |
| 17 | An unknown draught in front part of room? (3,6) |
| BAY WINDOW – A(an), Y(unknown), WIND(draught) inside BOW(front part) | |
| 20 | Pick up pounds, having additional merit (5) |
| LEARN – L(pounds) and EARN(merit) | |
| 21 | Climber is needing energy in repeated runs (5) |
| RISER – IS, and E(energy) inside R, and R(runs) | |
| 23 | Archdeacon coming to Italian city — good undertaking (9) |
| VENTURING – VEN(archdeacon), TURIN(Italian city), G(good) | |
| 25 | A part of the body in which one is most painful (7) |
| ACHIEST – A, CHEST(part of the body) containing I(one) | |
| 26 | Wild flower girl seizing knight (7) |
| VIOLENT – VOILET(flower and girl) containing N(knight in chess) | |
| 27 | Our late Queen as shown in The Times (4) |
| ERAS – ER(our late Queen), AS | |
| 28 | Showing courage, in hurry, being unable to hear? (10) |
| FEARLESSLY – FLY(hurry) containing EARLESS(being unable to hear) | |
| Down | |
| 1 | Trees and how they finish up in wood-burners? (5) |
| ASHES – double definition | |
| 2 | Therapy’s beginning — really — through touch (9) |
| TACTUALLY – first letter of Therapy and ACTUALLY(really) | |
| 3 | More than one prison is a pit internee gathered again (14) |
| PENITENTIARIES – anagram of IS,A,PIT,INTERNEE | |
| 4 | Time old reprobate perhaps announced for excursion (3,4) |
| DAY TRIP – sounds like DATE(time) and RIP(reprobate) | |
| 5 | Having passageways or a road invaded by rebel (7) |
| ARCADED – A, RD(road) containing CADE(rebel) | |
| 7 | The man drowning in strange fluid (5) |
| RHEUM – HE(the man) inside RUM(strange) | |
| 8 | Great Dane on the loose in outside refreshment area (3,6) |
| TEA GARDEN – anagram of GREAT DANE | |
| 9 | Explosive ingredient: colonel rules it must be deployed (14) |
| NITROCELLULOSE – anagram of COLONEL,RULES,IT | |
| 14 | Greeting Swiss city at start of evening, be out for a long time (9) |
| HIBERNATE – HI(greeting), BERN(Swiss city) AT, and the first letter of Evening | |
| 16 | Study one supposedly monstrous location, being well prepared (9) |
| READINESS – READ(study), I(one), and loch NESS(supposedly monstrous location) | |
| 18 | Fan with flower, conveying X? (7) |
| DEVOTEE – DEE(flower) containing VOTE(X) | |
| 19 | Convinced cleric currently upset about nothing (3,4) |
| WON OVER – REV(cleric) and NOW(currently) reversed surrounding O(nothing) | |
| 22 | Sort of sound was weirdly going round church (5) |
| SCHWA – anagram of WAS containing CH(church) | |
| 24 | Managed to travel on train avoiding wet times (3,2) |
| GOT BY – GO(travel) on TRAIN minus RAIN(wet) then BY(times, multiplied by) | |
I’m not going to get anywhere if I can’t read my own crossing letters, or even worse, put in a wrong letter – tea gartet, anyone? I also over-read the cryptics, spending a long time on elaborate schemes involving upside-down agas containing the last letter of trees, when the cryptic is much simpler. It is curious to see that Great Dane is an anagram of tea garden – I suppose we’ve had it before, but I don’t remember it. I also biffed Australian, but I decided it wouldn’t do after a while, even though one of the letters worked out on a subsequent down clue.
Time: 32 minutes
16:44, so the latest in a line of uncomplicated puzzles. Bunged a few in, including 24d, which had to be, even with no crossers. Last in the correctional services one.
Must be the season for Loch Ness monsters and deans, but then, when isn’t it?
ukaca?
Jack CADE is also in season – only 2 days since his last outing!
Chimera is also in vogue.
While the answer to 4 down was fairly obvious, I found the clue unsatisfactory as ‘announced’ (sounds like) is attached to ‘reprobate’ as well as (or rather than) ‘time’. So for a while there I was wondering if ‘trip’ was supposed to refer ‘reprobate’ after ‘day’ = time. Perhaps I’m being too pedantic!
If you announce “Date Rip” .. that works for me
Yes, but who announces Date Rip? That was definitely my beef with this puzzle. Nobody could possible confuse the two, wherever they come from!
You do it, because the clue tells you to… welcome to crosswordland!
I did it. That doesn’t mean I have to accept it works as a homophone. It’s worse than the non-rhotic ones because at least some people do speak with that accent – quite a few, in fact, whereas you can’t make DATE RIP sound like DAY TRIP.
Interestingly* I would have found this clue unsatisfactory if the homophone indicator had not applied to both parts of the clue. In a clue of the form [homophone of X], [Y] like this I think the homophone has to stand on its own. In this case ‘DAY T’ doesn’t work, because 1) it’s not a word so doesn’t really have a recognised sound and 2) if you did say it you’d probably say ‘day tee’. From past discussions I know that this is a minority view but there it is.
*possibly stretching the meaning of the word ‘interesting’ beyond breaking point
It wasn’t too difficult to find DAY TRIP but I wasn’t sure about the rip, so I looked in Wiktionary afterwards and it was a LONG way down the page:
“(colloquial, regional, dated) An immoral man; a rake, a scoundrel. [from 18th c.]”
so a MER.
Collins has “a dissolute character; reprobate”, although also a long way down the page.
Heyer! How many more times do i need to say this! 🙂
(sorry 🙂
The best part about not being a reference solver is that I can write Penitentiaries in however I choose to spell it, knowing it’s the correct answer but not having to worry even a little bit about all the the i’s and e’s and exactly where they go (unless they’re crossers). thanks, gh
15:00
It took me a while to come up with NEY, as I was trying to come up with a word for French soldier other than soldat. (When Nick Jenkins says “Une vraie famille de soldats”, Mme. Leroy corrects him: “Une vraie famille d’officiers”.) Biffed ANTIPODEAN, BAY WINDOW, WON OVER, GOT BY (which I’d originally biffed as GOT ON). DNK the explosive. I liked DEVOTEE.
Funnily enough, the word I thought of straight away for ‘French soldier’ was “poilu”, which I’ve only ever seen in crossword land.
Fortunately, I only thought of ‘poilu’ after getting NEY.
Luckily, I thought of HACKNEY before I worked out it was ‘hack’ rather than ‘h’!
I tried fitting ‘POILOU’ in somewhere early on as the French soldier but of course it got me nowhere.
And I’m always wary of clues where the answer is one of the (apparently) dozens of names for carriages. Setters seem overly keen on them, and I never seem to have heard of them. It turned out to be the much commoner HACKNEY.
I do remember a clue many years back where one had to spot that PHAETONS is an anagram STANHOPE. TWO carriages in one clue.
Enough, already!
23 minutes. Good to see 1a first, followed straight after by 1b, which I thought of in the sporting sense. Steady progress from then on, though I missed the significance of NEY for ‘French soldier’ and had never heard of RIP for ‘reprobate’ (or ‘old reprobate perhaps’), though it’s in both Collins and Chambers. Finished off with GOT BY, which also defied parsing – no excuses.
You will find both in Georgette Heyer 🙂
I tackled this at bedtime when I was overtired and made very slow progress with less than half the grid completed after an hour during which time I must have nodded off more than once. On resumption when refreshed this morning the remainder fell into place with little difficulty in just over 10 minutes.
I learned that NITOROCELLULOSE is another name for the more familiar ‘gun cotton’ which I have met many a time in the past.
I took ‘old’ in 4dn to refer to RIP being a very old-fashioned word for a reprobate that I doubt is ever used these days.
I struggled to reconcile ‘brute’ with ‘beastly’, thinking of one as a noun and the other as an adjective, but I got there in the end.
Brute force?
Yes, that was the example I thought of when I got there in the end.
There was a whole lotta biffing going on. Coming to the blog, I was still wondering about RIP for the rake.
GOT BY impressed me. LOI was NITROCELLULOSE (though the first part seemed obvious).
BAY WINDOWs are a common feature of the architecture of my neighborhood, historic Brooklyn Heights, where I’ve lived for thirty years but have only been photographing in the last one.
It’s a good idea to take some snaps before the area changes beyond all recognition.
It was NYC’s first officially designated Historic District, so change is slower here than in many other places, but a necessary revamping of the adjacent Brooklyn Queens Expressway and the riverfront Promenade cantilevered high above it are one dark cloud on the horizon…
18’31”, much delayed by putting in GOT ON, and foolishly thinking I could do the explosive anagram in my head.
Never parsed DAY TRIP, and never would have.
Looking forward to tomorrow.
Thanks george and setter.
22:12
No dramas and enjoyed it, but does ‘day trip’ sound identical to ‘date rip’? No way. The ‘t’ sound is completely different in each one. ‘Date rip’ can be uttered with a glottal stop in the middle. Not so with ‘day trip’. The two are totally different.
Thanks, g.
‘Totally’ is a bit harsh. I agree they’re not identical but it’s close enough for me (this is of course a matter of taste!)
Hardly totally; they’re both voiceless stops, they’re both variants of /t/. We’ve had a number of such (non?-) homophone pairs over the years, and while I don’t care much for them, I think we’ve got to give the setter some room. How do you feel about ice cream/I scream?
44:41, for 0.57 snitches.
Actually a red letter day as I had GET BY for GOT BY.
Tried NITROGLYCERIN and NITROTOLUENE, should definitely have written this one out. I thought that RIP referred to Van Winkle. Was he a reprobate?
NHO this CADE guy before, and here he is again.
WOD SCHWA
11:38. DNK RIP for reprobate, but I see the dictionary says “Informal, dated”, and failed to parse HACKNEY. A little quirky in places, I thought. Nice puzzle. Thanks George and setter.
Another easy one, helped once again by at least three Heyer references … hackney, rip and Ney. They were not short of a tea garden in those days, either.
If you were wondering about Ney, her semi-documentary book about Waterloo is considered one of her finest works.
FWIW here’s an extract of wiki
“An Infamous Army is a novel by Georgette Heyer. In this novel Heyer combines her penchant for meticulously researched historical novels with her more popular period romances. So in addition to being a Regency romance, it is one of the most historically accurate and vividly narrated descriptions of the Battle of Waterloo.”
10:41. A steady solve where I had to go through the clues several times, picking them off one by one as checkers appeared, neither getting stuck nor picking up a real head of steam.
NHO or (more likely) have forgotten RIP.
The homophone in 4dn is a bit dodgy but close enough for government work IMO.
plus, if it wasn’t a bit dodgy we wouldn’t have any fun at all in discussion here
17 minutes. No real problems, though I held myself up by not spotting that TEA GARDEN was a straightforward anagram, and NITROCELLULOSE was eventually pieced together, cellulose first then nitro, once all the checkers were in place. Didn’t know rip=reprobate, but DAY TRIP was pretty clear.
Thanks setter and blogger.
FOI Antipodean
LOI Nitrocellulose
COD Tea garden
Not much more to say than has been said already. A quick-ish time for me with LOI BRUT, (as I’d been looking for a word meaning beastly) and very thankful it was at the right end of the alphabet trawl. POI was the NHO explosive ingredient, pieced together with all the crossers and an educated guess as to the composite parts. Otherwise a smooth solve beginning in the SW corner.
A rare excursion south of 30 minutes for me, at 26 minutes and very satisfying at that. I biffed DAY TRIP thinking day was time and it had to be that, and wondering how TRIP equated with reprobate. If I had spotted the homophone, I would have been wondering how RIP equated with reprobate as NHO. I did know NEY and liked PEDICURED. Thanks all.
7.48 in the QC and now 26 minutes for the 15×15! You’re not on performance enhancing drugs are you Rotter! 🤩
I had an early night last night – must be that!
I can’t see what’s wrong with “date rip” for 4dn. It didn’t slow me down anyway. Wanted 26ac to be verbena, but verbena may not be wild, not sure, and a ben is almost certainly not a knight. And for some reason I thought there was an archbishop Venn, so was a bit delayed on 23ac. Otherwise reasonably smooth progress by my standards, 26 minutes.
38:27. I thought this one had an odd slightly unfamiliar feel to it, but perhaps I just wasn’t on the wavelength or not awake yet. I had to write out the explosive anagram even with NITRO and the rest of the crossers written in; the number of Ls helpfully minimised the possible permutations. OK with the DATE RIP homophone; the slight mismatch is what makes it fun. COD to the simple ERAS which took me a while to see
Still don’t understand DAY TRIP, but otherwise this was straightforward. 11 mins. Liked RHEUM and TACTUALLY.
20:21
Mostly fine though NHO NEY, NITROCELLULOSE nor RIP = reprobate.
TACTUALLY was a guess – only at the last minute spotting that it was made up of T + ACTUALLY (doh!).
No problem with DAY TRIP – just pleased to find something that went in front of TRIP and fit the parsing. Also pleased that CADE came up recently….
Liked FEARLESSLY which I only parsed post-completion.
Thanks George and setter.
Mostly a steady solve. One or two that I just bunged in and didn’t think too much about (DAY TRIP etc). But all green unlike the last couple of days where I’ve had a pink square or two
I worked out the parsing of DAY TRIP, but I still felt uneasy about it thinking there was a better alternative I was missing. My only hold up was biffing NITROGLYCERINE for 9dn, but soon corrected once LEARN became obvious.
A pretty straightforward offering today, and I finished in a speedy 27.27.
Got off to a bad start by assuming 1ac was AUSTRALIAN and failing to see why. I managed only a few answers on the initial trawl, but then suddenly I got in the groove and things fell into place, helped by the long anagrams 3dn and 9dn. Never heard of ‘rip’ in the sense required in 4dn, but the answer was clear enough. Crossed the line in a reasonable (for me) 22 minutes.
FOI – STUTTERED
LOI – ERAS
COD – HACKNEY, with its cunning, misleading pointers.
Thanks to george and other contributors.
Done in two stages separated by a couple of hours as life intervened. All in all, about the half hour with LOI GOT BY. COD to DEVOTEE. DAY TRIPper took me so long to find out. I found out. Not the best homophone, but perhaps they’re better that way. Thank you George and setter.
I found that apart from the 1a AUSTRALIAN (pencilled lightly as it doesn’t parse) it was a top to bottom solve.
4d Happy with the dodgy homophone but RIP=reprobate is v unfamiliar. BIFD anyway.
Writing SCHAW for 22d was a mistake, and I looked blankly at 27a E_W_ for a while. DOH!
Nearly fell into the GOT ON trap at 24d.
Otherwise I think it might be a PB, but I didn’t look at the clock, and rarely do.
ps – thank you for the 6a “BRUTe force” explanation as I was foxed there.
15’06” for the third puzzle this week barely to have stretched the grey matter. We must be in for a horror show on Friday!
14:02. Never heard of the old reprobate but it slid in as easily as everything else, though LOI DEVOTEE needed all the crossers.
NHO NITROCELLULOSE, which, together with my LOI, accounted for about a quarter of my solving time.
FOI ANTIPODEAN
LOI FEARLESSLY
COD BAY WINDOW
TIME 10:40
DNF in around 16 mins because I managed to type acheist (someone who doesn’t believe in Che Guevara?) instead of achiest also ruining my penitentiariis in the process.
I thought this was much like level of the Monday and Tuesday puzzles. I didn’t race through, but it was a steady solve throughout. Most of the pauses were in the bottom half. 23 minutes.
I held myself up in the NW by confidently entering FIRES at 1d (FIR + tre(ES). It wa only when I finally solved ANTIPODEAN that I corrected it and hey preston, HACKNEY appeared as LOI. A briefly biffed NITROGLYCERINE also delayed me. GOT BY and FEARLESSLY were late entries too. DAY TRIP went in unparsed! Good fun. 26:23. Thanks setter and George.
1ac clearly refers to patrons of Victoria golf course in Portugal, the true antipodes.
Enjoyable puzzle. The unknown explosive took some time to assemble, but the last one to drop was PEDICURED.
Thanks setter and George.
19:19
Good fun, No problem with DAY TRIP, or anything else for that matter, though TACTUALLY looked a bit odd. FEARLESSLY made me laugh and now I know what gun cotton is.
Comments here and elsewhere are slowly convincing me that I am going to have to put my literary snobbery to one side and read a Georgette Heyer.
Thanks to George and the setter.
You could do worse than start with “An Infamous Army.” No bodices were ripped during the making of the book …
People love to sneer at her books, just the way they used to love to sneer at Abba.. nowadays they are seen as national treasures, masters of their craft, and so should she be. What she did, she did better than anyone. Yes they are romances, but never mind that. Admire her perfect command of language, the assured plotting, and above all the deep, deep knowledge of her milieu. You will never catch her out with an anachronism..
Quite often I see things that are not my scene, but still admire how well they are done .. Elvis, Tom Jones, whatever. She does her scene better than anyone else ever has.
Thanks for the tip Jerry. I will start with that one. Re your other comment: I’ve been struck by the number of times I’ve heard people observe that Tom Jones and Rod Stewart both prove excellent stage shows .
It’s all been said. No problems with the dodgy homophone, but RIP was a bit of a MER. What’s wrong with using real words? I sort-of smeared “beastly European” together to be a noun, even though European would have to be doing double duty, so thanks for the explanation.On edit: thanks to alto_ego.
The NITRO was obvious, and I do know nitro cellulose, but I was another trying (tri)nitrotoluene, nitroglycerine, etc.
Did like TACTUALLY a lot.
36 mins, pretty straightforward. Last four in together VENTURING, GET BY, VIOLENT and the explosive. Had NITRO in early but needed the crossers for the cellulose bit.
I liked ANTIPODEAN.
Thanks g and setter.
I thought I’d posted this ages ago but apparantly I hadn’t !
Got through satisfactorily. Dnk SCHWA or NITROCELLULOSE. DEVOTEE made me smile.
19 mins. I bunged in NITROGLYCERINE without even checking the anagram which held me up for a bit. Main problem was finding the BY to go after GOT. Once that was in, POI FEARLESSLY was clear. LOI BRUT, had the clue upside down.
Can’t understand why folks were biffing NITROGLYCERINE when it was obviously an anagram. Or chucking in AUSTRALIAN when ‘hint’ obviously implied TIP. And once you’ve got TIP, it cried out for AN in front and O behind. Just saying …
The whole point (indeed the definition) of biffing is that you don’t pay attention to the wordplay, so if you’ve realised it’s an anagram you’re no longer biffing!
More broadly if your point is that this isn’t a very sensible solving strategy then you undoubtedly have a point…
FOI was PENITENTIARIES — didn’t even have to write it out. LOI was ASHES. Inexplicably, the NW corner gave far more trouble than it should have. NHO RIP for reprobate, and in any case I’m on the side of the objectors to the homophone. It just isn’t one! COD for me was RHEUM.
Fairly easy, like Monday and Tuesday’s puzzles. I took some time seeing GOT BY and FEARLESSLY, and BRUT was the last one in.
DEVOTEE was a nice clue, I thought.
Thanks George and Setter
17.20 but a careless GET BY. Or maybe it was a typo. Nul points either way
Liked TACTUALLY and ASHES
Thanks all
18 mins after a 34 minute slog yesterday and two 11s on Monday and Tuesday. So this week is a bit of a mixed bag for me. Today’s stumbling blocks were fearlessly and penitentiaries . Like at least one other solver, I wasted some time trying to find poilu to fit on the horse but it wasn’t terminal.
Liked the puzzle and await with anticipation tomorrow’s offering.
Thx setter and blogger.
25 minutes (actually a bit less, but some time for proofreading just to play it safe), so far easier than I was expecting on a Thursday. Or I was maybe on the right wavelength as we say. As for the homophone discussion above, I think one needs to be quite lenient about them in crossword clues or hardly any homophone clues would work. I liked greeting the Swiss city in HIBERNATE, which I put in before seeing that 17ac was not going to be BED SITTER after all.
18:16. An easy week. Tomorrow could be quite a test ……
19’17” same as above. no probs.
Very slow to finish today, with many distractions. Enjoyable puzzle. Pleased to complete successfully.
For DAY TRIP, “Old reprobate maybe” = RIP not very convincing. Possible alternatives – anagram of “Pay dirt”, or spooner of “tray dip”?
Held up to start by not getting 1a (even though I’m now an antipodean Victorian!) and not knowing the word TACTUALLY (fiddled all round the block with actually and fact and tactile, but if it’s a NHO…)
SW corner started me off well, and I progressed upward from there, especially liking PEDICURED , RHEUM and HIBERNATE. DNF, as I never did get HACKNEY ( Ney long forgotten), nor ANTIPODEAN, but enjoyed the ride.