Times Crossword 24166

Author   sabine_tkPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Solving time: 15.18.

After filling in the SW corner at lightning speed, with two helpful anagrams at 18 and 21 ac to start things going, I ground to an abrupt halt and plodded through the rest in what I suspect will turn out to be a very undistinguished time.

I haven’t posted much recently, because I haven’t been timing myself so often these days and I rarely had very much to say beyond posting a time. Also, I’ve often left the puzzle till late afternoon, by which time everything has pretty much been said already. But I’m still here.

Across
1
   PO(T-HOU)SE, an old name for an inn. “take attitude”= POSE, and “you can find accommodation inside” tells us to put THOU (you) inside it.
5
   ALUMNA (manual*).
9
   T(RUFF)AUT – Francois Truffaut was one of the founders of the French New Wave, and is probably among the 20th century European directors well-enough known to be familiar to most non-film buffs.
10
   BEAR UP, sounding like BARE UP, “up” here meaning on horseback, these two words sum up Lady G in a nutshell.
12
   TENTH, hidden in mosT ENTHusiastically. I knew what was going on here but even so wasted some time trying to justify STENT, a thing they use to keep blood vessels open and therefore a surgical part. Pretty thin, I know…
13
   HEA(D,STAR)T. D=”gained ultimately”, STAR = “top performer”, and HEAT = “contest”.
14
   INCAN,DESCENT – this has probably been used before but I quite liked it anyway – “decline of old civilisation” reads very smoothly.
18
   NON-BELIEVERS – an anagram of “observe Lenin”.
23
   POU(L)T – a chicken or young game bird.
24
   A,ST(R)AY – with “terrier finally” being the R.
25
   TIDIED UP – at least I hope so. I have stared at this clue for a long time without being really sure about it or understanding the wordplay. I had an idea that there was a thing called a shoelace tie, in which case the whole thing could be a soundalike for “TIE DID UP”, but it doesn’t really sound the same and in any case the tie I was thinking of turns out to be a bootlace tie. I’m sure someone will put me out of my misery soon.
26
   RIS(k)ING
27
   STAG,NAN,T – NAN being the family member (grandmother) and T=little time.
 
Down
1
   POTATO – dish=POT, and ATO are alternate letters in “salt cod”.
2
   TRU(e),ANT
3
   OFF-CHANCE – “position of authority” = OFFICE, and “detective will replace one” is an instruction to replace the I with CHAN, Charlie Chan being a fictional Chinese-American detective.
4
   S(OUT,HPAC)IFIC – I got this from “musical (5,7) with the 2 I’s in place, and only pieced the wordplay together afterwards. OUT=”revealed”, HPAC is an anagram of “chap” (chap out), all in an anagram of “sci-fi”.
6
   LEEDS, sounding like “leads”.
7
   MARGA(RE)T – RE=about, inside MARGAT(e).
11
   HAND OVER F(IS)T – I wasn’t entirely familiar with this phrase, defined in Chambers as “with steady and rapid gain”, but it was gettable enough from the wordplay. The daily paper is FT (Financial Times), always a good bet when a crossword clue calls for one.
12
   S(TRIP)LING, a sling being a band or strap. Didn’t see this at first, toyed with STRING or STING for the band, despite knowing full well Sting was only a third of a band and is in any case not dead.
17
   INFANTAS, being most of IN FANTASY. An infanta was a princess of Spain or Portugal.
19
   BU(DD)H,A – the word can mean a statue of the Buddha, as well as the Buddha himself. DD is the cleric (Doctor of Divinity) and “nave held up” is HUB reversed. This was the last clue I solved – HUB for nave just didn’t occur to me.
20
   S(TOP) IT – SIT=”pose for artist”, outside (without) TOP. The definition is simply “Don’t”. I found this quite difficult to decipher, going down a lot of wrong tracks like RA for artist, trying to remove an “a” from an artist’s name, and thinking “shirt” would just be T.
22
   TRA,IN, being NI ART all reversed (put up).

30 comments on “Times Crossword 24166”

  1. I think a shoelace can be defined as a tie, meaning simply something used to tie things up, but I was thinking along the same lines as you when solving, remembering Westerns where dudes and gamblers used to wear bootlace ties, and I wondered whether they could also be called shoelace ties. It seems not, however.
    1. Raced (for me) through most of this in 20 minutes but it had sting in its tail and I became horribly stuck in the Kent area where 15, 19, 20, 23, 25 and 27 fought a determined rearguard action. Of these I thought of STAGNANT first but couldn’t see the wordplay so it didn’t go in until I had all the checking letters, and then the penny finally dropped. I eventually finished in 35 minutes.

      New word learnt: Hub = Nave in 19.

  2. 10:33 – made progress 11D at first, completing NE and SW corners plus three of the 12-letter ones at a canter. Then engaged low gear, probably spending about 4 minutes on NW (1A,9,12,1D,2,3,4) and 2-3 on the SE – (23,23,27,19,20) with 19 last in.

    Can’t improve on “tie did up” at 25 – I relied on the def. Time wasted at 27 looking for a T for M letter swap, so canny disguise there. Also saw STENT more easily at 12.

  3. Good to hear from you again Sabine. My experience mostly followed yours, it appears, although my time of 35mins represents a fairly steady pace to your 15mins plod. I also liked Incan descent; irrespective of its history, it was new to me. Last in were the Infantas (thanks to Velazquez) which gets my COD.

    It’s quite possible that an Australian’s “did up” sounds like “deed up” to a New Zealander, so it might just pass.

    As for Truffaut, I recently watched Jules et Jim on DVD. Not sure that it lived up to the hype of the liner notes. Maybe I should have watched it in 1962, but it was probably banned in Australia then, along with Camembert cheese.

    1. I got it quickly as “tied, did up,” say it quickly and they run together as the answer. Shoelace fastened, and fastened on its own as the corresponding parts of the clue, then just say it!
      1. Except that “fastened” performing two functions like this is strictly forbidden in the Times clueing style (as far as my understanding goes) and when I say “tied did up” it still doesn’t come out exactly right unless I affect some accent that isn’t my own. I think other members of this blog have made this point previously about homophones. One person’s easy get can be another’s puzzlement, or at least resignation to the fact that it must be the answer but it doesn’t quite work. I guess we’ve all become accustomed to everything working perfectly all the time.
      2. I fear I only tackled 24166 several weeks after it came out, but would like to suggest that 25 is from “tied it up” (shoelace fastened) sounding like the answer (if said quickly) rather than “tied, did up”.

        John, Glasgow

  4. 30 min. Had trouble getting traction, yet never got completely bogged down. The NW quadrant was last to fall. 25 Ac has me flummoxed. I initially misinterpreted the clue (in a rush) as “ie” (say)inside “tiedup”, then realised in retrospect that this was rubbish. But I can think of nothing else that will fit.
  5. Hello Sabine, good to hear from you. About 35 minutes to solve.

    I actually entered STENT before realising 1D had to be POTATO thanks to the “salt cod” alternate letters. I then sailed through the rest of it before hitting a brick wall in the SE corner where I had complete brain failure for about 5 minutes. Finally saw POULT, twigged TRIP=tour at 15D which gave me everything except 25A. Eventually decided that “ordered” must be the definition and so went for TIDIED,UP. I can’t think of any other explanation for the rest of it other than the one you’ve given.

  6. This puzzle fell into two halves for me – a batch of very easy clues then a batch of rather tricky ones (POT-HOUSE is new to me). The homophone in 25 doesn’t work very well for me because of the differently stressed syllables. When it came to 27, “little time for men at first” seemed to be telling me to change an M to a T, which had me struggling. Once I thought of STAGNANT I entered it with some confidence, without seeing why; It was only later that I realised that STAG (male) = “for men” – a neat piece of deception. Another hold-up was my initial entry of CHIN UP for 10. It didn’t feel right, so I should have erased it immediately.
  7. Looks like my experience has been repeated a couple of times already, didn’t really get STOP IT or TIDIED UP, but they would be the only things that fit. 23 minutes, BUDDHA from definition (thankfully, because I was agonising which of POULT or PLOUT was a bird). Another day with an excellent hidden word clue in 12.
    1. >Another day with an excellent hidden word clue in 12

      If you think that’s good you should see my clue for Spanish Omelette in COW DIY

  8. This felt like the easiest this week, though still took me about 50 minutes (with lots of interruptions along the way!) The SE and SW corners gave me the most grief (not helped by my insistence that 16d was ON THE something). COD 14ac. I too struggled with TIDIED UP.
  9. I was thinking this was a stroll in the park until I got stuck in the SE. I had to go and make a cup of tea and then come back and refocus to finish in a ignominious 43 minutes.
    I had never heard of poult but I put it in on the basis that poultry must be a lot of poults.
    Defining Buddha as a religious effigy is a bit like calling Jesus a religious effigy but I see that it is the final definition in Chambers.
    Just to clarify Sabine’s point about nave, it means the hub of a wheel and has a completely different derivation from a nave in a church.
    Its good to see Truffaut today. It makes a change from Hitchcock or Lean. He came to mind easily because there is a new French television channel on Sky 839 called Cine Moi that is currently showing wall to wall Truffauts.
    Lots of feminine endings today: Alumna, infanta and petite. A trap for sexists maybe. It reminds me of the time that I tried to enter Ambassador in a clue defined as diplomat but it was too short. It took me a long time to realise that the answer was Ambassadress

    1. Poult: good thinking. Ditto the cup of tea!
      Unstated female endings: they must be somewhere in the setter’s “little black book” list of the top 20 crafty tricks – especially ones the same length as the male version.

      Edited at 2009-03-06 02:16 pm (UTC)

  10. Just over 30 minutes. A good finish to the week. Last to go in were the INFANTAS.

    I got a good start with the anagrams and was 75% complete after 15 minutes. Struggled a little bit on the remaining 25% which were almost all in the bottom half of the grid.

    I liked INCANDESCENT and STAGNANT.

  11. Got through most of this quite quickly, then at 20 mins with 4 left I got bored and just guessed at Buddha (right), tidied up (right), strapping (our survey said “ahh-aaaah”) and pet-house (bong).

    Leeds top of the league? You’re ‘aving a laugh. I think the last time was a very cold night in January 2001 when we beat West Ham 3-0. Mind you, we’d have been top of League One (3rd division in old money) for much of last season but for the 15 point deduction. Bah.

    Q-0, E-6, D-7, COD 20, Friday 1 across rock, Guildford’s own blues-rock outfit Pot-House Rising.

    1. Funny you should say that. This was the first puzzle in ages I couldn’t quite be bothered to finish. It felt a bit… whatever.

      Good pedigree for Pot-House Rising – didn’t the Stones come out of Guildford art college?

  12. A bit of a curate’s egg of a puzzle as far as difficulty was concerned. About 45 mins for me. Some very good clues – e.g INCANDESCENT. Like most others, I found 25ac unsatisfactory. TIE DID UP seems to be the only plausible cryptic reading, but a SHOELACE is only one of many things that might be described as a TIE (in the sense of the basic definition given by the COED: “a thing that ties”), making the definition unacceptably imprecise for me. Another minor quibble: at 5ac “Harvard” seems to me to be unjustified padding since ALUMNA describes any female graduate of any university. Presumably the setter thought the anagram would be too easy without the Harvard red herring, but some indication of definition by example is surely required.

    Michael H

    1. I think it’s possibly a side-swipe at American colleges that use alumnus/alumna/alumni without consideration of the correct form (also see emeritus)
    2. I thought the purpose of “Harvard” was to make the def. more precise than just “graduate”, and help you towards alumnus/alumna as being “chiefly US and Canadian” as described in Collins (which matches my impression of their usage).

      Edited at 2009-03-06 05:44 pm (UTC)

      1. On reflection, I think you’re right Peter, and that what I took to be red-herring padding was actually intended by the setter as a helpful nudge towards the right answer – though, in that case, “North American” might have been more to the point than “Harvard”. I agree that “alumnus” and its derivatives, though sometimes used on this side of the pond, are chiefly a US and Canadian usage.

        Michael H

  13. No real time to report since I started this last night, was distracted and had to put it aside, and resumed earlier today. Last entry POT HOUSE, which even with the crossing letters took some time, since I hadn’t heard of it.
    I also hadn’t realized that alumnus/alumna were chiefly American/Canadian usage. I agree George that there’s a lack of strict attention to Latin declension is the US when using these and other terms, but the institutions I attended were always strictly correct with their use of alumnus/-na/-ni/-nae. The students and graduates, on the other hand, far less so. I didn’t like the homophone TIDIED UP, but I did like STOP IT and INCANDESCENT for COD. Regards all.
  14. The first puzzle that’s made me swear out loud – when I finally got ASTRAY and INFANTA, having also taken ages on TIDIED UP, BUDDHA, and the fiendishly defined STOP IT. Trying to solve 17 down and 24 across with only 5 checked letters out of 13 made this a struggle – maybe a feature of this particular grid format?
    1. If you mean that when 17 and 24 are the last two answers left, you only have three checked letters in one and two in the other, that’s just a feature of the last two answers being ones that cross – the same could happen in any grid.

      Or have I misunderstood?

  15. The first Times puzzle that’s made me swear out loud – when I finally got ASTRAY and INFANTA, having also taken ages on TIDIED UP, BUDDHA, and the fiendishly defined STOP IT. Trying to solve 17 down and 24 across with only 5 checked letters out of 13 made this a struggle – maybe a feature of this particular grid format?
  17. As an alumnus of Southampton (UK) and Open Universities I wondered about the relevance of Harvard in 5a but that did not prevent it from being my FOI. No problem with TIE DID UP at 25a for me though.

    Three “easies” not in this blog:

    21a Amazingly lithe hare, less prone to disease (9)
    HEALTHIER. Anagram of (lithe hare).

    8d Laid up, old man has little desire for food (8)
    AP PETITE

    16d Unsettled when travelling by plane (2,3,3)
    IN THE AIR

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