Times Crossword 24525

Author   sabine_tkPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Solving time: 12.07

I solved the two long down clues and the linking 15A and 18A quite quickly, to find myself faced with a grid already divided into four quite separate quarters – a more dismaying sight, even, than Gordon Brown arriving on your doorstep to apologise. The NW corner was the first to submit, followed by the SW, and I then took quite a few minutes to polish off the stubborn 29A, 17D and 8D.
 

Across
1
   HO(AXE)D
4
   GOODY BAG – “Goody” is a shortened form of “goodwife”, while the unfortunate “bag” is defined by Chambers as offensive slang for “an unattractive, slovenly or immoral woman”. (Thanks to a couple of early posters for pointing out that “poor sort of lady” is actually a reference to a bag lady.)
10
   PACK,AGING
11
   I,BSE,N – I=one, BSE=bovine spongiform encephalopathy, otherwise known as mad cow disease, and N=attention, finally. Ibsen and Grieg are probably the first two dead Norwegians to pop into my head, if you exclude that blue parrot. (Please don’t post to state that it’s just shagged out after a long squawk; we could be here for weeks…)
12
   RED (TAP)E – TAP here is in the sense of a phone tap, while REDE is an old spelling of “read” in its archaic meaning of “to counsel” – a verb, then, not a noun as I had originally guessed.
13
   NIT,PICK
14
   OSAGE, being “dosage” with the D removed (indicated by “not at first”). The Osage are a Native American people, which I just about knew.
15
   A(ESTHE)TE – ATE=worried, and the Persian queen losing her tail is Esthe(r). I was briefly puzzled by how this lady came to have a tail in the first place, until it dawned on me that we were talking about a cat.
18
   AGONISED, a nice easy anagram that was one of my first clues solved.
20
   PASH,A – “crush” here is in the sense of an infatuation, while Pasha was a high ranking title in the Ottoman empire, given to governors, dignitaries and high military officers.
23
   I(ONE)S,CO – a reference to the playwright Eugène Ionesco.
25
   RECOUNT – “tell” here seems to work both in the sense of “count” and of “relate”. (Is there any other wordplay going on? If so I’ve missed it.)
26
   SKIRL – SKI=slide, RL =both hands (right and left), and SKIRL is the sound made by bagpipes.
27
   DEMETRIUS – (muse tried)*. Demetrius is a role in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (and also, I have just learned, a minor role in Titus Andronicus and in Antony and Cleopatra) – and therefore a part of (or in) Shakespeare.
29
   SH,ARIA = SH! = quiet! and Sharia is Islamic law. This was one of the last I got – I didn’t have the final A in place, and was trying with no success whatsoever to justify “chorus” – it was remembering SH for quiet that gave me the breakthrough.
 
Down
1
   HYPER,IO,N – HYPER=extremely excited. IO is a moon of Jupiter, N=new and Hyperion is a moon of Saturn. I thought at first that this one might start DE (the extremes of “excited”, reversed) with the rest of the clue working as it actually does, but luckily solved 1A very early on, which put paid to that.
2
   ARCAD,I,A – ARCAD(e) is “row of shops, shortly”, plus I=one and A=area.
3
   EL A,LAM,EIN, made up from ALE reversed (drink up), LAM=beat, and EIN, the German for “a”.
6
   DRIFT, a double meaning.
7
   B(ASS IS)T – and here, unlike 1D, we do have “extremely” in the sense of “take the first and last letter” – in this case of “brilliant”.
8
   GING,KO – the last clue I solved. I made the mistake here of thinking “G_N_K_? I don’t know this word. It’s probably an exotic tree.” I do have a bad habit of wrongly deciding I cannot possibly know a word. There seemed no chance other than to decode the wordplay, which was equally unhelpful. “Working” is often “ON” – maybe inside a word for “drop”? – but the K made that all but impossible, and what could anyone do with “fell”? Happily after half a minute more thought the actual answer, a tree I had known perfectly well all along, arrived in my brain, and I realised every idea I had had about the wordplay was complete nonsense. It’s actually GOING=working, remove the O (“drop round”) to give GING, and KO=fell (knock out).
9
   NINE DAYS WONDER – the second of two fairly straightforward long answers, always a very welcome sight.
16
   H,OP,SCOTCH – H=hard, OP=work, and to scotch something is to put an end to it.
17
   MANTISSA – an anagram of S (singular) plus STAMINA. A mantissa is the fractional part of a logarithm in maths. Looking at _A_T_S__ I was nowhere near getting this – but when the final A arrived from 29A I saw what it must be. I knew this word as something vaguely mathematical, but would never have got to it from “part of log”.
19
   GENTILE – “Teeing off” is a rather neat way of indicating an anagram, with the L coming from “links, originally”.
21
   SAUC(I)ER
22
   MISSUS – “Miss US” being Miss America, and therefore the most beautiful American.
24
   SP(L)IT. Just two overtly political/election clues this week, though in my post-debate haze 9D seems like a reference to Cleggmania. Just one week to go, folks. We’ll get there.

37 comments on “Times Crossword 24525”

  1. 22 min here. A steady solve until I ended up with G?N?K? at 8 dn. We grow ginkgo trees, so I dithered about possible misspellings before understanding the word play and getting GINGKO, and finding that it is now an accepted secondary spelling. Nice puzzle to get after making an absolute pigs ear of yesterday’s.
  2. An excellent blog as usual Sabine.

    I found this quite easy, because in many cases the unusual nature of the answer made it possible to get from definition alone.

    GINGKO was a prime example which was easy from the checking letters and the definition, but the wordplay took a while to work out post-solve.

    I had the same take as vinyl on “bag lady”.

    1. I also agree on the vinyl/kurihan interpretation of the ‘bag lady’ as an unfortunate sort, as opposed to a ‘bag’.
  3. Thanks Sabine, and others. Well blogged. I had no problem with GINGKO, which to me is not an odd spelling. My last was MANTISSA, from wordplay, since I have no math background beyond algebra and geometry many years ago. About 20 minutes or so. I didn’t recognize BSE as the farm ailment, nor the phrase NINE DAYS WONDER, nor goody. I gave myself a bit of trouble by trying ‘bandaging’ instead of PACKAGING at 10A, which needed correcting later when ARCADIA became apparent. COD to MISSUS. Regards everyone.
  4. About an hour’s worth of teeth extraction, stuck in all corners bar the SW. I too would have spelled GINGKO thusly, if asked, which probably is indicative of something or other. I didn’t help me solve it any quicker, mind, going through a sequence similar to that outlined by Sabine. As for RECOUNT, I just thought it was more or less a double def with of being a link word; although I see this interpretation has some problems.

    In my experience, MANTISSA disappeared from the mathematical lexicon about the same time as slide rules vanished from the shelves, circa 1972. I still have mine (slide rule,that is; the moths got at my mantissa) to remind me of a completely wasted childhood.

  5. Had problems in all four corners, with ten clues unsolved in all. The chastening part is that I reckon I should realistically have solved only two more (MISSUS and DRIFT). For the rest, in the main, the rareness of the word did for me.

    SH for ‘quiet’, in addtion to P, will be added (once again!) to what I optimistically might call my memory bank. Most helpful blog.

  6. Like Koro (and myself yesterday) just under the hour and a lot of teeth on the study floor. Never heard of a goody bag — Whisky Tango Foxtrot are they? Talked myself into all sorts of nonsense along the way. Like: NORSE for 11ac on the basis that an ‘eadless ‘orse is definitely a problem on the farm. And pondering whether to SPLAT someone (24dn) could mean to show them disgust. Must have been the devil in me: Et in 2dn Ego?
    COD to 7dn: avatar adjusted accordingly.
    1. The sort of thing that’s handed out free when you buy a new mobile phone for your daughter – as I did today; full of stuff like keyrings you don’t need.
  7. I’m in the ‘found it difficult’ camp, mainly due to a lack of scientific knowledge. Needed Sabine’s help to understand HYPERION and GINGKO; also struggled with MANTISSA and SKIRL, my last in at something over an hour.
  8. 10:38 here – some fast bits but a few tricky corners too. Several answers entered without understanding full wordplay – at 1D I saw “hyper” and then just assumed that Hyperion was some poetic name for the new moon. I had no idea about GOING in 8D either, just seeing the tree and not realising from the sound of “Ginko biloba and plenitude action liposomes” or similar in cosmetic ads on the box, that the “real” spelling is ginkgo. And in 22D, one of my last-but one pair, I only saw US=American and wondered how on earth MISS could mean “most beautiful”. Last in were 29 and 17 – I’m just old enough to remember log tables and adding up mantissas before calculators took over.

    You get a goody bag if you turn up to compete at the Times Crossword Championship. Any odds for another spare copy of Jumbo Book 7?

    1. I was surprised to find GINKGO as the primary spelling – I had always known it as GINGKO which certainly looks more easily pronounceable.

      The characters for the Japanese name for the tree mean literally “silver apricot” and (separately) are pronounced GIN (with a hard G) KYO, except that in the name of the tree they are pronounced I CHO, which sounds like a sneeze. And they say English is a hard language to learn.

  9. Yet another struggle for me (exactly 60 minutes) although at least it was a steadier solve than the past couple of days with no long unproductive gaps in the process. The most difficult parts were GINGKO and OSAGE, both of which I used aids for in the end, and getting properly started in the SE corner where for a long time all I had in place were CRIME and DEMETRIUS. Spotting SAUCIER was the key to this as everything fell into place once this was in. I think I have met MANTISSA before but probably wouldn’t have thought of it but for the anagram.

    I agree with the comment above about PASHA where the mention of “Muslim” put me off the scent. IONESCO has come up very recently I believe.

  10. Major plumbing problems so had to cut off eary with 3 to solve, ie SKIRL, IBSEN and HYPERION (actually, if I had all day I don’t think I would have got those). Norwegian for IBSEN seems a tad unhelpful. Had to comment though just to nominate the wonderful MISSUS as COD.
    1. Well, how many sufficiently famous dead 5-letter Norwegians are there? After looking at wikipedia’s long list of Norwegians, I could only add two to Ibsen and Grieg – Munch, who I should have thought of, and (Shipping man Fred) Olsen, who I hadn’t realised was Norwegian.
      1. Well, I was in a hurry.
        As it was unspecific I was trying to think of
        common Scandinavian first names:
        Hans, Nils and er, er… Bumps a Daisy
  11. Bag seems a innovation. Sharia maybe, but with the Ionesco and El Alamein i’m having a feeling that i’m just starting to paint the Forth Bridge again. Mantissa seems a standard to my mind.
  12. 18 minutes, held up like others with GINGKO, trying to remember how the thing was spelt and not finding the cluing helpful. I also had O?A?E left ’til late, one of those where you know if you let the little grey cells churn it for a while undisturbed, they’ll pop up with the right answer. OSAGE is also one of those odd bits of info that lie alongside mythical Gaelic poets not looking as if they really mean what they do.
    RECOUNT I thought rather under clued: I suppose the decision to call for a recount is one of many possible after the polls close, but I saw this merely as an attempt to be topical.
    Grateful for the wordplay to get EL ALAMEIN spelt right.
    Loved MISSUS, HOPSCOTCH and HYPERION in equal measure.
  13. I found this straightforward except for the NE corner where I needed online help to get GOODY BAG, DRIFT and GINGKO.

    I’m with Barry in thinking that defining IBSEN just as “Norwegian” is loose. Absent checking letters (Edvard) GRIEG and (Edvard) MUNCH would have fitted too. A Google list of famous Norwegians makes interesting reading – there are more than you might think. Welsh-born Roald Dahl makes an appearance!

    Liked the misleading homophone indicator “we hear” in the SKIRL clue.

    I think RECOUNT works as a double definition: 1) “narrate” and 2) “recount the votes” (which they’ll do next Thursday night if the poll is close and only a few votes separate fist and second place).

  14. A mainly well constructed and entertaining puzzle – 25 minutes to solve.

    Luckily I was completely ignorant of the alternative spellings of GINGKO. I saw the K, thought must be KO=fell and that was that. Can’t see the problem with IBSEN. From wordplay, a famous Norwegian 5 letters ending in “n” and starting either “a” or “i”? Thrown like others by “Muslim” at 20A. The clue works better without the word! Good to see a word like MANTISSA – as easy for me as all those obscure poets are to others. Well done setter!

    1. I think a list of 5-letter dignitaries would be longer than a list of 5-letter Norwegians, so I’d vote in favour of some word to narrow down the field a bit. If you think of a pasha as a high-ranking person in the Ottoman Empire – the original application of the word, characterising it as Muslim seems fair enough, that Empire being religion-based to a degree that caused Ataturk to make modern Turkey a secular state.

      If you think of it as a broader title applied to people not part of the Ottoman Empire who may or may not be Muslims, like Ataturk and General Gordon (“Gordon Pasha”), then “Muslim” is a confusing description. But I don’t think the existence of this meaning invalidates the other one.

      1. I won’t quarrel that “dignitary” could do with some qualification. However, I don’t think “Muslim” is particularly helpful and indeed as I and others found is a tad misleading (which I suspect was not the setter’s intention). That’s because I (and presumably others) think of PASHA as primarily to do with the Turkish military and government. Chambers appears to agree with us, citing both categories but not mentioning “Muslim”
        1. Further wiki reading turned up folk like this splendid-looking gent, who were pashas before the end of the Ottoman Empire and not (as far as the article indicates) Muslim – matching another article’s statement that “Ottoman and Egyptian authorities conferred the title upon both Muslims and Christians without distinction. They also frequently gave it to foreigners in the service of the Ottoman Empire or of the Egyptian Khedivate (later Sultanate, and Kingdom in turn), e.g. Hobart Pasha.”

          So now I’m with you – pasha is not accurate enough.

            1. Delighted to have my mental ? confirmed. Nothing to add – gingko always like that in my head, steady solve, no time, felt 20 m ish after tea in the garden.
  15. 9:05 for this. No problem with GINGKO (Gingko Biloba is a staple herbal remedy in health food stores), but pondered on 24d, my last in, where I wanted to put SPLAT before realising I couldn’t justify it. Failed to see the significance of IO in 1dn until I read sabine tk’s excellent blog.
  16. A tricky one that I would have been very pleased to finish in about an hour with a few interruptions had it not been for MANTISSA, which is completely new to me. I got the wordplay but had to cheat not to guess SANTISMA.
    Considering I miss the mathematical terms AND the obscure poets (Alfred Noyes) it’s a miracle I ever finish. Still, I enjoyed this.
  17. DNF and beginning to wonder if after about 45 years on and off at this puzzle – generically, though it felt otherwise – the graph’s beginning to dip. Had William for 25 for a bit – the archer – it works. Ish. Some words I knew but couldn’t dredge up. Maybe I’ll find a better part of the day to get lost in the labyrinth than when I’ve just got up.
  18. 15 minutes, but was waiting to be found out wrong on a few of them, big sigh of relief when I made it here. SKIRL and SHARIA from wordplay, GINKGO, HYPERION from definition, and had the DAYS WONDER in well before the NINE. Last in GINGKO
  19. No time for me today. Once again a bit of a toughie I found. Was pleased to guess ‘mantissa’ correctly but was stumped by 8d where beyond working out ‘ko’ for ‘fell’ I was all at sea. Thanks to the blog for explaining 4 as well. I think it’s been a challenging week. Regards to all.
  20. Agonisingly close, but put ‘DOGGY BAG’ in (not surprisingly, I didn’t get the word play!).

    I abandoned it with the SW corner undone. SKIRL was a new word that defeated me.

    Ah, well, there’s next week to look forward to.

    PS Pete’s anagram tips helped with DEMETRIUS!

  21. I took ‘pash’ to be the onomatopoeic word which means ‘to crush’ rather than teen slang for, like, love, or whatever.

    30mins: best in a tough week.

    1. Your kind of pash is in Chambers but not quite in Collins or COED – Collins has “smash” and “a crushing blow”, but not “crush”.
  22. Solved at dawn on Saturday. I got off to a bad start entering Seven Day Wonder and cursing the Times for getting the enumeration wrong again. After correcting this mistake, I found it a steady and entertaining solve. I particularly enjoyed Miss US and El Alamein.

    I got stuck in the NW and went off to make a cup of coffee. Not having the distraction of the crossword in front of me, I quickly got the easy hoaxed and the not-so-easy hyperion and osage. Then, finally, a little wrestling with the wordplay gave me gingko.

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