Times Crossword 25,559 – Pussyfoot Edition

Solving Time: This took me 35 minutes. It seems well on the harder side of average to me, (again – was it something I said?!) and includes some nifty vocab, as well as several quite tricky clues. Still I could find nothing wrong with it, inventive clueing and well up to the usual high standard I think. I had some trouble getting started, and eventually solved it bottom up since 30ac went straight in and so, a bit to my own suprise, did 26ac. So the bottom half went in OK but the top took longer to sort out

cd = cryptic definition, dd = double definition, rev = reversed, anagrams are *(–), homophones indicated in “”

ODO means the Oxford Dictionaries Online

Across
1 eclipsed – crop = CLIP in *(SEED), and not crop as in corn etc as I first thought.
6 poplin – L(EFT) in POP IN. What shirts used to be made from but don’t seem to be nowadays
9 duct – avoided = “DUCKED.” Is a duct what duct tape is for?
10 lacustrine – *(ITS UNCLEAR). One of my last in, because I hadn’t met the word before and also because although I suspected an anagram, I wrongly made “its unclear” to be 9 letters not the 10 required..
11 Stravinsky – V(ISUAL) + skills = ARTS rev., then airborne = IN SKY. A tricky clue, I thought
13 dirt – secret society = TRIAD, with the A removed and rev.
14 scandium – *(AND MUSIC). I hope we all got this OK, as Jimbo would wish? Scandium is not a rare element in nature but the refined metal is rare (just a few kg produced per year) and is used mainly in aluminium alloys.
16 optics – (RIGH)T in O(LD) PICS
18 Gallic – brass = nerve = GALL + zInC.
20 titaness – cITy and AN in novel heroine = TESS. The Titans ruled earth before being overthrown by the Olympian gods in the Titanomachy
22 knew – K(AFKA) + novel = NEW. I read some of his short stories once, and a depressing experience it was
24 brandy snap – mark = BRAND + girl = PANSY, rev. Presumably pansy is meant in the sense of girlie, as in little Lord Fauntleroy, or the unforgettable Basil Fotherington-Thomas in How To be Topp
26 bijouterie – sail = JIB rev., + in the open = OUT, + lake = ERIE. I can see this clue causing some trouble and I thought myself lucky to have the answer pop up from somewhere, straight off
28 exit – team = XI in ET, French for and and thus a conjunction, or “joiner”
29 leaner – LEA(R)NER. I suppose leaner can mean less productive, but in my business days we would regard a leaner organisation as being more productive, not less..
30 no matter – rOMe in NATTER.
Down
2 crustacea – King Charles = CR + (E)USTACE + A. Another tricky clue. I am familiar with ER (Elizabeth Regina, or Edward Rex) and GR (Deorge Rex), mainly through post boxes and coinage, but I have never seen CR before
3 in train – arrived at = IN + school = TRAIN. Awkward because it wasn’t clear what the def. was, and “in” in that sense didn’t come to mind easily.
4 salmi – SALM(ON) + I. A rich game stew apparently, another unfamiliar word to me
5 doc – trick = con = DO + C(YCLISTS)
6 pussyfoot – willow = PUSSY + foundation = FOOT. I am no expert on trees but I had heard of that kind. No sniggering at the back there..
7 peridot – awful = DIRE rev. in grass = marijuana = POT.
8 inner – function = (D)INNER
12 Sumatra – scripture = SUTRA with scholar = MA in. “Sanskrit” rather than “Buddhist” would have been more accurate, since more sutras are Hindu than are Buddhist, eg the Kama Sutra…
15 incubator – IN CUBA + TO + R. Don’t get me started on Guantanamo Bay. Two wrongs seldom make a right
17 cast aside – players = CAST + whisper = ASIDE.
19 lowdown – dd
21 nascent – (CARNATIO)N + A SCENT
23 naive – Indigenous = NATIVE with the T(RIBAL) removed, the def. being green, as in inexperienced
25 dream – drug = E in drink = DRAM. Where would setters be, without their E?
27 ran – tRANsit, the def. being “was a scooter.”

Author: JerryW

I love The Times crosswords..

50 comments on “Times Crossword 25,559 – Pussyfoot Edition”

  1. 19:49 .. mostly straightforward for me but I’d seen a couple of the more unusual words very recently.

    COD .. NASCENT.

    I had to wait for the solution to establish that my mistake yesterday was LAUDAMUN. I don’t know how many times I looked at that clue in my grid but couldn’t see the error. Late-onset dyslexia?

    1. It’s amazing how the brain is capable of seeing what it expects to see. Witness how esay it is to raed a scetnnee eevn wehn the lteerts in the wrods are all jembuld up.
    2. If it’s any consolation, sotira, you’re in good company. Magoo confessed last week that it took him five read-throughs of No. 25,553 before he spotted that he’d typed in CKECKOUT. And I’m not putting myself in the same league as Magoo, but it took me five read-throughs to spot that I’d typed GOODY-GODDY in No. 25,493.

      It’s probably significant that all three are down answers.

      1. Absolutely, Tony. There’s definitely something about vertically printed words which confounds our word recognition processes. Solving onscreen seems to to make matters worse still. Glad to hear that you and Magoo are not immune!
  2. 30′ online, but stumped by 6d and 7d and 6ac. And for good reason, as I’d mistyped LACUSTRINE as ‘lacrustine’, giving me 2 incorrect checkers. 6 more minutes did the job, though, although I had to check PERIDOT. I went through the whole set of clues before finally finding one I could solve, so I had bad forebodings, but aside from the lacustrine problem, it was a steady enough solve, I think. Some very nice clues, too, like 11ac and 23d, inter alia.
  3. 24ac PANSY is simply a girl’s name. “Little Lord Fauntleroy” was an all-American boy born and brought up on the back streets of New York (Brooklyn IIRC) so an unlikely example of “girlie” I’d have thought.

    I really struggled with this puzzle and for the third time this week I was unable to finish without resort to aids. Never heard of LACUSTERINE, BIJOUTERIE, SCANDIUM and many of the definitions (“stone”, “musician” “dish”) were too vague to solve without working out the wordplay so that slowed things up. Like the blogger I was unable to get started at the top so I worked from the bottom up which is always like battling against the tide.

    Edited at 2013-08-21 01:27 am (UTC)

  4. Over my Monday grump now. This and yesterday’s (too late for me to comment I’m afraid) were great puzzles.

    I haven’t seen a BRANDY SNAP in over 40 years, but they used to be the item de luxe when I was a lad. Do they still make them? I really need to know this.

    Much the same experience as Jerry: bottom half in quite quickly but stuck in the north for ages. Bogged down like a lacustrine crustacean.

    Query to Jerry: are we now allowed to include answers in our titles? I seem to remember an agreement about not doing so, inaugurated by Sotira I think??

    1. Well, ‘inaugurated’ might be somewhat overstating my powers but I think I did first raise the question. And I still think it’s the right policy.
        1. Much better 🙂 And yes, pretty much. Personally, I tend to have this site open in a tab most of the time and occasionally see the blog title before solving. I believe also that a number of people solve puzzles in batches or out of sequence but come to the blog after solving each, scanning through the titles for the right puzzle number.
    2. My local Tesco carries brandy snaps made by Fox’s (other supermarkets and brandy snap brands may be available). We used to have them at Christmas with a wodge of double cream in either end, which made the edges go soft. A special joy.
        1. They’re actually quite difficult to make so I just order the Fox’s ones from an online British food shop (I’m in NY) along with the Christmas pud. If you gently spike the whipped cream with the cooking brandy from the brandy butter they are divine.
          1. They can’t be all that hard to make, surely… 40 years ago my younger brother used to make them, when aged about 10. A splash of caramel baked on an oven tray and rolled on a wooden dowel when still warm and soft, cooling and hardening into crisp tubes.
            Rob
    3. They do still make brandy snaps – most supermarkets seem to stock them now – no need for all that fiddling around with hot nearly set ‘mixture’ and rolling it round a rolling pin handle before it set hard – not to mention the lack of burns caused while doing so!
  5. About an hour for me, without aids. Only word I didn’t know was LACUSTRINE and with checkers there wasn’t much else it could be.

    Held up a little by putting CREAM in at 5 down (MARC up with E in it, which seemed a reasonable try for what ‘spiked’ might mean). And trying to put PTIN in the middle of what turned out to be SCANDIUM was remarkably useless but very plausible.

    LOI DUCT which took me an embarrassingly long time to get. It is so annoying when the last answer just won’t come to mind.

  6. Today made yesterday’s 85-minute solve look like a Jacobean stroll in the park. Too much like a Club Monthly for me to enjoy properly, with a total of 5 unknown target words and those vague definitions Jack talks about. On the other hand, there was some very good stuff here, and even with aids – to which resort was made – I failed to get DIRT, even though I am surrounded by triads, though not perhaps by so many as other eminent folk here, such as our chief executive.
  7. 34’17” which felt like something of a struggle – many answers had that sense of being just out of reach, DUCT being a prime example and my LOI.
    LACUSTRINE, SCANDIUM and SALMI were unknown/forgotten, though the first was derivable form Latin (sort of) and SALMI looks as if it’s got the less forgettable salmagundi in its genetic make-up. Wiki rather severely warns against confusing SCANDIUM with Scandinavium. As if I would.
    LOWDOWN was nearly LOWBORN (a better synonym for base, if you ask me) but I couldn’t squeeze “data” into the mix.
    CoD to BIJOUTERIE for being a step by step instruction to a word I surprised myself by knowing.
    1. I knew SALMI because there’s a recipe in the River Cottage Meat Book. According to Hugh

      A salmi is a very specific way of cooking game and poultry and not, as some modern interpretations suggest, just a posh word for a game casserole.

      So nothing to do with Salmagundi.

      Edited at 2013-08-21 10:02 am (UTC)

      1. Chambers says “perhaps derived from”, but clearly the ingredients differ substantially, and not just by the use of a gun (and a d)

        Edited at 2013-08-21 11:52 am (UTC)

        1. Yes, I noticed that, but it also says “or from Ital salame sausage”. This is etymologese for “we’ve no idea”.
          Of course this caveat applies more than equally to the pronouncements of celebrity chefs.
  8. Hello everybody and good to be back this morning after a holiday period without internet connections.

    I had fewer problems with this than others have experienced and made steady progress top to bottom to finish in 25 minutes – not bad after a long absence. I rather enjoyed the puzzle, particularly deriving unknown answers such as BIJOUTERIE and SALMI

    I shall now enjoy myself looking back over the blog for the last 2 weeks

      1. I knew I could rely upon you!

        The interesting thing is how few real moans there are these days. I remember a couple of years ago keeping track whilst on holiday of clues that I thought bloggers would create a fuss over and there were quite a few. This time the overall standard of the puzzle looks to have been very high.

  9. 28 minutes but with an utterly foolish dark for dirt so all the intuitive unearthing of unknown salmi, bijouterie and scandium, and the dredging-up of lacustrine, was for nothing. But that’s only in a purist sense as this was an excellent challenge.
  10. Welcome back Jimbo, hope the golf clubs went with you. Today was a steady solve from bottom up and completed correct in 35 minutes, no pussyfooting around, without knowing why CRUSTACEA was right.
  11. Woe is me! Just could not crack the top half at all and gave up exasperated with an embarrassingly high number of blanks in the grid. Once I’d turned to Onelook all soon became clear. I can’t fault the cluing though – all very fair.
    Didn’t know Salmi, Lacustrine or Peridot. Should gave got Stravinksy (I had the Stra- bit), Scandium (like paulmcl I was trying to fit ‘tin’ in there somewhere), Poplin and Eclipsed (for which I had both parts of the wordplay!).

    (I was too late to comment on yesterday’s puzzle at the time but was chuffed to almost complete it without aids. I had one mistake – a wrong guess at Mallaime for the unknown poet)

    Edited at 2013-08-21 09:47 am (UTC)

  12. 28 mins, and I thought this was a top quality puzzle.

    I also solved from the bottom up and I was held up the most in the NW corner. Although I’d thought that King Charles was probably going to be “CR” I didn’t see ECLIPSED or CRUSTACEA for way too long. SALMI only went in from the wordplay after I decided that I couldn’t parse “petri” or “balti”, LACUSTRINE was dredged from a dark recess of my mind, SCANDIUM went in after I finally saw that I’d been reading the clue the wrong way (P + *METALIN with the definition a type of music), and DUCT was my LOI.

    And finally, welcome back Jimbo.

  13. Enjoyable DNF. Defeated by the unknown LACUSTRINE; in my ignorance LUCESTRIAN seemed a reasonable guess! For some reason INNER had also eluded me. Thanks, jerry, for the blog, particularly the parsing of DIRT and BRANDY SNAP.
  14. As expected, after a pretty nifty time yesterday, I struggled today. Eventually completed, without aids, in 54m 13s, but ‘lacustrine’ was a bit of a punt (I initially had ‘lucastrine’, then realised that transposing the ‘a’ and the ‘u’ looked much more likely). Like others, I gained a foothold in the bottom sector and worked up. All in all, a good and satisfying challenge, even if I failed to shine.
    George Clements
  15. 35m. I really enjoyed this puzzle. With the exception of LACUSTRINE the obscurities all happened to be ones I knew, so the difficulty all came from elsewhere:
    > 1ac is clearly some kind of cereal crop in SE????ED. Actually the 6th letter must be B, because even though I can’t figure out why 4dn has to be BALTI
    > 10ac is clearly an anagram of “unclear if” and L
    > 14ac is clearly P and then an anagram of “metal in”
    > 1dn looks like it should be CRUSTACEAN but that doesn’t fit the wordplay. Blimey, what other biological classification do crabs come under?
    > Oh god, I don’t know any varieties of willow… oh, I do!
    > Oh god, I don’t know any varieties of Buddhist scripture… oh, I do!
    I sorted it all out in the end, and I don’t think a single clue went in without complete or near-complete understanding of the wordplay. This is very unusual for me and in my view a sign of a very high quality puzzle.

    Edited at 2013-08-21 10:04 am (UTC)

  16. On the right track with duct but initially wrote in mist. Got there in the end. Now rummaging through my Molesworth books to find out where Fotherington -Thomas was named as Basil.
  17. I too solved from bottom to top in a time of 13.46. My last one in was LACUSTRINE – it helped knowing the French word for lake as it resolved the dilemma of where to put the A and the U I had left from the anagram letters.
  18. Like some others I found this even tougher than yesterday’s, and like some others I solved from the bottom up. I didn’t have too much trouble getting 26, based as it is on a familiar French word, but I spent ages playing around with anagram fodder for 10, slowly whittling down the possibilities as I got more and more checked letters. In the end the positions of the A and the U came down to knowledge of French, otherwise I could have had them reversed. Also wasn’t familiar with SALMI but guessed it, which at least gave me the initial L for 10.

    A full hour to solve.

  19. Yesterday’s, which I finished and classified as ‘a bit evil’, I managed after a considerable time, but today’s somewhat easier one defeated me due to what for me were obscurities. It is very hard to draw the line on such things, but LACUSTRINE? Anagrammed? I thought that really unfair.

    Chris.

  20. Remembered to log-in to the Crossword Club before printing it off – which immediately starts your personal timer going.
    Apologies for failing to do so on Monday, and getting a totally unmerited leader-board position.

    Another bottom-upper here, with Bijouterie an early one, which with Gallic, Exit & Lacustrine meant I dusted my French off – a Bijouterie is a jewellers shop.
    Last one in 3D, not a usage I recall.

    Completed on paper in good time for me – then dented the ego after all the hard work with an idiot typo.
    Well hacked off.

  21. Managed to stay under the half-hour, but not by much: that top half was a beast, notwithstanding I got LACUSTRINE fairly early on from the Latin (my less advanced French took longer to manufacture BIJOUTERIE). Putting in a half-parsed STRADIVARI didn’t help, but if this was a beast, it was a fair one.
  22. 12:55 for me. I made another of my ludicrously slow starts, but eventually found the setter’s wavelength. A very enjoyable puzzle, only marred by my thinking how fast I might have solved it in my heyday. (Sigh!)
  23. Like Mctext, I think Monday’s controversial offering has been followed by two excellent puzzles.

    LACUSTRINE is a word I learned from having to look it up (which is the best way to remember it)- it appears in the second paragraph of Conrad’s “Falk”. (English was Conrad’s third language so I bet he had to look it up as well.)

      1. An acquired taste, certainly, but “Falk” is a good story.

        Edited at 2013-08-22 03:33 am (UTC)

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