Times Crossword 25,822 – What the Dickens?

Author   JerryWPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving Time: 24 minutes; about average for a blogging day. When I typed the result into the club website to check it was all correct, I was surprised to find myself in first place, the other early birds all having one error. Not immediately obvious which it might be but we shall see as we blog..

I like this crossword; it certainly has some very elegant clues.

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

ODO means the Oxford Dictionaries Online

Across

1 persimmon – very small distance = IMM in being = PERSON. I love persimmons
6 frisk – dd, frolic and run your hands over looking for hidden weapons etc.
9 fifteen – Clearly 15 is a film type, (usually one where virtually any type of gory violence goes, but nothing more than a hint of cleavage). But what’s that about tableaux vivants? Ah, got it! It’s the XV in the middle, 15 in Roman numerals.. and there was me thinking about the Windmill Theatre. But it’s just devious, not deviant
10 wagtail – A G(REA)T in WAIL
11 sprog – S + PROG (-ressive rock). I did wonder for a while what a scrag was.. perhaps this is where others went wrong? I wasn’t familiar with prog rock and so was a bit surprised that a number of my favourite bands appear to have done it. The correct answer is clearly better than scrag, since scrag = little one doesn’t really work; but no doubt a case of sorts could be made for it
12 Argentine – G(RAND) in A + RENT + IN + (RAC)E
13 pinta – pop = NIP rev., + TA, crosswordlands favourite (reserve) army
14 in the club – C(OLD) in *(THIN BLUE). The def. is “Expecting,” this being one of many coy references to the gravid condition. More of a “Bun in the oven” or “Up the duff” man, myself
17 cha-cha-cha – ACH(E) twice, in tea = CHA. A neat clue
18 gigue – every other letter of GoInG qUiEt
19 sideswipe – maybe right = SIDE (ie, or left) + appropriate = half-inch = SWIPE
22 act up – turn = ACT + over = UP, as in “Come in no. 7, your time is up/over”
24 isolate – I(mmigration), + SO LA TE, the trio returning us to DO, as explained by Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music
25 lettuce – sounds like “let us.” Not when I say it it doesn’t, but let it pass, let it pass..
26 Freud – initial letters of For Restricting Entry Usually Does, for the Austrian pseudoscientific inventor of the id
27 errand boy – *(BEAN OR DRY)

Down

1 puffs – dd. puffs on part of 6dn, and advertising puffs
2 referenda – joint = REEFER with an E dropping, + N(ew) DA (district attorney)
3 ideograph – *(PAGE HID OR). “any graphic sign or symbol, such as %, @, &, etc” (Collins)
4 Mandarin Chinese – fruit = MANDARIN + CHEESE, with the first E replaced by IN. The world’s most widely spoken native language
5 new age traveller – W + A in *(TALL EVERGREEN), the def. being “unconventional, rootless one”
6 Fagin – something smoked = FAG + popular = IN. He likes to pick a pocket or two, (ie dip) in Oliver Twist
7 Iraqi – the Inland Revenue = IR + A + QI. Another clever clue. Note the careful “once” added because it is HMRC nowadays
8 killer bee – L(arge) in *(BEER LIKE). Not sure that honey production is what first springs to mind with this man-made hybrid species accidentally released into the wild, and now spreading across the USA.
13 Pecksniff – kisses = PECKS. NIFF presumably is intended to be for “no bouquet” but I would say it was a bouquet, albeit an unpleasant one. Bouquet just means “aroma” or smell, usually but not necessarily of wine. Pecksniff is a baddie in Martin Chuzzlewit. Never read it (or any Dickens, if I can help it) but I knew the name nevertheless
15 Edgbaston – DG + B + when = AS in ETON.
16 light bulb – easy = LIGHT (as in the Light Programme, perhaps?) + cry = BLUB, rev.
20 drove – hidden, rev., in rEV OR Dean. Clever, neat.
21 staid – = saint-aid, I suppose. I feel a TV special coming on
23 piety – irrational (number) = PI, + and = ET (in French) + Y, the unknown that isn’t X or Z.

Author: JerryW

I love The Times crosswords..

67 comments on “Times Crossword 25,822 – What the Dickens?”

  1. Much harder than Mon or Tues. All the trouble with the PUFFS / FIFTEEN pair. UK film classifications never come to mind. Even U (universal), though quite common, goes straight over my head most of the time. What are the others? I’ll make a list for future reference.

    Thanks to Jerry for finding the XV. I had no idea about that. Though I did notice that you can get FIFTEEN out of “different” (minus D & R) and thought that might be involved. Over-egging again!

    Note to Mrs McT: “25ac be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together”.

      1. Note ‘Parental Guidance’ not ‘Parent Guidance’!
        This gets a lot of attention in my house at the moment because my eldest kids (9 and 11) are obsessed with watching movies with a 12 certification. It doesn’t really matter what the film is: it’s the sense of transgression that counts. This has led recently to me watching an Adam Sandler movie, which I cannot imagine happening in any other circumstances.
  2. Too clever by half for me as far too many answers went in on definition and checkers without understanding the wordplay. I was going to go back and work through it but then I noticed the blog was up so I was quite relieved not to need to bother. I was utterly bored with it after an hour but I got there eventually without resort to aids. I assume “quarter Jan to Mar” in 7dn = Q1 i.e. the first quarter of the year, possibly in accounting.
    1. The poor setters seem condemned whatever they do! Too easy yesterday, too hard today..
      1. Agreed. They can’t win.

        Splendid stuff today! Definitely at the harder end of the scale.

      2. I wasn’t criticising the setter or any of the clues. I wrote “Too clever by half FOR ME” with the intention of reflecting my own inadequacies. The remainder of my comments refer to my solving experience which became less enjoyable as time progressed and I was simply reporting that.

        From my notes I see I wrote ‘?’ against 10 clues for which I had no idea how the wordplay worked and, had I got round to it, would have needed reverse engineering to understand. I would normally have perhaps only one such per day, or two at most, so something very different was going on here that didn’t fit in with what I expect in a daily puzzle, however I’m perfectly happy to be bowled a googly every so often, just as long as it doesn’t become the norm and preferably it doesn’t arrive when I’m on blogging duty.

        1. I expect though that on mature consideration, you can see how others would take the comment..?
  3. Which is probably why Jerry did so well, being able to knock off those things in 40 minutes. (Not quite on a par, I’m afraid, with Simon and Helen brushing aside the Jumbo in 25 minutes.)

    Well, I enjoyed the challenge of this one a great deal, even though I staggered home in just over two hours, finishing like McT with 1d and 9ac. Just as well I wasn’t on duty, as I needed the estimable Jerry to parse 9a and 24a (despite being on to Julie Andrews).

    At 20d, we appear to have an unindicated reverse hidden. Not sure I’ve come across that before. Incidentally, I had the first part of 1d referring to the taking of short, sharp breaths, as otherwise there is no accounting for the ‘lots’.

    If Jimbo finds this boring, I’m retiring.

    Edited at 2014-06-25 02:47 am (UTC)

    1. If the def is “flock being sent” (DROVE, noun), then “packing” indicates the hidden and “from Right” indicates the reverse. Does that work?
      1. Thanks, McT. Dunce’s hat for me. I not only failed to lift and separate Right Rev, I also did not know that a drove was specifically ‘a herd or flock of animals being driven in a body’ (ODO – my italics).

  4. Just now a pair of Willy-10s in the birdbath, followed by a pair of Fantail-1 acrosses from yesterday’s puzzle. Expect HONEYEATER tomorrow?
  5. I finished this with the same view as jackkt. For FIFTEEN I understood neither definition nor wordplay, the answer going in just on the checkers. I have no idea what a NEW AGE TRAVELLER or PROG rock are (and I suspect that I don’t really want to know).

    Jerry – as for expressions signifying pregnancy, I recently came across “in pig” which I thought had a certain rustic charm.

  6. A word on behalf of the many with SCRAG, which includes me. It’s not a wholly satisfactory answer, though Chambers does give some comfort with “an unhealthily thin person or animal”. But if that’s what you first light on, and crag for rock is a simple jump, it feels close enough for engineering. “Nothing else to see here, move along please”.
    26.48 for getting the rest of it right, with a feeling that a clue with a nasty bite will be pretty much all I (and currently half the leaderboard) will remember from this match.

    Edited at 2014-06-25 06:46 am (UTC)

  7. 30:00 .. but the rush to stay under 30 min meant a PANDA at 13a. I do have a rationale for that but I don’t want to repeat it on a family website.

    If anyone out there cares, my invisible error yesterday was EMPORER, and it’s not the first time I’ve done that.

    COD .. FREUD

    Nice puzzle. TTTSAB

    1. I also was tempted by PANDA simply because of the Pop=PA equivalence and the (apparent) lack of many alternatives for P?N?A but I couldn’t figure out the parsing so left it and came back to it at the end. I was actually expecting this to be the clue that caused problems rather than SPROG, where I didn’t even notice the alternative answer.
      1. Penfold (who clearly has a dirty mind) alludes to it further down the page. If you don’t know the joke, you’d best Google it. Suffice to say I forgot I wasn’t solving the Private Eye puzzle and wondered if ‘panda’ was some sort of slang for, um, a premature end to festivities in the bedroom department (and I don’t mean the office party at Furniture Village — or maybe I do, I’ve never been to one).
  8. Well over an hour, and I gave up with two blanks (PUFFS, could it be pulls? picks?, FIFTEEN), several unparsed: ISOLATE (great clue now I see it!), SIDESWIPE, REFERENDA, PIETY, and a couple of unknowns: PECKSNIFF, KILLER BEE.

    Great puzzle, nothing wrong with something more tricky after the last couple of days. Well done to both S and B.

    Edited at 2014-06-25 08:45 am (UTC)

  9. From the ridiculous to the sublime? Why these huge swings in level of difficulty from day to day? On a normal distribution there would be 6 standard deviations between this puzzle and the offering of yesterday.

    An excellent puzzle with only the dodgy homophone really causing me to pause and the SCRAG/SPROG conundrum where I guessed correctly if somewhat uncertainly.

    I agree a bouquet doesn’t have to be pleasant and once had a french winemaker describe a bouquet to me as “perhaps a little unpleasant – like ripe brie” but that didn’t slow me down. Also not sure that much milk is delivered these days.

    Amongst a whole raft of good clues I particularly liked 24A. 25 minutes to solve.

    1. We still get milk delivered by a man in a milk float in the traditional bottles, along with bread and eggs.
      I agree that a bouquet doesn’t have to be pleasant, but it normally is, which I would have expected to see in the dictionaries and supports the use in the clue as far as I’m concerned. Everyone in the wine world says ‘nose’, anyway!

      Edited at 2014-06-25 09:05 am (UTC)

    2. My mum has her milk delivered. What’s odd is that it arrives at about 10 or 11 at night.
  10. 22:10, but undone like z8 and it seems many others by the Suarez clue. SCRAG has sufficient connotations with small or inferior things (scraggy, scrag-end) for me to have assumed this must extend in some unknown way to rocks. It also means ‘stump’ apparently, but I didn’t know that so won’t claim it in my defence.
    Other than that, and the non-homophone in 25ac, this was a super puzzle, with some really clever and original stuff: FIFTEEN, for instance, or ISOLATE. These were clues where the answer seemed clear, but I had to figure out the wordplay to shake the feeling I was missing something.

    Edited at 2014-06-25 08:12 am (UTC)

  11. Incidentally I didn’t even think about it when solving but I’m very surprised to see that the dictionaries don’t support the idea that ‘bouquet’ usually implies something pleasant. To my mind there’s no doubt that it does: who ever uses the word ‘bouquet’ about a nasty smell, other than ironically? And people do use it ironically, which rather reinforces the point.
  12. 22 mins with one wrong. However, it wasn’t 11ac where I had SPROG correct and parsed. My error was the same as Sotira and for much the same reason (I wanted to finish the puzzle without giving it any more thought), a stupid unparsed “panda” at 13ac. I agree with Jack that this one wasn’t a lot of fun.
    1. Me care. Are you going to the prom in October Sotira? If so, do blog it for us.
      1. Due to a clerical error, Olivia, I have been invited to the ball. Blogging it sounds like a lot of fun (for me, anyway; Anon not care). I’d better make notes in case I end up seeking consolation in the hotel bar too early and can’t remember anything by Sunday.
        1. Good news! Very sorry I won’t be there but His Rupertness didn’t come through with my first class ticket. I do try not to do this “cute sayings” stuff, but apropos of our publisher my 3-year-old grandson saw Ms Brooks on tv yesterday while I was on granny duty and said – comb your hair.

          At 22.24 I was punching above my weight today, which doesn’t often happen. Loved the matching corners “Freud” and “frisk” and even though, along with just about everyone else, I absolutely abhor that song “isolate” was delectable.

          1. The filmed accompaniment to Do-re-mi is superb. And my nipper loved it as a one-year-old so I will never diss it. Also like Eagles, so I guess that means I’m the least cool dude on the site. Wevs.
  14. I have the dubious honour of getting 11A wrong twice. It was my first one in as SHARD, taking the rock to be hard rock, perhaps influenced by having just read about Metallica’s imminent appearance at Glastonbury. I then changed it to SCRAG, as it incorrectly remained.

    I thought this a fine offering which I was pleased to finish in 41 minutes, albeit with 11A wrong.

    1. I’m off to Glasto tomorrow. I’ll let you know how hard or shardlike they are.
  15. I promised to try harder today, and I did. Still took over an hour, and had to cheat for PECKSNIFF, as I’m not really familiar with the work of Chucky D.

    Great puzzle, loved ISOLATE and FREUD.

  16. Usual story – virtually all except the SW corner, where I had never heard of Pecksniff, had ISOLATE for quarantine but didn’t trust myself. Pleased that I did understand the clue for FIFTEEN. I am sure I was taught that the plural of referendum is referendums, as gerunds don’t decline. Never heard of GIGUE, either. Oh, and I was happy with SCRAG!
    1. The OED says: “The plural forms referendums and referenda are both found; in the early 21st cent. usage is fairly evenly divided between the two, as it was also in the late 20th cent. The form referenda is by analogy with memoranda, agenda, etc., and more generally with plurals in -a of Latin-derived words with singular in -um. This form is sometimes deprecated in usage guides, etc., on the grounds that a Latin plural gerundive referenda, meaning ‘things to be referred’, would necessarily connote a plurality of issues, but this view is unlikely to affect actual usage.”

      Since we are seldom allowed to have even one, never mind more, the whole issue seems a bit theoretical. But for what it is worth I use referendums even though we are labelled as pedants just for being correct. Assuming the above means we are, which I’m not in fact convinced of. There would indeed be a plurality of issues, if referenda were necessary, wouldn’t there?

      1. Where you are certainly incorrect is in the notion that you are correct. In matters of language there is simply no such thing.
    2. To briefly put it, applying Latin rules to a Germanic language is something I won’t put up with…
      1. But by adding the “a” ending to the plural, you are applying a mistaken Latin rule!
  17. 45 minutes, with several answers entered without understanding the wordplay. ISOLATE was my immediate thought for 24, but the wordplay completely eluded me so I didn’t enter it until near the end when cross-checkers confirmed it.
    Some original and devious clueing. Pity about the dodgy homophone at 25, and the duplication of ‘National’ in two clues. Nothing wrong with the latter per se, but once you’ve seen through the subterfuge in 12,the same trick in 7 is less successful.
  18. 16 minutes today which FWIW is quicker than I managed yesterday. Didn’t think of scrag and wouldn’t have thought it a ‘variety of rock’ (although it turns out to be one) but I don’t think I would have been at all happy with scrag=little one. I have failed to come up with a scabrous explanation for Sotira’s panda.
  19. 20:25 all correct. The fact that I wore a Pink Floyd t-shirt to an Eagles concert on Monday may have helped with sprog.

    I’m very much in the “enjoyed it” camp with ticks for drove, Fagin and particularly isolate. Brilliant stuff. The only clues I didn’t parse until afterwards were Argentine and sideswipe.

    Gigue and Pecksniff only vaguely familiar.

    TTTSAB from me too.

      1. Only the t-shirt is relevant, I was just adding local colour and detail to enhance the, um, anecdote.
        1. Fair enough. How were they? I saw them at the 02 in 2008. I didn’t wear a Pink Floyd t-shirt, but it was still great.
          2. Absolutely top drawer.

            It was at the new arena in Leeds where the sound quality is fantastic as it’s purpose-built for music.

            Add to that great songs, spot-on harmonies, interesting chat, great playing, the best part of 3 hours of entertainment and the phenomenon that is Joe Walsh and you’ve got a recipe for a great night out.

  20. These are honey producing African bees, not some man made horrors, so the clue is a good one. About the only one today in my very humble opinion.
  21. About 45 minutes, ending with PUFFS/FIFTEEN, the latter due only to the checking letters, and having zero further understanding until arrival here. We have a PG-17 rating over here, but no 15. Also, I had PANDA. There’s no way I would have ever lit on PINTA as ‘early arrival’. Everything else OK, and much of it very good altogether. FREUD as ‘one introducing ID’ is superb. Regards.
  22. Yes very tough, and excellent clues. I had a lot of trouble parsing several solutions but eventually managed most, though I failed to see the ‘reefer’ element of 2d – must be down to my sheltered upbringing.
    Like others, I thought that the clue for ‘isolate’ was especially good, and I felt a warm glow when the penny dropped.
  23. 17:38 for me, making heavy weather of parsing FIFTEEN (like mctext I noted that its letters appeared in “different”), and agonising for some time over SPROG (“prog rock” rang the faintest of faint bells, though I couldn’t think what “prog” was short for – but in the end SPROG seemed more likely than SCRAG).

    I thought this an interesting and enjoyable puzzle, except that: 1) I hated LETTUCE, which doesn’t sound nearly enough like “let us”; and 2) CHA CHA CHA should properly be spelled without hyphens, despite what all the damned dictionaries say. (I cite the WDC, IDTA, ISTD, Wally Laird’s Green Book, etc, etc in evidence!)

  24. Oh yeah? I liked it – time stolen here and there at work. DNF, but a couple minutes here and there getting one or two at a snatch made my day. Had especial difficulty in the NW due to writing STONE (s tone=crossword variety) in before I got to the downs.
  25. Times Crossword – mmmmmmmmmm, bring back the crossword from “Today” or just do the Guardian! Most of the compilers of the Times crossword have too much time on their hands, don’t follow the usual rules or are so far stuck up their own (Becoming sear mistakenly takes the sole task on, neglecting son for husband until the end). The clues end up ridiculously obscure.
    1. Dear Anonymous,
      When it comes to clue writing, don’t give up the day job.

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