Times Crossword 25,846 – 23 July 2014

Author   JerryWPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving Time: 32 minutes. I found this rather hard, partly because of some stretching vocab (eg 8, 13, 14dn) and some rather convoluted wordplay. These aren’t criticisms though, I enjoyed it very much

A somewhat briefer than usual blog tonight as I am off walking for three days, early doors. So any errors will probably remain uncorrected I am afraid and you must talk amongst yourselves if something is obscure… but someone always knows the answers

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

ODO means the Oxford Dictionaries Online

Across

1 inflexible – INF(O) + LEGIBLE, with the G changed to an X
6 as is – (O)ASIS
9 marrow bone – ROW (bank) + NOB (dignitary) rev., in MARE, for a main ingredient of (eg) beef stock
10 chou – which becomes “ouch” if halves are swapped. More familiar in the plural, choux
12 goldfish bowl – cd, goldfish proverbially having a worse memory even than me
15 side issue – SIDE (face) + ISSUE (children)
17 rabid – AB (able-bodied seaman) in RID, clear
18 Aruba – B(ritish) in AURA (atmosphere) rev. Aruba is a little part of the Netherlands, less than 20 miles off the coast of Venezuela. I’m slightly ashamed to admit I know of its existence mainly from watching old Miss World competitions…
19 pussyfoot – PUSSY, a cat, eg a tom (or the Tom, as in Jerry?) + F(ine) + TOO(L) rev.
20 acceleration – CEL(L) (small group) + ERA (time) in ACTION (warfare)
24 Ohio – alternate letters of bOtH lImOs
25 bestraddle – DARTS (sprints) rev. in BED (base) + L(ILL)E
26 Yves – hidden in safetY VESt
27 horizontal – (C)HORIZO (sausage) + (LU)N(CH) + TAL(E) (porkie, pork pie, lie..)

Down

1 iamb – BMA (doctors, ie the British Medical Association, a body that aggressively tries to stop us smoking, drinking, eating or doing anything remotely enjoyable) + I(nspect), all rev. I wouldn’t recognise an iamb, a spondee, a trochee, dactyl or any similar metrical foot if I tripped over one but I have an extensive list of them in my head, thanks to crosswords..
2 fork – FOR K, ie on his side.. a basic chess manoevre along with pins, skewers etc.
3 economically – E(questrians) + ON in COMICALLY. The def. being “with reins?”
4 in bud – IN (fashionable) + BUD(DY)
5 lankiness – KIN (family) in LANES (passageways) + (allotment)S
7 schoolbook – SCHOOL (of fish) + BOOK (reserve)
8 squalidity – LID (roof) + IT in S(mall) QUAY (landing area)
11 cherry tomato – CHER (dear in French) +*(TO + TO + MARY). A hard anagramt o spot!
13 escalatory – ESC (key) + A LA TORY. Finally I have become attuned to spotting esc, alt and similar keys
14 adjunctive – DJ (radio personality) + ‘UN (one locally, ie in dialect) in ACTIVE, ie busy. An uncommon word
16 superhero – a fine &lit clue, ie a clue where the whole clue acts as the definition. The wordplay is HE (male) in ERR (slip), all in OPUS (work) rev.
21 Tutsi – TUT (ie the incestuous Egyptian King Tutankhamun) + IS, rev.
22 edit – D(aughter) in TIE rev.,
23 veal – VALE, ie farewell, all the best, with the E raised to make the controversial meat

Author: JerryW

I love The Times crosswords..

42 comments on “Times Crossword 25,846 – 23 July 2014”

  1. Steady solve until I got stuck in the Wilsons Promontory corner, with HORIZONTAL, VEAL and CHERRY TOMATO falling slowly. Then took way too long on BESTRADDLE because of a mis-keyed TURSI.

    Still, my first error-free entry since this time last week, so no complaints. Thanks setter and blogger.

  2. I stand in awe of galspray’s time, since I myself limped home in a relative eon. Strangely enough, I also held myself up at the bottom by dint of the wrong Africans, in my case ‘Togan’.

    A very fine puzzle, where almost everything went in from the wordplay, apart from RABID, for which thanks to Jerry.

    I never knew that a goldfish was the opposite of an elephant, and will probably go the watery path by promptly forgetting.

    Edited at 2014-07-23 03:40 am (UTC)

  3. No solving time for this one as I got stuck and nodded off more than once before abandoning it for the night, but I doubt it was much (if anything) under an hour in total. A lot of answers came from wordplay, but one or two, such as MARROW BONE, were guesses based on what fitted the checkers and then reverse-engineered to confirm they were correct.

    LOI 3dn was the most problematic of all with only one non-vowel amongst its checkers and what turned out to be a somewhat fanciful definition.

    If you’re reading this on your return, Jerry, you’re missing an H in the explanation at 27ac.

  4. 35.36, definitely playing hardball again. Convoluted wordplay, but most of it giving the answer if you really worked at it. I had to discipline myself not to skip clues that looked too tricky, and to concentrate hard on unravelling the swine.
    ARUBA only rang a very faint bell, and was only in on wordplay: I freely admit I Googled it before submission.
    SQUALIDITY is not a real word, I don’t care what the dictionaries say.
    I don’t think I’d have got my LBOI HORIZONTAL by working through my Dictionary of Sausages: definitely one of the clues I had to reverse engineer for personal satisfaction.
    CHERRY TOMATO was a brutally hidden anagram, don’t you think? I obsessed for a while with CHERRY BUMBUM (itinerant repeated) wondering where in Mary Poppins the phrase turned up. Apropos of nothing in particular, except perhaps resonance, I recalled (from the film) that Lord Cardigan called his cavalry who charged with the Light Brigade Cherrybums: such flashes of memory only serve to confuse in this context. Could do with more living in a GOLDFISH BOWL, perhaps.
    Another fine, difficult offering. I used to regard going over 30 minutes a rare lapse: I think that makes 4 in the last 8 days. New setters? New Editor making a point?
    1. Of the usual sources, COED agrees with you but Chambers and Collins go with it.

      Here are the examples of earliest use quoted in OED:

      SQUALIDITY: The quality or character of being foul or squalid; filthiness, squalidness.

      1668 H. More Divine Dialogues iii. xxiii. 442 That horrid Squalidity in the Usages of the barbarous Nations presseth hard toward that Conclusion.
      1721 N. Bailey Universal Etymol. Eng. Dict., Squalidity, filthiness, nastiness, ill-favouredness.
      1773 Observ. State Poor 34 Rags and vermin, squalidity and disease.
      1823 Blackwood’s Edinb. Mag. 14 252 He has no keeping about him, excepting a sort of medium tint of squalidity.
      1857 C. Kingsley Misc. (1859) II. 340 Ill-built rows of undrained cottages,..left to run into squalidity and disrepair.
      1875 A. Helps Social Pressure iii. 53 The hideous difficulty and squalidity which beset those who are placed low down in the world.

      1. Wow. Serious eruditicity! I wondered about any usage post 1875, and found an example (truthfully, Google found it for me) in a book on Cybernetics and Society from 1988. You had to work through several pages offering definitions before lighting on an actual example, which suggests strongly it’s a made up word used by sociologists to try to look impressive.
        I’m in favour of its revised use here as an indicator of a disreputable word dredged from the lexicographer’s cess pit of abandoned words which would be left quietly to rot were it not for the Times crossword.
    2. Maybe this should enter the TfTT lexicion as a word meaning a word that shouldn’t exist but (just about) does.
    3. I did get to HORIZONTAL by working through my Dictionary of Sausages. I don’t think I’ve consulted this work before, but fortunately chorizo appears very close to the beginning, just after cumberland, wurst and salami (it isn’t in alphabetical order).
      1. I only got as far as chipolata and that big Spanish thing I’m not sure I really like. Tantalisingly close….
  5. A real maze of a puzzle that needed a lot of concentration and a very disciplined approach. However the answers are there in the clues if you keep plugging away with very few going in from definition alone (20A being the major exception)

    35 minutes to solve. Thanks to setter and nice one Jerry – enjoy your walk and the occasional refreshment along the way no doubt

  6. 26 mins. I agree that this was another of the tricky puzzles that we’ve been seeing recently. Count me as another who had to really concentrate on the wordplay to get SQUALIDITY, ESCALATORY and ADJUNCTIVE, although you can add MARROW BONE, BESTRADDLE and HORIZONTAL to that list. SUPERHERO was my LOI and I didn’t see the superb &lit, so apologies to the setter for thinking that it was just a poor CD that I should have seen much sooner. I thought it was a strange puzzle in as much as there were no full anagrams and only one partial one.

    Edited at 2014-07-23 03:24 pm (UTC)

  7. Tough one, not helped by assuming for a long time that 1A must begin with INTE(L) and that the “mostly porky” in 27A indicated an LI in there somewhere. Didn’t know that goldfish had short memories. Raised an eyebrow at superheroes supposedly wearing slips and the oblique definition in 3D. I had a friend at uni who was obsessed with Cocktail so the lyrics to Kokomo, and hence ARUBA, will not be forgotten any time soon. Still, it was a piece of all-time great songwriting compared to Don’t Worry Be Happy on the same soundtrack. COD to ARUBA for the stand-out surface.

    Edited at 2014-07-23 09:54 am (UTC)

    1. Never heard of Cocktail so looked it up on Rotten Tomaties and see it rates 5% with the critics. I may watch it then, as I’ve paid more attention to the public vote since the ‘experts’ gave 98% to Brazil.（The other Tom Cruise teen flick with Rebecca de Mornay wasn’t bad.）
  8. Thanks very much for the blog Jerry. I was nowhere close to finishing. Too tough for me at the moment.
  9. 26:49. Absolutely superb puzzle, tough without resorting to obscurity and a majority of clues that required proper engagement with the wordplay. The inclusion of less common forms of familiar words (SQUALIDITY, ESCALATORY, ADJUNCTIVE) helped in this regard, but I’m all for it. I didn’t know the chess move but the wordplay was clear without being obvious, which in fact applies to most of these clues. I know this sort of thing isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but it is mine, so thank you setter.
    I knew of ARUBA from a song, although I couldn’t remember what the song was. A bit of googling reveals that it was the Beach Boys song Kokomo, which in turn I must know from the movie Cocktail:

    Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take you to
    Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama
    Key Largo Montego,
    baby why don’t we go

    Edited at 2014-07-23 08:58 am (UTC)

    1. That’s exactly where I got it from K. Sadly I remembered the song and the movie, and may have even hummed a little as I entered it. Was too embarrassed to mention it at the time, but I feel better now that I’ve got it off my chest.
    2. Wondered about this because I thought “chou” was cabbage – mon petit chou. And cabbages plural is “choux” – savez vous planter les choux. The pastry however is “choux” singular. Post solve I hauled out Julia Child, Jacques Pepin and Escoffier which confirm this. Hmmm. 29.27
      1. You’re quite right. I didn’t even notice this at the time, which is very poor because 1) I’m supposed to be able to speak French and 2) I make choux pastry quite a lot.
      2. The OED has chou as a headword and defines it as: “A small round cake of pastry filled with cream or fruit, etc. Hence chou(x) paste, chou pastry, a very light egg-enriched pastry.” It offers several citations for “chou”, including one from Mrs Beeton!

        (Although I’m definitely not the best person to pronounce on foodie matters, I’m pleased to say that I’d not only heard of “chorizo”, but had actually eaten some on holiday in Madrid – though Janet and I were there mainly for the art rather than the food :-).

        1. Thanks Tony. A google search suggests that ‘chou pastry’ has almost completely disappeared as English usage. There’s perhaps an analogy with the way ‘data’ is on its way out as a plural noun.
          In any event there’s clearly no error of any kind on the part of the setter.
    3. I think I must have missed that movie. Fleetingly, I thought ARUBA was the sound vintage car horns made…
  10. 38 min, with SUPERHERO LOI, as I failed to see how to parse it.
    ARUBA a write-in: recalled from my stamp-collecting days.
    1. I meant to mention that, after several near misses, this was indeed a pangram, and yes, it helped with SQUALIDITY because of the crossing U
  12. An enjoyable solve but completely overlooked the pastry issue. I have no problem with SQUALIDITY and those who know my pre-retirement job (and there is one lurker!) will appreciate that ARUBA was a write-in.
  13. That was my thought too and it seems ‘choux pastry’ is only spelt with an X, but according to my sources ‘chou’ is a specific type or recipe of sweetmeat and in that context it is ‘a pastry’ and doesn’t need the X.

    Edited at 2014-07-23 10:04 am (UTC)

    1. I saw that: in both Chambers and Collins it’s defined as a ‘cream bun’. If this is what the setter intended I can’t see any reason for using ‘pastry’ in the clue, so I still suspect it’s a mistake. Perhaps I’m being unfair.
    2. According to my Petit Robert, a chou à la crème is a pastry made from ‘pâte à choux’, which is defined as the pastry from which you make choux, plural (‘dont on fait des choux‘). So a correct translation of ‘pâte à choux’ into English would be ‘pastry for chous’, or ‘chou pastry’. It appears that the English usage ‘choux pastry’ is an error of translation from the French.
      Where this leaves us with the clue I’ve no idea!

      Edited at 2014-07-23 10:29 am (UTC)

    3. And one last thing: Escoffier actually calls it ‘pâte à chou’.
      Now I’m going to shut up about pastry.
  14. … or DNF!

    Hats-off and fair-play to all of you that finished, and to the setter, for what was a fair but very tough puzzle for me. It took me so long to get a start that I actually turned to the QC for light relief on the rattler, embarrassed that anyone looking over my shoulder would see how poorly I was doing (at that point all I had managed was a nicely symmetrical bun and US state – I do find the “regularly” and “oddly” clues easy to spot generally).

    I did come back to make more progress, but finally gave up after about an hour with about six to go.

  15. Fine crossword, fine blog, so much better than yesterday’s rather dismissive effort
  16. I thought I’d never finish without resorting to aids, but, like some others, I kept plugging away at it (and kept nodding off) and finally finished unaided. Total time, including the snoozes, was 76 minutes! 25 and 27 held me up for a long time, as did 9, which I was convinced ended in BOND, thinking ‘stock’ related to ‘stock market’. I even considered MARKET BOND.
    I agree that close scrutiny of the clues paid off. For 8dn I wondered early on from some checked letters if the answer might be SQUALIDITY, but didn’t see the wordplay and wasn’t convinced the word existed, but once I had the final L from 12, it had to be that; I then saw the wordplay.
    A challenging puzzle, but all perfectly fair (though the cryptic definition for 3 was bit loose for my liking). Very satisfying to finish, with everything fully understood
  17. 27:45 with several possibles written under the puzzle to try out – MUSKET BALL for 9 (does a musket have a stock?), skinniness for 5 (too many letters) acceleration (it fits but doesn’t satisfy ANY of the wordplay!).

    At 27 like Mohn I was sure that mostly porky was LI(e) so the sausage had to be ??O. Poo? Eventually (despite not spotting the pangram) I saw that horizontal would fit and spotted my favourite sausage. I was unhappy with TALL for porky so was pleased to see that it’s TALE.

    For superhero unlike Andy a I solved it from wordplay and only then discovered that I’d run out of bits of clue for the definition. I’m not sure we’ve had an &Lit for a while.

    Edited at 2014-07-23 01:28 pm (UTC)

  18. I think this was the first time thinking pangram helped me finish, because with SUPERHERO and HORIZONTAL left to go I was thinking “shouldn’t there be a Z in there somewhere?” which lead to the sausage revealing itself. Umm… yeah, let’s leave it at that.
  19. Tough puzzle, with super-ingenious wordplay and well-disguised definitions. One or two of the latter verged on unreasonableness – notably “economically” = “with reins” at 3D which seems to me extremely far-fetched. (Always assuming that is the def the setter intended. I can’t see any other). “Rabid” also seems a rather imprecise synonym for “burning” at 17A. But, those quibbles apart, all clever stuff.
  20. About 25 minutes, ending with ESCALATORY because I had convinced myself that the key had to be ‘tab’, and the other part of the wordplay had to be ‘as a tory’. That got me stuck on the nonexistent ASTABATORY, so I had to plug away further until I started experimenting with the other keys. Finally got it. I was not familiar with the CHOU any way you spell it, but the wordplay was crystal clear, it seemed to me. Regards to all.
  21. 18:02 for me. I found the clues generally rather too convoluted for my taste, with the result that I didn’t enjoy this puzzle as much as the one from 1961 that I’d just tackled where the clues were a lot looser (so that some of today’s solvers would hate them) but had a lot more charm.

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