Times Cryptic 25929

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
This was something of a repeat of my Monday experience in that I solved one half of the puzzle quite easily (this time the LH side) but the other half proved more difficult, especially the SE corner where I did not help myself by writing HEAR HERE at 17dn. I completed in a few minutes under the hour. Perhaps more GK was needed than in some recent puzzles what with several historical references, but the wordplay was helpful in these cases so any difficulties should not be insurmountable.

Curly brackets indicate deletions

Across
1 CRABWISE – CRAB (grumble), WISE (sensible)
5 SWITCH – S (second), WITCH (one keen for a spell)
10 REBEL – B (bishop) inside REEL (react to shock)
11 APENNINES – A, {clea}N inside PENNIES (coppers)
12 PERSIMMON – PER (for each), M (mark) inside SIMON (apostle)
13 CRANE – R (king) inside CANE (stick)
14 CRANMER – N (new) replaces the middle letter of CRA{m}MER (intensive school). Thomas Cranmer was Archbishop of Canterbury 1533-1555.
16 DRIVEL – DRIVE (private road), L (left)
18 GAFFER – REF (judge) + FAG (once junior boy) all reversed
20 BALANCE – B{andage}, A, LANCE (cut)
22 ODOUR – O (old), DOUR {morose}
23 BARRACKER – RAC (drivers – Royal Automobile Club) inside BARKER (dog)
25 GALANTINE – G (good), ALAN (boy), TINE (part of fork)
26 TORTE – TORT{0, is}E (slowcoach)
27 MAHLER – H (heroin) inside MALE (man), R{ejoice}
28 ENGRAVER – Double definition, one somewhat fanciful

Down
1 CARAPACE – CAR (vehicle) then PA (every year – per annum) inside ACE (one)
2 AMBER – {ch}AMBER (room). This is a cautionary signal especially with reference to the UK traffic light sequence.
3 WILLIAM OF ORANGE – Anagram of A FOLLOWER AIMING. He invaded England and deposed King James II to qualify as “regime-changer”.
4 SHAMMER – Hidden. Not a word I would have thought to use myself as “sham” works well enough on its own.
6 WIND-CHILL FACTOR – WIND (turn), CHILL (relax), F (fine), ACTOR (performer)
7 TONKA BEAN – Anagram of A BANKNOTE. I knew this as a flavouring rather than a perfume ingredient.
8 HOSTEL – Sounds like “hostile” (inimical) when spoken by Americans apparently
9 WEANED – E (energy) inside WANED (decreased). I rather like the definition “being solidly converted”.
15 AYATOLLAH – AY (always) then HALLO (greeting) + TA (word of thanks) all reversed
17 HEAR HEAR – Sounds like “here here” (urgent call to attend). I might have expected “broadcast repeatedly” here.
19 RUBRIC – RU (game – Rugby Union), BRIC{k} (element of wall)
20 BURGEON – BUR (sticky seed) + anagram of GONE
21 DODGEM – Anagram of ODD then GEM (stone)
24 KIROV – KIR (mixed drink – crème de cassis and wine), OV{er} (finished). The old Bolshevik is Sergey Kirov 1886-1934

46 comments on “Times Cryptic 25929”

  1. Well over the hour for this, but saved the blushes of posting a time by the frequency of the interruptions this morning in Umbrella-filled Hong Kong.

    I went down almost every blind alley I could find, starting with reverting to duff spelling (with ‘Appenines’) after the false dawn of getting Cincinnati right yesterday. I had at least three other cold dishes at 25a (polentine, pilentine and even in desperation eglantine – hoping it was a variant of eggplant) and was totally bamboozled by ENGRAVER. (The second definition is so fanciful that it remains beyond my ‘len’.)

    At least I was able to write in Mary Stuart’s hubbie, thanks to my current reading, Old Mortality. Yes, it’s a long book….

    1. OK, one of us has to feign ignorance, only in my case it’s not feigning. Mary Stuart’s hubbie? Who and/or howso?
      1. Well, she was better known as Mary II, but she was a Stuart. Confusingly, her aunt / mother-in-law was Mary (Henrietta) Stuart. No wonder we had to call for the Germans.

        1. Thanks- I plead density! Couldn’t see WoO for looking, and was diverted by Cranmer and the other Mary.

  2. Time sort of slipped away on this one, until it reached 25.26. The RHS in particular needed an unlocker, which turned out to be HOSTEL: I wonder if that’s all Americans, or just the ones the Setter knows?
    ENGRAVER my last in, the sort of whimsy I can appreciate once I fall into it, making it my CoD. TONKA-BEAN “is used for flavouring snuff, etc”, according to my Chambers. What a world is in that “etc”. Solved with a mix of vague acquaintance and probable arrangement of letters.
    Good, twisty set of clues.

  3. After about 50mins I had one blank, and then I saw that I, like Ulaca, had misspelt APENNINES. However, after another ten minutes I gave up, and still had the blank at WEANED. Should’ve got that one.

    Other than that, dnk GALANTINE, and dn really ‘get’ ENGRAVER.

  4. Back to normal form at 18.55 after yesterday’s fluke. I agree Ulaca, “Apennines” was another Cincinnati waiting to happen. And yes Z, at least around NYC and among the types I hear on tv or radio, “hostel” and “hostile” are homophones, although I’ve retained my Brit pronunciation.
    1. The spelling of Apennines was easy for me as I’ve always thought there was a connection to the English Pennines (aka the backbone of England) dating back to Roman times in which the A was dropped for whatever reason. I came back here to point this out but in the meantime I discovered that the connection between the names may well be spurious or at best it was dreamed up by some British bod in the 17th century.
  5. Early solve for me today and another who can’t spell APENNINES so held up at the end by WEANED which gets my COD for its neat definition. Finally came home in 49m so on the chewy side for me. I pondered INGRAVER as a nearer ‘definition’ of murderer but plumped for the spelling I knew – not a clue that I liked because of its vagueness. There were some entertaining definitions elsewhere – CRABWISE for not straightforward took me a few seconds to see for example. Others I could not parse – KIROV for one -but bunged in on an at least it fits basis, so thanks for the blog and also to the setter for a challenging puzzle.
  6. 18:51 … I really liked this one. Plenty of smiles, especially with WEANED and ENGRAVED.

    Last in CRANE, once I finally remembered that it was a tonka, not a tanko, bean.

    Top notch educative entertainment — thank you, setter. And thank you, jackkt, especially for the link which confirms that I really don’t feel I’ve been missing out in never having encountered GALANTINE.

    1. You’re right Sotira – it’s awful stuff and joins oeufs en gelee as something I’d rather go hungry than try to eat. The setter included a rather clever hint however because it was something that was supposedly fancy that I remember my mother dishing up at ladies’ “fork luncheons” in the early 1960s.
      1. I’d never heard of one but now I really want to have a ‘fork luncheon’. Expect your invitation card (hand-written, naturally) in the mail any day now, Olivia. Galantine will not be served.
  7. 35.42. Bit of a 6 here and there, but cheered by appearance of galantine. Chaucer wrote a beautiful little poem to a woman who was giving him the air. The last verse of ‘To Rosemounde: a Balade’ starts,
    ‘Nas never pyk walwed in galauntyne / As I in love am walwed and y-wounde…’. There’s a touching refrain (perhaps not altogether surprising), ‘Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce.’ Grestyman, as a Chaucer-man you’ll know it.
    1. Yes indeed and remember the reference to the mappa mundi in it. Such an odd image isn’t it the idea of wallowing in love like a pike in a jelly!
      1. Yet the image is perfect in its way. Working on Shakespeare’s sonnets at the moment and quite a relief to read Chaucer’s delightful little throwaway piece again.
  8. With the iPad app playing up (don’t know about you, keriothe) this involved a stroll to the village and a treeware solve of about 20 mins. I have messed up APENNINES in the past so this is now hard-wired. Overall a pleasant puzzle so thank you setter and Jack.
  9. Not so keen as others on this one which I worked steadily through in 25 minutes. Some of it seemed rather loose to me with the odd extraneous word thrown in (“up”in 1A say, “had” in 26A, etc). I don’t really think 28A works does it? And “Americans” at 8D is a very broad definition – I think we need a “some” in there.
    1. Hi Jimbo. I can’t see anything wrong with 28a, to the point where I’m not sure what your objection is!
  10. 19m. I had to solve this online once I got to the office, because the iPad app kept crashing.
    I thought it was a super puzzle: challenging without excessive obscurity, a few where GK would help but with clear wordplay to help if you lacked it. The only thing I’d never come across was GALANTINE. I’m usually reasonably good on foodie stuff.
    Like a few others I had APPENINES for a while.
  11. 16 mins. I really enjoyed this puzzle, although it definitely helped that I had the necessary GK and knew how to spell APENNINES, the clearness of the wordplay notwithstanding. I might have knocked a minute off my time had I been able to see AYATOLLAH as quickly as I should have done, and the final checker from it gave me GALANTINE from the wordplay. I then went back to the NE for TONKA BEAN which was my LOI after I finally realised it was an anagram.

    I had no problem with either definition of ENGRAVER and it had one of the clues I enjoyed the most.

  12. 28.36 but I invented a new word doggem for 21ac. My terrible typing skills continually dog me as well as slowing me down.
    I didn’t care much for engraver.
  13. Right, time to be explicit. How does engraver (or something or other in the clue) mean murderer?
    1. To send someone to their grave is to kill them. So to ‘engrave’ might mean the same thing. It doesn’t, hence the question mark.
    2. OK. EN- can be used as a prefix making verbs from nouns, with the sense ‘put into or on’, so ‘engrave’ (rather fancifully) might mean ‘put into a grave’. Add an R at the end to make an agent noun ‘engraver’ who could be a person who puts (someone) into a grave. A murderer might be said to do that figuratively speaking, or literally if they choose to bury the body. The question mark smooths it over a bit.

      That’s my take on it anyway but it rather loses its whimsical appeal in the explaining!

      (Keriothe has said it all more succinctly whilst I’ve been writing this, but I’ll let it stand.)

      Edited at 2014-10-28 12:10 pm (UTC)

      1. ‘Engrave’ is not so much fancifully meaning ‘to put in a grave’. Chambers has it as a second definition, viz
        To deposit in the grave
    1. I don’t see why, really. One can entomb a body so it’s not much of a stretch to imagine ‘engrave’ might be used similarly.
    2. Like Jack I honestly can’t see the problem. Seems absolutely fine to me. I also thought of ‘entomb’.

      Edited at 2014-10-28 12:20 pm (UTC)

      1. I liked it, seems a good pun to me, also liked DODGEM and WEANED, clever crossword which took me nearly an hour while also watching Pointless.
    3. I could definitely hear it as a mob-style euphemism …

      “What happened to Bootsie?”
      “Bootsie got engraved. You won’t be seein’ that guy around no more.”

  16. Half an hour. I’m with those who enjoyed the puzzle and can’t find fault with 28; in fact I thought it rather a clever clue. Perhaps the compiler had Robert Ford in mind as the engraver.

    “But the dirty little coward
    that shot Mr Howard
    has laid poor Jesse
    in his grave”

    The Ballad of Jesse James

  17. Oh dear, I seem to have lost my crossword mojo. Two DNFs in a row. Today I got to 30 minutes with burgeon and engraver missing and a hopelessly wrong kirsh.

    At least I got Apennines right first time, but that was only by following the wordplay.

  18. Engraver’s quite funny once you get it, but then you have to get it. As one half of a DD that could be quite tricky! And with wordplay, perhaps somewhat TOO fanciful as the def. Hmm, puzzling.
  19. No problems with the ipad version crashing for me, but that isn’t to say there were no problems. I found this a tricky solve, although I did finish, after about 60 minutes. Tried HERE HERE initially, which is what made the SE the last bit to resolve itself, but once I corrected that and got BARRACKER the rest fell into place. Personally, I quite liked 28a.
  20. Oh dear. This took me an hour and I’m surprised to be correct. I, for one, had no idea of the ‘chase’ meaning of ‘engrave’, so that, I confess, was a complete guess from the checking letters. Didn’t know about GAFFER either, my LOI from wordplay only. The spelling of APENNINES was from strict reliance on wordplay also, and CRABWISE, BARRACKER, DODGEM and GALANTINE are not normal words to my ears. And yes, as Olivia reports above, our American HOSTEL and HOSTILE sound the same. Phew. Regards.
  21. 9:55 for me. I’d just taken 26:23 solving the much trickier No. 5,833 (from 1948) and started desperately slowly – perhaps taking time to acclimatise to modern clues – then found the setter’s wavelength, but finally slowed badly over the last few (easy) clues as exhaustion set in.

    No real problem with any of the words. I’ve known GALANTINE for ages anyway, but it came up recently (for me) in No. 494 (4 September 1931). I tend to think of a GAFFER as a “foreman” rather than a “manager”, but Chambers has “loosely applied to any manager” so I’m not complaining about that or indeed about any other clue. In particular ENGRAVER is just fine, and I’m amazed that anyone should take exception to it. (On second thoughts, perhaps not all that amazed, knowing how picky some of us are!)

  22. DNF – BURGEON and ENGRAVER.

    BURGEON I would never have got, as I was sure there were two rs in “burr”. And without its N (or perhaps even with it) I don’t think I’d have got ENGRAVER.

    Regarding the American pronunciation of HOSTEL/hostile – is this in any way related to the “war on tourism”?

  23. DNF with lots of unfamiliars – gaffer (I thought he was the best boy’s pal in the credits), crammer as a school, the other way of saying bumper car, and tonka beans which I guess are much different from Tonka Toys. A shame because I would have known most of the GK if I’d been able to get a foothold.
  24. Attempted late last night and had not solved the ‘Kirov’/’engraver’ crossers. When I looked again this morning, they fell into place. Sometimes you just have to sllep on it.

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