Times Cryptic 26300

36 comments on “Times Cryptic 26300”

1. ….but still a little surprised to see improper language in a Times puzzle, albeit in Sanskrit. I suppose they think that makes it high-class.

   I don’t know what the QCers would make of this, but I breezed through in about 40 minutes with no major difficulties. I had all the knowledge, and just had to puzzle out the cryptics. ‘Conker’ was my LOI.

   1. In all fairness, my mother was more amused than shocked. But she did ask what sort of people I was mixing with now.
2. 
   23 ac LINGAM A Hindu phallus – a useful word to know!

   DNK 8 dn SILENUS or LOI 18dn PLACKET

   All over in 42 min

   11ac CONKER I didn’t think ‘crumbled’ was quite the right word.

   horryd Shanghai

3. No problem with any of the vocab except SILENUS where the cryptic was helpful. I still remember PLACKET from having done King Lear for A-level English. I knew LINGAM as a stone symbol but never thought of it as remotely.

   My only question is why SNAPPERS is plural while the clue implies the singular. Not the Oxford -ERS for “snappy”, surely?

   Dereklam

   1. My thinking was that “who may be appear to be bad-tempered” allowed for the possibility of a plural solution.
      1. Yes you’re right of course. Thanks.
4. Like the blogger, I didn’t know PLACKET, SILENUS and LINGAM, but I’ll trade his unknown HUTU for my unknown ELGIN.

   HUTU (along with Tutsi) became a depressingly familiar word from news broadcasts in the ’90s, when Rwandans were probably not complaining about crossword clues.

   Fortunately we’re free to enjoy and complain at our leisure. No complaints here, just another pleasant solve. Thanks setter and Jack.

   1. I assume the name of the place was the origin of the title Earl of Elgin, and the 7th Earl is still remembered for bringing the Marbles to Britain.

      Edited at 2016-01-05 06:04 am (UTC)

   2. ELGIN sits on the south side of the Moray Firth with the Grampians as a backdrop and looking across the waters to the Black Isle. One of the most beautiful places in the world.
      1. Very nice, welcoming, parkland golf course, too.
         1. True, and across the water the Fortrose and Rosemarkie Golf Club – one of the oldest in the world. Set on a peninsular that juts out into the Moray Firth – tricky links course
5. Stalled at the half-hour with a half-dozen–including, to my disgust, 12ac–to go, I went off-line, came back just now, saw 12 finally, and the rest–1d, 5d, 9ac (BIFD), and LOI 15ac–fell into place quickly. Like Vinyl, I was surprised by 23ac, although I wouldn’t have thought it improper language, just not the sort of term one would expect here. (When I was a pimply-faced freshman, I actually bought a copy of the Kama Sutra, and plowed through pages of talk of lingams and yonis and absolutely useless, tedious advice, until I gave it up.) DNK NAPPER, barely remembered CONKER.
6. It just goes to show what a sheltered life you’ve led, Jack.
   Kevin’s just beaten me in recalling very similar youthful experiences reading the Kama Sutra and the confusion with lingams and yonis, never spelling out what they were – just what to do with them, mostly physically impossible.
   35 minutes.

   Edited at 2016-01-05 08:02 am (UTC)

7. Interesting puzzle for which knowledge of the Kama Sutra helped whilst Mephisto training came in useful more than once.

   I also don’t recall a CONKER crumbling – mine used to split. Good to see EDISON get a mention

   1. Forgot to mention 13ac was an elephant trap awaiting biffers with ‘journalist’ leading straight to EDITOR, with ‘young man’ accounting for ED and sod the rest of it because I’m in a hurry…
8. 35 minutes but failed to get 23a which I think is the stand out clue.
9. I have to admit I gave up, disgruntled, on this one with CONKER unsolved. It may just be a case of the post-festive blues but I got very annoyed by several things in this, including the Yoda-speak construction of the clue for PLACKET. Definitely not my cup of tea.
10. Enjoyed this one, not easy but a steady solve in 40 minutes; for some reason I knew LINGAM (just thought it was a posh word for phallus, not necessarily Hindu) but my Greek God knowledge was lacking, SILENUS from wordplay only.
    28a was a bit weak I thought.
    CONKER was my CoD.
11. I think I knew him from Prince Caspian where he makes an appearance with a posse of Maenads. Or it may have been from the weekly struggle with the TLS. PLACKET known from dressmaking at my boarding school where there was literally nothing else to do on weekends. The 2 I struggled with were NINETEEN (I nearly gave up and threw in Ximenean) and SNAPPERS (didn’t know “napper” and had the same reaction as Derek to the construction of the clue). 16.33
    1. Napper survives in this famous lyric though I don’t know whether it ever crossed the Atlantic:

       Any old iron? Any old iron?
       Any, any, any old iron?
       You look neat. Talk about a treat!
       You look so dapper from your napper to your feet.
       Dressed in style, brand-new tile,
       And your father’s old green tie on.
       But I wouldn’t give you tuppence for your old watch and chain,
       Old iron, old iron.”

       1. Thanks Jack – I didn’t know any other words beyond “any old iron”.
12. 17:12 with no unknowns. I recall that I heard once that Edison was one of the most unsuccessful inventors of all time, with one success and something over 10,000 failures. Doesn’t look right as I write it.
    [on edit] I have found his fine quote “I have not failed 10,000 times – I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work”

    Edited at 2016-01-05 12:08 pm (UTC)

    1. He must have been relieved to have that “light bulb” moment?
13. A smidge over 10 minutes but I’d forgotten that I once knew lingam so I invented the gidgam (with to dig as to love. Nice.) What consenting adults may choose to do with their gidgams is anybody’s guess.

    Silenus and gib unknown but that didn’t delay me and like others I recalled Hutu from the horrendous news stories.

14. 40m and held up by those already mentioned. EDITOR was a temptation, Jack, and the God and the cloth were my unknowns today. I didn’t much like SNAPPERS when I got it; there must be a better clue out the somewhere. Thanks for the blog.
15. I’m another who had a Kama Sutra moment at 23a. I quite enjoyed this puzzle and had no particular problems with it, although I spent some time looking for a singular solution to the SNAPPERS clue. 23 minutes. Ann
16. 6 minutes for almost all of this crossword and then another 3 and a bit to mop up a last few, especially 15ac. “Nob” and “napper” weren’t synonyms in *my* mental thesaurus, and what with the somewhat tortuous definition part I had to stare at it for a couple of minutes to make sure I was on the right track… Oh well, under 10 minutes all in, can’t really complain!
17. About 30 minutes, but I had SNIPPERS, because I didn’t know ‘nob’=’napper’, and because I didn’t know what SNAPPERS might be. Oh well. Everything else was OK, except SILENUS form wordplay only. Regards.
18. Wish I could be participating more these days… I’ve been doing puzzles as I can but have been traveling to Puerto Rico and California and get to the puzzles almost a day late. I’m enjoying a lot of new words in the new year and of course the entertaining and informative comments.

    Thank you bloggers and happy new year!

19. Thought my time was going to look distinctly pedestrian, so I feel relieved that some others were in the same sort of time zone.
    ‘Silenus’ came from the wordplay, with distant memory as reassurance, and ‘placket’ owed something to watching the Sewing Bee programme on television with Mrs C.
20. 17 mins. I had a similar experience to a few of you, inasmuch as I raced through most of it but struggled to get my last five, which were LINGAM, the intersecting SNAPPERS/NINETEEN/SILENUS, and CONKERS was my LOI. Also like others LINGAM and SILENUS went in from wordplay alone, and PLACKET was only vaguely remembered.
21. No idea of my solving time, as I left the window open between two bashes at solving. Well over the half hour, in any case.

    My LOSI were CONKER and ELGIN; I’d considered ELGIN early on, but wasn’t happy with it until I had the crossing CONKER.

    I’m afraid I can’t share Dorset Jimbo’s delight at seeing EDISON make an appearance. He was a ghastly man, by all accounts – 99% plagiarism, 1% inspirism. And when that failed, he wasn’t above a little intimidism to silence his competitors.

    My NHO for today was SILENUS. PLACKET also held me up, until I decided that there was no such thing as a peachet. KRAAL was a near thing – I had a vague memory of having had a recollection of once having known it, doubtless from another Times cryptic.

22. 20m: Lots of rather obscure stuff today, giving the puzzle an old-fashioned feel: GIB, NAPPER, LINGAM, KRAAL, SILENUS, PLACKET. However my main problem was with 11ac, which I couldn’t see for the life of me: it needed two alphabet runs before I got there. I still struggle with ‘crumbled’.
    Jack I confess I’m pretty amazed you didn’t know HUTU. I guess you weren’t reading the news in 1994!
    LINGAM might be a bit off-colour but we get ‘berk’ from time to time, which is at least as rude, and in a version of English!
23. 10:37 for me, slowing badly towards the end.

    I didn’t know that meaning of “gib”, but everything else was familiar enough: SILENUS mainly from various paintings (particularly a famous Rubens), NAPPER from e.g. Any Old Iron, PLACKET particularly from Joan’s placket is torn (old song), KRAAL from countless crosswords, LINGAM particularly from the Kama Sutra (does Private Eye still refer to Yoko Ono as “Okay Yoni”?).

24. 11ac annoyed me a lot because firstly conkers don’t crumble, I played a lot with them in my youth, they crack and split and secondly to conquer is to win not be defeated so the homophone was wrong.
    1. Your point about ‘crumbled’ has been made above by two other contributors and is arguable I suppose but it depends on a somewhat inflexible interpretation of words and meanings and of the clue itself. ‘Crumble’ is defined in SOED as: “Break or fall into crumbs, particles, or fragments, (lit. & fig.); disintegrate; (cause to) go to pieces”. Of these ‘fragments’ and ‘disintegrate’ both suggest a less literal meaning that doesn’t necessarily involve crumbs, with ‘fragment’ being defined as ‘a broken off, detached or incomplete part”. And in any case the clue only said ‘one may have crumbled’, not that they all do.

       Your point about ‘defeat’ is lost on me. The clue said ‘defeat is reported’ and if you defeat someone you might be said to conquer them, so conquer and defeat can be interchangeable in that context.

Comments are closed.