Times Cryptic 26354

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I found this one quite hard in places and spent an hour on it by which time I had been stuck on the final two answers long enough to be bored with them so I looked them up and technically did not finish. After the eloquence on display in some recent blogs this will be rather short and to the point but may at least free up some time for other activities!

As usual deletions are in curly brackets and indicators in square ones. I’m also including a few more definitions these days to assist the increasing number of newer solvers attempting to make the transition from the Quick Cryptic.

Across
1 MARSH TIT – MARS (is ruining), then T (time) inside HIT (popular song)
5 CREPES – REP (traveller) inside CES (these, French)
9 INFANTRY – IN, FAN (cool), TRY (experiment)
10 UNROLL – UN (peacekeeper – really?), ROLL sounds like [we hear] “role” (function)
12 RUB SHOULDERS –  A figurative phrase defined by “meet socially” plus a literal hint
15 TAROT – TOT (drop – e.g. of whisky) contains [keeping] A (ace) + R (king)
16 LIFE TABLE – LIFTABLE (likely to be plagiarised) containing [content’s] E{nlightening} [principally]. I can’t say I’d ever heard of this defined in SOED as: a table of statistics relating to expectation of life
18 AXMINSTER – X (ten) + MINS (minutes) inside {b}AT{h} [centre], RE (about) reversed [head back]. The town in N.E. Devon is famous for its carpets.
19 BRAVE – B (bachelor), RAVE (party). Definition: with bottle – slang
20 INTERROGATOR – IN TERROR (panic-stricken) containing [carrying] GAT (gun) + O (round)
24 SLEIGH – From the definition “ride through snow” this might have been “sledge” but the remainder of the clue tells us the answer is a homophone [you say] for “slay” (ice – slang for “kill” at least in America [in the Rockies])
25 BILLHOOK – In Spoonerese this would be HILL BOOK (volume on fell-walking?). Definition: I’ll prune
26 YANKEE – Two definitions, a bet and a Unionist soldier at the time of the American Civil War, though the term is also used more widely and sometimes perjoratively
27 ANCHORED – CHORE (job) inside [secured] AND (with)

Down
1 MAIN – I inside [introduced to] MAN (bishop perhaps – chess). Definition: cardinal – important, pre-eminent
2 RIFT – {d}RIFT (tenor – theme running through an argument, for example) [misses introduction]. Definition: lack of harmony
3 HINDUSTAN – HIN{t} (suggest [briefly]), DUST (cloud of pollution), A, N (northern)
4 IRRESOLUTION – I, ERR (make a mistake) reversed [over], SOLUTION (answer to crossword)
6 RENAL – REAL (material) contains [incorporates] N (name). Definition: associated with organ i.e. kidneys
7 PROVERBIAL – PAL (friend) contains [to keep] ROVER (dog) + B (black) + I (one)
8 SELF-SEEKER – A straight definition and a cryptic hint
11 CONFIRMATION – CO (business) then FIRM (steady) inside NATION (country)
13 STRAVINSKY – STAV{e} (set of notes [brief]) contains R{hapsody} [start of], IN, BLUE (sky). I’m not entirely convinced by “stave” as “set of notes” because it’s actually the set of five lines on which musical notes are written. Is a sheet of paper a piece of writing?
14 PROMETHEAN – PROM (concert), ETHE{r} (number – anaesthetic [shortened]), A, N (note). This was my first failure, but since I had PROM?T?EAN I really should have got the answer if for no other reason than it’s a word I’d vaguely heard of and it would have fitted the checkers and space available. I didn’t know what it meant though, other than something to do with Prometheus, as I’m afraid my knowledge of his exploits is limited entirely to his fate of being chained to a rock, so I had no chance of linking his name to “daringly original”, the definition given here.
17 TABBOULEH – Anagram [tossed about] of BLUEBOAT, H (hard). My second failure and another example of a particular bugbear of mine, the anagram of a foreign word that you either know or you don’t. With all the checkers in place I suppose the position of the second B was guessable but the remaining three vowels might have gone anywhere. SOED describes it as: A Syrian and Lebanese salad made with burghul, parsley, onion, mint, lemon juice, oil, and spices.
21 ROGUE – G{reek} [leader] inside [implicated in] anagram [new] of EURO. The surface reading may amuse those of a Brexit persuasion!
22 POOR – PO (naval officer – Petty Officer), OR (men – army, Ordinary Ranks)
23 SKID – S (small), KID (child). After the rigours of 14 and 17, the final three Down clues appear to have escaped from the Quickie desk providing an example of a useful hint for newbies that it’s sometimes possible to get a foothold in the SE corner where the setter may have run out of steam.

54 comments on “Times Cryptic 26354”

  1. … than yesterday, by quite a long chalk. One where it’s indeed hard to complete without working out the long answers. Had to guess quite a few from what I suspected were the defs. No trouble with the Lebanese salad. Eat it all the time in kebabs. Bit boring without the hummus but.

    Got a bit excited by the Nina(?) in the second column. Doesn’t sound like him though … but you never can tell.

  2. Mar. 8th, 2016 at 12:04 AM
    Is this GMT?

    Enjoyed the puzzle … chuckled at 8D
    Thanks jackkt & setter

  3. As Cosmo Kramer once memorably said, “feels like Tuesday”. A bit of a step up from yesterday.

    Not knowing of BILLHOOKs and YANKEE bets didn’t help, and I would have struggled to spell TABBOULEH, but it must have all been clued fairly as I got there in the end. COD to BRAVE.

    Thanks setter and Jack.

    1. Surprised Galspray didn’t know about racehorse betting!
      In Australia, a Yankee is officially:

      Yankee – (4 legs – no single bets – $11)
      11 bets on four legs. ($11 total for a $1 bet).
      1 x 4-leg multi; 4 x 3-leg multi; 6 x 2-leg multi.

      Go figure. I thought they all had four legs! Though one without could always do a Bradbury?

      1. It’s certainly not part of traditional Australian racing or betting parlance.

        The global explosion in on-line betting has led to more and more exotic techniques for parting with one’s hard-earned. Presumably this is part of that trend.

        The fundamentals don’t change though. As Johnny Tapp used to say “the moment you enter the track, off goes the head and on goes a pumpkin”.

        Edited at 2016-03-08 08:33 am (UTC)

      2. Same in the UK, although we do not have legs and multis. 4 selections, one foursome, 4 trebles and 6 doubles. Very popular with the bookies who typically have preprinted betting slips for Yankees and sometimes its bigger brothers
        Canadian – 5 selections 26 bets
        Heinz – 6 selections 57 bets (geddit!)
        Super Heinz – 7 selections 120 bets
        Goliath – 8 selections 247 bets.

        Edited at 2016-03-08 04:37 pm (UTC)

  4. 13dn STRAVINSKY was to be my COD – I was happy with stave until Jack pointed the inherent weakness in the definition.

    So COD 17dn TABBOULEH the Lebanese salad – reminiscent of one of those ‘Call My Bluff’ words. It might just as well have been an Irish minstrel or a Moroccan smoking vessel!

    FOI 12ac RUB SHOULDERS and LOI 21dn ROGUE (not because it was hard – just didn’t clock it!)

    35 mins roughly

    horryd Shanghai

  6. I was laid low today by a brilliant trap – absolute hats off to the editorial team if it was in any way deliberate. Powered my way through the Concise in a fairly good time, making a subconscious note of the answers, which of course do sometimes reappear in the main event…. and one of which was SLEDGE. I think you can guess where things went from there! I deserved everything I got though as 24ac would have been the weakest cryptic def ever if that was all there was too it, it couldn’t possibly have been right!

    Edited at 2016-03-08 08:08 am (UTC)

    1. I wonder if your subject title was a cryptic reference to my lapse of grammar at 14ac? Anyway I spotted it myself and have corrected it now in the hope that not many people noticed it.
      1. Pure serendipity I assure you! I would never snipe at the grammar of others, especially when I’ve gotten so much flak over my unrepentant use of “gotten”, in my time…
    2. I put in SLEDGE, but then I dimly remembered making a pretty much identical error on this puzzle just over a year ago, and reconsidered.

      Edited at 2016-03-08 10:42 am (UTC)

  7. Same two for me. Looked up promethean in the dictionary so does that count as a failure? As for tabbouleh, I was certain it was an anagram but I needed the iPad to solve it.
  8. About 35mins, so significantly tougher than yesterday’s.

    YORKEE and ice=to ‘slay’, both from previous crossies, dnk SELF SEEKER, BILLHOOK or LIFE TABLE, so hope they come up again before I forget them…

    LOI: PROMETHEAN, from wp. As Jack, I’d vaguely heard the word, but couldn’t have provided the def. Refreshing that AXMINSTER was not defined by its carpets.

    No problem with TABBOULEH, love the stuff.

  9. 16:01 .. some time staring at the sleigh/sledge dilemma before that penny dropped. Also dithered for a while over LIFE TABLE but it rang a faint bell. Maybe we’ve seen it before?

    COD to RUB SHOULDERS for the smile it raised.

  10. 35 minutes but never got PROMETHEAN or ANCHORED.
    No problem with TABBOULEH as I knew his singing sister Pat.
  11. 38 minutes, but had to look up the middle-eastern dish to confirm the placing of the e and the a.

    I vacillated between sledge and sleigh and chose the latter because it sounded more like the sort of thing Santa would take. I don’t usually feel so deferential towards Santa, but there we go. I thought ANCHORED was top hole.

  12. If it had been December when we get bombarded with all that kind of stuff I don’t think anyone would have had a problem with the sleigh. I’ve lived in the US so long that I just associate a sledge with a hammer. 15.08

    P.S. In 22d I think it’s OTHER (not ordinary) ranks.

    Edited at 2016-03-08 01:02 pm (UTC)

  13. Cometh the Tuesday cometh the cock ups. I feel LIFT TABLE was inexcusable given I considered an actuarial career which would have involved life tables. I was less bothered by SLEDGE as it was a nicely tempting biff.

    At least I did better than a computer could manage. There is an article in The Times today about how computer programs can now solve quick crosswords but it mentions that they are nowhere near solving cryptics.

  14. Befuddled with flu donated by the barmaid at the Gilpin Bell, I was quite pleased with a) sleigh and b) finishing in 17 and a bit with only one typo. Back to bed.
  15. 40 minutes for this one, but with the A and E the wrong way round in TABBOULEH which I’d never heard of, so I’m with Jack in his dislike of anagrams which only work if you know the answer. Biffed ANCHORED without fully parsing, so thanks Jack for explaining that. Otherwise an enjoyable solve after coming back from A&E (E&A?) where the nice Maxillo Facial surgeon put an extra couple of stitches in my gum following yesterday’s visit to the dentist. Now it’s time to shove my pillow in the washer. (I’m sure you all wanted to know that!) John
    1. I kind of see where you’re all coming from… but surely *all* anagrams only work if you know the answer?
      1. The objection is to foreign words as mentioned in the blog and I’m sure that’s the point that John was agreeing with.
        1. Surely it’s a matter of familiarity/obscurity, rather than whether or not they’re foreign? I assume you wouldn’t object to an anagram of PASTA?
          1. This conversation has come up many times before and often recently so I think we all know what we mean. Of course familiarity and relative obscurity are factors. Also very often the foreign word has one or more alternative spellings and this confuses the issue further if one knows only the one that doesn’t fit the anagrist.

            Edited at 2016-03-08 10:56 am (UTC)

            1. Of course I see what people are driving at, but I’m just not convinced there’s any logical place to draw the line. Every word is a word that *somebody* is unfamiliar with, and unusual words is part of the fun of cryptic crosswords, for me anyway. I guess I do agree that something like TABBOULEH where the English spelling is clearly pretty arbitrary as long as it sounds something like the Arabic word is a bit rich. Though even so I don’t see any really persuasive alternatives, if you’d ever come across any spelling of tabouli before.
            2. In this case I would argue that it’s just a case of familiarity, since as verlaine says, if you know the word at all there isn’t really anywhere else to put the letters. But of course whether or not things are commonplace/obscure is highly subjective: as I said below I wouldn’t have thought twice about this one, but based on the comments here it seems much less well-known than I would have thought.
              1. I agree with the complainants here – when a word is that obscure and transliterated, presumably, I think we should get a bit more help – but I guessed the right order for the four leftover letters, so I’m not as grumpy as I could be.
      2. Hi V, I was really just sounding off because of my sore head 🙂 but I do prefer clues where you can construct the answer from the clue even when you don’t know the word rather than having to guess where the letters might go. John
  16. 23m. Quite tricky this, but I enjoyed it a lot. No problem with TABBOULEH: in my world it is so commonplace that it wouldn’t even have occurred to me that people might not have heard of it. Just goes to show, and as I’ve observed before, one woman’s whatsit is another man’s, you know, like, thing.
    1. Though I have been stymied by foreign anagrams several times, I really can’t see any objection to them. Apart from the whole question of subjectivity, I enjoy seeing how diverse our vocabularies are. GLUHWEIN (recently) and TABBOULEH were write-ins for me! Maybe I would feel differently if I were competing.

      Edited at 2016-03-08 11:42 am (UTC)

      1. To my mind it’s more about obscurity than foreignness: the only word I didn’t know in this puzzle was BILLHOOK!
        My personal view is that an obscure word should always be clued in such a way that the solver can deduce the answer with confidence even if he or she doesn’t know it. An ‘obscure’ word is one that a reasonably well-informed solver might be expected not to know. A reasonably well-informed solver is, er…
        1. I can’t see the difference between an anagram of a word you don’t know, and another cryptic clue of the same ilk; as seen above, TABBOULEH was a familiar word to some (including me, I eat it often at our Lebanese) and obscure to others.
          I liked this and finished in 25 minutes, with PROMETHEAN biffed as I also only knew about the rock-chaining myth.

          Tomorrow is another day.

          1. The difference is just that with an anagram there is sometimes no way to tell where to put the letters, so you can’t be sure of the answer. With other types of cryptic clue the instructions are usually unambiguous, as long as you can figure out how to interpret them.
  17. Quite a testing, but entertaining, puzzle. RUB SHOULDERS was neat. I hesitated for some time over “sleigh/sledge”, plumping eventually for the former on gut instinct more than anything else. Thanks to Jack for explaining the meaning of “ice” needed here, which I may have known once but had forgotten. I also had to resort to the dictionary to check the required spelling of TABBOULEH.
  18. Maxwell’s equations were no help. I kept ignoring ‘we hear’ and was certain the function was curl, dimly remembered from long ago Physics. My scouse chums would call me a div. A full hour today, finishing with Stravinsky as the last rites of Spring.
  19. 35 minutes, so double yesterday’s time, but I entered SLEDGE thinking there might be a place called SLEDGE in the Rocky Mountains. Glad I’m not alone in my wrong answer.
    I thought it was good puzzle with some lovely clues at 1a, 27a 2d in particular. I entered RIFT tentatively for 2d early on and only at the end did I think of the necessary meaning of tenor to justify it.
  20. I make this the fourth appearance in 2016 of the homicidal ice . American slang has a propensity to use innocuous words as synonyms for quite unpleasant things . Lets hope it doesn’t catch on here .
      1. Which of course in certain parts of the UK has an unsavoury slang meaning and given said person’s public outbursts perhaps the slang is in fact the mot juste.
  21. Rarely am I so on wavelength! 15 mins of steady solving (and less steady biffing) with some time spent plodding through the alphabet for my LOI “rift”. I know “tabbouleh” from close observation of SWMBO in the healthy aisles of Waitrose – more a black pudding man myself.
  22. A surprising 23m today, 5m quicker than yesterday so this was more to my taste. In fact I really enjoyed this puzzle and smiled at the neatness of 5a and 27a for example. No problem with the anagram salad but only because I knew of it and so could guess where the uncrossed letters went. Had I not known the word I would have been with the complainants. The difference to answer Keriothe for me is that TABBOULEH has not yet been incorporated into everyday usage, certainly here in the North East, and you’d find few people who have come across it, whereas PASTA is universally available and recognised. But I agree the line is a wavy one and probably dotted in places. Certainly a more obscure or foreign word clued with an anagram gives me a fighting chance. I’ve abandoned the ST when Mr Manley does it these days as he very often clues his hard words in such a way that if you don’t know the word you have zero chance unless you use a dictionary. And if I wanted to do that I’d do the Mephisto! Great puzzle overall. Thanks for the blog, Jack.

    Edited at 2016-03-08 02:46 pm (UTC)

    1. Yes I completely agree with you: indeed that’s my point really. It’s about familiarity/obscurity rather than whether or not the word is foreign.
  23. Lashed it up by biffing ‘sledge’ at 24a. Should know better – saw the crossers and thought ‘it must be’, and never considered that there might be other possibilities. Time would have been 21m 15s, – hey-ho.
  24. It all went wrong for me in the NE where I confidently entered FRITES for CREPES (T for traveller tucked into our own FRIES to give the French version). This led to THEREABOUT for PROVERBIAL (reasonable IMHO if you ignore the dog and the friend), which led to UNVEIL for UNROLL (not quite as reasonable, but excusable). All of this made BRAVE impossible, and distracted me from the SW corner where I suffered equally badly. Here I couldn’t get STRADIVARI out of my head, biffed DRAMATICAL for PROMETHEAN, and screwed that corner all up too.

    All-in-all a bit of a dog’s dinner hereabouts, where I gave up after 55 minutes and came here for solace. Thanks Jack et al.

  25. About 30 minutes, ending with an alphabet tour to find the correct answer at POOR. I don’t know how many naval officers there are to fit ?O, but my imagination allows me to believe there could be at least a few I haven’t heard of very often. No other real problems after I finally saw CONFIRMATION, after which the center of the grid filled in without much trouble. Regards.
    1. There are only two in the Royal Navy, both non-commissioned: Petty Officer and Warrant Officer.

      PO is more usually the RAF rank Pilot Officer in Times Crosswords.

  26. Lots of comments already today – I was very much on the setters wavelength and knew that spelling of TABBOULEH which made it a 9:28 canter with the last in being PROMETHEAN, very cleverly clued. Lots of nice definitions today I thought – good one setter.
  27. 13:01 for me, not on the setter’s wavelength for most of the time, and going down far too many blind alleys with the wordplay.

    After noting ROGUE from today’s T2 puzzle, I wasted time trying to fit SLEDGE from the same source into 24ac. However, like others I’m aware of the SLEDGE/SLEIGH dilemma (I’ve probably chosen wrongly at one time or another) so was prepared to switch to SLEIGH.

    I’m not sure if I’ve ever eaten TABBOULEH, but I’ve read about it somewhere, so I was pretty confident of the answer. However, I’m aware that foodie matters are quite likely to expose my ignorance, so wouldn’t really have objected if this one had passed me by. Certainly when I started solving the Times crossword, the setters gave very little quarter: you either knew how to spell things (some of them a lot more obscure than anything you’d come up against today) or you didn’t. I suspect that in those days solvers were simply less worried if they completed a puzle incorrectly or failed to complete it at all. When the Championship started, this did give a distinct advantage to those who were in tune with the sort of knowledge expected of Times crossword solvers then.

    Edited at 2016-03-08 11:55 pm (UTC)

  28. I can usually mess up a solve in short order, but it took me the better part of an hour to mess this one up, with ‘sledge’ at 24ac – serves me right for failing to parse.

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