Times Cryptic 26540

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
My problems finishing off continued today and I resorted to aids for two answers as the hour approached. The one at 7dn I should have got but I was still missing the first checker and it refused to come to mind. The other at 18ac was unknown to me and the only word I could think of that fitted was a type of soup. Some clues would have been a gift even in the QC e.g. 13ac & 2dn, whilst others like 3dn were gifts for biffers. Here’s my blog…

As usual definitions are underlined in bold italics, {deletions are in curly brackets} and [anagrinds, containment, reversal and other indicators in square ones]

Across
1 Architect Mark does houses? (8)
DESIGNER – DEER (does) contains [houses] SIGN (mark)
5 Torn to pieces, as may be a roof? (6)
SLATED – Two definitions. How appropriate this should turn up so soon after the mild controversy re plated/slated in another puzzle.
10 Side on wheel clamped by those transporting stock (9,6)
DONCASTER ROVERS – ON + CASTER(wheel)  contained [clamped] by DROVERS (those transporting stock – cattle). One of my last in. I keep anything to do with football as far from my mind as possible and even eventually with DONCASTER as the only option to fit the checkers it took me ages to realise that I was looking for the name of a soccer team.
11 Disturbing improvisation of lutenist, no good (10)
UNSETTLING – Anagram [improvisation] of LUTENIST, NG (no good)
13 Continent first of all in Africa, second is Antarctica (4)
ASIA –  First letters in A{frica} S{econd} I{s} A{ntarctica}. Easy QC fodder.
15 Royal, sweet little thing (7)
SULTANA – Two definitions, both rather vague but together they clinch the deal
17 Librettist inspiring a neophyte (7)
LEARNER – LERNER (librettist) containing [inspiring] A. Alan Jay Lerner appeared in a Times cryptic in April and in a Mephisto in July. He’s probably best known for My Fair Lady but there were many other musicals, mostly in collaboration with Frederick Loewe.
18 Wine knocked over by a hundred despicable cats, all together (7)
CLOWDER – C (hundred), LOW (despicable), RED (wine) reversed [knocked over].  As a life-long lover of cats I’m surprised I’ve never come across this collective noun. I checked for alternatives and found “pounce” which I think I have met, and “destruction” if the the cats happen to be feral. CLOWDER has apparently never appeared in the main puzzle before but it was in a Mephisto in May 2012.
19 South of France recalled disease in rubbish collector (7)
DUSTBIN – SUD (south – French) reversed [recalled], TB (disease), IN.
21 Power unit, where I didn’t hear sounds (4)
WATT – Sounds like “what?” (I didn’t hear)
22 Discrimination, quality of a brunette might you say? (10)
UNFAIRNESS – A straight definition and a cryptic one
25 Doubly OK with gallons in a stew that’s rich! (4,4,7)
LOOK WHO’S TALKING – Anagram [in a stew] of OK OK [doubly] WITH GALLONS
27 Epithet welcomed by US author this spoon-fed? (6)
POTAGE – TAG (epithet) contained [welcomed] by POE (US author). A somewhat vague definition here.
28 Hairy biker’s ultimate parting drink (8)
WHISKERY – {bike}R [‘s ultimate] inside [parting] WHISKEY (drink)
Down
1 Singular slander used to upset? There there! (7)
DIDDUMS – S (singular) + MUD (slander) + DID (used to) reversed [upset]. This is a heavily sarcastic and insincere expression of sympathy usually said to petulant children or adults who behave like them. It has been around certainly since the late 19th century but there’s no agreement as to its origins or even any substantial theories on the subject. Because of its innate insincerity it’s not quite an exact equivalent of the definition given here. On edit: Having read Ulaca’s comment below I was encouraged to look further into this and I found that the ODE (which I believe is the printed versioin of the ODO he refers to) says that it’s a genuine expression of commiseration when said to a child, or ironically, to an adult. It also gives the origin from “did ’em” i.e. “did they?”   (tease you, do that to you, etc), which seems quite logical to me.
2 Source of light embodied by Helios, unsurprisingly (3)
SUN – Hidden [embodied] in {Helio}S UN{surprisingly}. More fodder for an easy QC.
3 Something native to China in wok, perhaps? Starters of dubious authenticity (5,5)
GIANT PANDA – GIANT PAN (wok, perhaps), first letters [starters] of D{ubious} A{uthenticity}. I biffed this one with help from enumeration and a couple of checkers
4 Praise levy once cut (5)
EXTOL – EX (once – former), TOL{l} (levy) [cut]
6 Cut around circular line forming ring (4)
LOOP – LOP (cut) containing [around] O (circular line)
7 Criminal in the end, dirt cheap (11)
TREASONABLE – {dir}T [in the end], REASONABLE (cheap). I’m not entirely convinced that “reasonable” is the same as “cheap”, it’s just not extortionately expensive once the value of the goods is taken into consideration.
8 Misery guts in tiresome couple supporting daughter (7)
DESPAIR – D (daughter), {tir}ES{ome} [guts], PAIR (couple)
9 Happy to be ushered past beastly noise (8)
GRUNTLED – GRUNT (beastly noise), LED (ushered). This is a back-formation from “disgruntled” meaning “discontented”.
12 Girl spilled rum onto head of this fish (6,5)
SALMON TROUT – SAL (girl), anagram [spilled] of RUM ONTO, T{his} [head of…]
14 Prior to functions, bag up some empty dishes (10)
CASSEROLES – SAC (bag) reversed  [up], S{om}E [empty], ROLES (functions). Another eminently biffable answer.
16 Fundamental part of nature to pocket money without prior arrangement (2,6)
AT RANDOM – ATOM (fundamental part of nature) contains [to pocket] RAND (money)
18 Flower from the edge of Hereford? (7)
COWSLIP – COW’S (of Hereford – cattle), LIP (edge)
20 Indeed canning goes wrong for spray (7)
NOSEGAY – NAY (indeed) contains [canning] anagram [wrong] of GOES. Shades of Frankie Howerd!
23 A desire that I will immediately succeed (5)
AITCH – A, ITCH (desire). A cryptic definition with reference to letters of the alphabet.
24 Slug in bottom of glass with syrup (4)
SWIG – {glas}S [bottom of…], WIG (syrup – CRS from “syrup of fig”)
26 Gloriana stands for wrath (3)
IRE –  ER I (Gloriana – Queen Elizabeth I) reversed [stands]. Yesterday ER I was the Virgin Queen and today we have Gloriana, another of her sobriquets taken from the name of the protagonist in Edmund Spenser’s epic allegorical poem “The Faerie Queene”.

41 comments on “Times Cryptic 26540”

  1. Quite a few unknowns for me including ‘syrup of figs’ for WIG, ‘Gloriana’ as a term for Queen Elizabeth I and CLOWDER as a collective noun for cats. Yes, some of the defs weren’t quite right, eg 1d, but I liked many clues including NOSEGAY and the def for AITCH. Overall, a GRUNTLED solver.

    Thanks to setter and blogger.

  2. My FOI was DIDDUMS (biffed) 2ac SUN was a dreadfully easy clue.

    18ac CLOWDER my LOI. Not come across this rare collective noun before.

    Same time as Jack and pretty much the same sentiment although 10ac DONCASTER ROVERS wasn’t too difficult.

    I felt this was the same setter as yesterday – fairly edgy like 18dn COWSLIP.

    COD 23dn AITCH WOD GRUNTLED.

    horryd Shanghai

  3. 68 minutes, nodding off a few times and finishing with CLOWDER. Enjoyed it when I was conscious.

    Incidentally, Jack, ODO supports the use of DIDDUMS as a genuine expression of sympathy to a [non-petulant] child (‘used to express commiseration to a child’), as I would expect.

    1. Many thanks for this and I have added further info to the blog entry above.

      If I’m raising a query about a definition I try to check all “the usual sources” but evidently didn’t do so on this occasion. All the Oxfords (and I’ve now looked in COED, OED, ODE and SOED) confirm what you found in the ODO and the derivation I’ve now included. But Collins and my edition of Chambers don’t even list DIDDUMS, so I’m now at a loss as to where I read the entry on which I based my original comment.

    2. I suspect that DIDDUMS may be used exclusively as an ironic expression of sympathy these days, but ‘there there’ can be used in exactly the same way.
      1. I think it became Alastair Campbell’s favoured response to the more sensitive backbencher. Not much can survive that unscathed.
      2. Hard to believe anyone could use “diddums” and mean it, so I’m with you on this one.. “There there” I could manage, just about
  4. After an hour I had three left: DONCASTER ROVERS (where I nearly biffed ‘doncaster movers’, so maybe should’ve got this one), CLOWDER (unknown to me as others) and AT RANDOM (which I should’ve got, but was convinced it was some latin phrase…).

    IRE (didn’t know Gloriana) and AITCH biffed (clever cryptic), all others laboriously worked out.

  5. 33:12 … phew! That was hard. I’m not sure where the time went except that I did get mightily stuck on the SULTANA, AT RANDOM, CLOWDER grouping.

    Frankly, I’m just glad to have finished. Compliments to the setter and hats off to those who managed a competitive time.

  6. 25:41. Crikey, more or less the opposite of yesterday’s, feeling miles from the wavelength all the way through. I was lulled into a false sense of security by a couple of very easy clues, but then got badly stuck about half-way through. CLOWDER was the only out-and-out unknown for me, although I didn’t think of ‘syrup of fig’ at 24dn, my last in.
    I did wonder about ‘indeed’ for NAY. I can see how they can substitute for one another in a phrase like ‘I am pleased, nay/indeed delighted’, but the individual meanings of the words seem very different, indeed (!) almost opposite. But I didn’t wonder about it for long.
    A good challenge. It was probably unwise to attempt it before my first coffee of the day.
  7. DNF but liked it very much. Great to see some different stuff like DIDDUMS, LOOK WHO’S TALKING, CLOWDER etc. Grateful for the easier SUN, SLATED, ASIA etc to get started. Clever, witty and concise – my sort of crossword. Just wish I could do them!
  8. 33:25. Fairly tough again, particularly my last two GRUNTLED and CLOWDER. I particularly liked wok for GIANT PAN.

    I always like to see AITCH written down to remind me I’m right in not pronouncing it HAITCH!

  9. Five over par, but delighted to finish. For most of the solve, I didn’t think I would.

    Don’t think I knew CLOWDER or the required meaning of WIG, and was lucky to have learned ERI yesterday. Also managed to convince myself that DONCASTER HORSES were a thing, then very sensibly changed it to DONCASTER PONIES, until I eventually parsed the clue and remembered the soccer team.

    Rewarded for perseverance in the end, and enjoyed the whole thing immensely. Thanks setter and Jack.

  10. I’ve often said this without thinking that GRUNTLED was still in use. DNK CLOWDER but knew it wasn’t CHOWDER and eventually saw the parsing. Got POTAGE early but the clue seemed a bit of a mess. Otherwise I enjoyed this, taking 50 minutes. I guess COD LOOK WHO’S TALKING followed by DONCASTER ROVERS.
  11. Also found this a challenge.Surprising that many of us including myself had never come across clowder.Murders,charms etc but nothing for the common moggie.For your erudition I discover there is also a pounce and for feral cats a destruction
    2. Cats being such self-sufficient creatures, it seems a rather redundant word. We’ll gloss over your post title, which I think might point in quite another direction! (but made me laugh)
      2. I had completely forgotten about “pounce”; we used damp white bread to clean up our pencil drawings at Art College.
  12. There were some gimmes here, as noted above. I biffed a couple – 10a, 25a – and took a while to get 9d (my LOI) but found that a lot of the southern half snowballed for me. Not the easiest, so I’m happy with 11m 49s.
  13. Another tough puzzle, but at least I managed to complete this one, albeit taking 68 minutes in the process. FOI SUN, LOI DONCASTER ROVERS as I’d carelessly biffed GREAT PANDA for 3d and spent a while trying to fit DENVER BOOT into 10a. Eejit! I’d also never heard of CLOWDER and had to rely on WP. Tried to build happiness around an OINK for a while but became gruntled eventually. An enjoyable hour and a bit. Thanks setter and Jack.
    1. Thank heavens I was not alone in my discovery of this species!
      I worked out the cat thing eventually, but a bit worried about myself here.
      1. I guess there’s only the two of us!! There’s still comfort in not being alone though 🙂
  14. I hope this trend doesn’t continue for the rest of the week, or I won’t be finishing Friday’s before Saturday. A lot of my 44 minutes spent looking blankly at the blanks in the mostly blank bottom half – some sort of brain freeze, I suppose, because LOOK WHO’S.. was not that hard, even if sorting out what was and was not anagram fodder wasn’t am easy task. CLOWDER from wordplay: a word clearly warped in from an alternate timeline because it certainly wasn’t in my dictionary yesterday. The collective name for (domestic) cats before today was a fartoomany. Not sure I’ve ever seen cats massed in any significant numbers that weren’t ripping bits out of each. Appalling creatures, amongst very few that consistently kill for fun. They only do that cute thing to fool people into providing room service when they can be bothered to lay off their local biocide.
  15. I have no patience with these ‘inkhorn’ terms for collections – the ones invented by scholar wannabees, which no real people ever use.
    1. If you were in Australia right now, you’d perhaps appreciate that the collective term for bankers is “a wunch”.
  16. Hell has no cellar space deep enough, for those who think it is clever to produce totally spurious words for several of a thing… murders, charms, clowders, etc etc etc. Every last one of them should be consigned to the oblivion they came from, and replaced en masse with “a lot of” or “many”

    None of them has ever performed a useful purpose; and perpetrating this sort of nonsense is right up there with arson in her majesty’s shipyards, imo, and should meet the same fate

    1. Sorry, I think there is room for a lot more. How about a heep of Dickens novels, for starters? Or an oread of crossword solvers?
  17. 30 mins. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t on the wavelength, although my time wasn’t helped by my drifting off a little in the middle of it. It took me a long time to see CLOWDER, and you can count me as another who despises such manufactured collective nouns. I finished off with WHISKERY after AITCH.
  18. In addition, I don’t know what’s wrong with “some”. It was certainly good enough for Baldrick when Blackadder was trying to teach him how to count.
  19. 50 min – after about half an hour was completely stuck resorted to aids, which still got me nowhere till I eventually noticed that I’d biffed GREAT at 3dn and HITCH at 23dn, enabling me to finish with 1dn LOI.
    I had heard of 18ac (possibly from a shoe-off review of Cats) so no problem there.
  20. Heavens, one for the home team. I actually guessed CLOWDER from the wordplay, but I needed aids to locate the DONCASTER ROVERS and of course, DIDDUMS. Those two aren’t transatlantic travelers, I don’t think. At least, they never washed up near me. In retrospect, the Rovers were something that could be deduced form the wordplay, as the result looks like it might be a side/team. Mea culpa. DIDDUMS, on the other hand, doesn’t look like anything at all. Aagrh. Anyway, regards and better luck to me tomorrow.
  21. Gruntled is a word coined I suspect by P.G.Wodehouse. At one time the ODQ only had one of his quotations. Something like “I could see that although he wasn’t disgruntled he was far from gruntled”. Now of course there are lots and rightly so.

    Wil Ransome (not signing in since I can never manage to do so on my phone)

  22. 15:53 – slightly faster than yesterday, but still way off the pace.

    CLOWDER rang a vague bell: just enough for me not to feel the need to check for alternatives to LOW at any rate. Apparently it’s a variant of “clutter”, and I don’t see why we should have to stick with this obscure word when a “clutter of cats” sounds both apposite and intelligible.

  23. Well, once again, my Monday has happened on a Tuesday. Yesterday’s had me beaten, but this one was quite manageable. Not sure of time, but probably somewhere between half an hour and thirty minutes, which is about average for me.

    CLOWDER was worked out from wordplay, but then turned up in a dusty corner of my memory, meaning that I didn’t agonize over it. AT RANDOM held me up for a while, because I got all excited about fundamental particles (especially with that penultimate “o”) and was sure there was one that fit (up quark? No. Mu or pi meson? No. Xi baryon? Perhaps…). But, alas, I had hold of the wrong end of the stick. Still, I live in hope of seeing greater geekiness in the Times cryptic.

    A few clues (SUN, WATT, SLATED) were a bit too simplistic for my liking, but I did enjoy AITCH.

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