Times Cryptic 26990

88 comments on “Times Cryptic 26990”

1. ….as I was able to recall ‘enthalpy’ from nearly 50 years ago. However, the whole puzzle was rather difficult, and I took about 50 minutes to finish. Fortunately, the fame of George Best extends even to the US, leaving ‘equity’ as the only clue to really give difficulty. I had seen ‘Ironsides’ before in a previous puzzle.

   Edited at 2018-03-20 03:21 am (UTC)

2. ENTHALPY was known to me (mainly via Scrabble studies, and I did see it played over the board on one occasion), but I had most difficulty with the S-A-E at 12a. Almost plumped for SOAVE (something like 0 in SAVE) but that isn’t fizzy, and STATE (for ‘say’) was a possible biff, best avoided.
3. Similar trouble to aphis, having guessed the sciency one. Thought of STATE, thought of SOAVE – didn’t like either, but couldn’t see anything else, so looked it up and kicked myself for not sticking with my first thought SH***.

   A victory to the setter. Actually, rather pleased about the ENTHALPY one, as it gives us space for an arty/Classical dodgy one down the line. And these words are fun for the dialogue they provoke.

   Edited at 2018-03-20 03:23 am (UTC)

4. After our action-packed (!) NYC meetup last week, I resolved to take Keriothe’s advice and do the puzzle more regularly. Tonight was my first attempt, so naturally I was a bit disheartened when the stopwatch reached 10 minutes and I had only one answer in. (NAILS, I believe.)

   Gradually, I was able to crack the lower-left corner and start working my way up. At about 28 minutes I reached what is, for me, the sign that I’ve managed to do a decent job: eight clues left, four across, four down. It took only two minutes to do the first six of these, yet three more to do the last two — SHALE being my last in, and little more than a hopeful guess.

   *

   I found this puzzle to be quite do-able. Lots of helpful crosses (the U at FLAMBEAU/EQUITY comes to mind) and biffable answers. I don’t usually keep track, but this is probably around my best time for a puzzle to date, even with the 10-minute stupor.

   I was reminded of something I said at last Thursday’s meetup: I’m incredibly poorly-read and un-worldly, and despite this I have a knack for retaining words and bits of culture I have only seen in passing and likely know nothing about. I couldn’t tell you how I knew, for example, COMMISSAR and ENTHALPY, but they snapped into my mind as if they were part of my everyday lexicon.

   What a strange machine is the brain, and what a lovely mirror into its inner workings is the cryptic crossword!

   1. Welcome +Jeremy but maybe not if you, as a relative neophyte are going to show up people like me in completing a tricky puzzle in 33mins!!
      1. Hardly a neophyte. I’ve been doing cryptics for 17 years and the London Times puzzle for about 8. Most days I can’t finish!
   2. Welcome, +jeremy. Although I see you have been contributing occasionaly for a couple of years perhaps we shall hear more regularly from you in future?
   3. Welcome Jeremy – hope to hear much more from you

      I was like you – poorly read but with a memory that retained nearly everything (not so good these days!) Keep doing the puzzles and your knowledge will improve

      You may well be good at bar crosswords like Mephisto

   4. Great to meet you Jeremy, it was fun! Nice picture.
5. This was just work for me. Steady work, but work none-the-less. I knew Enthalpy, but struggled with my spelling – how many Ms and Ss in Commissar, is it Angle- or Angle-worm, and a couple others. I should have paid better attention in grade school I guess. Nice blog, and Happy Spring to one and all.

   Edited at 2018-03-20 04:18 am (UTC)

6. Well, Im glad you had to look up enthalpy, Jack! So did I. Thanks for Capt Kidd. I originally had skipping, based on Skip. Bodice Ripper was another that threw me, as did Ironsides.
7. Everything but BODICE RIPPER and, of course, ENTHALPY after 20something minutes, then a lot of time running through the alphabet for the former, and a lot more time trying to figure out the wordplay for the latter, and shutting down at maybe 34′. Then waiting for the train 3 hours later I took another look, immediately saw (but did not parse) BODICE RIPPER, figured out how 7 worked, and saw that there was only one possible way to distribute the remaining letters. ‘Analytical system’ gave me pause, at first, as I think of REDUCTIONISM as more of a philosophical stance, but no problem. Good puzzle.
8. I saw this as simply PA + ELLA (a girl), the definition being ‘a dish’, both articles being necessary for a natural surface.
   1. Yes, that’s the way I would have parsed it but for Myrtillus’s recent comments (if I understood them correctly). As I believe he’s a distinguished setter himself I’m trying to incorporate his views into my way of thinking but perhaps on this one I have over-egged it a bit. I hope he will let us have his thoughts a little later after his breakfast.

      Edited at 2018-03-20 06:21 am (UTC)

      1. I am flattered. My suggestion was to apply the ‘is’ test – i.e. you put ‘is’ (or similar equality) between the bits you want to equate and see if it sounds right. This is what Kevin has done and I did.
         Ella is ‘a girl’ (tick). Paella is ‘a dish’ (tick). And just for good measure, Pa is ‘The old man’ (tick). Often ‘Pa’ is just ‘old man’ which is ok on the basis of “one’s Pa” is “one’s old man”.
         1. Thanks for clarifying the ‘is’ test. I’m now concerned that I missed that previously or (more likely) that I have forgotten it although it could only have been a few weeks since we discussed it.
            1. A (slightly) interesting case is: “Best” is “Man U footballer” (tick ?? – not really).
               One argument could be “Best” is really “a Man U footballer”. But I am ok in missing the “a” as I justify it using the headline approach – e.g. “Man U footballer, George Best, was drunk on Wogan”. In this case the two are clearly being equated without the need for the “a”.
               But I do think he is an ex-footballer.
               1. No, he’s resting
9. DNF … I could see the ENTHALPY clue was an anagram but couldn’t sort out the fodder and certainly didn’t know the word. Too hard for me.

   Not helped by also being unable to see SNEERS — ‘wise folk’ just doesn’t trigger ‘seers’ for me.

   The rest was enjoyably solved in par time

10. A tough one, coming in at 58 minutes. 7d also my LOI, but that wasn’t helped by my inability to come up with 5a, thinking of “snarks” and “snides” and all sorts of other things but only eventually SNEERS. At that point I wrote in ENTHALPY, which I’d had pencilled under its anagram fodder in the margin for about twenty minutes… It did feel likely, but I wasn’t sure it was right until I came here.

    Apart from those, the crossers of 20d BLIGHT (I couldn’t get “plague” out of my head) and the 27a footballer were the toughest for me. I’ve heard of George Best, but I didn’t know he played for Man U. In my defence, during my lifetime he was probably most famous for being rat-arsed on Wogan.

    Thanks to Jack for the enlightenment, especially on IRONSIDES, which stands out as probably most egregious among my lacking GK…

11. 45 mins to DNF on the Sneers/Enthalpy crossers – with yoghurt, granola, etc.
    No croissant! When one would have been so fitting.
    I hope if I had not given up on Sneers, I might have had enough checkers to guess where the rest of ThePanLy went.
    I’m not very keen on ‘hesitation’ on its own as the clue for ‘Er’ or ‘Um’ and we had both today.
    Thanks setter and Jack.
    1. …. and Vera Lynn 101 today
12. After failing yesterday by not knowing HARDIHOOD (I got Hardiwood instead), as an engineer it’s nice to see the boot firmly on the other proverbial foot with ENTHALPY. 27 minutes. Snigger.

    Edited at 2018-03-20 08:36 am (UTC)

13. 21 min 45 secs with two wrong. Angleworm for Angleworm and Stall for Shale.

    Done on iPhone SE on train. Getting the hang of doing it this way.

14. I’m the anonymous IPhone SE user
15. Who would have thought it – thermodynamics in the Times and not an obscure poet in sight. How things have changed – Carnot will be overjoyed

    Steady top to bottom solve of a largely straightforward puzzle

16. Add me to the list of those who couldn’t work out ENTHALPY (entropy I know but ran out of energy) and couldn’t do SNEERS without it. Otherwise 26.53, with snags in all four corners.
    I spent some time on 20d convinced it was BLIGHT but wondering where the removed UM had been. Surely not? Anyway, a blighter is a person, not a thing (Snoopy), so that didn’t help either.
    I wonder whether us chaps should consider a BODICE RIPPER romantic now that it’s more likely a potential lawsuit. Advice please – I’m having trouble keeping up.
17. SNEERS and ENTHALPY left. I just googled the anagram as none of the letter combinations looked particularly obvious and life’s too short.
18. Another DNF on the SNEERS/ENTHALPY crossers. As sotira says the latter was obviously an anagram, but there are numerous ways of constructing a set of fodder that might do the job and it’s not clear what the definition is. So the clue might as well have read ‘word you don’t know that is an anagram of some letters’. As sawbill says, life’s too short.
    1. It was (is) a word I don’t know, I decided it was an anagram and (finally) realized what the anagrist was: the letters E T A P H N Y L. I had E_T_A_P_. For the life of me I can’t see where to insert the T H Y L except where they in fact go.
       1. See below: I never realised what the anagrist was because I thought the definition was ‘heat’.
          1. Whereas I never knew what the definition was. Well, I never knew whether it was ‘heat’ or ‘heat content’. But I finally saw (well, thought) that the anagrist was THEPANLY, and with the checkers, yatta yatta.
             1. Yes fixing on a definition was my mistake, although it was more a case of deciding that ‘content of’ must be a wordplay indication, which then meant that ‘heat’ must be the definition and I had to take something away from ‘the pan’ to get my anagrist. The definition could have been ‘flamingo’ for all it was ever going to help me in any way with the clue.
19. Obviously, as one of the regularly-indulged smart-alec classicists whose scientific training stopped at O-level, it seemed to me that there was a word here which belonged in a completely different puzzle, however: a) I don’t get to decide what counts as “normal” vocabulary or “general” knowledge, so I accept this is likely to happen occasionally, especially if scientific terms are given a fair crack, and b) (presumably after some thought from the setter/editor) the difficult word is clued as an anagram, and one with five potential checkers already in place in a nine letter word (at least once a solver has decided that SNAGES, say, looks even more unlikely a word than ENTHALPY and cracked 5ac). Anyway, despite being only half-convinced, I went with the word which looked most closely related to entropy.
    1. You make fair points but to the solver who doesn’t know the word it’s not clear that the definition isn’t ‘heat’. Taking ‘content’ to be part of the wordplay I can see three possible combinations of eight letters that contain all the checkers. This is a complication.

       Edited at 2018-03-20 09:50 am (UTC)

       1. Yep. I was treating ‘content’ as part of the wordplay. It would never have occurred to me that there was a word meaning ‘heat content’

          Edited at 2018-03-20 10:03 am (UTC)

          1. I can’t say with certainty that it would never have occurred to me: if I had devoted a significant proportion of my morning to finding a likely-looking word that is an anagram of HPANEMT, HEPAEMPT or HPAEMPTY I might eventually have concluded that no such word exists, and reconsidered the definition. But on the other hand I might not, and what I can say with certainty is that as I contemplated this task on the train into Waterloo this morning the shortness of life loomed large in my consciousness.
             1. Elegiac stuff, keriothe. You just put me in mind of T S Eliot

                I have measured out my life in unsolved clues …

                (see, we can turn any sciency clue into a literary endeavour)

                Edited at 2018-03-20 10:48 am (UTC)

                1. I grow old, I grow old, I shall leave this bloody clue unsolved.
          2. The only thing that crossed my mind was gossip magazine filler.
             1. Do you mean that I have put down my Grazia magazine to read your comment? Really?
    2. My criticism is not the word itself or the use of an anagram per se. It is that the setter could help the solver with the letter sequence. I offer the following not as a great clue but as an indication of what I mean.

       Energy to play around? then relax before.

    3. But thalpein, to warm, as in Aeschylus!

       πῶς δ᾽ οὐ κλύω τῆς οἰστροδινήτου κόρης,
       590τῆς Ἰναχείας; ἣ Διὸς θάλπει κέαρ
       ἔρωτι, καὶ νῦν τοὺς ὑπερμήκεις δρόμους
       Ἥρᾳ στυγητὸς πρὸς βίαν γυμνάζεται.

       (Don’t worry, I didn’t really remember or think of any of this.)

       1. Cool!
          [To Prometheus ]
          Do you hear the voice of the maiden with cow’s horns?

          prometheus
          How could I not hear the gadfly-driven daughter of Inachus, who warmed the heart of Zeus with desire, and who now, hated by Hera, has been forced into this lengthy, exhausting flight?

20. Known from my thermodynamics (Zemansky was the text book we used) although I would have clued it as energy. Did this in 38 minutes with LOI SHALE, which first I thought might be SHAKE. Hopefully when they frack for one they won’t cause the other. ‘By Jove’, as used by Ken Dodd, would have been in common currency earlier in my life with ‘Gad’ only used by Lord Mauleverer. COMPADRE solved courtesy of Jim Reeves and ‘Adios Amigo’. COD to BODICE RIPPER, not that I’ve read many. On 27a, where did it all go wrong, George? Thank you Jack and setter for a tough but fair puzzle, at least if you were a physicist.

    Edited at 2018-03-20 09:31 am (UTC)

    1. Zemanksy! Yes, my text book too – a name that I can’t have heard for nearly half a century. This is all very apposite for the “two cultures”, really – after all in his original essay Snow pointed out that in scientific circles asking whether someone is familiar with the Second Law of Thermodynamics is equivalent to asking a humanities person whether they’ve read a Shakespeare play. Despite being familiar with enthalpy I did fine this tough going, though. LOI Bodice ripper after a little over 30 mins.
21. 21′ dnk LAM, vaguely rememberd ENTHALPY. SHALE a write-in due to continuing fracking debate. Spent time on BODICE RIPPER as had got wrong enumeration in head. Thanks jack and setter.
22. Same experience as many others, knew my thermodynamics but held up at the end by the ANGLEWORM nd SHALE crossers; after 35 minutes I checked to see if there was an ANGELWORM (there isn’t) and then stared at S-A-E options until a search made the penny drop on the controversial source of gas. good though provoking puzzle with no poets, plants or antelopes.
    1. What finally fixed the heat content of my Angleworm/Angelworm dilemma was the S-A-L crossers not leading to much. Then S-A-E offered way too many, but the trusty alphabet trawl….
23. Straightforward top-to-bottom solve, though SHALE took me a while to find. No problem with enthalpy, as long as I am not required to define it.
    Just in case anyone should dare to suggest that Georgette Heyer wrote bodice-rippers,I would point out that in all the books I only recall a single bodice-ripping being attempted, during which the girl shot him with a pistol. So there!
    1. I dared once, but learnt my lesson.

       PS Has any of you guys who read modern novels read The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch? I was stuck with it on my recent visit to the UK and soldiered on, and thought I would check out the collective wisdom here before going online to read reviews.

       1. It’s many a long year ago, but I read it and liked it. It was one of my favourite Iris Murdoch’s. I’ve turned to Wiki to remind me of the plot. “How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality… Yes of course I was in love with my own youth… Who is one’s first love?”
       2. Yes, read virtually all of Iris Murdoch and it is one of her best
       3. Thanks for the responses. I must be more out of sympathy with modern novels (or at least Murdoch’s) as I found it overblown. The situation was interesting, I liked the sea stuff, but the dialogue seemed so phony. Does anyone really talk like that?
          1. Only philosophers and their spouses!
             1. WRT The Sea, The Sea — I found it to be a disappointment, when I didn’t want it to be. Given Murdoch’s reputation I expected more, but found the work pale and lightweight. She had something to say, but did her upmost not to say it.

                Martin Hill

                1. Well put. It’s a pity the book isn’t as light in weight as the treatment.
24. Twenty-four minutes for this one, with which I’m quite pleased – it felt like heavy going at the time, but looking back I can’t see why. ENTHALPY/SNEERS were my LOsI – no problem with ENTHALPY, but I didn’t get the parsing for quite a while. IRONSIDES was new to me.

    And welcome, +Jeremy – nice to see a new face!

25. I struggled badly with this, being 3 minutes in before opening all the way down at 21A (COMMISSAR). That in turn led me nowhere, but the reasonably friendly SE corner got me the required leverage. Took me a while to see Captain Kidd though.

    When I finally got back to the top, I was stuck with the NW corner, and two other clues. I had to consider ANGLEWORM and its ethereal alternative as both were DNK. Wasted time at 2D trying to work round the damned OR for soldiers, rather than the usual men.

    After 18 minutes I finally cracked COD BODICE RIPPER, and was left with 7D which I’d spotted as a DNK anagrind earlier. Fortunately, with all the checkers in, the H could only really fit in one place, and I biffed successfully.

    22.25 but I felt I should have been quicker, though this wouldn’t have been out of place in the Championships.

26. Once I got going, which took about 5 mins, prob because I chose the wrong clues to look at first, this fell into place very steadily. FOI was CROISSANT, very suitable for someone just back from France. As a scientist, I felt that it was time that we had a clue that didn’t involve muses etc, so ENTHALPY highly justified. 11d I got the broker bit, but assumed that home = in, which left some problems with a rogue N for ages.
27. CARESS and MENIAL were my first 2 in. DISCIPLE and EQUITY brought up the rear. We had ENTROPY in another puzzle recently and I’d been trying to bring to mind the word for its related concept. 7d brought the Thermodynamics lessons of my youth back to mind and the helpful anagrist did the rest. I had to get SNEER first and that took a while. As Tim mentioned, SNAGES just didn’t seem to fit. Fortunately I had SHALE before the ANGLEWORM popped out of its burrow. Nice puzzle. 35:53. Thanks setter and Jack.
28. I was all done bar two in 11 minutes, got SEERS after another 3 or 4 then jacked it all in after another 5 or so staring at E?T?A?P?. I had the right letters but they refused to arrange themselves into what I would consider a proper word. I thought the clue was out of kilter with the rest of the puzzle.
29. You can rest assured that I will continue to tease you with physics and poetry, alternately delighting and infuriating the monocultural scientists and classicists!
    1. As a (I hope) not too monocultural scientist, I was pleasantly delayed by today’s offering. My only disappointment was that Pistol didn’t refer to the Henry 4 pt 2 character – that would have made it truly a bi-cultural crossword. Thanks for the enjoyment.
    2. All’s fair in puzzles – just don’t get carried away with the Earldom stuff!
30. I just about remembered ENTHALPY from my schooldays, but it was my second-to-last entry. The last one, which took about a minute by itself, was SNEERS at 5a, where the “of” confused me for a while. 7m 43s in all, suggesting that this wasn’t too tricky.
    1. Are you saluting yourself as per your avatar? horryd
       1. I think the avatar is me gazing helplessly into the distance… it’s the pose I adopt whenever a crossword asks me to name a shrub.
          1. Oops – the shrub comment was mine. That was probably obvious from context in any case.
          2. You are never going to learn any shrubs if you spend your life gazing across some barren land.
    2. Similar time and feeling here – was surprised to see all the comments/leaderboard times suggesting that this was a particularly difficult one!
31. Dear Mr. Speaks,

    I ran through your downstairs with some ease, but finished off upstairs in my limo, on the way to the dentist’s chair in downtown Shanghai. I would reckon about an hour’s worth.

    FOI 18dn DIVINE
    LOI after 12ac SHALE – 2dn MENIAL as I had lazily stuck in MENACE

    COD BODICE RIPPER

    WOD ENTELECHY

    Yours,

    Phyllis Stein

32. Merci to Myrtilus for the CROISSANT. No idea how I knew ENTHALPY except it wasn’t from Flanders & Swann (they gave us “entropy”). SHALE has been in the news lately with the Trump Interior Dept wanting to open up Western national parks to oil prospecting. The one that I was dubious about (but couldn’t be anything else) was NAILS. In NYC they’re known as salons and about 20 years ago they started opening up on every block in Manhattan. 19.29
    1. Didn’t know about–though hardly surprised by–the Interior Dept. You reminded me, though, of “La Folle de Chaillot”. (I mean it reminded me, of course.)
       1. It would indeed be rewarding to see Trump and all his Trumpettes tried for crimes against the planet in a Parisian cellar…
    2. Usually I can find your wavelength Kevin but I missed it this time. When I was a kid I saw a dreadful movie with Katherine Hepburn as La Folle but I now realize I don’t know the original drama at all. Another lacuna in my literary GK.
33. I double-dog-dare any setter reading this to include the world OISTRODINETIC (gadfly-driven) in a future grid.
    1. Right. Better make a note of that!
34. I am now having flashbacks to an exam in 1989.
    1. AD or BC?
       1. Could be either. After all, when you reach a certain age, everything tends to be divided into Things which definitely happened in the last week, and Everything Else.
35. BODICE RIPPER, indeed! That was my LOI, at the end of 45 minutes, after I realised that POLICE ?I?P?R was not going anywhere. ENTHALPY at least seemed vaguely familiar once I became aware that “sadly” was the anagrind and not the definition. A few more words not really in my vocabulary, but nothing really difficult.

    Edited at 2018-03-20 06:48 pm (UTC)

36. Around 20 minutes for this. DNK ENTHALPY but put it in from the anagram as plausible looking. My LOI was actually EQUITY, where I missed the old ‘ye’ at first. Regards.
37. Good crossword today – no obscure authors or composers!! Took a while to get “Sneers” as I thought unknown number would be X,Y or Z. Did not get “Reductionism” until I had r_d_c_i_n_s_ !! Otherwise all ok – I knew “enthalpy” from my old thermodynamics lectures – for once, being an engineer gave an advantage.
38. Similar experience to the blogger and a few others. All but 7dn went in in around 40 mins. I spent some time more on 7dn, did consider enthalpy at one point but there wasn’t even the faintest flicker of a glimmer of recognition which usually happens with the more obscure (to me) gk dredged from the farthest reaches. Didn’t really find the root or structure of the word consistent with anything else either, which can also sometimes help with unknown words. Nor was I confident I knew what the anagrist was (could it have been H A G E M P T Y – content or middle letters of the pan and largely with empty?) let alone how best to deploy it around the checkers. Touche bi-cultural setter, touche.
39. This tiresome word turns up every two or three months. It shouldn’t. When did anyone meet COMPADRE in English speech or text outside crosswords? (Or perhaps Hemingway, it’s so long since I read him I frankly cannot remember). There are plenty of foreign words that we have de facto adopted–signor, monsieur, for example. To my ears and eyes, COMPADRE is not one of them. Do we say ‘compagni’ or ‘camarades’ when talking of those Italians or Fenchmen? No, we don’t.
    1. Always interested to hear points of view, but your complaint would be better addressed to the lexicographers, not the Times setters.

       ALL the usual sources (Chambers, Collins and the Oxfords) list COMPADRE and if a word’s in any one of them it’s available for inclusion.

       The other examples listed by you are not in any of them so we should not expect them to appear. CAMARADERIE however has made it (again to all).

       Edited at 2018-03-21 06:52 am (UTC)

40. LOI was SHALE. I had thought first of SHAKE, as SAKE with Hydrogen gas in it. For definition, I thought that Shakers were maybe a silent order. But this seemed flimsy so I allowed myself a peak at the wiki definition of Shaker. Celibacy is the main requirement for adults, which seems arduous enough so I can’t believe they are mute as well. As is often the case, I need to look at the other end of the clue for the definition.
    COD: HONEST BROKER. If “house and home” for HONEST is original, my compliments to the composer for a magnificent conceit.

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