Times Cryptic 27440

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

At 32 minutes I found this quite straightforward although 12ac as my LOI gave me more trouble than it should have. I expect to see some very fast times from the speed-merchants.

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

Across
1 Intimate conclusion of plot not revealed (6)
CLOSET : CLOSE (intimate), {plo}T [conclusion]
5 Seabird crossing land offshore to find vegetation (4,4)
TREE FERN : TERN (seabird) containing [crossing] REEF (land offshore). I’d have sworn this came up very recently here but the latest I can find is in a Jumbo from January and I don’t think I was doing them at the time. Perhaps it was in an Everyman or Oldie Genius.
9 Treating children terribly, a patricide (10)
PAEDIATRIC : Anagram [terribly] of A PATRICIDE. Our US cousins have an extra A to find a home for.
10 Two couples rejected church’s corruption (4)
VICE : IV (two couples = four) reversed [rejected], CE (church). Roman numerals clued as ‘couples’ was a novelty when I first came across it in May this year  (three couples = VI) but it appeared as recently as 15th August (three couples = VI, again) so it’s beginning to wear a bit thin now.
11 You need time to get to know this fellow (8)
CELLMATE : A very good cryptic definition.
12 Region and former kingdom – it’s east of South America (6)
SUSSEX : S (south), US (America), SEX (it) with ‘east of’ as a positional indicator. The ancient Kingdom was ‘of Sussex’ or ‘of the South Saxons’. ‘Region’ is to take account of the sad state of affairs in which the proud historical County of Sussex no longer officially exists but has been divided into two parts going by the names West and East Sussex. This, like Trafford which came up last week, was yet another result of the act of butchery committed by The Blasted Heath.
13 One-time radical husband attempting to conceal baldness? (4)
WHIG : H (husband) in WIG [attempting to conceal baldness]. Forerunners of the Liberal Party.
15 Delivery of first Christmas meal, menu having changed (8)
EMMANUEL : Anagram [having changed] of MEAL MENU. Also spelt ‘Immanuel’ this was the child whose birth was foretold by the prophet Isaiah and in Christian tradition is identified with Jesus. It crops up in a number of Christmas carols, perhaps most notably:
Pleased as man with men to dwell,

Jesus, our Emmanuel
Hark! the herald angels sing,
“Glory to the newborn King”
18 Horse in literature in contortions through pain (8)
WRITHING : H (horse) contained by [in] WRITING (literature). H clued by ‘horse’ appeared in the puzzle I blogged last Tuesday when I said that it’s a reference to heroin rather than the quadruped. One of the commenters queried this, so I have checked the usual sources again this week but have still been unable find anything other than the drug under H for ‘horse’. It’s indirect, so perhaps a little naughty, but it has come up so many times over the years I don’t really notice it any more. Edit: On reading Viny1’s comment below I checked yet again that h / horse is not in Collins or Chambers, but it IS in the Concise Oxford, the Oxford Dictionary of English and Oxford Online (now called ‘Lexico’ for some reason). Of the Oxfords I had previously checked only the massive two-volume Shorter Oxford and made the mistake of assuming that it would contain everything that’s in the smaller Oxfords, apart from perhaps recent new additions which h / horse surely wouldn’t be. So now we can take it as official that it’s not an indirect drug reference and be thankful for that. Apart from the SOED thing, another lesson learnt from this is that one can’t rely on Chambers to include every single-letter abbreviation, even one that’s in common use – and that comes as something of a surpise to me! 
19 Some of clergy readers forming circle (4)
GYRE : Hidden in [some of] {cler}GY RE{aders}. I don’t recall meeting this word but the answer was surely going to be hidden and I’d heard of ‘gyral’ and ‘gyroscope’ in connection with spinning in circles so it seemed a safe bet.
21 Laundry appliance no good with men’s clothing (6)
MANGLE : NG (no good) contained by MALE [with men’s clothing]
23 Downgrading of French proposal (8)
DEMOTION : DE (of – French), MOTION (proposal)
25 One squad’s short of a pair (4)
ITEM : I (one), TE{a}M (squad) [short of a]. A couple ‘going steady’.
26 Returning old pack, tore off a strip and added more (10)
ELABORATED : O (old) + BALE (pack) reversed [returning], RATED (tore off a strip – told off)
27 Brown beverage to take home from audition (8)
BRUNETTE : Sounds like (from audition) “brew” (beverage) “net” (take home – pay)
28 Philatelist ultimately understands stamps (6)
TREADS : {philatelis}T [ultimately], READS (understands – my reading of the clue)
Down
2 Were pound to plummet, this contract could provide support (5)
LEASE : LEASE (contract) becomes EASEL (support) if the L (pound) were to move to the end of the word (plummet – in a Down clue). A rare example of a definition in the middle of a clue.
3 Extra information from border not amounting to much (9)
SIDELIGHT : SIDE (border), LIGHT (not amounting to much). A piece of incidental information on a subject.
4 Bitten by sheep, a graduate leaves under wraps (3,3)
TEA BAG : A + BA (graduate) contained [bitten] by TEG (sheep). SOED has TEG as  a  sheep in its second year, or from the time it is weaned until its first shearing; a yearling sheep. It’s also the wool of the sheep. Great definition!
5 Fifty percent of members bound to participate in this event? (5-6,4)
THREE-LEGGED RACE : An excellent cryptic clue although perhaps a little easy once the enumeration has been noted, especially with a checker or two in place
6 I didn’t quite catch that   dance (6-2)
EXCUSE-ME :  In the days of formal dances a ‘ladies excuse-me’ was an opportunity for a woman to approach a man of her choice and ask him to dance with her. This has come up before. The first part of the clue leads us to EXCUSE ME without the hyphen by way of a secondary definition.
7 More than one prime   game (5)
FIVES : Two meanings, five being a prime number
8 Rogue trader ballyhoo accompanies always (9)
RACKETEER : RACKET (ballyhoo), E’ER (always)
14 Woman consumer stopped by force some time later (9)
HEREAFTER : HER (woman), EATER (consumer) containing [stopped by] F (force)
16 Horrific experience in Black Sea for Caesar (9)
NIGHTMARE : NIGHT (black), MARE (sea, for Caesar – yer actual Latin)
17 Officer holding strange belief makes provision for safety aboard (4,4)
LIFE BELT : LT (officer) containing [holding] anagram [strange] of BELIEF
20 Tax this writer’s column (6)
IMPOST : I’M (this writer’s), POST (column). Usually this is customs duty.
22 Young rascal placing bets loses second grand (5)
GAMIN : GAMIN{g} (placing bets) [loses second grand]
24 Upright object supporting leg (2,3)
ON END : ON (leg – cricket),  END (object) with ‘supporting’ as positional indicator

54 comments on “Times Cryptic 27440”

  1. Thirty-two minutes for me too, with the very good CELLMATE a satisfying way to finish. I missed the ‘Two couples rejected’ bit of 10a, even though we have had VI for ‘three couples’ recently as you point out and GYRE was new, though hardly could have been anything else.

    Sorry, I may be looking at only the draft version of your most excellent blog (on a par with Schubert’s Symphony No. 8), but it looks like from 23a to 28a are missing.

    Not too difficult (unlike one in particular yesterday – still recovering), but pleasant enough and I did like the ‘leaves under wraps’ def. and ‘brew net’ homophone.

    Thanks to setter and blogger.

    1. Many thanks for pointing out the omission, now corrected. During the final edit I decided to delete an additional comment I’d made about MANGLE at 21ac and must inadvertently have deleted more than I intended!
  2. I learned this from Yeats’s “Second Coming”, which begins:

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Edited at 2019-08-27 02:57 am (UTC)

    1. From which in turn I was able to Ninja Turtle it thanks to the estimable Robert B Parker’s Spenser novel “The Widening Gyre” 🙂
      1. Ninja Turtle? I’ve seen this once or twice here, and haven’t understood (I do know, vaguely, of the cartoon). It may be in the glossary, for all I know, but I’m denied access to the glossary for some reason, and will be until I can find time to consult our IT boffin.
        1. It is indeed in the glossary with this definition:

          Ninja Turtling – divining the existence of something highbrow or classical from something distinctly not, as in: “Of course I’ve heard of Donatello. He’s the one with the purple mask..” Coined by Keriothe in this 2018 blog (https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Ftimes-xwd-times.livejournal.com%2F1884640.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNEcor6zNjvAOF_vAQfdj1f7fPXO-Q)

          The glossary is very entertaining, Kevin, as well as informative. Definitely worth checking out if you can get it sorted

    3. I remember a version of the last two lines allegedly coming from Bertrand Russell.
    4. He had a Thing about them:

      THE GYRES! the gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth;
      Things thought too long can be no longer thought,
      For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,
      And ancient lineaments are blotted out.

      1. Yes he did seem to have a thing about them. “Pern in a gyre” comes in Sailing to Byzantium.
  3. A slow start–FOI WHIG, SOI GYRE– and a slow finish, with CLOSET (LOI), SIDELIGHT (POI), & CELLMATE all recalcitrant. I’m not sure why CELLMATE took me so long; ‘time’ had suggested prison from the start. I liked a number of the clues for their misleading parsing, like 15ac, 27ac, 16d; they had me fooled, anyway.
  4. My LOI was the same as Jackkt’s.
    I had to look up TEG before inking in the answer.
    Nice one.
    2. I have a childhood memory of being force marched up the Teg’s Nose near Macclesfield by a seriously sturdy aunt.
  5. COVERT was bunged in early at 1ac and was my undoing, CLOSET being the solution to my problem.

    Time 38 minutes, I should have been nearer 30, but for that nonsense.

    FOI 6dn EXCUSE ME

    LOI 3dn SIDELIGHT

    COD 11ac CELLMATE – however not applicable to Jeffrey Epstein.Terrific clue.

    WOD 5dn THREE-LEGGED RACE

    Lovely puzzle. Grand blog!

  6. 14:10 … though with a daft double-typo. Quality stuff, with SUSSEX, NIGHTMARE and BRUNETTE especially enjoyed.

    And I’m clearly not alone in finishing on CELLMATE (or ‘callmate’, as I typed it, overtyping the final e of lease). Cheers, both

  7. Thanks! Definitely a concept in search of a word. I’ll call on the boffin as soon as I can.
      1. Thanks, but no; it’s the same thing as always, something to do with my password, which may not have been updated, or something.
  8. Unable to concentrate on much today, with sound of the gallows being erected keeping me awake all night, but I managed to finish this in 28 minutes with SUSSEX LOI. I didn’t understand SIDELIGHT fully, so thank you Jack. And to setter.
    1. See my post below – what a contrast with our youth when football teams were local and the maximum wage was £100 a week.
    2. It will be a VERY sad day if Bolton Wanderers go out of business. Fingers crossed for a Stokes-like resurgence.
  9. 30 mins pre-brekker.
    And several of those struggling with the brunette (if only).
    Mostly I liked the cryptic defs: 3-leg race and Cellmate. Which reminded me of the old joke about the only 20 stone man to ride a Derby winner.
    Now, more Yeats.
    Thanks setter and great blog J.
  10. Enjoyed this puzzle although not particularly difficult

    Knew GYRE from the Jabberwocky – none of this highbrow stuff for me

    MANGLE a trip down memory lane. My job was to turn the wheel of the mangle as my mother fed the wet clothes into it

  11. As dorsetjimbo noted…..

    14’45”, delayed by putting in EASEL instead of LEASE. CELLMATE took a while (time), as did SUSSEX. EMMANUEL is the name of my church, and means ‘God with us’. Only knew of FIVES from reading Billy Bunter when a child.

    Thanks jack and setter.

    And the very best to you and your town boltonwanderer.

  12. I found that rather enjoyable. Thanks, Jack for an enjoyable blog as well.
    Growing up in SUSSEX I remember Mum putting clothes through the MANGLE.
    I held myself up by initially putting PARDON ME for 6d, thus making a mess of PAEDIATRIC for a while.
    SUSSEX was my COD.
  13. Thought I was back last week but a week off with teenage kids does not leave much quiet time. So today back on train to Glasgow…

    50 mins or thereabouts on paper. Spotted GYRE early though wasn’t 100% sure. Steady solve around the grid with NW holding up longest. Had SECRET at 1a for ages which made 3d tricky. Not sure of SIDELIGHT until CELLMATE fell followed by LEASE and finally CLOSET.

  14. 32 mins. Took a while to get going – thought I was in for a repeat of yesterday. But then I was up and running. LOI brunette. Thanks jack.
  15. 18 minutes or so, during which I had a grid with gaps in all four quarters.
    As Jimbo notes, Humpty Dumpty in Alice is my source for GYRE. “To ‘gyre’ is to go round and round like a gyroscope”. With others quoting Yeats and Robert B Parker I am at a loss to decide which of us is Ninja Turtling!
    First in the (fortunately very easy) long one, last CELLMATE, but it might just as well have been SUSSEX, IMPOST, ELABORATED or BRUNETTE.
    “Leaves under wraps” was cute.
  16. 9:33. Mostly very quick but then a few slower ones at the end, mostly the tricky SUSSEX.
    I don’t see the drug-related H for ‘horse’ as indirect: they are both slang terms but nonetheless directly synonymous. We wouldn’t object to ‘moolah’ being defined as ‘tin’, would we? Not that it means it’s any more right or wrong than the racing abbreviation.
  17. I’m a little fuzzy-headed from a long weekend at a 25th anniversary party, otherwise I might have made shorter work of this than 42 minutes. Still, at least I managed to get there in the end, and it’s good practice before I catch up with the weekend’s various prize puzzles…

    Had a few gaps in my knowledge here—EMMANUEL, IMPOST and GAMIN (though I knew the feminine “gamine” as an adjective, so that wasn’t too hard to derive.)

    The ones that took me the longest, though, were 27a BRUNETTE, where I’d got the rough idea but was trying to shove “TEE” in at the end rather than using it as a “BRU” at the start, and CELLMATE, where I just didn’t clock the relevance of “time” until a happily short alphabet run gave me the answer.

  18. I did the same as Vinyl and got the wrong end of the stick with LEASE/easel which unglued that side of things for a while. The Christmas carol I always liked was O Come O Come EMMANUEL but it may have gone out of style because it goes on to say “and ransom captive Israel”. 18.09
    1. I think a lot of traditional carols tend to get sung without bothering with the words much, though “O Come Emmanuel”, blending OT prophecy with a pious hope for the conversion of the Jews does push ecumenical manners a bit. Personally, I cringe at the last verse, with O come O come Adonai” forcing us to stretch Adonai over 6 notes and four syllables.
    2. In similar vein I have always liked the full version of the National Anthem. These two verses are seldom included these days!

      O Lord our God arise,
      Scatter our enemies,
      And make them fall!
      Confound their politics,
      Frustrate their knavish tricks,
      On Thee our hopes we fix,
      God save us all!

      Lord grant that Marshal Wade
      May by thy mighty aid
      Victory bring.
      May he sedition hush,
      And like a torrent rush,
      Rebellious Scots to crush.
      God save the Queen!

      I mean, it isn’t as if we don’t HAVE any rebellious Scots to crush, is it?

      1. Anthony Powell–at least, his narrator Nick Jenkins–considered this the best part of the anthem.
  19. 10m 20s, slowed down quite a bit by putting PARDON ME for 6d, therefore rejecting the possibility of an anagram in 9a and trying to work out how ?P?F or P?FE could mean ‘land offshore’ in 5a, as well as scratching my head at 12a beginning with an O. Took me longer to figure out the error than it should have done.

    LOI was IMPOST, a word I wasn’t familiar with, but I couldn’t think of anything more plausible.

    Thanks for explaining the Latin in 16d, I had no idea what was going on.

  20. ….by a man from Suthics (The Two Ronnies).

    I got down to 12A after 8 minutes, and threw in SUSSEX at the end after alpha-trawling, and without a clue why – thanks Jack.

    Perversely, my FOI appears to have been most other people’s LOI !

    FOI and COD CELLMATE
    LOI SUSSEX
    TIME 9:35

  21. Back after a short break, and on a day when I nearly failed to complete the QC. Form is temporary they say and I completed this over lunchtime.
    LOI was LEASE after CLOSET as I covertly copied Horryd.
    The Three Legged Race got me started and I managed to parse SUSSEX after a long look. DNK GYRE.
    Very enjoyable puzzle.
    David
    1. Copying eh! ‘You naughty, naughty little man!’

      You have ‘Form’ alright!

      Edited at 2019-08-27 06:25 pm (UTC)

  22. 42:43 I got really stuck on my LOI brunette. That added considerably to my time. Like others, gyre was known primarily as something the slithy toves do in the wabe, along with gimbling, when it hits brillig o’clock. I liked paediatric and thought cellmate was very good. Wasted time trying to remember and then fit Rocinante into 18ac. DNK sidelight and was hesitant to enter impost which I wasn’t sure about either.
  23. Like Matt, I’m feeling fuzzy after a long weekend golfing in the relentless Lincolnshire sun and carousing with abandon in the evenings, so catching up with the crosswords since Saturday is challenging my remaining brain cells. The RHS went in without too much difficulty, with GYRE associated with mimsy borrowgroves, although SUSSEX, RACKETEER, FIVES and TREE FERN held out for a while. WHIG and CLOSET(del COVER) finally got me moving on the LHS again, and with a bit of WRITHING and MANGL(E)ing, I was soon left with BRUNETTE as my LOI. A tortuous 51:45. Thanks setter and Jack.
      1. I can believe it, but then I have just spent a weekend in the scorching desert sun of, er, Abergavenny…
        1. My niece lives in Abergavenny. Lovely place, but as you say, not famous for sunshine 🙂
  24. Finished in a normal time, ending with SUSSEX which I didn’t know was once a kingdom, nor did I know it has since been divided in two, so not a county but a region. It did match the wordplay and it fit, so in it went. Also thought about EASEL, but then solved 1AC and realized the setter wanted LEASE. And that extra “A” in PEDIATRIC always looks jarring to me. Regards.
  25. When it’s got Collins, Chambers or Merriam-Webster in front of it, that’s when. Is there a reason why setters don’t just stick to anything published by Oxford? Mr Grumpy
  26. I need to take issue with Jack’s comments on the division of Sussex – this long predates The changes in the 70’s (see the Wikipedia entry for East Sussex for example). They did mess with the boundaries at this time though – I live in Mid-Sussex which moved from East to West (if you follow what I’m saying…).

    Mark

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