Times Cryptic 27524

75 comments on “Times Cryptic 27524”

1. Happy to finish this in reasonable time, especially as my first pass through the across clues only yielded a few. I had no idea of the parsing of BACKWATER, putting it in from the crossers, so thanks for the explanation, Jack. Have we had that in another puzzle recently?

   Thanks, Jack, for the early blog and to the setter for a puzzle with little UK-centric knowledge required – my reckoning is that you just need to know about the Tate (which is used even in Australian crosswords) and I’m assuming “busy” as policeman is UK usage.

2. ….not seeing much on the first pass, only to start speeding up when I got a few crossing letters, and finishing in 27 minutes. So easier than yesterday’s for me, although not for everyone.

   I thought ‘leaner’ would mean more productive, not less, as in ‘leaner and meaner’.

   1. Collins gives prominence to the more positive meaning which rather surprises me as I’d have thought it was a modern one, but ‘lean times’ as in years of economic depression is surely a more traditional meaning? The dictionary has this too but further down the page.
      1. As in Pharaoh’s dream as interpreted by Joseph.
3. Did this in my hotel room before checking out, so I have no hard copy to refer to, but I do remember wondering about FETCH and BACKWATER, so thanks Jack for clearing those up. FETCH seems rather Mephistoey for a regular cryptic.
4. 20 minutes for this, with the same comments as everyone else.

   Note to setters/editor: Keep the Anglocentric stuff up! Got to keep those colonial types in their places.

   1. Hmmm … and maybe add some technobabble and obscure science terms to show how we’re keeping up with the times.
      1. Dear Mr. Starstruck,

         Take no notice of Lord Ulaca’s Anglocentricity!

         Computers these days are capable of most things, once they have the data. Chess coming to mind.

         Would it be possible to get AI to solve the new GK crossword – I believe it might be thus. Then gear it up to eventually solve a QC?

         And by 2050 to solve the 15×15?

         It could be called Magoo2.0 or Verlaine2.5 or simply jacktt?

         Edited at 2019-12-03 07:46 am (UTC)

         1. I hate to say this, but a very good friend of mine who is high up in computer science at Imperial College, London is working on just such a project. The programme is currently quite good at anagrams, hidden/reverse hidden and double definition clues but struggles with the more esoteric. Long may it remain so, says I.
            1. It’s not Paul Field, is it? I only ask because I was at school with him and last I heard he was a professor of AI at Imperial, I think…

               I’ve often wondered about AI solving, and it’s always felt to me like we’ll be safe on the more esoteric clues that give the best penny-drop moments; it’s nice to hear that the machines are actually struggling on that score!

               1. Tony Field – I don’t know if it’s the same person but seems bit of a coincidence!
                  1. I think it may just be coincidence. They were a talented family, and his brother’s a professor too, but I don’t think any of them ever went by Tony…
      2. I say! That wouldn’t be cricket
         1. OK. We’ll call it HulacaK.
5. Similar experience to others, particularly being unable to parse BACKWATER, which would have been very tricky without the crossing letters. Thanks to Jack for explaining that one.

   COD to ROMANESQUE for the elegant surface.

6. Busy was a policeman, but way before the Peelers were formed.
   Ben Jonson’s ‘Barthol(o)mew Fair’, from memory, even stars Mistress Busy. Reminiscent of ‘Happy Families’.

   Jack’s parsing of 1dn was miraculous! Well done, Sir!

   Lord Ulaca – some of those ‘colonial types’ may soon quit NATO, and move into your neck of the woods!

   FOI 1ac BUSYBODY

   LOI 21dn ATTISHOO!

   COD 22dn BISTRO – it simply chimed with me. Ah! Bistro!

   WOD 25ac AUTODIDACT

   fyi There are also Tate Galleries in Liverpool and St. Ives, Cornwall, not Cambs.

   43 minutes

   1. True, but the clue specified ‘London’ as did I in my reference to two Tates.
      1. I was only doing a bit of advertising – note the fyi
      2. I find it a bit of a stretch at times to call the Tate Modern an attraction. It will always be Bankside Power Station to me of course. You can still admire Gilbert Scott’s original brickwork, and I quite like the new annexe, although it’s a pity they didn’t match the bricks, but I don’t feel the buzz I got in the MOMA, New York.
7. Just scraped in under 30 minutes. Thanks jackkt for FETCH and BACKWATER information. Not a lover of the BACKWATER clue; Erie is too removed from WATER.
   1. One of the definitions of ‘water’ in Collins is ‘any body or area of this liquid, such as a sea, lake, river, etc’. ‘Water’ is also used specifically to refer to a lake sometimes, as in Coniston Water. This seems pretty darned close to me!
      1. Ouch!
      2. Well, of course. But the point was which of the thousands of “waters” was meant, surely.
         1. I don’t think anyone’s going to be going through lists of lakes to solve this clue. I got there by reverse engineering the cryptic from the answer, which I got from definition and checkers. I’d be amazed if anyone did anything different.
            1. I’m different then, in that I didn’t bother with the reverse engineering bit. Just biffed.
               1. Right yes, what I really meant was that no-one was going to get it from the wordplay first!
8. My goal of 6 Verlaines exactly achieved today, despite being very exercised by TONS, where it took ages to let go of going = ON, thus trying vainly to find two opposite compass points that would surround it and work. Like others, signed off FEVER PITCH with a shrug and looked it up to learn something new, which is partly why we do this of course.
9. 18:42. Becalmed with 5 to go until I saw AUTODIDACT which led to STAGNATES and BEDLAM which got me to DOUBLE TAKE and my LOI PLAYTHING… annoyed that I hadn’t seen the obvious DBE from Hamlet earlier. DNK fetch for apparition. I liked the reverse cryptic BACKWATER and SIC, but OVERAWE best for the fun surface.
10. 27 minutes with penultimate OVERAWE and LOI AUTODIDACT, my COD. I’ve convinced myself I knew that meaning of ‘Fetch’ post event. If Nick Hornby got so depressed following Arsenal as described in FEVER PITCH, he should try supporting my mob through thick, thin and thinner. I didn’t parse BACKWATER. Decent puzzle. Thank you Jack and setter.
11. A word of warning to those headed for the championships—apparently it’s quite possible to make a stupid “typo” even with pen and paper. I managed to have EALRDOM in 19d for most of the puzzle, which made the SW corner rather harder than it should have been.

    Mind you, it was hard all round anyway, and took me 54 minutes. Had a lot of trouble getting started and it was only when 17 ROMANESQUE fell that I managed to get going properly after a few faltering starts elsewhere. (I watched The Naked Civil Servant last night, following up on a mention earlier this month—perhaps that’s what attracted me to 17’s surface…)

    Anyway. Cunning puzzle, I thought, and some lovely words. FOI 8a CUE, LOI 18d OVERAWE, COD 10a WARRANTY (though it might’ve been 1d BACKWATER if I’d parsed it at the time!) WOD AUTODIDACT.

12. 10:20. No dramas this morning. I didn’t know FETCH but I didn’t even notice while solving – just biffed it. I liked the clever BACKWATER.
    1. Maybe we should let the setter know that he should “stop trying to make FETCH happen”!
       1. LOL. In a TfTT that is a very niche reference!
13. 16 minutes. 1dn (not parsed by me) doesn’t seem entirely satisfactory: if ‘backwater’ was used in a clue, it would have been regarded as a rather unfair way to indicate the reversal of the name of a specific lake, especially as the one required isn’t normally called a ‘water’.
14. Twenty-three minutes, but I somehow managed to spell SCEPTIC with a K, despite parsing the “SCEPTre” bit. Ah well.

    I’m also quite sceptical of 1d. I think if you’re going to do this “reverse clueing”, the component parts have to fit together quite tightly, and “water” for “Erie” didn’t do it for me.

15. 10’48”, flying today, aided by one clue being very similar to the QC. Did not parse BACKWATER.

    Thanks jack and setter.

16. 20 mins; no dramas. Thanks jack.
17. … even with your explanation. No doubt I’m terminally thick.
    1. You’re not; far from it – it’s just a pickle of a clue. ‘So come to Eire’ = ‘In this way [you might] arrive at Eire’. In what way? Well, in backing – writing in reverse – the name of a body of water; in this case Lake Erie, or just Erie. So if you ‘back’ Erie, which is the ‘water’ in question, you get BACKWATER – which is somewhere dull. Phew! 🙂

       Edited at 2019-12-03 11:27 am (UTC)

    2. It is an unusual and slightly complicated clue.
       So how would you come to EIRE as an answer? You could reverse (i.e back) ERIE (which is an expanse of WATER ….a lake). A BACKWATER is somewhere dull. Hope this helps? Not everyone finds this clue wholly satisfactory ….. see various comments above.
18. Nope, didn’t parse BACKWATER, thanks Jack. I did know FETCH though from an excellent ghost story by Edith Wharton called All Souls in which a woman with a broken leg is immobilized in a snowbound house in Connecticut and everyone else in the house disappears. Nice and creepy. 14.06
19. What purpose does In serve? Otherwise all ok, stupidly putting in Warrants initially, thanks blogger and setter.
    1. I was misled by the “In”, thinking it was going to be an insertion type clue. However, I think it is supposed to read like “In [entering] base, almost halt [you get] uproar”. Plus it wouldn’t read correctly without “In”.

20. Struggled with AUTODIDACT which I think I knew and DOUBLE TAKE. Never seen the ‘shady’ clue before, though I’m sure it’s a chestnut, these things I haven’t seen before usually are.
    Should have been quicker with this one, but I did this while waiting for my car, and the Christmas muzak is driving me to distraction. ‘A Child is Born’ at the moment. Am tempted to wait outside in the cold instead. How do people work with that going on?
    1. When I worked in that sort of environment, I made an executive decision to hide the Christmas-themed CDs from my co-workers who thought the appropriate date to start playing them was around November 5th. Purgatory.
       1. Went to the supermarket early this morning fully expecting the little drummer boy and grandma got run over by a reindeer et al. Blessed silence. I asked the manager how come and he said overwhelming pressure from employees AND customers starting right after Thanksgiving last week.
          1. Hear hear! Or maybe Not hear! Not hear! It drives me mad that we get the same old stuff we have had for the last 20 years blared at us as we just want to do our shopping. It’s bad enough as a shopper. Having to endure it as a shop employee would have me quitting the job.
21. Entertaining puzzle without being too tricky. I didn’t know the FETCH, but obviously didn’t need to.
22. BUSYBODY, CUE and BEDLAM went straight in, but I drew a blank in the rest of the NW, and then found myself skipping around the grid trying to get a foothold, but only getting the occasional clue without being able to build on it. Eventually I was able to take advantage of FEVER PITCH and DOUBLE TAKE to fill in the NE and made a bit more progress. I was unable to parse 1d, but used it to get TONS, ROMANESQUE and WARRANTY(my LOI, eventually). I spent a couple of minutes trying and failing to parse it before submitting with fingers crossed. Didn’t know FETCH as an apparition. Liked DAUNTLESS and AUTODIDACT. 35:15. Thanks setter and Jack. Kudos on managing to parse BACKWATER!
23. I must confess to having a soft spot for this word. It appeared in the very first Times Crossword that I ever attempted as I began my slow graduation from the Telegraph sometime around 1990. I’d never heard the word before, but my good friend and crossword mentor Gordon Mathew guided me through the parsing which I seem to remember was very similar to today’s.

    Like others I didn’t spot Erie until after submission.

24. I had WARRANTS for WARRANTY. If there is an easy way to slip up I usually find it.

    COD: BACKWATER.

25. Similar experience to many solvers. The top left held me back, with backwater going in blind. Held back by thoughts of Ulster … Byulster (too short, I know). I have to add my voice to those who find the clue somehow unsatisfactory. I get it. But to work fully, Erie would have to be a generic word for lake or water. No?
26. Slight amendment to the blog, I think, though it’s so late no one will notice. For 5a to work – i.e. with the definition as a noun – I think we have to infer an acute accent at the end of the entry. (No idea how to do one on my laptop!)

    Plain sailing, from the bottom up, then a long delay caused by “seeing” sceptic, but entering sceptre, which made 14a an interesting challenge.

    1. True, but the accents do not show in the puzzle and we have a nifty script that lifts the answers out of the completed puzzle and plonks all but the explanation in the blog template (mohn, you are a wonder), so adding the capitalised accented E is not trivial. Well it’s trivial, just a bit of trivia I do not know.
       1. You can get an É by holding down Alt, then on the keyboard on the right typing 0201, then releasing Alt.

          I have a list of these things from the manual for Impression Style, RiscOS around 1994. Lots of useless stuff like Æ; the one I use most often is Alt-0189 for ½. There’s probably a list on the internet somewhere.

          1. Impression! Now there’s a blast from the past. I had an Archimedes A440/1 back then, if I recall correctly…

             (PS: For those on a Mac, just hold down shift+E for a little while. A little menu pops up above your cursor with a list of options including É… Seems a more humane option than remembering numbers…)

             1. What I get on my Mac when I press shift+e is EEEEEEEE. When I press Option + e and e, I get é (or á, í, ó, ú). But it doesn’t work for capital E. option+i, u, n, underline, plus the desired letter, gets respectively î ê ô â û, ü ë ä ï ö, ã õ ñ, è à ì ò ù .
                1. Ah. Is your Mac on an older OS? They added the “hold the button down” feature a few major releases ago (in Sierra, maybe?)
          2. Use of accents on upper case letters is optional in French, most people don’t bother.
             1. But it’s lower case – exposay – and the accent serves to differentiate between two English words. I understand that it’s difficult to work it into the blog, but it’s worth noting.
                1. Sorry you’ve lost me. The answer in the grid (and in the blog) is in capital letters. In French most people wouldn’t bother with the accent (and ‘expose’ is a word in French too) so why should we be plus royaliste que le roi when we borrow the word in English?
                   1. Apologies for lack of clarity – blame beer.
                      Yes, I realise that it’s conventional to omit accents and diacritical marks from crossword entries. My point is that the acute accent here is relevant, in that it marks a distinction in pronunciation between ‘expose’and ‘exposay’, and so could have been mentioned in the blog.
                      1. Well if I mentioned everything I could have mentioned in the blog it would never have got written.

                         The omission wasn’t because I couldn’t write É if I’d wanted to, I just didn’t see any point in explaining things further. I assumed that most solvers would have understood the difference between EXPOSE and EXPOSÉ without having it spelled out (no pun intended) and also would be aware the conventions under which crosswords operate, i.e. by ignoring accents etc.

                         Edited at 2019-12-04 10:31 am (UTC)

                      2. Oh I see what you mean. I guess jackkt thought it was obvious enough from the definition.
                         Edit: as I now see he did!

                         Edited at 2019-12-04 12:00 pm (UTC)

                         1. Yes, and a further point being that if I’d written the accent in the up-front answer it wouldn’t have reflected what solvers were supposed to write in the grid. I didn’t quote the word as having that meaning elsewhere otherwise I’d surely have added it on the next mention.

                            Edited at 2019-12-04 12:14 pm (UTC)

27. Sounds like I had the same experience as most, though I did not know the definition for HUE-AND-CRY. BACKWATER in without understanding wordplay. 10:39.
28. Around twenty minutes in the end but certainly not fluent. Got stuck in the NE corner but busybody eventually opened it up. Guessed Backwater for 1 dn and didn’t understand it even after putting it in!

    Final piece was overawe, nice clue to finish with.

29. ….because my game has gone to pieces.

    The only unparsed solution was BACKWATER (thanks Jack), but I only got to it after realising my initial biff of “backwoods” was wrong.

    I also biffed “swear by”, altered it to “swear to”, then “swear on”, before twigging it was SWEAR IN, and actually so easy that I was forced to swear at it !

    Tried to biff “standstill” at 13D, and more language of a foul and abusive nature ensured (I promise to behave on Saturday).

    DNK “fetch” in that sense, but I shrugged and moved on.

    A third of my time was spent polishing off the SW corner.

    FOI BUSYBODY
    LOI AUTODIDACT
    COD DAUNTLESS
    TIME 15:03

    Oh….the pangram was utterly wasted on me !

    Edited at 2019-12-03 03:06 pm (UTC)

    1. I had my stumps rattled three times in the nets by our scorer before going on to score a match-winning 91* against Uppingham (Aggers included) back in the day, so take this as an omen, Phil!
       1. Crikey. I didn’t know we had a proper cricketer in our midst. I don’t think I ever managed even a 50. Chapeau.
30. I don’t think so: it’s just a definition, in exactly the same way as ‘country’ might define France.
31. 49:13. I struggled with this, not much went in on a first pass and after that I was scratching around the grid to make any progress never getting any fluency. Backwater was crowbarred in from Def and checkers with the wp high over my head. The real problem was autodidact though, I wasn’t seeing the wp correctly and despite my best efforts was unable to summon the word from the depths, it did eventually come to me but took an inordinate amount of time.
32. I am another who remembered “Autodidact” from previous crosswords (and never from “real life”).
    Spent a while on “Picaresque” – trying to be clever – before I saw “Romanesque”.
    Nice crossword.
33. Lots of stops and starts today, so no definitive time – more than an hour though. I found it hard, but finished, although quite a few went in semi or unparsed, so thanks for the expanations, Jack. I REALLY don’t like these reverse-engineered clues, as I may have mentioned before! Just can’t get to grips with them, so I’m another who biffed Backwater. NHO busy for policeman or fetch for apparition, so 1a and 14a went in with shrugs.

    Autodidact also took a while to show itself – it was only when, in desperation, I showed my husband the clue and he said ‘auto something?’ that there was a massive PDM!

    I enjoyed it though – it’s a good feeling to finish one like this without resorting to aids 😊

    FOI Cue
    LOI Autodidact
    COD Romanesque

    Never saw the pangram 😕

34. Wavelengthless today and after 9 hours kip – a very rare thing. Only three clues in after 15 mins. Nowt really flowed easily.

    Biffed FEVER PITCH only understanding the REV. No idea with BACKWATER nor with the LAM bit of BEDLAM.

    Still, no pinkies so not all bad.

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