Times Cryptic 28022

72 comments on “Times Cryptic 28022”

1. I just checked Hector in Wikipedia, and in Greek the name does end in rho, so I don’t see a problem with the clue. I dithered for a long time over 1ac; DANDER definitely seemed called for, but the ‘stroll’ meaning was unknown to me. And I dithered for another long time over 21ac; ‘escape’ seemed something of a stretch, but I could think of nothing else that would end in [z]. As it was, I was so uncertain of these to that I submitted off leaderboard. I liked OUTDO and POOCH.
2. – is what I think you are looking for, Jack – but for me the clue doesn’t quite work!
   A clue desperately searching for members of The Pink Square Society.

   FOI 27dn LIT

   LOI 21ac OOZE – stroll-on!?

   COD 5dn POOCH! A little, spoiled-brat of a dog

   WOD 15ac PILLOW TALK – Rock Hudson and Doris Day!

   DNF 42mins

   Edited at 2021-07-06 01:28 am (UTC)

3. OOZE — a bit of a stretch isn’t it?
   HALF-TERM — one of those clues you have to get wrong before you can get it right; I entered half-turn before seeing it
   DANDER — geez, life’s too short. Dutifully did my alphabet trawl, shrugged, entered the obvious (wrong) answer, and shrugged once again at The Times’ ridiculous scoring system
4. I tried 3 dictionaries without finding this meaning of pooch. Any enlightenment welcome! Thanks
   1. Clearly you have never owned a dog! ;P
5. Interesting on the OOZE. Went right in for me; I feel like we’ve had it quite a bit lately so it came straight to mind. I found most of this puzzle very easy, but the bits I had left at the end were quite difficult! DANDER, POOCH, HALF TERM, and maybe one or two others where I had all the crossers but couldn’t quite see what it was!
   1. Odd; I don’t recall OOZE, although what I don’t recall is legion. We’ve had OUSE a couple of times recently, though, I think. Or maybe I’m making this all up.
      1. https://times-xwd-times.livejournal.com/2557193.html
         1. I remember that puzzle, too (time: 42:57), because of MOZAMBIQUAN. (My older son is obsessed with geography and neither of us had considered the term before!)
            1. Not only is it OOZE, and recent, but it’s clued as ‘escape’.
               1. My medium-term memory is excellent.
               2. Of course I solved that puzzle but I think the answer BAMBOOZLED went in quite easily from definition and checkers and I probably didn’t pay as close attention to the parsing as I might on a blogging day.
6. Mostly easy. Read the clue for 1ac which was crying out for DANDER, but didn’t know the stroll meaning. The three down words crossing it went straight in, so DANDER it had to be. Then no hold-ups until TRENDY, getting the right end of the clue, and OOZE which took a minute or two to find.
   Discovered I didn’t know how to spell bombardier, would have left out the first R. Which is ridiculous, as it must come from bombard.
   Liked Inter the Italian side, but COD Pooch.
7. 23 minutes, but with ‘gander’ for DANDER – having overcome the temptation to put ‘wander’ in – relying on the vaguely remembered (actually, misheard) expression ‘to get one’s gander up.’

   Enjoyed POOCH and OOZE.

   1. You weren’t the only one who misremembered it. I even checked YouTube afterwards for the clip from Fawlty Towers (“You’re beginning to get my g/dander you you grotty little man”), which is the only time I’ve heard it. And to me it still sounded like gander. Of course, gander doesn’t mean stroll, but I’m not sure I knew dander did either. Lives and learns (until I forget it again next time).
      – Rupert
8. I put in LOSE (lose a pursuer, escape a pursuer) because I had half an idea that a LOO was a cry in hunting? As in HULLOO perhaps? It seems that this was completely the product of my fevered imagination though. I wasn’t too impressed by the “correct” version I must say. About half the results on the Crossword Club so far are off-by-one which makes me think that I wasn’t the only one, and the clue could have stood to be a lot less ambiguous.
   1. I was OK with OOZE, but having spent 5 minutes looking at it went for WANDER, not DANDER.
   2. I wondered when watching your stream if you might have been thinking of ‘coo’, an expression of surprise.
   3. Short form of gardyloo?
      1. Yes, I was thinking of that too!
         1. There’s also ALEW, Spenser’s spelling of HALLOO but unrelated to Indian potatoes
9. Many clues that have done me in in the past are of the “Hobson’s choice” variety: in this case, does one go with WANDER = ‘stroll’ and wonder if there is some expression involving wandering pests; or does one go with DANDER, which fits the wordplay, and then wonder if there is a definition of ‘dander’ which has something to do with strolling.

   This time I chose right, but it’s not a pleasant situation to be in.

   1. What wordplay? Isn’t 1ac essentially a double definition?
      1. Yes, wordplay, as in, “punning or witty repartee exploiting verbal ambiguity”. In this case the clue is written to suggest the answer is a certain annoying person who has arisen to take a walk, but if you parse it differently, you see the answer is something an annoying person will “get up” for (some)one. Verbal ambiguity. Wordplay.

         But to be honest I was speaking of a more general situation where there might have been actual letter manipulation going on.

   2. I reached exactly the same dilemma (having never heard of dander = stroll). At which point, you either know it or you don’t which is not very satisfactory.
      Like others, I didn’t think of ooze and I guessed trendy but couldn’t parse it. I was sure of half term but didn’t parse that either.
      Other than that I nearly achieved a personal best of 33 minutes. Increasingly, I find that there are puzzles that are easy until they are impossible.
      Thanks to the setter and for the explanations, Jack.
10. I misremembered “get one’s dander up” as “get one’s gander up” which did for me. If I’d stopped to think that a gander was a look rather than a walk I might have amended it. After much deliberation I did manage OOZE which is little consolation. One thing it reminds me is that I should consider all possibilities on an alphabet trawl no matter how unlikely they seem — putting an O at the beginning of _O_E was skipped over in my trawl.
    1. Oops, you too, and Keriothe. I should have read all the comments before replying to Ulaca. Naughty step for me.
       — Rupert
11. My main problem was equating LIT with ‘set fire’ or ‘set fire to’. The answer is clear so I assume it does.
    1. In the past tense.
       1. Ah, yes of course. Thanks. What’s the matter with me?
12. …Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
    Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
    Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;

    Took me 20 mins pre-porridge to ‘burst Joy’s grape’ today.
    I liked it. Very gentle. But NHO Dander=stroll.
    Thanks setter and J.

13. A very quick time (for me anyway) in the QC does not make up for a stupid stupid OUTGO.
14. 27 minutes with LOI TRENDY. COD to BEEHIVE and the memory of Dusty. I only knew the one meaning of DANDER, which wasn’t a stroll. I didn’t feel that confident early on when I entered IMPERMANENT faintly, but it proved to be a permanent feature. I also wasted time on making an Italian side dish out of the letters of conversation, and working out which half of the term was jolly. Good puzzle. Thank you Jack and setter.

    Edited at 2021-07-06 07:23 am (UTC)

15. I finally slowed for 1ac – was it GANDER, DANDER or WANDER?
    It had to be LANDER – the moon-stroller – didn’t it!? Was a lunatic involved? I suppose not! Overthinking. I saw OOZE as noun – not a verb. POOCH was kinda interesting – but my COD KINGFISHER – my fave Indian Ale – it’s probably the label and not the beer.
16. I thought of ‘gander’ and DANDER but couldn’t be bothered resisting the temptation to put in ‘wander’ at 1a, so a 40-odd minute DNF. At least I managed to get OOZE as my LOI which was some consolation.

    BEEHIVE is obviously the hairstyle du jour for our eminent setters. Maybe they’re lusty Dusty fans.

    Thanks to setter and Jack

17. 11:06, but with GANDER. I’m glad I’m not alone in misremembering the expression, although I barely remembered it at all. Like pootle if I had stopped to think about it I would have realised that a GANDER is a look, not a stroll, but if I had done that I’d have changed my answer to WANDER.
    A fairly lengthy pause at the end, with the 60s hairstyle taking a while to come to mind and OOZE tricky.

    Edited at 2021-07-06 07:00 am (UTC)

18. If perchance you didn’t get OOZE
    There’s a couple of routes you can choose
    You might libel the setter
    Claim they should’ve done better
    To deal with your pinky-square blues

    Or accept that your alphabet trawl
    Was not fit for purpose at all
    You should not weep and wail
    Any DANDER’s a fail
    And admit you’re not perfect — your call

19. 19:46. All finished bar 2 in 11 minutes, then a double alphabet trawl to find OOZE and then another minute or so to find something other than WANDER for 1A. Eventually put in DANDER but dnk the second meaning. My initial thought waa I needed a synonym for nose. I liked POOCH best.
20. For once I checked the leader board before solving and saw a long run of 1s, which slowed me down considerably suspecting every clue as a probable heffalump trap.
    In the end, having negotiated the very good TRENDY, I was left with 1a, settling on DANDER as most likely, just, and the truly horrible ?O?E. So many possibilities for “cries” sounding like something you can squeeze into “escape”! I spent quite a while wondering if I could make NOSE work, or HOSE, or even, like Verlaine, LOSE. Eventually settling on OOZE, though still unconvinced, pushed my time to a very un-Tuesdayish 27.24. This was not a hard puzzle for the most part, though I wondered about the IMPERMANENT fugitive, But those two clues in particular ate up time.
    Is setting fire to JPS’s bed a good idea? Discuss, existentially, over several demitasses d’americano.
21. … pretty unsatisfying for me, though I don’t expect anyone to agree with that. NHO jolly as slang for Royal Marine; didn’t at all like POO as a synonym for mess; not especially impressed with ‘oohs’ as a random noise occasionally emitted from audiences but surely not as a cry. 5/10 for today’s setter; thanks, as always, to our blogger.
    1. On our pathways and green spaces, dog mess and dog poo are 100% interchangeable, if only as politer versions of dog sh** and dog cr**, still all expressed with much disgust. I’ve always wondered why cat deposits don’t meet with the same ire, unless it is that dog owners are expected to clear the offending stuff, and cats are regally above that kind of responsibility. Dogs will often look sheepish, as if they know it’s a sin. Cats don’t understand the concept.
22. Absolutely no problem with DANDER, a common enough Scots word, though usually written as DAUNER and pronounced as DAWNER, as in “Ah’m awa’ fur a dauner doon the pub.”

    Delayed by initially entering FISHER KING, which absolutely works if, like me, you ignore the enumeration.

    1. I was another FISHER KING.
23. 23:04

    OOZE came easily enough, but DANDER took an age.

    TRENDY was nicely worded. I thought RHO was quite clever till I read Jacks’s comment. Ignorance is bliss.

    Thanks to Jack and the setter.

24. No problems with the NW corner where I started with WELL TO DO and followed up with DELIGHT, AMERICANO and DANDER, which I knew as what someone gets up if it’s not one’s nostril(my first thought). Wasn’t so familiar with it as a term for stroll though. RHO followed. I definitely seemed to be on the wavelength for this, as in short order I was doing an alpha trawl for 21a, my LOI. Oohs and Ahs soon came along, so in went OOZE. 15:48. One of my better efforts!. Thanks setter and Jack.
25. DANDER was my LOI – like others, trying to decide if it could mean stroll, or if WANDER could fit the other half of the clue. Fortunately landed on the right one today.

    OOZE went straight in for me, but I’m not sure I’d have entered it so confidently if it hadn’t been for its recent outing. The bottom half all fell pretty quickly, apart from a pause on BOMBARDIER because I’d accidentally entered AMERICANA instead of AMERICANO.

    4m 37s in all, so it’s somewhere in my top 10 fastest ever I’d say.

26. The obvious pauses for thought: firstly, to get 1ac straight in my mind, largely because of an old boss with a gift for malapropisms who regularly talked about treating customers well, and not getting their gander up, so I had to remember that was one of his*; secondly, it took a while to come up with OOZE, depsite my first instinct being BOOZE, which was obviously too long, but should have given me a clue.

    *at quiet times, we used to amuse ourselves in the office creating [boss]isms. I remember suggesting that bad customer service really made people’s goat boil.

    Edited at 2021-07-06 10:14 am (UTC)

    1. Your former boss (and BEEHIVE) reminded me of my late Mrs. Malaprop mother-in-law who used to say that someone had a bee in their belfry.
       1. Obviously batty
27. 27 mins nice and easy till it wasn’t, as I might have said before.
28. 30 minutes and quite content until left with GANDER or WANDER. Went for WANDER meaning stroll. Shame.
29. But with an error. I put gander for dander. Why?? I was reaching for dander, but it refused to come! And then I must have spent five minutes doing a letter trawl before finally getting ooze. Still, much fun. Thanks.
30. Like others DNK the stroll but cat dander really gets up my nose. Wasted a perfectly good 15plus minutes with an invisible typo at 8d (along for AMONG). We just had July 4th fireworks so oohs and ahs came to mind right away.
31. Double-checked DANDER before submission for the stroll definition. otherwise it was the NE and OOZE that I was a bit slow with.

    HALF TERM well known in the UK, biffed through checkers though failed to parse

32. 19:32
    No problem with ooze – those ones where the ‘sounds like’ target word is a plural often end -se or -ze.
    Dander went in with a shrug, based on the only one of the two definitions I knew. That said, I did wonder if the Scottish word dauner had anything to do with it; dcrooks has already discussed this. Thanks, jack.
33. 13 mins. Plain sailing but for HALF TERM, which I never parsed and spent a while looking for something starting with HOL-. The conversational definition of INTERCOURSE is not the first to spring to mind, but I got there.
34. Great puzzle but defeated me on dander which was unknown to me so I fell into the un parsed wander trap. It was at least my 3rd unparsed answer as I had no idea of RM = jolly or impermanent meaning fugitive.

    COD Trendy for me as even with the checkers and the obvious answer it took me forever to see the beautifully misdirected definition of In.

    Thanks J and setter.

35. An enjoyable hour or less over lunch with much time over LOI 21a.
    I started with BOOS; was not clever enough to see OOZE; and ended with LOSE as it fitted the escape definition best.
    COD to INTERCOURSE which, if a chestnut, I had not seen before.
    David
36. Homer did not write anything. The Iliad and the Odyssey were oral epics. The Times is rather intellectually downmarket these days but nonetheless…
    1. The word “write” in this context is slippery. Consider:
       “David and Solomon lived very merry lives
       Had 40,000 concubines and 30,000 wives
       Later in their lives to settle all their qualms
       One wrote the Proverbs and the other wrote the Psalms”
       A favourite quiz question of mine is “Who wrote Paul’s letter to the Romans?” to which the correct answer is Tertius.
       Again, if Homer ever wrote the name Hector, even in a message to his greengrocer, the name would have finished with a rho. The clue is not making assertions about authorship of the epics.
37. ….INTERCOURSE, I spent a little time trying to justify “nightie” at 20D. I’m not sure if this says more about me or the setter.

    IMPERMANENT was new to me, and I biffed it with crossed fingers. DANDER was an unknown definition, but a perfect fit for the surface, so I was a tad more confident.

    I always contend that the hardest thing to crack is a four letter answer with the second and fourth letters in place. My SLOI was CAST, but at least that had a consonant already entered. My LOI took an alpha-trawl approaching two minutes. How many word fit “-O-E” ? An excellent time reduced to very good unfortunately !

    FOI WELL-TO-DO
    LOI OOZE
    COD BEEHIVE
    TIME 9:55

    1. Chambers on my phone has 136 words that fit.
38. I spent about as long on OOZE as the rest of the crossword. First, it was not one of the most obvious of the zillion words that fits _O_E and it doesn’t really mean escape. And oohs has to be just a cry, since “from the audience” is a homophone indicator. Or maybe it is doing double duty. But I had WANDER since I didn’t know either meaning of GANDER so, while I half suspected WANDER was wrong, I couldn’t find anything better.
39. Not much to add to above except to say that the second (Stroll) meaning of DANDER is dialect(North English or Scottish, take your pick) and there should have been some indication of such. Advanced cryptic setters would never be allowed to get away with this omission and nor should back-pagers. Had there been “stroll in the Highlands” say … I think far few solvers would have got this wrong as it would have put them more on their alert… Almost the same criticism could be levelled at OOZE clue which would have been so much fairer if it had been, say: “cries of pleasure” or “cries of surprise” …
    Enough beefing for one day (and I did get both DANDER and OOZE right); rest of puzzle was oddly easy in comparison to these two outliers, and I thought – whilst perhaps unseemly – POOCH clue was a full-on smirky smile delight. Many thanks to blogger; mild tsk to editors and setter …
40. 15:09. As a perennially late poster, I realise that much of what I was going to say about this puzzle has been explored already.
    Like many I wasn’t 100% sure about 1 ac “Dander” meaning a stroll, but my vague recollections of the Scottish word “dauner” convinced me it was my best bet.
    My LOI, which took some time, was 29 ac “trendy” where I just couldn’t figure out the clue’s construction. So I applaud the setter for completely misleading me.
    I enjoyed several clues along the way 25 ac “Strife”, 26 ac “half term”, 4 d “rho” and 20d “Necktie”.
    I always associate “Bombardier” with one Billy Wells, a British boxer who belted a huge gong to introduce any cinema film made by the Rank Organisation. Apparently there were four different “biffers” in total. Mmmm, yes I know, should get out more…..
    Thanks to Jack and setter for an entertaining blog and puzzle respectively
41. Completed it in two sessions which is usual for me.

    FOI 1ac Dander though I didn’t know the second meaning.
    LOI 21ac Ooze which I was about to give up on before yet another alphabet trawl. Took me a long time also to see 29ac Trendy. Duh!

    Liked the puzzle, but then I usually do if I can finish it.

42. Forty minutes entertainment with one wrong – did not get dander. DNF, then. FOI well to do. only three acrosses on first pass, but everything started to fall into place as I read the down clues. LOI 1ac *a*d*r, last asterisk guessed as an e. Clueless as to the other two *’s. Very enjoyable and a good result for me, only two letters short, and only one (half term) unparsed. Thanks, Jack and setter. GW.
43. 30.22. Nearly screwed the pooch on this one with an errant fisher king in at 11ac for the longest time but eventually saw the error and corrected. That only left the alpha-trawl for ooze and then the Hobson’s choice between dander, which fit the what annoying person might get up bit but was unknown as a stroll, or wander which fit the stroll but I just couldn’t see it being something an annoying person might get up. I plumped for dander but it was unsatisfying to lack the required knowledge. I liked the lift and separate of Italian side dish.
44. With only _O_E to get I gave up thinking I had probably made a few mistakes elsewhere, which I hadn’t. Still, that probably saved me another half hour. And I thought OOZE was quite good so had no problem with the clue.
45. Liked INTERCOURSE a lot

    POOCH also

    No problem with OOZE but couldn’t be bothered with 1ac once I had WANDER in my mind but knew it wasn’t right. Did think of DANDER but also GANDER. As a previous poster said, life’s too short

    21 minutes bar that one, 2 minutes to alpha trawl and then come here

    Thanks all

46. My usual day-after post simply because that’s when I do it! FOI 2d AMERICANO – a super neat anagram. LOI PRIMEVAL But a DNF because no idea about RHO. Being Scottish, no problem with DANDER – use it regularly, “Gaun for a daunder doon the road.” Personally don’t feel it needed to be signalled as Scots. Many clues left equally open. Biffed several of the answers here because they seemed to work and now I know why, so thanks, jackkt. 50 minutes.
47. Go for a dander — quite common usage in Ulster

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