Times Cryptic 28226

51 comments on “Times Cryptic 28226”

1. I’m not sure of my time, as I forgot to pause, but probably around a half-hour. I was held up by REINSURE, ACCURSED, & ALMA MATER, until I finally noticed that I’d biffed SAMBA for some reason. The R gave me ALMA MATER, the A gave me ACCURSED, & the R REINSURE, all almost immediately.
2. Thanks for 8 dn, had to be, but NHO buccal. Having seen it above a faint bell rings, think we’ve had it before… google google…25815 in 2014.
   Otherwise all known an polished off quickly. Like WEREWOLF, ALPACA, TILLAGE and SUPERHERO where I was expecting a star like Aldebarran. Thanks setter and blogger.
3. I thought BUCCAL meant pertaining to the mouth, but dictionaries beg to differ. There is also MALAR which refers to the cheek or cheekbone – was trying to force that in somehow until the NEER element put me straight.
   1. Medieval Latin bucca does in fact mean mouth, but it comes from the Latin word bucca meaning cheek. So you were warm, but in English it was applied to the nether cheeks.
      1. There you go. I studied late Latin and early French (inter alia) at university, which may have misled me.

         I also recall an old friend rather archly referring to his tongue being ‘buccally inserted’ so it should have entered my ken earlier.

      2. Nether cheeks? I thought that was where schoolmasters applied the cane.
4. ….failing to solve clues like reinsure, which I had just solved last week in some non-Times puzzle. My main problem was misunderstanding the cryptics – if I had just biffed, I would have done much better. Maths was my LOI – the cryptic points strongly to MAT[t]ER, but once I got reinsure I knew that was wrong. Eventually, I saw how the cryptic worked and finished in 44 minutes.
5. 20 minutes for me. I don’t remember anything unknown. LOI was REINSURE, POI SUPERHERO. I knew BUCCAL from listening to dentists describe the sides of the teeth as BUCCAL or LINGUAL.
   1. On International Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19) do we all become buccalingual?
   2. Ah, so that’s where I’ve heard it! The only problems being that I didn’t know why the dentist was saying it and I always assumed it was spelt ‘buckle’.
      1. Ditto – I thought it meant something alarming was happening back in there somewhere.
6. 27 minutes. The ‘Cut furrows round’ part of the MILL triple def was the only bit I couldn’t parse. I biffed SCRUM before seeing the parsing later on and had some trouble with ENGRAVER, thinking it was going to be an anagram, but otherwise I didn’t find this too tricky. Favourite was the surface for ALPACA.
7. FOI ACCURSED got me going and I found the SW corner fairly easy, working my way up through the puzzle with the pace slackening as I did so. REINSURE / MATHS took quite a while, then I was left with the NE corner for completion – and I was too tempted by the offer of O—–, biffing OLIVER for “Twist say”. Then spent numerous further minutes trying to make ICON fit into the 10a solution.

   A further 10m later, I properly solved ANALGESIA and removed OLIVER, leading to a relieved completion shortly thereafter, BUCCANEER half-biffed. Feeling somewhat stressed out, but the right result is always a good feeling – thanks J and setter.

8. A full half of those 38 mins were taken up with 7 clues in the NW corner.
   Thanks you Jack for HEARSAY EVIDENCE, SCRUM and BUCCANEER. Oh, dear I thought the sacrum was elsewhere! As for BUCCANEER, I’m sure I’ve heard dentists use the term ‘buccal’ , as you also indicate, Jack.
   I think we all know what John Stuart MILL did of his own free will!
   I biffed SUPERNOVA for 1ac but then had to have a rethink.
   LOI: MATHS/REINSURE
9. Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling blackbirds.

   25 mins pre-brekker.
   Buccal rang distant bells only.
   Mostly I liked Revolver.
   Thanks setter and J.

10. 12′ 49″, with MILL LOI, distracted by ‘also’. I failed metalwork ‘O’ level.

    Name a parasitic growth.

    Thanks jack and setter.

11. 32:22
    A steady solve. No dramas.
    Thanks, jack.
12. 29 minutes with LOI MATHS staring me in the face. I’ve never heard of BUCCAL so BUCCANEER was biffed. Otherwise, a steady solve. Thank you Jack and setter.
13. My lasf one in today — SCRUM
    (The parsing was quite slow to come)
    And I only half-knew
    The “cheeky” part-clue
    I thought buccal referred to the bum
14. Like Denise I was sorely tempted by Oliver at 5D, as I’m sure were many of us. I managed to resist the biff on the basis that it was just too tempting. Elsewhere BUCCANEER may have been helped by the fact it was pirate day yesterday in the school class my wife teaches and she had to dress as one, much to my amusement.
15. 44 mins so normal service resumed after yesterday’s speedy (for me) solve. Held up for a while in the NW. Did not parse either SCRUM or BUCCANEER so thanks for that Jack. LOI REINSURE. Isn’t that what the Swiss do?

    Liked ROLLING and the two long clues.

    Thanks Jack and setter.

    1. Yes, and they also do it in Munich.
       1. Did not know that, thanks.
16. Straightforward today but enjoyable, i liked the neatly hidden anagram in 2dn and the def. in 21ac; also 18ac. Good stuff ..
17. 10:58. Another who didn’t know BUCCAL, so 8d went in unparsed. I liked MATHS best. Thanks Jackkt and setter.

18. A good 10 minutes slower than yesterday taking a while to break in before picking up the pace. NHO BUCCAL but otherwise everything parsed. Thank you, jackkt and the setter.

19. 8:05. I more or less parsed all of this as I went, but I would have been unable to tell you with certainty what the sacrum is, I thought buccal referred to the mouth (it can), and I didn’t really understand the first definition of MILL beyond knowing that it’s something you do with some sort of machine tool so why not this?
20. I thought that with me taking ‘only’ 18 minutes the SNITCH would be incredibly low, but to my surprise it isn’t — yet, anyway. No problems that I can really remember.
21. 17.33, with the setter providing an early test to see if I remembered how to spell BUCCANEER. I did, and the bucca(l) bit definitely helped.
    I’m not sure what “also” is doing in the MILL clue: it doesn’t add anything to the surface and is a mite overgenerous in the wordplay. “Comic” star threw me as well, as I ran down my list of deceased funny ladies, though in the end turned out to be quiet clever.
    A puzzle which made me feel as if I was rather smart, without being particularly difficult.
22. The one I was slow to see was DEFERMENT because I kept thinking of the shelving being some kind of geological formation. Which was silly because draft deferments related to the Viet Nam War were a big issue around the time I started paying attention to that sort of thing. To this day boys turning 18 are required to register for the draft (and girls are not which seems anachronistic). Nice puzzle. 18.09
23. Pleasant and mostly smooth (some nicely concealed definitions, but with all required knowledge carefully considered and officially certified “general”).
24. I too found this harder than the low snitch suggests. Not entirely happy with withdrawing = backwards in the maths clue (LOI). Comic hero had me grappling for Laurels and Chaplins, so good lure there. It all came out fine in the end, but a bit like yesterday I felt should have been quicker.
25. Pretty straightforward solve. NHO POMANDER, and didn’t know where the BUCCA came from, but what else could it be?

    Always worth remembering that WEREWOLF is only one of the singular forms of “werewolves”. The other one being…???

    Thanks Jack and setter.

    1. waswolf?

       1. I’m a wolf.

          Guess that’s three then.

26. On the basis that it is sometimes inadmissible I think 7d is probably ok? But it’s no longer the case that hearsay is necessarily inadmissible. In many jurisdictions it isn’t, even in criminal courts it has been gradually eroded. Thanks to setter and blogger
    1. Traditional standards are falling by the day and we can’t reasonably expect setters to cater for every change. Collins has the exceptions covered, but the general rule is surely sufficient for crosswords purposes? Collins: hearsay evidence is based on what has been reported to a witness by others rather than what he or she has observed or experienced (not generally admissible as evidence)

       Edited at 2022-03-01 02:28 pm (UTC)

       1. There were multiple exceptions to the hearsay rule decades ago when I had to study criminal law so it’s nothing new.
27. 18:51. No problems apart from the cheeky definition of “buccal” but I knew it had something to do with the mouth and that was close enough for me. MATHS was the only one that put up much of a fight — always seems to be short ones that do.
28. Made rapid progress initially, but a couple of unforced errors (such as reading my O as a C), and some blind spots in the NW corner held me up for ages. It seemed no harder than yesterday’s puzzle, but it took me ten minutes longer to finish (in 35 minutes).
29. I took every wrong turn available before arriving at the actual definitions in most of the clues in this puzzle. Apart from BUCCA(l) which I didn’t know, I finally twigged the rest of them. SPONGE was FOI and the NE was my first completed section. The SW followed without too much angst, but the SE and NW held out for a while longer. SCRUM and 2d eventually led to SUPERHERO and ORPHAN. REINSURE scrubbed the biffed MOTIF and sanity was restored. WEREWOLF finally opened up the SE and ORDINAL, DEFERMENT and POMANDER dropped into place. By the time I submitted I was 104 on the leaderboard, so no SNITCH for me today! 32:36. Thanks setter and Jack.
30. Fell at the last fence and plumped for MYTHS = fake cases. The rest of the clue just being there to confuse me.
    As a Mathematician I have never liked the abbreviation Maths, and detest the American Math. I now dislike first almost as much! Good clue!!
31. An enjoyable romp with nothing difficult, but little easy either.
    For once we had ANALGESIA without the usually obligatory ‘number’.
    LOI WEREWOLF which needed all the helping letters to twig it.
32. ….or at least my persistent fat finger did, so my 7:32 was made null and void by a weeewolf.
33. Seemed to be reasonably smooth, but time somehow drifted.

    A few challenges towards the end — didn’t think of ORPHAN (nor Oliver) for ages, even with all checkers, ENGRAVER and MILL also took longer than they might have.

    BUCCAL — NHO

34. I really enjoyed the challenge today. Held up for a long time in the North East and I needed Jack’s cheeky assistance to parse Buccaneer – my thoughts had been running (quite innocently) along callipygian lines.

    Thanks to Jack and the setter

35. Enjoyed this puzzle — much to like but I think my favourite was “Reinsure”.
    With a bit of luck, I now have a user name “vaccarex” (not difficult to work out) — Mike Cowking

    Edited at 2022-03-01 04:08 pm (UTC)

36. Struggled at every level and shuffled off defeated by too many clues that I had no way in to. Respect to all finishers – thanks Jackkt for a very clear blog. All makes perfect sense but there were no “doh” moments, only moments of increased respect for those that made it through.
37. Just got around to this one, no problems.
    LOI was the very last Across clue. I think of a DENT as unintentional and a “recess” as natural or deliberately built.
38. 17.52. I didn’t find this too hard although I never did manage to parse buccaneer and mill needed a flash of inspiration.
39. Half decent time for me today especially as only squeezed in after watching another episode of the excellent La Promesse on BBC4 (Other classy sub-titled French cold-case police dramas available).

    Can’t remember where I started but steadily worked round till I finished with 1ac having been too easily fooled by “comic” at the beginning

    MATHS was duly assembled according to instructions but the word only revealed itself as I posited the final letter

    Enjoyable

    Thanks Jackkt and Setter

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