Times Cryptic 29142 – Sat, 1 Feb 2025. Eek – Greek!

Author   branchPosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic

Easy enough, apart from the Greek term at 22ac. How did you do?

Note for newcomers: The Times offers prizes for Saturday Cryptic Crosswords. This blog is for last week’s puzzle, posted after the competition closes. So, please don’t comment here on this week’s Saturday Cryptic.

Definitions are in bold and underlined.

Across
1 Cold broth’s served up — being this? (7)
BORSCHT – anagram, served up: (C + BROTHS).
5 Notice no longer available to stop work (4,3)
SIGN OFF – SIGN (notice) + OFF (no longer available).
9 A record height (3)
ALP – A + LP.
10 Bad smell over aroma of fish past its prime (11)
OBSOLESCENT – OB (BO, over) + SOLE + SCENT.
11 Ruling abandoning last mine gone to rack and ruin (8)
DECREPIT – DECREE + PIT.
12 Tax’s current range reduced after first of February (6)
FISCAL – F (first of February) + I (symbol for electrical current) + SCALe, reduced.
15 Narrow channel runs badly (4)
RILL – R (runs) + ILL (badly).
16 Bootlicking — or a less healthy desire, it’s said (10)
SYCOPHANCY – sounds, it’s said, like SICKER FANCY.
18 Being in Africa, I’m with tank unit nearly trapped by revolutionary (10)
CHIMPANZEE – IM + PANZER, trapped by CHE.
19 President in black American hearts (4)
BUSH – B + US + H.
22 Embryonic sac in mother inverted in operation (6)
AMNION – AMNI (IN MA, inverted) + ON (in operation).
“Amniotic” is familiar, so obviously it had to be the corresponding noun. Alas, I had no feel for how Greek nouns are formed, so this was a struggle.
23 Considered drink bottles safe (8)
MEASURED – MEAD bottles SURE.
25 Old gout remedy doctor keeps about emergency room (6,5)
GROUND ELDER – GELD (doctor/desex, a horse for example) keeps ROUND (about), then ER.
NHO the plant.
27 Snake is lighter, say, without its tail (3)
BOA – BOAT.
28 What fag end is put back — it will attract vermin (3,4)
RAT TRAP – the fag end of a cigarrette would be mostly the filter, which would hold PART TAR. Put it back.
29 River suffered without the UN (7)
DERWENT – UNDERWENT (!)
Down
1 What jester often has left to replace deficiency in TV comedy (7)
BLADDER – well, if L is to replace LACK, the TV comedy is obviously BLACKADDER. What I didn’t know is that court jesters often had a mock sceptre, tipped by an inflated animal bladder.
 2 Scamp reportedly stole onion (11)
RAPSCALLION – RAP (sounds, reportedly, like WRAP) + SCALLION.
3 Plant bay bordering lake and river (6)
CLOVER – COVE bordering L + R.
4 Declaring for your information in strange setting (10)
TESTIFYING – FYI in anagram, strange, of (SETTING).
5 Ledge below window is even now losing temperature (4)
SILL – STILL, losing T (temperature).
6 Note a minor attempt to manipulate (8)
GASLIGHT – G (note) + A + SLIGHT.
7 Mineral found in no other mine ultimately (3)
ORE – last letters: nO otheR minE.
8 Note score as one goes down finally? (7)
FATALLY – FA + TALLY.
This time the other way of naming musical notes.
13 Guy perhaps gets round concerning brief challenge possible to overcome (11)
CONQUERABLE – CABLE gets round ON (concerning) + QUERY (challenge, brief).
14 Stupid individual almost decapitated guards (10)
BONEHEADED – BEHEADED guards ONE.
17 United sacked Newport City man (8)
UPTOWNER – anagram, sacked, of: (U NEWPORT).
Not a familiar word.
18 Inception of Charles’ reign’s overturned in error (7)
CLANGER – C + REGNAL overturned.
Another unfamiliar word.
20 Supply of firefighters late to hospital going up around noon (7)
HYDRANT – (TARDY + H) going up, around N.
21 One whose work attracts interest, certainly in the old City (6)
USURER – SURE in UR.
24 Whale’s skin and porpoise’s covering up blubber (4)
WEEP – WE (WHALE’s skin) + EP (PORPOISE’s covering, up).
26 Blooming unruly youth going topless (3)
OUT – LOUT.

21 comments on “Times Cryptic 29142 – Sat, 1 Feb 2025. Eek – Greek!”

  1. 35:29
    Viv Stanshall’s “Rawlinson End” had a pub called “The Fool and Bladder”, so 1d was OK.
    I have a GROUND ELDER problem in my garden, but never knew that it was a remedy for gout.

    Thanks branch and setter

  2. 28:18
    As a medico, AMNION was a write-in, but I didn’t know the old gout remedy GROUND ELDER. Colchicine is an old remedy still in current use, and comes from the bulb of the Autumn Crocus plant – but it didn’t fit. Thank you Simjt for informing me that ground elder is a plant, not a ground up part of an elder tree.

    I have become so used to pronouncing “supply” as an anagram indicator that it took a while to get the fire hydrant at 20D.

    Enjoyable puzzle, thanks to blogger and setter.

  3. According to my print-out I spent 78 minutes on this yet there are very few workings in the margins and I don’t recall any major problems so possibly I didn’t record (or didn’t notice at the time) that I nodded off whilst solving.

    NHO GROUND ELDER and didn’t understand the parsing of RAT TRAP. Oh, and had to stop and think for a while to come up with AMNION based on ‘amniotic’ which I knew.

    I use Collins online every day and have noticed that British English and American English entries are now on separate tabs and COBUILD entries seem to have disappeared completely. Is this very recent or have I been unobservant for a while?

    1. They keep mucking about with the formatting of Collins. The current iteration is a great improvement IMO, in the previous version you had to scroll through reams of extraneous stuff to get to the basic dictionary definition. I’m sure that’s what the vast majority of people using the site are interested in!

      1. I think ‘Examples in a sentence’ beneath the definitions is new too. That will be useful when blogging. And synonyms on the same page? I think a click was involved previously.

  4. I biffed DECREPIT from the C, E, I, and never bothered to parse it. NHO GROUND ELDER, of course.

  6. 56 minutes. I didn’t know a BLADDER as something carried by jesters and needed all the crossing letters to be able to spell BORSCHT correctly. Both of these slowed me down but the one I found really difficult was GROUND ELDER, both for the obscurity (to me) of the plant and the wordplay, including GELD for ‘doctor’ which I’ve rarely if ever seen before. CONQUERABLE and CLANGER were hardly write-ins either.

    I agree PART TAR for ‘fag end’ was a bit iffy. Favourite was the surface for SYCOPHANCY.

    Thanks to branch and setter

  7. I started this one by mistake! I thought I’d clicked on the quick cryptic, and wondered why it was a bit difficult. Struggled with the down clues, I seem to remember.
    Question for the experienced hands: we’ve had two puzzles this week with more than one hidden clues. Has the new crossword editor relaxed the rule of normally only one hidden?

    1. I noticed that. My guess is that it would depend on the cleverness of the hidden. While these clues can be ‘gimmes’, to start off the solving process, a great hidden is often not seen until one attempts to parse it. There shouldn’t be too many hard and fast rules – it’s better to go with guidelines.

  8. Unlike Branch I found this difficult, and had to enlist Mr Ego’s talent for biffing to come up with GROUND ELDER, which is a plant I know only too well from my ongoing offensive against it in my garden. Clever wordplay, though. BORSCHT was also a problem, and another concise and clever clue. I thought this was going to be a pangram until it wasn’t. Done in at least two sittings, deduced from the different pen colours…

  9. 52 minutes. This was mostly straightforward but I was hugely breeze-blocked by CLANGER and GROUND ELDER. Oh, that kind of doctor!

  11. 13:07. I found this quite tricky. 25ac is a tough one: obscure plant indicated by an even more obscure definition and some quite oblique wordplay (doctor = GELD!).

  12. COD to 20d Hydrant; I too mispronounced the “supply” part of clue. Couldn’t fully parse the (familiar) 25a Ground Elder. NHO 22a Amnion and biffed (or rather followed the instructions) to come up with the non-existent Amniop.

  13. I finished in exactly 30 minutes but had AMNIOP instead of AMNION. I’ve just seen, I’m not alone!

  14. DNF, defeated by AMNION, where I invented AMNIOS, and GROUND ELDER, where I gave up as I had no idea about it being a remedy for gout and would never in a million years have thought of doctor=geld.

    – Didn’t understand RAT TRAP
    – Didn’t know jesters used to have a BLADDER
    – No problem with CLANGER as it’s used quite often in football

    Thanks branch and setter.

    COD Boneheaded

  15. I hadn’t known that the verb “to doctor” can mean to castrate or spay an animal (and hence = geld).

    But I see now it is in the dictionaries.

    Over the past year, about twice the usual number of cats and dogs were doctored.

Comments are closed.