Times Cryptic 29166 – Sat, 1 March 2025. The crossword of my dreams.

27 comments on “Times Cryptic 29166 – Sat, 1 March 2025. The crossword of my dreams.”

1. Thanks for explaining how 9a and 25a worked. I rather liked 21a, but 5d has to be COD. Just a small nit: isn’t the anagrind “involves”? The clue works pretty well as a riddle, but I agree “as ultimately defined by” doesn’t quite make the definition.

   1. You could perhaps view “involves” as an anagram indicator, but I had read it as indicating that the two sins cited were just examples of the category.

      1. I think strictly speaking ‘idleness’ is not listed as one of the Deadly Sins; it comes under Sloth.

         1. But idleness and sloth are synonymous – I can’t see any objection as the list is not referenced as such.

            1. Certainly there’s crossover and sloth would include idleness, but as a deadly sin I think of sloth as a much deeper concept than a simple lack of activity.

               1. The seven deadly sins were probably first recorded in a language other than English. Google google…. it was Pope Greg in the 6th century, no doubt speaking Latin (English hadn’t been invented). So any English words for the sins are not definitive, but random guesses by people 1000 years later translating from the original. Idleness is as good as sloth; the real deadly sin is the Latin word! Or is the most common current translation “correct”, even if it might change soon?
                  Meh! Not for me. It’s a transliteration from the original language, so anything goes, nothing is wrong or right.

      2. ‘Involves’ has to be the anagram indicator because everything else in the clue is the anagrist.

2. I enjoyed this and found it mostly quite friendly for a Saturday. I also wondered why it was EVEN-STEVEN without the ‘s’ but the online sources confirm it’s correct. Liked FLATIRON even though iron/press is always a gimme. Difficult homophone indicator for FREEZE being ‘for those attending’ and never saw it till afterwards. Didn’t know about ‘wimmin’ but got SWIMMINGLY from the checkers. FLIMSY went in but only from ‘unconvincing’. COD to CITIZENRY.
   Thanks B.

3. I had trouble parsing (sc. I failed to parse) a couple, eg FLATIRON (irony=satire?), STUDIOUS (U=certificate never occurred to me). I liked SUCCINCT.

4. 56 minutes, so this was not easy for me although my only failure was not spotting the parsing of LIGHTEN UP. I had to dig deep to remember the days of using FLIMSY paper to make carbon copies on a typewriter.

5. I had an extraordinary number of question marks next to clues that I couldn’t properly parse, so thanks, Branch, for the enlightenment, although there were several I wasn’t too impressed by, eg OG OG with half of the first half missing! It’s not a great crossword IMO when you are unsure of many answers because of the difficulty in parsing them, but all completed correctly in the end.

6. Struggled hugely with this but got through – also with plenty of questions about parsing. Thanks for clearing it all up.

7. DNF big time. I’m too embarrassed to say how many I didn’t solve. I guess I just wasn’t going to try hard enough last week. Was planning to come back to it, but didn’t (as usual.)
   POI 26a Swimmingly; never knew why Private Eye used “Wimmin” in one of its regular features; never knew it wasn’t just PE doing its own thing. Now added to Cheating Machine.
   24d Delve. We must have had dele before because I have all the verb parts in the CM. But I agree with branch it is an obscurity.

8. Fairly gentle for a Saturday. I always personally use the ‘sussinkt’ rather than ‘suksinkt’ pronunciation of ‘succinct’ but I have heard the latter and it’s in the dictionary. I think it was one of my first ones in anyway though IIRC

9. Seems like I’m in the minority here but I found this very hard. I couldn’t parse EVEN-STEVEN, AGOG, STUDIOUS, YIPPEE, CONSTRAIN or DELVE (DELE counts as an obscurity to me) and I could only finish by dragging the FLIMSY sense of ‘copy’ from the depths. Again, for me at least, this was up there with a tough Friday and I’m hoping for something a bit kinder in the ST tomorrow as a confidence rebuilder.

   Thanks to branch for filling in my many parsing gaps

   1. In the minority perhaps but not alone. I rarely give up on a crossword, but this defeated me after a weekend chewing over the clues, so I looked up at least 5 answers. That I couldn’t see how some worked convinced me that I was right not to waste(?) anymore time on the damned thing.

      1. #Me too!

   2. I’m with you – I found this very difficult, and having read the blog I can see I wouldn’t ever have solved the many clues that stumped me no matter how much longer I’d spent on it. As you say, it doesn’t half dent one’s confidence. Mine’s taken a battering over the last several months when it’s seemed as though the weekend crosswords have stepped up a gear. But we’ll keep trying, won’t we? Onward!

   3. I also found this very hard and rather unsatisfying. I don’t mind it being hard when on finding the answer I think “that was clever” or “should have seen that earlier”, but with this one I still didn’t understand after seeing the answer, and there were some rather tenuous synonyms. Not sure of home as a clue for flat, and while strain and air could both be tunes they are hardly interchangeable (Bach’s Strain on a G string? – not a fair comment I know!)

   4. I’m right with you – couldn’t cope with this at all. Head not properly screwed on. Many thanks to the bloggers.

10. DNF, defeated by FLIMSY (didn’t know it could be used as a noun) and YIPPEE (even if I’d had the Y at the start, I’m not sure I’d have got it). Also didn’t parse LIGHTEN UP and had to trust the ‘dele’ part of DELVE.

    Thanks branch and setter.

    COD Draper

11. 49.35

    I found this hard but persevered and was pleased I did. I found CITIZENRY impossible to see until finally locating FREEZE and even with the Z still needed a think to see what fitted. The sin clue was v clever as was CLICKS.

12. Thank you for the blog.

    Needed to check I had understood YIPPEE correctly “getting gratuities endlessly”. But then discovered I had mis-parsed AGOG. Pleased I had remembered “blunder” = OG, but hadn’t appreciated that “one” is giving a very precise instruction in that clue, which you explain. I think that makes it quite a nice, clever clue.

    21ac. I’d though of “stuff” as rather a vague word like “things”, but saw from the dictionaries that it does have a specific meaning as “cloth” or “fabric”. And “doctor-aper” was amusing.

    27ac. Took me a while to understand “ten certificates”, but an original alternative to the usual “promissory notes” etc for IOUS.

13. DNF – infuriatingly CLICKS is what I didn’t do. The rest of the puzzle was excellent.

14. Took a long time. Got there in the end but didn’t parse agog. Thanks for explanation

15. As a couple of others have said, this was infuriating in the sense that, having looked up the answer, and despite knowing that you would never have solved it, it still didn’t make sense ( to me!). For eg FREEZE for peg (?), DELVE as the opposite of dig( ?), LEVEL as train (?), CLICKS for success(?). Too hard for me.
    Enjoyed the seven deadlies though.

    1. The words in your list all work, perhaps in a specialist sense at least:

       Peg/freeze the interest rate on your home loan.

       One, two: buckle my shoe … eleven, twelve: dig and delve.

       I tried and tried to do it, and then it just clicked/succeeded.

       Level/train your rifle at the target.

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