Times Cryptic 29366

70 comments on “Times Cryptic 29366”

1. Certainly tougher than yesterday’s! I checked that PUDENDOUS is a word and finished by using Word Wizard to find NOMISM, a word I should’ve remembered if I’d ever come across it, since the very clever device of “progressive characters” (I work with a whole gang of them!) was beyond me, though I’ve seen it before.

2. Smash is slang for loose change, coins as opposed to paper money in Collins, SOED and Chambers. SUCRES are both coin and paper money.

   1. Here was me thinking it referred to some kind of South American financial crisis!

   2. The sucre did crash at turn of the century and was replaced by the USD

3. DNF
   I never got GANDHI. NHO BLANQUET, NOMISM, PUDENDOUS (guessable from ‘pudenda’). I knew the name THALIA (Thalia Menninger was a character in a sitcom), dnk she was a Grace. DNK ‘smash’, but thought I knew SUCRE; actually I was thinking of the city in Bolivia. ‘Jewish ascetic’ immediately gave me ESSENE.

4. ESSENE/SUCRES did for me; all else done in 15′-ish. I was nowhere near ESSENE, either in terms of def or wordplay. SUCRES I had considered an anagram but didn’t know it – undoubtedly as ‘smash’ for ‘cash’ is a NHO of the highest order! I guessed PUDENDOUS from – well, anyway.

5. I seem to have been somewhat more successful than the previous commenters. Yes, pudendous and nomism are pretty obscure, but that’s where the clues are pointing, and nomos is the Greek word for law. I biffed Essene, ab ovo, and Andromeda, but wasn’t able to parse them. I knew sucres had something to do with Ecuador, but I couldn’t remember what. It was actually beguine and Hound Dog that gave the most trouble.

   Time: 31:11

6. Well and truly beaten today by several: PUDENDOUS, ESSENE, BLANQUET, NOMISM and THALIA. I should have seen what was going on with ‘progressive characters’ in ‘nomism’ but I’d forgotten that particular trick but won’t be fooled again, hopefully. NHO EXARCH either but the wordplay was kind, along with INTAGLIO. I spelt GANDHI incorrectly before seeing my error, always think it’s ‘Ghandi’. Liked ANDROMEDA with the use of the ‘NDA’. Biffed SUCRES from the anagrist. All in all, I felt this was a bit tough for a Tuesday.
   Thanks Jack.

7. Failed on EXARCH and SUCRES in about 35, but felt quite chuffed to have figured out a string of unknowns like NOMISM, AB OVO, THALIA and PUDENDOUS. Tough assignment though not unenjoyable, thank you Jack.

   From She’s Your Lover Now:
   It’s true I just can’t recall
   San Francisco at all
   I can’t even remember EL PASO honey

   1. Thanks for the reminder of this deep cut from Dylan. I knew the song first from a lyrics collection, and I’d sung it in a good approximation, as it turned out, of what I heard when it was finally available. Funny how that worked out… I’ve mentioned here having a similar experience with another Dylan song of that period, “Up to Me.”

      1. As soon as El Paso appeared in the grid I was reminded of the remarkable way Dylan belts out those words in that song (though I had to scramble to remember which song it was!) I quoted the brilliant Up To Me again recently and was remembered your experience, quite a feat!

8. 35:53

   While I managed to finish, I also needed aids to understand, particularly for NHO NOMISM and SUCRES (smash? really?). I did rather better when the wordplay was clear and I understood everything in the clue but perhaps hadn’t come across the definition before i.e. THALIA, BLANQUET, EXARCH, INTAGLIO, AB OVO (though think I’ve seen the term before), PUDENDOUS. So, while I applaud the wizardry of the setter, the puzzle as a whole loses its sheen somewhat…

   Thanks Jack and setter

9. DNF. Seems like I can’t count to five. For the last letter of NOMISM I had an O, the fifth letter of ‘promoters’ rather than an M, the fourth. Very annoying as I would have felt a sense of accomplishment in completing a puzzle with so many uncommon words.

   1. NOMISO is what you say in a Japanese restaurant when you don’t want the offered sauce.

   2. Re NOMISO: Join the club!

10. I thought the Spanish word for sugar might be the same as the French sucre, and wondered if we were looking at two slang terms for a white powder . Could. “Smash “ and “sucre “ be cocaine? Convoluted and wrong – but led to the right answer.
    24 mins

11. Stuck in the SE again, although less badly than yesterday. Oddly (possibly NHO) ESSENE only came to me when I removed the last three letters of SHOE TREE to see if there was another option there. NHO ‘smash’, but had a vague memory of Ecuadorian sucres having come up before. Pleased to see my trusting nature wasn’t taken advantage of!

    Thanks both.

12. Nearly done in 43 mins
    — Got a whole clutch of NHOs but did not see the country of Guinea. Had to put BEGUILE which fitted, I heard the song “ Begin the Beguine” with Julio Iglesias and never knew what it was on about.
    — The other frustration was a misspelling of Ghandi, which made AMNESTY impossible. HONESTY fitted, so in it went. That clue is pretty convoluted, any clue that requires three types of brackets and two tildes to explain is hard. And the superfluous “for” makes it even harder.
    — NHOs AB OVO, INTAGLIO, THALIA, BLANQUET, EXARCH, NOMISM, BEGUINE, PUDENDOUS, SUCRES
    — ESSENE went in quickly, weren’t those the guys who stashed the DeadSea Scrolls?
    — COD HOUND DOG

13. Tough-ish towards the end, this one, with some unfamiliar vocabulary – something of a trend currently it seems. Only nomism completely nho but remembered the progressive bit, fortunately.
    Knew Thalia from the French train service of that name, though not sure it is the same Thalia, there were several.
    Using a word that means “shameful” to describe womens’ privy parts seems very strange to me, my own view is essentially the precise opposite.

    1. I think you are perhaps confusing/merging Thalys and Lyria.

14. DNF after a valiant effort. Only NOMISM was beyond me. Perhaps I should have persevered. I’d just put in SHOETREE and SUCRES without expecting either to be right. I did remember there was a place called SUCRE somewhere in South America from my 1961 ‘O’ Level Geography too. As a lad, I thought the words were “When you begin, you begin.” And I didn’t want my dog to catch a rabbit, which he never had any intention of doing. I was a mixed-up 3d. Good puzzle, mainly. Thank you Jack and setter.

15. BTW did anyone else notice that we have THE TIMES down both sides of the grid?

    1. Hi ha. Our comments arrived simultaneously.

       1. I am usually hopeless at spotting such things, but I think the number of unusual words must have triggered my brain, and by that point I had the whole LHS.

16. 25:35 A feast of unknowns finishing with the NHO HOUND DOG, finding the H from the first and last column Ninas. SUCRES derived with a shrug from the anagram. (Smash? Really?). Thanks Jackkt and setter.

    1. You’ve never heard the Elvis Presley song Hound Dog?!

       1. Not his song.
          Written by Leiber and for a woman to sing, his was a cover and arguably not a patch on Big Mama Thornton’s original which pre-dates it by three years.
          Sung by a male, the lyrics make no sense at all. But that didn’t bother listeners at the time. In fact I doubt it does even now.
          At least the original version at no 19, has now replaced the Elvis version in the official ‘top 500 singles of all time’.

          1. The Elvis version is undoubtedly the most famous one. But I daresay you’re just enjoying needlessly correcting someone.

17. WOE in a guessed AD OVO after 43 mins. And I know Ad means to as in Ad Astra.
    That was about as far out of my comfort zone as any puzzle for a long time. Very little biffable and I counted 8 NHOs so all hard graft through the WP. A good test of ones cryptic skills and I was esp. pleased with ESSENE and NOMISM but it felt like an exam, not much fun and a fail at the end.
    Thanks jackkt and examiner.

    1. If it’s any consolation, once you come across AB OVO in a crossword you’ll almost never forget it again!

       1. That, then, will be a good beginning for me.

18. 11:09, and one of those days where a classical background helped enormously in assembling answers, not to mention having done numerous quizzes which involved bygone South American currencies and the like.

19. 22.47. Our setter obviously also creates Mephistos, given the obscurity of many of the entries. Like Mephisto (at least this week) the answers are all gettable if you follow the wordplay, but might need a confirming look-up in Chambers, or presumably, for the daily, Collins. It turns out that’s mildly perilous with the Ecuadorian SUCRE, as Chambers hasn’t caught up with the Dollarisation of the currency, rendering “once” questionable.
    PUDENDOUS is a horrible word, not surprising that it’s not shown up before. But given the fodder, it’s about the only possible arrangement.
    Clever devices for INTAGLIO and NOMISM, illustrating that thing of following the instructions.
    I’m glad I’m not the only one who can’t spell GANDHI – I too pondered how HONESTY could be made to work before correcting.
    I didn’t spot the NINA, exhausted by the solving effort, but now wonder whether our setter was dropping a hint with EL NINO.

20. Docked in Kusadasi (for excursions to Ephesus) but sunk by the NHOs PUDENDOUS, NOMISM and SUCRES. Oh well, tomorrow’s another day, another port and another chance.
    Thanks to jackkt and setter.

21. Also beaten by the ESSENE/SUCRES pairing, but at least I’m in good company. NHO either (or ‘smash’ as currency) and wouldn’t have got them however long I’d tried.

    NOMISM also NHO, but a guess from wordplay. Astonishingly, I was aware of the BLANQUET pear, and knew THALIA was one of the Graces, but these were also tough. A thorough workout today.

22. The progressive characters device is not new and I should have seen it, especially in such a long and ‘meaningless’ surface. I’d never heard of NOMISM and when I had N_MISM and could think of nothing that fitted I used aids to finish in 61 minutes. Which could have been much faster but the SE corner really held me up.

    [Strange: this is my second try. First time round I got some frightening error message which told me that I had been blocked.]

23. I found this very satisfying, which I would say given that everything clicked smoothly into place for a sub-20 solve. Count me as another Ghandi, initially. It didn’t stay in for too long as I’m well aware of my confusion: my Ghandhis seem to exist in a perpetual state of flux between my khans and my autobahns (and I think also some other, currently forgotten, confusingly-positioned-H-words). I thought the Nina very neat. Thanks to setter and Jack for the blog and extra info.

    1. I have a friend whose surname is Mukhopadhyay.

       1. How does he spell it?

       2. I imagine that’s a fun signature – I hope they don’t shirk it with a cheap initial or the like.

24. 15:30. A tough one, and rather too many obscurities for a daily puzzle IMO.
    I was a bit thrown by SHOETREE as a single word. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it like that.
    Another who can’t spell GANDHI, but I sort of knew that I probably couldn’t so was able to correct it quite quickly. Fun fact: Indira’s husband Feroze was originally a GANDHY but changed it in honour of the more famous one.

25. Beaten by ESSENE and NOMISM, where the clue made absolutely no sense to me and the definition is still above my pay grade! I’m surprised to see the snitch below average for this given the number of tricky words.

26. DNF on the hour. Life’s too short……..

    All has been said above.

    Well done Jack for finishing!

27. 19 mins which for me is extraordinary. Particularly with all those NHO’s. Hardest was AB OVO, totally new to me, which could have been anything.

28. Tuesday is the new Friday?
    28 mins with LOI EXARCH. In a grid full of tricky words this was the trickiest, as the others at least had some generous wordplay. Actually the biggest holdup was my old enemy: the correct spelling of GANDHI. Very entertaining challenge though.

29. DNF – ESSENE and SHOETREE – c’est la vie

30. My thanks to jackkt and setter.
    Used aids quite a lot; I found the vocab a bit too much.
    1a Thalia, forgotten her. It is a plant of some kind with lower case T.
    5a NHO Blanquet; found it hard to find any of these pears on Google or in my dictionary.
    10a Exarch HHO but forgotten.
    17a Indira G. Didn’t recognise Mills as the anagrind so took a while. Also couldn’t spell GhandI so that delayed others.
    NHO 22a Nomism. Added to Cheating Machine which “proves” it is rare.
    27a Sucres. Abstruse, but was in CM. NHO Smash in the required sense and I think that was adding obscurity to an abstruse answer. I’m happy with Sucre as one of Bolivia’s capitals but that doesn’t have a plural so would not have worked.
    1d Hoop-La. Surprised that this is now one word and hyphenated is obsolete.
    15d Pudendous. NHO, added to CM. As JerryW notes, why shameful? We all have pudenda. But the dictionary does have it as meaning shameful; well I never!
    19d Essene DNF. Never thought of essence.

31. Taken from twenty five minutes or so to 37,15 by ESSENE, SUCRES and NOMISO thus finishing with a pink square. Drat. Can’t count!! Some of these puzzles are becoming a chore rather than a pleasure! Thanks Jack.

32. Foiled by the SE corner – miserable ending to what had been a good challenge hitherto.

33. DNF, beaten by most of the SE corner: SHOETREE, SUCRES (same NHOs there as Jack), PUDENDOUS and AMNESTY (both foiled by misspelling INDIRA GANDHI), plus the unknown ESSENE.

    – Had no idea how THALIA meant Grace, but the wordplay worked
    – Didn’t know the BLANQUET pear but the cluing was kind, and the Q checker helped a lot
    – Had to trust the wordplay for EXARCH
    – Followed the instructions for the unknown NOMISM and INTAGLIO
    – Got CHARISMATIC without understanding how it worked

    Thanks Jack and setter.

    COD The Red Planet

34. I didn’t really enjoy this, not least because of the amount of biffing that I undertook. NHO BLANQUET or NOMISM, and couldn’t have defined PUDENDOUS.

    FOI EL PASO (cue Marty Robbins earworm)
    LOI NOMISM (weird words should be clued simply, this was labyrinthine)
    COD HOUND DOG (still humming EL PASO though 😂)
    TIME 9:46 (miraculous in the circumstances)

    1. Agree: weird words should be clued simply. That’s what Ximenes said and he was right.

35. “The food that to him now is as luscious as locusts shall be to him shortly as ACERB as the coloquintida” (Othello).

    Must look out for that progressive characters dodge. Especially in words I’ve never heard of. DNF, in spite of nailing some beauties.

36. Meh! Finished but not overly enjoyed. Oh, well, each to his own. Same number of NHOs as our blogger’s copious listing; but I had QUA for his ESSENE. SUCRE alternative capital of Bolivia known, maybe it was a South American thing and there was one in Ecuador as well? Presumably Adrian Mills is a “thing”, not GREEN PAINT? Another NHO, along with SMASH.
    El Paso brought to mind not Dylan but the song by Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. Needed a cut lunch and a water bag to even read through the clue for 22 ac. COD to the smooth anagram for EL NIÑO.

37. Sort of DNF in 25

    Sort of because I considered ESSENE, even understanding it was ESSENCE without the C and that BEING could be a noun but totally failed to cut the clue after ASCETIC rather than JEWISH. Should have just bunged it in; I normally do. Like Dr Shred all done in decent time (17 minutes) bar that one and SUCRES where I finally twigged what was going on.

    I don’t mind a few obscurities so didn’t mind this one. SOB STORY my favourite.

    Thanks Setter/Jackkt.

38. 27a left me with an unspeakably awful image of the good people of Ecuador putting sugar on their instant mashed potato.

39. Struggled on gamely until confronted by the SE. Pudendous, nomism and sucres caused my withdrawal from the fray. Thanks for filling the gaps.

40. DNF I share many NHOs with my predecessors. Managed to work out a few from wordplay INTAGLIO PUDENDOUS NOMISM amongst them.

41. Trying to extend my skills into the 15×15 this week. It’s an interesting experience so far. Having to trust the wordplay so much is challenging and though I’m totally prepared for NHOs aplenty it is reassuring to find many fellow solvers with the same experiences. So this was a DNF but I was pleased to correctly complete about three quarters.
    Many thanks to Jack, and indeed all bloggers, for illuminating the shadows and thanks to the setters for being so blooming clever!

42. I loved this, despite 7 NHOs, though actually THALIA was a DNRemember! The joy was sailing through the top half by following the wordplay and bunging in what was clearly indicated. SE corner held me up somewhat – not SHOETREE, as Oxford always takes me first to shoes, or NOMISM – I remember the first progressive characters clue a while ago – but the other NHOs ESSENE, SUCRES and AB OVO. I eventually bifd and then parsed the latter, assuming ‘from the egg’, and decided the anagram of curses only worked one way. After which ESSENE became clear. I admit to checking the NHOs once I’d put them in, but I don’t submit anyway. So very chuffed overall to have finished, and relatively quickly.

43. Too many NHOs here for this to have been an enjoyable solve, mostly those set out by our blogger. Some of them went in simply because nothing else could, but NOMISM and ESSENE, as unknown intersectors, offered too many options for anything but a guess, so I bagged it at this point. DNF after about 35 mins, but sadly with no sense of satisfaction. Oh, well … another day tomorrow.

44. I was pleased when this came back all green since, like most of us, there were many words I’d either never heard of or forgotten. When three of the first 4 across clues are THALIA, BLANQUET, and EXARCH, all of which were cross-fingers answers, you know it is not going to be straightforward. Then things settled down until the other end with AB OVO, ESSENE, PUDENDOUS, NOMISM, and SUCRES. I felt lucky to get them all. Since I know what PUDENDUM means, it seemed unlikely that PUDENDOUS would mean “shameful” but it seems it does. I had no idea what was going on with SUCRES since I didn’t know that meaning of “smash” either. I wondered at first if it had something to do with the Graf Spee being sunk/scuttled somewhere in that part of the world, the only South American smash I could think of, but even that was stupid since I was mixing up Ecuador and Uruguay. Definitely a crossword that had to be wrestled to the ground.

45. I enjoyed tackling this one – I don’t think I’ve ever got so many NHOs right purely from word play, but I didn’t manage to finish – NOMISM was one NHO too many for me and although I could see that ‘IS’ would be part of the answer, the “progressive” thing I couldn’t fathom and don’t appreciate now that it has been explained; didn’t get SHOETREE – maybe I have heard it in the distant past, but wasn’t thinking on the right lines at all; similar story with AMNESTY – one that I think I would have got if I had taken a break and cleared my head.

    And as for SUCRES, I got it purely because I know that the Sucre was the currency of Ecuador (I thought it still was…, but no) and deduced that “smash” must be rhyming slang for “cash” even if I have never heard it and struggle to believe that anyone uses it.

46. 46:30. Loads of NHOs … very stuck with NOMISM and ESSENE. Some fairly esoteric vocabulary today!

47. A surprisingly good effort for me, but definitely no cigar. I used aids for nho Pudendous, but even then Nomism, Sucres and Essen were still beyond my level. I also struggled to parse Charismatic.
    In passing, I was relieved to see that global warming was limited to El Nino . . .and not No Nile 😉 Invariant

48. EL PASO in music for me is the Marty Robbins hit that became a Grateful Dead standard, about the cowboy who comes back to town to get his girl but is shot and dies in her arms. “Out in the west Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a Mexican girl …” Coincidentally caught a glimpse of Marty Robbins at the weekend when he appeared unexpectedly in a cameo in the rather good Clint Eastwood country music film Honkytonk Man. HOUND DOG was originally recorded by Big Mama Thornton in ’52 and it’s well worth listening to. Beginnings of rock. Must have been on wavelength because I did this in 18’02”, confidently guessing quite a few.

49. Quite easy really, or it would have been if I’d known just a bit more about varieties of pear, Byzantine governors, Greek mythology, dances, arboriculture, Latin and obsolete adjectives for ‘shameful’.

    If only I’d remembered ESSENE (or even ESSENCE) I might have somehow worked out what do with the letters in ‘curses’ and that ‘smash’ could just be yet another word for money, and made it over the finish line. Just a touch too tricky for me with ESSENE and SUCRES. But this was hugely educational, the most new words from a single crossword for quite a while, so thanks for that.

    I’m hugely in awe of those of you who can come up against all that and still somehow solve in a time under 20 minutes, some even under 10. Spectacular.

50. Too many times these days I’m asking myself what the point is of creating and presenting puzzles that good solvers can’t solve. Are new solvers going to be attracted by puzzles such as this, last Wednesday’s and any Friday offering over the past several months? I’d say probably not. I’d really like to get back to the days where solvers are beaten only by ingenious cluing rather than by obscure words with tortuous wordplay

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