Times Cryptic No 26880 – Saturday, 11 November 2017. Nice clues if you can get them.

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This was my idea of a perfect crossword! I am a big fan of puzzles that use familiar words in unfamiliar ways, rather than obscurities from foreign places and times, and/or plant and animal names.

I started off thinking it was going to be an easy puzzle, and some solvers may have found this easy, but I had to work at it in the end. The lovely feature was that, except perhaps at 4dn, there was nothing obscure, just lots of unusual slants on familiar things.

My clue of the day was 24ac, closely followed by 21dn – both had very nice devices to tell you to use only part of a word in the clue! 9ac and 28ac also had fresh ways to say “don’t include this”. Thanks to the setter for a highly enjoyable puzzle.

Clues are in blue, with definitions underlined. Anagram indicators are in bold italics. Answers are in BOLD CAPS, followed by the wordplay. (ABC*) means ‘anagram of ABC’, deletions are in {curly brackets}.

Across
1 The Bull accommodates males; it offers a wide variety of terms (9)
THESAURUS: TAURUS around HE’S. This and 6ac got me off to a flying start.
6 “Message received“, say men turning right (5)
ROGER: EG / OR, all reversed, then R.
9 Sick relation deficient in a vitamin (7)
RETINOL: (REL-TION*). Drop the A from the anagram, because that’s its deficiency.
10 Flat containing tons of sole (7)
PLANTAR: PLANAR containing T. I wasted time trying to make “PLATTER”.
11 Complete upper-class eccentric catching cold (5)
UNCUT: U / NUT, containing C. Again, I wasted time, this time trying to justify “UTTER”.
13 Physical County players taking on Madrid team (9)
CORPOREAL: CO=county / RPO=Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / REAL {Madrid}. DNK the abbreviation “RPO”, but the answer was clear.
14 Anguish of judge with facial hair (9)
HEARTACHE: HEAR / TACHE. I would never write TACHE, and the dictionaries allow other spellings, but it is easy to get there by dropping the starter letters from {mous}TACHE.
16 Extremes of invidious pedantry in word game (1,3)
I SPY: first and last letters.
18 Second of seeds chokes half-cut parrot (4)
ECHO: E=second of sEeds / CHO{kes}. I wondered at first reading whether E-H-A-U (second letter of each word) was a parrot.
19 Try to stop dissipation of anaemic narcissist (9)
EGOMANIAC: (GO ANAEMIC*).
22 Terribly acned lad left ballroom (5,4)
DANCE HALL: (DANCE*) / HAL / L.
24 Muscular worker perhaps content to abandon family (5)
BEEFY: BEE / F{amil}Y. “Content to abandon” is a very nice way of saying “first and last letters”!
25 Join retired and oddly torpid musicians of distinction (7)
MAESTRI: SEAM reversed / TRI=odd letters of torpid.
26 What guards privacy of endlessly corrupt scoundrel at first (7)
CURTAIN: CUR / TAIN{t}.
28 Class of individuals banned from CIA site (5)
CASTE: drop the two “I”s from CIA site.
29 Hit me (6,3)
NUMBER ONE: double definition, referring to the hit parade or the writer.

Down
1 By way of the short and not so short grass (7)
THROUGH: TH{e} / ROUGH=long grass on a golf course.
2 Consume case of aquavit after end of marriage (3)
EAT: {marriag}E / A{quavi}T.
3 Gloss paint regularly disposed of and recycled at one time (8)
ANNOTATE: AN=“paint”, regularly / (AT ONE T*). The definition is “gloss”, in the sense of words of explanation.
4 Finally consider Samuel’s teacher Charlie a bit of a saint? (5)
RELIC: {conside}R / ELI / C{harlie}. DNK the relation between Eli and Samuel, but it seems it was so.
5 Queen enthralled by Orpheus, odd person with special powers (9)
SUPERHERO: ER inside (ORPHEUS*).
6 Grounds crossed by areas once (6)
REASON: hidden answer indicated by “crossed by”.
7 Threaten to go out and steal drug for waif (11)
GUTTERSNIPE: when candles GUTTER, they threaten to go out / SNIP is a possibly archaic verb for steal / E is as always the drug that setters are addicted to. On edit, thanks to harmonic_row: “steal” as a noun=bargain=snip.
8 Meeting supporting sport in the countryside (7)
RURALLY: RU=to quote Winston Churchill, “a sport for hooligans, played by gentlemen” / RALLY.
12 Vow to put on ruffles beneath cape, and suspenders, in closet (4,7)
COAT HANGERS: C=cape / OATH=vow / ANGERS=ruffles. Nicely concealed definition.
15 Incisive way to bring issue to light? (9)
CAESARIAN: quite a good cryptic definition.
17 Dull WI member perhaps joining English party (8)
JAMBOREE: could a Women’s Institute member really be a “JAM BORE”? Surely not! Whatever … add E for English to get the scouting event.
18 Tender skinned tailless rodents prevalent locally (7)
ENDEMIC: {t}ENDE{r} / MIC{e}.
20 Longing to tuck into kind of sugar and spice (7)
CAYENNE: YEN inside CANE. Peppers don’t top my mental list of spices, but I got there via cane sugar.
21 Amiable chap with feet of normal size (6)
GENTLE: GENT / {norma}L / {siz}E. Nice clue.
23 Doctor and I don’t know what to say after colonel turns up (5)
LOCUM: COL turned up / UM.
27 Bother leader of anarchist party (3)
ADO: A{narchist} / DO.

 

27 comments on “Times Cryptic No 26880 – Saturday, 11 November 2017. Nice clues if you can get them.”

  1. Failed at this one with a despairing PLATTER at 10a. Didn’t know plantar and wouldn’t have got there if I’d stared at it all day. As it was it took me 51:41 to do this puzzle. Liked 1d when the penny finally dropped. Didn’t know ANNOTATE for gloss either. An enjoyable puzzle though. Thanks setter and Bruce.
  2. I had a PLANTAR wart removed as a child, which ages later came in handy. (Bruce, you didn’t underline the definition, ‘of sole’.) DNK RPO, but I did know the name of the team, which was enough. I also didn’t, and don’t get the JAM BORE bit. COD to 29ac for its beautifully simple surface.
  3. …gave me 4d. As a result of too much pounding the pavements in my fifties, I got a plantar fascitis injury and solving 10a is the second good thing to come of it. The first was giving up jogging. Sometimes it seems that the weekend puzzles are for the biologists, the midweek for the physicists. I’ll readily admit as one of the latter to having trouble distinguishing posterior from elbow but I managed OK on this. My longest hold-up was getting LOI GENTLE on my mind, as I’ve never used it synonymously with amiable, but I guess it can be so used. COD CAESARIAN, incisive indeed. 53 minutes. A nice puzzle. Thank you B and setter. * On edit. Today’s puzzle. I believe 10a should be 4,2,3 not 4,1,4 as shown in newspaper. No spoiler alert necessary, I trust.

    Edited at 2017-11-18 09:41 am (UTC)

      1. I was OK with 16d, both in constructing the answer from cryptic and spotting the definition phrase. But that’s as printed in the newspaper – “Did arias, maybe, getting rid of alternative, being composed in conservatoire? (9)” Is that what you had as a clue?
        1. That’s what was on the club site. I suspect Kevin may be referring to the fact that the word can also be hyphenated, depending on which dictionary you use.
          1. On Wiki, it can be either way. I wondered if it was a part of speech point, but I believe the word can be noun or adjective.
      2. I’m also ok with 16d from today’s though it took a while – reminded me of an awful joke that will have to wait until next week. My elder daughter would kill me for saying this but she also had PLANTAR warts as a small kid. My mother did some sort of incantation over them but I think it was the stuff from the pharmacy that really did the trick.
        1. I’m sure it must have been the incantation, Olivia. None of the proprietary stuff ever seemed to work with our three kids, for veruccas or warts. They all had to have them carved out at a clinic. Back in about 1955, I incanted the words, walking three times around the garden at the same time, as required by family folklore. This did the trick, although I had to wait about ten years for the magic to take effect.
    2. Thanks for the correction on today’s 10a. I don’t think I would have got it otherwise. David
  4. Ooops! another PLATTER for you @10ac would not have done it in a million years!
    Thank the good Lord I only wasted an hour! My LOI.

    Not often we have ROGER’S THESAURUS (FOI) on the top line.

    COD resides at 17dn JAMBOREE with 21dn GENTLE in with a shout.

    My WOD has to go to 7dn GUTTERSNIPE – not so many of them around these days!

    Edited at 2017-11-18 11:09 am (UTC)

  5. I agree it was a good puzzle for the most part but I’m not sure that 10ac was completely fair as it was an obscure word (i.e. one I didn’t know) which relied on another obscure word (as defined above) in the wordplay. I also didn’t know the required meaning of “gloss” although I solved that one easily enough.
  6. Inside 40 mins for all but 10ac which I ended up using aids to solve. I could have kicked myself. I was a keen runner in my thirties and like BW I suffered from plantar fasciitis so knew the word. Some nice touches in this one. I thought “threaten to go out” for “gutter” in 7dn was very good.
    1. I too suffered from plantar fasciitis, after running from the 2008 Shanghai Grand Prix to get a taxi!

      I did know it after all!

  7. The Women’s Institute is famous for making jams. I think they also have contests for best jams. Jam being such an integral part of their organisation (at least in the popular perception), it’s quite feasible that some members bore the pants off any willing listener with a breakdown of recipes, sugar levels etc.
    1. Thank you, U. All I knew about the WI was that they were a bunch of frumpy middle-aged women who applauded enthusiastically on Monty Python.
      1. Watch the good movie Calendar Girls you will understand more! jam and Jerusalem, says Mrs K an ex-branch-treasurer.
  8. Nice puzzle, and great blog, thanks. I think in 7 dn ‘steal’ means ‘bargain’, as in ‘At that price it’s a steal!’ Hence ‘snip’, which is also a bargain. Cheers.
  9. An enjoyable puzzle but I failed to get two.
    I thought Platter was probably wrong but could not improve on it.
    And I just could not get 15d; I went with Cremation which fits quite well apart from the Incisive bit – Light = fire etc. I’d been watching Sue Perkins on the Ganges and there was a lot of that . David
    1. Chambers, Collins and Oxford all have -ian as an alternative spelling. I suspect I wrote it in without thinking, although maybe I had the I from MAESTRI.
  13. It seems PLANTAR fasciitis is quite common among solvers, as that’s the only reason I came up with 10a, too. I sympathise with those who plumped for “platter” as it’s written in my margin, but I gave it another few minutes and finally worked it out, squeaking in two minutes under my hour.

    Enjoyed that one regardless of the close shave, and also 14a HEARTACHE and the jam bore at 17d. I reckon it was years of The Archers that got me to that one. Some might argue that that’s more painful than the foot condition…

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