Times Cryptic No 27000 – Saturday, 31 March 2018. Crossword 27K day.

36 comments on “Times Cryptic No 27000 – Saturday, 31 March 2018. Crossword 27K day.”

1. 11:38 for this enjoyable offering.

   FOI SUMATRA after scratching my head over 1A, which I tried to start “SC”, before moving across diagonally to get cracking. That didn’t work either, but moving to the SW did.

   DNK SCHENGEN, but the surface was friendly. Unusually for me, no biffing on this puzzle.

   LOI ARMOURY

   COD GEORGE ELIOT, honourable mention to STOCKING FILLER.

2. Once again missing a hidden, I got ORB from checkers, only later seeing how the clue worked. Only knew SCHENGEN by chance, my brother mentioning it in talking about his upcoming trip to Europe. I suppose I would have solved it anyway, but I would have been waiting all week to see this blog. (Well, of course I wait all week to see it anyway, but.) DNK TIPPER. LOI URANIUM. 10ac is one of those annoying non-homophones that one must put up with, I suppose; no one pronounces the fruit as ‘pommie granate’, and no Aussie calls a Brit a ‘pomme’ ending in schwa. Same CODs as Philip, or maybe in reverse order.
   1. Am I allowed to suggest that, never mind the schwa: if an Australian calls an Englishman a “Pommie”, it usually ends in B*****D? No, I thought not!! But, that’s Aussie culture for you. Always said with affection, of course!

      More importantly, I think that if one were over-enunciating POMEGRANATE for clarity, the first two syllables would sound like Pommie. So, I take Kevin’s point but don’t feel so strongly as I sometimes do in cases where different accents/dialects clearly don’t “sound like”.

      Edited at 2018-04-07 12:55 am (UTC)

3. Is exactly as I would and do prononunce it!
   It must be remembered that this crossword emanates from the UK and therefore the setter’s homophones are usually of the British persuasion. Americans and our other colonial cousins generally no longer use Standard English. Isn’t it about time that ‘American’ and ‘Australian’ are accepted for what they are, and not English per se. Once loaded with inceassant acronyms and mangles it becomes very un-English – and will only become more so. I have increasingly great difficulty in comprehending ‘South African’ and ‘Neuzoilander’.
   Brummie, Geordie, ‘Scouse, Glaswegian and Cockney are far easier.

   FOI 3dn RAG WEEK
   LOI 4ac SCHENGEN (‘Eurospeak’)
   COD 8dn NOBODY
   WOD 10ac POMEGRANATE!

   28 minutes

   Edited at 2018-04-07 03:17 am (UTC)

   1. I’d bet big bucks that in fact you do not pronounce it [pomi…]. If I ever get to Shanghai I’ll record you. ODE gives [pomIgraenIt], but I imagine that what they’re marking as [I] (lax) is a so-called barred i if not a schwa; anyway they don’t give [i] (tense). Since neither Brits nor Murcans consider [I] homophonous with [i] (‘ship’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘sheep’, etc.), neither should they –if ODE is right about UK pronunciation– take ‘pomegranate’ to rhyme with ‘pommie granite’.
      1. That is precisely how I would pronounce it. Sorry.
         1. Kevin I do not gamble – but like Jerry that is how we – and the setter pronounce it. I would be very happy to see you in Shanghai with your tape recorder.

            Out of interest – how do Murcans pronounce flaccid? – most Anglos make it sound onomatopaeic – however the first c should be hard ie flak/cid. What say you?

            1. You don’t gamble, I don’t have big bucks, so let’s leave it at that (although the ODE–I’m not going to look further–gives a different pronunciation). I actually read something somewhere about ‘flaccid’–can’t remember where–that if I recall correctly suggested that the ks pronunciation (which is mine, too) is yielding to the ss pronunciation. Can’t remember if this was specifically about US English–I think not. Not a word that comes up too often in conversation, of course.
               On edit: I actually did look further, and much to my surprise, and acute embarrassment, at least some of the (I assume RP) examples make pomegranate/pommie granite homophones. (There seems to be variation between tense and lax versions of the vowel–the tense being the true homophone–and the transcriptions I saw gave the lax [I].) So my sincere apologies to the setter.

               Edited at 2018-04-07 08:53 am (UTC)

               1. Perhaps Jerry and Horryd do pronounce pomegranate as ‘pommie granite’ but if they do then they are I think unusual. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone pronounce it like that, in England or anywhere else. It would sound strange to me.
                  As for the use of the homophone itself, as far as I’m concerned it’s close enough. I actually find these slightly awful homophones quite amusing.
                  I’m now going to spend the rest of the weekend asking people to say POMEGRANATE.

                  Edited at 2018-04-07 12:59 pm (UTC)

                  1. I’d confine myself to people you know, just to be on the safe side; people can react unpredictably to being asked by a stranger to say ‘pomegranate’. You could carry a picture of one, and ask in a foreign accent, “Excuse please; what do you call this?” Anyway, I think Z below has a point: the spelling. There aren’t many English words with the stress pattern of ‘pomegranate’, but they don’t invite a full vowel in the second syllable: acupuncture, dandelion, elevator, atomizer, feminism, syllabary, customary, culinary, … pomEEgranate is rather an odd man out.
                     1. Sound advice. I’ve confined myself to members of my immediate family so far and have only encountered schwa. This is slightly surprising because I myself pronounce the I (albeit as a hard i), but my wife is Canadian which no doubt influences the kids.
   2. Me too. Ann
   3. I know from your suppport in the past that you all will bow to Lancastrian as the real standard English. I pronounce it as POMMIE, that is not using the schwa, followed by a GRANITE pronounced with a schwa. My Londoner wife is called Janet and can’t even pronounce her own name. Janit indeed! My pronunciation of that is as per Dr Finlay of his housekeeper, ie with a schwa. Now let’s get to work with the safety pin.
4. 19 minutes on this pleasant puzzle with everything known. If only the power station operations manager had read The TAO of Physics, the URANIUM fuel wouldn’t have become dangerously unstable, the control rods could have stayed up and there would have been no LOST GENERATION. I ‘d always thought the alternative definition applied because of the resulting mismatch in the female to male ratio causing a drop in birth rate, as had the war itself of course. I read the newspaper once I’ve done the crossword and the Killer Sudoku so the SCHENGEN area is familiar territory. I’m torn between NEPOTIST and GEORGE ELIOT for COD. I’ll go for the latter because discussion about Mrs Gaskell and Victorian novels on here during the week reminded me of SILAS MARNER, a favourite novel. Thank you B for an informative blog, and setter for a nice puzzle.

   Edited at 2018-04-07 06:35 am (UTC)

5. Enjoyable crossword, with some neat clues, eg 2dn. I feel a little bit let down that 27000 did not lead to a theme or something, though I’m often not that keen on themes so I suppose the poor setter can’t win, as usual.
   Speaking of which, what is it about homophone clues that drives commenters to basically call the setter a liar, if it does not match with their personal experience? It doesn’t happen with other types of clue.
   1. I’ve never seen a commenter call the setter a liar, even basically, about homophone clues or any other types. I have seen a number of comments from speakers of rhotic dialects, but I would have thought that the most common type of comment was not ‘X doesn’t sound like Y’ (or ‘X doesn’t sound like Y in my dialect’), but ‘X doesn’t mean Y’, i.e. a type of clue where homophony is irrelevant.
6. Exactly 45 mins for this which comes at 2700.0 secs. Spooky!

   I was hoping to see a theme for this puzzle. 27000 = 30 cubed. I thought we might get a cubic, 3-D Jumbo Crossword with 30 squares per side. All the corners, sides and vertices were to share the same letters in their lights and the clues and answers were to have a cubic theme. Sugar lumps and blocks of ice would abound. This was the day the setter would Crossword the Rubik on.

   No dice.

   1. That was me above, anonymously trying to box clever.
      1. And succeeding!
         1. X OXO

            My real time was 21 min 55 secs.

7. I enjoyed this over a perfectly average 17.45, partly because of a couple of deep set recollections. One is a ISIHAC classic “late arrival” at the grocer’s ball: “all the way from Australia: the entire It family and their Pommy Gran”. The other is a favourite clue for NEPOTIST, from maybe less precise Times days, which was simply “Uncle Pushkin?”
   Pommie granite sounds that way to me: my problem is spelling it which requires ignoring that pronunciation.
8. Well I was due for an error and for some reason I went with “nepotisM” – just sloppy clue-reading probably. I certainly dnk SCHENGEN but it looked plausible. I rather like POMEGRANATEs and probably pronounce them just like Kevin if I stop to think about it – but no need to start that up again. 15 on the nose but with a pink square.

   As a footnote, I expect to be away most Saturdays for the next 6 months or so, so will be doing my disappearing act from Bruce’s blog comments most likely for the duration.

9. A gentle stroll in 16:03 with no unkinowns. POLE VAULTER my favourite, but TOM was cute too. Thanks Bruce and setter.
   1. Interestingly UNKI-NOHN is the Japanese for incognito.

      Pomegranate in Japanese is Zakuro.

      恐ろしい お忍び! Osoroshi oshinobi!

      Edited at 2018-04-07 11:42 am (UTC)

      1. Interesting. I should try and remember to wear my reading glasses when type a comment… but if I had I would never have found that out. Thanks!
10. 36:35. Forgot to do this last week so did it just now. I usually do the jumbo on Saturday and the Saturday puzzle on Sunday or Monday but was out on Sunday and got bogged down in the BH jumbo on Monday. Nice puzzle. Got stuck at the end for a few minutes on 1dn and 1ac, I just couldn’t see the word at 1dn for ages. As soon as I got it 1ac went in straight away.
11. I went to The British Museum last Saturday -along with thousands of others-and I solved this on the way there and back,which means it was pretty quick for me, an hour or so.
    1a seemed an easy start and nothing much held me up. LOI was Uranium where I struggled a bit. David
12. 12:32. Nice puzzle, but I was slightly disappointed not to find something special to mark the occasion.
    As mentioned above I’m with Kevin on not thinking that POMEGRANATE and ‘Pommie granite’ are homophones, but not with him in minding.
13. Completed with my first cuppa this am. Very enjoyable. No quibbles. 22 minutes. Ann
14. COD NEPOTIST. Guessed NOBODY.
    Ong’ara,
    Kenya.
15. I did this puzzle last Sunday after spending Saturday driving from Middlesbrough to Mull, and in true jet lagged fashion, made a mess of it. Like Olivia I had NEPOTISM, but in my befuddled state I also couldn’t see through the wordplay for 17a and biffed POST GENERATION. Hopefully I’ve typed this correctly after driving from Mull to Middlesbrough. Sleep… I need sleep….zzzz Thanks setter and Bruce.
    PS I’m fine with Pommy Granite….. Do some people say POEM GRANATE?
16. Not an easy solve for me — 43 mins. I was harrumphing at the wonky hidden in 2d TOM, until I came here and discovered what a clever clue it really was!
    I think the setter went a little OTT on the whimsical double-defs — as brnchn (is that Bruce?) notes in the blog.
    The homophony row is going to run and run unfortunately. My main career was in academic linguistics and lexicography, so I have spent some time considering the issues of the socio-linguistics of Received Pronunciation in English, of “citation” forms of pronunciation as represented in the (over-simplified) IPA transcriptions given in dictionaries, of phonemes and allophones, and of the relationship between phomenics and phonetics. Kevin is right that no two speakers will produce the *same* sound when a word is uttered in the flow of normal speech — but we idealise the *actual* sounds into an agreed scheme which e.g. distinguishes ‘sheep’ from ‘ship’ but not the second vowel sound of ‘pomegranate’. I have carried out precisely that field-study work where you ask people how they pronounce words, and then you record them saying the words. People almost never report their own speech performance accurately.

    Thanks to brnchn for a neat explanation of solutions.

    1. Actually, I don’t think I said what you say I said, about no two speakers etc., but I agree with you absolutely. And I’m glad you brought up the unreliability of self-reporting; I was going to, but decided not to. As you know, for instance, people will firmly deny that they ever say such ‘ungrammatical’ things as ‘gonna’ or (in the US, anyway) ‘wanna’. Meanwhile, I wonder how Keriothe’s doing.
       1. Yes, sorry. In my original comment I casually conflated two discrete points: a) I contend that technically two speakers are very unlikely produce exactly the same sounds when pronouncing apparent ‘homophones’ and b) I think you are therefore justified in asserting that you pronounce ‘pomegranate’ differently from ‘pommie granite’.
          Of course, if Keriothe pronounces the word ‘pomegranate’ in order to prompt his informants to pronounce the word, he will obviously invalidate the experiment! So I hope he was using a photo/picture cue.
17. …was caused by being under the impression there was an ‘L’ somewhere in ‘Schengen’.

    As for the pommie, I took him for granite, so no issues there.

18. On 8th Jan 2020 – visiting some old grids

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