Times Cryptic No 27054 – Saturday, 02 June 2018. Meaningful spelling reform needed?

Author   branchPosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
No flora or fauna – how excellent! Strangely I knew the rock at 10ac, no doubt from crosswords. This was a steady solve until I got down to four or five missing in the top left, and my LOI 26ac.

I think the clue of the day will be 3dn by overwhelming agreement. A beautiful play on the idiosyncrasies of English spelling and pronunciation. Some will remember the example of GHOTI – apparently not, as I thought, an idea from George Bernard Shaw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti .

There were many other nice clues. Thanks to the setter for a very enjoyable puzzle.

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

Across
1 Vital fluid turning black just about OK (8)
PASSABLE: SAP (vital fluid) reversed, then SABLE (black). I saw “sable” quickly but still took a while to find the answer.

6 Change into suit (6)
BECOME: double definition.

9 Totter, having gone and drunk with barman (3-3-4,3)
RAG-AND-BONE MAN: (GONE AND BARMAN*). So a totter is a rag-and-bone man? Learn something new every time!

10 Rock singer’s run off, rocking (6)
GNEISS: (SINGE-S*). Leave R for “run” out of the anagram. A lovely clue I thought, and one of my last ones in.

11 Part of motor fully formed fitted to lead-free vehicle (8)
ARMATURE: {c}AR is the vehicle, MATURE is fully formed.

13 Border is quiet at these points, one either side of equator (10)
HEMISPHERE: HEM (border), IS, P (quiet), HERE (at these points).

15 Play them again, why don’t we! (4)
LET’S: double definition, the first – spelt without the apostrophe –  referring to tennis.

16 King is present to speak (4)
OFFA: sounds like OFFER.

18 Passage of play in Tri Nations (10)
TRANSITION: (TRI NATIONS*). Very nice surface.

21 Time after time in soldier we see a disciplinarian (8)
MARTINET: the soldier is a marine. (Is he really? I suspect Marines are Marines, not soldiers, but I’m no expert. Certainly a quick Google enquiry suggests US Marines feel strongly about this!) Anyway, scatter T for time judiciously.

22 Aussie girl greeting German in South Africa (6)
SHEILA: HEIL is the German greeting, with infamous connotations in WW2. Put it in S.A. I have to say the idea that Sheila is a prototypical Australian name is a myth that lives on only in crosswords. In real life she’s not in the top one hundred.

23 Anger after family service cancelled — initially an ordeal (7,2,4)
BAPTISM OF FIRE: BAPTISM OFF is a family service cancelled, then IRE is anger.

25 Desirable type wrong to turn back on a party (6)
ADONIS: A DO, followed by SIN backwards.

26 Kind of ship at intervals we must keep out of the wind (8)
SISTERLY: SI from S{h}I{p}, then the wind is a {we}STERLY, minus “we”. I had great trouble with this, not least because I didn’t think “sisterly” could specifically mean “kind”, but Chambers says it can.

Down
2 Called in a body of engineers to fix (7)
ARRANGE: RANG inside A RE.

3 Important instruction to deputy about outgoing mail? (11)
SIGNIFICANT: the boss says, “sign {them} if I can’t”. Very cute!

4 Crazy, omitting two separate articles in church announcement (5)
BANNS: BANANAS minus two “A”s. Nice clue.

5 Host briefly grabbing supporter in this? (7)
EMBRACE: EMCE{e} around BRA.

6 Times editions produced in simple steps (2,7)
BY NUMBERS: BY (“Times”), NUMBERS (“editions”).

7 From the tops, cascading waterfall moulds valley (3)
CWM: spelt out by first letters of each word. Answers with no vowels are hard to see, even though by now I half know “W” is a vowel in Welsh.

8 Live amid vast wealth in turret (7)
MINARET: ARE (“live”) in MINT (“vast wealth”, as in “he made a mint”).

12 Read what grandfather shows you, perhaps (4,3,4)
TELL THE TIME: cryptic definition, “grandfather, perhaps” being a clock.

14 Puritan so wrong to pretend to be superior (3,2,4)
PUT ON AIRS: (PURITAN SO*).

17 Somewhere to live and base truck (7)
FLATBED: FLAT (place to live), BED (base).

19 In our office occasionally (2,5)
AT TIMES: double definition – the first jocular.

20 Natural source of wealth: how to stop it seizing up? (3,4)
OIL WELL: double definition – the second light-hearted, but good advice.

22 Dreadful fuss about one Muslim group (5)
SUFIS: insert I (one) in (FUSS*).

24 Less than a glassful of beer in cask (3)
PIN: drop the T off PINT, for a somewhat obscure size of cask.

22 comments on “Times Cryptic No 27054 – Saturday, 02 June 2018. Meaningful spelling reform needed?”

  1. I thoroughly agree with you, brnchn, about 3d. I laughed out loud when I solved the clue. and wrote it in my notebook for future use as a favourite clue.
    Thank you for SISTERLY. That one clue must have occupied 10 to 15 minutes of solving time and I entered what proved to be the correct solution more out of hope than conviction.
    I agree with you about SHEILA. I lived in Sydney for 20 years and I only knew one lady by that name who arrived with it on the boat from England!
    1. But ‘sheila’ is used as a common noun to mean ‘woman’, no? That’s how I interpreted the clue.
        1. Come to think of it, probably the only time I ever heard the word was the Monty Python sketch, which is around 40 years old.
          1. I can think of only one or two people in Australia of my acquaintance who use that name as a generic term for women and they are both in their 70s. Our son’s generation doesn’t use it at all.
  2. I had no idea what was going on with 9ac, which I biffed from checkers. (I suppose one can’t biff from checkers, but.) CWM was fresh in memory, as I had typed in CYM in a recent Concise, and remembered the W just as I hit ‘submit’. I liked the neatness of 6ac, and LETS (which took me forever to parse), but yes, the COD goes to SIGNIFICANT.
    1. “Steptoe & Son” was a very popular 1960s British sitcom based on the lives of father and son rag-and-bone men.
    2. Someone recently gave us the answer to biffing from checkers: but it fits … !
  3. I knew RAG-AND-BONE MAN, I didn’t know that ‘totter’ had that meaning.
  4. ….and you can get it if you try. Which was the case with SISTERLY which took the last 3 minutes or so of a 14 minute finish. I thought of biffing it, but as I couldn’t see anything else that would fit (confirmed by later spell check) I juggled around with it and finally saw the light.

    FOI MARTINET after a worrying wait for inspiration, but then I quickly hit top gear.

    LOI SISTERLY

    Totally agree with Brnchn that SIGNIFICANT is COD – indeed a COY contender.

  5. The news from the land of Oz has not caught up with Chambers: SHEILA is alive and well, though Collins admits she’s old-fashioned now. So there you go, Bruce, mate, just stick another prawn on the barbie, pour yourself a cold one and chill. Fair dinkum?
    17 minutes, my standard time, but my oath, 3d was a beauty! Good on ya, setter. Cheers B!
    2. As an Aussie I have to say: no-one ever uses Sheila (oops, there’s another lie, you do occasionally hear it). It’s very much 40 or 50 years old – had a brief time in the sun in about the early/mid 1970s from memory. Perhaps spawned by a comedy show on TV? The Naked Vicar, or maybe Paul Hogan?
      Even so it was a write-in, and absolutely a great clue: perfectly fits the Times’ 1950-ish feel, even if it is 20 years too modern. And perfectly fits the Poms’ superior and supercilious attitude towards us unsophisticated antipodeans. (Watch out while I brush that chip off my shoulder 😉
      Otherwise: 21 minutes, enjoyable puzzle.
  6. …when the old man died. 38 minutes of my life numbered on this middling difficulty puzzle. I can’t believe that I spent 50 years in business and never heard about “sign if I can’t”. Definitely COD SIGNIFICANT. LOI OFFA. Took a long time to parse SISTERLY. Of course it can mean kind, but it’s not what I first think of. Like others of our generation, my sister and I were separated in age by the length of the war, and sadly she died a few years ago. She was the one who decided where that line that can’t be seen was. That’s what I miss most.
    Enjoyable puzzle. Thank you B and setter.
  7. 19:43. Yes 3d made me laugh too. And so did the bananas at 4d when I saw it. GNEISS my LOI, taking a while to spot that “Rock” was the definition. SISTERLY my SLOI which also made me smile when I worked it out. Ticks on my copy too for TELL THE TIME and LETS. Nice puzzle! Thanks B and setter.
  8. All good fun, if a little old fashioned with SHEILA and the totter, my print out says 16 minutes with SISTERLY parsed last and 3d CoD. GNEISS I also liked.
  9. Great puzzle. Loved SIGNIFICANT. Like others, I had trouble parsing SISTERLY, though the answer seemed obvious once I had the checkers. 24 minutes. Ann
  10. 36:11 for me. Nipped through most of this fairly quickly but held up a bit at the end by LOI armature. Dnk pin but 24dn could only be a short pint. Agree that 3dn was very good. I also liked 4dn.
  11. 9:15. Quite straightforward but a nice puzzle, and yes of course SIGN IF I CAN’T is the clue of the day, if not the year.
    I’m sure GNEISS has appeared before: I have a vague memory of it causing me problems the first time I came across it.

  12. What a brilliant Saturday crossword. Thank you setter.

    We had Steptoe and Son at 9a, The (Lewisian) Gneiss at 10a, Offa (‘s Dyke) at 16a, Sign If I Can’t at 3d, a Welsh Valley at 7d, an Oil Well at 20d and my LOI – probably with many others – S(h)I(p)(we)STERLY being kind at 26a. Excellent.

    This is what I signed up for.

  13. This was definitely not a puzzle for this relative beginner. I do the Saturday puzzles every week and only managed to get about half of this so I rate it as significantly more difficult than average.
    Unknowns such as Gneiss and the required meaning of Totter made it hard. 26a was very difficult. I had all the checkers for this and no idea what was required. 7d not seen before in a puzzle. Should this not indicate a foreign language as with Scottish good etc?
    So what we call a learning experience. David
  14. 1 across in another Saturday puzzle (27,114 August 11 2018) is also PASSABLE.

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