Times Cryptic No 27624 – Saturday, 28 March 2020. Heteronyms ’R US.

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I found this another relatively easy number for a Saturday. My FOI was 4ac, and LOI was 1ac, which I think was also my favourite among a number of contenders.

Several delightful clues, like 14ac and 18ac, had me thinking, ‘surely that must be the answer, but how does it fit the definition?’ … followed eventually by a series of aha moments, when I realised I was reading the definition with the wrong pronunciation, and therefore a different meaning!! Apparently, we can call these heteronyms, as opposed to homonyms which have the same spelling and pronunciation. There were also some answers that had a distinct whiff of nostalgia about them, like 28ac and 5dn. Thanks to the setter for a very enjoyable puzzle.

Notes for newcomers: The Times offers prizes for Saturday Cryptic Crosswords, so this blog is posted a week later, after the competition closes. So, please don’t comment here on the current Saturday Cryptic. Clues are blue, with definitions underlined. (ABC*) means ‘anagram of ABC’. Deletions are in [square brackets].

Across
1 Spotted piece showing the same note and number (6)
DOMINO – DO (ditto=the same), MI (note), NO (number).
4 Romantic English celebs pursue papers (8)
IDEALIST – ID, E[nglish], A-LIST.
10 Cobalt miners maintain one rotating sequence (9)
CONTINUUM – CO (Co is the symbol for cobalt), NUM (Nation Union of Miners) ‘maintaining’ TINU (unit=one, ‘rotating’).
11 Problem with current tree (5)
SUMAC – SUM (problem), AC (current).
12 Duty that could be tinier possibly? (14)
RESPONSIBILITY – ‘could be’ (TINIER POSSIBLY*).
14 Point about women’s tier? (5)
TWINE – TINE (point of a fork), around W. A ‘ti-er’, pronounced with a long I, can be something used for tying up a parcel for example.
16 Foreign article in metal case that may go up at any time (9)
TINDERBOX – DER is the German article, in TIN BOX. How long ago the bushfire crisis seems in this time of pandemic.
18 Relay touching silicon in store (9)
REDEPOSIT – RE (touching), SI (chemical symbol for silicon) in DEPOT. ‘Relay’, pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable, is to lay again.
20 Dim British king (5)
BLEAR – B (British), LEAR (king).
21 Old Peruvian quote about father’s disability (14)
INCAPACITATION – INCA, PA, CITATION.
25 Measure of area surrounding east German plant (5)
HOSTA – HA (hectare) surrounding OST (German for east).
26 Greek character in patio’s sickly, sort of green (9)
PISTACHIO – CHI (Greek character) in (PATIOS*), ‘sickly’.
27 Locate dull table item (5,3)
PLACE MAT – an escapee from the quick crossword, probably needing no explanation.
28 Minor perhaps beginning to madden Iris (6)
MORRIS – M[adden], ORRIS (a variety of iris. Orris root is used in perfumery).

I remember the strange feeling when I first went to New Zealand in the 1980s, to see the streets full of cars transplanted from the 1960s, like Morris Minors and old Holdens. It’s a different country now!

Down
1 Strippers who hand out awards? (10)
DECORATORS – double definition, the first perhaps a bit elliptical; decorating may or may not begin with stripping.
2 Take away copper and half of lead from rear of toy? (5)
MINUS – take CU and LE[ad] off the end of MINUS[cule]. Does that really mean ‘toy’? I suppose it could.
3 Terrible sound drowns old mike (7)
NOISOME – NOISE ‘drowns’ O[ld] M[ike].
5 Drove fast northwards, expelling black discharge (5)
DEMOB – BOM[b]ED, ‘northward’. Another rather dated expression, perhaps – is it still used?
6 Mariner loves crackers free from 12 (7)
ABSOLVE – AB (mariner), (LOVES*) ‘crackers’.
7 The writer’s free to keep amounts regularly, like gold? (9)
IMMUTABLE – I’M (the writer is), ABLE (free), ‘keeping’ MUT (from aMoUnTs, regularly).
8 Pin down heading (4)
TACK – double definition: tack down carpet, or tack a boat.
9 Breach is limiting newspaper complaint (8)
BURSITIS – BURST IS ‘limiting’ I (a newspaper with which I’m not familiar). Not so hard a clue, since a complaint was very likely to end -ITIS.
13 More intelligence keeps European outside (10)
EXTRANEOUS – EXTRA (more), NOUS (intelligence) keeping E.
15 Units occupying subcontinent and country further east (9)
INDONESIA – ONES inside INDIA.
17 Nothing’s smarter than this new manifest I installed (8)
NATTIEST – N[ew], ATTEST with I installed.
19 Calm spot to hold a tango (7)
PLACATE – A T[ango] inside PLACE.
20 Showing off poster during what follows 22 (7)
BRAVADO – AD in BRAVO. I thought for a long time that the thing to follow ALPHA would be BETA, but here we’re using the phonetic alphabet.
22 Top star to risk leaving all the letters we need (5)
ALPHA – take BET off the end of ALPHABET.
23 What’s in divine vessel? Rich, ornate contents (5)
ICHOR – hidden answer.
24 Flog whiskey with fruit (4)
WHIP – W[hiskey], HIP.

27 comments on “Times Cryptic No 27624 – Saturday, 28 March 2020. Heteronyms ’R US.”

  1. I whipped through this in 48 minutes with 9dn as -U-SITIS.

    MER The Independent is no longer as such newspaper! thus only available as news on-line. Terrible clue – ‘foreign’ word – badly clued. At least I was reminded of Jerome K Jerome’s ‘J’ going through his medical dictionary so see what he might be in for – and what he already had! Wonderful book.

    FOI 20ac BLEAR

    COD 12ac RESPONSIBILITY with a nod to TINDERBOX

    WOD 11ac the fragrant SUMAC with a nod to TINDERBOX

    The Morris Minor – probably the most authentically British thing ever. Whilst visiting Anne Hathaway’s cottage at Shottery, Dame Edna noted that Shakespeare drove a Morris Traveller – as it was half-timbered!

    Edited at 2020-04-04 08:25 am (UTC)

  2. I wondered about M for Mike, and DNK that ORRIS is a kind of iris. Couldn’t parse 17d, as ATTEST never occurred to me. I got 12ac from 6d, saw the anagrist later.
    1. MIKE = M in the NATO phonetic alphabet. Along with “golf” it’s unusual in that set for being a single syllable, which can be easily missed in taxi radio usage. My colleague used to shout in “Michael” when calling for work to make sure the operator heard him. I gave up being Golf for the same reason when the call sign Romeo came up for grabs.
  3. This proved a bit trickier to finish than to do the bulk of the puzzle. Late in was 28a, MORRIS, my COD. I learnt to drive in my Dad’s Morris Minor that Davidivad would have killed for, registration number PNE 458. LOI wasTACK. Not being a sailor, I didn’t know anything about it as a HEADING. I thought it was how you moved against the wind, though they may be the same thing.HOSTAs should have been clued as slug food. I gave up the unequal struggle of trying to have some many years ago. 37 minutes.
    1. I was just looking that up, so:

      Chambers has “The course of a sailing ship with respect to the side of the sail against which the wind is blowing”, and ODE has “on the starboard/port tack” and “the brig bowled past on the opposite tack” as examples. “From the practice of shifting ropes to change direction”, as a tack is also “a rope for securing the corner of certain sails”.

  4. My notes say “56m. Annoying.” so (a) I clearly didn’t find this as easy as Bruce did, and (b) apparently I was in a bad mood last weekend. There’s also a lot of scrawling around the edges of my sheet as I did laborious workings-out, so I was probably feeling a bit dim, too.

    FOI 4a IDEALIST, with my last couple being 14a TWINE, where I could see the answer but was fixated on WI being the women, and took ages finally to see “tine”, and 9d, which I’d vaguely heard of, but have always thought was “burstitis”. Well, if a medical condition hasn’t come up in an episode of House then I probably don’t know anything about it…

  5. I wrote the one word ‘hard’ in the margin probably based on the fact that I started solving after midnight and didn’t make much progress so I gave up on it. I’ve no idea how long that session was, and I may even have curtailed it involuntarily by falling asleep, but I note that on resumption next morning I finished whatever was left of the puzzle in 31 minutes.

    I’ve no other comments on the puzzle as such but would point out a couple of things about 9dn and the ‘i’ (lower case) newspaper. Firstly, although it was founded as a cut-down version of The Independent it gave up its ties with that organ on being sold to Johnston Press in 2016, and last year it was acquired by The Daily Mail and General Trust. It is still published as a printed newspaper so there is absolutely nothing wrong with cluing it as such. The Independent, however, is only published electronically.

    Edited at 2020-04-04 05:58 am (UTC)

    1. I see you got there before me! I should read all the comments before doing so myself. I used to pick up the i in airports and do the crossword, which was always an old independent puzzle.
  6. ….BURSITIS was a DNK. In my case it was a badly swollen elbow. The condition went away on its own after about three weeks.

    I didn’t (as usual) care for the Grauniad-style cross-referenced clues, and spent far too long playing around with “beta” at 20D when the previously mentioned NATO alphabet should have jumped out at me.

    Thanks to Bruce for parsing MINUS which failed to yield its secret after a full week !

    FOI DOMINO
    LOI MINUS
    COD DEMOB
    TIME 11:57

  7. My mum was the dispatcher for Radio Cabs in Ilford when I was a lad. I still remember their oldest driver’s persnicketiness when they changed the call signs and he turned from Black One to Juliet One 😀
  8. I thought of the NATO alphabet at the time, but also thought they wouldn’t choose a one-syllable word (I’d forgotten about ‘golf’, one of the few letters I know). I forgot to look it up afterwards.
  9. I found this rather difficult. FOI was WHIP ( I often read the clues bottom up on paper). I got about 10 clues in my first 45 minutes. Looking at my notes I had 4 left at 2.40pm and those four remained unsolved.
    At 10a I had pencilled in CUNEIFORM; never got close to solving this one. At 14a had noted TWINE but did not put it in;couldn’t parse it. At 28a had no idea at all, not knowing ORRIS and never thinking of the car. And most annoyingly at 9d my first thought was Bursitis which I have had in my hip recently;I discounted it trying to fit the SUN newspaper into Sinusitis which doesn’t fit anyway! I did manage to parse MINUS and thanks Bruce for sorting it all out for us.
    This week I will try to change tack. David
    1. It’s not a bad ploy to start at the bottom as setters are sometimes running out of steam by the time they get to those clues.
  10. Enjoyed this, not taxing. Having submitted the crossword I looked up bursitis in Collins, which said “Inflammation of the bursa” .. which I thought could perhaps have been more helpfully put
  11. BURSITIS came easily to me as I had a case of Housemaids Knee some years ago, I see Phil had the similar Tennis Elbow version of it. Very painful! From Google I found the following:”Bursas are located near joints and cushion your bones, muscles, and tendons. Your elbow bursa helps your skin smoothly slide over the olecranon bone.
    If a bursa gets inflamed, it can fill with extra fluid and become a painful condition known as bursitis. Bursitis can also commonly occur in joints near your:
    shoulder
    hip
    knee
    heel”
    I now have no recollection of where I started and finished, but it wasn’t a top to bottom solve. I think I moved around the grid trying to pick off low lying fruit. I eventually got over the line without any major trauma in 43:21. Thanks setter and Bruce.

    Edited at 2020-04-04 09:54 am (UTC)

  12. 24:09. I was a bit slow getting going on this. REDEPOSIT and BURSITIS my last two in, although I don’t recall being stuck for too long. It looks like I had an unparsed NIFTIER for 17D for a while, which can’t have helped. I liked DOMINO and TWINE.
    1. I started with NIFTIEST (surely you didn’t have NIFTIER, John? the space would have been a giveaway, even to me), too.
  13. 42:07. I found there were quite a few fiddly bits in this one where I got stuck in the nitty gritty. I spent a long time mispronouncing tier at 14ac before the pdm and a long time trying to shoehorn beta into 20ac.
  14. 12:24. No partcular problems with this. Quite a few obscure plants but after years of doing these things they were all reasonably familiar.
    1. There must be some botanist out there who is an aficionado of cryptic crosswords, but I don’t think I’ve met one yet on this blog.

      As one of our colleagues here (I may get around later to finding out whom to attribute this to) so wittily said, Just about anything is a plant.

      1. Indeed. I mean HOSTA, you’ve got to be kidding me right? But it’s happened before.
      2. There’s a prolific setter who has a PHd in botany, particular interest in flowers, setting as “Flowerman.”
        eg Evergreen.

        Remember one of his clues, a compound anagram of chrysanthemum, solution was “Cyme Rachis”. It was simultaneously brilliant and awful – brilliant because it was a superb &lit, awful because anyone who didn’t have a PHd in the comparative biology of flower inflorescence didn’t have any chance of solving it.

        Edited at 2020-04-06 01:26 am (UTC)

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