37:29. I was concerned about solving a Friday puzzle after an early morning and long day of plane travel, but I’m quite pleased with this time for what seems to be a difficult puzzle.
(If I had to put my finger on it, the difficulty seems to come from uncommon vocabulary more than anything else.)
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Following delay of months, slander hospital department’s union (9) |
| ALIGNMENT – MALIGN (slander) with M (months) moved to the end + ENT (hospital department) | |
| 6 | Public school lodge reported (5) |
| STOWE – homophone of STOW (lodge)
My last in, and a frightening clue for an American! I don’t know of STOWE, and S _ O _ E doesn’t exactly narrow things down, especially when there are multiple meanings of ‘lodge’. Fortunately, a straightforward synonym presented itself after a few minutes of thought. |
|
| 9 | Depraved scene from “love party” embodied by aggressive-submissive proclivity (5) |
| SODOM – O (love) DO (party) in SM (aggressive-submissive proclivity [S & M = sadism and masochism]) | |
| 10 | Second-rate artiste carrying more weight on thigh (9) |
| HAMFATTER – FATTER (carrying more weight) next to HAM (thigh)
I parsed this one as HAM (second-rate artiste) + FATTER (carrying more weight), not knowing what the word meant. |
|
| 11 | Monarchies asserting vetoes abroad (9,6) |
| SOVEREIGN STATES – anagram of ASSERTING VETOES | |
| 13 | Took away cover from discharge pipe examined at both ends (8) |
| DEDUCTED – first and last (cover) from DISCHARGE + DUCT (pipe) + first and last of EXAMINED | |
| 14 | Stick notice in The Times? (6) |
| ADHERE – AD (notice) HERE (in The Times?) | |
| 16 | Catch securing edges of door-plate in tank (6) |
| HEADER – HEAR (catch) around first and last of DOOR-PLATE
Chambers informs me that a ‘header tank’ is a thing. |
|
| 18 | Good buzz surrounding Polish play in Rugby (4,4) |
| GRUB KICK – G (good) KICK (buzz) around RUB (polish)
GRUB KICK is in Chambers but it appears to be ‘grubber kick’ nearly anywhere else. |
|
| 21 | Regrettably, couple that initiates divorce furtive about settling (15) |
| DISAPPOINTINGLY – first two letters of DIVORCE + SLY (furtive) around APPOINTING (settling) | |
| 23 | Bizarre dream, not the first that involves intro to Finnegans Wake (9) |
| AFTERMATH – anagram of {d}REAM THAT around first letter of FINNEGANS | |
| 25 | London authority protects river for locals (5) |
| DONAU – hidden in LONDON AUTHORITY
What we call ‘Danube’, German locals would call DONAU. |
|
| 26 | Horse bet, essentially £1 (5) |
| EQUID – middle letter of (essentially) BET + QUID (£1) | |
| 27 | Soldiers charging Roman Catholic gathering ultimately feeling sorrow (9) |
| LAMENTING – MEN in (charging) LATIN (Roman Catholic) + last letter of GATHERING | |
| Down | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Fools judge? Not quite (5) |
| ASSES – ASSES{s} | |
| 2 | People from Indiana share twin sons (11) |
| INDIVIDUALS – IN (Indiana) DIVI (share) DUAL (twin) S (sons)
Didn’t know this spelling of ‘divvy’. |
|
| 3 | Head of state no longer in charge following union of cardinals (7) |
| NUMERIC – ER (head of state no longer) IC (in charge) after NUM (union)
Mineworkers, this time. |
|
| 4 | Defective electronic chip’s core codes formed imitative words (8) |
| ECHOISED – anagram of E (electronic) + middle letters of CHIP + CODES | |
| 5 | Breaking in, tense street urchin lowering head (6) |
| TAMING – T (tense) + GAMIN (street urchin) with G moved down
When I remembered T = ‘tense’ and GAMIN for street urchin, I knew I was going to fare decently on this puzzle. |
|
| 6 | Hurt forces brought up case for three days (7) |
| SMARTED – RAMS (forces) reversed + first and last (case) of THREE + D (days)
Thought the ‘forces’ would be some combination of RA, RE, etc. Also, this setter sure uses this ‘first and last’ technique a lot, don’t they? |
|
| 7 | Old newspaper much of the time in verse? (3) |
| OFT – O (old) FT (newspaper)
I had a much harder time with this one than I should have! |
|
| 8 | Continental jargon primarily used in sensitive, regressive summit (9) |
| EUROSPEAK – first letter of USED in reversal (regressive) of SORE (sensitive) + PEAK (summit) | |
| 12 | Film of Charles upset Diana briefly (3,4,3,1) |
| THE KING AND I – THE KING (Charles) + anagram (upset) of DIAN{a} | |
| 13 | Dry ditty regularly confused with 14 (9) |
| DEHYDRATE – anagram of D{i}T{t}Y and ADHERE (14 across) | |
| 15 | Scold Henry in school, location of Maggie’s education (8) |
| GRANTHAM – RANT (scold) H (Henry) in GAM (school)
Of whales. Was glad to remember this one, too. No idea about the definition. |
|
| 17 | Met maker of saw that’s turned up in River Dee (7) |
| EXPIRED – RIP (saw) reversed in EXE (river) D (dee)
Great definition. |
|
| 19 | Incorporate legal draft delivered prior to crash (5,2) |
| BUILD IN – homophone of BILL (legal draft) + DIN (crash) | |
| 20 | Fat cat completely extra (2-4) |
| NO-BALL – NOB (fat cat) ALL (completely)
I’m sure a cricket reference? |
|
| 22 | Second person finally seen collecting litter? (5) |
| YOUNG – YOU (second person) + last letters of SEEN COLLECTING | |
| 24 | Leading trio to sign letter overseas (3) |
| TAU – first three letters of TAURUS (sign) | |
Clues like that to DISAPPOINTINGLY where the cryptic depends on a slightly different meaning of a word of same origin (ie APPOINT) are a bit weak I feel.
Also never heard of HAMFATTER (old US slang apparently) or GRUB KICK
Margaret Thatcher was brought up and schooled in Grantham
This was right at the limits of my knowledge. Was Margaret Thatcher from Grantham? Is hamfatter a word? Is no ball an extra? Is a header a kind of tank? When in doubt, trust the cryptic.
‘No ball’ a very familiar term to cricket aficionados. When the bowler delivers a ball that doesn’t conform with the rules (eg his foot is beyond the crease) a run is scored by the batting side under the heading ‘Extras’ (ie it is not credited to the batsman). Or batter I should say.
Despite having this knowledge and checkers I still found this a difficult clue!
Tough, with several guesses. HAMFATTER looked extremely unlikely, though it parsed ( my spellchecker appears to like it as little as I do ), but was correct. Similarly ECHOISED. Unfortunately my guess of AFTERWASH for 23a , which in my mind could have referred to the wake of a boat, didn’t parse and wasn’t so lucky.
Over 40 mins with a pinkie.
I needed 70 minutes and was surprised to complete with grid without error as some of the answers seemed unlikely – HAMFATTER and GRUB KICK indeed!
Too difficult for me. Thanks Jeremy.
Gave up after 40 minutes as couldn’t see BUILD IN and NHO DONAU, eventually reduced to checking for a pangram (no J or Z as it turned out). Had to write out 9 biffed answers to work out the parsing.
Had no idea about some things such as whether the unlikely HAMFATTER was really a word, and which Maggie we were talking about. My first thought was that it was a reference to the Simpsons but the smart daughter is Lisa not Maggie and the school is in Springfield so a total dead end. I knew GRUB KICK from playing as a wing three-quarter in rugby as a teenager/undergraduate where I was expected to do one if I was going to be tackled (and I’ve never heard it called a grubber kick). I had no idea that the German for Danube is DONAU but so long as I was right that it was a hidden it had to be (I think other countries are available since the Danube is long). This was a weird crossword in some ways, a lot of easy clues, and then some that were hard because they were obscure or contained obscurities.
17.09, with a feeling I was being a bit slow. In hindsight that only really applied to INDIVIDUAL, where I was hung up on DIVIDE for ‘share’ and SS for ‘twin sons’. HEADER was new to me, and I half-expected a pink square, although I was happy with my parse. I’m no rugby fan, but recalled a grubber, probably from freezing cold PE lessons.
Thanks both, and slightly belated happy New Year to you all.
75% done, almost blank in NW.
NHO GAM or GAMIN. and HAMFATTER does not look remotely like a plausible word.
Got GRUB KICK, after trying DROP GOAL, KICK OFF, SPOT KICK, LINE OUTS.
Well beaten, but enjoyed the challenge in the other corners. COD NOBALL
Hmm, I found this hard and I wasn’t very keen on it. Hamfatter (!) is US slang and nho, of course. Echoised, an ungainly word tortuously clued. Couldn’t parse that, or 3dn either.
Nho grub kick either. At least Lady Thatcher, Donau and Stowe were write-ins..
Hamfatter isn’t marked as a US term in either Collins or Chambers
It’s definitely a US term, originating in the early 19th century and ‘said to be derived from an old-style negro song called The Ham-fat Man’. That comes from the OED, where it’s marked as ‘US slang’ and all of the citations are from American publications.
DNF, with HAMFATTER, ECHOISED and SMARTED missing. Possibly, I don’t watch enough movies to know a word like HAMFATTER but its inclusion made a difficult crossword impossible for me, despite Mrs T’s home town being a write-in and remembering the Danube in German. Thank you Jeremy and setter.
32.01 WOE
DISAPPOINTINGLY was disappointingly slow to come as I had two sort of plausible answers (BLEND IN and AS WELL) mucking up the checkers. The former was my downfall where I saw BUILD and the w/p but changed the IN to ON. ALIGNMENT was also slower than it should have been as the w/p was clear but I just couldn’t think of the right words.
Elsewhere HAMFATTER sort of rang a bell but I certainly didn’t see all the parsing in every clue. Overall, liked it with SOVEREIGN STATES being a very nice anagram
31.54, feeling slightly sorry for Other Solvers who can be forgiven for not knowing where Richard Branson and Thatcher were schooled or the more esoteric bits of rugby. Die schöne blaue Donau turned up in the most recent circular Listener, so that was OK, but HAMFATTER? Really? Chambers says our setter was generous in attributing second-rate. ECHOISED also had a whiff of the crossword-only about it.
I don’t usually comment on such things, but half way through this I thought we were too much blessed with first and last letter devices.
Pleased to complete, of course, but this had more than a touch of “let’s make a Friday toughie” about it
25 minutes or so.
– Had to trust the wordplay for the unknown HAMFATTER
– Slightly surprised at the lack of a question mark or similar in the clue for SOVEREIGN STATES, as there are many sovereign states that aren’t monarchies (unless the definition is more of a whimsical one)
– Didn’t know there’s such a thing as a HEADER tank
– Wasn’t sure about TAMING as I had forgotten gamin as a street urchin
– Didn’t know which sign was being referred to in the clue for TAU
Thanks Jeremy and setter.
FOI Asses
LOI Taming
COD The King And I
I got that clue and on the basis of that incorrect definition simply stopped there and then. And judging by some of the other loose definitions, I’m glad I did. I obviously didn’t miss much. Another waste of the subscription.
22 mins, but with an annoying typo. This seemed like a nice level of difficulty for a holiday morning. The more obscure words (and unknown GRUB KICK) were all fairly clued, and there were not too many opportunities for biffing (THE KING AND I, etc.), so all in all a good puzzle. COD to AFTERMATH
After getting the two long clues quickly, I turned to the rest of the puzzle with a sense of confidence which turned out to be entirely misplaced, taking 67 minutes and making increasingly frequent use of aids, hence a technical DNF. Only one genuine NHO (HAMFATTER) but some very tricky clueing.
Thanks Jeremy and setter.
19:49. Tough, and not necessarily for the right reasons. Teasing out obscure words like HAMFATTER with the help of Chambers is great fun in barred-grid puzzles but I don’t think a word like that belongs in the daily puzzle, even on a Friday!
DNF, finally giving up on ECHOISED (also E plus the middle letters of cHIp and cODEs, doesn’t give all the necessary letters??). So I still don’t get it…
Obviously biffed NHO HAMFATTER and assumed DONAU. I didn’t parse a few such as INDIVIDUAL, wondering initally where “hoosier”might come into it. All a bit too contrived for me.
Thanks Jeremy and setter
It’s E + the middle letters of cHIp + all the letters of CODES
DOH!. Happy in the knowledge I still wouldn’t have got it!
No time because I was trying to explain cryptics to my son. He probably (perhaps correctly) thought I was a right idiot when little went in on the first pass. Thankfully the two long acrosses were amongst them which allowed for a good base to polish this one off. Never managed to get my son interested though. I don’t think the education of Thatcher was of much interest to him.
Relied on my general knowledge for a lot of it including GRANTHAM.
NO BALL and GRUB KICK (where I was aiming for the far corner) reminded me of my school sport days. Although I would always use grubber kick.
HAMFATTER must have been in a previous crossword as I can’t imagine I have encountered it in the wild but I saw it straight away.
COD EUROSPEAK
Thanks blogger and setter
The golf equivalent (though not a shot played on purpose, or, for that matter, ever hit by a competent player) is a worm-burner.
61:58
For me this was the toughest of a tricky week. Never heard of HAMFATTER or ECHOISED and in no hurry to hear them again The last two, BUILD IN and DONAU took far longer than they should. I liked GRANTHAM, TAU and COD AFTERMATH.
Thanks to Jeremy and the setter
Like others, I had never heard of HAMFATTER. Is it just a coincidence that AFTERMATH, in a symmetrical position, is an anagram?
And thank you for explaining TAU, which was obviously the foreign letter, but I could not see why.
Probably not a coincidence, since we also have ALIGNMENT/LAMENTING and ADHERE/HEADER.
Well spotted.
What an ingenious setter.
Shame the compiler couldn’t fit HEDERA into the grid, too.
DNF – wrestled the improbable toughies to the ground after half an hour or so but was floored by STOWE, which I simply couldn’t see.
I started with SODOM and struggled through for forty minutes or so until I was left with 4d, 6a, 6d and 10a. SMARTED came first of those and I begrudged the time it took to work out STOWE (should’ve see that much earlier), ECHOISED (really?) and HAMFATTER (wtf). 50:10. Thanks setter and Jeremy.
My thanks to plusjeremy and setter.
DNF, even with cheating.
Some of that was me being useless, some missing GK and the rest obscurities clued rather vaguely. Well done plusjeremy for getting through it.
6a Stowe, I didn’t think stow=lodge but it is in Wiktionary. So I cheated. I live not that far from Stowe, and I have an inkling we used to play them at Rugby when I was at school. I didn’t enjoy Rugby but we were compelled (when junior) to show up and “cheer our side on” on Saturday afternoon, which I resented, so I remember some of the schools responsible for this misery including Stowe.
9a DNF, Sodom, DNK this phrase for S&M which I did know. Can’t moan as it is biffable.
10a NHO Hamfatter, easy to biff, cheated. I NHO last time as well.
18a NHO Grub kick, cheating didn’t help as I think this phrase is out-of-use, but I’ve added it to Cheating Machine anyway.
23a Aftermath DNF. MER at aftermath=Wake? Not for me, and the wordplay lost me totally unless I missed it being an anagram of hamfatter at 10a. Humph.
4d Echoised added to CM.
8d Eurospeak ditto.
15d Grantham biffed, just connected it with Mrs Thatcher.
20d NobAll, ho ho!
I’m eternally grateful for all the work the computer people on this site do, but my questions yesterday weren’t answered. The fact that today I got in to the site with no problems may suggest that things are now all right and people have been beavering away behind the scenes to make it so. But in case this is not in fact so I shall repeat below what I said and would be grateful if it could be explained to someone who is only partly computer-literate.
Of course it goes without saying that I took ages on this (95 minutes) and I did think I was going to finish without aids (only looking up the crazy words to see whether or not they existed), but my LOI, SMARTED, defeated me for some reason and I relented. And it was so easy, too. HAMFATTER indeed.
***
Couldn’t get in because of ‘Too many requests’. What does this mean? Is it something to do with me or with the site? I looked on Google to see if anything could be done about it and got a whole lot of incomprehensible stuff: ‘Too Many Requests means you’ve exceeded the API’s rate limit. Solutions include implementing exponential backoff, respecting Retry-After headers, using request queuing, caching responses, and distributing load over time.’ Wouldn’t dare to fiddle with it; it would probably only make it worse. However, it does seem that if you wait for a couple of hours it goes away.
It’s down to the site, not you, and the more technically-minded people who run the site are working on it!
It is a problem with the site which will be solved, as soon as they work out what’s causing it! Usually it goes away in exactly an hour, meantime…
49:26
For a 146 Snitch, my target is 58 minutes, so pleased to come in under the wire:
No idea how DISAPPOINTINGLY was put together – NHO settling = APPOINTING, but everything else fit around it OK.
NHO HAMFATTER and ECHOISED was pretty horrid. Didn’t see DIVI for share either.
GRUB KICK vaguely familiar probably from playing rugby at school nearly fifty years ago – well, I say playing, but I mean standing around on the wing chatting with the oppo wing as the ball never came our way – not played nor watched since.
On the other hand, GRANTHAM, DONAU and NO BALL were write-ins (with a few checkers)
Thanks PJ and setter
Thought I did well to finish all correct, despite some unknowns. I didn’t know GRUB KICK and I’m not keen on sporting references that are too specialised, although in retrospect the cryptic was fairly generous. I’d seen HAMFATTER before so knew it was a word, but had no recollection of what it meant. I didn’t know that a HEADER was a tank and wasn’t sure ECHOISED was actually a word. Also didn’t know the German for Danube.
Grub-kicked it downfield about 2/3 of the way through – too much fiddly construction and too many words I either didn’t know or words I do know but rarely use the way they were used here. Thanks, Jeremy
HAMFATTER. ECHOISED. I hope I will never encounter these ?words? again.
Otherwise, excellent crossword.
Not debarred for ‘Too many requests’ today until I attempted to post this comment! Keep up the good work, Wil Ransome. Thanks for your reassurance, Amoeba, posted since my first two attempts to post this comment. I took 36 mins solving this one. Having looked at its SNITCH rating, I feel rather pleased with myself. I took several minutes getting SMARTED, my final entry. HAMFATTER, emerged undefined from somewhere in my mind. I did not know ECHOISED existed. My favourite two clues were to ADHERE and THE KING AND I, and I particularly enjoyed ‘Met maker’ as the definition of EXPIRED, which had me foxed for some time. Thank you to Setter and plusjeremy.