The usual Jumbo rubric: as the solution is available alongside (or indeed before) the blog, comment is confined only to references that might remain obscure to overseas / inexperienced solvers even with the answer visible, or anything I thought notably good or deserving a question mark; other clues happily discussed by request, please comment if required.
Less challenging wordplay than some recent puzzles, but required me to educate myself on a couple of points of knowledge.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 14 | PARTNERSHIP – double def: possible that those outside the cricket-playing world won’t recognise the second meaning: one can talk about “a stand of 100 for the fifth wicket” or “a big opening partnership between Strauss and Cook”; Australians may suggest these examples are simply propaganda ahead of the next Ashes… |
| 15 | AIDE MEMOIRE – (MEDIA)rev. + E. MOIRE, a material I wasn’t previously aware of. |
| 17 |
PROLONG – 0 L( |
| 20 | DEFINITE ARTICLE – I suppose technically “It’s not ‘a'” hardly qualifies as a classical definition, but it works for me. |
| 22 | MICKEY FINN – MICKEY (Mouse) + FINN; the derivation is American, probably from a real person. |
| 28 | INDISCRIMINATE – D + IS in INCRIMINATE; felicitous use of the slang meaning of “frame” allows a short clue for a long word. |
| 30 |
ELECTRIC – ELECT RIC( |
| 32 | EMBER DAY – (RED MAYBE)*: I thought “fast” would indicate some variation on Lent, but it was these fasting days. |
| 34 | LABOUR MOVEMENT – double def. which raised a smile. |
| 38 | HANGAR – =”HANGER”; I was puzzled at first as I could see what the answer clearly was, but the only wood-related allusion I could see was to a wooden clothes hanger, which didn’t make a lot of sense. It turns out, after dictionary consultation, that in Old English a hanger is a “steep wood on a hill”. |
| 52 |
TRINIDADIAN – TRI( |
| Down | |
| 3 | LANDGRAVE – LAND + GRAVE; see also MARGRAVE and BURGRAVE , which appear regularly in Times puzzles. |
| 4 | STRAPPED FOR CASH – (DO CRAFTS PERHAPS)*; always makes for a good anagram clue when a word like “perhaps” turns out to be part of the anagram material, rather than an anagram indicator. |
| 10 | LAMER – “the drink” = “the sea” = “la mer”. |
| 20 | DENIMS – IM in DENS; “bags” = trousers, as in “Oxford bags” or being “debagged”. This has made me think of the Bay City Rollers; I’m not convinced they advance the argument for baggy denim. |
| 21 | TRANCHE – (RAN C.) in THE. |
| 22 | MAIDEN – “single” = straight def; the &lit. is another cricket reference – a maiden over is one where no runs are scored. |
| 24 | FELLOW TRAVELLER – I suppose this is a phrase which has been slowly dying out since the end of the Cold War. The monk and the nun, of course, could have been replaced by any of their fellow pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales. |
| 26 | ANDAMAN ISLANDS – lAND A MAN IS LANDScaping. A 14 letter hidden answer is something you don’t often see attempted. |
| 27 |
SCOTER – = SCO |
| 36 |
ENVELOPING – ENV( |
| 48 |
FAINT – F( |
I had just been reading a news article about the last speaker of Bo dying on the Andaman Islands so the ingeniously hidden phrase at 26 did leap out at me.
I might have had trouble with Straitlaced at 2 because I think I usually spell it Straightlaced. Fortunately I had recently read an article in the Times’s Feedback column that explained that the strait form was to be preferred although the straight version is permissible. Otherwise it was quite straitforward.
John in USA
It seems that all depends how deep and into which dictionary you go, as shown below! I must admit I didn’t look for the citation first time around, but assumed it was from the same root as the adjective “tacky”, and wrote it in without more thought or comment, seeing as the “change of course” definition is pretty conclusive. Anyway, when I went to look it up, I found none of my normal dictionaries had it either, and you have to go to the 9th discrete meaning in the OED (and we’re talking the full OED here) to get:
“That which is ‘tacky’ or cheap and shabby; shoddy or gaudy material; rubbish, junk.”
[1986 Video Today Apr. 33/4 Any interest in this sordid tack lies in the role it plays in Cohen’s regression since the days of The Terminator. 1988 Arena Autumn-Winter 198/1 The king of cinematic trash
and tack turns his attentions to the written word. 1990 Sounds 3 Feb. 20/2 Queen B are pretty much an exercise in traditional tack, a celebration of all things glittery.]
Now I see that, I’m guessing (from the fact that there’s no citation older than 1986) that it’s a neologistic back-formation from the far older adjectival “tacky”. More to that than I first thought, so thank you for the pointer…