Times Quick Cryptic 1937 by Izetti

Author   william_j_sPosted on Categories Quick Cryptic
This was difficult, but the clueing is scrupulously fair and often very clever. I certainly enjoyed the challenge, but it took longer to complete than any QC of late.

Newbies getting stuck, improvers completing the grid but not really knowing why, and old QC hands taking longer than expected, should all take heart. I hope everything is explained clearly enough, but if not, please ask.

Definitions underlined.

Across
1 Funny company host entertaining one (5)
COMIC – CO (company) and MC (host) containing (entertaining) I (one).
4 Duck in river in Italy and river in African country (7)
POCHARD – PO (river in Italy), then R (river) in CHAD (African country). A diving duck.
8 Student not so thick, having embraced reading? (7)
LEARNER – LEANER (not so thick) containing (embracing) R (reading, one of the 3Rs). I am left to guess that this abbreviation for reading is actually used somewhere, and knowing the setter’s penchant for religious references, assume it is from Christian service. Thanks to Paul for putting me straight.
9 A November in which female sits looking poorly? (5)
ASHEN – A and N (November, phonetic alphabet), containing (in which… sits) SHE (female).
10 A tiny store specially designed for office materials (10)
STATIONERY – anagram of (specially designed) A TINY STORE.
14 Bear running loose in New York right behind you! (6)
NEARBY – anagram of (running loose) BEAR inside NY (New York).
15 Flowers contributing to Easter Sunday (6)
ASTERS -hidden in (contributing to) eASTER Sunday.
17 Sober? I assume half of bottle drunk (10)
ABSTEMIOUS – anagram of (drunk) I ASSUME and half of BOTtle. Hats off.
20 Twelve practise meditation, possibly? (5)
DOZEN – DO ZEN (practice meditation, possibly).
22 Requirement came first, making one annoyed (7)
NEEDLED – NEED (requirement) and LED (came first).
23 Note feature of act (6,1)
MIDDLE C – a feature of the word ‘act’ is that it has a MIDDLE letter ‘C’.
24 Belief in number of commandments from a world beyond (5)
TENET – TEN (number of commandments) then E.T. (extraterrestrial, from a world beyond).

Down
1 Porter maybe for an old king (4)
COLE – COLE Porter, and Old King COLE.
2 Old bird beginning to twitch in ditch (4)
MOAT – MOA (extinct (old) bird) and the first letter of (beginning to) Twitch.
3 Officer studies information systematically displayed (9)
CONSTABLE – CONS (studies) and TABLE (information systematically displayed).
4 Robber is quiet and angry (6)
PIRATE – P (piano, quiet) and IRATE (angry).
5 Drink that’s part of each afternoon (3)
CHA – hidden in (that’s part of) eaCH Afternoon.
6 First lady to occupy chair, unusually successful person (8)
ACHIEVER – EVE (first lady) contained by (to occupy) an anagram of (unusually) CHAIR.
7 Somewhat elegant hands ruined with DIY (8)
DANDYISH – anagram of (ruined) HANDS with DIY.
11 Old boy’s meeting priest on street, becoming most vague (9)
OBSCUREST – OB (old boy) with CURE (priest, especially a French priest, and usually indicated as such) then ST (street).
12 Together at home, having met up — and inside! (2,6)
IN TANDEM – IN (at home), then a reversal of (up) MET with AND inside.
13 Upset player given recognition and measured (8)
CAPSIZED – CAP (player given recognition) and SIZED (measured).
16 A piece of cake? It may need a bit more than that! (6)
PICNIC – definition and cryptic hint.
18 Tribe about to take most of country (4)
CLAN – C (circa, about) and all-but-the-last-letter from (most of) LANd (country).
19 Check uranium has been removed from passage (4)
ADIT – ‘U’ (uranium) removed from AuDIT (check). A passageway in a mine (that I had to look up after guessing). Thought it might be ‘edit’ for a while, but could’t make it work.
21 Nothing to fix — article has been discarded (3)
NIL – NaIL (fix) after the ‘a’ (article) has been discarded.

64 comments on “Times Quick Cryptic 1937 by Izetti”

  1. Reading is one of the three Rs (Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic). I found this okay until I couldn’t get PICNIC for ages at the end.
  2. ….only getting cha and asters, but then I mentally adapted to the higher level of difficulty than usual. I think the letter-removal clues will befuddle at least some of the SCC, but they are common in more advanced puzzles like Mephisto. I did like the bear running loose in NY, he’s not the only one!

    Time: 9:03.

    BTW, I hope our Wyvern got moat, after I gave him the Moabite example cum chestnut.

    1. I did! and as soon as I saw it I remembered what you had said, and in went the answer. Thank you 🙂
  3. ABSTEMIOUS threw me; I biffed it, worked it out post-submission. DNK, or barely K, POCHARD. 5d looked like it had to be TEA, which it couldn’t be; once again I was slow to see a hidden. And I dithered between EDIT (check?) and ADIT, which is a NYT chestnut but always clued as a mine entrance not a passage. 7:33.
  4. 12 minutes, with PICNIC, ABSTEMIOUS and OBSCUREST delaying me beyond my 10 minute target. I was particularly annoyed that I took so long over PICNIC as both it and ‘piece of cake’ were referenced in my 15×15 blog yesterday in connection with the saying ‘easy-peasy’.

    I was pleased to remember POCHARD from a previous encounter. R for ‘reading’ has come up before but this may be its first outing in a Quickie.

  5. Had to look up ADIT and POCHARD to check they really were things on my way to a 21m solve. Very becalmed in the SW before MIDDLE C for ‘note’ appeared which in turn allowed IN TANDEM and DOZEN. ABSTEMIOUS took a bit of unravelling.
  6. After weeks of crises, minor abdo surgery that turned out to be anything but minor, and a succession of conflicting Olympian slug fests that had me on the ropes, I am glad to find relaxation in the pedestrian pleasure of the QCC.
    A challenging 42 mins with the DKN, but clearly clued, POCHARD and ADIT, COD MIDDLE C, couldn’t see CURE without the e acute and biffed ABSTEMIOUS. ACHIEVER took longer than it should due to a careless A instead of an E and was my LOI.
    Thank you Izetti for a very elegant puzzle with many tasty morsels, a thoroughly enjoyable work out and escape from a tough patch. Thanks William for the blog, surprised you missed the 3R’s! and to other commenters for their insightful experience.
    1. Sorry to hear about your troubles. Hopefully all is now well, and you can enjoy getting back to normal.
        1. Thanks to all, yes much better and seeing the world again without a haze of analgesia which I must say made XWD’ing a hopeless exercise! Now back to sorting out the usual stresses and frustrations of everyday, made that much more bearable by an unhurried QCC immersion.
  7. Went for MANSIZED, with man=player, other parts worked, sort of.

    But was pleased to look up “I wonder if an adit is a type of pipe”. After checking of EUDIT, of course….

    COD MIDDLE C

    ABSTEMIOUS has all five vowels in the correct order.

      1. But not, therefore, facetiously, which has all the vowels in the right order including a Y…
        Cedric
        1. And of course abstemiously does too! I know which I’d rather be (she said not entirely facetiously 😅)
          I’ve never worked out how many other words have all the vowels in the right order — there must surely be more than two?
          On edit — just read PW’s comments — crossed lines there, sorry.

          Edited at 2021-08-11 04:08 pm (UTC)

  8. I also struggled for 1 or 2 minutes on PICNIC. Strange — not a difficult clue when you know it but for three of us already there seems to have been some head scratching. I just couldn’t get BIONIC out of mind and was starting to curse the setter as to why the “answer” neither fitted the w/p nor the definition 😀

    Otherwise harder than normal but all workoutable

    Liked ABSTEMIOUS

    Thanks William and Izetti

  9. Weird goings on in the Crossword Club as it still had yesterday’s puzzles up when I tried doing this. Only when I switched from MS Edge to Chrome could I access todays offerings.

    It was worth the faffing about as this was my favourite puzzle for quite some time. I started off swifty in the NW and made some good progress around the grid until bumping into some of the chewier clues. I didn’t help myself by biffing a careless TEA and spelling STATIONREY with two As and no E, but once I saw my errors the unknown duck and ACHIEVER revealed themselves.
    I finished in the SW with ABSTEMIOUS and CAPSIZED in 11.36, which I was pleased with despite being over target. DOZEN gets my COD.
    Thanks to William

    Edited at 2021-08-11 08:00 am (UTC)

  10. FOI: 9a. ASHEN
    LOI: 16d. PICNIC
    Time to Complete: DNF
    Clues Answered Correctly without aids: 17
    Clues Answered with Aids: 7
    Clues Unanswered: 1
    Wrong Answers: 1
    Total Correctly Answered (incl. aids): 24/26
    Aids Used: Chambers

    I found this one very difficult, as I usually do with Izetti, and I relied heavily on the use of aids.

    One clue I was able to answer was purely down to a comment Vinyl1 made the other day. He told me about the Moabites, which referred to a clue that contained an extinct bird. When I saw “old bird” in 2d MOA immediately came to mind, giving me MOAT. (Thank you Vinyl1)

    17a. ABSTEMIOUS – This came to me rather quickly as I recall somebody once telling me that “facetious is the only word in the English language in which all five vowels appear in their correct order”. (It’s not the first time I have heard somebody say that). Abstemious is the word I gave that proved him wrong. There are a few other words that also have all vowels in order, though I can not remember what they are without a dictionary.

    One unanswered clue and one incorrect clue resulted in a DNF after 60 minutes.

  11. I think William’s first sentence says it all.
    An excellent puzzle but in a totally different league to the normal run of QCs.
    Thanks to William and Izetti. John M.

    Edited at 2021-08-11 08:00 am (UTC)

  12. 23 min without parsing several although definitions worked. Thanks for clear explanations and the ACE PDM (Penny drop Moment for C bring middle letter of ACE by the way) Great QC. Great blog.
    On another note I struggle with some of the TLA Three Letter Abbreviations and still am unsure of the meaning of SCC (apologies if my doctor head comment re skin disease upset others) could it be Slow Crossword Camp…. Can someone enlighten me please.
    1. This question comes up once a week. Just Google ‘Times for the Times Glossary’ or ‘Times Crossword Club SCC’ or similar and all will be revealed.
      1. Both search terms work for me, William. Using a simple Google search, each comes up with a list of alternative links that work. John.

        Edited at 2021-08-11 08:52 am (UTC)

    3. Graceful apology accepted — thanks.
      Re TLAs etc, on some devices (eg tablets and phones) you’ll find the glossary at or near the bottom of the TffT front page — there are lots of other fun and interesting links there too.
  13. I thought. Economical clueing (though not as economical as Monday’s Guardian cryptic where I think all the clues only had 3 words), a few DNKs fairly clued. CAPSIZED was my LOI, ABSTEMIOUS was biffed (thank you William), and favourite was MIDDLE C, though I enjoyed several other clues as well.

    6:45.

  14. 18 minutes for me, which is 3 over target, and I wondered why until coming here and finding the general consensus that it was harder than usual, and a bit ‘different’. I plodded along not really noticing that it was taking longer than average, until completion, when I saw the time. I think it is an excellently crafted puzzle from the Don. I knew POCHARD, and even saw the flowers almost immediately (horticultural clues are usually my bete noire!). Thanks both.
  15. I found this on the trickier side, with OBSCUREST,POCHARD, CAPSIZED and LOI, PICNIC all giving me pause for thought. Got there eventually in 10:26. Like Plett11 I had to switch browsers to get today’s crosswords to work, despite clearing cookies in Edge. I’m using Firefox for now. Thanks Izetti and William.

    Edited at 2021-08-11 09:30 am (UTC)

  16. I thought this was a peach, so many clever clues. Very slow, but I know, as William said, that Izetti clues are so precise, it just needs me to see the wood for the trees. Lovely when the lightbulb goes on. Pleased to have parsed them all, eventually, and a good start to the day.
  17. Stupidly, I didn’t think of PICNIC – clever clue. Otherwise finished.
    Got POCHARD from the cluing but NHO. COD MIDDLE C. Also liked DO ZEN (failed to parse until blog enlightened)
    Lucky we had MOA recently.
    Just seen another mistake, put Edit not ADIT (NHO).
    FOI (tentative) COLE, then DANDYISH PIRATE.
    An enjoyable puzzle all the same.
    Thanks for much needed blog, William.

    Edited at 2021-08-11 09:55 am (UTC)

    1. My first thought on seeing DANDYISH was the highwayman! Now there’s an earworm I’m happy to have 😄
  19. Enjoyed this halfway house between the normal QC and the main puzzle.

    Loved Middle C.

    Thanks setter and blogger.

  20. As I understood it “a piece of cake” means something is easy. Picnic can also mean something is easy, by the opposite being “it was no picnic.
  21. DNF after 42:46 because I had EDIT instead of the NHO ADIT. Okay, I hadn’t heard of an eduit either (for the very good reason that it’s made up) but I thought it might be similar to a conduit so it might very well be some kind of passage. Didn’t know a cure was a priest either, but I’m sure that’s come up before. Liked the use of the three Rs, although I didn’t see it before coming on here. I’m surprised they are not used more often. Anyway, much to admire so thanks to Izetti and to William for ravelling all the loose ends.
  22. I was pleased to cross the line in 11 minutes as I expected to come a cropper today, especially as the last few in the SE slowed me down, not helped by another literal – I typed in I instead of E in OBSCUREST.
    As everyone (well nearly everyone) says, this is a super puzzle. I found it quite hard to work out where the definition was in several clues. Most annoyed with myself as I struggled with 16d, knowing I’d seen something similar recently — it was this: Picnic, and what you might eat on it? (5,2,4) Oink 27.7.21, blogged by Chris!
    Lots of witty and smart clues — COLE, MIDDLE C and DOZEN were among the highlights.
    FOI Comic
    LOI Adit
    COD Stationery
    Many thanks Izetti and William
  23. I was all over the place with this one. It didn’t help that I put in “learned ” rather than LEARNER for 8 across which seemed eminently sensible at the time but for reasons which currently escape me. I also managed to scupper any remaining chances of success by writing OBSCUREST as “obscur-I-st”. Not in a million years, though, would I have come up with curé for priest. I realised that POCHARD had to be right though it was NHO but then, of course, couldn’t come up with 4 down, a robber spelt “P*D*T*”. To which I say harrumph! To make my disaster complete, I put the unparsed edit rather than the probably DNK ADIT.

    Disaster.

    Thanks to blogger and setter

  24. Twenty very pleasant minutes, unfortunately followed by a further 10 on a trio of clues — Obscurest, Capsized and E/Adit. I suspected Edit was wrong, but I was convinced the answer was a type of check rather than passage. I’ve even seen Adit before in a 15×15, so no excuse really, other than the wording made it a bit of a stretch today. Having said that, others managed it without difficulty. CoD to 23ac, Middle C. Invariant
  25. … that he couldn’t finish this one. So it’s DNF for me two days in a row. My undoing was that I put EDIT, since it could work for “check” and was the only word I recognised out of ADIT, EDIT, IDIT, ODIT or UDIT. Or indeed YDIT. So I am an IDIoT.

    Really tough. Mini 15×15, exposed me as the dilettante I am.

    COD MIDDLE C, LOI PICNIC.

    Many thanks Izetti and William.

    Templar

    Edited at 2021-08-11 01:07 pm (UTC)

  26. Ed, I would have been happy to engage in discussion about the points you raise but your final remark insulting the people who enjoy solving and discussing the puzzles here has made me disinclined to do so. Any further postings containing comments along those lines will be deleted.

    Edited at 2021-08-11 12:57 pm (UTC)

  27. Like others I was becalmed in the SW, although now I have seen the explanation, I do think middle C was a great clue. NHO Pochard and do think Dandyish is a bit of a stretch for somewhat trendy these days, given no-one has used the term outside of crossword land for at least the last 70 years! Still fairly clued. A DNF for me as I biffed edit having never heard of adit.

    Edited at 2021-08-11 12:56 pm (UTC)

  28. Pleased with my 27 minutes but disappointed that Edit was wrong — I had my suspicions but the construction of the clue was IMO incorrect rather than misleading. It felt that the definition had to be ‘check’.
    Anyway, maybe I will remember Adit in the same way that Moa just recently appeared to help with this one…
    Very tricky but a very enjoyable struggle. I must have been in the mood!!!
    Thanks all
    John George
  29. I was doing quite well on this until I reached the SW corner after only about 12-13 mins. Then solved 12dn, 14ac and 23ac reasonably quickly and spent what seemed a very long time staring at 13dn, 17ac and 20ac, my last three. I suspected DOZEN for 20ac but still couldn’t get 13dn even with the z in place. Couldn’t make head or tail of 17ac – I was unsure what the definition was, although I thought it had to be sober, and equally unsure whether I was supposed to use half of assume or half of bottle (and which half). Eventually capitulated and used an aid to reveal ABSTEMIOUS, after which everything became clearer. Time with aids 23 mins.

    FOI – 1ac COMIC
    LOI – 20ac DOZEN
    COD – 20ac DOZEN (couldn’t parse even when I had the answer – thanks for the exlpanatory blog William) and also 23ac MIDDLE C

    Thanks to Izetti for a fine puzzle

  30. Very fine puzzle …
    … which kept me both stretched and amused for 12 minutes. For some reason the left side seemed much tougher for me than the right; indeed at one point almost the entire right was completed while the left was still blank.

    Both the Adit and the Pochard were known to me, so went in smoothly, and it was the SW corner, and especially my LOI 23A Middle C, which held me up. That last is a very nice clue (whatever some other poster says) and my COD.

    Many thanks to William for the blog
    Cedric

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