Times Quick Cryptic No 1312 by Orpheus

Author   plusjeremyPosted on Categories Quick Cryptic

A strange, strange solve. I finished just over 15 minutes, yet I had most of the grid filled in within 5! I filled in 1 Across and 1 Down without even reading the full clue, and on a first pass I was able to fill in many answers without even consulting the wordplay. And yet, the last five or six clues took me ten minutes!

So… after hitting ‘Post’, my blog was somehow posted without any of the writeups for the clues. I have to redo the whole thing, and I am not pleased. Sorry it’ll be pretty terse.

Across

1 Second sailor downed tools, overawed by celebrity (10)
STARSTRUCK – S (“second”) + TAR (“sailor”) + STRUCK (“downed tools”)
As in, ‘went on strike’.
8 Joint [obtained from] the Spanish part of London (5)
ELBOW – EL (“the [in] Spanish”) + BOW (“part of London”)
9 Giant, raving, hit a log (7)
GOLIATH – anagram of (“raving”) HIT A LOG (“hit a log”)
10 Supposed discharge, do we hear, [in] visitor’s accommodation? (5-4)
GUEST-ROOM – GUESSED (“supposed”) + RHEUM (“discharge”) replaced by homophones (“do we hear”)
12 Atmosphere [in] racecourse, by the sound of it (3)
AIR – AYR (“racecourse”) replaced by a homophone (“by the sound of it”)
13 Farm worker beginning to interpret Asian language (5)
HINDI – HIND (“farm worker”) + first letter of (“beginning to”) INTERPRET (“interpret”)
‘Hind’ is a British term for ‘farm worker’.
15 Hibernian flag at front of hotel (5)
IRISH – IRIS (“flag”) + (“at”) first letter of (“front of”) HOTEL (“hotel”)
Flag is a kind of the flower iris.
17 Dull / piece of floor covering (3)
MAT – double definition
The first sense is the opposite of ‘glossy’. Can also be spelled ‘matt’ or ‘matte’.
18 Kind of hydrangea rhinos eat, unfortunately (9)
HORTENSIA – RHINOS EAT (“rhinos eat”) anagrammed (“unfortunately”)
20 English girl, about to enter African country (7)
ERITREA – E (“English”) + RITA (“girl”), RE (“about”) inside (“to enter”)
21 Reportedly remained sedate (5)
STAID – homophone of (“reportedly”) STAYED (“remained”)
22 Former college girl framing directions [for] Pacific islander (10)
POLYNESIAN – POLY (“former college”) + SIAN (“girl”) outside (“framing”) NE (“directions”)

Down

1 Heavy tool fraud used to secure shelf (12)
SLEDGEHAMMER – SHAMMER (“fraud”) outside (“used to secure”) LEDGE (“shelf”)
2 Mosey along, initially attracting mockery by the French (5)
AMBLE – first letters of (“initially”) ATTRACTING MOCKERY BY (“attracting mockery by”) + LE (“the [in] French”)
3 Farm animal [identified in] broadcast? (3)
SOW – double definition
4 District Officer originally involved in the rise of Niger (6)
REGION – OFFICER (“officer”) reduced to its first letter (“originally”) inside (“involved in”) the reversal of (“the rise of”) NIGER (“Niger”)
5 Get together to bind top half of lush plant (9)
COLUMBINE – COMBINE (“get together”) outside (“to bind”) first two letters of (“top half of”) LUSH (“lush”)
6 Savoury dish [served by] girl with friend in Paris (6)
SALAMI – SAL (“girl”) + (“with”) AMI (“friend in Paris”)
‘Ami’ is French for ‘friend’.
7 Sort of pipe we crunch hard, surprisingly (12)
CHURCHWARDEN – WE CRUNCH HARD (“we crunch hard”) anagrammed (“surprisingly”)
11 Hotter hit played until that time (9)
THITHERTO – HOTTER HIT (“hotter hit”) anagrammed (“played”)
14 Some open it with a jerk! (6)
NITWIT – letters inside (“some”) OPEN IT WITH (“open it with”)
16 Back in outskirts of Derby? [That’s] dull (6)
DREARY – REAR (“back”) inside (“in”) first and last letters of (“outskirts of”) DERBY (“Derby”)
19 Language [of] extreme characters in SW1 (5)
SWAZI – AZ (“extreme characters”) inside (“in”) SWI (“SW1”)
21 Prosecute union leader in Home Counties (3)
SUE – UNION (“union”) reduced to its first letter (“leader”) inside (“in”) SE (“Home Counties”)

51 comments on “Times Quick Cryptic No 1312 by Orpheus”

  2. I agree with Vinyl. HIND, for instance, is marked by ODE as ‘archaic’ & ‘chiefly Scottish’. And I don’t think I knew HORTENSIA, although the plants I don’t know would fill an arboretum. That was, I think, my LOI; it took a long time to sort out the anagrist in my head. iris/flag shows up in 15x15s often, as does heather/erica/ling; verb. sap. I just noticed that we have ‘the Spanish’=EL and ‘the French’=LE. Hard lines about your blog, Jeremy; I hope that at least it wasn’t one of your detailed play-by-play analyses. 6:02.
    1. No, just a discussion of some of the more difficult and obscure clues with links to definitions and more information.
  3. 13 minutes and I agree this was a toughie with some clues more suited to the 15×15 and possible even the Mephisto.

    HINDI is something of an elephant trap because if one doesn’t happen to know HIND as a farm worker (and I’d guess that few do) the wordplay clearly leads the average solver towards HAND,I – not a well-known language perhaps, but who’s to say it’s not spoken somewhere in the huge continent that is Asia? A clue best biffed, I’d suggest.

    ROOM as a soundalike for a word meaning ‘discharge’ is pushing things a bit too, along with, as already mentioned above, CHURCHWARDEN as a pipe and HORTENSIA which somehow I knew originally as an old-fashioned female name and later learned it was a plant. And THITHERTO – I ask you!

    Not having 1ac in place when thinking of a 3-letter farm animal ending in W was a distinct disadvantage and I lost time trying to justify the more obvious answer.

    I sympathise with our blogger over his lost work but I’ve never felt comfortable enough with the vagaries of LJ to trust it to behave itself so I always prepare and save my blogs using a standalone web-page editor and transfer them LJ only for the final few tweaks.

    Edited at 2019-03-20 06:32 am (UTC)

    1. I just Googled HANDI, and it turns out to be a kind of pot used in Indian cooking; the word comes from Hindi!
      1. Alternatively, ‘hind’ could just be ‘hand’ spoken with an upper class English accent…
    2. Can’t find your blog on Times Subscriptions but I rang to cancel my (full) sub at £34-ish pcm and was immediately offered 50% off for a year or ditto 50% off the digital-only alternative. As The Times has been vocal in campaigning that ’loyal’ customers have been ripped off for eg insurance/broadband I thought this hypocritical! Cancelled anyway and will rely on freebies from Waitrose on 3 weekdays and buy the two others, but probably skip the weekends. They said they used to do segmented deals per the NYT (?) which would access the puzzles, but no more. How did you/others get on? Hope I can find your blog when I get back to my desktop machine. Regards
  4. Definitely a few clues more suited to the 15×15 – maybe that’s why my quickie-block was temporarily lifted?

    Agree re HORTENSIA, and definitely THITHERTO.

    LOI was (as usual for me, inexplicablyj SOW.

    Dabbled with HANDI for a bit before tossing a coin between “known word clueing unknown language” or “unknown word clueing known language”. On this occasion I guessed right.

    4.42

  5. 11.05 today and with one wrong having guessed HORNETSIA instead of the correct plant. Botany not my strong point. Vocal seemed quite obscure the quick. I’m a fan of HITHERTO but oddly never used THITHERTO. Must get that into reports at work.

    NeilC

  6. I thought I was in for a quick one when the first three went straight in, but then obscurity set in – probably too much of it. I didn’t enjoy it so gave up after 30 minutes with the crossing anagrams HORTENSIA, and THITHERTO un-solved. Too much gardening and too many random girls names for me.
    Brian
  7. 26 minutes so 6 over target. I really don’t like the ‘insert random boy’sgirl’s name’ type clues.

    I don’t mind the odd bit of (very) obscure vocabulary in the QC as it helps to build knowledge – in fact it’s enjoyable when the wordplay allows the solver to discover new words, but where the solution depends on knowing the obscure (rheum, hind) then I find it unsatisfying as it forces one to biff the answer.

    Not the most enjoyable QC.

  9. Lots of obscurities in this one. I weighed up the odds between HINDI and HANDI but then had a vague impression that the obscure meaning of HIND had cropped up once before in the big puzzle. HORTENSIA is the sort of name that crops up in a PG Wodehouse novel, with an E for the final IA, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch. I dithered over SWAZI, my LOI, until I saw the parsing and then remembered Swaziland (Eswatini now, thanks Kevin). I raised an eyebrow at the apparent anti-homophone SOW which has 2 different pronunciations of the same spelling, unless I’m missing something. I quite liked GUEST ROOM, but again RHEUM is not something I’d expect to find in the QC. 11d was a barely known usage too. I knew the pipe. At least it wasn’t Meerschaum:-) A tough workout. 13:32. Thanks Orpheus and Jeremy, and commiserations on your lost blog.
  10. A good number of these made me look at a dictionary to confirm that they were indeed valid definitions. For me dictionaries are only reliable as authorities on spelling – they can confirm historic uses but can’t be relied upon for modern or familiar usage. My own view is that quickies should steer clear of obscure or outdated uses. Got to be honest I’m still not understanding sow – the word sounds like sow rhyming with now ????
    1. A sow is a farm animal (female pig); and “sow” is a verb meaning among other things to scatter seed on the earth, which used to be done (probably by hinds) by throwing it or “broadcasting” it. So it’s a double definition.
      1. Thank you. The dictionary does indeed list sowing as scattering but it underlines my main point.
    2. But can also sound like SEW, as in SOWing seeds (broadcasting). In fact this is the first definition of the word in my (less than totally – see below) reliable Chambers, with the female pig definition coming second.
  11. Well, I thought that that was an absolute stinker for all the reasons already articulated above – random girls’ names (x3), random plants, random archaisms, dodgy homophones. Big Fat Golden Raspberry from me. 3 Kevins.

    Templar

  12. Hmmmmmph. I think a few problems with this one for a QC. I agree most of the comments above – HINDI/HANDI, ROOM/RHEUM, et al, but made even more difficult I think with two unusual words (THITHERTO and HORTENSIA) not appearing in my Chambers app unaccountably. Luckily, I knew HORTENSIA (and CHURCHWARDEN), and THITHERTO came to me as a possible option when looking at placing the remaining anagrist into the empty spaces of my LOI. It was only post-solve that I discovered the strange absence of those words in Chambers, which I don’t think has happened to me before. No time for me today because I missed the result after submitting and pondering LOI, but probably over 20 minutes.
  13. I, too, started off very quickly but slowed down dramatically for the second half. Last in were SWAZI and POLYNESIAN but I found CHURCHWARDEN and SLEDGEHAMMER (nice clue) more difficult than they should have been, looking back. A touch over 3 Kevins so keeping my SCC membership intact. Thanks to Orpheus and Jeremy. John M.
  15. Not a huge fan of this puzzle, it felt as if there was too much guesswork involved, as highlighted by previous comments, and I hit submit with a bit of trepidation over a couple of the answers – HORTENSIA and SALAMI. Surely salami is a type of food rather than a dish. To me a dish would involve a recipe or a number of ingredients at least. Completed in 20.28
    Thanks for the blog
  16. 12+ minutes finishing on Swazi after bludgeoning the brain. Sadly, I’d fallen into the Handi trap at 13ac so dnf.

  17. After my success of yesterday my forecast of staring at empty squares was unfortunately spot on. Never heard of Hortensia or Thithereto

    Can I add to the Hind debate as it is my given surname. When researching our family tree my cousin concluded that in all likelihood my great, great grandfather was probably Jewish and had married a gentile and parish records were all available for the various marriages. Her understanding was that the definition was a shortening of Hired Hand but less a general worker more likely as someone employed as a piano tuner or French polisher. Whether she felt that was better to assuage my fathers middle class ambitions I don’t know but that’s what I was told

  18. I had all the problems with vocabulary that have been mentioned repeatedly above. Having said that, I was not far above average so the cluing seems to have been fairly generous. Although, like others, I just decided that HANDI was simply one of the many asian languages I had never heard of.
    In addition to all the other issues, I was not happy with SUE = prosecute. A suit is a civil matter. A prosecution is a criminal matter. Two very different beasts.
    PlayUpPompey

  19. I can’t say I enjoyed that at all. I have never seen MAT paint advertised, have heard of hitherto but not THITHERTO and I dabble in the garden but don’t refer to Hydrangea as HORTENSIA and Aquilegia as COLUMBINE. I biffed HINDI, GUEST ROOM and CHURCHWARDEN because my parsing skills failed me. Definitely not QC fodder.
    An unsatisfactory 18 mins.
  20. Ditto all the above. A bit of a slog – everything went in slowly but steadily until I invented a new language – Henti. I parsed it as hen – (farmyard worker) plus the first letters of To Interpret!! I justified it to myself as there were quite a lot of non-QC words, and I thought ‘Well maybe!’ At least today’s earworm is the amazing Sledgehammer ☺
  21. Certainly not a birthday treat for me today. I had Farsi (far m worker beginning but couldn’t parse SI), which threw me, Hithertoo which didn’t fit and a number of other sillies. No problem with Hortensia but I too don’t like random boys or girls names to fit the clue. Poor setting in my book. As to rheum (as in a cold, not rheumatology), that was off the game for me. Never knew an Iris was a flag, but there were other floral precedents today, so whacked it in.
    Never managed to parse Sledgehammer but it had to be right. All in all, not very satisfying. Oh well, just have to have another slice of birthday cake and down my sorrows with champagne to forget the parlous state of Brexit.
  22. This was very strange for a QC, with more than a fair quota of obscurities. HIND as a farm worker and THITHERTO were unknowns to me and I didn’t know a HORTENSIA was a type of hydrangea nor that alternative spelling of matte. Not one of the most enjoyable. 5:52.
  23. Managed HORTENSIA despite not knowing that it was a hydrangea, but blanked out totally on SWAZI. Not helped by being unable to access the blog on the train to Newcastle because Trans Pennine Express WiFi said the connection was not private.

    FOI STARSTRUCK
    COD GUEST ROOM
    The rest is irrelevant.

  24. Much the same views as others today. I did manage to finish but only with some artificial help. Not sure why ‘*get*’ together is ‘combine’ = *put* together, maybe..

    Also NHO ‘hind’ for hand and certainly don’t remember coming across ‘thitherto’ even though my anagramer knew it.
    Knew rheum (it’s come up before, I’m sure) and have heard of hortensia. Iris/flag is also not that uncommon in gardening, I would have thought.

    After many years of using computers from bitter experience, I’ve got into the habit of ctrl-a, ctrl-c (select all, copy) before posting anything more than a short entry in an online form.

    Also too many random names, that seems to me to be a bit of a cop out when the setter can’t think of anything else to use.

  25. Perhaps it’s just me but I find any QC where many solvers have to refer to a dictionary highly unsatisfactory. I realize it’s “allowed” but I’d much prefer the setters to work a bit harder to avoid it.
  26. This was a toughie, but I managed 30mins 12 seconds, so close to my 30 mins target. I had to look up several words to check they existed. I had to check whether HANDI was a language or HIND meant farm hand. I couldn’t find either definition quickly, so biffed in HINDI. THITHERTO was okay, but HORTENSIA was difficult. I first tried to look if there was a SENHORITA hydrangea flower. Not come across “rheum”, so that was a biff. And was surprised to find out that CHURCHWARDEN was indeed a type of pipe.
  27. In view of you all finding this difficult, I’m rather pleased I managed it all without any aids. Initially I didn’t thing I knew any kinds of hydrangea- or pipes – but once I had a few letters I remembered churchwarden and realised I had vaguely heard of hortensia. I hadn’t heard of hind as farm hand so LOI were Hindi and nitwit.
  28. About 30 mins but dnf as misspelt hortensia the dreaded plant clued by an anagram 😡

    Also dnk churchwarden.

    15×15 is good today, finished in about 45 mins and no obscure/unfair clueing.

  29. Rather harsh for a QC, I felt. DNK Hortensia or Columbine, despite the perfectly reasonable wordplay, and unfortunately could not get the checker for ColuMbine, since I was stuck on the obviously incorrect GUEST-HOME – whilst I had heard of Rheumatism, etc, that’s not common wordplay! Random girls names are never fun, being able to label Bow Street seems a big ask for a non-native Brit (or indeed, a non-Londoner), and I was genuinely convinced Handi/Hindi was a misclue. Thitherto is also rather archaic – I’m a Latin teacher, and I still wouldn’t pull that one out!

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