Times Quick Cryptic No 1543 by Tracy

Author   TheRotterPosted on Categories Quick Cryptic
First of all, my apologies – I may have messed up the posting of today’s blog.  If you see this twice, it is entirely my fault.

I found this to be on the easier side for a Tracy puzzle and completed it comfortably inside my 10 minute target.  Some unusual devices gave it interest though, along with a number of cleverly constructed clues.

I particularly liked the four letter answers at the start and end of the across clues.  I don’t think that today’s puzzle is hiding any theme or NINA, but I have been wrong in the past.

Across

1  Team bragged (4)
CREW – Double definition, obeying Rotter’s Law (two-word clues are DDs).  The second definition in this case is the past tense version of crow, as in to brag.
3  Tedious talk about border plant (8)
PRIMROSE – PROSE (tedious talk) around (about) RIM (border).  For once, I am not stumped by a floral clue!
8 Read duties involved nursing duke (7)
STUDIED – Anagram (involved) of [DUTIES] and containing (nursing) D{uke}
10 One may have used rifle criminally? (5)
LIFER – &Lit clue (the whole clue constitutes the definition), containing an anagram (criminally) of [RIFLE] as the embedded wordplay.  I always get into difficulty identifying &Lit clues – I hope I have it right this time – if not, I am sure someone will tell me, and I shall learn from it (hopefully).
11  Slanderous comment in manly speech (11)
MALEDICTION – MALE (manly) and DICTION (speech).  MALEDICTION is defined in my Chambers as ‘cursing, a calling down of evil’, with no reference to slander.  I must admit that I questioned their equivalence when completing the grid.
13 Salad ingredient artist portrayed by plate (6)
RADISH – RA (Royal Academician or artist) and DISH (plate).
15  Batting order for cricket, say (6)
INSECT – IN (batting – in the sport of cricket, the side ‘batting’ are said to be ‘IN’) and SECT (order, as in religious order).  A cricket is an example of an INSECT, as well as being the name of one of the world’s greatest sports.
17  Have a share in it per capita in resort (11)
PARTICIPATE – Anagram (in resort) of [IT PER CAPITA].
20  Left donkey attached to old rope (5)
LASSO – L{eft} followed by ASS (donkey) and O{ld}.
21  A short time in that place’s playhouse (7)
THEATRE – A (a) and T{ime} (short time) inside THERE (that place’s).
22  Repaired sitar crack with such great skill (8)
ARTISTRY – Anagram (repaired) of [SITAR] and TRY (crack – as in ‘have a crack at’).
23  Said of country life, past not present (4)
ORAL – Pastoral means ‘of country life’, and if PAST is not present, we are left with ORAL.

Down

1  Money just for wool (8)
CASHMERE – CASH (money) and MERE (just).  Haven’t we seen this a few times recently?
2  Peer in uniform (5)
EQUAL – Double definition – this time not quite conforming to Rotter’s Law.
4  Censor text of radical decree (6)
REDACT – RED (radical) and ACT (decree).
5  One being broadcast in factory, English fat cat? (11)
MILLIONAIRE – ON AIR (being broadcast) preceded by I (one) and contained inside (in) MILL (factory) and E{nglish}.
6  Crime of receiver (7)
OFFENCE – OF (of) FENCE (receiver – fence is a slang term for a receiver of stolen goods).
7  Gain attention towards end of discussion (4)
EARN – EAR (attention) and last letter (end of) {discussion}N.
9  Busy Asian river – tours I suspect (11)
INDUSTRIOUS – INDUS (Asian river) followed by an anagram (suspect) of [TOURS I].
12  Heavenly in Somerset – here also (8)
ETHEREAL – Hidden answer (in) {somers}ET – HERE AL{so}.
14 Down payment is raised inside store (7)
DEPOSIT – IS (reversed, or raised) inside DEPOT (store).
16  Easy catch for model (6)
SITTER – Double definition.  In cricket, an easy catch is referred to as being a sitter, as it sits up waiting to be caught.  The second definition refers to an artist’s model.
18  Player’s agent blowing top (5)
ACTOR – The agent is a {f}ACTOR (blowing top means to remove the first letter).
19  Perhaps Russian girl’s goal abroad (4)
OLGA – Anagram (abroad) of [GOAL].  OLGA is a common girl’s name in Russia, but isn’t exclusive to that country, hence the ‘perhaps’.

59 comments on “Times Quick Cryptic No 1543 by Tracy”

  1. Some eyebrow-raising involved in solving this one. REDACT means ‘edit’, with no implication of censoring. An order is not a SECT (the Carmelite sect? the Jesuit sect?), nor a sect an order. And as The Rotter points out, a MALEDICTION is a curse not a slanderous comment. (At 22ac, I’d say the definition is ‘great skill’.) Liked ORAL. 5:48.
    1. Redact to me means shorten/censor and its the second definition in my online dictionary.

      Edited at 2020-02-06 05:13 am (UTC)


    2. MALEDICTION
      2 Reviling, slander; the condition of being reviled or slandered. M16.

      SECT
      2b A religious order. LME–E19.

      and Lexico (Oxford on-line) has

      REDACT
      1.1 Censor or obscure (part of a text) for legal or security purposes.

      Many people in the UK (including myself) only learnt the word REDACT a few years ago when documents relating to MP’s expenses (and other scandals) were made public in heavily redacted form and the term was widely used in the media to describe this unfortunate practice. In retaliation the press published images of the documents, many of which contained more text that had been blacked out than was still available to read. No-one seeing these could have been left in any doubt that what was going on here was censorship.

      As for today’s puzzle, I completed it in 9 minutes. It was handy having CASHMERE at 1dn today after its appearance at 1ac yesterday had slowed me down.

      Edited at 2020-02-06 06:14 am (UTC)

      1. REDACT: I’m happy to retract my remarks on REDACT; I’d totally forgotten the usage–which is the same as in the US, with government documents. Although I suspect that REDACT in this sense actually was a euphemism; the government wouldn’t say, “We’re releasing these records, but have had to censor them.”

        MALEDICTION
        This surprises me; I’ve never seen ‘revile’ and ‘slander’ listed as synonyms. (If SOED had had ‘2 reviling ; 3 slander’, that would have been perhaps understandable. I don’t have SOED to hand, but tomorrow I’ll look at their entries sv ‘revile’ ‘slander’. )

        SECT
        The definition you give is evidently obsolete, having died out in the early 19th century. I don’t expect obsolete meanings in a QC (I’m not that happy with them in a regular cryptic); and my objection was directed toward the current meanings of the two words.

    3. It is usually a mistake to insist on your own personal usages for words capable of bearing more than one .. I for example, would only use redact to mean censor. And sects, cults and orders are all much the same to me 😉
      1. No doubt it would be a mistake to do so; but I insisted on nothing (and of course I don’t make mistakes). Your attitude toward sects, cults, and orders is, I suspect, very much like mine; but that doesn’t mean that ‘sect’, ‘cult’, and ‘order’ mean the same thing. I despise Trump and fascists; that doesn’t mean–it’s not true that–Trump is a fascist.
  2. Tracy reverts back to type. My longest time for ages, 38m. But I was up at 4.30am to take the lifestyle inhibitors to swim squad so that’s my excuse.

    Found this like wading through treacle. The 15×15 took not much longer.

    COD insect.

  3. The Rotter found this easy I was completely stuck and probably only got about 50% done. It is always interesting to see how one mans easy is another’s impossible, perhaps a good lesson for those of us trying to learn how to do these puzzles. For me this was on the very hard side
    1. Agreed. This felt more like the standard Times Cryptic because the clues all had an extra level of abstraction. Does Tracey have a reputation for setting difficult crosswords?
      1. My analysis of difficulty of various setters (last updated in Jun 2019) places Tracy square in the middle of the league table. You can see this here: https://jackkt.livejournal.com/ but please read the caveats in the introduction as it’s entirely based on my own solving times and in statistical terms probably not worth the paper it’s not written on!

        Edited at 2020-02-06 09:56 am (UTC)

  4. I too found this difficult. I could blame a late night after a cricket dinner but I would probably still have gazed at my LOI 5d for over two minutes with all the checkers; the letters permitted all sorts of words and I found the clue very confusing -MULTIENGINE anyone?
    Apart from that I had to work hard round the grid often thinking that wasn’t easy e.g. ACTOR and ORAL (Ural seemed to work at first). So all done in the end in 14:31 which I’m quite pleased with. David
  5. Nice to hear that others found this on the more testing side. I got most of it quickly but spent time puzzling over clues that should have been easily solved e.g. ORAL (nice clue), PRIMROSE (because I mis-typed 5d as LILLIONAIRE without noticing, CREW (it may be an alternative to crowed but I would never use it). Given that the long answers went in very quickly, I am at a loss to explain why I took over 3K. A good puzzle and blog, thanks to both. John M.

    Edited at 2020-02-06 08:44 am (UTC)

  6. I found this a struggle, particularly the top half where I was clearly on a very different wavelength. I had real problems with 4d which I was convinced was an anagram and 3a as I’ve never considered prose to be boring. I needed all the checkers for the 11a and LOI MILLIONAIRE. Completed in 17.21.
    Thanks to Rotter for the blog and Tracy for the workout.
  7. Worked my way through this without any problems, starting with CREW and finishing with ORAL. 6:59. Thanks Tracy and Rotter.
  8. Since when has your target been 10 minutes, Rotter? On Monday you said it was 15! Or do you have different targets for different setters?

    If I were going for setter-specific targets I definitely wouldn’t be picking Tracy for a lower target. I always find myself left with two or three of his to scratch my head over. Today it was PRIMROSE, MILLIONAIRE and INSECT, where pennies were slow in dropping. It’s funny how the pressure increases when you’ve only got a few left!

    Anyway, all done and dusted in just over 2K for a Decent Enough Day. FOI CASHMERE – not only did we have this yesterday but we’ve also had it before from Tracy. In QC 943 (19.10.17), curiously enough also at 1dn and also blogged by the Rotter, he gave us “Money gets plain wool”. LOI & COD INSECT.

    Thanks Tracy and Rotter.

    Templar

    1. Sorry for the confusion, I have a target range between 10 and 15 minutes for all solvers.
      1. Thx Rotter
        I don’t work off Kevins but rather Rotters with my target being 2 Rotters. Today we diverged- DNF with 4 clues absent. Yesterday I did the same time as you at 11pm on paper, being incredibly determined before lights out.
        Sometimes it’s wavelength, but it’s partially a mindset, though in my case Parkinson’s Law often applies (depending on the size of lunchtime wine glass).
        I am in your debt. Johnny
        1. I am flattered Sir. Good luck with your future solves. I always try to indicate my times as closely as possible, but cannot aspire to Kev’s times I am afraid.
  9. This took me just over my target of 15 minutes. A chunk of time at the end was spent just staring at 15 across – inject? invest? invert? insert? It’s the word “cricket” wot done it. I know nothing about the sport and decide instantly when I see it in a clue that all is lost. Eventually, however, I remembered that a cricket is also an insect (duh!) and there you go. I can’t be too proud of myself, though, because I didn’t undestand the “batting order” part of the clue until I read Rotter’s explanation – for which I am most grateful!

    There are some really super clues today and lots of smiley faces in the margins – 11, 22 and 23 across (my COD), for instance, and 2, 4, 5 (my FOI) and 9 down.

    I was less wild about “ear” for “attention, though, and really unhappy about “prose” for “tedious talk”. I knew that the answer had to be “primrose” early in the solving but , unable to see “prose” – well, I wasn’t looking for it – I imagined that it might be something to do with “prim” for “tedious” and “rose” as rows = “border” as a homophone (“talk”) – but I knew that the singular/plural conflict stuffed that.

    Thanks so much, Rotter, for sorting out the tangles, and thanks, too, to Tracy, for a fun puzzle.

        1. “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your…”. I’ve been binge watching Upstart Crow, and thus suspect Shakespaeare would have claimed ear = attention was one of his. No problems with this for me. COD to INSECT. 4:18.
  10. Big DNF. Grateful for a few easy ones but then got properly stuck and gave up after about half an hour. Not heard of CREW as past of crow and PROSE being boring.
    Completely done by Tracy over INSECT, knowing too much about cricket but not enough about cryptic crosswords, yet also dropped the SITTER.
    COD ORAL though not one I solved.
  11. We finished but it took us longer than usual. Spent ages on the top half of the grid. However, feeling pleased to have completed it. Nice brain teaser
  12. ….”ural” at 23A (I was thinking “rural” instead of “pastoral”) I had little trouble and was within my target.

    FOI CREW
    LOI MALEDICTION
    COD LIFER

  13. I think it a little unsatisfactory to identify cricket as one of the world’s greatest sports without mentioning others that may fit the description. It would be more accurate to say that Test cricket is one of the world’s greatest sports, the others being limited over, Twenty20, county, grade, club, school and village cricket.

    Nice puzzle today with nothing to frighten the horses.

    Many thanks to Tracy and Rotter.
    4’50”

    1. Like Phil above and yourself, I thought {r}URAL at first but it doesn’t work on any level I’m afraid.
  15. I am convinced that the level of difficulty of different setters it is very much a personal thing. You are either on their wavelength or you are not. I always find Tracey a struggle, and today was no different.
    PlayUpPompey
  16. Struggled on this – and just couldn’t get 1ac “Crew” or 2dn “Equal”. In hindsight, they are fairly straightforward but sometimes the double definition ones can be the hardest.

    Other than that – very enjoyable with some tricky clues and nice surfaces.

    If this has already been mentioned then apologies – but I was slightly confused by the parsing on 5dn “Millionaire”. It states “in” factory – but the “ionair” is to the right of “mill” so it isn’t really in it at all. Am I missing something?

    FOI – 1dn “Cashmere”
    COD – 15ac “Insect” (took a while to get this)

    Thanks as usual.

    1. For the ‘in’ to work it needs to be read as:

      I + ON + AIR (one being broadcast), contained by [in] MILL + E (factory, English)

      1. Thanks Jackkt, I was about to say the same thing, I.e. I plus ONAIR is contained within (in) MILL (factory) up front, and E{nglish} at the back.
    2. It’s a little bit complicated, but it breaks down as follows:

      “One being broadcast” = I + ON AIR

      That is then “in” “factory, English” which = MILL + E

      So you put I + ON AIR inside MILL E and you get MILLIONAIRE.

      1. Thanks everyone. I was thinking the E was separate – but the explanation(s) all make sense and, once again, are obvious!
  17. Endless seeming alphabet trawl to get ORAL. Easy enough in hindsight, but a sluggish 10:27…

    Edited at 2020-02-06 04:10 pm (UTC)

  18. I found this too hard. Quibbles about PROSE = tedious talk, MALEDICTION = slanderous , IN = batting order. Not sure of CREW as past tense of crow either.
    1. Completely agree, finished but my eyebrows were somewhere down the back of my neck. I can understand the occasional need for an iffy clue to make a puzzle work, but really can’t see any excuse for as many as this. I even spent time with multiple dictionaries trying to find some justification for these, without success. We found this impossible to get into, and more irritating than enjoyable.
    2. No-one is saying IN = batting order, it’s IN = batting, which is absolutely correct and fair with reference to the game of cricket.
  19. We join those that found this tricky, but lots of clues with things to remember for the future. Very instructive, the problem is to remember them all! Thanks to Tracy for the puzzle and all the helpful comments above.
  20. new to this. Just wanted to say how helpful this blog is for someone lerning to do cryptic crosswords.As several other people said also I found todays really quite hard but did get all but 2 done so quite pleased with myself! Big thanks to those who do the blog.
  22. Far too many dodgy definitions IMO: apart from those archaisms, tortuous constructions and definition number 17 of 17 in Chambers already mentioned, since when is “fat cat” synonymous with “millionaire”? Does a big lottery winner automatically also become a fat cat? Not a quick crossword, methinks. Stephen
  23. … in finding this hard, and many of the clues on the iffy side. After 10 minutes I had 6 entries. The rest eventually followed for a time that I prefer not to reveal, but too many were biffed and I really don’t see uniform = equal, tedious talk = prose, slander = malediction or crew as the past tense of crow. Crowed, anyone?

    Much appreciated the light shone by Rotter’s blog, for which many thanks.

    Cedric

      1. “Peter then denied again: and immediately the cock crew.”

        It’s biblical, apart from anything else…

        1. Not great on my biblical references I have to admit – but that does ring a bell. I’ll put it in my “one of those crossword things” list. Thanks.
  24. Found the top half very hard today. A DNF over 3a and 15a. Had to have stinker after a run of good (for me) times and a complete 15×15 on Monday. I usually find Tracy harder than usual but thought some iffy clues today eg 1a 5d that felt rather like biffing. Ah well, live and learn
  25. Just to answer a few of the comments above:

    PRIMROSE – definition no 6 in my Chambers for prose is given as ‘a piece of dull, tedious speaking or writing’.

    MALEDICTION – I can offer no real justification for this. My views are as stated in my blog, and I think criticisms are reasonable.

    ORAL – I also considered URAL, but it just doesn’t work. The clue is clever, admirable and fair!

    EQUAL – uniform means ‘alike all over, throughout, or at all times’, which seems to me to be pretty similar to EQUAL.

    REDACT and MILLIONAIRE have been dealt with in the comments above.

    IMHO this was a fair and reasonably accessible puzzle that I found enjoyable and relatively easy, and I’m sorry that so many others appear to have struggled with it resulting in criticism.

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