Introduction
16:46, which was disappointing, given that I’ve been on a roll lately with a bunch of sub-8 solves. It’s always harder when it’s your blog!
That being said, this one actually seemed quite difficult, with several tricky anagrams, and lots of juicy vocabulary. I struggled with 17 Across and 13 Down for at least 6 or 7 minutes. I had my suspicions about 17 Across but couldn’t see how it worked (and still don’t). I pulled 13 Down out of god-knows-what depths of my mind, and then tried 17 Across as a hit-and-hope. Turned out to be correct.
A fine, fine, fine puzzle.
Solutions
Across
1 | Small fish always around lake (5) |
ELVER – EVER around L (lake) A young eel. |
|
4 | A lot of excellent aluminium [is] essential (6) |
PRIMAL – all but the last letter of PRIME (excellent) + AL (aluminium) This one took me a long time and I didn’t understand PRIM(E) until writing the blog. |
|
9 | Dislike destroying a particular edition (7) |
VERSION – AVERSION (dislike) without A Very sneaky. Also took me awhile. |
|
10 | Son covered in blood [in] spiny bush (5) |
GORSE – S (son) inside GORE (blood) We know this one from Winnie-the-Pooh. |
|
11 | Fabrication [of] lino is expensive to begin with (3) |
LIE – first letters of LINO IS EXPENSIVE | |
12 | Rebuilt city mess affecting an entire body (8) |
SYSTEMIC – anagram of CITY MESS | |
15 | Being evasive before holiday taking in Rhode Island (13) |
PREVARICATION – PRE (before) VACATION (holiday) around R.I. (Rhode Island) Delicious word… but isn’t the part of speech wrong? |
|
17 | Hop on foot [in] game (8) |
BASEBALL – BALL (hop, as in ‘a dance’) next to BASE (foot, as in, ‘of a statue’) This one completely eluded me. Very subtle, although completely fair. The uses of these words are completely standard and not at all esoteric. |
|
18 | Regularly crude sign (3) |
CUE – every other letter in CRUDE | |
20 | Foreign article includes falsehood (5) |
ALIEN – AN (article) around LIE (falsehood) | |
22 | Following a line sideways (7) |
LATERAL – LATER (following) + A + L (line) Couldn’t see past AFTERAL for quite some time! |
|
23 | Seaweed beginning to trap fish (6) |
TANGLE – first letter of TRAP + ANGLE (fish) ‘Angle’ for ‘fish’ in pretty common in puzzles. I’m more familiar with the word ‘angler’. |
|
24 | Guard missing second way in (5) |
ENTRY – SENTRY (guard) without S (second) |
Down
1 | Cover of English novel redesigned with purple on the outside (8) |
ENVELOPE – E (English) + NOVEL anagrammed + first and last letters of PURPLE Hands up if you tried EGGPLANT. |
|
2 | Sparkle you can see in silver vessel (5) |
VERVE – hidden in SILVER VESSEL | |
3 | Put back what can control art gallery (9) |
REINSTATE – REINS (what can control) + TATE (art gallery) | |
5 | Make fun of / newspaper (3) |
RAG – double definition | |
6 | Cocktail [made with] skill in small car (7) |
MARTINI – ART (skill) in MINI (small car) My favorite cocktail. With gin, of course. |
|
7 | Place [where] officer has ejected tenant? (4) |
LIEU – LIEUTENANT (officer) without TENANT Cute. |
|
8 | Very large inset I blame for resetting (11) |
INESTIMABLE – INSET I BLAME anagrammed Delicious word. Tough anagram. |
|
13 | European girl[’s] shoulder pad (9) |
EPAULETTE – E (European) + PAULETTE (girl) I remembered this word from god-knows-where after an alphabet trawl on the second letter. I originally thought the definition was ‘pad’. ‘Epaulette’ is a shoulder decoration, and the word is a diminuitive of the French ‘épaule’, meaning ‘shoulder’, which shares a root with ‘spatula’, believe it or not. |
|
14 | Place below Arundel, crumbling over years (8) |
UNDERLAY – ARUNDEL anagrammed + Y (years) | |
16 | Great joy [when] sister, say, dismisses Romeo (7) |
ELATION – RELATION (sister, say) without R (Romeo, in the phonetic alphabet) | |
18 | Unit caught a traitor (5) |
CARAT – C (caught) + A + RAT (traitor) A unit for measuring precious stones, that is! |
|
19 | Fine deed [in] truth (4) |
FACT – F (fine) + ACT (deed) | |
21 | Love extracting energy from river (3) |
NIL – remove E (energy) from NILE (river) |
Edited at 2020-07-08 12:55 am (UTC)
Very hard today.
I wasn’t entirely sure of PRIMAL but went with it and then took a long time over my LOI at 7dn doing a fruitless alphabet trawl on L?E? and distracted by thoughts of ‘lease’ and ‘lessee’ on seeing the word ‘tenant’in the clue, thinking the answer surely had to be related somehow to one of them. Eventually the penny dropped.
Edited at 2020-07-08 05:49 am (UTC)
FOI: lie
LOI and COD: lieu
That was an excellent challenge, completed in 1.6K for a Good Day. I had five acrosses unsolved after going through them all, which is many more than usual, but fortunately all the downs yielded in order and so the mopping up didn’t take too long. Parsing PRIMAL was tough and I never did parse BASEBALL. At 15ac first I wrote ION and then I re-read the clue and wrote ING, with a mental note to check when I got to 14dn … which fortunately was straightforward … so back to ION it was.
FOI ELVER, LOI PRIMAL, COD REINSTATE. Many thanks to the two Js.
Templar
PS on edit – TANGLE for seaweed was pretty obscure! Wholly reliant on the wordplay.
Edited at 2020-07-08 08:20 am (UTC)
Who thinks suburban ‘hops’
More fun than Monday ‘Pops’…
i.e. Archibald Grosvenor would rather attend a dance than a ‘prom’ concert.
I started very quickly with RAG and GORSE; I have often been in gorse on golf courses, it is spiny.
It took me 15 minutes to get to my last two 17a and 13d. I was pretty sure about BALL = HOP but Install allowed Ball in two places. Was looking for something meaning PAD at 13d for a long time. The key was correcting Install and then Baseball was very clear. It still took a while to find the random girl, without the possessive.
27:55 after all that. Off to play golf in the rain now.
David
To be fair, I was OK – slow but determined – until I got to 7 DOWN, LIEU . I got this only through an alphabet trawl – and the letter U is nearly at the end of that particular arrangement of letters. Without the marker of eg “posh ” for U or “French” for the whole word, I think this clue – in a Quick Crossword – is a Golden Raspberry.
I’m also tempted to award a GR to TANGLE, 23 across because I think this is an overly obscure kind of seaweed to put in an entry level crossword. I got it through the wordplay but still…
And, whilst I’m being so negative, I might as well throw in an extra layer of grumpiness at the parsing of BASEBALL, which I biffed and needed the blog to sort out. A “ball” as a “hop”? Really?
I’m going to re-check Jackkt’s piece about the relative difficulties of the setters to see where Joker is on that because I nearly always find his puzzles trickier than the rest. I know we need a spectrum so that there’s something for everybody but I still would like to think that even the most difficult are doable, even if they take ages.
Clues I enjoyed today included VERVE and ENVELOPE. I parsed 22 across, LATERAL, as a double definition ie “following ” a line of thought plus “sideways “.
Sorry for the rant. Thanks, Jeremy, for the blog and thanks, too, to Joker
Any large type of seaweed, especially a species of Laminaria. quotations ▲
1849, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, 10:
Than if with thee the roaring wells / Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine; / And hands so often clasped in mine, / Should toss with tangle and with shells.
1917, Kenneth Macleod (editor) “The Road to the Isles”, in Songs of the Hebrides:
You’ve never smelled the tangle o’ the Isles.
There is in English the phrase ‘in lieu of’, no?
I never knew of tangle until a 15×15 taught me, if I recall correctly. But:
If you got it through the wordplay, you did what you should have ought; you solved it. Surely one of the joys of doing these puzzles is to find a word that a) you’ve never come across but b) you know from the wordplay must be right. Please, please don’t give a GR to clues like that!
In addition, I would respectfully add that a GR is an absolutely personal response to a clue. I found three clues today to be obscure and, to my mind, overly difficult for a crossword that has “quick” in its title descriptor.To my mind, that consitutes a GR whilst, at the same time, I totally respect your opinion that it doesn’t. You’ve been doing cryptic crosswords for such a long time and what seems difficult or overly oblique to you is very different to the way things seem to me, a person who has been attempting these crosswords for only 2 years.
Edited at 2020-07-08 11:23 am (UTC)
By the way, although there weren’t any QC’s when I started here, my impression is that you’ve shown more progress in 2 years than I did.
Started Crossword early today as rain stopped play ie no gardening , and son is using my study, but I found this very tricky. Had to look up Tangle. Pleased to get the anagrams.
Yes, too difficult for a member of the Slowcoach Club.
but thanks all round as ever.
On edit. I didn’t have a problem with Tangle for seaweed. I’ve seen it before in a cryptic but perhaps not the QC.
Edited at 2020-07-08 10:14 am (UTC)
P.S. Can someone remove the previous post? Thanks.
Edited at 2020-07-08 10:45 am (UTC)
(but I’m now also quite curious about what this one might have been…)
Not trolling or offensive, just inappropriate and irritating
Thanks to Jeremy
Similar to Mendesest, in that everything seemed to need working out rather than just twigging the solutions and then justifying. ELVER and TANGLE looked plausible but were not entered confidently. LOI LIEU. No problem with the anagrams but I always struggle with taking a letter away from a word. Great puzzle.
Fast start allowed time for LIEU, TANGLE and BASEBALL and delighted with <21m. My target is still just to finish without errors or using wildcards in a Chambers search, so ticks on all fronts.
FOI – ELVER; LOI – TANGLE; COD – PREVARICATION where I take all the points above but was thrilled with my fairly speedy and accurate parsing.
A good day!
I’m with gcook52 on BASEBALL. A hop is no more a ball than a bus is a train.
Being evasive is evasion, and therefore a synonym of PREVARICATION, so no problem there.
FOI ELVER
LOI VERSION
COD TANGLE
TIME 3:03
1A Elver a new one – won’t be forgetting it, though!
4A Didn’t know where to start with this, and answers involving synonyms (prime) I find tricky.
23A How is Seaweed a tangle?
15A thought ans. was prevaricating as was looking for an adjective…
Over the months I’ve learned to prepare myself for Joker’s puzzles being more challenging, but will keep at it!
Now you know – it always pays to check the dictionary.
FOI: lie
LOI: tangle
COD: prevarication
Thanks to Joker and Jeremy
Like some others, I hadn’t heard of TANGLE for seaweed and I also had to biff BASEBALL.
I thought (r)ELATION and (a)VERSION were both clever but my COD has to be MARTINI for its simplicity (and for giving me something to look forward to later!)
Just outside my target of 15 minutes so not a bad day again.
Thanks to Joker and Jeremy.
Edited at 2020-07-08 01:30 pm (UTC)
13dn “Epaulette” I have seen before and I knew roughly it was something like that, but it just wouldn’t come. Afraid I’m in agreement with Louisa Janey regarding “Hop” for “Ball” – wouldn’t have got that in a million years, let alone biffing what the game was.
FOI – 1ac “Elver”
LOI – DNF
COD – 3dn “Reinstate”
Thanks as usual.
I was among those who initially had -ING for 15A, and certainly among those who had not heard of 23A Tangle as a type of seaweed, though the cluing made the answer inevitable and as has been noted, half the fun is encountering new words. Puzzled also at first at 14D Underlay: underlay = place below? I know it only as an under-carpet but I see it can also be a verb.
17 minutes in all and all green at the first submission, but quite a workout. Last 2 in were 4A Primal (not parsed before I read the blog) and then 7D Lieu (nice clue, my COD).
Thanks again to Jeremy and all contributors to a good read today
Cedric
Which is my way of adding something different because all of my issues were so ably covered before by everyone.
26 minutes- no problems Epaulette or Prevarication – delighted to see Reinstate and then ages over Baseball – couldn’t parse properly – and last ones Primal then Lieu slowly dawning on me. NHO Tangle seaweed
But finished again – always pleasing! So another good day.
Thanks all
John George
So no time, but slow.
COD LIEU.
Thanks to Jeremy for the blog, I had given up trying to parse baseball.
KevinS
Thanks for the blog and for all the contributions which show I am not alone in being challenged! And thanks Joker for the puzzle, I am trying to improve!
so A: Hop (BALL) on B: foot (BASE) = BASEBALL.
There has been the very occasional exception to this but when it’s happened in the past and been queried it has usually turned out to be an error that wasn’t picked up before publication.
In Down clues ‘on’ simply means ‘on top of’ so ‘A on B’ = AB.
If you want to know more about this you can read about it here if you scroll down to the third article entitled ‘Positional indicator protocol’https://jackkt.livejournal.com/
Edited at 2020-07-08 10:20 pm (UTC)