Times Quick Cryptic No 1753 by Izetti

63 comments on “Times Quick Cryptic No 1753 by Izetti”

1. 12 minutes, but there was only one clue responsible for missing my target 10 minutes, and that was 14dn. I see TOPPERS meaning ‘excellent folk’ has been around since the 18th century but I seem to have lived beyond three-score years and ten without ever coming across it before. I didn’t know the second meaning of MOMENT either.

   Edited at 2020-11-26 02:38 am (UTC)

   1. Completely agree – a very poor clue in my view in an otherwise very good crossword. I’m nearly 70 myself and have never heard it. Something is ringing a bell about moment from Physics – the principle of moments – but I thought that was to do with balance.
      1. As my Physics Master used to say “every couple has its moment in a field”
      2. I’m over 70 and have never seen the usage, but the clue is perfectly good.
         1. Indeed it is. As a Wodehouse fan I happen to be familiar with this word and its meaning, but Izetti’s puzzles often have answers I didn’t know beforehand and I like it that way. It frankly bemuses me that some people seem to think their ignorance is a reasonable yardstick to measure the quality of clues.
      3. It is. Moment of inertia is related to mass and torque. Simple moment is the underlying principle of levers, how balances (seesaw) work from my recollection of basic physics!
         No problem with that clue, more issues when it comes to opera and Greek gods.
         1. I think the clue being objected to might be TOPPERS rather than MOMENT, although it isn’t clear. I didn’t give either clue much thought, they seemed reasonable to me when blogging, even if the second meaning of MOMENT took a moment to materialise.
            1. Thank you. I certainly didn’t tip my hat to that one.
               1. Oh yes- I don’t have any problem with ‘moment’. ‘Toppers’ however was unnecessary though in my opinion.
            2. We certainly speak of a momentous event as being something important and changing.
2. …but unwisely failed to prepare a scratch pad and pen in advance, so I came in at 10:03. As it happened, well-informed turned out to be right, so I could have skipped the trouble.

   I got off to a very fast start, completing about half in three minutes, but the bottom seemed to be more difficult. Maybe I shouldn’t have looked at who the setter was, and just kept going? There is really nothing very difficult, except perhaps for moment and toppers.

3. I took the the 7.30 flier this morning to Waterloo.
   So new leader in the Clubhouse but not for long!

   FOI 5ac FLAT

   LOI 23ac WHITE HOT

   COD 3dn WELL INFORMED

   WOD 8dn ASTEROID BELT – my grandfather was forced to wear one when his asteroids played-up.

4. All green in 17. I thought I must be running out of things I didn’t know but TOPPERS , SOU and MOMENT showed I’m not at the end just yet and GOGOL is the latest in a series of authors I’m dimly aware of but haven’t read and couldn’t name the works of. Disasters averted by choosing ‘soul’ over ‘Saul’ as the person to lose left – a comes first in an alphabet trawl and seemed to work until something better came along two vowels later and having decided ‘second’ meant MO I was left trying to pick between MENT and DEST to make a recognisable word that would parse. For TOPPERS I thought the definition was the other end so after TOP for excellent I was short of ideas of how the rest worked. Six on the first pass of acrosses and fast work on the early downs before crawling over the line with the tricky unparsed four to place much lower on the leaderboard than I expected.

   Edited at 2020-11-26 06:14 am (UTC)

   1. I remember some of his short stories, my favorite being “The Nose”, where the protagonist wakes up one morning to find his nose missing, and later sees it in the street dressed as a State Minister.
5. This felt sluggish again but at least there were no mistakes this morning. I got held up at he end by TOPPERS and LOI RASH where it took an age to notice the fairly obvious hidden. Finished in 14.07 with COD to ELOPE.
   Thanks to Rotter
6. Not as successful in completing as yesterday, but still did pretty well in the one-hour time I allow myself. I got 19 of the 26 clues. I started off quite well but flagged toward the end.

   9a I worked the answer out, though I was not familiar with the name. However, once I had the word, I Googled it and found it to belong to a novelist, which reassured me that I had the correct answer.

   As with yesterday, I am feeling quite pleased with myself as I become more attuned to reading cryptic clues, well, cryptically, rather than relying on the surface rendering.

   1. Well done PW, and keep at it, you are clearly approaching the mastering of cryptics with a sensible attitude.
7. I find Izetti’s style very consistent and familiar and I whizzed through this, pondering only that second meaning of MOMENT, which I see Chambers marks as “obs.”. 3:18.
   1. It’s far from obsolete in mathematics, statistics and physics where it has a precise meaning and is very much in regular use. Whether that makes it fair game in a QC is another matter; I can see quite a few on this blog being caught out by it. But having studied maths and physics – albeit nearly 50 years ago – it was one of my FOIs.

      Cedric

   2. 3:18!!! Chapeau
8. DNF after 25 mins. Failing with RATIFY TOPPERS and MOMENT. I saw how Ratify was going to work, and was close with prefer/refer, but the alphabet trawl didn’t come up with the goods, with too many gaps. This left TOPPERS without its initial letter, for a word that I had never heard of (apart from a 1970s comic), since I didn’t figure how the clue works, I’m happy with a DNF.

   As others noted, top half was much easier. Thought I was on for a good time.

   COD ASTEROID BELT, great surface, but generously clued with Solar System as opposed to the bigger ‘outer space’

   Thanks for the elaboration on Gogol, I was getting confused with the mathematician Godel.

   Edited at 2020-11-26 09:31 am (UTC)

   1. Was that comic called Topper? Wondering if it’s the one with Beryl the Peril.
      1. Topper, ran for 30 something years, but didn’t have many memorable characters. I think Beryl was about the only one I remember.
         1. I’d forgotten about Topper but I’m sure BtP was in The Beano.
            I too failed with Toppers and Ratify because I made the basic error of ending my alphabet trawl at T forgetting that Y can follow almost any letter. Knew Moment due to engineering degree which I used today for the first time in 30 years. Johnny.
9. Ah well, back in the SCC again. Some great clues but Izetti just seems to unsettle me in key regions. Once a blockage is cleared, answers seem to roll out quickly but, unfortunately, the unrolling came too late. I started well in the NW and jumped around the grid but needed to get ASTEROID BELT and WELL-INFORMED before really making progress in the middle. SOU, TITCH (?) and ELOPE (my LOI) took a while and TOPPERS just had to be when I had all the crossers but I’ve never encountered the word except as headgear. Roll on Friday! Thanks to both. John M.
10. … and I predicted before turning to this blog that 14D Toppers and 15A Moment would attract comment. And they duly have.

    I confess I did not like Toppers. It was my LOI, and pushed a pleasant 11 minute solve out to 14 minutes. It is generously clued, but it is not a word I have ever heard used with that meaning in real life and I doubt I ever will.

    My dictionary marks Toppers as “dated” which they tend to use for words which have no further active life in them, and while I suppose it’s fair game for setters to use such words, I always think that it is a small admission of defeat by the setter when they have to ransack the dustier and more obscure corners of the language to complete their grid – it is after all a QC.

    That apart, a very nice puzzle. An interesting point about 19A Sou – although now used in French-speaking countries for a very small coin (in French Canada, for example, un sou is used I believe for 1 cent), its origin is the 4th century Roman solidus, a gold coin of about 4.5 grammes and so in modern money around £200. Not so small!

    Many thanks to Rotter for the blog
    Cedric

11. I had some big hold-ups today. As ever with GK it’s personal. I knew GOGOL but know nothing about astronomy; so trying to construct something from LITES (the other half) and ORBITED was difficult. I needed MOMENT, which was very slow to emerge, and ELOPE (good clue) and even then it was hard. LOI was TOPPERS which I paused to parse. Thought the Cork might refer to Erse but once I had thought of Stopper it was more feasible that the unknown Toppers was correct. All done in 21:10.
    Enjoyed Izetti’s challenge as always. COD to TITCH.
    David
12. Thankfully, I don’t get many of those but I still don’t like them! I always stop at 30 minutes and, at that point, I still had 14 down and 15 across blank. I did think that 14 might be “topless” as a kind of weird version of “first to last” but I don’t think I would ever have come up with TOPPERS which, like many here, I’ve never heard of. With 15 across, though I had all the crossers, I was still stuck, mainly because I was fixated on “for ” for “second “. An alphabet trawl brought me to “forest ” which was clearly not the answer. However, even had I thought of “mo” for “second “, the chances of my recognising MOMENT as a synonym for “turning point ” are nil. Eek. Thanks, Rotter, for the blog and thanks, (with unsporting gnashing of teeth) to izetti!
13. I started off like a LIVE WIRE but then got slightly bogged down. RATIFY only appeared from the mists once I had the F from WELL INFORMED, for which I needed pen and paper. MOMENT appeared from the depths of vaguely remembered Physics or Maths lessons without much anguish. No problem with TOPPERS. I’m sure a youth spent reading PG Wodehouse, helped with that. LOI, IN THE DARK. 8:51. Thanks Izetti and Rotter.
14. As for many other, so for me – fast through a lot of it but serious delays on MOMENT and TOPPERS (ridiculous non-word), plus for me PREVENT (guessed it but couldn’t parse it, thanks Rotter) and RATIFY, which took forever.

    As usual with Izetti a thoroughly enjoyable experience; he has a wonderful lightness of touch.

    FOI LIVE WIRE, LOI RATIFY, COD ELOPE, time 9:58 for an estimated 2K and a Good Day.

    Many thanks Rotter and Izetti.

    Templar

15. I must have spent nearly as long on my last pair (Ratify/Toppers) as the rest of Izetti’s puzzle. Or at least it seemed that way. Ratify eventually came to mind, once I allowed ‘off’ to join ‘sign’ – you can carry lift and separate too far – but even then I agonised over Topless/Toppers before I saw how the clue worked. That left me squeezing in just short of 30mins for what could have been a sub-20. Such is life. Invariant
16. A quick start, but then struggled to get the 8d anagram which eventually gave clue to ELOPE (nice clue). Got TOPPERS, but an odd word.
17. MOMENT, but, although I daydreamed through four years of physics at Grammar School, it had somehow stuck in the old grey matter.

    I would never dream of questioning Izetti, and the clue for TOPPERS is fine by me, but if I’d been compiling this completed grid I’d have been tempted to change it to “topless” (the clueing possibilities are boundless !)

    FOI LIVE WIRE
    LOI RATIFY
    COD ELOPE
    TIME 3:32

    1. Phil – what a good point you make. Often the really obscure words are clearly there because nothing else at all would fit and the setter doesn’t want to rework more of the grid. But here there’s a very nice and (as you say) easily clued alternative.

       With your expert setter’s hat on, can you guide us as to what a setter thinks about as he or she chooses which words to use, and why Izetti might have lit upon toppers here, of all words?

       Many thanks
       Cedric

       1. I think “expert” is pushing it more than a bit ! For my relatively inexperienced part, I usually already have at least two clues in mind that I’ve tinkered with previously. Those answers go into the grid first. Then I try to fill the longest cells in such a way that I can fit something clueable around those words. I may not have a clue in mind, but I certainly consider whether I feel I can produce one ! For every completed grid that I try to clue, three others will have been scrapped as unworkable. And probably two in every five completed grids will go the same way. I’m still very much a novice, and at my time of life I don’t see me taking it up seriously.

       2. And let’s have some good clues for TOPLESS…..

          1. Decapitated apostle, shot by Squadron Leader (7)

             Schutzstaffel joins lunatic plot, with leader of Einsatzgruppen beheaded (7)

             Its perhaps, just a smile and a thong (7)

             Edited at 2020-11-26 04:09 pm (UTC)

18. Please can an experienced solver help me here. If you ‘depart’ the leader from ratify you have atify. If the clue had read ‘sign off please before the leader has departed’ it would make sense to me.
    1. It is Gratify = please without the first letter.
       Am not an experienced solver but the blog explained.

       Edited at 2020-11-26 12:40 pm (UTC)

19. All was going well, all in in 5 mins bar two. Then I ran into RATIFY and TOPPERS and ground to a halt. Finally limped in in 9 minutes. Did try to make TOPLESS fit for a while, and that would have been a much better word for a QC. Or maybe he(?) could have clued it as hats, in which case the answer would have been easier. Hey ho.

    H

20. Struggled with Ratify, Moment and Toppers, as others did. Had put Poppets at one stage which made Ratify tricky, so resorted to the CCD for ‘sign’.

    Liked In the Dark, Lighter, Remit.

    Biffed Erode instead of Elope.

    Oh dear again.

21. Kind of got distracted halfway through with the Tier announcement, but even then I’m not sure if I’d have finished.

    After 30 mins still had 13ac, 14dn, 15ac and 19ac to complete. 19ac I DNK and was a total guess (wrongly as it happens – thought the person might be “Saul”). 15ac I identified as “Moment” but couldn’t see the second definition and spent too long trying to make an anagram of “second”. But without 13ac I was always going to struggle with 14dn.

    Still not sure about lighter = vessel? Am I being stupid here!

    FOI – 11ac “Tie”
    LOI – dnf
    COD – 1ac “Livewire”

    Thanks as usual.

    1. A lighter is a sort of small cargo boat:
       A boat or vessel, commonly an open flat-bottomed barge, but sometimes decked, used in lightening or unloading and also in loading ships, and for receiving and transporting for short distances passengers or goods, or materials of any kind, usually in a harbor.
    2. It’s a kind of barge. Crops up quite often in my limited experience.
    3. James, it took me a moment for lighter to click but here is a definition:
       Lighter, shallow-draft boat or barge, usually flat-bottomed, used in unloading (lightening) or loading ships offshore.
       1. Well – it just proves that you learn something everyday and I can certainly say that when I read this blog.

          Thanks to all.

    4. A lighter is usually a largish vessel like a barge used to load and unload larger ships.
22. Slow brain slog and in the end gave up with TOPPERS for a disappointing DNF. Didn’t like the clue or the answer. All good experience.
    Thanks Izetti and Rotter
23. …TOPPERS, I had shifted the S from STOPPER to the end and just chucked it into ??P?E?S without really thinking about the definition.

    Struggled with a lot of the others though, especially RATIFY and ELOPE, which dragged me out to a sluggish 8:52.

    Edited at 2020-11-26 01:53 pm (UTC)

24. We raced through the grid until we arrived at toppers (which we correctly biffed) but it meant a time of 21 minutes today. We didn’t have any problems with moment – we came across it in O level physics. Good puzzle – thanks Izetti.

    FOI: live wire
    LOI: toppers
    COD: well informed

    Thanks Rotter – especially for clarifying toppers 😀

25. Being aware of the precise meaning of ‘moment’ led me reject it, so spent several minutes trying to think of something starting MO that would parse.

    Edited at 2020-11-26 03:23 pm (UTC)

26. Re: 9across: yes, I too wonder WHOM we’ll have tomorrow.
    1. Touché.
    2. Author’s relatives follow barge?
27. Like Invariant I spent almost as long on the last two, 13ac & 14dn) as on the rest of the crossword. 14 mins for all bar those two and then another 12 just to complete. Annoying, as I had thought of TOPPERS quite quickly but couldn’t parse it. No problem with MOMENT, vaguely remembered from schooldays (must have been paying attention that day) and knew GOGOL as an author, although I couldn’t have named any of his works.

    FOI – 1ac LIVE WIRE
    LOI – 14dn TOPPERS (parsed it eventually but thanks for the confirmation in the blog Rotter)
    COD – 20ac PREVENT. One of many with a smooth surface

28. Completed three quarters of the puzzle fairly quickly, but slowed down towards the bottom. Needed to solve the long anagram at 8d before 15a fell, moment, and 14d completed because nothing else seemed possible. Enjoyable puzzle as usual from Izetti, thanks for the blog.
29. A DNF after 40 minutes for me, defeated by RATIFY. Should have thought of trying a Y at the end really, but it’s easy to say that in hindsight. Strangely I had no problem with TOPPERS despite not ever having heard the word used before. I think I have seen it in a crossword before and stopper for cork was the first thing that came to mind. SOU would also have been unknown had I not seen it here within the last few months (I think). Annoying to fall at the last as I had everything else well before my target 30 minutes, but a good workout anyway. Thanks Izetti and Rotter.
30. I thought the parsing of 19A was from the phrase “He hasn’t got a sou left” which used to mean someone without money. Great to see alternative explanations.
    Beryl the Peril was in the Topper, which my parents used to buy for me in the fifties. I think they thought I was her real life embodiment! Enjoyed the puzzle and blog.

    Happy Potter

31. Thank goodness for Izetti! Most enjoyable. FOI live wire which could be assembled on sight and while toppers I saw immediately I couldn’t get the first to last bit. Baffled by TAUTEST as I had written tautens and couldn’t understand h_s until the sou fell. Thanks! BFM
32. .. as Izetti’s QCs always are. Fair and fun.
    17 minutes.
    Per
33. Now don’t tell me your first name is Pansy!
    1. No, there were plenty of putative Beryl the Perils around back then. That must have been someone else!
       1. I was thinking of Pansy Potter the Strongman’s Daughter in the “Beano”.

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