Beck’s sixth outing, providing a quality puzzle pitched around average difficulty.
There is an error in the clue at 7ac that I didn’t notice when solving, indeed it looked perfectly fine and in it went without any checkers. But yes, a rare mistake – I hope it didn’t throw any more careful solvers off the scent for too long. The clue could have been “An irrevenant partly returned…” with an IR-REVENANT presumably being some kind of strange ‘un-zombie’ type creature. Ok maybe not.
A few tricky things going on elsewhere with a touch of slightly unusual vocab, but all clued very fairly, giving us a lovely QC, flowing and enjoyable. My main hold up was definition-hunting at the wrong end of the clue at 18d, and I needed that opening checker to unravel 17ac.
I’d put this around the low 90s on the Snitch; I managed it in 6:48. Lovely stuff – many thanks to Beck!
Anagram indicators in italics.
| Across | |
| 1 | Caught flexible person at the rock wall gym? (7) |
| CLIMBER – C. is caught in cricket; LIMBER is flexible | |
| 5 | Fool‘s involuntary movement (4) |
| JERK – double definition | |
| 7 | Somewhat irreverently returned? In your dreams (5) |
| NEVER – “Somewhat” often indicates a hidden, and “returned” indicates reversal: apply to irREVERENtly and we have a collection of letters that rather resembles the word NEVER. Shame, as it would have been a nice clue – I liked the “in your dreams / no chance / never” definition | |
| 8 | Alternative healer we anger furiously (3,4) |
| NEW AGER – WE ANGER furiously | |
| 10 | Shakespearean king, scratching head, is a good listener? (3) |
| EAR – LEAR (Shakespearean king) scratch the head | |
| 11 | We’re told the writer cried, getting looked at (9) |
| EYEBALLED – We hear the same as I BAWLED (the writer cried) | |
| 13 | Hot goal in rugby score (6) |
| TRENDY – END (goal) in TRY (rugby score) | |
| 14 | Thrash with entirely old power (6) |
| WALLOP – W(ith) ALL (entirely) O(ld) P(ower) | |
| 17 | Reinforce mysterious brotherhood (9) |
| CONFRERIE – REINFORCE mysterious. At least with all the checkers, if you weren’t quite sure of the word, there was no other plausible arrangement of letters. | |
| 19 | Nearly stylish life force (3) |
| CHI – CHIc = stylish, Nearly = remove the last letter | |
| 20 | Deliberately lose best sleeveless garment (4,3) |
| TANK TOP – TANK (deliberately lose) TOP (best). I didn’t know this tennis slang sense of TANK. The OED gives a Guardian quote from Jan ’79: “But it is ironic that Connors, a player generally considered too honest to ‘tank’ to anyone, should be the one to suffer.” Would that be the Australian Open then? No further information, and I’m intrigued! | |
| 22 | Am leaving US to find evergreen shrub (5) |
| ERICA – AM leaves |
|
| 23 | Dog food (4) |
| CHOW – Double definition | |
| 24 | Circle of friends needing somewhere to sleep next to Great Lake (7) |
| COTERIE – COT (somewhere to sleep) next to ERIE (Great Lake) | |
| Down | |
| 1 | State: “I make incision after join” (11) |
| CONNECTICUT – I CUT (I make incision) after CONNECT (join) | |
| 2 | Opposite, one new poem (7) |
| INVERSE – I (one) N(ew) VERSE (poem) | |
| 3 | Publican‘s skill in heavy drinking (9) |
| BARTENDER – ART (skill) in BENDER (heavy drinking) | |
| 4 | Some cash brought up for cheesemaker’s ingredient (6) |
| RENNET – TENNER (some cash) “brought up” = reversed | |
| 5 | Gossip starts to jar as well (3) |
| JAW – “starts” to Jar As Well | |
| 6 | Large ugly royal (5) |
| REGAL – LARGE ugly | |
| 9 | Repeat paid lecture randomly (11) |
| REDUPLICATE – PAID LECTURE randomly | |
| 12 | Humiliation in a cellar (9) |
| ABASEMENT – A, BASEMENT (cellar) | |
| 15 | More fortunate, and braver, after losing head (7) |
| LUCKIER – |
|
| 16 | Discussion item about radius line on a globe (6) |
| TROPIC – TOPIC (discussion item) about R(adius) | |
| 18 | A bit of emotion in the Beethoven symphony (5) |
| NINTH – “A bit of” emotioN IN THe | |
| 21 | Pronounced piggy pull (3) |
| TOW – heard the same as TOE (piggy) | |
I didn’t notice the error, which was pointed out in the club forum; and I’m glad I didn’t, as it would have slowed me down. I was slowed down by CONFRERIE, which I didn’t know, although I knew ‘confrere’. I haven’t seen ‘mysterious’ as an anagram indicator before (or ‘ugly’ (6d), either); I don’t think much of it. TANK isn’t specific to tennis. 6:28.
8:29. Luckily I didn’t spend too long on NERVE as it could only be a very rare slipup. EYEBALLED was my COD. I’ve been part of a COTERIE a few times and maybe even a CONFRERIE or two(now that I know the word for it). TANK is a common term in North American professional sports as teams are rewarded for poor finishes in the standings by getting to choose the best new young players. So they purposely lose games down the final stretch. Just the opposite of the more sensible relegation for having a lousy season. I think TANK TOP ERICA sat a few rows over from me in one of my high school math classes.
8.20. Nice puzzle from Beck, though I too lost a not particularly significant amount of time over the stuff-up involving NEVER. I know a few NEW AGERs but none would call themselves a healer, alternative or otherwise. No other probs, CONFRERIE went in with a shrug but came up trumps so all good. Thanks roly.
As a speed solver – or attempted speed solver – I didn’t notice the problem with never, but just glanced at the letters and stuck it in. I also have to say that even though I am sitting right in the middle of Connecticut, solving one puzzle after another, I couldn’t think of any US state that fit the crossing letters for the longest time. Minnesota? Nope, too short. It does help if you know chi and rennet, everything else was quite simple.
Time: 8:24
12 mins held up by the error for a while near the beginning and trying to smash some form of 6-lettered ‘reverie’ into 5 instead. I think I can only recall one such setter error previously. Perhaps it’s not and there’s a devious twist to be revealed.
I thought to TANK was simply to suddenly lose form or energy in any sport (in cycling it’s now to ‘bonk’) -I didn’t know it was deliberate and related specifically to tennis . Don’t Jockeys ‘drop their hands’?
Quite a tough one all round I thought. Thanks Beck and Roly.
Tanking has become a big phrase in American sports where high draft picks next season can encourage teams who are already having a bad season to deliberately avoid winning games. Not literally playing badly but trading decent players, starting the rookie over the experienced QB saying you’re doing it to give him experience. Obviously you don’t get tanking in sports where relegation is at stake.
There have been examples of tanking in other sports. There were some badminton players at the 2012 Olympics who deliberately played to lose their pool game because finishing second would give them an easier opponent in the next round. Similar football example at the 1982 World Cup where Austria and Germany played out a draw to ensure they both qualified.
There was a time where sports psychologists used “tanking” to indicate a player who loses it and just starts playing wildly. They start hitting every ball and serve as hard as possible, hoping it’ll win them the point but not caring whether it loses. This was decades ago but someone like Nick Kyrgios would be a good example of that.
11 minutes, but I feel I should deduct a minute to compensate for the faulty clue that delayed me while I considered whether there might be a word REVER associated with dreams, perhaps derived from ‘reverie’. You will gather I didn’t have the N-checker from CONNECTICUT at that stage. Another thought arising from that and adding to time lost, was that REVER in ‘irreverently’ wouldn’t have needed ‘returned’ as it’s there whichever way you read it.
TANK TOP was no problem but I didn’t know it as a deliberate loss even though it appears to have originated in tennis, the only sport I follow with any degree of interest.
CONFRERIE was unknown, and REDUPLICATE is a cumbersome word which I wonder if anyone actually uses.
Never knew LIMBER could be an adjective.
I DNF due to not knowing ERICA at all and no amount of alphabet trawling would have assisted me there. The rest of it was fairly straight forward though I thought
I didn’t understand the parsing for NEVER and put it down to my deficiencies not a clue error!
Also CONFERIRE I nho but like Roly said there was no other ways to spell the word.
There’s a lot of tanking in Australian and US sports as being at the bottom of the league gets you rewarded with better odds of drafting good players for next year. Tanking in English football just gets you relegated and probably isn’t recommended.
I quite enjoyed this one!
I think tanking has two meanings, especially in Oz. In footy etc it refers to teams deliberately losing, but in politics when you tank in the polls you are on the skids…
Not on purpose though, with the pollies!
Stocks and shares have an irritating habit of tanking too (I do wonder whether some of that is deliberate as well…)
You just found another way to spell the word!
Keep the erica-ling-heather trio in mind; you’ll see them again.
Ah thank you. Totally sounds like a group of mean girls at school
2/4 so far this week. I must admit to finding many of the clues very hard to parse today, but once I’d got some checkers in things fell into place and I came in all green in about 23 minutes. Like others I’d never heard of CONFRERIE, but it had to be. WALLOP slowed me down and I guessed it in the end as I could see the OP but not the WALL (why should ‘with’ represent a ‘w’? It seems a bit random to me).
All in all a fair QC today so thank you Beck and Roly.
w, often w/, has represented ‘with’ for ages; I’m surprised you haven’t seen it.
Yes, I think w/ = with is a US thing. “Burger w/ fries” etc.
Hard to gauge my time as I had to take a “go out to the car and look for a school shoe” break after 15m. So I wasn’t going to break any records today. Held up a bit by the error but I had the N from CONNECTICUT by then so once I’d dismissed ‘nerev’ I just stuck it in. Briefly revisited when faced with the unknown CONFRERIE and then was just slow to see TANK TOP when I was at the wrong end of the clue and trying to do something with ‘vest’ and didn’t think tanking had anything to do with failing on purpose, more snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Thanks to CO and Roly for putting me straight. Ended up all green in 22.
Sluggish going today and thought I was going to miss my target until the last few came to mind in a rush.
Getting fixated on California, despite having the wrong number of letters, made 1d tricky and spent time toying with ‘rever’ at 7a. Needed most of the crossers for REDUPLICATE as it doesn’t look like it should be a real word. Surely by duplicating something you’re already repeating it so there should be no need for the ‘re’ at the start.
Started with CLIMBER and finished with NINTH in 9.55 and had a couple of nice PDMs for ABASEMENT and EYEBALLED.
Thanks to Roly
A horrible word, but if you had to repeat the whole process because of a problem, you might be asked to ‘reduplicate’
Fair point
Reduplication is primarily a technical term in linguistics. Read the Wikipedia article – it was common in Sanskrit and Greek.
9 minutes for this nice puzzle. No time wasted on the mis-cluing of Never as when I can’t quite parse the obvious answer I always assume the clue is just too clever for me and move on. The joys of not being an ace solver!
Spent rather longer on Chi: when I just had the C checker I wondered briefly if Coo (from COO[L]) could be a life force. But Reduplicate put that right. In passing I do agree with Plett11 that it is a poor word, and either Duplicate or Replicate would be more usual – but I’ve learnt by now that a word being poor, ugly, archaic, obscure, foreign etc etc won’t stop a desperate setter using it if it is the only one to fit the grid!
Many thanks to Roly for the blog
Cedric
6:00. Unlike some, I did spend a bit of time puzzling over NEVER, wondering if my eyesight was faulty when looking at ‘irreverently’ but I did eventually concede it might be a mistake and bunged the answer in. The unknown French word CONFRERIE also took me some time and I wasn’t aware of that meaning of TANK. Otherwise all quite pleasant. I liked BARTENDER best for the surface. Thanks Beck and Roly.
NEVER was jolly irritating, especially when solving on a phone because the letters are quite small and so I was squinting away to see if I was misreading backwards. I kept putting in NEVER and then taking it out again. In the end I decided to abandon doing the acrosses first and tackle the whole NW corner to get checkers from the downs. Those of course fitted NEVER, thus leading to a further outbreak of squinting. During all this a chap sat down opposite me absolutely stinking of booze (not that unusual on a late night train home but strange on a morning commuter train!) but fortunately I remembered an old face mask in my bag from the covid era, which was a nice silk one sprayed with lavender oil!
Oh yes, the puzzle. Otherwise fun but the NEVER thing put me in a thoroughly bad mood from which I did not recover. All done in 07:29 for 1.2K and a Grumpy Day.
Thanks roly.
Templar
Finished fairly quickly and enjoyed but did spend some time worrying about Rever or NEVER until CONNECTICUT came to mind.
Wasn’t sure of the parsing of BARTENDER.
Knew ERICA which means Heather. I don’t have ericaceous soil, i.e. it is chalky, so I can’t grow azaleas, rhododendrons etc.
CONFRERIE is surely a French word, but easy to biff.
Liked ABASEMENT, TROPIC, WALLOP among others.
Thanks, Roly.
10:09 (Thorkell The Tall leads Viking invasion of Kent)
7a was my LOI, since I couldn’t find a work that made sense reversing the letters. With all the checkers in place, it has to be NEVER, and I did not recheck that it was there in the reversed letters.
I usually struggle with the middle C in CONNECTICUT, but the need to make a word meaning join steered me in the right direction.
Thanks Roly.
I’m now going to have to Google Thorkell the Tall
Interesting- I’d never heard of the Vikings pestering that far south.
They got (almost) everywhere including the Mediterranean South let alone west and east.
13:55. (1355 riot at Oxford university breaks out, leaving 63 scholars and 30 locals dead)
Not happy with the error at NERVE and the NHO CONFRERIE.
Town 1- Gown 0.
That’s the halftime score. After the king got involved it was very much Town 1 – Gown 2!
Just spent some time reading the wikipedia article – very interesting. Quite the riot all right.
I wondered whether Beck is American as some of the words whilst used here might be more familiar over the pond. I’m thinking CONNECTICUT, CHOW, CONFRERIE, cotERIE.
Quite a challenging puzzle.
For those who are new LEAR, CHOW and ERIE are frequent visitors.
Thanks Roly and Beck wherever you are!
Clearly no relative of Martin 😉
I also thought Beck might be a septic – as you mentioned (Connecticut/Tank =to lose), but also Bartender instead of barman/barkeeper. The Times Daily Quiz setter Olav Bjortomt is absolutely obsessed with setting questions on america, hopefully the quick cryptic can continue to provide some relief….
9:36. Well I …, a mistake in a The Times puzzle, which I did happen to notice. Still, made up for by the chumminess of CONFRERIE and COTERIE, even if one of them sounded like a made-up word. Favourite was the ‘Large ugly royal’; I don’t think Beck would still be with us if Henry VIII were on the throne.
Thanks to Roly and Beck
Took an age to find a foothold and get started, but still finished in 12 minutes without even noticing the now obvious error – probably making the same mistake as the Setter / Editor. Otherwise, a nice puzzle with some unusual vocab – I sense some cries of ‘foul’ from some of the newbie solvers, but it all seemed fair to me.
16:07
Didn’t really like this, especially never and confrerie (obscure word clued as anagram) where the vowels were inserted hopefully. Dnk Tank for lose on purpose, only throw.
LOI Confrerie
COD bartender.
6:28
Agreeable puzzle. As for the error, I nerev noticed it.
Thanks, r.
🤣
9 minutes for me. LOI was CHI.
A lot of fairly simple stuff but with some odd words. I too wondered whether REDUPLICATE was a real word but put it in quite quickly; and CONFRERERIE seemed plausible. A coterie theme perhaps.
A pleasant puzzle overall.
David
Well virtually everyone’s times would suggest that this wasn’t too difficult, but I certainly didn’t find it easy finishing in 14.15. I suppose if you’re not on the setters wavelength then you have to make the best of it. I took the trouble to check 7ac to make sure that NEVER was in there but reversed, and satisfied myself that it was! Wishful thinking obviously!
I did wonder about the clueing for 9dn where ‘repeat’ would normally be covered by DUPLICATE rather than REDUPLICATE, would it not be ‘repeat again’?
Wrestled with NEVER for a while before realising it must be a mistake. Remembered CONFRERIE from the French. Struggled with CHOW and TANK TOP. Odd to see EYEBALLED so soon again and the PIGGY = TOE clue. Quite hard, I thought.
7.21. I missed the error because I initially wrote in REVERIE, which also isn’t quite there and quickly runs out of room.
Do people in CONNECTICUT ever pronounce that middle C? Whenever I’ve heard it it’s sounded like the Cand T are elided into a soft D.
Silent C, the T is subject to North American Intervocalic Flapping–not a [d] but as near as dammit. It’s what makes e.g. ‘metal’ and ‘medal’ homophones over here (well, not here, I’m in Japan; but on the other side of the pond).
“North American Intervocalic Flapping” – a phrase I’m just going to have to drop into a conversation sometime over the next few days.
Since I live in Connecticut, I would say that some people do pronounce the C, primarily as a bit of a joke. While metal and medal are homophones in many US dialects, that is not universal by any means. If you are from Ohio or New Jersey, yes, but maybe not so much in New England.
All these years I’ve been saying Connecticut and now I find out it’s Onnecticut 🤐
That’s just silly. It’s Connectiut … obvs!
Started with JERK and finished in around 10 mins with my LOI CONFRERIE requiring a lot of juggling of letters. It sounded the most feasible but I wasn’t confident enough to submit to the leaderboard. Having now read the blog and comments I admit to not seeing the rrEVER error with the double r merging into an n.
I managed to complete this one relatively quickly, using no aids. No help required from the cat either.
I agree with rolytoly’s comment on CONFRERIE. I had never heard of it, but with all the checkers in place, and the French word for brother in my mind, there had to be only one way the remaining letters could go.
Yesterday I was about to tackle the QC when my friend invited me into his Xbox party. I explained to him I was about to start the QC and he asked if he could help me, though he’d never attempted one before.
I read each clue out to him as we tackled it and then explained what type of clue it was (reversal, hidden, homophone etc). Then together we tackled it. More often than not I’d see the answer first and would encourage him to find it too by giving him a little help, just as my cat does for me when I’m stuck.
I have to say that he did extremely well. I’ll even confess that twice he got the answer before I did. He’s only 18 too! 🤣
It took a couple of hours to solve as we went slowly so I could teach him. It was great fun teaching him how to solve cryptic clues, how to read the clue, all the different types of clues and what to look out for.
I too did not notice the NEVER error. I think my brain just automatically sorted it out for me.
The cat trick usually does work.
When I was a programmer, and had an error I couldn’t figure out, I would sometimes ask a buddy for assistance. Often, as I was explaining how the code worked, and what was happening, the cause of the problem would become apparent before my colleague had a chance to open his mouth.
Also known as rubber ducky debugging 😀
7:15
A few to think about here – I too was slowed by the NEVER/REVER/NEREV debacle, only resolved once BARTENDER and CONNECTICUT (from all of the other checkers) were safely in. Thought twice and then again before sticking NEW AGER in. CONFRERIE was a new word for me, but juggled with the letters to find the best fit (the similarity to confraternity left just the I and E to put in the correct windows). NHO that meaning of TANK i.e. to deliberately lose.
Thanks Beck and Roly
I wasted a bit of time on the NEVER clue, but once INVERSE arrived I decided it was an error and bunged it in. ‘Twas all in ain though as I had a typo at 10a, EER. Drat! 7:43 WOE. Thanks Beck and Roly.
Well off the wavelength today resulting in a sluggish 24min solve, with loi Abasement taking ages to come to mind (amazingly via Amazement). Gave up trying to parse Never, and a bit miffed now I see it’s just an error rather than a cunning example of the setter’s art. CoD to 13ac, Trendy, just ahead of Ninth. Invariant