Times Quick Cryptic No 2664 by Izetti

The build instructions are pretty clear for this word which comes from Old French “par auenture” meaning “by chance”.

Earworm alert!!

PER can substitute for A when it is a preposition. F’rinstance, in the song “I’ve Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts”, the fairground showman calls “Roll or bowl a ball, a penny a pitch”, only the final ‘a’ is a preposition and could be substituted by PER.

1 SEN = 1/100th of a Japanese yen or a Brunei dollar/ringgit

Typically caused by fungi such as mildews, rusts and smuts.

The OED cites the term ‘HOT SEAT’ as a 1920s colloquialism for the electric chair.

Wikipedia suggests that the term was coined by Harpo Marx who was frequently invited to parties thrown by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, remarking that when Hearst disliked a guest, the guest would be seated at the far end of the long table nearest to the fireplace and never invited back.

However, there are much earlier examples of “hot seat” as a difficult or uncomfortable position, including a newspaper article from 1857 regarding U.S. President, James Buchanan, escaping the “hot seat of government” while on vacation at Niagara Falls.

In Italy, a PADRONE is a hotel owner or manager.

In the United States, PADRONEs were labour brokers, often Italian immigrants or first-generation Americans, acting as middlemen to find work for immigrants. The term was also used to described a Mafia boss.

In the sense of the definition, there are two OCTAVEs still observed in the Christian calendar – Easter (Easter Sunday through to the following Sunday) and Christmas (Christmas Day through to New Years Day). In the case of the latter, there are several feast days observed.

As with cheese in a Swiss fondue, the French word FONDU in ballet means ‘melting’. It describes a controlled and gradual movement of a dancer bending their supporting leg. Where a plié is done on two legs, a fondu is done on a single leg.

You may need to be of a certain age (pre-decimalisation) to remember when a shilling was almost always referred to colloquially as a bob. The most popular theory as to why this was, suggests a link to Sir Robert Walpole (‘Bob’ being a diminutive of ‘Robert’), Prime Minister from 1721-1742 and Chancellor of the Exchequer before that. Walpole reduced the Land tax from four shillings to three, then two and finally one shilling, which would have been quite popular at the time.

The ‘briny’ is the sea, brine being very salty water.

THORN (Þ) was a letter in Old English, which sounded like the th sound (as in thick) in Modern English. With the arrival of movable type printing, which used the Latin alphabet, the substitution of y for Þ became ubiquitous, leading to the common “ye“, as in ‘Ye Olde Booke Shoppe’.