Times Quick Cryptic No 2784 by Trelawney

PRESS-UP or PUSH-UP? – place your bets now on which term came first…

PRESS-UP is the British term, PUSH-UP the American term for the same movement. PUSH-UP was first used between 1905 and 1910 whilst PRESS-UP was first used much later, between 1945 and 1950…

One of the four official languages of Spain, (the others being Spanish, Euskara and Galician) CATALAN is spoken by four million people in Spain, and by more than ten million worldwide.

Surprisingly, aural wordplay fans, I needed all of the checkers to see this chestnut second time through the clues.

Mildly surprised by the definition as I understood a HYDROPLANE to be a motorboat designed to skim over the surface of the water.

But I see that it is also a US English term for a seaplane.

PANTS here has the UK meaning of underwear

An ESCAPE ROOM is a game in which a team of players discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms in order to accomplish a specific goal in a limited amount of time. The goal is often to escape from the site of the game.

Needed some checkers to see this as the first half of the surface does not easily point to the answer…

From Old English twiccian “to pluck” (and perhaps related to twitch), TWEAK originally meant a “pinch, pluck, twist,” applied usually to the nose. The meaning “to make fine adjustments” is much more recent, attested from 1966.

That’s two uses of ‘badly’ to signify an anagram in the same puzzle – see also 14a

I don’t expect too many will fall for the Bundesliga misdirection – The Bundesliga is the top division in Germany’s football league system, whereas ARSENAL play in the English Premier League.

QUIP is from the 1530s, meaning “smart, sarcastic remark”

EQUIP is from around the same time, from French équiper “to fit out,” from 12th century Old French esquiper “fit out a ship, load on board”, which itself is probably from Old Norse skipa “arrange, place in order”.

‘to produce’ is merely to improve the surface.

From early 14th century, panterie, pantre, “a storeroom or closet, especially for bread,” from Old French paneterie “bread room” and directly from Medieval Latin panataria “office or room of a servant who has charge of food”.

The sense in English soon evolved so that the word’s roots in “bread” (from the Latin panis) were no longer felt. It came to be used for any closet for provisions generally, or where plates and knives are cleaned.

PER and A are interchangeable prepositions as follows:

She goes to the forest three times PER week.

She goes to the forest three times A week.

In the 1610s, PANTOMIME referred to a “mime actor, one who expresses meaning by action, not words,” from Greek pantomimos “actor,” literally “imitator of all,” from panto- (genitive of pan) “all” + mimos “imitator”.

The meaning of “drama or play without words,” in which the plot was expressed by mute gestures, had become archaic by the mid-18th century. Christmas PANTOMIMEs with words and songs and stock characters, are said to have originated around 1717.

Rotten beans anyone? TOFU is the Japanese word for soy bean curd, from Chinese doufu, from dou “beans” + fu “rotten.”