Sunday Times Cryptic 4807, by David McLean—Idiomatic for the People

Author   guy_du_sablePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic

Shall we count the UKisms? The idiom that answers 2 down (my FOI), as well as MCC in the clue; the two “T”s in ACTUATE (which are why this was my LOI); BISH for “mistake”; the definition for GRAFTER, which made me hesitate; HALF-CUT; in “Cold Feet,” possibly an allusion to British TV fare… Not only do we have the Queen, who is a regular here, but also her beloved CORGIs, with the British exclamation COR (next to an American term for an low-ranking soldier, GI, clued by another Americanism). There seems to be an appearance by learnèd dons (appearances are deceptive), and a nod in one clue to a former British queen and two erstwhile members of the Empire (where ER is still the queen, oddly enough), Australia and Canada. And 19d is one of the Leeward Islands, a former colony.

The idiom at 27 is often heard over here, but Jonathan Swift used it in 1738 and there are earlier references to variants from almost a hundred years before. For the derivation of the phrase, all we have are interesting theories.

(amarangs)* like this, definitions underlined…

ACROSS

 1 Flight whose path circles before a landing (6,9)
SPIRAL STAIRCASE—Cryptic definition.
 9 Start off champion about gold upset in race (7)
ACTUATE—“Champion” = ACE, insert “gold upset” = AU<— in TT (Tourist Trophy, a specialty of the Isle of Man) “race.”
10 Help! rented already? Get Cold Feet? (4,3)
BACK OUT—BACK = “help” + “rented already” = OUT. I don’t know why “Cold Feet” is capped, although I did learn that it is the name of a British sitcom.
11 Those against lad reversing over European (4)
NOES—SON<—with E(urope) inserted
12 Stores wrap up gear for game types (10)
SPORTSWEAR—(stores wrap)*
13 High-flyer that’s head of satellite channels (7)
GULLIES—GULL + I.E. + S[atellite]
15 City finally to dump squad leader for northern ace (7)
ATLANTA—“finally” = “at last,” with “squad leader” S dumped for N[orthern] + A for “ace”
17 Pants chafe and slip (7)
RUBBISH—“chafe” = RUB and “slip” = BISH
19 Site of corporation sign by black-centred poster? (7)
ABDOMEN—OMEN next to “poster,” AD, with B[lack] inside it.
20 Unfinished poem client wants rewriting (10)
INCOMPLETE—(poem client)*
22 Hot and, out of head, cry “I’m in trouble!” (4)
HELP—H is for”hot, + [y]ELP
25 Free-thinker rejected quote about hospital (7)
HERETIC—CITE RE H <—
26 Hard worker good with roofing support (7)
GRAFTER—G[ood] + RAFTER. Talk about being separated by a common language! Imagine an American calling someone (suivez mon regard…) a “grafter,” meaning a con man, a cheat, and a Brit, who actually sees him the same way, demurring.
27 Come down heavily on addict new grass set off (4,4,3,4)
RAIN CATS AND DOGS—(on addict n[ew] grass)*. But we’re missing an “A”—which I didn’t see, till Jack pointed it out. It’s not a great surface, even aside from that. I may have hallucinated “a new grass,” which makes about as much sense. A grass could be a snitch. Honestly, I don’t see any connection between “addict” and “grass” in the sense of my old pal Mary Jane.

DOWN

 1 Country pest found under base of trees (5)
SPAIN—[tree]S + PAIN (“pest”)
 2 Where MCC member might be expecting a delivery? (2,3,4)
IN THE CLUB—Preggers. My best guess for MCC is “Melbourne Cricket Club” (I Googled). [EDIT: Actually, Marylebone is surely the intended reference, as our Aussie mate brnchn and Englishman Dun point out below. I was going to leave this for a while to see how many read the comments, but my perfectionism won’t let me.]
 3 A course of action on vacation (4)
AWAY—A WAY
 4 Quiet times full of pressure for climbing people (7)
SHERPAS—“Quiet” = “Sh,” “times” = “eras,” filled with P for “pressure.”
 5 Province: one close to Victoria, Australia originally (7)
ALBERTA—Prince Albert was Queen Victoria’s consort, + A[ustralia]. At first glance this looked like a clue for a (nonexistent, of course) word beginning with three A’s: “one,” [Victori]A, A[ustralia]…!
 6 Stones cover cut by Love is unlikely to fail (4,5)
ROCK SOLID—Stones = ROCKS, + “cover” = LID, “cut by Love” (deceptive capitalization) meaning interrupted by an O. I’m pretty sure Arthur Lee’s excellent West Coast US band never covered a song by your and the world’s Rolling Stones, but Lee reportedly resented Jagger/Richards’s apparent lifting of his song title “She Comes in Colors” for the first line of their “She’s Like a Rainbow.”
 7 Worship a party communist (mostly) (5)
ADORE—A + DO, “party” + RE[d]
 8 Limit for data brought in by new internet host (9)
ENTERTAIN—([dat]a + internet)*
13 One dressing as herring must get changed (9)
GARNISHER—(as herring)*
14 Stupid to take in old lady using native tongue (9)
IDIOMATIC—IDIO(MA)TIC
16 Second person supporting lead anaesthetist? (6,3)
NUMBER TWO—Cryptic definition.
18 Little drink by dock to get thus? (4-3)
HALF-CUT—“Little drink” = HALF, “dock” = CUT; the word is a UKism for “drunk.” &lit.
19 Island colonist, one with 18 guards (7)
ANTIGUA—“colonist” = ANT, “one” = I, GUA[rds] This is my COD, closely followed by the Love/Stones clue. Another to add to my “Rule Britannia” theme.
21 Grunt carrying my or the Queen’s best friend? (5)
CORGI—“Grunt” = GI, “my” = COR. Blimey!
23 Second gin brought up for constituents (5)
PARTS—“Second” = S, “gin” = TRAP  <—(“brought up”)
24 Tough slice of rump dons ate (4)
HARD—R[ump] “dons” (puts on) “ate” = HAD

28 comments on “Sunday Times Cryptic 4807, by David McLean—Idiomatic for the People”

  1. Hi Guy, nice of you to think of us but in context MCC must be Marylebone Cricket Club! ER is still Queen of Australia too – is that what you meant?

    Edited at 2018-07-21 11:39 pm (UTC)

    1. Oh, thanks. I should clarify that, about the queen. I actually wasn’t sure, forgot to check!

      Edited at 2018-07-22 02:52 am (UTC)

  2. Excellent blog Guy. Over here the MCC is the Marylebone Cricket Club, guardian of the laws of Cricket, and based at Lords Cricket Ground. The garish bacon and egg coloured tie being the emblem of membership. I liked that clue a lot once the penny dropped. I found this to be one of Harry’s trickier puzzles and 40:50 had elapsed before I was able to submit successfully. As you say, lots of UKisms. You can rely on Harry to come up with off the wall definitions! Thanks Guy and Harry.
    1. The latter was just below the former in the first Google results page. It’s all I had to go on! I should have realized, though, that a British club would be more likely than one further afield. (The initials alone, with “membership,” are enough to indicate a “club,” without need for further precision.)

      Edited at 2018-07-22 02:53 am (UTC)

  3. I forgot to type in HARD for some reason, even though I’d solved it; dumb. A couple of biffs–ROCK SOLID, ABDOMEN, ANTIGUA–parsed post hoc. RUBBISH was nice, but COD to ANTIGUA. Pity about 27ac.
  4. My perfectly logical starting point for 2d, the MCC clue, was “In the nets”. Well, it’s the logical place to find a cricket person.
    By a similar logical process I thought first of BAIL OUT for 10ac
    SPIRAL STAIRCASE was clever as was ANTIGUA but my favourite was the use of NUMBER in 16d.
    1. In the slot works even better, thinking of a ball in the hitting zone and a letter in the mail. And it avoids the faux pas of using ‘club’ to match the final C in MCC. Really hard to not see that as a superior answer!
  5. 8:03. Thanks for a great blog, and a reminder that our North American friends who solve these things do so with a quite considerable handicap. Never mind the cultural/geographical references, where on earth did you even get the idea that these puzzles were a thing? We Brits are inculcated with the idea at least from a young age. I take my hat off to you.
    And more specifically in your case, guy_du_sable, hope to see you in October.
    1. I first became acquainted with cryptics in the early 1980s through the ones in The Nation magazine, which has had a cryptic puzzle since time immemorial. The mag’s puzzles were at that time created by former OSS cryptographer Frank W. Lewis. I occasionally used to try to work them with my girlfriend in Philadelphia, but it wasn’t until a few years after I started working as typographer for The Nation in New York City that I actually forced myself to finish one, as compensation for not being able to completely solve the New York Times Saturday puzzle. That seems to have caused a permanent chemical change in my brain, and after that point I was never unable to finish a Lewis puzzle.

      The London cryptics I first came across, incongruously enough, in the pages of the New York Post (it no longer appears there). Vinyl can tell you a similar story.

      As I would never buy the rag, I resorted to looking for discarded copies on the subway or in the trash, if a colleague in the office who often bought it for the sports pages didn’t leave me his copy. It was frustrating, because I could never be sure of seeing the next day’s paper, and I knew I would go crazy if I couldn’t find the answer, at least, if not immediately the explanation. But when I found the crossword club, and especially this blog, I was a goner. Fully hooked.

      Looking forward, keriothe!

      Edited at 2018-07-22 10:50 pm (UTC)

      1. Interesting. I wonder how many of the Post’s readers actually did these things. A limited proportion, I would imagine. I’ve never read the rag so I don’t have a real view but the one thing I do know about it is that it produced possibly the best headline in newspaper history, which surely deserves some credit.
        1. The Post also has the distinction of being the only paper (I hope!) to use the word “SLAY” as a noun. The columns are often just too narrow for “MURDER” in a headline. I guess our favorite cryptic started running there when Rupert Murdoch became publisher—and stopped running there when someone realized that approximately five New Yorkers were working it (although four of them may have been buying the paper just for that). The puzzles appeared in the Post some days—about a couple weeks, if memory serves—after they were published on that side of the pond.

  6. Mostly an enjoyable offering but a shame about the faulty anagrist at 27ac and having all those UKisms in a British newspaper crossword puzzle!
    1. HA!
      You know, if we hadn’t had as one of the answers IDIOMATIC, I might have looked for another leitmotif. I do so like to have one.

      Edited at 2018-07-22 05:00 am (UTC)

  7. …MCC, OBE. A refrain from a popular radio show, ‘I’m sorry I’ll read that again’, aired in the 1960s on the BBC. I’m sure it must have been compulsive listening in the US, Guy. Anyway there was an Americanism I didn’t know, grunt for GI, but fortunately the clue was a gimme. 23 minutes on this, with joint COD for SPIRAL STAIRCASE and NUMBER TWO. Thank you Guy and David.
  8. It don’t ‘alf ‘elp!

    This was 28 mins of my life not wasted.

    27ac was technically an angram! Mr. Trump would enjoy The Times 15×15! Would he wouldn’t he?

    FOI 11ac NOES

    LOI 9ac ACTUATE from IKEA.

    COD 1ac SPIRAL STAIRCASE

    WOD MCC

    At first I thought 13dn was something to do with skiing.

    God Bless America!

  9. 31 minutes here, all good fun, enjoyed 19d ANTIGUA. FOI 1a was a good start, LOI 27a, not because of the missing letter but just because I was being a bit thick.
  10. I remember finding this difficult but enjoyable. FOI was 1d and 1a followed shortly afterwards, so I made a good start. I did then get a bit stuck.
    In the end it came down to 5d and 10a. For 5d I had either Austria or Andorra. The latter seemed better and almost plausible. So 10a had to be Duck Out-a link to the MCC perhaps? I was at Lord’s on Thursday for a very enjoyable T20 (for our overseas friends, a short match in which each side has 20 overs and it takes three hours-and there is a result).
    Could not parse Atlanta or Hard so thanks for the blog and to DM for the puzzle. David
  11. 28:57. A bottom up solve taking a while to find the wavelength. I solved this on paper and the newspaper version of 27ac was: “Come down heavily on an addict grass sent doolally”. Which, when I worked it out, seemed to have enough As and everything else: anagram of (on an addict grass) indicated by (sent doolally). I take it everyone else saw something different in a slightly changed online rendering of the clue? Grafter I obviously knew as a hard worker. Graft I also know as corruption, particularly in politics. But it is a third (possibly related) word, grifter, which I would use to mean a con man and a cheat not grafter. There is a film with John Cusack, Annette Bening and Anjelica Huston called Grifters.
    1. That’s a new one on me. So the version of the anagrist in the paper has all the letters, and nothing but the right letters (dropping “new”). Much better. (The Crossword Club version of the clue is as I rendered it above.)

      Merriam-Webster says, “‘Grift”’ may have evolved from ‘graft,’ a slightly older word meaning ‘to acquire dishonestly,’ but its exact origins are uncertain.”

      Edited at 2018-07-22 03:22 pm (UTC)

  12. 16:53.I thought this was a lot of fun. I liked NUMBER TWO and ANTIGUA. I never spotted the imperfect anagrist for 27a. HARD my LOI as I struggled to parse it at first. Thanks David and Guy.
  13. Not too difficult but good fun, unlike today’s which is easy but desperately dull.
  14. 17A (rubbish) was clued differently in the app and on the website. The app says “Trash talk full of worthless ideas”. I can’t imagine it being intentional.
  15. 19 minutes, no problems, as rineff says, more fun than today’s. Thanks guy du sable for the story of your puzzle and tftt interest.
    I tried to explain RAIN CATS AND DOGS to a French friend recently, where the equivalent idiom is “pleut comme vache qui pisse” which is easier to visualise!
  16. Apologies for the slight differences between print and online versions. Somehow the file used for the online puzzle content was not the final version. Step added to my final checks to avoid this problem in future.
  17. My printed version in The Australian reads: 27 Come down heavily on an addict grass sent doolally (4,4,3,4)
    The anagram “on an addict grass” is fine.
    Nunk
  18. As a kid living near Dublin we got excellent BBC Radio signals (I also read Billy Bunter) so cor blimey became a fixture in my vocabulary UNTIL an English neighbour pointed out that it meant Christ (or maybe God) blind me. Imagine how the Catholic guilt kicked in at that stage.

    A neighbour who had emigrated to Somerset used to come back for a visit every summer. His repeated phrase of surprise was Cor Bugger I, said as all one word corbuggeraye. All the locals were highly amused by this (it’d be a catch phrase in the area for a while after he left) including my very prudish and fanatically religious father. I can’t imagine his reaction if he’d known that his old neighbour was saying Christ Bugger Me. The Christ would have been enough to cause apoplexy, he probably wouldn’t have known what bugger meant.

    Tom (of Jan and Tom) Toronto

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