Times 27472 – selling sea shells by the seashore

Author   glheardPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 10:50, with a fair chunk of that on my last two. Although this is a little faster than my average time, the usual early quick solvers have taken a bit longer than usual. There’s some nice wordplay here, and a few tricky definitions, so overall a fine puzzle.

I think I have everything sorted out, but if you find a mistake or have a question, check the comments, since I will not be able to modify this until the early afternoon UK time.

Away we go…

Across
1 Unrested, somehow, set to come out at night (8)
DENTURES – anagram of UNRESTED, set of teeth you might take out at night
6 One managing to contain phosphorus in large vessel (6)
COPPER – COPER(one managing) containing P(phosphorus)
9 Search on northern river keeps one in form (13)
QUESTIONNAIRE – QUEST(search) ON, N(northern), AIRE(river) containing I(one)
10 Fish food with crust son Charlie tucks into (6)
PISCES – PIES(food with crust) containing S(son), C(Charlie, NATO alpahabet)
11 Traveller cutting steak produces an instrument (8)
TROMBONE – ROM(gypsy, traveller) inside a T-BONE steak
13 African seen buffeted by winds close to village (10)
SENEGALESE – anagram of SEEN then GALES(winds) and the last letter of villagE
15 Smaller runner runs poorly (4)
RILL – R(runs), ILL(poorly)
16 Grain used in pudding: try it first (4)
SAGO – GO(try) with SA(it) first
18 Dictatorial nurses see proof (10)
IMPERVIOUS – IMPERIOUS(dictatorial) containing V(see)
21 Remains here when rogue returns, having caught on (4,4)
GODS ACRE – AS DOG(rogue) reversed, then C(caught), RE(on)
22 Sandy, also going to hold back in quarrel (6)
SHINDY – remove AND(also) fron SANDY, then insert HIND(back)
23 Stuttering woe corrected in diction exercise (6-7)
TONGUE-TWISTER – anagram of STUTTERING,WOE
25 Get morsel to chew as filling (4,2)
BEAT IT – BIT(morsel) containing EAT(to chew)
26 Night fell over development area (8)
DARKROOM – DARK(night) then MOOR(fell) reversed. An area for developing photographs

Down
2 Title state expunged from essay and paper (7)
ESQUIRE – remove SAY(state) from ESSAY, then QUIRE(paper)
3 Dangerous influence monarch introduced to all French (11)
TREACHEROUS – REACH(influence), ER(monarch) inside TOUS(all, in French)
4 Considers vermin circling base of tree (5)
RATES – RATS(vermin) containing the last letter of treE
5 Small bed and leash for dog (7)
SCOTTIE – S(small), COT(bed) and TIE(leash)
6 Old soldier, one with punishing schedule, maybe, nobody welcomed (9)
CANNONEER – CANER(one whose schedule involves giving out punishment), containing NONE(nobody)
7 Postie occasionally delivers foreign letter (3)
PSI – alternating letters in PoStIe
8 Endless ale drunk before and after reported act (7)
ETERNAL – anagram of ALE containing what sounds like TURN(act)
12 Sign of illegitimacy as wickedness is evident in deal (3,8)
BAR SINISTER – SIN(wickedness), IS inside BARTER(deal)
14 Anti-Royalist battle? (9)
AGINCOURT – if you are anti-Royalist then you are AGIN COURT
17 Christian missionary throwing stone into a bar (7)
APOSTLE – ST(stone) inside A, POLE(bar)
19 Organic fuel around lake man gathered (7)
PLEATED – PEAT(organic fuel) containing L(ake) all reversed then ED(man)
20 Open about amount of work experience (7)
UNDERGO – UNDO(open) surrounding ERG(amount of work)
22 Sporty sort to steal tuppence from captain? (5)
SKIER – remove P,P(tuppence) from SKIPPER(captain)
24 Fortune trader keeps after taxes (3)
NET – hidden inside fortuNE Trader

55 comments on “Times 27472 – selling sea shells by the seashore”

  1. I biffed 9ac (after finally giving up on ‘form’ as a school thing), 23ac, and 12d (without bothering to read the whole clue), but this still was slow going. DNK GOD’S ACRE. I never worked out SHINDY, and wasn’t that sure it meant ‘quarrel’. LOI BEAT IT, which I thought of early on but couldn’t make sense of; it took me until the end to see that ‘get!’.
  2. I completely missed that TONGUE TWISTER was an anagram. I assumed “stuttering woe” was the definition and biffed it from the checkers without thinking too much. My LOI was SHINDY, a word I don’t remember coming across, which took some time to get since the SY thing took ages for the penny to drop.
  3. My last five in were SAGO, GOD’S ACRE, BEAT IT, SKIER and SHINDY, all of which I feel were worthy opponents.
  4. Gave up on this overnight and after another 30 minutes this morning I gave up on it again and reached for aids.

    It had all started well enough with most of the top half in place and a smattering of answers lower down, but the middle of the grid was nearly empty and I began to realise that I had gone off the setter’s wavelength.

    CANNONEER, SENEGALESE (with all vowel checkers) SHINDY and GOD’S ACRE were my downfall. I got BEAT IT without understanding it and I can’t say that I’m familiar with the meaning required for the definition to work. It sounds rather rude, and if I felt that strongly about telling someone to go away I’d probably revert to Anglo-Saxon.

    Edited at 2019-10-03 05:57 am (UTC)

    1. You had me wondering if this was another Americanism I’d assumed was universal, but ODE sv ‘beat’ Verb 7 doesn’t specify dialect. And there was Michael Jackson’s song, although perhaps that wouldn’t leap to mind.
      1. Sorry my comment was misleading, Kevin. I’m fully aware of BEAT IT meaning ‘go way’, it’s ‘get’ that I was querying. On its own, that is.
        1. That’s in fact what I thought you meant at first. And that’s why I was slow in, ah, getting BEAT IT. But I finally thought of westerns were someone like Gabby Hayes would tell someone to git, and thought that would have to do faute de mieux.
      2. I took it to be the English way of saying “git” as in git lost – but of course git means something else entirely in the UK.
          1. it’s a handy word, get. It means so many things; children for example, particularly unexpected ones.. One of my infant teachers banned the use of got, get or lot because she said there was always a better alternative available. Not quarrelling with that..
  5. I found this fairly tough though I never felt like I wasn’t going to finish – it was just slow going. I think that reflects on the quality of the clueing today with several answers having to be teased out from the cryptic and resisting biffing – CANNONEER, SKIER and SHINDY in particular.

    With BEAT IT being clued using ‘eat’ I was put in mind of Weird Al Jankovic and his parody of Michael Jackson’s song, EAT IT. Do artists still write comic songs? I’ve not been aware of any for a while but I might be listening in the wrong (or right) places.

    1. If you haven’t seen Weird Al’s version of ‘Smells like Nirvana’, have a look! It’s hilarious 😊
  6. 25:36. I spent ages over my last 2 – GODS ACRE (an unknown to me) and SHINDY. Like Jackkt I also thought “Get” as the definition at 25A a bit odd – I don’t remember coming across it it in that meaning without “lost” after it. PLEATED was needed to get IMPERVIOUS which gets my COD for clever deviousness.

    Edited at 2019-10-03 07:09 am (UTC)

  7. 40 mins.
    No dramas, but God’s Acre and Shindy upped the chewiness rating.
    Thanks setter and G.
    1. .. we should start a Pam Ayres for Laureate campaign. I think she’d go down very well
  8. 19:51 … a very slow start, but the puzzle turned out to be not quite the beast I first suspected.

    COD to DENTURES, which successfully got me barking up the wrong tree, trying to find an adjective along the lines of nocturnal or sidereal.

    1. I was close to guessing that DENTERUS somehow meant nocturnal but managed to pull back from that potential embarrassment just in time!
  9. That looks like a stellar time, George: mine stretched to 24 minutes, not helped by assuming “man gathered” in 19 was an awkward agent noun, PLEATER. There was (is?) a memorable Peter the Pleater in Shoreditch: if you drove into his tiny adjacent cul-de-sac you entered the congestion zone and had your picture taken.
    DENTURES eluded me for a while, wondering what an UNDERSET was.
    When you get back, the organic “food” in 19 should be “fuel”, which in another context might be a proposition worth following
  10. …your eyes are like pools etc. Over 50 minutes on this tricky puzzle, with LOI the unparsed CANNONEER. IMPERVIOUS for ‘proof’ wouldn’t come to me either. ‘Get’ to mean BEAT IT was less than obvious, although I have heard it. I liked AGINCOURT, DENTURES and DARK ROOM, but COD to GOD’S ACRE. I ‘ve booked a plot in the village cemetery where my parents and grandparents are buried. Standing on it gives the same feeling of terror as I would no doubt feel before the Championships, which is why I never enter! Abandon hope all ye who have entered there. Thank you George and setter.
    1. The writer Jan Morris famously has her gravestone already carved and ‘ready to go’. It’s sitting under the stairs in her living room. It’s a nice idea — saves others the grim task of doing it, plus you get to decide what’s on it!
      1. Great idea. If I leave if up to Mrs BW and the kids, I’ll no doubt get, “Under this sod lies another.”
        1. heh, love it. I think hers reads “At the end of one life …” or something like that. I seem to recall Spike Milligan saying he wanted his to read “I told you I was ill”
          1. …and gloriously, it does, in Irish, of course: Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite.
      2. Oh that is SUCH a good idea. I will get started on that. I will want a whole section devoted to vilifying the idiots in my village, probably
  11. Jack, I think Kevin’s onto it; it’s a bit like when you’re shooing a cat and say, ‘Go on! Get!’ That said, not a perfect clue, really.
  14. 57 minutes for me, but at least I finished it, and it seemed a fairly consistent grade throughout, unlike yesterday’s. Not much to add—I too was held up by GOD’S ACRE and SHINDY, wasn’t too sure about my BEAT IT, etc…
  15. 18:15. I really enjoyed this: just the right level of chewy. You can tell you’ve been doing these things for too long when things like ROM, GOD’S ACRE and BAR SINISTER seem perfectly reasonable and familiar answers. It’s worth keeping in mind that this is not normal.
    1. Heavens, who wants to be normal? Embrace your eccentricity K, it is what keeps England the way it is
      1. In the current political environment that is not necessarily an endorsement.

        Edited at 2019-10-03 02:29 pm (UTC)

  16. This started off innocuously enough with RATES, PSI, COPPER, ETERNAL and TROMBONE flowing in, although it took a while to see the steak and the A-less ROMA. Things went downhill after that, although SAGO, SKIER and UNDERGO arrived without too much neuron bashing. Like Johninterred I’m more used to seeing Get as an accompaniment to Lost, so a MER to 25a. The teeth pulling really started then. I spent ages trying to make something nocturnal out of DENTURES. ESQUIRE eventually opened things up by pointing to QUESTIONNAIRE, which gave me CANNONEER and IMPERVIOUS. I was finally left with SHINDY and LOI GODS ACRE which occupied an inordinate amount of time. Liked BAR SINISTER and TONGUE TWISTER. Tough stuff! 50:12. Thanks setter and George.
  17. Keriothe has a point – when you assume, as I did briefly, that the form in 9a has something to do with hares this is not normal. Luckily lagomorphs and leporidae didn’t fit so I didn’t need to try to remember how to spell them. SHINDY took a while but otherwise no big hold-ups. 19.21
  18. ….how 25A worked, and eventually assumed that “get” would be a curt instruction to leave or desist, probably accompanied by a coarse gesture. That clue accounted for almost a quarter of my total solving time.

    Like Olivia, I considered something to do with hares at 9A, and it took a bit of head scratching to squeeze out SHINDY and DARKROOM.

    An enjoyable puzzle – thanks setter, and George.

    FOI COPPER
    LOI BEAT IT
    COD GOD’S ACRE
    TIME 14:42

  19. Rather than trying to find some way of making ‘get!’ equal the common use of ‘beat it’, I had a different approach: trying to make ‘beat it’ equal to ‘get’, which it did to my half-satisfaction in the sense of cracking a problem. Possibly no good, though.
  20. 14m 25s, with the last few minutes spent on SHINDY and COPPER, where I was shamefacedly held up by thinking that phosphorous was Ph. Otherwise a couple of moans – my pet hate of partial homophones in 8d, and I’m not entirely convinced 22d works. Maybe the question mark does the job there.

    ‘Stuttering woe’ was lovely anagram fodder for TONGUE-TWISTER, I’ve not seen that before.

    1. Don’t work harder, work smarter! (sorry, been reading too much Dilbert)
  22. A snooze and a few breaks along the way, so an approximate time of a bit over an hour. I didn’t know ‘proof’ as an adjective and was delayed in the SE corner, with DARKROOM my last in. ‘Get’ in the sense of ‘scram!’ was fine by me.

    I liked the ‘set to come out at night’ and ‘development area’ defs, but anything reminding me of a SCOTTIE has to get my pick as COD.

    Thanks to setter and blogger

  23. I’d agree that this was pleasantly chewy. NHO the word which isn’t SHINDIG, but the wordplay was clear, and finished on a nice penny-drop moment with the DENTURES.
  24. Strangely, I didn’t have many problems with this one, until my LOI Shindy. I worked through quite steadily to a comfortable time of about 45 minutes, a good result for me, only to fall at the last post. I couldn’t make Skiddy fit so resorted to aids. Even then, Shindy didn’t appear to work as it seemed to be short for shindig and I didn’t see a reference to quarrels – perhaps I didn’t look far enough. So a DNF by one again. Hey ho …

    Had the same views on Beat it as others. Couldn’t parse God’s Acre, although I got the definition easily enough; liked Trombone.

    FOI Scottie – just spotted it straightaway
    LOI Shindy – see above
    COD Dentures – initially I was trying to find some star like Arcturus!
    Daily score 27/28

    On edit: today’s earworm – Smells like teen spirit!

    Edited at 2019-10-03 12:27 pm (UTC)

  25. After a few months off I’ve decided to return to the fray in order to get a few under my belt in prep for the Championships. This was all pretty straightforward apart from 25ac. I must have spent at least 5 mins trying to think of a justification or an alternative to BEAT IT, but with the clock ticking I just bunged it in and hoped for the best!
  26. Similar experience to others above. After 34 minutes had all done except 21a and 22a and a MER at BEAT IT, didn’t get the get meaning at all. Never heard of God’s Acre (which apparently derives from German Gottesacker) or the odd spelling of Shindig. Not a good day at the coal face.
  27. why? It is quite standard English, in some quarters. Though perhaps not those we inhabit, I concede 🙂
  28. Enjoyed this, although having finished the Pennine Way only days ago I can authoritively state (re 26ac) that “fell” and “moor” are not in any way synonymic. Ask any Northumbrian
  30. Didn’t get SHINDY – never heard of the word. IMPERVIOUS, GODS ACRE, PLEATED (made mistake of thinking TED rather than ED) and UNDERGO (not sure of ERG) all took plenty too long.

    No probs with GET – my Mum said this often….

  31. This took a while for me. I was totally held up halfway through, due in large part to my brain thickening up, and finally seeing TREACHEROUS and IMPERVIOUS opened up the rest. LOI was SHINDY, from wordplay only after another while. Didn’t know of it. Regards.
  32. I was a bit pushed for time at lunch and had to put this down three quarters done after 30 mins. I came back to it after work and finished at my leisure in front of the tv taking my time to get dentures, pisces, god’s acre, shindy, beat it and treacherous. Clever stuff.
  33. Having to do late solves at the moment and didn’t fare much better with this one. Gave up in the end and use checkers for BAR SINISTER and SHINDY. unfortunately my checker didn’t even know GODS ACRE, and nor did I, so came here since it’s past my bedtime.
    COD TONGUE TWISTER
  34. It took me fifty minutes to get one wrong, alas. I had “discus” for 10ac (aquarists will understand).

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