Times 27,851: The Hills Are Alive With The Sound Of Clue-sic

Author   verlainePosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Straightforward by Friday standards, with a lot of clues that I think of as Cryptic Jumbo-type constructions, nothing too fancy or frivolous. FOI 4ac, LOI 23ac. I mostly liked the “always ignores over” device in 17dn. Not much more to say on this last blog before Christmas except thanks to the setter, and what are the rest of you all hoping to find in your stockings next week?

ACROSS
1 Franc note in money box (6)
COFFIN – F F in COIN

4 Low life, right one, very loud air force female (4-4)
RIFF-RAFF – R I FF RAF F

10 State without change, silver, say, and gold (7)
PLATEAU – PLATE + AU

11 What holds oil left in glacial formation (7)
DRUMLIN – DRUM L IN

12 Painful phase of tachycardia (4)
ACHY – {t}ACHY{cardia}

13 Bold player playing disgracefully (10)
DEPLORABLY – (BOLD PLAYER*)

15 Spot sort to use a keyboard (5-4)
TOUCH-TYPE – TOUCH [spot, as in a spot of milk in one’s tea] + TYPE [sort]

16 In Scotland, hit old wild dog (5)
DINGO – DING + O. Didn’t have much sense of DING as being a Scottish word, but apparently so…

18 Billions invested in English medical implant (5)
EMBED – B “invested” in E MED

19 Amazed a bridge player in front of a packed crowd (9)
AWESTRUCK – A WEST in front of RUCK

21 I count on us flying non-stop (10)
CONTINUOUS – (I COUNT ON US*)

23 Not quite all slip home (4)
GAFF – GAFF{e}

26 Is filling a requirement for strong flavouring? (7)
ANISEED – IS “filling” A NEED

27 Sweet bunch, for example with no opportunity to speak outside (7)
NOSEGAY – E.G., with NO SAY outside

28 Prize article mostly secure in box, perhaps (8)
TREASURE – A SUR{e} in TREE

29 Regularly turn nasty and difficult (6)
TRICKY – T{u}R{n} + ICKY

DOWN
1 Company prospector’s casing a source of oil (5)
COPRA – CO + P{rospecto}R + A

2 Fancy garlic, perhaps? This may have gone off with exposure (9)
FLASHBULB – FLASH [fancy] + GARLIC [bulb], plus cryptic definition

3 One reportedly burns tough goat (4)
IBEX – I + homophone of BECKS [(watery) burns]

5 Humour’s eluding oddball (7)
INDULGE – (ELUDING*)

6 Chemically treat disease I found in yellow fruit (10)
FLUORIDATE – FLU + I “found in” OR DATE

7 Freely commercial library (2-3)
AD-LIB – AD [commercial] + LIB(rary)

8 Like to succeed in ornamental knitting (9)
FANCYWORK – FANCY [like] + WORK [to succeed]

9 Carve cathedral charmingly (6)
CUTELY – CUT ELY

14 Lack of quality in footwear messes with soles finally (10)
SHODDINESS – SHOD [in footwear] + DINES [messes] + {sole}S

15 Biting fish swallowing angler’s last insect (9)
TRENCHANT – TENCH “swallowing” {angle}R + ANT

17 Like a pain, one our logic always ignores over admitting answer (9)
NEURALGIC – {o}NE {o}UR L{o}GIC, “admitting” A

19 In pieces and sure to be put together somehow (7)
ASUNDER – (AND SURE*)

20 Horse — one Queen ordered (6)
EQUINE – (I QUEEN*)

22 Local resident having no time to be green (5)
NAIVE – NA{t}IVE

24 What fighter may carry out through following cunning (5)
FLYBY – BY [through] following FLY [cunning]

25 Title — Serbia’s and Russia’s leaders carry it (4)
TSAR – T{itle} S{erbia} A{nd} R{ussia}, semi-&lit

48 comments on “Times 27,851: The Hills Are Alive With The Sound Of Clue-sic”

  1. I believe I made harder work of this than necessary, but hey, at least I finished. Misparsed clues all over the place, but fortunately I was suspicious of myself so that very often I would try something different and that would unlock it. Spent a good five minutes at least on DRUMLIN, assuming I needed to put L inside a glacial formation to get some sort of seed. Finally I realized that ‘left in’ might be LIN, and that thankfully helped me to get over the line.
    1. Hi plusjeremy, I have received your message and tried to reply and also to accept your friend request. But I’m not very good with this LJ stuff and I think I am being prompted to sign up for a professional package if I want to have you as a friend and reply to you. I think this happened with louisajaney as well and also a long time ago with verlaine but I never heard from them in reply either so I think I am not ‘privileged’ enough. I tried to send you the message and then it disappeared and said that it had been sent successfully but then I can’t see it anywhere so I just wonder if you got it.

      If you didn’t get it (and why not do it anyway as it might be simpler) could you please write to me at dcl ‘at’ lyons-lines dot co dot uk.

      Kind regards

      Don

      1. No, I got your message loud and clear! You can always feel free to email me too. I’m this at Gmail but if you ever forget, get in touch with Vinyl probably.
  2. Like Jeremy, I thought L inside glacial formation until finally enlightenment came. Like Verlaine, my FOI was 4ac and LOI 23ac. I have CALF, HALF, NAFF, WAIF written down in my attempt to solve that one, and at the last minute I thought of GAFFE, and very very vaguely remembered the house meaning, which I could only have learned here. My COD to NEURALGIC, which I only parsed post-submission.
  3. If ever a member of the QC Squad wants to try the Friday 15×15 – today’s the day – as Lord V says it has that Jumbo cryptic style with easier anagrams.

    I knew DRUMLIN of old, at 11ac, so no bother there – (moraine is transported)

    FOI & WOD 4ac RIFF-RAFF also liked SHODDINESS

    LOI 3dn IBEX as I originally had 1ac as COFFER as opposed to COFFIN

    COD 29ac TRICKY-Poo or TRICKY-Woo (All Creatures Great and Small!)

    Edited at 2020-12-18 03:15 am (UTC)

  4. I found this not much harder than yesterday’s, so got through it pretty quickly.

    I was happy to know GAFF from watching British crime dramas. DNK DRUMLIN but it was reasonably clued. My LOI was IBEX, when the penny dropped on beck = burn.

  5. My LOI was GAFF too, and my COD definitely 17 down.
    I’m looking forward to having more time for crosswords (just got to yesterday’s) and non-work reading.

    Edited at 2020-12-18 05:57 am (UTC)

  6. I finished in 45 minutes with one cheat. At 35 minutes I had 23 and 24 outstanding but could only think of ‘slyly’ for 24dn based on ‘following cunning’ in the clue although I had serious doubts about it. Eventually I decided to give up and check other possibilities by other means and found FLYBY which I’d always thought was hyphenated, as do Oxford dictionaries and Chambers, although Collins sanctions it. Having got the F-checker from that, I then immediately saw GAFF at 23ac.

    Elsewhere I was distracted by the ‘tough’ in ‘tough goat’ and the Scottish reference re DINGO, both designed to make life unnecessarily complicated in my view.

    Wasn’t sure of ‘messes’ = DINES.

    Failed to parse TREASURE, but then I think of ‘box’ as a hedge rather than a tree – rather odd as not far from my childhood family home was a Boxtree Lane with its pub called The Boxtree.

    Mis-parsed FLUOR in FLUORIDATE after the event having found a reference to a mineral which can on occasion be yellow although usually isn’t. Should have been looking for the more obvious.

    Can we have a ban on AD LIB please?

    Edited at 2020-12-18 05:48 am (UTC)

  7. I had a similar experience to yesterday, getting through most of this quickly then spending as long again my final four answers – FLUORIDATE, FANCYWORK, DRUMLIN and AWESTRUCK. Like Kevin and Jeremy I was looking for some sort of oil container to be the definition at 11A, and eventually seeing the light on this one enabled me to knock off the remainder. I was also delayed for a short while at 24D, thinking that cunning was going to be sly and wondering what a SLYBY was.
  8. Friday fare not so meaty today.

    GAFF, FLUORIDATE, FLYBY were the memorable clues, with NAIVE taking a while (nimby being my first idea).

    MERs at MED for medical and LIB for library.

    Thanks verlaine and setter.

  9. Some clues were TRICKY, some seemed NAIVE
    NEURALGIC DEPLORABLY hard to achieve
    To EMBED ACHY was easy
    And AD LIB was cheesy
    There’s an “effing” top row, I believe
  10. 15:15 managing to navigate the trickiness better than yesterday, with CUTELY and PLATEAU my last two in. Failed to get BEX = burns in 3D and TOUCH = “spot” 15A, so thanks for explaining those, V. I remembered GAFF from a previous crossword. COD to NEURALGIC. Nice stuff. Thanks setter too.
  11. I found this tricky. With SLYLY and COFFER at 1ac I was never going to get the two short ones. Seems like the setter had an excess of Fs and Us to USE UP! NHO DRUMLIN. Thank you V for the explanations and setter for the challenge.
  12. …Bring out the Coffin, let the mourners come.
    After 25 mins with yoghurt, granola, etc. I still had three I couldn’t get: Drumlin, Gaff, Flyby.
    But had to stop as a wardrobe is being delivered.
    Thanks setter and V.
  13. 15:32. Some tricky stuff in here, I thought, but it was an interesting one.
    DK DRUMLIN, or that DING is Scottish. It isn’t necessarily, but in English it’s a small dent in your car. Like others I was held up at the end by thinking 24dn was going to involve SLY somehow.
    1. In Doctor Who the Weeping Angels were first encountered at Wester Drumlins. Why does my brain retain all this information and so little of practical use…
  14. …but we had to. 21 minutes, only a little bit tougher than yesterday’s. LOI FLY-BY. COD to NEURALGIC. DNK DRUMLIN but cryptic was clear. A pleasant enough crossword, but let’s hope the Killer Deadly is a stinker. Thank you V and setter.
  15. Ironically for a crossword which had TOUCH-TYPE as a feature, I had more than my usual share of keyboard-watch-typing mis-entries, losing quite a bit of time working with misplaced letters, taking me to 23 minutes, all but. I struggled with COFFIN and IBEX in the top left and FLYBY and TRICKY (which it wasn’t really) in the opposite corner.

    I’m sure it’s perfectly OK, but I was trying to work with Fr for franc as the usual abbreviation, suggesting COFRET, which needs another F but I thought might not.

    At the last, went back to sort out SHODDINESS because SHOES was in there for footwear but didn’t work. Got it.

    Incidentally, my phone often goes DING, but it’s Chinese, not Scottish.

  16. 24.36 but messed up on gaff annoyingly. As recorded bit of a relief to find the Friday puzzle amongst the more straightforward of this week’s offerings. FOI riff raff, LOI drumlin.

    No standout clue for me but obviously gaff was a pet hate. I’ll just have to become better acquainted with slang, innit.

  17. I had the glidepath for this until I got to the SE corner where I met the same problems as others with FLYBY and GAFF. I knew “flyboy” – probably from that Tom Cruise movie – but I was another looking for a hyphen there and I DNK gaff=home. I’m about to make a polar expedition to take the garbage down to where the bins are (not looking forward to it). 18.29
  18. As an annual Lake District visitor, I was very slow to see IBEX. Finished up with 3 holes that wouldn’t go, and my main problem was that all I could see was SLYLY which obviously wasn’t right. LOI TREASURE just because I couldn’t work out what was going on.
  19. and children watch them
    awestruck in August.

    A bit tricky, this. I was never going to parse neuralgic yet was caught somehow by its surface. Last in as with others gaff and flyby. A relieved 37 minutes.

  20. Yesterday I had the second highest WITCH of the day. As things stand today I’ve got one of the 10 lowest. Go figure, or whatever it is one says on such occasions.

    My only real pause was over FANCYWORK, which isn’t familiar and work/succeed isn’t an obvious match.

  21. Think there should be a rule that if you type “XXX Meaning” into Google and the meaning being used in a crossword doesn’t appear in the list, then that sense of the word shouldn’t be used. Call it the Sheapey Test? Anyway, GAFF would have failed it. I thought FLUOR would too, but I know realise that was just me being stupid. Did like the “messes” though.
    1. I thought gaff was fairly common usage particularly in TV series such as Minder, and I did find this definition online:

      noun British slang, archaic
      a person’s home, esp a flat
      Also called: penny-gaff a cheap or low-class place of entertainment, esp a cheap theatre or music hall in Victorian England

      That brings it within normal 15×15 acceptability doesn’t it?

      I suppose Minder was 80s TV and maybe that qualifies now as archaic.

      Don

        1. I’m sorry. If I had seen that vinyl1had already posted about this I would not have said anything. But for some reason his post (and your reply) did not show up when I posted my reply despite its apparently having been posted about 2 hours ago!

          Don

  22. As I read the first few clues with bafflement, I thought we were in for a stinker, but switching to the downs, I spotted COPRA and was off at a gallop. Wending my way in an anticlockwise direction, I made CONTINUOUS progress, even with the TRICKY FLYBY. Like Z, I saw shoes and dines=messes, so didn’t fully parse SHODDINESS. With only the NE left I AD-LIBbed again, and mixed with the RIFF RAFF after dosing the reservoir, then DEPLORABLY INDULGEd in a bit of FANCYWORK, before skidding to a halt on the DRUMLIN, which took a bit of thought. Certainly easier than the usual Friday offerings! 18:53. Thanks setter and V.
  23. Slyby? Probably not. Very straightforward for a Friday though gaff took a while.
  24. 30 mins or so, while occasionally interrupted by emails. LOI CUTELY, I could not think of a 3 letter synonym for carve for a long time.
  25. For the last 56 years I have said in my know it all way, “they look like drumlins to me” on viewing any lumpy bit of landscape. Come on setters, bring on a roche mountonnee to show my geography master that I was listening after all.
  26. ….from paper to screen, I entered “fanny work”. Luckily I spotted before submitting, so much industrial language was avoided. NHO FANCY WORK anyway, but it’s utterly believable. I only parsed SHODDINESS afterwards.

    FOI COFFIN (which I don’t want for Christmas)
    LOI GAFF (perfectly well known, just not seen at first)
    COD FLASH BULB (made me chuckle)
    TIME 7:39 (should help my SNITCH ratings)

  27. About an hour after lunch to get to my LOI 23a. Quite a few biffs en route; one of which was SLYLY at 24d which I failed to parse properly ( and had noted BY as part of the probable contents). Hence the GAFF failed to appear. I looked up GAFF just the other day as I had no idea how it comes to mean Home; and I have forgotten again. I need a reMinder.
    David
    1. If you watch a rerun of The Sweeney, you’ll often hear the protagonists refer to someone’s abode as their GAFF 🙂
  28. Not much going on in this one – I would have been quicker if I’d typed Fluoridate with the O and the U in the proper order, if I had not seen money box and biffed coffer, and if I could have ignored slyly as a word also cunningly spelt with two Ys. Thanks verlaine.
  29. Quite mild for a Friday, but no doubt there will be plenty more puzzles of all strengths over the holiday period. On a recent Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, soneone came a cropper after saying that an IBEX was an antelope rather than a goat, so that’s become fixed in my mind (though probably not as firmly as it is for the poor guy who lost £16,000 as a result).
  30. Struggled at the end, not convinced that SLYBY was a type of air-to-air missile before seeing that FLY and SLY mean roughly the same thing. But I didn’t know that meaning of GAFF so in the end I bunged in HALF, pretty sure it was wrong, but at least HALF means some, even if “not quite all” is a stretch. So pink squares and DNF for me.
  31. 47 minutes with one mistake (GAFF, which I have never seen before). Much of this was very easy and the rest nigh on impossible. But it IS a British puzzle and it really is my fault if I insist on doing crosswords in a foreign language, isn’t it. The only thing I could think of for GAFF was HALF (for “not quite all”) and who knows whether it might not mean “slip home” in British slang? Not more unlikely than that GAFF would mean “home”. FLY for “cunning” is also a bit strange, but it has appeared before so I was prepared to accept that.

    Edited at 2020-12-18 07:18 pm (UTC)

  32. Worked my way through nearly all of this, thinking it was easy for a Friday, only to fail at the end with Coffer and Slyly making Ibex/Gaff impossible. Pleased to have got the completely unknown Drumlin and Fancywork and to have parsed 17d, but this still feels like a missed chance. Invariant
  33. 19.21. At the easier end of the Friday spectrum. Hesitated over the unknown drumlin, trying to put an L in an unknown word for a glacial formation, but it turned out to be much easier than that. Also had fingers crossed at fancywork which didn’t sound like the specific piece of technical knitting jargon that I was searching for.

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