The Times Crossword Friday Masterclass: 29 March 2024

** TODAY'S PUZZLE **
In the 59th edition of our attempts to solve a Friday Times crossword, Simon tackles today's puzzle which is another brilliant workout.
The puzzle is available to play on The Times crossword club website (which is behind their paywall):
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[@howardgrater7660]

I am reasonably new to cryptic, and in your world I think it’s safe to say that I would be classed as pretty pathetic at them! Today was my first time clocking the times cryptic, no checking my answers, no cheeky glances at the internet for the last couple. Straight up ‘look Ma, no hands’ puzzling. It may have been easy to most of you all, but I’m pretty chuffed with myself. Thanks for these videos, they are definitely a huge contributor to me getting ever so slightly more adept! Keep up the good work, much love x

[@michaelpdawson]

Before the US Post Office assigned standard two-letter abbreviations to each state, FLA was commonly used for Florida, as in Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side": "Holly came from Miami F-L-A."

[@samsowden]

these were usually not all caps, like the modern ones, so it would be Fla.

[@suewilliams7091]

Hi Simon, Suze here. Thank you so much for the shout out, it made my day. I just wanted to let you know that the lack of chocolate cake is not my choice, it’s my stomach that has the objection to chocolate!! thanks for all the great videos x

[@lacavallaviola5707]

As a Greek person who's also worked in a lab, I could solve the clues which Simon considers hard, i.e. involving Greek words and metric units of volume. Instead I have no knowledge of cricket or who Flashman is. It always gets me thinking that it would be nice to have cryptic crosswords assuming knowledge in different fields or interests.

[@andrewshelley410]

A toile is a garment not the fabric, it's a practice piece made with cheap material or remnants to refine the pattern and fit before you cut the real thing.

[@Prazzie]

I found this to be a satisfying puzzle, a bit easier than recent Friday offerings. Your guide and some of the comments here helped me to parse some clues that I was unable to fully understand. Thank you!

[@mycroft64089]

I don't generally shout at Simon, but when it was time to quote Jabberwocky, I couldn't resist.

[@bryanroland9402]

Absolutely frabjous!. Particularly liked the roundup of all the diverse stuff one needed to know in order to understand the clues. Watching the Friday crossword solve is an education. Not always a useful one. I'm still waiting for an opportunity to use "fishgig" in conversation.

[@mikechappell5849]

Flashman was the bully in the book Tom Brown's Schooldays, only later co-opted by George Macdonald Fraser for his splendid Flashman books.

[@andrew_hulme]

You're right about there being a fabric called tulle, but you were trying to put an i in it.

[@emilywilliams3237]

The answer 'beechnut' interested me, especially when you discovered that as a single word it is not in Chambers. It is indeed the nut of the beech tree which has a brown prickly husk or shell. I know it mainly as a brand name, I think, of chewing gum from a bygone generation. (It might actually be a flavor of said gum, in which case I don't remember the brand!)

[@Anne_Mahoney]

It's the brand name, and I don't think they ever did a nut flavor. There was a beautiful big beech tree on my campus until it was finally downed by a storm half a dozen years ago; you could find its nuts on the ground beneath it in the fall.

[@adrever1986]

Great video Simon thank you. You gave me "analects" and helped me understand why "offcut" was right - I don't know the first thing about cricket!

[@samsowden]

you're missing out!

[@archivist17]

A very eclectic puzzle.

[@PaulReinerfelt]

Octopi, Squids, and Nautili are three different families of tentacled molluscs so Nautili are _not_ squids per se but related. Nautili are characterised by having a spiral shell, something neither squids nor octopi have.

[@richardfarrer5616]

Flashman was originally a bully in Tom Brown's Schooldays. I think this must be the first time I got half of them faster than Simon - or at least faster than his explanation.

[@oak3001]

As it's Good Friday, I get to watch while having my lunch instead of while I'm having my dinner. I feel quite discombobulated

[@grenvillephillips6998]

Very doable for me for a change, but I can only conclude that for those who complete in less than three minutes, do so intuitively rather than analytically. Great stuff!

[@clivebrenchley5319]

Very enjoyable, as always. Hadn't thought about the Jabberwocky poem in a long time. Had to recite it at school.

[@eclectichoosier5474]

One must have quite an eclectic base of knowledge to work these puzzles :)

[@bobblebardsley]

21:00 If that waffle came from a certain village in south-east France could it be une gaufre du Gordon?

[@CrackingTheCryptic]

Underrated comment X)

[@bobblebardsley]

@@CrackingTheCryptic 😜

[@MartinSteed]

15:00 100ml is 1/10 of a litre - a decilitre - dl

[@DuncanBooth]

and your noddle is your head.

[@michaelocyoung]

and cl is 1/100 of a litre - so in some countries such as the Nordics, you get beer served in 40cl or 50cl measures which is equivalent of 400ml and 500ml, or just over 2/3rds and just under 1 pint.

[@villesyrjala3354]

@@michaelocyoung and a lot of food ingredients are typically measured in dl. That part of the clue was definitely a gimme for people from this neck of the woods.

[@OlafsLeftArm]

How very British to not know deciliter 😄 Centiliter (cl) is very common at least in strong alcohol measurement.

[@arthurcharest9061]

As always, delightful to solve along with you* *I do very little of the solving 😂

[@mccabjo]

This had harder vocab than a sub-3m time would generally suggest but it happened to be stuff I knew (e.g. VOILE/VOLE) or seemed likely from the wordplay (e.g. BEECHNUT). Note that the Quick Cryptic is a 13x13 (like the Concise) rather than a 15x15 (like the main cryptic) so time comparisons between the Quick and main cryptics need to be adjusted for the size difference as well as the "easier" clues of the former.

[@vinyl1Earthlink]

I would suggest that cryptic solvers know many 15-letter books, records, and poems - but hardly any 16-letter ones. This puzzle did draw on a wide range of knowledge. Chambers does not include the US baseball meaning of rhubarb

[@richardfarrer5616]

Try looking at the Times jumbo crosswords at some point. Their grids are 23x23.

[@zealot2147]

I was so happy to get the long down clue before I even read it.

[@ronitabick961]

Always love this content, and for the first time since the series began I got a clue without you explaining it. It was orangeade, and I even got it before you did! All credit to you for being a master teacher

[@KeiFlox]

Same, I got ADORABLE instantly and felt quite proud of myself haha

[@peterbiddlecombe1939]

Analects: there’s only one way to know this word, and that’s to read a bit about Confucius. In English, the collection of his sayings is “The Analects”, and I’m still waiting to see “analect” used to describe anyone else’s fragments.

[@annaschulmeyer9356]

This felt similar to listening to someone explain a topic in a language I don’t know. I was so lost, I understood some words. And I think I’m pretty good at English. This was wild.

[@icecreamandsadness]

I wonder if the snitch algorithm needs adjusting for the homogeneity of the sample? Easier for a group of people who know all those specific bits of general knowledge. I've only found your videos in the last week Simon and I absolutely adore them, and they've helped me get cracking on my own. Still a total novice but really enjoying having a go at a crossword each day. Thank you :)

[@Anne_Mahoney]

High point of the week as always -- and I got a few of these quicker than Simon (though not very much quicker, I admit). 😸

[@chris_wicksteed]

I found this relatively easy, except that I never parsed 'node' and got mole/vole wrong. I should really have gone with the fact that a vole is the more likely rodent, but instead my logic was that 'moile' sounded more like a fabric than 'voile' (to me at least). On looking it up in Chambers, I discovered that 'moile' is actually 'a type of rice pudding made with almond milk'.

[@bryanroland9402]

A mole isn't a rodent. It's an insectivore and is related to shrews. Naked mole rats are rodents however.

[@Myer5Hertz]

Eleven across seems very apt given today's news from Northern Ireland!

[@debrabowen4276]

More videos like this please!

[@mjkluck]

Good stuff, Bubs.

[@longwaytotipperary]

Feeling a little yucky today - but the sun is out and Simon’s on my screen - so things are looking up. 👍🏻

[@davidrattner9]

Feel better and glad the sun is out for you to get some Vitamin D. Seeing a Cryptic solve from Simon helps brighten the day. 😃

[@longwaytotipperary]

@@davidrattner9 thank you, David!!! 🌞❤️

[@sebastienlecoq3956]

I got a word in the grid before Simon ! almost without his help, or checking letter. I shouted so loud my cat complained. And I got the second one before explicitely stated, thanks to the long winded explaination. It looks very easy indeed, but somehow, I think I would love it better if I can get my chances. Something tell me I will pause a lot.

[@IlliniRocket]

It's interesting that 'analecta' was also a valid answer...I wonder if that would've been accepted as correct.

[@timevans3539]

Tulle is the fabric used in ballet dresses. I'm willing to bet that's what Simon was thinking of.

[@brucepicton9358]

The silky fabric is voile. Remove i for vole

[@timevans3539]

@@brucepicton9358 Oh yeah, sorry, there was a bit where he was searching the dictionary for 'tuile' from memory and not finding it

[@bluerizlagirl]

100ml is a tenth of a litre, or a decilitre, abbreviated dl. If you "drain" the letters DL from NODDLE (for "head") you get NODE.

[@jovancvijanovic7457]

I hope we get a Pangram cryptic crossword soon :)

[@joshuaharper372]

I know more about fabrics than Simon, apparently, but he definitely has me beat on cricket slang.

[@Raven-Creations]

While that was certainly easier than most Friday cryptics, to do it in under three minutes is mind-boggling. Even if you parse the clues correctly first time, it's an average of less than six seconds per clue, including typing in the answer. Even those people who type in their answers after solving offline only manage to do it in around two minutes. 100ml is one decilitre or dl, drained from noddle. Noodle is the US term for the head. Noddle is the British word. Apparently ana is the standalone version of the suffix -ana as in Victoriana, and Americana, whereas analects is from the Greek analekta (things gathered up) via Latin analecta. I think "brown dressed in a shell suit" is a somewhat loose way to describe a beechnut. It's a bit like a horse chestnut in that there's a fleshy case around the brown nut. As it dries out, the case peels back like peeling a banana to reveal the brown nut inside. I liked "little squiffy?" not just for its simplicity, but because it reminded me of how many words we have for being drunk. A friend is of the opinion that any noun used as a verb can mean drunk, such as "we were absolutely trousered".

[@mccabjo]

A decent typist should be able to fill in the grid in less than 30s if they already know the answers, meaning there is perhaps rather more solving time (as opposed to typing time) in a 3m completion than you might initially expect.

[@darreljones8645]

Yes, "Dora the Explorer" is a long-running animated series on Nickelodeon,

[@yadt]

Hopefully that was something crumby, not something crummy.

[@kevinmartin7760]

At 28:00, 11 across, how does "having been found out" turn into "rumbled"? Evidently an idiom I've never heard of...

[@PeterMoore66]

It's quite a common phrase in British English. If you're doing something secretive and you've been "rumbled" then someone has found out about it... "I was organising a surprise birthday party for my wife, but she came home while I was putting up the decorations and now I've been rumbled"

[@DaShikuXI]

4 down is one of those clues that I could never solve. The words tiddly and squiffy just aren't real.

[@bryanroland9402]

Those words are common enough in British English. Funnily enough, there was an unreal word in today's puzzle and Simon recited several more from Lewis Carroll's poem.

[@DarklordZagarna]

I guess Simon is not a Redwall devotee, since voles and moles are rodents that each make appearances in that series. Of course, that doesn't help you pick between them...

[@thescrewfly]

As you pointed out, Simon (albeit obliquely), the Times crossword is hopelessly middle class. Just a comment for the algorithm's sake.

[@bryanroland9402]

Don't see why a diverse knowledge base should be a class thing.

[@thescrewfly]

@@bryanroland9402 Pretty much everything is a class thing in the UK, but it was just an off-hand joke.

[@bryanroland9402]

@@thescrewfly Fair enough. How about a "snoot rating" for each puzzle?

[@watchmakerful]

Rhubarb is not nonsense, it's a garden plant.

[@SnugglesPlays]

I've never heard of Flash man or the books which he is meant to be from. Definitely wasn't an easy crossword! 🙂

[@arhamdugar396]

im so bad at crosswords 💀

[@iwishexamsneverhappened]

E

[@williambarnes3868]

Moles are not rodents. A silky fabric is VOILE. Oh dear Simon, you are a clever chap,but you have some terrible gaps in your knowledge! 100cl = 1 deciltre (!dl)

[@andyrooiam]

I don't think he had issue with the dl part, more that it was being removed from noddle and not noodle

[@pairot01]

Cryptic crosswords seem like a bunch of in jokes that you either know or you can't possibly figure it out. How is "potentially" code for anagram? You can say literally anything is potentially literally anything else.

[@emilywilliams3237]

It's more like a code than in-jokes. More like bridge bidding, really, where by convention certain bids can have specific non-literal meanings. And also, like bridge bidding, conventions have developed over time (and sometimes by rule) regarding how clues are written and what can be used to mean what. I will say, though, that it used to be totally inscrutable to me, but now I almost get it. Not that I can solve almost any clue, but I understand how they are constructed and how I am meant to go about solving them.