What would ‘cat-killer’ be? Hmm, hmm, I’d certainly like to know.

It’s just occurred to me how often we say, ‘Time is not on our side.’

Arfanarf just beat me to reposting my similar previous comments on “time is the enemy”. Time is identified as an enemy in several of Shakespeare’s sonnets, but I’m sure it’s an association that people will have come up with over and over again in the past – I guess that the Brewer’s definition of “enemy” is the soundest reference in terms of justifying the use in crosswords. (I remember another commenter here telling me that there’s a recent new edition of Brewer’s, so I wonder if someone could check if that definition has anything more nowadays? I don’t have a copy, unfortunately.)

(This will be one of a number of very late posts – I’m terribly behind on the daily crosswords now.)

The clue was: Find how long the dance might be (7)

Responding to a query from someone, I responded:

Quote

One of the meanings of ‘measure’ is dance.

In Shakespeare’s R and J, we have:

But, let them measure us by what they will,
We will measure them a measure…

where the word is used in different senses including dance.

Unquote

IDIOM: „How goes the enemy? (What says the enemy?)‘

EXPLANATION: What o’clock is it? Time is the enemy of man, especially of those who are behind time. Origin: derived from a theatre play: „The Dramatist“ (1789), written by Frederick Reynolds. It almost immediately became a (usually somewhat facetious) catchphrase and it has remained one, although it hasn’t been much used since 1939. It was used occasionaly in past (1863-1952).

SOURCE (The Dramatist): … „[Ennui the Timekiller:] I’ve an idea I don’t like the Lady Waitfor’t – she wishes to trick me out of my match with Miss Coutney, and if I could trick her in return – (_takes out his watch_). How goes the enemy – only one o’clock! I thought it had been that an hour ago.“

I never heard of the Lyric Theatre (and it didn’t ring a bell for my ‘partner in crime’), but I’ve been to a Shaftesbury Avenue theatre (to see Spamalot).

So, ‘measure for measure’ is a kind of ‘step by step’?

Goodnight – [didn't have to Google]

Welterusten

To be fair, I think the Lyric Theatre is reasonably well known.

Re ‘measure’: oh dear, this is another thing I remember from the dim and distant past: a song ‘Come and dance a country measure’: [why do these things stick, at the expense of more important recent things?]

And yes, all things considered, a very good crossword!

Goedenacht – [I googled]

And I was hoping you would reply to my post, since you are very interested in language related topics.

Re 3dn: having read your explanation, I agree, this a brilliant clue (but do all the other solvers know about the Lyric Theatre, I guess not)

Re 7dn: I didn’t know that a measure is a dance, but you surely will forgive me.
Never too late to learn something new.

Re 6dn: glad you didn’t like it either, but in the end still a very good crossword
(we thought).

7dn clearly hasn’t gone down very well. I was quite pleased – this clue was one of the few times that my stats training has proved useful. The term ANOVA is the way ‘analysis of variance’ is usually abbreviated when calling up the procedure in a stats software package. So I guess pretty obscure to most people.

I thought ‘boss’ was a bit of a stretch for ‘excellent’ though.

And I agree that the construction of 6dn felt a little awkward.