Independent No. 12,027 by Tack

24 comments on “Independent No. 12,027 by Tack”

1. In 20d I think we have OH (I see) IO(W)AN (statesman with W taken) to give OHIOAN (another statesman).
   23a confused me with singular/plural in solution/clue.
   Lot to like elsewhere. If there’s a theme it’s passed me by, as per usual.

2. I had OHIOAN for 20d: I see = OH American statesman = IO(w)AN wife = W leaving (deletion)

   In 23a, I thought ‘phones’ might be abbreviation for headphones which could be defined as headset?

3. 20d OHIOAN – Oh! Io[w]an. — [Still taking ages for comments to appear.]

4. I am slightly confused by ILL-GOTTEN: the blog just says ‘get’ = GOT and I’m not seeing how that transformation is made. What am I missing? I’m also hoping there is an explanation for AGAINST THE CLOCK which seems strange as just a CD.

5. Seethe is ‘the’ with ‘see’ = ‘clock’ against it, as a setter might clue.

6. Saw 12a as a CAD.
   21a CLOCK = see; AGAINST the = see+the — {Edit: as Hovis@5}

7. Loved this. Lots of head-scratching, particularly with AGAINST THE CLOCK (see explanation above). Particularly liked the ‘was up and down’ in 6d. Like PostMark, I’m a bit confused with 2d. Thought ‘Tack will not get upset when taken dishonestly’ might work better but who am I to say.

8. 2d Tack will get = I’LL GO; upset after tax is taken = NETT<. — 26a Took OP as just operation.

9. I’ll go/get + style adjective sort of works:
   fancy; formal; colourful; sporty ….?

10. I’m not sure that I’ve yet nailed this Tack, but the previous posts are starting to help!
    HEADSET, for “phones”, in 23(ac), not an issue, because I remember the eponymous George Lee “Phones” Sheridan, in Stingray from the 60s. He of the communication headset.

    FORTY TWO, or forty-two as the setter has it ( I think Tack’s correct?), is a pretty weak offering as a definition [ figure], in my book. Green paint, for me, and a missed opportunity to allude to “the meaning of everything”.

    This is a very clever puzzle, but some of the wordplays are too clever for me. Why is “see”, “V”, in AVOCET? ( 18ac).
    Like a lot of my solutions, a gungadin from the definition, which I can’t parse convincingly.

    Enjoyed it though, just feeling very dumb despite completing.
    Ta, Tack, & Leedsclimber ( & posters!)

11. V = vide (Latin)

12. I think v might be Latin, vide …

13. Thanks both. Quite a challenge, more from the perspective of parsing than solving. I think I am there now with AGAINST THE CLOCK thanks to comments here, but would be still wondering come the next ice age if left to my own devices. It’s a small matter by comparison, however I don’t regard the ‘oh’ in OHIOAN as ‘I see’ but doubtless others do – for me, it would be an expression of surprise more than realisation, otherwise ‘ah’ does the job.

14. Thanks, FG,GIF, @ (11,12,).
    Though I am still feeling a bit dumb.
    “veni, vidi , vici”, was an old joke that I coined as a company Auditor….” I came, I saw, I concurred”, but bugg*r me, see=V, seems a stretch? Is it one of those cryptic conventions?
    TFO@13, for what it’s worth, I agree on “OH” vs “AH”.
    The first, “oh?”, means “are you sure?”; whereas “ah”, or “aha”, means, “I see it, now”.
    And there is still a bit of the “oh”s, and not the”ah”s, in Tack’s wordplays, for me.

15. I came here to investigate 20d as I wrote THROWN
    For some strange reason I have been put off Americana,

16. E.N.Boll&. v = ‘see’ does crop up once in a while so is worth remembering. I’ve ‘seen’ it often enough that I was onto it quite quickly. You will probably not be surprised in the slightest that it is in Chambers.

17. V = see is part of the standard text abbreviation qv = “quod videlicet” (“which is to be seen / referred to” [I think]), often further abbreviated simply to v.

18. Thank you all for explaining AGAINST THE CLOCK. I saw the “see the” trick, but clock=see is not a meaning that I encounter often (at all?), so that last leap beat me.

    Re the query in the blog: if you have a job where you’re on the phone more often than not, they give you a HEADSET instead of a handset so you can type and talk at the same time. But it really should be defined in the singular, and that wouldn’t harm the surface either; I’m assuming that stray S was just a typo.

    I certainly say “oh”, with a drawn-out O, to mean “I see.” (More specifically, “I get it now, stupid me.”)

19. Hovis @16, many thanks.
    I will try to remember it, but I doubt that I will.
    I was old, when the B/W Hovis advert started on TV.
    Dvorac, New World?
    Thank you, Ian B

20. Thanks Tack. Although this was DNF for me (I never solved several clues & couldn’t parse several others) I thought much of this was excellent with my favourites being NOVICES, OUTLAYS, CACHE, SOCIOPATH, and FORTY-TWO (COTD). Thanks Leedsclimber for the unenviable task of explaining all this.

21. Consult Wikipedia’s List of Latin phrases (full) for all your Latin needs. Here you’ll also find:
    v.i. = “see below”, vide infra; v.s. = vide supra, “see above”; and viz. = videlicet/videre licet, “it is permitted to see, namely”. — Not forgetting:
    q.v. quod vide, “which see” – Used after a term, phrase, or topic that should be looked up elsewhere in the current document, book, etc.
    For more than one such term or phrase, the plural is qq.v. quae vide.

22. ILL-GOTTEN didn’t give me any parsing trouble but A T CLOCK did and still does.
    ILL-GOTTEN
    ‘I’ll go/get crazy’ is what I thought about. ginf@9 has given other examples.
    So no issues there.
    A T CLOCK
    I could equate see+the to AGAINST THE CLOCK but couldn’t (and am still not able to)
    see how ‘this could make someone like me seethe’ works.
    This could make a setter seethe —->how does it become ‘a setter may clue A T CLOCK as seethe or the other way round?’

23. 21a AGAINST THE CLOCK: Took it as meaning “This could make seethe (sc. for) someone like me …”

24. Essentially the same as FrankieG. I read it as ‘This could make [for]someone like me [the word] ‘seethe’ …’.

Comments are closed.