Today's Times Cryptic (#28539)

I’ve had a rough week this week but mustered the courage to attempt Wednesday’s crossword with my morning coffee. There were some wonderful clues but I didn’t get round to writing about them on the day. To jump right in…

Spooner’s contemptible chef collected records (8)

For those new to the Times Cryptic, “Spooner’s” is a dead giveaway that the answer is a Spoonerism. Given that “Spooner’s” is the first word, it’s likely that we’re looking for a word for “records” or “collected records”, with “contemptible chef” being the cryptic. “Chef” made me think of “cook”, a relatively easy word to mix with another (“spoonerise?”). In my head, I was thinking what would fit within C _ _ _ _ O O K? The “ook” ending made me think “book”, and then CASEBOOK fell out. A contemptible chef could be called a base cook, of course.

In coming to this answer I realised that casebook is also a Spoonerism of bookcase, though I had assumed that a Spoonerism was always just the switching of the beginnings of words. It turns out there is a fancier term for this: metathesis, (n.) the transposition of sounds or letters in a word.

The exact thing (8,7)

This is probably the most succinct cryptic clue I’ve come across and is absolutely delightful in its simplicity. I moved on swiftly from this on first pass but it came at me from left field about two minutes later.

Believe it or not, we’re looking for a word for “the”. As any student of language would tell you, “the” is known as the DEFINITE ARTICLE. Something that is “exact” is “definite” and a “thing” is an “article”.

I love this clue in particular because it so obviously leads one down the garden path. One wants to read the clue literally. Always distrust this instinct when attempting a cryptic.

One who fought J. Frazier with extremely combative hostility (6)

Another great example of what sounds like a completely normal sentence. The only hint that I picked up on straight away here was “extremely”. In cryptics, this is normally a hint to take the beginning and end of a word (in this case “combative”) to give you CE. That made me think I’m probably looking for a word for “hostility”. One who fought J. Frazier was of course Muhammad Ali which, once abbreviated to “M. Ali” combines nicely with CE to give us MALICE for 6.

Four brave guards gad about (9)

This immediately reminded me of a children’s TV programme I used to watch in the very early 2000s called “Sir Gadabout: The Worst Knight in the Land”, a show about a useless knight who continually saves the day by mistake.

My parents used to bemoan my siblings and I gallivanting around so this clue fell out quite quickly and gave me a pang of nostalgia. To parse the clue, we’re looking for a word for “brave” that “guards” (i.e. surrounds) a word for “four”. In this case, brave becomes GALLANT and four simply becomes IV.