Times Cryptic Jumbo 1593 – 1 January 2023

19 comments on “Times Cryptic Jumbo 1593 – 1 January 2023”

1. Another mostly straightforward solve. I also queried pain / AIL at 19ac but concluded that they work as synonyms as verbs: What ails / pains thee? Didn’t know the CK brand in MACKINTOSH. I still don’t get exploit / MASTERSTROKE.

   1. Yes.. Collins says, for exploit: “a notable deed or feat, esp one that is noble or heroic,” and for masterstroke: “an outstanding piece of strategy, skill, talent, etc ”
      .. which seemed close enough, to me, though I admit I would not use them interchangeably. For me, masterstrokes have an element of surprise which exploits don’t, necessarily.
      Now I am retired, both are foreign territory these days 🙂

      1. Thanks. One lives and learns but probably won’t remember for long!

         1. “Matcham’s Masterstroke” is the story that Bloom starts to read while in the privy. We never find out what it was.

2. Nice crossword, but it took me 2 hours 22 minutes. A relapse after my sub 60 minute PB for 1592. Never mind. It could just be a blip. We’ll know next week. Watch this space…

   DNK 35ac ACTINIDE or 7dn MAENAD. A MER at CK clued by “label” in 23dn – I couldn’t stop myself – but I don’t think I have grounds. My favourites included THATCH, TROUT and GALLIVANT.

   At 12ac, I don’t think I’ve seen TENT (the red table wine from Alicante, Spain) for ages. I was OK with that. Collins describes it as obsolete. But it reappeared a few days later, so now we’ve seen it twice. It’s back

3. I wondered about the spelling of 16ac; MARLINESPIKE just didn’t look right. DNK TAIL-END CHARLIE. I’ve got checks by several clues: 334ac MONOMANIA, 8d LAUREL AND HARDY (I gave up on Hardy after dragging myself through Jude the Obscure), DERMATITIS, CO-STARRED, TROUT. 28d: Yet another ‘commonly’ to characterize speakers of a non-U dialect.

   1. Thomas Hardy gave up too after Jude the Obscure – writing novels that is. I remember The Woodlanders and Under the Greenwood Tree as showing he could write some happier stories!

4. After a run of good times over Christmas I found this slightly tougher and took 1:05:20. MAENAD, CO-STARRED and MARLINESPIKE all held me up as none of them looked quite right but eventually went in on the basis that I couldn’t think of anything better.

5. I too found this a little harder than the previous one (1592) but still about average difficulty, finishing in about 41 minutes. Plenty of entertainiment… I was a little surprised by the spelling of MARLINESPIKE with an E in the middle, but guessed there were multiple possible spellings. I bristled slightly at the definition of HYPERTEXT as software as it’s more like data with embedded code than an application, but it’s close enough. I remember that in the REST application architecture loose-coupling is achieved using the HATEAOS principle (Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State)…. which I don’t think I ever fully understood (but then I never found anyone who did). I’d never heard of (but also inferred the existence of) Marinetti and looked him up. I wondered if TROUT are ever found in shoals (or schools). Favourites were the last two acrosses – BONEHEADED and GALLIVANT. Thanks Jerry and setter.

   1. I thought the same about trout, but decided that sea trout probably do shoal..

      1. I thought I’d check. Yes they do! See here. Sorry I erroneously cast aspersions on our setter. I should know by now – if I think something in a clue isn’t right, it is probably me that’s wrong.

6. An All Green Jumbo! Not so common for me. Very tough start after a wrong FOI: MINIMAL for NOMINAL. Also DETENTE for ENTENTE.
   Was surprised like many to see the extra “E” in MARLINESPIKE. I knew it from Captain Haddock’s mansion. Was convinced it also appeared in Pirates of Penzance but it’s a “handspike”

   I think the capital “C” in New York City is a bit unfair in the Buffalo clue, I know we are supposed to ignore Case, and misdirection is part of the game, but I think the clue is better as “New York city”.

   I still don’t see where the MILLSTONE comes from in 34A. I get the John Stuart Mills reference, but what’s that “1 across” all about?

   Did not Parse CO-STARRED (NHO COSTRAD)
   NHO MARINETTI, Brad=Nail, DERMATITIS, MAENAD

   56A Was my LOI, caused by a typo in a checker.

   1. A millstone around someone’s neck is proverbially a heavy burden or responsibility weighing you down. In the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner the albatross that the Mariner thoughtlessly shot and killed is hung around his neck by his fellow sailors as his punishment for the bad luck his murder brought about. So in a sense millstone and albatross (clue 1 across) can be equated as unpleasant things hung around your neck causing you great difficulty.

   2. This is an interesting one because the rule is that common nouns can be capitalised but proper nouns can’t be uncapitalised. The justification for this is that any common noun can be capitalised at the beginning of a sentence whereas a proper noun is always capitalised. Here though the relevant noun is not ‘city’ but ‘New York city’, which can only indicate Buffalo if the last word is not capitalised. So I agree.

      1. Perhaps it is my fault but I have never been able to follow that logic. Capitalisation at the start of a sentence, fine. Capitalisation for a proper noun, fine. Capitalisation otherwise is not misdirection, it is just a lie plain and simple. And absolutely equivalent to not capitalising a proper noun, which as you say is not allowed.
         Not criticising you K, I know it is generally accepted. Just not by me!

         1. I know, we’ve had this discussion before!
            A helpful (for me) way to think of it is that each element of wordplay is cut out from another bit of text somewhere else and glued into the clue.
            So in 19ac for example the word ‘nurse’ is cut out of a sentence where it is a verb (because the definition is ‘tend’) and plonked into the clue. In the surface reading it is a noun, and ‘tend’ is not in any circumstances a noun meaning ‘nurse’. So you might argue that this is also a ‘lie’.
            To me cutting a noun from the beginning of a sentence (where it would have a capital letter) and plonking it in the middle of the clue is exactly the same. It doesn’t make sense in the context of the surface reading but neither does ‘tend’. The only difference is that in one case the ‘lie’ is grammatical, in the other it is orthographical.
            However if you follow this principle with the clue under discussion, the lexical unit you are cutting out of another sentence and plonking into the middle of the clue is ‘New York city’. There are no circumstances in which that group of words could be correctly rendered as ‘New York City’ and still mean BUFFALO.

            1. Well, I wouldn’t argue that your use of “nurse” is a lie because we have not altered the word, only its meaning. I would argue that spelling it Nurse would be a lie, if we are pretending there is some different sentence where it capitalised solely because it happens to be the first word.
               It so happens that most cities are not ordinary words as well, but some are. So by your logic it would be OK to refer to the city of Bath as bath, because sentences do exist where it is not capitalised.. or Buffalo as buffalo, except that isn’t allowed, is it? It is the precise euivalent of Nurse v nurse, but one is allowed, and one not. I don’t think either should be. Or both.
               Rest my case, m’lud!

               1. There are cases where the word ‘bath’ (meaning ‘tub’) is written ‘Bath’.
                  There are no cases where the word ‘Bath’ (meaning the city) is written ‘bath’.
                  That’s the difference.
                  From a wordplay perspective, clues are not sentences, they are just collections of unconnected words and phrases. 19ac could be rendered as ‘stupid person after mind contains bother last person’. It’s gibberish, in which the words don’t respect the rules of grammar or syntax. I don’t see why we would accept that but insist that they follow the rules of capitalisation.

7. I didn’t find this too hard but I put TRANCE for 24ac. T (Tory leader) dismisses the head of FRANCE to give a word meaning ‘shock’. A TRANCE is kind of similar to a state of shock, but not really the same thing at all, and the ‘once’ is unaccounted for, but this is the kind of mistake you can easily make at the end of a jumbo if you are sloppy like me and trying to go quickly.

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