Jumbo 750 (Sat 5 Apr) – Yoga meister

Author   talbinhoPosted on Categories Jumbo Cryptic
Solving time: 26:07, but a couple of minutes thanks to the mistake in the clue for SIDDHA at 55ac. Also two mistakes of mine (28ac and 12dn).

A fairly standard and unremarkable puzzle, I thought – maybe slightly on the hard side of average. Perhaps someone could confirm whether the mistake at 55ac was present in the paper version?

If anyone would like any other clues explaining, please say so in the comments.

* = anagram.

Across
1 POLY + PUS[h]
25 FLIP (double definition) – as in ‘egg-flip’, whatever that is.
28 OBSERVATION CAR – not ‘observation van’, as I put, not knowing this phrase. I thought I was looking for something meaning a place from where (e.g.) a spy might covertly observe something, but the actual answer (a railway carriage designed for sightseeing) explains the use of ‘trained’, which I didn’t understand.
30 C(LIEN)T + AL[l]
38 MOIETY (initial letters) – meaning ‘a half’, from French. Not a word I knew, but the wordplay was fairly obvious.
52 A + MON + TILL + A + DO
55 SIDDHA – a yogic term meaning ‘someone who has attained perfection’. The (online) clue to this read ‘…some pulses: I’d dahl’. Obviously this should have read ‘dhal’, but I just wrote in ‘siddah’ which caused me real problems with 42dn. It turns out that while ‘dahl’ is a valid spelling, ‘siddah’ isn’t so I can’t entirely blame this on the typesetter.

6 ONE-LINER; rev. of (NILE in RENO)
7 TRI[p]S + TRAM’S HANDY
8 EAST INDIES; (T[ime] + IN + SEASIDE)*
11 PO(IN + TILL + IS)T – possibly the hardest cryptic construction in the puzzle.
12 SINICISM; “CYNICISM” – a Chinese peculiarity, which I misspelt as ‘Sinecism’.
20 B(RIG)ID
21 TAFFETA; “TAFF” + TA – a somewhat iffy ‘partial homophone’.
29 RATT(L)ER
31 ANGLE + R; &lit
35 STOOL PIGEON; (E.G. ON TOP SOIL)*
42 STABLISH; rev. of 1LB in STASH – this was rather tricky until I realised that there was an error in the clue for 55ac. Unusual for the Times to include such an archaic word as this.
44 ORTOLAN; (ALTO)* in alternate letters of SOPRANO
48 A(I)T + CH

3 comments on “Jumbo 750 (Sat 5 Apr) – Yoga meister”

  1. I couldn’t figure what word was meant to be in the clue for 55, maybe it was meant to be a reversed contained word? Fortunately the checking letters meant it had to be SIDDHA. An annoying end to an otherwise good jumbo.
  2. Newspaper clue to SIDDHA was wrong too and there was an apology with the solution yesterday.
  3. This held me up as I also entered the “word” the hidden sequence seemed to indicate. I was working from the paper so the mistake was in both. The Times apologised when solution was printed which was good.
    The fact that this and STABLISH were new words (to me anyway) made it tricky.

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