ST (Jumbo) 4360 (Sun 20 Dec) – Referees assistance

Author   talbinhoPosted on Categories Jumbo Cryptic
Solving time: 30 mins

As well as some Christmassy clues there were a few thematic answers in this (e.g. THREE KINGS, HOLLY TREE, FRANKINCENSE) but not enough to justify the traditionally awful grid with grossly underchecked answers (i.e. across answers with insufficient down answers crossing them and vice versa).

The clues weren’t too bad but I believe there is a mistake in 40ac (PESSIMISTIC) – hardly likely to get through a Jumbo without one, after all. I don’t understand 16ac (REFEREES) and would be grateful if someone could explain it.

* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.

Across
1 BREATHTAKING – a pun on ‘quick’ = ‘alive’, as in ‘the quick and the dead’.
8 HASSLED; (HAD LESS)* – the question mark is probably because of the double duty of ‘worried about’ as the anagram indicator and the definition.
13 SPOONER – referring to the Oxford lecturer Dr Spooner; ‘bought toys’ is a Spoonerism of ‘taught boys’.
14 NURSEMAID; NURSE (= ‘tend’) + (AMID)* – I initially thought that MAID was given by (I in MAD); ‘to employ’ now seems superfluous.
15 TAWNY; T, + [no]W in ANY
16 REFEREES – this must be (FREE)* in something, but I can’t see what.
18 ASSET; A + rev. of TESS
19 BAR + CODE – a partial definition (‘may be scanned’).
22 MISS[ive]
24 IMPETIGO; I + M.P. + (I GET O)*
25 AUTUMNAL; (AN[d] MUTUAL)*
29 ADVENTURE; ADVENT (= ‘coming’) + URE (= ‘river’)
30 HITCH (2 defs)
31 DE + CRYPT
33 REARRESTS; RESTS (= ‘settles’) after REAR (= ‘back’)
34 REGRETTABLE; (REBEL TARGET)* – good anagram.
40 PESSIMISTIC; (PIES TIM IS SIC[k])* ? – this anagram seems to have one ‘I’ too many. Perhaps it was supposed to read ‘Tim’s’ instead of ‘Tim is’.
44 PRES(ID)ENT
46 GO(RILL)A – the goa is a Tibetan gazelle, useful for crosswords.
48 PURSE (2 defs)
49 HOLLY TREE; (HE’LL TRY + O)* + E – the ‘to’ in the middle of the anagram fodder rather ruins this.
51 PARASITE; (PARTIES A)* – someone else will have to comment on the accuracy of the definition (‘mistletoe sprig can be’).
53 CALENDAR (cryptic definition) – can’t decide if I like this or not.
54 SEER; R[ight] after SEE (= ‘spot’)
58 O + I’LL + AMP (= ‘power’) – the second use of ‘ring’ for ‘O’ in the last five clues. Not sure about ‘power’ for AMP.
60 PLAIT (cryptic definition) – I guessed this tentatively over ‘plant’. Chambers tells me that ‘queue’ can mean ‘a braid of hair hanging down the back of the head’.
62 CREATION; (REACTION)*
65 EMMER; EM + MER – the ending was clear here (‘main French’ = ‘word for “the main”, i.e. the sea, in French’ = [la] MER) but I spent the best part of ten minutes on the first two letters, partly owing to doubt over the anagram at 51dn. This was my guess, but for the wrong reasons: I thought ‘mutton’ might be an abbreviation for the letter ‘M’ (phonetically, ’em’) along the lines of ‘ack emma’ = AM, ‘toc’ = T etc (although with ’emma’ already indicating M, this was unlikely); in fact a mutton is an em-space in printing, while emmer is a species of wheat.
66 STATES + MAN (= ‘player on board’) – reading ‘player’ as ‘prayer’ didn’t help here.
67 V + ENDING
68 SOPRANO; SO, + PRO around AN (= ‘article’) – PRO for Public Relations Officer.
69 FRANK + INCENSE

Down
1 BE[he]ST
2 ELOPERS (cryptic definition) – very transparent if you know the crosswordese ‘union’ = ‘marriage’.
3 TINSEL; TIN + SEL[l]
4,5 THREE KINGS; (SEEKING THE R – E)* – ‘out East’ meaning ‘remove an E’, and I suppose ‘train’ is the anagram indicator.
6 NORM + A
7 CHASTE; (CHEAT’S) – this took me far too long.
8 HIDEBOUND – this means ‘conservative’, and a twitcher (bird-watcher) might be heading for a hide (a wooden aggregation from where to watch birds, well-known to orienteers), but ‘twitcher heading for the lookout point’ suggests the wrong part of speech.
9 SATYR (2 defs)
10 LOW-DOWN (2 defs)
11 DRY (= ‘non-drinking’) + CELL (= ‘group’)
12 PEA-SHOOTER (cryptic definition) – I liked this.
17 EX-PORTERS – ‘before’ indicating EX.
20 EM + BARK
21 STY (cryptic definition) – ‘litter’ as in a group of little pigs.
23 SKEWERS; WE in SK[i]ERS – this clue doesn’t really work, because ‘we’ doesn’t ‘replace’ the ‘I’ of ‘skiers’, it goes a letter later.
24 INTERIM; (IN MERIT)*
26 U.N. + CUT
27 AMPULE; A + M.P. (= ‘representative’) + “YULE” – a small sealed medical container.
32 ETUI (cryptic definition) – easy to see through if you know the word, but still a good clue.
35 EYR[i]E – Lake Eyre is nearly 50ft below sea level.
36 RESPONDER; R.E. (= ‘Royal Engineers’) + S (= south = ‘pole’) + PONDER (= ‘consider’) – I wasn’t keen on the redundant use of ‘holding’ here.
37 TIDDLER (cryptic definition) – again a decent clue, but curiously I wrote in ‘tadpole’. Fortunately 49ac dug me out (HOLLY TREE) of the hole, because the clue to the other crossing answer (53ac, CALENDAR) had me baffled.
38 ANNATES; ANNA + rev. of SET – horrible: ‘setup’ needs splitting into ‘set up’, ‘covering’ meaning ‘on top of’ is iffy and so is the definition ‘fee’ for a plural noun (although it’s perhaps justifiable by analogy with ‘costs’ or ‘dues’).
39 PELOTA; (A LOT)* after P.E. (= ‘exercise’) – a squash-like Basque game.
41 IDLES; (SLIDE)*
42 TOPS – like this.
43 CORNCRAKES; (NO CRACKERS)* – nice anagram, and nice Latin name (crex crex). There’s more on the corncrake here.
45 SHERRY; ERR (= ‘be wrong’) in SHY (= ‘to throw’) – ‘out’ meaning ‘on the outside’, and this clue just about hangs together.
47 ANTIPASTO; (TIP NOT AS A)* – is ‘garnish’ a fair definition here?
50 PEP (palindromic) – I think I’ve seen this before, but it’s good.
51 PIOLETS; (PILES TO)* – I thought this was right but wasn’t totally sure which hindered 65ac.
52 ROLL + MOP
55 EROSION; rev. of (OR (= ‘gold’) in NOISE)
56 OPIATE; (PIE TO)* around A
57 A TONIC – because a tonic is equivalent to the degree between (most) adjacent whole notes of the musical scale.
59 AORTA (cryptic definition) – didn’t much like this.
61 TAMAR (hidden)
62 CANON; “CANNON”
63 ENVOI; “ENVOY” – I’ve always thought this was pronounced to rhyme with “moi”, but not according to Chambers which validates this homophone.
64 OGRE; rev. of ERGO – ‘nasty’ in the sense of ‘a nasty’, i.e. something nasty.

11 comments on “ST (Jumbo) 4360 (Sun 20 Dec) – Referees assistance”

  2. 23:27 for me – helped by having no problem with either EM (= mutton) or EMMER (= wheat), both familiar from years of crossword-solving.

    REFEREES is explained by SEER = prophet (sounds like “profit”). Even I am not too keen on that!

    I suspect that “is” in 40A is supposed to represent “‘s” – a slightly different explanation from yours, and one that perhaps makes the clue unacceptable to purists.

    I wasn’t all that worried about “to” in 49A, taking it to mean “beside” (or something of the sort) – though I have to agree the clue would have been better if it could have been avoided. I thought 51A (the “mistletoe sprig” clue) was probably OK as well, though again purists would probably find it a bit forced. On the other hand I don’t much like “power” = AMP in 58A.

    The question mark at the end somehow made 8D acceptable to me, though again I can see that purists might object. I didn’t think of TADPOLE for 37D, mainly because my first thought was TODDLER, but fortunately I realised in time that TIDDLER was a better answer.

    All in all, not a bad puzzle, provided your standards aren’t too high :-).

  3. This was a tedious affair on a grid that crammed more than 70 little words into a 23×23 grid. The three-letter words only had 1 checker and some 6-letter words only had two checkers. It compared unfavourably with the sister paper’s Jumbo and with the large crosswords printed by most of the other papers over the festive season.

    Curiously, the Sunday Times takes the unusual step of naming the setter. I am guessing that Barbara Hall is not very good at Scrabble, since her grid is full of short words with a predominance of Es and other 1-point letters. There is a plethora of Es in the NW with all the Es in Referees being checked.

    I had to use a dictionary to get the intersecting Emmer and Piolets. I had never heard of either, nor did I know the mutton meaning of em. My fault, I should have guessed that the checking letter was an E.

    To be fair, I did enjoy the clues for Breathtaking and Spooner.

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