Times Cryptic Jumbo No 1637 – 30 September

8 comments on “Times Cryptic Jumbo No 1637 – 30 September”

1. At 19dn, I think the stitches are “fits of laughter”. Thank you for TUTORS – didn’t get the wordplay at all!

   1. Thanks for the help with 19d. I knew I must have missed something. Will update the blog.

2. I gave up on this fairly early on. Lots of DNKs: FIND THE LADY, STOKE, BLONDE MOMENT (happy not to have known that one), OBJECT BALL, SPLIFF, KORMA & KORA. (I also didn’t know the Marvel character Loki, only the god.) Some dubious definitions: uncivil does not mean tasteless, pure does not mean fresh, a tutor is not a lecturer. The setter has an unfortunate predilection for initial/final letters: 2d ultimately, 19d starter of salmon, 50d first of meat, 35ac issue ultimately, 48d stupidity primarily, 26ac leaders from Tunisia and Egypt, 21d restraint at first. And a plethora of rebarbative surfaces: what does e.g. ‘Norse god, malice at the core about right’ mean? ‘Uncivil in reversal of politesse, let’s attack’? ‘Dead–brown bread’?

   1. I too thought some of the definitions a bit of a stretch but didn’t mention it in the blog as I thought I had just been a bit grumpy when solving. But it all came good in the end.

   2. Unknowns we shared were LOKI, BLONDE MOMENT and KORA but the others on your list are in common use. KORMA, for instance, is one of a range of pre-prepared curry dishes that are on offer in almost any UK supermarket – like Jalfrezi which came up recently. Korma is at the opposite end of heat scale, as it’s very mild.

      On the synonyms, I thought uncivil and tasteless can both mean offensive or lacking in refinement so there’s overlap there. Tutor and lecturer may be a UK thing as they can be interchangeable here although there may be subtle differences of ranking in snobby educational circles. SOED has fresh 5 Esp. of air or water: pure, untainted, cool, refreshing, invigorating. LME. Both words are favoured by advertisers ranging from those promoting fabric conditioners to mentholated cigarettes in the days when they were allowed to be advertised.

      I agree with your first two example of bad surfaces, but the third one is redeemed in my view by ‘brown bread’ being CRS for ‘dead.

      More generally I found the puzzle reasonably straightforward and unusually for me for a Jumbo, I solved it in one session.

      Footnote on BLONDE MOMENT: Having just checked on this, it’s not in Collins but I was surprised to find it has its own separate entry in the usually more staid ODE.

      1. I hasten to say that I was not criticizing the use of terms, like KORMA, that I didn’t know; what I don’t know is my problem, not the setter’s. Also DNK the CRS ‘brown bread’ (or indeed, most CRS terms).

3. Another Jumbo that took a long time – 2 hours 25 minutes – but a particularly good one, I thought, perhaps because I wasn’t confronted with lots of DNKs. No problem with any of Kevin’s list (except KORA). I liked the puzzle because there wasn’t any difficult vocab or GK, just splendidly deceptive clues. In that frame of mind I was happy to live with the odd dodgy definition or surface.

   The most dodgy thing of all was the homophone in 1dn. Great stuff. And I loved 15ac with the CRS (already pointed out by jackkt) giving a kind of three-way double definition where dead = toast = brown bread = dead.

   I’m with the blogger on the spelling of PALLIASSE. It’s a difficult word to have mastered and I’m not going to change now. LOI the wonderful YOLKY.

   Many thanks to setter blogger and all

4. Quite a tricky one, and I enjoyed it apart from the rather surprising casual sexism in 34dn.

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