Times Jumbo 1102

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Jumbo Cryptic
And we’re back to my normal sort of solving time, 33 minutes for this one. Steady and mostly enjoyable challenge; I concluded that this solver a) likes their cryptic definitions, and b) would have been a disappointment to their Latin teacher.

With Jumbos, which attract a far smaller audience than daily puzzles, I generally confine myself to discussion of answers which I think are a) less straightforward for inexperienced or non-UK based solvers, or b) especially elegant / questionable. In other words, unless it’s an exceptionally interesting puzzle, the coverage is unlikely to be 100%; however, as always, if a particular clue is not discussed, please feel free to raise it in comments for explanation or discussion.

Across
1 MACERATED – MACE, RATED. The “disconnected” isn’t really needed, I suppose (I mean, I rather assume that words in cryptic crosswords will be separated or run together in every other clue without it being explicitly stated), but helps smooth the surface.
9 AVERAGE – A REV.(rev) + AGE. Despite the common usage, “mean” is only one sort of average, as opposed to, say, the median or the mode. Hmmm, perhaps I remember more of my ‘O’-level maths than I thought.
13 GENUS – GEN(=info) + U/S(=unserviceable).
15 BALLPOINT =”BAWL”, POINT(“idea” as in what you might examine in an essay or presentation).
16 THREATENING – [River, EATEN] in THING.
17 INSTRUCTION – INST(=”this month” in traditional business letters, see also “ult=last month”), RUCTION(which always seemed to me a made-up sort of a word).
18 RAGLAN – RAG(something tatty), LANe. Coat named after Lord Raglan (with short sleeves because he’d lost an arm in battle), but less well-known than Wellington or Cardigan. Very tempting to put in RAGBAG here if you don’t bother checking words which fit to make sure they actually parse in some way (something I have frequently done on other occasions).
19 STANDARD – i.e. if looking down The Mall, you could see the Royal Standard over Buckingham Palace (assuming Her Maj is home).
26 A ROOM WITH A VIEW – the view in the book being over Florence.
29 LOOFAH – LOO(washroom), FAH(note). Possibly slightly baffling outside the UK?
30 DEAD LETTER – Energy in DAD, LETTER. I was familiar with one meaning, i.e. a letter which is returned as undeliverable for whatever reason, but not with the subsidiary one, which is a rule or law which has fallen into abeyance.
33 BRASSERIES – BRAS, SERIES. Quite chestnutty but elegantly expressed.
35 ENTRAP – (PARTNER)rev.; it could have been anyone’s wife, of course, but Lot’s wife (never given an actual name in the Bible story) fits nicely with the “looking back” in the clue.
36 SPEED – Person, as in the abbreviation pp=per person, inside SEED(=race), &lit. Took a bit of wrangling to make sure there wasn’t some wordplay leading to STEED, which was also tempting based on the definition.
40 STALLION – STALe, LION.
42 STERNA – TERN in S.A.; not normally seen in the plural because we only have one each.
43 SON IN LAW – Pedantic Quibble of the Day: your son is by definition younger than you, but your son-in-law doesn’t have to be (even though he usually is, of course). Nothing to see here, let’s move on.
44 LADDIE – Island in LADDER, running as tights do.
50 IMPRESSIONS – cryptic def., a best seller will go though several imprints or impressions; other meaning=”opinions”, as in Airplane. “Doctor, can you give the court your impression of Mr Stryker?” “I’m sorry, I don’t do impressions. My training is in psychiatry”.
52 IRONED OUT – another elegant chestnut playing on the dual meanings of “evening”.
56 PURSE – Second in PURE. These days it’s only really boxing matches which have “purses”, I think.
57 TIREDNESS – (RESIDENTS)*. Nicely done.
 
Down
1 MIGHT – MIG + HeighT.
2 CONGREGATIONALIST – (CERTAINALOTSGOING)*. One of the joys of the jumbo is allowing 17-letter words which can be angarammatised into nice phrases.
3 RASTAFARIAN – I think most people would be more likely to describe Rastafarianism as a Caribbean religion, but as Ras Tafari is Haile Selassie, who is clearly African, in Crossword Land, why not?
4 TESTER – THE ESTER minus HE.
5 DIARISTS – another cunning cryptic def.
6 NONAGENARIAN – Oops? Unless I’m missing something very crucial, “excel” sounds like XL, which is the Roman numeral for, er, 40. Which leaves 50 years unaccounted for…
8 REBUS – insert a hyphen to get the rather ugly verb “re-bus”. See also “de-bus”, which is considerably more inelegant than “get off”.
9 ALLERGIST – ALLER(=”to go” in French), GIST(=”heart” of the matter); lift-and-separate to get the definition “expert at medical centre”.
11 ALIBI – A LIBIDO minus the DO.
12 EXTENT – as John Cleese might say, “this is an ex-tent, it has ceased to be”.
20 DEWBERRY – mounD, (BREWERY)*. An educated guess, as I have never knowingly eaten or otherwise encountered a dewberry; however, my wife tells me that when she was a student, everyone smelled of dewberry essence thanks to the Body Shop.
22 A LITTLE BIRD TOLD ME – is this expression common outside the UK? As per previous discussions, the clue has been organised so that Robin has a potentially misleading capital thanks to being at the start of the sentence (the convention is that you can’t capitalise a word which wouldn’t normally have one, in the middle of a sentence, say, just to pretend that it’s a proper noun).
23 ASHLAR – ASH(tree), LARK. Possibly the only obscure bit of vocab in this puzzle.
24 SWORD DANCE – another cryptic def.
27 FOREARMS – two meanings; as in forewarned is forearmed, and “part of one’s arms”.
32 INTRANSITIVE – IN TRANSIT, I’VE(=”the writer’s”).
34 SHEARWATERS – as an example of not looking before you leap, I confidently wrote in WHEATEATERS, congratulating myself on spotting the non-existent anagram so quickly.
37 CHANGE GEAR – double def.
39 TRAINLOAD – another cryptic def.
41 WAR PAINT – WARP AIN’T.
46 HECTOR – specifically the son of King Priam of Troy, HE, CT., O.R.
48 ROOKS – CROOKS.
49 ON TAP – i.e. Hot and Cold.
51 SIDES – IDE, the setter’s favourite fish, on board ship i.e. in S.S. The definition wasn’t immediately obvious to me, but I took it to refer to the quantity of writing on a piece of paper, which could be expressed as “lines” or “sides”.

17 comments on “Times Jumbo 1102”

  1. 34 mins. FOREARMS was my LOI and I didn’t think it was the best of clues, and as Tim pointed out the clue for NONAGENARIAN just seems plain wrong, but it had to be the answer so it went in. I didn’t make any other notes, but I see what Tim means about the CDs. An enjoyable puzzle for all that.
  2. Yes I enjoyed this too so didn’t complain too much about 6dn which is surely wrong. Also manfully suppressed the shudder that runs through me, every time I see castle = rook.

    I take the point about sons in law but if I caught sight of a prospective s-i-law who was older than me, I should definitely have something to say about it

    Re 51dn I took sides to be as in side lines, per rugby or whatever

    Not sure it is necessary to point out all the possibly UK-specific words? It sounds a bit like a complaint, but the setter has a perfect right to use such, in a London newspaper, after all; if there is any overseas floundering, no doubt they will point it out, and anyway they have only to come here to receive enlightenment 🙂

    1. I’m definitely not complaining, Jerry, just trying to pre-empt what is likely to be obscure – as the preamble says, experience suggests there are two main reasons someone is likely to seek enlightenment here, i.e. he or she is a) relatively new to these puzzles or b) one of the overseas contingent. That being the case, I don’t think it does any harm to wonder out loud which terms might be especially unfamiliar to either of those groups…
        1. Point taken, but I do it so explicitly in the Jumbo blogs, and not in my Tuesday slots, because I get the impression that the proportion of interested overseas solvers is far higher for the former than the latter (possibly as a result of where the different puzzles are syndicated). In so far as there is any great interest at all, of course; we few, we happy few, we Jumbo bloggers and commenters…
          1. Like the club monthly, doing the jumbo blogs is a labour of love; and is appreciated by the cognoscenti 🙂
  3. Put 6D in from the checkers and realising that the clue was something to do with Roman numerals, but didn’t notice the apparent error. Describing a RASTAFARIAN as following an African religion seemed odd at the time (both the “African” and “religion” parts) but the answer couldn’t be anything else and the clue had a decent surface regardless. DEWBERRY is inextricably linked with the Body Shop for me too. FOREARMS my LOI after a couple of minutes’ struggle to come up with something better.
  4. As a non-UK solver,got the above easily as the wordplay was clear.For the second one,Robin was a dead giveaway though I’ve never heard of it after googling.
    C.ONG’ARA,
    KENYA.
  5. 34:53 for me. I didn’t notice the error in 6dn: like mohn2 I just put it in from the checkers and twigging that it was something to do with Roman numerals. Fortunately I never had a Latin teacher to disappoint.
    1. “Not all of the members” = part of limbs = FOREARMS (noun)
      “getting” is just padding to connect the two definitions
      “kits out for battle” = prepares weapons in advance = FOREARMS (verb)
  7. The setter (mercifully anonymous) apologises profusely for making XL equal to ninety in the desperate attempt to limit the number of anagrams and has sent the crossword editor an alternative clue for future reference.
    1. On behalf of the blogging community, thank you for that, though when all is said and done, I’m sure it didn’t utterly spoil anyone’s weekend 🙂
  8. I would also like to apologise, as I solved this puzzle twice over and still didn’t spot it.
    I suspect I was fooled by the “xc” in “excel”

    RR

    1. Possibly remembering an echo of a puzzle from February, where we had:

      Figure in excess, capped? (6)

  9. Clever setter! (I thought)
    Apologies for being so late on this one – I was abroad at the time. Since we were aller-ing so much en francais in Jumbo 1102, I thought the definition was “battle”, and the rest clued a translation of Wellington’s battle of Quatre Bras!
    From Alicycle

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