Times Jumbo 932

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Jumbo Cryptic
Even allowing for the fact that at this time of year I usually tackle the weekend puzzles in a leisurely fashion while watching cricket, a time of nearly 1 hour 20 suggests this was the toughest Jumbo I’ve encountered for some time.

With Jumbos I generally confine myself to discussion of answers which I think might be a) less straightforward for inexperienced or non-UK based solvers, or b) especially elegant / questionable. However, as always, if a particular clue is not discussed, please feel free to raise it in comments for explanation or discussion.

Across
4 BRINDLE – bitteN in BRIDLE; all sorts of animals can have this colouring, though I think I had Gerard Manley Hopkins at the back of my mind (“Glory be to God for dappled things / For skies of couple color as a brindled cow”).
13 DEDICATED – [DI + CAT (of nine tails)] in DEED.
14 NO OIL PANTING =”KNOW” OIL PAINTING.
15 NIGELLA – [E.G. in ALL IN] all rev. Re: pre-emptive comment below, I read this as a simple (if rather weak) definition, i.e. Nigella = a woman. In fairness, though, the wordplay is unambiguous, and with checking letters N_G_L_A, I don’t think many people will have left this incomplete…
16 MEASURE – double def. I’m assuming from the clue that it’s commonplace in an American bar to ask for, say, “a measure of Scotch”, but have never been there to observe.
17 ARUNDEL – RUN (spell, as in “having a good run of fine weather”) in LEDA(rev.) By various mediaeval intrigues, Arundel Castle (resolutely in Sussex) is the seat of the Dukes of Norfolk.
21 SANG – Name in SAGa.
23 GENTEELLY – GEN + [English in TELLY].
28 TOASTING FORK – (TAKINGSORTOF)*; for the benefit of North American solvers, the reference is obviously to this sort of muffin, and not this sort of muffin.
30 SINGLES BAR – SINGLE + buS + BAR. Elegant surface, very misleading.
33 PASTEBOARD – double def.; the thin cardboard used for business cards etc., and the light trestle table used by decorators when pasting wallpaper.
34 PREMIUM BONDS – (MODERNPUBSIM)*; in the UK, government bonds which instead of paying uniform interest, pay a return in the form of randomly allocated cash prizes.
37 PARKIN – PARKINg. Afraid this attempt to disguise the car by use of an extra food reference seemed awkward and laboured to me.
42 EXPO – EXPOnent. Power as in “to the power of n“, mathematically; an Expo (this time being short for Exposition) is what used to be called a World’s Fair.
43 CENTRAL RESERVATION – (IVELEARNTATCORNERS)*; nice long anagram. Wikipedia tells me that this would be called something else in North America or the Antipodes.
46 MAE WEST – EWE in MAST (acorns, basically). The WWII lifejacket was so nicknamed after its own similarly pneumatic qualities.
47 CAIRENE – A/C(rev.) + IRENE. I had never thought what the inhabitants of Cairo might be formally called, but the wordplay and checkers made it a pretty safe guess.
48 SIGHTLY – SlIGHTLY. “Less length” = without L.
50 CREDIT SQUEEZE – CREDIT(believe) + SQUEEZE(press) gives us what might have been, until a few years ago, an obscure technical term known only to economists.
52 ESTAMINET – MINE in ESTATe. This seemed to me to be what you might call a “bar crossword word”, derived solely from wordplay.
 
Down
1 RIDING LIGHT – double def.; being a total landlubber, I was glad of the very obvious wordplay.
2 PI-DOG – DO (as in “you’ve been done like a kipper, my son”) in PIG.
3 LOCAL ANAESTHETIC – once you identify that “number” is “something that numbs”, you realise the clue is a convoluted way of saying “something that would be applied to someone in an operation in order to partially deaden their response without rendering them unconscious”.
4 BE TOAST – as the bad guys say in Die Hard, “The quarterback is toast”….
5 INDEMNITY – IN + DEMocrat + NItTY.
6 DUN LAOGHAIRE – (HEARING A LOUD)*. This brought back adolescent musical memories, as I immediately remembered that the ‘B’ side of Like Clockwork by the Boomtown Rats was a tribute to their hometown called “D.U.N L.A.O.G.H.A.I.R.E” (being the answer to the question “How do you spell Dun Laoghaire?”).
7 ELOQUENTLY – LO in frEQUENTLY.
8 HALVE – Very in HALE.
9 PEASANTS – [English AS] in PANTS. Not sure when “pants” moved from obscure slang to Times crossword material, but I guess the 2001 Comic Relief campaign (slogan: “Say Pants to Poverty”) helped make it mainstream.
11 THIRD RATE – (TRADERHIT)*.
19 KENYANS – (NAY)rev. in KENS (as in “D’ye ken John Peel?”).
22 ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE – double def.
24 LONG ON – LON(D/G)ON with Good instead of Duke. The obligatory cricket reference, as the Lord in question is Thomas (if it helps anyone, long on is roughly equivalent to a left fielder in baseball).
27 AGOUTI – GOUT in A1.
29 FORFEIT – FeeblE in FOR IT.
31 BENGALI – BEiNG + A LIfe.
32 PRO-MARKETEER – (MAKEREPORTER)*; this sort of phrase would sound a little dated in the age of Europhiles and Eurosceptics, since it brings to mind the days when what we now call the EU was generally known as the Common Market.
35 SWEENEY TODD – (ENDOWEDSTYlE)*.
41 JETTISON – JET(black) + [SO in TIN(money)].
44 RESUMES – double def. (though obviously in a crossword format one can’t have the necessary acute accent for the second of them).
45 MEDIUM – (IDE)rev. in MUM. The ide is one of those odd creatures which appears far more often in crosswords than in normal life.
47 COUNT – triple def.
49 TAIGA =”TIGER”. Cue Monty Python fans thinking to themselves “A tiger? In Africa?“

14 comments on “Times Jumbo 932”

    1. EXPO short for EXPOsition, but also half of EXPOnent (mathematical power such as square,cube).
      JET (=black) plus SO in TIN (=money).
  2. This just seems to be a woman’s name defined by “Woman” (with EG inside ALL IN backwards) – a bit like have CUTHBERT as an answer and cluing it as “man”. Or, is there any hint here of Nigella damascena, otherwise known as ragged lady? “run ragged” = “extremely tired”…
    1. topicaltim says “In fairness, though, the wordplay is unambiguous, and with checking letters N_G_L_A, I don’t think many people will have left this incomplete…”

      That is not the point. In a Times crossword it is not sufficient for the wordplay to be unambiguous. Putting in a feminine forename defined by “Woman” is, in my opinion, just poor grid construction combined with poor clue writing. This could have been circumvented in a number of ways – for example, by referring to the plant genus Nigella or to Nigella Lawson.

  3. I had the same feeling as Tim as to difficulty, until I encountered 934. As an American who has hung out in more than his share of American bars, I can assure you that I’ve never heard anyone speak of a measure of anything; 16ac was one of my 3 or 4 LOIs (LOsI?), along with PARKIN and DUN LAOGHAIRE, neither of which I’d heard of and both of which required aids. Wasn’t there a brouhaha recently over TAIGA?
  5. Please could you provide the solution to 36across and 39 down.

    (By the way Hopscotch – Bound = Hop; and, to scotch = put and end to, together make the game.)

    1. I assume you mean 36D and 39A 🙂

      36D SLEAZINESS – S(on) + E(cstasy) inside LAZINESS.

      39A BEDLAM – BED (plot) + LAM (strike).

  6. 25:58 for me. A pleasant, reasonably straightforward puzzle.

    I should just like to state that I have absolutely no objection to the use of “woman” for NIGELLA. I’m not keen on “Girl’s name” in the T2 puzzle, but I simply don’t see the problem in a cryptic where the wordplay makes the answer unequivocal.

    1. What about when ‘woman’ or ‘girl’ is part of the clue, rather than the definition, so that you have to figure out whether ‘girl returns’ is OGRAM or YMA or SSEB or …?
      1. Fine by me! Certainly no worse than “flower returns” (with all those rivers as well) or “animal returns”.

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