Times Jumbo 965 (11 Feb 2012) – Stretching my vocabulary

Solving time: Just over 2 hours – with one use of aids.

I didn’t find much to enjoy in this puzzle. There were a lot of words I didn’t know – REPINE, COLZA, RARA AVIS, GREENEYES, CRACK WILLOW, KAROO, UNDINE, DISTRAINT, DISTRAIT & NAXOS. My progress was generally slow, particularly towards the end. I eventually had to resort to aids for DISTRAINT which seemed a particularly unfair clue. There probably were clues that I liked, but by the time I’d clawed my way to the end, my memory of them had been entirely overshadowed by the ones I didn’t.

cd = cryptic def., dd = double def., rev = reversal, homophones are written in quotes, anagrams as (–)*, and removals like this

Across
1 S + LOW + COACH – ‘trailer’ is the definition, as in someone who trails.
6 SALEM = STEAM (engine driver) with TEA replaced by ALE. Salem is the State capital of Oregon
9 MAFIOSI = (IS A MOtIF)*
13 OPERA – hidden in party-poOPER Attacking – Falstaff is an opera by Giuseppe Verdi
14 REEL OFF – dd – Stagger away / Say without apparent effort
15 MET + ROLAND – Roland was an 8th-century Frankish knight under Charlemagne. His life inspired the fairy tale ‘Childe Rowland’, which in turn inspired Robert Browning’s ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, which itself inturn inspired Stephen King’s ‘Dark Tower’ series of books.
16 CHUCKING OUT = CHUCK + IN/OUT about buildinG
17 GRANITEWARE = EG rev about (RAINWATER)*
18 MADRID = MAID about DiRt
19 KNAPSACK = K + SACK about NAP
21 RE + PINE
25 NEEDLING = (IN LEGEND)*
26 DEAD IN THE WATER – dd – In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet’s bride-to-be Ophelia fell from a willow tree into a brook and drowned.
28 PAPA + William
29 I + RISES
30 DAISY ROOTS – cd – Cockney rhyming slang for boots, which cover plates of meat, rhyming slang for feet. Neither ‘ones and twos’ (shoes) nor ‘almond rocks’ (socks) nor even ‘Roman candles’ (sandals) fitted.
33 LA ROCHELLE = (LOCAL HERo)* in LevantinE – one of the main French ports on the Bay of Biscay
35 A + T(H)OME – As a noun, an ‘at-home’ is a reception held at one’s own house
36 CO + L + Z + A – I hadn’t heard of colza oil, but it seemed more likely than colya or colxa. It’s similar to rapeseed oil and used as a mechanical lubricant
38 THERMODYNAMICS = AM in (CHEMISTRY DON)*
40 RARA AVIS = RA x2 + SIVA rev – My last one in. Not a phrase I’d come across before, but I knew both the deities involved, so I could deduce it from the wordplay.
42 S(TRAD)S – Antonio Stradivari was probably Cremona’s most famous subject.
43 SPECIe + MEN
44 A + BROAD
47 AGENT ORANGE = (NOTE)* in A GRANGE – DOD (Definition of the Day) for ‘Nasty American stripper’
50 THE THIRD MAN – dd – Carol Reed’s film-noir thriller is currently #68 on the IMDb to 250. Abel was the third man after Adam & Cain, of course.
52 MAIDENISH = (I + HAS DENIM)*
53 Opposition + RATION
54 ANNE + X
55 COAL TIT = (TAIL)* in COT
56 W OR SE
57 GREENEYES – dd – I didn’t know the bottom-dwelling fish but the G & Y checkers only left one real possibility
Down
1 STOIC = STICk about O
2 ONE HUNDRED PER CENT = (PRUDENCE ENTHRONED)*
3 CRACK WILLOW = (K + WILL) in CRACOW – Cracow, an alternate spelling of Kraków, is Poland’s second largest city behind the capital. At the time I struggled to think beyond Warsaw, Gdansk & Lodz. I didn’t know the tree so that wasn’t much help.
4 ARRAN + settlemenT
5 HOEDOWNS = (WHO’S DONE)*
6 SH + OTTO + PIECES
7 LIFE + GUARDS – ‘porridge’ is UK slang for time spent in prison, hence the classic Ronnie Barker sitcom of the same name. ‘A lot of porridge’ would therefore be LIFE.
8 MAM(B)A
9 MATRIARCH = MARCH about TRIAl
10 FLOWER POWER – cd – a slight twist on the ‘flower’ = ‘river’ crossword cliche
11 OS + AKA
12 IN + DEED
18 MANIPULATE = TensE after UP rev in MANILA
20 KANGAROO = rANG in KAROO – Another word I didn’t know, the Karoo region of southern Africa.
22 NOT FOR LOVE OR MONEY = (RELY ON VOTE OF MORON)*
23 UNDINE – hidden in foUND IN Egg – A boyhood fascination with Dungeons & Dragons gave me a fairly encyclopaedic knowledge of fabulous creatures, but this water nymph was unknown to me. I suspect it’s probably quite obscure. Still, you can’t go far wrong with a hidden word.
24 TRESPASSED = DESERT about SAPS all rev
27 MIDLANDS = MINDS about (LAD)*
31 SEESAW = SEE + WAS rev
32 STOCK-IN-TRADE = STOCKADE about dIgNiTaRy
34 COM(PART)MENT
36 CHAMBER + LA + IN – Neville Chamberlain was Prime Minister at the outbreak of the Second World War, and has been much criticised for his apparent failure to adequately prepare the country for the upcoming conflict.
37 AMPERE-HOUR = AMOUR about (HERE + P) rev – a unit of electric charge equal to 3600 Coulombs
39 DISTRAINT = N in DISTRAIT – Having never heard of either DISTRAIT (distracted through anxiety) or DISTRAINT (seizure of property as security against an outstanding debt) this was ungettable short of outright guessing. I wanted to be sure of a correct solution for blogging purposes, so I resorted to aids for it.
41 S(EVER)ING
45 TARMAC = T + CAMRA rev – CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, is the largest single-issue consumer group in the UK.
46 CHANGE – dd
48 EVITA = nATIVE rev
49 NOHOW = “KNOW-HOW”
51 NAXOS = NATO’S with T changed to X. I didn’t like this clue – the X is unclued, ‘alliance’ is a very vague definition of NATO, and Naxos itself is a fairly obscure Greek island.

3 comments on “Times Jumbo 965 (11 Feb 2012) – Stretching my vocabulary”

  1. 85′, but one wrong; I’m happy to find out that it was rhyming slang (30ac). You mean 2d World War, no? for Chamberlain. I knew UNDINE as ‘ondine’, a variant, having read the Giraudoux play by that name. There is also a (fortunately very rare) breathing disorder called Ondine’s Curse, which pretty much involves not breathing while asleep, and dying.
  2. 28:10 for me, with COLZA and CRACK WILLOW both unfamiliar.

    NAXOS is well known to members of the Musical Mafia from Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos. And there it was again on Thursday (No. 25,093). And surely “alliance” has come up for NATO a few times in the past, e.g. in No. 24,753 (22 January 2011): “An alliance with the French, in France (7)” (answer ANATOLE).

Comments are closed.