It's been a while since we've spotted the same word in different puzzles in the same week. So it's cheering to note that while Quixote in Monday's Independent used grisly imagery …
13ac Animal seen in a road getting run over (5)
… to elicit a LLAMA, Thursday's Times took an ecclesiastical route …
24ac Priest on left, a woolly customer (5)
… to another LLAMA. The plural is LLAMAS and don't let anyone tell you otherwise, and the word apparently comes from that of a different woolly mammal, the OVEJA, once Portuguese for "sheep".
The Oxford English Dictionary has 1,200 "newly revised and updated" words and phrases, including DEBT TRAP, METABOLIC SYNDROME and CLUDGIE. But there is no entry yet for the phrase clued by Phi in Friday's Independent …
3d/10ac Difficulty getting child to speak limiting onset of language? That's a minor inconvenience (5,5,7)
...that is, FIRST WORLD PROBLEM. It does indeed mean "a minor inconvenience" – since when has Phi made mistakes? – but it also comes with a bundle of ticklish assumptions and connotations which would make for an unwieldy definition in a cryptic clue. The phenomenon is summarised by remarks attributed to comedian Louis CK (though I can't find the routine):
That's where your life is amazing, so you just make up shit to be upset about. People in other countries have real problems. Like: 'Oh shit, they're cutting all our heads off, today!'
"Somewhere around the world someone would love to have my first-world problems," tutted Matthew Good in 1995 in the track Omissions of the Omen, which gives a sense of the "there but for fortune" / "consider yourself lucky" undertone to the phrase. As a hashtag, #firstworldproblem allows tweeters to complain about the temperature or frothiness of their babyccino, while showing that they acknowledge that there are others less fortunate, while still going on about their response to the semi-skimmed. That's one problem with the phrase: the self-conscious, self-defeating air. It also has an undertone of fatalism; worse, as Nigerian-American commentator Teju Cole points out, it betrays an assumption about the grim homogeneity of the third world:
Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems.
Better perhaps to use the alternative hashtag or phrase that assumes nothing about the rest of the world and is the subject of this week's challenge: reader, how would you clue WHITE WHINE?
Thanks for your clues for PRISM. Who knew that a colossal civil liberties breach could lead to such blue clueing? I'm thinking of JollySwagman's "Interesting figure but coy about sex initially" and gleety's I-won't-parse-it-here "Quiet pleasure fundamentally has point: it reveals the nature of things".
The runners-up are andyknott's appostite acrostic "origin of polychromatic radiation, if supplied multiwavelength sources" and steveran's elegant "prudish about small see-through item"; the winner is Ambush's audacious but fair "Cameron took knighted man from behind, hung from a chandelier". Kudos to Ambush – please leave this week's entries and your pick of the broadsheet cryptics below.
Clue of the Week
4d When agitated, he got spiteful, no mistake! (4,2,3,6)
… for SLIP OF THE TONGUE. Lapsus linguaes all round!