May Update

The site has been up and running for three months now, and over the last few weeks I’ve been pleased to see a steady increase in the number of visitors – John Tozer and Derek Harrison kindly gave publicity to the article about the characters in Last Bus to Woodstock, which was gratifying. However, I had been hoping to get a bit more feedback (whether positive or negative) from visitors in order to help me shape the future content of the site. Actually, I’ll rephrase that – I was hoping to get more feedback from crossword aficionados rather than (i) people who think that I will be interested in links to healthy eating sites (they clearly don’t know me at all) or (ii) people who apparently believe that I am fluent in Chinese (just for their reference, I am not). So far the level of contributions to the site and instances of volunteering to help judge the Superclue competitions have also been disappointing, but I’m prepared to wait! Be assured that anything submitted via the content submission forms on the site or by email will not be immediately visible to other visitors; comments will appear immediately, but only if the submitter has already had a comment approved (a comment will only be rejected if it is spam or if it contravenes the site guidelines – not because we don’t agree with the content!).

I was somewhat disappointed by the results of Azed competition 2,338 (TRUMP) – strangely enough, the results rarely live up to my expectations (incidentally, and not for the first time, I thought that Richard Heald’s clue was the pick of the bunch) – but with gritted teeth I forced myself to review the published clues for potential additions to the Clinical Data tables, supplementing any changes that I had myself identified during the month. This has led to the inclusion of the following:

• primes/priming/primed (vt, insertion indicator, definition ‘to charge, fill’)
• flayed (pap, first+last letter selection indicator, definition ‘having had the skin stripped off’)
• fluffs/fluffing/fluffed (vi/vt, anagram indicator, definition ‘to bungle’)
• lets slip/letting slip/let slip (vt, expulsion indicator, definition ‘to allow to escape through carelessness’)
• oddball (adj, anagram indicator, def ‘eccentric’)

No entries have been removed from the lists this month.

Although it featured in a successful Azed clue, I have not included ‘seat‘ (last letter selection indicator), and won’t do unless it receives support from readers, since I can’t justify it to myself based on any of the meanings ascribed by Chambers/OED. Please use the comment form for this post if you have a view on this, or on any of the other indicators above.