Notes for Azed 2,721

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible, by email.

Azed 2,721 Plain

Difficulty rating: (3 / 5)

I started off at the gallop on this one, thinking that it was on course for a difficulty rating of no more than 1.5, but by the time the last letter was entered I had adjusted that upwards significantly. It’s tricky to assess the toughness of a puzzle like this with several long anagrams leading to unfamiliar words, since an anagram solver will make short work of them, but I felt that overall this puzzle reached at least the middle of the range. In the light of the faulty clue (which I didn’t originally notice) and the comments of other solvers, I have raised the mark above the mid-point.  I didn’t feel that it was one of Azed’s very best, but it was an enjoyable solve nonetheless, and featured two old favourites, ‘mouse’ at 15a and ‘pud’ at 4d.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to look at clue 25a, “The plash of oars I love, easy on the ears (6)”, where an anagram of OARS I is followed by the single letter representing ‘love’ in sports such as tennis. An area where I think it’s fair to say there is an almost complete lack of agreement among setters is the use of redundant articles (a/an/the) in clues. It is generally accepted that the hiding place in a ‘hidden’ clue can contain no unnecessary words except articles, so ‘Fellow in a French apartment’ for CHAP is ok, but beyond that it’s as clear as a particularly opaque mud. There’s no problem with ‘Argue about a boy’ for REASON [RE A SON], because the ‘a’ in the clue carries across into the answer, but what about ‘A builder in stone, a mother, and a male child’ for MASON {MA SON]? Sometimes the varying syntax of the surface and cryptic readings means that an article has to be omitted, but on many occasions the inclusion of an article improves the surface reading without affecting the grammar of the wordplay. I think that the modern trend is towards brevity, and the exclusion of redundant indefinite articles – I favour this approach because it also improves accuracy. There is usually less of an issue with the definite article, because…well, it’s definite. ‘The end of summer’ seems absolutely fine for R, as it is indeed the last letter of summer. But what about the clue here, and that ‘The’ at the start? I don’t like it at all – it suggests that there is only one possibility for the result of the rearrangement, when in fact there are 120 of them.

Across

7a Poet’s company, sad excluded from romantic enterprising (4)
The consecutive letters SAD are removed (‘excluded’) from a seven-letter word for romantic enterprising.

10a Daughter to bring up, I face gloom as of old (10)
A 1+4+1+4 charade of an abbreviation, a word meaning ‘to bring up’, the letter I (from the clue), and a word that might seem slightly counterintuitive as a synonym for ‘face’, but as verbs they can both mean ‘to point towards’. The answer is one of four similar words given by Chambers as ‘all Spenser’, but he can legitimately claim responsibility for only three of them, the other being the standard qualitative noun derived from the adjective.

13a Fish obtained on ship’s bow (4)
A three-letter word for ‘obtained’ follows (‘on’) the first letter (‘bow’) of ‘ship’.

14a Expression from arbitrator and what he administers? (6)
The arbitrator is a three-letter informal term associated with sports such as football, while ‘what he administers’ is a word taken into the English language directly from Latin and meaning ‘law’.

15a Mouse producing squeak between King and Queen? (6)
An Azed favourite is ‘mouse’ in the sense of a black eye (although I tend to think of it more as the sort of swelling that appears around a boxer’s eye and which will have the trainer reaching for the ice-cold metal plate which they will apply to it during the intervals between rounds). The wordplay here has the chess-and-cards abbreviation for ‘king’ and the cipher of Queen Elizabeth being placed either side of the sort of squeak that in The Beano would have been emitted by Walter the Softy after discovering a mouse (of the rodent variety) that Dennis the Menace had placed in his desk, satchel etc.

17a Purse firm becomes cast if this (4)
When you see ‘if this’ at the end of an Azed clue for a four-letter entry, there’s a strong likelihood that the answer is going to be ‘xISy’, where one word becomes another ‘if x is y’. Sometimes both the ‘before’ and ‘after’ words are on view in the clue, but here you have to first find a suitable synonym for ‘firm’ (as a dye or a boat might be) that differs by one letter from CAST.

33a Recognizes what’s broadcast, start to finish (4)
The first two words of the wordplay in this clue need to be interpreted as something like “What’s another word for ‘broadcast’?” The first letter of that word then needs to be moved to the end (‘start to finish’).

34a To prepare e.g. fish in kitchen, see e.g. Sam as cutting back here and there (7)
A five-letter word for something of which Sam is an example, as is Vanya, has the letters of AS (from the clue) inserted (‘cutting’) separately (‘here and there’) and in reverse order (‘back’).

Down

1d Flank is replacing one for groin (5)
I had carelessly failed to check the meaning of FLISK in Chambers, and on this occasion – my thanks to the correspondents who have pointed out the issue – my faith in Azed was misplaced, because I would have found no confirmation that it had any connection with groins. Here in fact we have a clue unique in the history of this blog in that there is no definition to underline because…there is no definition in the clue. FLANK with IS replacing AN is FLISK, but the word that means ‘groin’ is not FLISK but LISK. It isn’t a clue for LISK either – that would have to be ‘Lank is replacing one for groin’, which makes no sense. One correspondent has suggested that groin³ in Chambers could just about equate to FLISK (with the aid of a following wind and rose-tinted spectacles), but the fact that LISK answers the ‘groin’ perfectly strongly suggests to me that it’s just a faulty clue.

I can entirely understand why Azed would have given up on a wordplay involving LISK – I certainly couldn’t work it into anything that was close to satisfactory. My best alternative clue so far is “Scots dance tango, avoiding kilts abandoned after foxtrot”. I never said it was good.

4d Vintage pud that could provide stuffing for beanfeast (5)
If I see a pud, I generally eat it, but when I see one in an Azed clue I immediately think ‘fist’. To be fair, I’m not sure I would be so keen on eating a pud that was described as ‘vintage’, here included because the answer is a Shakespearean word, the result of rearranging (implied by ‘could’) five consecutive letters within (‘stuffing for’) BEANFEAST. I had assumed that they were the letters right in the middle of the word, but as a correspondent has kindly pointed out, they aren’t – this strikes me as being a bit weak.

5d Carriage support has enough power to drag behind (8)
A charade of a three-letter word meaning ‘has enough power to’ and a five-letter word meaning ‘[to] drag behind’.

7d Head of cuisine, male preferred to female? (4)
An &lit of a pretty basic kind, where the first letter (‘head’) of ‘cuisine’ and a two-letter word for a male are placed above (‘preferred to’) the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘female’, and the whole clue provides a definition, or at least an indication, of the answer.

9d Examiners led astray about leaving out less PT (7)
An anagram (‘astray’) of LED contains (‘about’) a six-letter preposition meaning ‘leaving out’ from which the consecutive letters PT have been omitted (‘less PT’).

16d Typical of early bishop, mounting funeral with Gaelic John (8)
A five-letter word for ‘a Maori ceremony of mourning, a funeral’ which was unfamiliar to me but will, I’m sure, have caused occasional commenter Maggie no problems, is reversed (‘mounting’) and followed by a three-letter Gaelic form of ‘John’.

20d Loudspeaker to waver with being installed (7)
A six-letter word meaning ‘to waver’ has the usual abbreviation for with inserted (‘installed’). I do feel that the wordplay here requires a comma between ‘waver’ and ‘with’ in order for the setter to be  ‘saying what they mean’.

26d Registers in desks, top removed (5)
My first thought was that a six-letter word for ‘desks’ would be deprived of its first letter, but in fact it is an eight-letter word which must lose the consecutive letters TOP (‘top removed’).

27d This orange is inedible, round and green (5)
The answer is produced from the single letter indicated by ’round’ and a four-letter shade of green (Chambers doesn’t give it on its own with that meaning, but it seems perfectly fair). You might wonder why Azed hasn’t phrased the clue more along the lines of ‘Round green orange, inedible’, but I think that he was trying to indicate that the answer isn’t an orange, rather a word used to describe a particular type of orange, just as an Ogen isn’t a melon and Vera isn’t an aloe.

(definitions are underlined)