Notes for Azed 2,728

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 2,728 Plain

Difficulty rating: (3 / 5)

There was certainly a lot of variety in this puzzle, which I felt that Azed had enjoyed putting together. I felt that it reached at least the middle of the difficulty range, and probably nudged a little above. I could have included notes on quite a number of the clues, but I have limited myself to the ‘standard’ 8+8, so if there are any that I have missed out which you feel warrant comment then please let me know.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to look not at a clue but at the grid, where we have a feature which is rare in a plain Azed – at the NW and SE corners there are fully-checked lights of four letters. The Ximenean guidelines state that there should be no unchecked letters in a 3-letter entry, one ‘unch’ in entries of 4 and 5 letters, one or two in 6- and 7- letter entries, two or three in 8 letter entries, and no more than a third of the letters unchecked in entries of 9 or more letters. The ‘allowance’ of three unches in an eight-letter entry is something of an anomaly (more than a third of letters unchecked), and Azed has a self-imposed limit of two unches for such entries.

The upper limits are strictly  applied by editors, so if you are setting a barred puzzle make sure that the above guidelines are observed and there are (for instance) no five-letter grid entries with two (or more) unchecked letters; the rule is relaxed slightly in themed puzzles where there are unclued entries or a perimeter message – letters of clued entries that intersect with these are counted as ‘checked’, but be mindful when writing clues for such entries that the solver will have less help than usual from crossers.

The lower limits are less important, although a large number of fully checked entries is normally frowned upon, simply because the solver can complete the puzzle without solving them. As Azed noted after unwittingly producing a puzzle containing 5- and 6-letter entries with no unches, “I believe in making you solve every clue, the only exception being 3-letter words, which I don’t include very often anyway.” On another occasion, he remarked, “The number of unchecked letters should be neither too great (unfair to solvers) nor too small (unfair to Azed!)”

Across

1a Sexy topper builds to this (4)
The formal name for a ‘topper’ is made up of the letters TO (from the clue) followed by the solution (‘this’).

5a 2’s dreadful with maths usually, as before (8)
An anagram (‘dreadful’) of the word represented by the figure ‘2’ and MATHS. The answer (perhaps more like ‘to a considerable degree’ than ‘usually’, but you can see why Azed has eschewed the Chambers definitions) was in common use during the 17th century (Henry More: “That State‥being ????-???? supported by the Supreme Power of their Two Consuls.”) but unlike its ‘lesser degree’ brother it subsequently fell into neglect.

12a Foreign station in painting recalled sultan’s palace (8)
When you see ‘foreign’ in an Azed clue there’s a high probability that it will equate to ‘French’ (although ‘German’ is also a possibility), and here it is the French word for a station which must be put inside a four-letter word for a particular type of painting before the whole lot is reversed (‘recalled’).

13a Short stalk containing new appendage (8)
One of those clues where the construction (one word containing the usual abbreviation for ‘new’, thus producing another word) is easy to work out, but identifying the words themselves is trickier. The seven-letter one is derived from the Latin for ‘a little foot’.

14a Profitable but ineffectual head dismissed (5)
A six-letter word meaning ‘ineffectual’ or ‘pointless’ has its first letter removed (‘head dismissed’).

15a Country minnie will thus treat bairn (5)
I don’t remember coming across ‘minnie’ before, a familiar term for a mother in Scotland and the north of England. It’s origins are unclear, but there is a suggestion that it might be a childish version of ‘mammy’. As Burns has it, “My minnie does constantly deave [pester] me, And bids me beware o’ young men.”

27a Jaws of a glutton encountered as Shakespearean figure (6)
A charade of two three-letter words, the first for the ‘ jaws or gullet of a voracious animal or (facetious) person’ and the second a crossword regular for ‘encountered’, which produces a word originally applied to a false god, thence an idol, and subsequently a dressed-up figure, a doll or a puppet. This isn’t actually the spelling found in Shakespeare, but Chambers doesn’t make that clear.

28a Beethoven’s this in hint clued here (5)
A trademark Azed clue – if you take the letter of BEETHOVEN indicated by the answer (‘this’) and put it inside an anagram (‘clued’) of HINT, then you will arrive at the answer.

Down

1d Like computer-generated numbers, changing poem’s date around (12)
An anagram (‘changing’) of POEMS, the usual abbreviation for ‘date’, and AROUND results in a term which most programmers would probably like to think referred to certain computer-generated numbers rather than all of them.

6d Smelly Italian dish not swallowed by pa (5)
The wordplay involves removing the letters PA from the outside of a word for an Italian porridge, but I am very doubtful about ‘not swallowed by’ indicating such a manoeuvre. If you want to tell the solver to strip a group of letters from the outside of a word using a negative, the verb surely has to refer to the structure of the word itself, so ‘not fringed by’ would be fine while ‘not held by’ would not – ‘A not swallowed by B’ doesn’t suggest that B should be removed from the outside of A, simply that it shouldn’t be put around it.

8d Act as hunt assistant, creating confusion among the gorse (6, 2 words)
The ‘confusion’ is a two-letter word frequently spotted in cryptic puzzles which can also be spelt with three letters; this two-letter combination can also be indicated by ‘irrational’ or ‘transcendental’. It is contained by (‘among’) a word for gorse or furze, the result being a (4,2) compound verb.

10d On each side island reveals fish (5)
When the score in a tennis game reaches 15-15, the umpire will have recourse to the word here meaning ‘on each side’. When followed by a two-letter abbreviation for ‘island’, it produces the name given to a type of shad which travels up rivers to spawn and was once abundant in the river Severn. Apparently, “1776 to 1822 was the golden era of the Severn shad. They were plentiful and recognised as a superior commodity across the kingdom. Many books of this time referred to the Severn shad being without equal. By 1776 reference appeared of the shad harvest being sent to London and not just for royalty, but the new wealthy inhabitants. There is also a single reference in 1781 of them being ready stewed, put in barrels and sent to the Empress of Russia.” The industrial revolution, which led to the construction of weirs to facilitate navigation, was bad news for these ‘Mothers of Herring’. By 1844 they had disappeared from most of the freshwater Severn, although to this day a few are still to be found in the Severn below Worcester, returning each year from the Severn Estuary to spawn.

22d Picador e.g. in singular set of old dances (6)
A seven-letter name for a set of quadrilles which became popular in the early 19th century (and in which Joyce Grenfell was led by Mrs Tiverton) is turned into a (non-existent) singular, thus forming the name given to the sort of person exemplified by a picador (who, contrary to the impression which you might have gained from Flanders and Swann’s Los Olividados), does not have a pick of sharpened wood which he “holds at arm’s length and prods into the olive, trying to determine whether the stone runs true up and down, or whether it is set at an angle, favouring one side, the dreaded oliva revoltosa.”

23d It coats e.g. blood vessel eventually with adult replacing how it ends (6)
A (2,4) expression meaning ‘eventually’ has the usual abbreviation for ‘adult’ replacing its last letter (‘how it ends’).

24d Like a whistle in sound suggesting a trumpeter? (6)
The answer (with its mildly cryptic avian definition) is a homophone for the epithet applied to a certain type of whistle or flute with a side-plunger to vary the pitch, being the name of a US river which features both in ‘The Old Folks at Home‘ and an Al Jolson song (“I give the world to be / Among the folks in D-I-X-I- / Even though my mammy’s / Waiting for me, / Praying for me”).

25d What’s just above sends me, a spume whipped up (6)
An anagram (‘whipped up’) of A SPUME leads to the name given to a hobgoblin or spectre supposedly sent by…the person whose name appears directly above in the grid (“What’s just above me”).

(definitions are underlined)