Notes for Azed 2,680

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 2,680 Plain

Difficulty rating: (1.5 / 5)

Even with a false start at 1a, I found this a very straightforward solve – plenty of anagrams (twelve) and four ‘hiddens’ helped to ensure steady progress. Another bonus was that most of the obscurities had links to more familiar words.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to look at clue 33a, “Gains yard, feeling very smooth (7)”. A six-letter slang term meaning ‘gains’ or ‘winnings’ is followed by the usual abbreviation for ‘yard’, producing a word meaning ‘soft and smooth’. Just a few days ago, a correspondent (Dr Daniel Price) posted a question on the Feedback page about what he termed the use of ‘divergent definitions’ in a double definition clue, such as in ‘Crash party’ for BASH, where the two meanings are quite different but have evolved from the same root and appear under the same headword in Chambers. Here we have a near relative, the divergent wordplay/definition, the solution appearing under the headword for the six-letter word in the wordplay. I’ve no problem with this sort of thing when the meanings have truly diverged, but here they are quite close and therefore whilst the clue is neither unsound nor unfair it is certainly rather weak.

Across

1a Cup brewed, chat freely to exchange latest news? (7)
I always start a plain puzzle at the beginning, and here I was pleased to be able to quickly and confidently write in CATCHUP. I admit to a a few qualms around the enumeration (I circled the ‘(7)’, thus marking it out for subsequent comment), and would have been happier had the definition been of a noun (which could have been hyphenated) rather than a phrasal verb, but what else could the answer be? However, a C at the start of 1d didn’t feel quite right, and the A at the top of 2d was clearly wrong. I then realized my error, though in my defence the actual answer has nothing to do with exchanging news, relating instead to things being caught up on the wind or suchlike. The definition in Chambers doesn’t make that clear, though, and at least Azed has put a question mark at the end to suggest that the definition could be slightly fanciful. The actual answer served to put me in mind of the short-lived 1970s comedy series The Upchat Line, where John Alderton played Mike Upchat (one of his many pseudonyms), who lived out of a railway station locker and, appropriately, had very much a one-track mind.

11a Rough sound, one stirring in mud? That was river fish (10)
A four-letter ‘rough sound’ (usually applied to utterances, especially ones characteristic of a particular locality) is followed by a single-letter word meaning ‘one’ and an anagram (‘stirring’) of IN MUD.

12a Pastry, its middle roughly left unfinished (7)
The two central letters of PASTRY (ie ‘its middle’) are followed by a six-letter word meaning ‘roughly’ or ‘coarsely’ from which the last letter has been omitted (‘left unfinished’).

13a Ball entering landed back in net (4)
The single letter that resembles a ball in shape is contained by (‘entering’) a reversal (‘back’) of a word meaning ‘landed’, in the sense that a bird might have landed on a branch. In recent times I have only ever seen the word for a net used figuratively and in the plural form, as in ‘I was in the ????? of a particularly tricky Azed and desperately needed another biscuit (or two)’.

18a Stamp collecting – it brought back glimpses of my boyhood somewhere in E.Europe (11)
They say ‘philately will get you nowhere’, and that is true when it comes to this clue – I don’t recall ever coming across the solution here before, and I think I might well have remembered it if I had. It comprises a reversal (‘brought back’) of IT (from the clue), the first letters (‘glimpses’) of MY BOYHOOD, and the name of a country in eastern Europe.

27a Smart thief, one likely to succeed pinching shimmering set (7)
The four-letter word which describes someone who is in line to succeed (eg to an estate) contains an anagram (‘shimmering’) of SET; the ‘smart’ in the definition refers to the Chambers entry for the noun from which is derives, “a particularly clever or spectacular theft”.

Down

1d Verbal jokes, top to bottom, I had not noticed in Milton (6)
A four-letter word for ‘verbal jokes’ has its first letter moved to the end (‘top to bottom’) before the shortened form of ‘I had’ is tacked on the end. The Miltonian word contains an apostrophe, something which Azed tends not to mention in enumerations, particularly if they simply represent the omission of a letter from a single word, as in fo’c’sle.

2d Appoint world leader? Responsibility of No. 9 (5)
An unusual clue, in that the three definitions lead to a two-word phrase, a proper noun, and a hyphenated word. The last of these is defined by Chambers as “the act of throwing the ball into a set scrum”, but from what I saw of the Rugby Union World Cup it seemed to be more about the number 9 (the scrum half) placing the ball at the feet of their own forwards.

5d Part of play (not amateur) including performance pieces moved slowly (5)
A three-letter ‘part of [a] play’ having had the usual abbreviation for ‘amateur’ removed (‘not amateur’) contains the abbreviated term for “a stock of pieces that a person or company is prepared to perform”.

6d Pain when taken in by old dandy, artless crooked politician (6)
A four-letter word for a pain is contained by a five-letter slang meaning of the adjective ‘dandy’, from which the consecutive letters ART have been omitted (‘artless’); I’m not sure why ‘old’ is there, because there is no suggestion in Chambers that the required sense of ‘dandy’ is obsolete. The solution was originally the name given to certain native American chiefs, then (jocularly) to a ‘chief’ of any sort, and then specifically to any one of the twelve high officials in the Tammany Society of New York

9d Reichenbach’s theory, nothing depressingly avoided by ally (5)
The single letter representing ‘nothing’ is followed by an eight-letter word for ‘depressingly’ lacking the consecutive letters ALLY (‘avoided by ally’).

10d He may be seen in Roman units (marching) (5)
The Roman units here are the sort by which their marches were measured, but I suspect that Azed has added the last word to avoid any potential ambiguity with a word sharing the first four letters but ending in an R, and for which ‘running’ would have been appropriate. The defined solution appears in Chambers only in the form of a two-word Latin term for a vainglorious soldier.

19d Layout to do with strong hand makes this difficult (6)
A four-letter word for “the layout of cards” is followed by that familiar piece of commercial jargon for ‘concerning’ or ‘to do with’, the result being a contract in a card game such as solo whist which would be stupid to attempt and well-nigh impossible to fulfil with a strong hand. Incidentally, the ‘layout’ sense seems to be restricted to Chambers – it’s not in OED, and the only reference I can find in the context of card games is to tontine, but there it describes the initial distribution of the ‘chips’, not the cards.

20d Like Sandy’s stubborn mount, no longer sluggish around race’s end (6)
A Shakespearean word meaning ‘sluggish’ containing (‘around’) the last letter of RACE (“race’s end”) produces a Scots adjective (indicated by “Sandy’s”) used to describe a horse which is inclined to stop suddenly and refuse to go on. As the Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopaedia has it:

A horse is ??????? when it stands fast, and will not move for the whip.  

23d What’s confused with goral, emitting e.g. slow roar? (5)
A composite anagram &lit, where the letters of the solution (‘What’) when mixed up (‘confused’) together with GORAL can produce EG SLOW ROAR. The whole clue provides a loose definition of the answer, based on one goat-antelope being very much like another.

25d Bar – not a beautiful place for alcohol moderation (5)
A ten-letter word for alcohol moderation has the name of a valley in Thessaly praised by ancient poets for its extraordinary beauty, and thus a term applied to any rural spot deemed to be of similar charm, omitted in order to produce the solution.

(definitions are underlined)