Notes for Azed 2,734

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 2,734 Plain

Difficulty rating: (1.5 / 5)

Just before I started on the puzzle, I found myself explaining the meaning of the term ‘yakka’, which I first came across in the title of cricketer-turned-pundit Simon Hughes’ book A Lot of Hard Yakka. The first clue that I looked at in this puzzle happened to be 7a, which (in addition to being mildly spooky) boded well for the rest of the solve. This indeed turned out to be one of Azed’s very friendliest offerings – in general, even if the entry was obscure the wordplay led straight to the answer (or just a couple of possibilities). The only exceptions of any significance were 1a and 5d, and it was only their presence that inched the difficulty rating past 1.

Note that the definition in 3d is slightly awry – instead of ‘referring to ancient deity’ it should be something like ‘sacred to ancient deity’.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to look at clue 29a, “Account’s settled in return of price paid – in this? (6)”. The usual two-letter abbreviation for ‘account’ is ‘settled in’ a reversal (‘return’) of the price paid for the temporary use of something, with the definition being (loosely) provided by the whole clue. It is clear that qualifying the ‘price paid’ further would make an ‘&lit’ unfeasible, but can the setter simply leave bits of the Chambers definition out when it suits them? I don’t think there is a simple answer to that – ROULETTE is defined as a ‘game of chance’, but ‘game’ on its own would surely not be unfair, as it belongs to the general class of ‘games’, just as FLUTE belongs to the ‘instruments’. But RANSOM, say, is the ‘price of redemption or reclamation’, and it seems to me that there is no class to which prices belong, so neither ‘the price paid for the use of anything’ nor ‘price of redemption or reclamation’ can legitimately be pared down to just ‘price’ or ‘price paid’.

Across

1a Scottish dress (old-fashioned) one kept in sanctuary once (6)
One of those clues where the answer and the key wordplay element are both obscure (the former being Scottish and obsolete, the latter historical). An alternative wordplay would be ‘grand name given to Rovers in Kircaldy’.

13a Printer’s odd-job man returned written work at fault (5)
A two-letter abbreviation for ‘manuscript’ (‘written work’) must be reversed (‘returned’) ahead of a word meaning (among many other things) ‘at fault’ or ‘inaccurate’. If ever a word sounded like a candidate for ‘origin obscure’, this one does, and it doesn’t disappoint in that respect.

14a Dance to jazz stuff – nothing found in music authority? (6)
The usual single-character representation of ‘nothing’ is contained by (‘found in’) the surname of the engineer and author famed for his Dictionary of Music and Musicians. As well as editing the original four-volume work, he contributed several entries to it including the biographies of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schubert. The dictionary, with regular revisions, has remained a standard work of reference, and is now available online. Apparently, the 1980 edition included a couple of hoax entries (for Dag Henrik Esrum-Hellerup and Guglielmo Baldini); neither lasted beyond the first printing. 

19a Like a sourpuss dancing reel in the grass in America (9)
An anagram (‘dancing’) of REEL is contained by an American word for a type of grass which grows as a weed among wheat (also the name of a popular board game).

26a No longer last, race’s leader coming in directly (4)
The first letter of ‘race’ (“race’s leader”) is contained by (‘coming in’) a word for ‘directly’ which is only ever seen these days when followed by one of the four main points of the compass.

30a Evergreen timber, lustreless, of prime quality (5)
A three-letter word for ‘lustreless’ (spelt by Dulux et al with four letters) is followed by the two characters which for many years were used in the Lloyd’s Register of Shipping to designate a vessel whereof both the hull (the first character) and the fittings (the second character) were in good order.

33a Painter accompanying crumbling residence (6)
I am all in favour of setters coming up with innovative ways of disguising ‘hidden’ clues, given their lack of inherent difficulty, but I think ‘accompanying’ is a bridge too far. The strange thing is that it seems to make no sense in the context of the surface reading. Shouldn’t the painter be ‘inhabiting’ or ‘occupying’ the residence?

Down

4d Measure in physics child on a lathe got wrong (9, 2 words)
A three-letter word for a small child (or drink) is followed by an anagram (‘got wrong’) of A LATHE. The answer is (5,4).

5d Mangle leg twisted under hole in bog (6)
An anagram (‘twisted’) of LEG follows a word which is used in two opposite senses – it can either mean a pit or softer area in a bog (Scott: “To assist his companion to cross the black intervals of quaking bog, called in the Scottish dialect ???s, by which the firmer parts of the morass were intersected”) or a piece of firmer ground rising out of a peat bog (Sir Walter again: “A small and shaggy nag, That through a bog, from ??? to ???, Could bound like any Billhope stag”). The answer is more often associated with assertive price negotiation than mangling..

9d Smart person with small bottle of Scotch – one may fashion dough in US (12)
The first part of the 6-6 solution doesn’t describe a smart person, it’s simply a person; they are only ‘smart’ when the word is so qualified, similarly if they are ‘tough’ (interestingly, the ‘smart’ example has been replaced in Chambers by the ‘tough’ one, perhaps something to do with data protection). Without that ‘Smart’, the clue is fine. The bottle holds half a mutchkin, which is really not mutch at all [it was either that or a Wizard of Oz ‘joke’].

11d Chaps putting away litre in content of tankard? Rarely pleasant (5)
A three-letter word for ‘chaps’ is replacing (‘putting away’) the usual abbreviation for ‘litre’ in a three-letter word for the sort of stuff that could be served in a tankard.

23d Tree yielding both oil and nuts? Draw up between two (6)
A word meaning ‘to draw’ is reversed (‘up’) in the pair of Roman numerals representing two (‘between two’).

25d Like a king or queen abandoned by prince beforehand (5)
A six-letter word describing festively attired costermongers is deprived of (‘abandoned by’) the usual abbreviation for ‘prince’.

27d Wizard picture I dashed off (4)
A clue with an ‘invisicomma’ between ‘picture’ and ‘I’ has the letter I (from the clue) being ‘dashed off’ a five-letter word for a picture.

28d Domiciled by Bohemia as was, wherein His Excellency resides (4)
The IVR code for the country which includes the area formerly known as Bohemia has the abbreviation for ‘His Excellency’ inside (‘wherein…resides’). The rather ungainly start to the clue, where ‘Domiciled in’ would be much more natural than ‘Domiciled by’, is the result of the answer having as its object a person rather than a place. Even ‘Domiciled by’ strikes me as unsatisfactory. It needs to be something more like ‘In place of’, which would, I suspect, mean the clue having to be rewritten.

(definitions are underlined)