Notes for Azed 2,735

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 2,735 Plain

Difficulty rating: (3 / 5)

After last week’s uber-friendly offering (ie you could have solved it during a taxi ride), this week we have a horse of a significantly different colour. Quite a few anagrams to help the solve along, but also a good helping of obscurities and some wordplays that pushed the boundaries of acceptability.

Note that, as pointed out by correspondent Rick, the enumeration for 22d should be (6) rather than (5).

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to look at clue 1a, “What covers wound discharge? Woman may use it in boudoir (12)”. The wordplay is a charade separately indicating the two elements of the (8-4) hyphenated solution, the first being a word for something which covers a wound and the second being a verb meaning ‘to discharge’ or ‘to dismiss’. So far, so good. But the solution is shown by Chambers as ‘obsolete’, which means that it is defunct in terms of modern usage. There are two ways that setters can indicate such words in clues: either through a qualifier such as ‘old’ or ‘neglected’, eg ‘old sign’ for GEST, or (in particular for nouns) by the use of a past tense in the definition, eg ‘It was a sign’ for GEST. Here, though, we have neither, and that is unsatisfactory. In this instance, ‘route 2’ was the way to go, something along the lines of ‘Woman may have used it in boudoir’.

Across

12a Regarding clergyman, not ‘priest’ outwardly (4, 2 words)
A six-letter word for a clergyman has the two-letter abbreviation for ‘priest’ stripped from the outside (‘not…outwardly’).

14a Score here and there, returning single unimportant? Not I (6)
A three-letter word for a ‘single’ scored in cricket is reversed (‘returning’) and followed by a four-letter word meaning ‘unimportant’ from which the letter I has been removed (‘not I’). The answer is also a cricketing term, often encountered in harness with ‘nudge’.

16a Violet Grey having smirk about foreign food place? (8)
A four-letter ‘smirk’ containing (‘about’) an informal word for ‘a place which sells high quality, often foreign or unusual prepared foods’ leads to a term for ‘violet-grey’. Over time, I have become increasingly picky about words whose only purpose is to link definition to wordplay (or vice versa) – I originally had a moan about ‘having’ here, but (as per discussion with RJHe below), this was probably unfair to Azed. However, I stand by my comments about such words when, as in 11d, they indicate that the definition leads to the wordplay rather than the other way round.

19a Religious deputy, man from Rome holding cases (5)
The Latin word for a man (‘man from Rome’) contains (‘holding’) the two-letter abbreviation for ‘cases’, with the definition drawing on a less common sense of a familiar word.

20a Element of climatic graph is first to include US island (7)
The letters IS (from the clue) are followed by a three-letter word for ‘first’ containing (‘to include’) the two-letter abbreviation for a well-known US island.

21a Chemical flask, in tangles round point (7)
A four-letter word for ‘tangles’ (noun or verb, take your pick), often used in reference to hair, is put round a “setter’s friend” which can describe either a headland (ie ‘point’) or an Ethiopian prince.

26a Stalks ancient paths round mine shaft (8)
A five-letter obsolete (‘ancient’) word meaning ‘paths’ (or, in current usage, ‘pens for pigs’) contains a word for a mine or a mine shaft. The plural which constitutes the answer is to be found in Chambers under the five-letter singular form which will be familiar to all REM fans.

28a Ferries old men traversing river (5)
I’m sure correspondent Tim C will have had no problem with the wordplay here, but I can’t recall previously coming across ‘old man’ as a term for an adult male kangaroo. An informal word for kangaroos is here found containing (‘traversing’) the usual abbreviation for ‘river’, producing a hyphenated solution, though there really ought to be an indication that ‘old men’ is an definition by example.

30a Jersey etc with parasites, get-up for penitents (6)
The two-letter abbreviation for the geographical group of which Jersey is a part precedes a familiar word for ‘parasites’, this being one of those Azed clues where you can be almost certain about the correct answer even if you’ve never come across (or, indeed, donned) the ‘undergarment worn by penitents, originally made of haircloth but now usually a band of pronged wire’. Now that’s gotta hurt.

Down

1d See Jock’s strut, pale for love of Scottie? (5)
The wordplay here just about works, I think, with a three-letter word for ‘pale’ replacing (‘pale for’) the usual single-character representation of ‘love’ in (‘love of’) the sort of animal exemplified by a Scottie (‘Scottie?’). My dislike of ‘link words’ extends also to words like the ‘See’ at the start of this clue, which serves no purpose other than to enhance the surface reading.

3d Saw wee boy died in it (6)
A three-letter word for a little lad (more American than Scottish, despite the ‘wee’) and the usual abbreviation for ‘died’ are contained by a two-letter abbreviation which, in the land of the crossword, often equates to ‘it’. A good excuse for me to repeat  Dorothy Parker’s observation on a character in Elinor Glyn’s novel It: “And she had It. It, hell; she had Those.”

4d What Sandy may have spent for pop endlessly? (6)
One of those awkward clues where you may not know either the word which goes in the grid or the word which is the key element of the wordplay. Here a seven-letter word for a champagne (‘pop’) produced near Rheims is deprived of its last letter (‘endlessly’) to produce a Scots word for a familiar element (differing in its spelling by one letter), and thus for money.

7d What’s caught off US coast in sound, reddish-brown (6)
A strange homophone clue, in that neither of the pronunciations offered by Chambers for the horse-mackerel matches that given (‘in sound’) for a reddish-brown or light chestnut colour.

11d Gland yielding fluid, mostly jaundiced within (11)
A five-letter word for ‘fluid’, often seen referring to one containing antibodies and used for immunization, has inside it (‘within’) a word meaning ‘jaundiced’ from which the last letter has been omitted (‘mostly). You will probably have guessed by this time that I was less than enthusiastic about the ‘yielding’.

18d Sun out before canonical hour is up, concealing nothing (8)
An anagram (‘out’) of SUN is followed by a reversal (‘up’) of a word for one of the hours of the Divine Office, originally held at the third hour of the day (hence the name).

25d Is fed without second, hot, salt-free (5)
A word meaning ‘is fed’ (or ‘gets on’, often with ‘well’) is deprived of its second letter (‘without second’) and followed by the usual abbreviation for ‘hot’.

27d Race whose winner is auctioned without right saddle once (5)
The six-letter term for a horse race where the winner is offer for sale loses the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘right’, the result being an obsolete (‘once’) word for a saddle.

29d Get penny for leak (4)
A three-letter word meaning ‘get’ (as you might ‘get’ what someone is trying to say) is followed by the current abbreviation for ‘penny’.

(definitions are underlined)