Notes for Azed 2,740

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 2,740 Christmas Playfair

Difficulty rating: (4 / 10)

My first thought was, “A Playfair, oh goody”…well, actually, “DM LBCCPK”. After I’d solved the first two italicized clues, I thought, “Oh double dear – this is looking disturbingly familiar.” And so it proved: a code word that we have seen before, hinted in the same way, which meant that the ‘endgame’ simply entailed writing out the square and encoding the last four answers. I still remember my entry from ten years ago (a VHC), so I don’t think I’ll be having another go this time round unless I have a flash of inspiration. I suspect that not too many solvers will need (or want) to break the code in the old-fashioned way, but I have appended a few notes on solving Playfair puzzles (including a link to an excellent ‘cracker’) at the end of this post for those that do. If you are working out the code word from the hints, you should identify the common feature of the answers to the italicized clues and then establish how that combination might be indicated cryptically, remembering that you are looking for a long word (possibly hyphenated) in which no letter appears more than once. You can then try encoding one of the ‘special’ answers to check that it fits with the checked letters in the grid. Always remember when encoding the two corners of a rectangle that the letter in the same row as the first letter comes first, something I regularly forget.

The puzzle itself was a bit of a mixture – a lot of pretty straightforward clues and just a couple of tricky ones. Combined with the big hint to the code word, I felt that this was one of the least taxing specials that I could remember, and, if I’m honest, perhaps just a slightly soggy cracker.

That lack of snap notwithstanding, may I take this opportunity to thank readers for their most welcome comments and messages throughout the year, and to wish you all a very happy Christmas indeed.

Clue Writers’ Corner: Writing a clue for a word which has been the subject of a previous competition presents something of a conundrum. Do you look at the list of published clues, so that you can avoid ideas that have been used before, or do you simply start afresh? With some words, it’s not so much of a problem, because there are so  many possible treatments, but with one like this there is every likelihood that you will come close to reproducing an earlier clue. However, there are two possibilities which did not exist when the word came up before.  One alternative is to make reference in your clue to the repetition itself; this is perhaps an option for those who have already clued the word. But more importantly, when this word appeared before it was not in a Christmas puzzle, so any clue that is festively themed will inevitably have novelty on its side. I would suggest not referring to the previous slip and just writing your clue as you would for any other competition, but with the fact that it is explicitly described as a Christmas puzzle very firmly in mind.

A similar repetition issue occurred with COLD TURKEY (except they were both Christmas puzzles – 1,180 in 1994 and 2,064 in 2011), and in the slip for the latter (a Playfair), Azed wrote:

It left me with the difficult decision as to how I should treat the competition as a whole, especially in relation to the fiercely contested annual honours list. After much thought and advice from a number of experienced competitors, I decided to let it stand as normal and assume that most of those who remembered or had a record of the earlier competition 17 years ago would have consciously attempted to come up with a different clue. I myself did not consult that earlier slip and still have not looked at it. A comparison would now be interesting but I won’t make it for a while yet.

Across

1a Dad enters platform (not I) for tasty crisp (7)
A two-letter word for ‘dad’ is contained by (‘enters’) a six-letter ‘platform’ from which the letter I has been omitted (‘not I’).

10a Old matter? It’s usually numbered (4)
The usual abbreviation for ‘old’ is followed by the sort of matter that’s yellowish and yucky.

17a Admission made by nurse with pedigree (6)
A two-letter abbreviation for a nursing qualification no longer recognised in the UK (I think Nursing Assistant may be a near-equivalent, but I stand to be corrected on that) is followed by the sort of pedigree that might be represented in a diagram, perhaps framed and displayed on the wall.

27a Thesp in Paris seen making comeback in live broadcast (6)
There’s rather less punctuation than I would have liked in this clue, where the French word (‘in Paris’) for ‘seen’ is reversed (‘making a comeback’) within an anagram (‘broadcast’) of LIVE.

34a Time to tear and puff, like a deer walking? (8)
The usual abbreviation for ‘time’ is followed by a three-letter word for ‘[to] tear’ and a four-letter word for ‘puff’, the result being a heraldic term, typically referring to stags or bucks.

35a TV opening, not the first in retrospect (4)
A five-letter word for an opening or first appearance is deprived of its first letter (‘not the first’) before being reversed (‘in retrospect’).

37a A section in daubs presenting tricky questions (7)
The letter A (from the clue) and the usual abbreviation for ‘section’ are contained by a word meaning ‘daubs’ or ‘plasters’; this word may not be familiar, but the answer certainly will.

Down

2d Quibble over cat getting caught out in tiny apertures (6)
A three-letter word answering to ‘quibble’ (see Chambers) is followed by an anagram (‘getting caught out’) of CAT.

4d Small portion, about nothing, causing distress once? (5)
The small portion which contains (‘about’) the usual single-letter representation of ‘nothing’ is more often seen as a verb, compounded with ‘out’, and meaning to distribute in modest helpings.

7d Acidic compound as a rule kept in mug (7)
The letter A and the usual abbreviation for ‘rule’ are contained by (‘kept in’) a five-letter mug, intended to hold beer and often featuring a hinged lid.

8d Vintage tot of whisky in favour (5)
A slightly strange double definition clue, the two meanings being listed consecutively under the same entry in Chambers. In Three Men in a Boat, J writes that:

Having thus settled the sleeping arrangements to the satisfaction of all four of us, the only thing left to discuss was what we should take with us; and this we had begun to argue, when Harris said he’d had enough oratory for one night, and proposed that we should go out and have a ?????, saying that he had found a place, round by the square, where you could really get a drop of Irish worth drinking.

18d Bust according to audience was radiant (5)
The slightly odd-looking past tense here is a homophone (‘according to audience’) of a four-letter ‘bust’ in the drugs sense.

19d Waiter in robes displaying basket of goodies? (7)
Another double definition where you (like me) may well identify the word from the second definition but need to confirm the first one in Chambers.

22d I pulled out of concert midway? It’s to do with innards maybe (6)
My favourite clue in the puzzle, the letter I is removed (‘pulled out’) from the middle of a word for a concert.

24d Develop, university replacing one volume, educated to an advanced level (6)
A word for ‘develop’ has the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘university’ replacing one instance of its counterpart for ‘volume’.

26d Monastery reuse abandoned table (5)
A ten-letter word for a particular monastery has the consecutive letters REUSE deleted (‘abandoned’), the result being a table that display information in a helpful way.

(definitions are underlined)

I know that some people really enjoy Playfair puzzles, but they leave me cold,  so when no clues are provided to the code word (unlike today) I have no qualms about using a code cracker such as Quinapalus to identify it. The only real option for cracking a Playfair puzzle the traditional way is to solve the non-Playfair clues to get all of the checked letters in the Playfair solutions (or at the very least the pairs of letters which are both checked in the grid, but don’t forget that you can draw conclusions even from an incomplete quartet), work out the non-encoded answers to the Playfair clues, and then create quartets by relating the checked letter pairs from the encoded answers to the corresponding pairs in the non-coded solutions (eg solution = SOLVED, part completed light in grid = R?TPAG, hence LV encodes to TP and ED encodes to AG, while SO encodes to R?).

There are a number of ways to move forward from there, but I tend to look at the pairs of letters that (assuming the quartet represents a rectangle) are going to be in the same row (in my example L and T, V and P, E and A, D and G, S and R) and those that will be in the same column (in my example, L and P, V and T, E and G, D and A, O and R) and then link with other pairs (so if I find that L and P are in the same column and P and S are in the same column, I know that L, P and S are all in one column). And if I find that a group of letters (L, P and S, say) appear to be in both the same row and the same column? Then we are looking at a line and not a rectangle, so wherever any two of those letters appear as a pair on either side of an encoding, all four letters in that encoding are in the same row or column – so if L, P and S appear to be in the same row and the same column, and LP->IK, then L, P, I, K and S are all in the same row/column and I is (cyclically) to the right of or below L, K to the right of or below P. Oh yes, and Z is probably in the bottom right hand corner!

To which I will add a couple of points:

1. If a letter appears on both sides of an encoding, ie DR encodes to RI, that means that the letters (here D, R and I) appear consecutively in a specific sequence (cyclically) in the same line (could be either a row or a column) – for AB->BC the sequence is ABC (so in the example, DRI), for AB->CA the sequence is BAC.

2. If you can find all the letters in cyclic sequence within a column, eg SBLYU, remember that the letters which don’t appear in the code word are listed alphabetically at the end of the square, so it is likely that at least two, and potentially three, of the letters in the column will be part of this ‘remainder’; therefore they will occur in alphabetical sequence at the end of the column. And not only is Z likely to be in the bottom right-hand corner, but some of its near neighbours at the end of the alphabet will also be on the bottom row.