Notes for Azed 2,748

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 2,748 Plain

Difficulty rating: (2 / 5)

This struck me as being significantly easier than its immediate antecedents. Not too many obscurities and plenty of anagrams certainly helped the solver’s cause. It was a pleasant solve, though it did seem to lack the élan  of Azed’s very finest.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to look at clue 5d, “Satellite can when housing volunteers (5)”. A straightforward wordplay, another word for a can containing the letters TA (‘volunteers’). However, there is a potential issue here. Chambers gives TA as an abbreviation for ‘Territorial Army’, so there is no problem at all in using ‘Territorial Army’ to indicate TA in a cryptic wordplay. The issue is that whilst the British Army’s volunteer reserve force was known as the Territorial Army until 2014, since that time it has been called the Army Reserve. For this reason, most editors now insist that if ‘volunteers’ is used to indicate TA it must be accompanied by a ‘not any more’ qualifier, eg ‘volunteers once’. The same applies to ‘teachers’ for NUT, the National Union of Teachers having in 2017 become part of the National Education Union. The Royal Artillery, by contrast, is very much alive and known to all as ‘The Gunners’, so there’s no problem with ‘Gunners’ for RA. I appreciate that there are other ‘Territorial Armies’ around the world, and perhaps other National Unions of Teachers, but I don’t think that has a material bearing on the situation, where I am broadly aligned with the current thinking – when indicating a defunct entity using a description other than the expanded form of its abbreviation, the solver should be made aware that the entity for which the abbreviation was created no longer exists.

Across

7a Mass that’s sticky and avoided by food lover (4)
A seven-letter ‘older form’ of an eight-letter word for a lover of good food is deprived of (‘avoided by’) the consecutive letters AND.

15a Convent I’ll enter to divide out in proportion (8)
The letter I (from the clue) is inserted into (‘[wi]ll enter’) a seven-letter ‘mainly US’ verb meaning ‘to distribute proportionately’, derived from a familiar (3,4) Latin expression describing such a distribution. It occurs to me that Chambers uses both ‘chiefly’ and ‘mainly’ in classifications (eg ‘chiefly US’, ‘mainly US’). I would have thought that they came to the same thing (C gives the first meaning of ‘mainly’ as ‘chiefly’) – does anyone know if there is any significance in the choice of one over the other?

18a Mischievous spirit in river, sacred one, … (5)
The usual abbreviation for ‘river’ is followed by the name of a particular sacred river (ie ‘sacred one’) which will be familiar to all Coleridge aficionados (or those who were ‘encouraged’ to read Kubla Khan at school). The ‘mischievous spirit’ is the imp of mischief in a printing house, usually to be found residing within the offices of The Guardian.

20a … Which with us leaving river may create such a fiasco (6)
The solution to the previous clue (hence the ellipsis), plus the letters US and without (‘leaving’) the abbreviation for ‘river’, can be rearranged to form (‘may create’) a (4-2) slang term for a fiasco. Note that if the preceding clue had not included a comma after the ‘one’, it is the sacred river, not the mischievous spirit, that would have been carried forward, There would then have been no requirement to eliminate the letter R from the anagram fodder, but “… Which with us may create such a fiasco” wouldn’t make any sense. I wonder if Azed started there but couldn’t produce a serviceable surface reading.

24a One exploring cellar, long, second to last (5)
A five-letter word meaning ‘[to] long’, as one might do for nicotine or attention, has its second letter moved to the end (‘second to last’).

26a Scots downfall left to happen (6)
A two-letter word with many meanings is followed by a four-letter verb meaning ‘to happen’ or ‘to arrive’. Is one of those many meanings ‘left’? Only if you are a right-handed batter, I would venture to suggest. A similar issue arose in 2,588 with the clue “Last bit of lunch left for pet (3)” for HON [(lunc)H + ON]. This makes me suspect that Azed has it in his mind that because the right-hand side of a horse or vehicle is termed the ‘off’ side that the left side is ‘on’ rather than ‘near’. Incidentally, the OED confirms that the near/off thing started with horses, which apparently are (or were) “commonly mounted, led, or approached, from the left side, which is consequently the one near to the person dealing with them”.

32a See this roan or bucks in one horse race – Derby maybe? (6)
A composite anagram, where the solution plus ROAN OR undergoes rearrangement (‘bucks’) to form ONE HORSE RACE. The definition is by example, hence the ‘maybe’ (although the question mark alone would have been sufficient).

33a Veteran combatant; club admits dry alien, tottering (10)
A three-letter word for the sort of club that might be wielded contains (‘admits’) the two-letter abbreviation often indicated by ‘dry’ and an anagram (‘tottering’) of ALIEN.

Down

1d Give metal hull to vessel, dry within long beam (12)
A six-letter vessel in which water would have been heated precedes that ‘dry’ abbreviation again (see 33a) contained by (‘within’) a word for a long beam particularly associated with microphones (and Basil Brush).

6d In cheap style, not well cut in Indian mat (7)
A three-letter word meaning ‘not well’ missing its last letter (‘cut’) is contained by a five-letter word for ‘a screen or mat, usually made of the roots of the fragrant cuscus grass, which is placed in a frame so as to fill up the opening of a door or window, and kept wet, in order to cool and freshen the air of a room’. The ads make Febreze sound a simpler option.

10d Falsify king in gambling stake on hand (12)
The usual monarchical abbreviation for ‘king’ is put inside a four-letter word for a stake in gambling (a sense of a word originally meaning ‘outlay’ or ‘expenses’ seemingly known only to the editors of Chambers), the combination being followed by (‘on’) a seven-letter verb meaning ‘[to] hand’.

12d Variety entertainments not following scripts (5)
There is (or perhaps I mean “isn’t”) one of those missing commas between ‘following’ and ‘scripts’, because a six-letter word meaning ‘scripts’ is to be shorn of the single-letter abbreviation for ‘following’ (ie ‘not following’).

16d Water buffalo tucking into Caribbean country palm (8)
There are believed to be less than 4,000  of these water buffaloes in the world, mainly found in Assam and cryptic crosswords. The four-letter term (derived from Hindi) for one of them is contained by the name of a Caribbean country which is famous for its boxers rather than its cricketers. The palm that forms the answer is associated, in my mind at least, with wax.

23d Reckon region must lose railway (5)
A seven-letter word for a region must be deprived of (‘lose’) the two-letter abbreviation for ‘railway’.

25d Typical of flasher, slurped ale in the course of meeting (6)
An anagram (‘slurped’) of ALE is contained by (‘in the course of’) a three-letter abbreviation for a particular sort of meeting. I wondered why I had never seen ‘slurped’ used as an anagram indicator before, and when I looked the word up in Chambers I was unconvinced by its credentials.

27d Some wines can make this islander sit up (5)
An eight-letter plural of a particular sort of wine (ie ‘some wines’) constitutes (‘can make’) the five-letter answer, a word for the inhabitant of a specific island, followed by the letters SIT reversed (‘sit up’).

28d Phenol suiting piggy not having exercise outside (5)
A seven-letter word meaning ‘piggy’ (ie like a pig) has a two-letter abbreviation for ‘exercise’ removed from the outside.

(definitions are underlined)