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all about cryptic crossword clues
all about cryptic crossword clues
Please use the comments form attached to this page for any general feedback relating to the site.
What do you think of Frankenstein as anagrind?
“transitive. To assemble (disparate or ill-matching parts) to form a whole in a manner resembling the creation of Frankenstein’s monster; to create or construct in this way.”
Also “mutant”?
Thanks, Johannes
Yes, ‘mutant’ (as well as mutates/mutating/mutated) seem absolutely fine to me. They’ll be added in the next update.
‘Frankenstein’ isn’t given as a verb by Chambers or Collins, so I’m afraid I have to disqualify it as far as the lists go, although I’m sure that solvers would work out what was intended by “Introduce Frankensteined being” or the like.
Ah interesting, you try and avoid relying on meanings that are in OED but not Chambers?
Indeed – there is no guarantee that all entries in the lists will be accepted by UK crossword editors, but it’s pretty much certain that any word not given in mainstream single-volume dictionaries will be rejected by them. Solvers have to be able to validate words, including the relevant meanings, using readily-accessible references. The online Collins picks up any neologisms (eg ‘nepo baby’) or modern usages (eg ‘gaslight’) which Chambers hasn’t caught up with.
Hello Dr Clue
A quick query on the Juxtapositions page. It used to be the case that three successive sorts of the data resulted in the Before’s being listed in two groups – Across and Down – and the After’s similarly. Now, whatever combo of sorts I use, I can only get groupings of either Before/After or Across/Down with the items within each group being muddled up. Has there been a change to your algorithm – and could it be returned to the state it was in?
Many thanks, in advance for any response, and generally for the very helpful resource that these pages provide.
Hi PM, and thanks for your comments.
I haven’t changed any sort parameters – perhaps a Table Press update resulted in things working differently. Anyway, after a crash course in DataTables, I have added a couple of commands to the controls for that table. You should (fingers crossed!) find that if you sort on ‘Before or After’, the resultant hierarchical order will be Before/After, Across/Down, Indicator; if you sort on ‘Across or Down’, you should get Across/Down, Before/After, Indicator.
Let me know whether it’s now working as you would hope.
Splendid job, Dr Clue. Now working better than ever.
We aim to please 😉
Hi,
Great site! As well as Azed 2,500 this year, it’s the 80th anniversary of Ximenes 1. Have there ever been any blog posts about the Ximenes competition winners? I think it might be fun to revisit some of these, to see how they hold up, 80 years on.
In some cases it might be tricky to parse them at all. I note the winning clue for CAT-LAP from Ximenes 1 was “Once round the tiles for a drink” and the “explanation” was “i.e. a lap for a cat”.
Even if the “Ximenes competition clue archeology” idea doesn’t catch on, can anyone please help me understand how that clue works?!
CAT-LAP: I don’t think there’s much more to it than cat-lap meaning a weak drink, and the traditional saying of a night on the tiles being derived from cats on rooftops mating and fighting and making a racket. Any cat who makes a round trip on a night of doing that is whimsically completing a (cat-)lap.
Hi Zithery, and thanks for your comment (your name immediately made me think of Shirley Abacair, which says something about the way my mind works!)
Yes, it looks like 24th June is the day. Although the first Ximenes puzzle was published in 1943, his ‘new style’ puzzle was launched in 1945, and the numbering restarted from 1. An image of the puzzle can be found on the Crossword Centre’s blog; in puzzle 778 (December 1963), Ximenes produced a puzzle with the same grid and answers as the first puzzle, but with some clues ‘modernized’; apparently no-one noticed, which is, frankly, hardly surprising. Both versions are to be found in ‘Ximenes and the Art of the Crossword’; the first one certainly supports the assertion that, in the land of the crossword at least, ‘the past is a foreign country’.
For quite a while the &lit site used to tweet a randomly-selected clue from the Azed and Ximenes slips every day, which neatly illustrated the (gradual) change in standards. sadly, the site is currently unmanaged and the posts are no more. But the winning clues are all there in the &lit archive, and it would be good to give some of the best ones an airing. That CAT-LAP clue isn’t among them, not by today’s standards at least – I can’t add anything to CG’s explanation.
Ah, Thanks, Doctor Clue & CG for the analysis and the link to the original Ximenes 1 grid. I’ll have a closer look at that.
re: CAT-LAP: Seems as though I was looking for some cryptic depth that wasn’t there…
re: Shirley Abacair: that clue might not have held up well but Shirley has. 94 and still going! 14 when Ximenes 1 was published…
Blog posts on the “best winning competition clues down the ages” might still be a goer?
Hello,
Thank you for maintaining such an excellent website. Internet domains as indicators for various countries seem to be included in your database inconsistently or are they not internet domains but something else altogether? For example, I see CH for Switzerland and DK for Denmark, but not NO for Norway, RU for Russia, or RW for Rwanda. I do see these abbreviations listed in dictionaries such as Collins.
Also, will C for Charles and CR for King be included at some point?
Many thanks.
Thank you, Dromedary, and welcome to the blog
The reference for all the abbreviations is Chambers, and the country codes are IVR codes as given by that dictionary, so Norway is N, Russia is RUS, and Rwanda is RWA. Chambers doesn’t give country code TLDs, so they are not included. I have long entertained the hope that the editors of Chambers would review and update the abbreviations, since there are some obvious omissions (S for small and L for large, for example) as well as a few that could do with being retired, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I have two problems with adding non-Chambers abbreviations to the list: (i) they are likely to be rejected by barred puzzle editors, and (ii) where do I draw the line? I am certainly minded to add small, large, live, neutral etc to the Lexicon, though, if not the main list.
Thanks for the monarchical prompt! I have added CR for ‘King’, ‘the King’ and ‘King Charles’, and changed ER to ‘the old Queen’. I’m not sure what the justification for Charles = C would be (Charlie is ok, of course, being part of the NATO phonetic alphabet); I don’t think that Elizabeth was previously valid for E. Is it something that you have seen used in puzzles? CAR for Charles is given by Chambers.
Good evening Dr Clue
Is there a way to search this site for keywords? I’ve been having a debate with A N Other tonight about the bidirectional expulsion/deletion nature of ‘avoid’, and I somehow think that you and I have exchanged comments on this, but I can’t find them.
Thank you (and also for resurrecting my border collie a fortnight ago).
Good evening Monk
The answer at the moment is ‘no’, but I have been looking at adding a site search facility.
That said, I was able (as the administrator) to do a search of all comments for ‘avoid’, and nothing relevant turned up. I don’t remember discussing the topic, but that doesn’t prove anything!
Personally, I’ve always felt pretty comfortable about ‘avoid’ being bidirectional. The two current meanings ascribed to it by Chambers are (i) ‘to evade, escape’, which clearly suggests departure of the subject, and (ii) ‘to shun, shirk’. The Chambers Thesaurus observes in its ‘nuances of synonyms’ for ‘avoid’ that “The word shun implies ignoring that which is to be avoided, whereas abstain from has more to do with not taking part.” That indicates to me that expulsion of the object is possible. In ‘I avoid the Christmas party’, the party goes on but without me; in ‘I avoid the manky sprout’, I go on, but without (and perhaps due to my avoidance of) the manky sprout.
Good evening Dr Clue
Just chanced upon a minuscule cosmetic typo in the “last letter” subgroup of the Letter Selection list, which contains “what’s behing this = S”. Prob best to correct this asap otherwise children across the land will be shouting “It’s behing you!” at the imminent Xmas pantos.
Thanks, Monk
Is it fixed now? Oh yes it is!
😆 Just wondering why my avatar on the first posting in this latest thread is no longer my lovely border collie? Has the server/protocol changed?
There was a slight problem with the spelling of your email address on that particular comment – I’ve adjusted it, and the border collie is back 😃
Hello Dr Clue
Just noticed that the internal timestamp on the Drag and Drop lists is still showing as 27-11-23 (31 entries) rather than 21-10-24 (37 entries). I couldn’t post this comment using the non-public interface as no AntiSpam question appeared therein in my Firefox browser.
Thanks, Monk
Looks like I’d closed the browser accidentally when there were unsaved changes pending. Thankfully (since I’d updated the introductory text as well as the change history), WordPress had an autosaved version , so all should now be well.
Hello Dr Clue
Thank you for your ongoing sterling efforts in maintaining this excellent site. One (so far) of the most recent updates struck an immediate chord as it arose in a puzzle I recently solved. It concerns the addition of ‘drains/draining’ as deletion indicators. The clue I saw obtained ‘[Letters for a bottle] minus [letters for a man]’ from the wordplay ‘Bottle man drained’. Notwithstanding the minimalistic crosswordese, surely “Bottle man drained” leaves not “bottle minus man” but rather “bottle and man, with the contents of the former now transferred [to the man/sink/floor/A N Other/etc]”. Presumably this is why you didn’t include ‘drained’ in the list?
Hello Monk
Most kind, thank you.
I agree completely with your analysis of ‘Bottle man drained’. I included ‘drains’ and ‘draining’ on the basis of the intransitive meaning of the verb, but (as with something like ‘disappear’) only compounded forms can be used in an ‘unpaused’ construction – ‘colour drains from face’, ‘face drained of colour’ – with the uncompounded verb only working in something like ‘face, colour draining’. I wouldn’t use ‘face, colour drained’ or ‘face, colour disappeared’ myself, but I can see that the transitive senses of the two verbs make the judgement on them marginal.
Hello Dr Clue
It’s often the case with so many of these apparent complications that simply adhering to normalspeak resolves any ambiguities. In your examples, ‘face, colour having drained’ or ‘face, after colour has disappeared’ would be 100% soundly parsed. I wonder if such ambiguities arise predominantly in sound-SR-driving-iffy-CR clues?
I’m sure you’re right, and I suspect that it’s often the quest for the smoothest possible SR that tips the CR over the edge.