Saturday 4 September 2021
Five-Clue Cryptic (#3364)
Some really elegant clues today. The one I particularly liked was 3a, PALAVER (PAL + AVER), for which one needs to know the well-used rhyming slang reference "China (plate)" = "mate". Also nicely done was 5a, which had TREND in HEARING to give HEART-RENDING; as an aside, I'm slightly annoyed by the modern habit of saying "heart-wrenching" instead, presumably by confusion with "gut-wrenching". I doubt whether anything much can be done about it though.
2d had (E + ST) in WEND to give WEST END. I suppose non-London readers might have reason to complain that in other cities the West End isn't usually the theatre district, but London's West End is so well known that I think this slight metropolitan bias can be forgiven. AWARD (A + WARD) for 4d was straightforward, but 1d was slightly more convoluted: (A + PH) in a reversal of LEAR to give RAPHAEL. For this I needed to remember the Ordnance Survey abbreviation PH for "public house", which I don't think I've seen since school geography lessons, but which still seems to crop up in crosswords from time to time. I don't even know if the Ordnance Survey still uses it.
Concise (#3364)
Codeword (#3042)
Letters given were X, F and G. This took me considerably longer than usual; I simply couldn't get into it at all, even after coming to the conclusion that 17 had to be E. Eventually I put in a tentative EXACT above the SW corner and hoped for the best. This gave me 1-23-A-F-T just below it, from which I concluded that 23 was R, giving me a fairly definite ORIGAMI in the second column and thus the rest of the grid, but more by luck than judgement! Two fairly obscure words (AUK and EVANESCE) helped to throw me off the scent.
Cryptic by Phi (#3300)
Link to idothei (blogged by Cornick)
Link to Fifteensquared (May 2017, blogged by duncanshiell)
Two stars from Cornick, which is probably about right though perhaps bordering on three. Solved in about average time.
My first one in was 15a, ODD. I then thought "hang on, that clue hasn't got a definition". Well it has, sort of: "not these characters" refers to the odd letters of SORDID, which were the ones not used in the answer. Thus you needed to have solved the wordplay to get the definition - maybe a little devious, but probably excusable, especially since two out of the three letters were checked and the answer was easily guessable anyway.
There was a theme of one-word film titles, which I didn't get, although I probably should have. My favourite clue was 20d, which brought a little smile; other good ones were 10a, 11a, 22a, 3d, 5d and 16d. I paused over 21a, thinking it must be SEA ("salty water") but unable to parse it, until 7d brought me enlightenment.
The most obscure word was definitely 9d. Although I knew the Greek root "hymen-" meaning "wedding", I couldn't work out the last three letters, and resorted to the COED, which only had HYMENEAL (marked "literary"). I duly wrote it in and then had trouble with 18a, which didn't fit the final L. I changed the final letter to N and managed to get the wordplay to fit, but I had to go online to check that it was actually a word. Collins has two definitions, both marked "archaic": "a wedding song" and "relating to weddings", of which only the second fits the clue. A little too recherché for my liking!
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