Wednesday 8 September 2021

Five-Clue Cryptic (#3367)

Just right today!  GDANSK was my favourite.

Concise (#3367)

Also just right.  HOLE + SAILOR for "wholesaler" was the pun. 

Codeword (#3045)

G, H and V given.  Very little to say about this either, but I enjoyed it.

Cryptic by Dutch (#3303)

Link to idothei (blogged by Borodin)
Link to Fifteensquared (July 2017, blogged by RatjokaRiku)
 
Apart from one clue, solved in about my average time.  I'd agree with Borodin, the new blogger on idothei, who gave it three stars.  Favourite clue was maybe 13d for the clever way it split up the phrase; other contenders were the anagrams at 15a and 11d, and the hidden at 22d.  Sadly, I had to resort to Crossword Solver for 3d, where I should really have spotted the anagram; also for 8d, where I was misled into thinking that "store" was the definition.

I didn't like 9a for two reasons; firstly it can hardly be said to be a dictionary phrase, and secondly it's surely two homophones rather than one, "a king" (= "a royal") and "feat" (= "act")?  "A king feat" isn't a phrase meaning "a royal act", so I'd have thought two separate homophone indicators would be required.  (I'd also quibble with whether "a king" is a genuine homophone for ACHING, but I suppose it can be pronounced like that at a stretch.)

In 23a, Dutch says on Fifteensquared that "small" is supposed to indicate an abbreviation, but I didn't think answers in this type of puzzle were supposed to be abbreviations (although I got it anyway).  And in 5d, is AVENGED really a synonym of "requited"?  For "requite" the COED says "return a favour to", whereas "avenge" means "inflict retribution on behalf of" - a completely different concept, I'd say.

"Pro" = HO in 2d seemed to be of dubious taste, but I'm used to that sort of thing by now. And in 18d, as noted by others, Sean Spicer hasn't been US communications director for some time - these topical references sometimes get updated and sometimes don't.  A pitfall of using reprinted puzzles, I suppose.

I didn't finish the puzzle as I failed on 12a; like some others, I wrongly assumed the answer would be a type of drink.  It's quite a clever double definition, though, and I wish I'd seen it!


 

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