Comments on: Independent 6,811/Scorpion

By: davey b

davey b — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 21:15:57 +0000

12 ac macaw. Since when did parrots sing?

By: Fletch

Fletch — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:31:25 +0000

Before I started doing Indies fairly regularly, I always used to read here that Scorpion was hard. I did my first puzzle of his shortly before Christmas and another couple since and found them reasonably straightforward. This one however was in another league!

By: eimi

eimi — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 07:36:26 +0000

Collins is my weapon of choice in deciding whether a word should be hyphenated, other than in the Beelzebub puzzle where use of Chambers is taken as read. This tends to mean that fewer hyphens are used, which certainly helps when space is at a premium.

By: C G Rishikesh

C G Rishikesh — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:58:05 +0000

I can’t give an explanation but certainly I can express an opinion.

Indeed ‘skew-whiff’ is hyphenated in all the dictionaries that I checked.

I don’t know the origin of the word but it seems to have been made up from two distinct words. And with two consecutive w’s in it, I think it makes sense that the hyphen is there!

Sometimes online versions of crosswords have strange variations from paper versions. I don’t know if the enumeration appeared as 4-5 in the in-print edition.

By: Ali

Ali — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:50:21 +0000

Or they might have Collins 2003!

By: Ali

Ali — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:48:04 +0000

Hmmm, Chambers gives it as skew-whiff as well. I never thought twice about it when solving the puzzle. As a rule of thumb, advanced puzzles like Azed and the Listener very rarely if ever indicate hyphenated words (much as I wish they would sometimes!), but daily puzzles usually do, so unless Scorpion and Eimi have a different dictionary to the rest of us, this might be an error.

By: nmsindy

nmsindy — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:38:22 +0000

Looking at my dicts, Sara-H, it’s given as one word in Collins (2003). While I can’t speak for crossword editors, maybe they’d have gone for this so as not to give too much away.

By: Sara-H

Sara-H — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:14:44 +0000

Quite new to the whole crossword thing, so puzzled by skewwhiff – both my OED and online dictionaries all spell this skew-whiff (with hyphen)or even as two distinct words, never as one. Should this be indicated in the clue?
Appreciate an explanation from all you experienced puzzlers!

By: Kieron

Kieron — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:10:59 +0000

I travelled to and from France on the You’re-a-star last week. I did it twice, in fact, both times departing from Ashford (the last stop in England before the tunnel, i.e., “the gateway to the continent” as the announcers proudly tell you a million times). And I still didn’t get 11A. Grrrr.

A nice puzzle, though. I was charmed by 13A and the ticklish 19D. Good work Scorpion, and Al.

Didn’t like “singer” in 12, if I can add a little gripe. Yes, if the answer were a songbird. But surely there is a more defining feature to parrots than their singing. It threw me anyway. I would have allowed “vocalist”, though, and I think it would have been better all round! I’m obviously brilliant, though.

Now if only I could clue 20 odd answers a day, with words that perfectly intersect in a rotationally symmetrical grid, and repeat the process over about 1,000 times for decades, I could be a professional setter!

By: rayfolwell

rayfolwell — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:45:27 +0000

Chambers has “diphthong – (loosely) a digraph; the ligature ae oe”