Comments on: Azed 1992

By: John

John — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 22:21:05 +0000

Sorry, Bob@3, I can’t help with 15/16 — as I said in the blog the ellipsis defeats me

By: Robin Gilbert

Robin Gilbert — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 12:36:37 +0000

23dn. I agree with John that, however hard a clue may be, it should be possible to solve it as it stands without having any crosschecking letters – and that it would be impossible to solve (let alone understand) this one until one already had most of the letters, which, in my book, makes it deeply flawed, however clever the wordplay. What’s more, the surface is hardly the greatest ever!

2dn, on the other hand, I thought was unorthodox and sailing a shade close to the wind, but ultimately fair, the surface providing the element of the definition missing from plain “me” – a quasi &lit. Indeed, this was the clue that appealed to me most in the whole puzzle, with 20ac a close second.

By: sidey

sidey — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:27:32 +0000

28a A BLAIN is, in Chambers at least, a fish as well as a boil. The surface reading wouldn’t work without the double definition.

re 4d, perhaps most people assume that tropical islands are all atolls? Works for me as an alternative to ‘for example’.

By: Myrvin

Myrvin — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 07:09:02 +0000

ATOLL. Chambers says “noun a coral island consisting of a circular belt of coral enclosing a central lagoon.
ORIGIN: Name in Maldive Islands”
So it doesn’t actually say that the Maldives are atolls.

OED says “adoption of the native name atollon, atoll, applied to the Maldive Islands, which are typical examples of this structure”, which does.

By: Myrvin

Myrvin — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 06:47:35 +0000

Usual plethora of unheard of words. To be expected.

Last one in was ATOLLS, but only because I missed it. Now I understand the A..S in this. Thank you John.
26a is FOULARD a silk scarf

By: Bob Sharkey

Bob Sharkey — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 06:43:21 +0000

Regarding 2D, I have been carping about certain &lits not having distinct internal cryptic/def. structures for a while. Is that me being old-fashioned?

By: Bob Sharkey

Bob Sharkey — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 05:38:17 +0000

John, I was perplexed by the linked pair 15/16. Best I could do was to take ‘silent’ as the link-word and then to read 16 as meaning ‘our youngster’ being in denial about having to do History.

I was stuck for a while on ‘sundeck’ trying to make a Scottish bank out of ‘suneck’.

20A hilarious – almost an ‘au contraire’ from ‘get your balls out of bed!’

Can anyone explain ‘one assumes’ in 4D? I’m assuming it gets round the need to flag ‘Maldives’ as an example, but how?

By: sidey

sidey — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 02:45:52 +0000

Been time travelling John?

Good stuff as usual although Author was a bit naughty, it did make me smile when I spotted it.

By: nmsindy

nmsindy — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 23:29:37 +0000

Thanks for this, John, and esp for explaining AUTHOR which I did not understand tho I got it right. Quite a hard puzzle with most of the answers being unfamiliar words. Re 26A which looks like FOULARD, the Guardian/Observer website did show the asterisk.