Azed 2030
Posted by John on May 1st, 2011
The usual utterly sound and satisfactory puzzle from Azed.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | FIREPLUG — discharging = fire, bolt = gulp, which reversed is plug. A fireplug is a hydrant: one is misled by the word hydrant, which is one of the Chambers abbreviations for h that Azed might have used |
| 7 | skittiSH A Harem |
| 10 | FLAGITATE — florin briefly is fl, beg = agitate; not a word one uses daily |
| 11 | SPIV — (VIPs)rev. — one thinks of a spiv as someone like Walker in Dad’s Army, but one of the meanings tucked away in Chambers is this one |
| 13 | GRASS — 2 defs, as in meadow-grass and also grass the noun as in grass up; canary also means informer (sl) |
| 14 | CUMQUAT — cum = with, a quat is a pimple (now dialect) |
| 16 | SNEER it has to be, but I can’t explain it properly: OK sneer = scoff, s = seconds, ne = not once (ie not (obs)), but how is ‘er’ = ‘on offer’? Perhaps Azed’s attitude to ‘on’ is like that of The Times and A on B = BA, in which case this is the wrong approach. Perhaps neer = ne’er, but what then does the ‘on offer’ mean? It can’t be a reference to Ozymandias‘s ‘sneer of cold command’? (Of course not: just an excuse to provide a link to a wonderful poem, and this comes from someone who isn’t all that excited by poetry) |
| 17 | RETIRE — E(rite)R, all reversed |
| 18 | SCALE STAIR — ales replacing o in Scot, air = look; a scale stair is a Scottish term meaning stairs in straight flights |
| 20 | LUXURIATES — (a Lurex suit)* |
| 22 | CLAMBE — C(lamb)e, a Spenserian past tense of climb |
| 24 | ARGUS — an argus is a vigilant watcher whose origins lie in Greek mythology; and it’s also a pheasant of SE Asia, which explains the ‘Bird watcher’, and it’s argu{e}s, and argue = prove, as a corner of Chambers shows |
| 27 | REMOUNT — r (= take) (men out)* |
| 29 | UN{w}ARY |
| 30 | SLAE — a Scottish form of the word sloe, and “slay”; stonker is, although one thinks of it as a noun, also a verb |
| 31 | T(HR)ILLERS |
| 32 | HYEN — a Shakespearean form of the word hyena, and it’s (Hen{r}y)*, ie Henry shunned by king |
| 33 | END ANGER — if you end anger then you perhaps cool off |
| Down | |
| 1 | FISC — if the f is c in fast it becomes cast (= formulated) — a nice device Azed often uses |
| 2 | IMP UNDUL{ating} U |
| 3 | RHIME — I’m in (her)* — an obsolete spelling of rhyme |
| 4 | PLEURA — P (la rue)* — at first I thought Azed had made a slip here, since a pleura is a side-piece whose plural is pleurae, but when I looked more closely I saw that a pleuron is a side-wall and its plural is pleura |
| 5 | LAVALLIERE — laval (I reel)* — aval means relating to a grandparent, hence the maybe |
| 6 | dancinG I GUEss |
| 7 | STRETTE — tret in (set)* — strette is the plural of stretta, which is a musical term meaning a passage, esp a coda, in quicker time |
| 8 | Harbour Arrive After Fishing, an &lit. |
| 9 | HESPERUS — (she)* Peru s — Venus as the evening star |
| 12 | STREAMERED — (reed’s a term)* |
| 15 | TRIBUNATE — (a nub)rev. in trite |
| 16 | SELCOUTH — (clues to)* h — an obsolete (‘no longer’) term for strange |
| 19 | CUM(AR)IN |
| 21 | TAMARA — 2 defs, one of them the Caucasian name, which hasn’t really reached the West, probably because of the association with the very mannish Soviet athlete Tamara Press |
| 23 | BAY L{anguag}E — a variant of bail, one of whose meanings = barrier |
| 25 | GU{ard} LAG |
| 26 | GARE — 2 defs, a gare as a French station, also a Scottish word meaning greedy or miserly |
| 28 | T EAR — ref Robert Tear, the great tenor who died this year |
May 1st, 2011 at 12:51 am
Thanks, John, for your blog. I parsed 16ac as S + NE’ER and disregarded the rest of the clue – I have that luxury. Tamara Press – Wow! What a blast from the past. I do vividly recall her manly heaves at the 60 Olympics.
Cheers…
May 3rd, 2011 at 11:49 am
John, I’m with Grandpuzzler on 16ac. All you can say is that “on offer” adds to the surface reading, by reference to the other meaning of “scoff”. I think that Homer has nodded on this one. Thanks for elucidating 1 down; I knew that it was one of those words, but couldn’t understand “formulated”.