* = anag, < = reversed, () = removed
A good mix of clues from Punk, many of them quite deceptive.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Leeds: homophone of “leads” |
| 4 | Trampling: T + Rampling (Charlotte Rampling, an actress) |
| 9 | Cosmetic Surgeon: ET in Cosmic + surge + on. |
| 10 | Sex Appeal: Cryptic def |
| 12 | Wales: (SE + Law)<. But it must be a bit irksome for the people of Sussex, Essex etc to be considered part of London. |
| 13 | Sign: sin around g. |
| 14 | Admirable: A + D + (elba + rim)< |
| 17 | Half Crown: A LFC (Liverpool FC) in HR + own. Note the “spent” is not redundant – it refers to money no longer in use. |
| 18 | Dead: Double def (as in “he’s dead lucky”). |
| 20 | Riser: R + is + ER. |
| 22 | Sequester: Seer around quest. |
| 23 | Circumstantiate: (it isn’t accurate m)*. This threw me for a long time because I was convinced the “a” in front of “thousand” must be part of the anagram. |
| 26 | Tiggerish: (Their gigs)*. I haven’t been able to find the word in any dictionaries I’ve consulted. |
| 27 | Range: double def. |
| Down | |
| 1 | Locust: I assume this is locus + t, although I’ve never seen t used to mean twentieth before. |
| 2 | Essex Girl: This is the only one I didn’t really follow. I assume it’s an &lit but don’t really get the wordplay apart from possibly “tess topless” = ess. Full clue is “Tess perhaps going topless, her reputation dubious ?” |
| 3 | Sleeping Car: (Resting Place – t)* |
| 4 | Triceratops: Trice + rat + ops. |
| 5 | Ass: A + SS. |
| 6 | Par: cryptic def (golf). |
| 7 | Ideal: Double def (“I deal”). |
| 8 | Gangster: Gagster around N. |
| 12 | World Beater: (bowler rated)* – very well disguised anagram. |
| 15 | Boat Train: OA + TT in brain. |
| 16 | Short Cut: double def (bob is a type of hair cut). |
| 19 | Breeze: double def (piece of cake = breeze = something easy) |
| 21 | Sprog: S + prog. |
| 24 | Ute: Hidden. |
| 25 | Ski: Ski(p). |
2d – I think it’s a Thomas Hardy ref: “Tess of the D’Ubervilles”, like all of Hardy’s novels, was set in Wessex, so she’s a Wessex Girl.
According to:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/teachers/literacy_7_11/word/newsid_3877000/3877313.stm
‘Tiggerish’ is in the Oxford Dictionary, 11th edition.
V difficult today – managed half before moving to the on-line reveal button.
Fortunately, I was doing the paper version on a train, so didn’t have reveal available. Otherwise, I might have been tempted.
LOCUST I think what’s meant is that T is the twentieth letter in the alphabet. I found this very hard, too.
There was a lot to like here, including 12ac, but one small thing I’d query was ‘works’ for OPS in 4down. I’m no expert on Latin or music, but the plural of op (opus) is not ops, is it?
Could it not be short for operations ?
You can still argue that more than one cryptic element OP (for OPUS) are OPS, and so justify WORKS.
(Thanks by the way Punk, for that fiver.)
Whether technically correct or not, a quick trawl of classical music magazines and record companies shows that ops is a fairly common abbreviation for more than one distinct musical work. It seems that few people in the real world use opera to mean the plural of opus rather than a musical form. Presumably, as a music graduate, Punk is on fairly safe ground here.
We could do the Guardian and the Indy today, and they were very different.
This was the best, with Essex giel making us laugh.
COSMETIC SURGEON
“ET in Cosmic + surge + on”: not quite I think; isn’t it “ET in Cosmic + s(tudio) + urge + on”?
Testing – can’t post in Virgilius.