Azed 1950

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As always Azed produces a top-class grid, with four words crossing it completely and two more almost doing so. As a result, of course, there are many words that need a painstaking hunt through Chambers, but they are all clued soundly and fairly.

Across
1 ENCEPHALARTOS — (hose plant care)*
11 F(ERA)L
12 ATOC — a species of skunk and ‘a to c’, suggesting ABC and ‘easy as ABC’
13 OAT H — ‘oons’ is an archaic word for an oath
14 LO(A)VE — to loave is to form a head as in a cabbage
16 HOW(B)E — an old way of saying ‘yet’
17 GI GUE — ref ‘GI Blues’; a gue is a kind of viol formerly used in Shetland
19 BAPU — (a pub)*; a bapu is a Hindi spiritual father
20 C(ROPE)AR — a crop-ear is an obsolete word for a person, horse, dog etc with cropped ears
21 GYNAECOMAST — (stance may go)*
24 N(A CRIT)E
27 Y{o}U{r} FT — Russia leather
29 YELTS — l in (stye)*
30 GAUDI{est}
31 IXTLE — {t}(extil)*{e}
32 matcH UNGovernable
33 STOT — a stot is a stupid oaf and also means ‘beat’, and wordplay as well: (tots)rev.
34 arrearS witH lifE dO dwelL
35 TAKE TO T(HEBE)NT — a Scottish phrase meaning to take flight
 
Down
2 NEO(P AGA)N
3 CR(A MP)Y
4 PLEIN-AIRIST — (painter I lilies — lie)*
5 HAG GLE{am}
6 L OPER{a}
7 ACHROMATISE — ach(amorist)*e
8 ROOP — this required much research: it’s (poor)rev. and the reference is to Lady Macbeth’s line ‘the raven himself is hoarse’. A roop is a hoarse sound.
9 TAWSE — {miscrean}T (weals — L)*
10 SH(EARST)EEL — sh(earst)eel — what an effort it was to find out that a sheel is a hut. I suppose Azed just knows that.
11 FLY-BY-NIGHT — fly b (thingy)*
15 SUCCEED — ce in (decus)rev.
18 MAT FELON
22 OOLITH — (I tool)* h{atchet}
23 SUTTEE — s(tut)*ee — some people might object to the mere statement that suttee is barbaric, but one definition of ‘barbaric’ in Chambers is simply ‘foreign’
25 hooCH UNKnowingly — I’m not quite sure where the bar comes in [Large section of bar maybe tucked into hooch unknowingly]
26 TYPTO — (potty)*
28 {B}E(DG)E{b} — nice clue — director-general

11 comments on “Azed 1950”

  1. Got off to a good start, but struggled with NE corner , then realised I’d got OAST instead of OATH. Corrected that, but needed help with 10- tough!

  3. Curses! Finished it but with one wrong at 8dn. We went for ‘rook’ in the end, on the basis that it means something like raven – couldn’t decide on the wordplay. Bit of a difficult clue, that one. Otherwise an enjoyable puzzle, thought 28dn was inspired.

  4. Re 25dn, I think Azed is using ‘bar maybe’ (as in chocolate bar) as an example, as Chambers states chunk = ‘a thick piece of anything’ – and most people break up a bar of chocolate into chunks.

    Nick

  5. Thanks, John. Took a lot of time to make sure I spelled SHEARSTEEL correctly. As you say, finding ‘sheel’ was not easy. I got 35ac from the wordplay, but only verified the def when I eventually looked up ‘bent’.

    The one I got wrong was 12ac. I had ‘apoc’, with perhaps the slightly strange justification that it might be an acronym for ‘a piece of cake’.

  7. bobvl #6, look under shiel…; shiel -> sheal <- sheel. Bloody Chambers (sometimes). Took me a while to it find too, but Bradford's listed it so I knew it had to be there somewhere. I still do not understand the cross reference[s] though.

    Nick

  8. bobvl, #6, look under shiel[2] (page 1438). My origianl post was spam trapped, so it will appear here soon.

    Nick

  9. Bobvl – do you remember a ‘Mog’? I apologise if I’ve got this all wrong, but I *think* you may know of that wonderful character.

  10. Chambers doesn’t say sheel=hut. It says sheel=sheal[1]=to shell or husk. But it is sheal[2] that is a hut via shiel[2].

  11. Stevem is absolutely right about sheel and hut. Azed has made this sort of cross-referencing error before.

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