A 13 x 11 grid for this week’s puzzle, which was carelessly printed in the paper as an 11 x 11 grid, with the two right hand columns omitted. Fortunately, the pdf was correct.
I made a reasonably quick start to the puzzle, before running into difficulties in the south-east and north-west quadrants, but managed to resolve everything eventually. As always, my vocabulary has been extended by having to look up unfamiliar words in Chambers (from which I have taken all the definitions in the blog). I’d be particularly interested in comments on the clue for TSETSES at 34 across, where it seems to me that the clue comes very close to an indirect anagram. In fact, it now occurs to me that the same could be said of TICTAC at 6 across. In both cases the solver has to find a synonym for a word or phrase in the clue and rearrange it as directed.
On a less controversial note, it would be a lot easier (for those of us who still purchase The Observer) if they would print the puzzle on the outside half of the page and put the answer from three weeks ago on the inside half. It wouldn’t take up any more space, but it would make tearing or cutting it out a lot more straightforward.
| Across | ||
| 1 | BHANGRA | Drug-led artist in crossover style (7) |
| A charade of BHANG and RA. | ||
| 6 | TICTAC | Telegraphy switching parts of battle plan (6) |
| TACTIC with its parts exchanged. TIC-TAC (which is hyphenated) is the system of hand and arm signals (formerly?) used by racecourse bookmakers. It can be tricky with this sort of clue to determine which part of the clue is the definition and which the wordplay, but the crossing letter at 9 down left no room for doubt. | ||
| 11 | THEOBROMA | Broom fashioned in tea-tree or chocolate tree (9) |
| *BROOM in THEA (the tea genus). Theobroma is the cocoa genus. | ||
| 13 | BRAXY | Diseased sheep unknown in pound (5) |
| X in BRAY. I was unfamiliar with this word and with the secondary meaning of BRAY – “to break, grind or pound”. | ||
| 14 | LADEN | Left port with cargo aboard (5) |
| L ADEN. A delightfully simple clue that would not be out of place in a daily cryptic. | ||
| 15 | BABOONISH | Clumsy mistake involving an asset (9) |
| A BOON in BISH. | ||
| 16 | HISPID | What identifies him includes start of petulance, bristly (6) |
| P(etulance) in HIS ID. | ||
| 18 | MAKAR | E.g. McGonagall, larger part of destiny saved to the end (5) |
| KARMA with the first three letters moved to the end. Some might argue that although McGonagall was Scottish, it is stretching things to call him a poet. | ||
| 20 | SACROSANCTITY | I say contract’s to be rewritten, ensuring inviolability (13) |
| *(I SAY CONTRACTS). | ||
| 22 | OMAHA | Large part of tomahawk may be unearthed here (5) |
| Hidden in “tomahawk”. I’m not sure that this qualifies as an & lit: perhaps a semi-& lit? | ||
| 24 | USEDNT | Rock tunes – Dominican initially involved was not in the habit (6) |
| D(ominican) in *TUNES. | ||
| 28 | DE RIGUEUR | I’d urge breaking with Europe, as fashion dictates (9, 2 words) |
| *(ID URGE EUR). | ||
| 30 | EDITH | Work on copy of Hockney’s head – a female (5) |
| EDIT H(ockney). | ||
| 31 | TESLA | T junction of routes with lane is spanned by it (5) |
| Hidden in routes lane. Tesla is a derived SI unit, the unit of magnetic flux density, whose symbol is T. | ||
| 32 | ROBOTISES | Excludes human agency from boosters misguidedly I installed (9) |
| I in *(BOOSTERS). | ||
| 33 | SCENIC | Special production of Cenci, spectacular (6) |
| S(pecial) *CENCI. | ||
| 34 | TSETSES | Nasty nippers, group of six playing around with son joining in (7) |
| S in SESTET, with the two parts exchanged. I must confess that I find it hard to distinguish this type of clue from the indirect anagram, which Azed explicitly disavows. | ||
| Down | ||
| 1 | BOBBYSOXERS | Cop’s jumping obstacles for US teenagers (11) |
| BOBBY’S over OXERS. This word now has a rather dated feel to it. | ||
| 2 | HORAH | Cheer following tart round dance (5) |
| RAH following HO. | ||
| 3 | ARABICA | Coffee from the fringes of Colombia after an early harvest (7) |
| A RABI (a spring grain harvest) C(olombi)A. | ||
| 4 | NAXOS | Greek island temple with cross inside (5) |
| X in NAOS (a temple). | ||
| 5 | RHENISH | Wine: a dash of red with chicken is set before husband (7) |
| R HEN IS H. | ||
| 6 | TOPS | Drunk up about a quarter of pint at most (4) |
| P (one of four letters, a quarter, in PINT) in SOT (rev). | ||
| 7 | CRAVAT | Fizz, tons taken about first in race. Ascot perhaps? (6) |
| R in CAVA, T(ons). The full stop in the clue is to disguise the fact that ascot does not need to be capitalised. | ||
| 8 | TODO | Weight of old wool on top of old bustle (4) |
| TOD (an old wool weight, around 28 lb.), O. | ||
| 9 | AMEBA | Protean US creature mounting a rostrum (5) |
| A BEMA (rev). I was only vaguely familiar with a bema, and got the answer from the definition. | ||
| 10 | CANARYGRASS | Source of bird seed, kilo lost from bursting granary sacks (11) |
| *(GRANARY SACKS) less K. | ||
| 12 | EPIDAURUS | Good place for open-air theatre? Paid misguidedly with wind around (9) |
| *PAID in EURUS (the south-east wind). The second (and perhaps less familar) Greek place name in this puzzle. | ||
| 17 | INSIDES | Playing team games, requiring guts (7) |
| IN SIDES. | ||
| 19 | KINESIS | Energy put into family’s lives stimulated movement (7) |
| E in KIN’S IS. | ||
| 21 | RHYTON | Cup (old) that is found in fashioned horn (6) |
| YT (a very old form of THAT) in *HORN. | ||
| 23 | MEDOC | This will be imbibed in some do copiously (5) |
| Hidden in “some do copiously”. Our second type of wine. | ||
| 25 | DUETT | Small group as is proper with end of concert given encore (5) |
| DUE (concer)T T. The second T is the encore. I’m not entirely happy with the definition; can two people fairly be defined as a small group? | ||
| 26 | TULLE | Hat material? Third of sale goes in a rush (5) |
| L (third letter in saLe) in TULE (a kind of bulrush). | ||
| 27 | GIBE | Boiled egg? It’s e.g. old toying with this scoff (4) |
| A compound anagram; combine GIBE and EG OLD to produce BOILED EGG, or rather reverse the process to obtain the answer. | ||
| 29 | ERIC | Fine glazed fabric put up (4) |
| CIRÉ (rev); it’s the name for a blood-fine paid by a murderer to his victim in old Irish law. | ||
*anagram
Thanks for the blog, bridgesong.
In 34a, I had ‘group of six playing’=SESTET and ‘around’ is a reversal indicator.
I saw 34 across the same way as Matthew did, with “playing” being part of the definition rather than an anagram indicator.
Glad to see that there have been more responses to the Azed threads recently. Long may it last!
Thanks to AZED and bridgesong for a tough but achievable workout.
I was held up at the end by putting in tactic rather than tictac.
I find that as well as Chambers, Bradford’s often has obscure words – for example “bray” for “pound”.
Matt and cruciverbophile: you’re both right, of course and I should have spotted that it was a reversal, not an exchange of parts like 6 across. But that doesn’t detract from my point, which is that in both cases the solver has to find a word indicated by the wordplay and then rearrange it in the way suggested to obtain the answer. I do struggle to understand why this is acceptable, when the indirect anagram is considered unfair.
Apart from the brouhaha with the grid, all I can remember of this now was getting stuck on 18ac at the end and having to do a word search. That gave me two options and I somehow couldn’t see MAKAR in Chambers and ended up googling it. At which point I realised it was a word I knew from a news item I remembered from a couple of years ago about the Scottish poet Jackie Kay.
@4 Bridgesong I think it’s a convention based on the degree of rearrangement. One could argue that reversals of synonyms, or clues where one letter moves in a synonym to give the answer (beer is great right at the end for LAGER) also involve rearrangement of a synonym so are unfair, but nobody complains about those. In the case swapping halves as in TICTAC/TACTIC the synonym of “battle plan” is quite similar to the answer, so again not a lot of rearrangement is needed. An anagram involves total rearrangement and is therefore a leap too far, as there are too many possibilities and the answer is usually totally different to the synonym indicated by the wordplay..
That’s my take on it anyway – it’s probably locksbol.
I’ve no problem at all with the clue for 34ac (a standard insertion within a reversal); the construction of 6ac is fine as far as I’m concerned, but I feel that Azed may have overlooked the fact that TACTIC as an adjective can mean ‘of battle plan’ and therefore the clue is ambiguous, which is particularly unfortunate when the two possible solutions have only a pair of letters exchanged. I must say that I am not entirely comfortable with cruciverbophile’s ‘Beer is great right at the end’ for LAGER as there is no indication that the R should be moved to the end of LARGE rather than simply being appended to it.
A lot of clues involve some degree of indirection, such as this one from AZ 2,308:
‘Mutton in the upper house George freely tucked into’ (HOGGEREL; GEORGE* in HL)
where ‘upper house’ must be translated into ‘House of Lords’ on its way to ‘HL’.
Regarding indirect anagrams specifically, Azed is not averse to the occasional one as long as there are very few possibilities for the solver to choose from for the intermediate word. In AZ 2,207 this clue appeared:
‘Persistent source of evil, he escapes Poirot deviously’ (ULCER; (HERCULE – HE)*)
where the solver must make the (small) jump from ‘Poirot’ to ‘Hercule’ before proceeding.
I think there is a big difference between this (or, say, ‘Commend replacement of French capital with euro initially’ for PRAISE (PARIS* + E(uro)), the answer to the question ‘What is the French capital?’ being pretty clear) and the following clue for ICEBERG which appeared in a popular 1960s puzzle:
‘Beg a man to create one? He couldn’t do it!’
I certainly wouldn’t want to see the return of that sort of thing, but solving a clue often involves several steps – the unfairness, I think, comes when any of those steps is in fact a giant leap.
Yes DRC, my example clue was rubbish. Clue-writing isn’t my strong point! Perhaps “Right to move in great beer” illustrates the point better (if you ignore the poor surface)?
I guess the ICEBERG clue is an anagram of BEG ERIC but the definition’s pretty loose!
Bridgesong@4: I think it’s down to the principle, stated explicitly in Alec Robins’ The ABC of Crosswords if I remember rightly, that when a solver gets the answer s/he should know for certain that the answer is correct. That is the case with the TACTIC/TICTAC clue, but would not be for an indirect anagram, as one cannot be sure which word has to be rearranged
Me too: I can never understand why indirect anagrams are taboo, whereas some clues like (made up here) “dog runs around tree” where the solver has to get(guess?) the name of a dog and tree.
Nick
Sorry, cruciverbophile@8! Didn’t mean to impugn your clue-writing ability – the point you were making is absolutely valid.
Yes, you have to get ERIC from ‘a man’, infer an anagram from ‘to create’, and then determine that something a man couldn’t create is an ICEBERG. Sounds like you’re on that setter’s wavelength, so how about
‘Beastly they may be, but they have the makings of a team’ for OXEN?
No need to apologies DRC! I have no clue-writing ability to impugn.
That clue works quite well as a CD (team of oxen) but if there’s wordplay as well I’m blowed if I can see it.
Thanks to all who have taken the trouble to comment and join the debate. Gougers @9: I don’t have the Alec Robins book, but Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword justifies the rule by saying “Why should he [the solver] have to solve something before he can begin to use part of a clue?…The secondary part of the clue – other than the definition – is meant to help the solver. The indirect anagram, unless there are virtually no alternatives, hardly ever does. He only sees it after he has got his answer by other means”.
Azed himself, in his A – Z of Crosswords, says only this: ” … what is generally called an indirect anagram, which won’t do….it is unfair to expect the solver … to have to deduce the word from which the anagram is to be formed”. It is interesting to see the examples cited by DRC @ 7, showing that the rule is not iron-clad.
A interesting discussion on indirect anagrams. I think bridgesong’s quote from Ximenes says it all “the secondary part of the clue is meant to help”. Would that some modern compilers kept that in mind when rambling on. I thought both TICTAC and TSETSES were fine as the definitions led to unique switches/wraps. Delighted that more are joining in Azed’s blog. He is Numero Uno.
For me the most relevant quote is perhaps one which I have seen reproduced in various forms but that boils down to the role of the setter being ‘to do battle with the solver and lose gracefully’ (to which I would probably add ‘…and entertainingly’). I think that if a solver feels that the dice were loaded against them from the outset such that victory (by which I mean not just getting the right answer but knowing why it is correct) was well-nigh impossible, then the offending clue is unfair. I don’t consider that indirect anagrams or single cryptic definitions are unfair per se, any more than charades and reversals are intrinsically fair, although the former types need to be very precisely executed if they are to ‘give the solver an even break’.
Couldn’t agree more with keith@14 re Azed’s status.
Incidentally, @11 the wordplay is based on a team being an XI; I is ‘one’, making the team XONE; rearrange the letters and you have OXEN. Simples! But only when the explanation is in the back of the book…
I did wonder if XI was somehow involved but I’d never have got near who the clue works.
The anti-Ximeneans who see deliberate unfairness as “innovative” should be made to sit down and solve 100 such clues. They’d soon change their tune!
Well said!
About middling difficulty for Azed I thought, though with a few not fully understood. 12d was pretty obscure, but also pretty clearly clued so no complaints there.
In the 20 years I’ve been solving Azed, I can recall only two instances of his having used indirect anagrams (though there may have been more). One is from Azed No. 1,868, which is still available on the Guardian website:
Turk’s cap, name Jerome doubly retains in a way! (6). Answer: KALPAK.
The other is from about 20 years ago – I forget the exact wording but it’s something like:
Flavoured liqueur: one over the eight and AZ must get squiffy! (6). Answer: ENZIAN.
In each case the indirect part is indicated in such a way that there can only be one possible answer: Jerome K. Jerome has only one middle name (Klapka), and one plus eight can only equal nine. Furthermore, each clue ends with an exclamation mark, which Azed almost always uses to let his solvers know that something unusual is going on. For these two reasons, I think both of these clues are fair.
I can recall only one other indirect anagram, in 2,295 – ‘Freshwater catch among 1,152 wriggling’ for LIMNETIC, where the fodder is similarly unambiguous. I think that Azed’s views on the topic are summed up by this comment from the slip for AZ 75:
“I am accused of perpetrating an indirect anagram with my clue to MORONIC in a recent puzzle: ‘Stupid, getting what comes before pi wrong’. Strictly speaking, my accuser is right. The solver has to determine which letter precedes ? in the Greek alphabet and form an anagram of it to find a word meaning ‘stupid’. Since, however, there is only one letter which does precede it and this is easily discoverable if not known, I regard this as permissible. ‘Stupid getting omicron wrong’ would have been too easy (and incidentally nonsensical); ‘Stupid getting Greek letter wrong’ would have constituted an indirect anagram, and you can rest assured that I would never have used it.”
I see no problem with these clues; I had a greater issue with the indirection involved in a simple container/contents clue for PACY in 2,207 (which passed under the radar while the ULCER clue was singled out for comment on this site):
‘Ton received in benefit – smart’
A double jump is required here – the solver must translate ‘ton’ into ‘hundred’, and then find an abbreviation for ‘hundred’ which is completely unrelated to the word in the clue (‘ton’). I see this as quite different from the use of (for instance) ‘say’ to indicate EG or ‘American’ for US, as the abbreviations here are very much part of the English language (“He’s met some interesting people, eg the US President”, but not “Root completed a C before being caught on the boundary”).
There was an indirect anagram in Saturday’s Independent puzzle by Quaiteaux:
Cheese cut & grated (8) giving PARMESAN from (AMPERSAN[d])*
Quite smart, and not unfair, unlike, I’d say, the clue for ENZIAN given by Richard Heald@19. One over the eight can’t only mean nine. It has an idiomatic meaning, one and eight can be all sorts of things, as can over, and the ‘the’ is superfluous and therefore misleading.