AZED 2,386

24 comments on “AZED 2,386”

1. Two small slips: superfluous APOLOG at the start of the unravellng of 1 across; the numbering for PST should be 24, not 2. Concerning that clue, isn’t the interchangeabililty of O (digit) and 0 (letter) a long-accepted crossword convention? I don’t have a problem with it, but maybe this just shows my lack of rigour. Will think about it. Anyway, I agree that this was a bit harder than usual. There may be a slight lack of concentration when it’s a cluing week, as here, since I don’t spend time trying vainly to compete, though sending in the straight solution most other weeks, and very occasionally being rewarded. Many thanks to Peedee, as to Azed.

2. I’m glad you two found it as tough as I did. Usually when I struggle, I find to my embarrassment that no one else at fifteensquared has.

   Not that it wasn’t enjoyable or unfair. The clue for ‘upgrade’ was superb.

3. Thanks for pointing out the typos quenbarrow.  Did you have a coherent explanation for 5dn?

   Re 24ac: I know that O is commonly clued as “love”.  In this case Azed explicitly states that O is a letter, not a digit.  If the justification is that O is the digit 0 because it has an established usage as such  in cryptic crosswords, then isn’t this a bit self-referential?  A bit like a Wikipedia article that quotes Wikipedia as a source.  There is something about this clue that feels a bit wrong to me.

4. PeeDee, I think you’ve pretty much answered your own question regarding 5 down in your explanation. HOGGING is defined by “greedily devouring what host offers” –  DEVOURIN’ reduces this to  HOGGIN’ and a Cockney ‘OST would drop the H so we get ‘OGGIN’. NOGGIN doesn’t work as the initial N wouldn’t be dropped by our East End ‘OST.

   I’ve never had a problem with O and 0 being interchangeable, because  they look exactly the same when I write them. Likewise I and 1. I’m not sure I quite understand Azed’s reasoning about “love”, though. Doesn’t it refer to a love/zero score in tennis so it does indicate a digit, which conveniently looks like the letter O?

5. I think the bit I struggle with on 5dn is that though the ‘ost may be a cockney he is the person offerin’ the fare, not the person devouin’ the fare.  Just because my host is a cockney doesn’t make me talk with a cockney accent.

6. I can see what you mean, but I think it works if you treat the clue as a sentence spoken actually being spoken by a Cockney rather than the host himself necessarily being one?

7. Don’t recall this being particularly harder (or easier) than usual.  I think I did most of it in a single session before dinner on Sunday evening but there were a couple at the end I needed to do word searches.  34ac is such an unlikely looking word I just couldn’t see it.

8. The OED entry for ‘O’ gives it as ‘The Arabic zero or cipher 0’, which indicates to me that ‘nil’, ‘zero’, ‘love’ etc are quite acceptable for O and that we don’t need to start referring to James Bond as ‘zero-zero-seven’. More questionable, I feel, is using ‘ten’ to indicate ‘IO’, although it’s something that I believe both Ximenes and Azed have done on occasion.

   In 14ac, I think the wordplay is SPINS (‘short trips’) reversed (’round’) containing (‘about’) (PIN G).

   I’m not convinced that the wordplay in 32ac is completely sound. When a preposition (here, ‘among’) is used as a hidden indicator (rather than a noun, say, ‘part [of]’ or ‘piece [from]’), there needs to be a link in the clue to show that it is the solution which is to be found among the letters of the clue itself. So ‘Among fauna (unusual) is creature slightly better off than the Pobble’ (or ‘Among fauna (unusual), creature…’) would be fine, but not ‘Among fauna (unusual) one’s slightly better off than the Pobble’ where the main verb (‘is’) relates to the UNAU’s digital endowment rather than its location. That said, the clue is surely not unfair.

9. DRC – Re 14ac: yes, I remember that is how I parsed the clue when I solved the puzzle.  For some reason I could not recall this when writing up the blog post a few days later.  Fixed now.

   Re 32ac – I see what you are saying here, but I think that although the surface reading has to be read as a whole the two parts of the clue can be disjoint.  “Among fauna (unusual)” can be the wordplay and “one’s slightly better off than the Pobble” can be the definition.  This may not be as elegant as a joined-up alternative as you suggest, but not a malformed clue.

   Re O and 0 – you are right there.  Now I think about it I sometimes use “oh” rather than “zero” when reciting my telephone number.

10. Just a small point, not mentioned by others – 8 Down is SINGULT, not ‘SUNGILT’, as shown in both the list and the grid.

11. PeeDee@9 – if 32ac is divided into wordplay and definition, strictly speaking ‘Among fauna (unusual)’ is a prepositional phrase which then requires the solver to infer ‘Something found…’ or the like in order to deliver UNAU. I know I’m being (very)finicky – I raise the point only because Azed’s accuracy rarely falls below ‘total’, and a comma after the third word here (such that it can be the ‘one’ which is found amidst the fauna) would have made me just a tad happier!

12. Thanks to Azed and PeeDee for the usual enjoyable Sunday tussle.

    I didn’t find this too challenging (comparatively speaking – Azed is always a challenge). But I held myself up by confidently putting in “clippings” for 14ac and thus, until the light dawned, getting stuck on 4dn, despite my love of Schubert and Winterreise, and familiarity with Ian Bostridge. Lovely clue!

13. Oops! Well spotted Bob.  I can fix the list now, the grid will take a little longer.

14. I didn’t find this too tricky for Azed, apart from 2d where I had no idea and threw in the towel. Oh well…

15. Indeed, Marienkaefer, 4 down was superb and your post is a reminder of how much I was impressed by it when I solved the puzzle. High time I gave my recording of Winterreise with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (aka D Fiddy) an airing!

16. Referring back to early exchanges after a day away (it happens) from the internet – and after now catching up with the enlightening debates that followed:

    On 0 vs O, I had not thought initially of 007 or phone numbers, both of which seem decisive; but was ready to recall, from time spent in the US, the way an unbeaten NFL team has its early-season record summarised: Cowboys or whoever are ‘5 and 0’ pronounced ‘five and owe ‘.

    Were people recently regretting the relative lack of response, on this site, to Azed? The traffic is never going to be as busy as the response to the six days of The Guardian, but things are surely looking up. Thanks to PeeDee and others bloggers for advancing this.

17. quenbarrow – Gaufrid once joked that the best way to get a comment on a quiet day is to make some errors in the blog.  I seem to be a natural at this game!

18. cruciverbophile @4 – your comment that 0 and O look exactly the same when you write them demonstrates to me how personal the solving experience is.  Having studied mathematics at school and university and then worked a as computer programmer 0 and O are absolutely not the same and do not look the same either; confusing the two is a complete no-no. People I knew would ensure that a handwritten O and 0 look different, typically by adding a vertical or slanting line through the character zero so it looks a bit like a no-entry road sign. Other people might dot the centre of the zero.  One would certainly not write them identically!

19. …yes indeed, those of us who remember coding sheets and punched cards will probably also recall the frustration of a deck of cards coming back from the card punch operators (known collectively where I worked by the rather bleak term of ‘Input’) with one card (usually somewhere in the middle of the deck!) having an O for a 0 or vice versa. The error came to light only when it caused a compilation failure in one’s program, which was followed by a wait of several hours before the job could be resubmitted with the error corrected. Our company used the old IBM convention of the ‘slashed O’, together with a dot or short horizontal line in the zero…any attempt by a coder to differentiate between the two by simply making the O a bit fatter than the zero would inevitably end in tears.

20. Rapacious parking companies (are there any other kinds?) are said to make a lot of money from people who key in 0 for O for vice versa when entering their car number and are thus deemed to be parked illegally…

21. Further to the above, I have the Chambers CD-ROM and the licence key contains several 0s and Os. It is practically impossible to distinguish which is which and causes much annoyance whenever I install the programme. What’s more, I recently had to book a repair for my dishwasher. I wrote down the model and serial numbers and took them to the repair shop. The person there couldn’t find my model on the computer – you can guess why…

22. DRC@19:  I well remember when I started work as a programmer back in the mid-seventies and encountering coding sheets for the first time.  (Up to then, I’d been typing my own programs.)  I was immediately taken to task for not distinguishing my ohs from my zeroes.  I was told to put a slash through it if I wanted an alpha, which confused me as surely that would make it a phi.

    quenbarrow@20:  Indeed, there was a question about this very point in the money problems column in the Observer this weekend.

23. Amen to the pleasure at getting a lot more taking part in the Azed blog. My clue for the comp (my usual rubbish) included a nomination for favourite clue but some of the comments make me think I missed the stars in PIANISTE and UPGRADE both A grade Azed. The latter’s compound anagram is the kind one would put down to serendipity if one didn’t know the great compiler’s skill.

    Re O and 0 my home telephone number as a child was 0608 (the 608th in that locality) and was always pronounced with oh’s.

24. Keith @23, “My usual rubbish…” That must be another K Thomas I see time and time again on the Azed roll of honour then!  😉

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