AZED 2,425 Plain

26 comments on “AZED 2,425 Plain”

1. As usual, I have no memories of doing this after a week, but I have a completed grid so I know I did it.  I also noted I couldn’t parse 3dn and 6dn.  The latter is obvious, now you’ve explained it, but the first I didn’t know the Latin, although I suppose I should have been able to guess it from “puerile”.

2. I thought ALSO-RAN was very clever for a hidden clue. An enjoyable puzzle overall, leaving aside the hairs I tore out in vain when trying to write a decent clue for Epilimnion.

3. I wasn’t entirely happy about the clue for POIND, which seems to be a Scottish legal term. It means distraint, the “legal seizure and detention of a chattel”, but Azed seems to equate this with restraint, which is rather different. Any other lawyers out there share my view?

4. bridgesong – I am glad you brought that up, I have wondered about that myself.  I am so out of my depth on legal matters that I didn’t even know if was a sensible question at ask.

5. As explained 17dn is perfectly understandable, but Azed and others would call it a comp. anag. (I never know what comp. stands for: composite? compound?) where [yet a tiller] has the same letters as [at tree-lily]. For some reason that I have never understood, Azed has always said that there should be some sort of break between the two parts (if he was observing his rules he’d say something like ‘yet a tiller is working’? At it’ which is of course no good as a clue at all and as it is it’s far better).  So Azed has contravened his own weird rule, but should he have done so, in view of his edict?

6. Hi Wil, I saw the anagram indicator applying to “at tree lily” rather than to “yet a tiller”.  The latter is just read literally. The break, if it needs one, would be the word “is”.  My reading is: “yet a tiller” is “anagram of at tree lily “

7. Azed refers to the construction as a composite anagram, and the point he frequently makes is that there must be an indication that the first collection of letters can be rearranged to form the second collection. So here “Yet a tiller is working at it [ie TREE LILY]” is fine, as would be “Yet a tiller could be working at it”, but “Yet a tiller worked at it” would not, because nothing tells the solver that it is YET A TILLER which the anagram (‘worked’) of AT TREE LILY can produce (it would need to be rewritten as something like the meaningless “Yet a tiller could be worked at it”).

    

8. Hello DRC – your explanation states that (Azed writes) the first set of letters has to be arranged for the second set.  Your example of [is TREE LILY]* suggests to me that here the second set is being arranged.  Am I missing something?

   PS – thank you for you valuable insights on this blog.  I learn a lot from them.

9. Sorry, I didn’t make myself very clear there – you’re not missing anything! I should have said “one collection of letters can be rearranged to form the other“, as the order of the groups is not significant – here the anagram indicator is applied to the second group. What is important is that an equivalence between the two groups is explicitly stated (contrasting with definition + wordplay in a clue, where no explicit indication of equivalence is required – eg in 31ac there is no need to say “A river, not English, is dark blue” because crossword convention allows for the “=” to be inferred)

10. I should add that it is not necessary for the indication of equivalence to appear in the clue between the two elements – one of the earliest clues of this type was produced by A F Ritchie (Afrit) more than 70 years ago: “You could make this whale seem quarrelsome, but hold it up by its tail and it begins to laugh”. Leaving aside the superfluous (and rather distracting) verbiage after the comma, the clue indicates that the solver could turn RORQUAL SEEM into QUARRELSOME, and clues of this sort were sometimes referred to as ‘Quarrelsome Whale’ clues.

    Incidentally, in the slip for puzzle 2,235 Azed writes: “Ximenes in his slip No. 63 (in 1947) on the subject of what are now generally referred to as composite anagrams [wrote]: ‘… an anagram involving added letters offers such wide scope, and opens up such terrifyingly tortuous possibilities, that it should not really rank beside first class clues which do not go outside the word itself …’. Given that he subsequently awarded prizes to comp. anags. occasionally, I assume he modified his stance a bit as the years went by.”

    And thank you, PeeDee, your words are appreciated, as are your blogs – I know from experience that it’s a lot easier to comment on them than it is to write them!

11. I ask the question about whether the first or second can be the anagram as I have seen you comment before about how Azed, as I understood it, requires the wordplay lead to the solution rather than the other way round.  It seemed to me that attaching the anagram to “at it”, at + the solution, the wordplay is producing YET A TILLER which is not the solution.  On the other hand the “is” implies that YET A TILLER is leading to the solution.  The rules seem to contradict each other.

12. That’s a very fair question. I have expressed unhappiness in the past about clues in which the solution appeared to be leading to the wordplay rather than the other way round, eg “Factories resulting in a thousand ailments” for MILLS [M + ILLS], where surely the solver can expect that the definition is the ailments and not the factories. Incidentally, I’m fine with clues like “Material is special type” for SILK [S + ILK], as this suggests an equivalence to me – if X is Y, then Y is also X.

    However, the composite anagram is rather different. A typical Ximenean clue (other than an &lit) consists of a definition and a wordplay, in either order, with an optional link between them. So in the clue ‘Second shopping centre is tiny” for SMALL [S + MALL], the wordplay is ‘Second shopping centre”, the link is ‘is’, and the definition is ‘tiny’. Applying a similar analysis to 17dn, “It grows wild in Brazil, yet a tiller is working at it”, the definition for TREE LILY is “It grows wild in Brazil”. This definition is followed by a comma, there being no linking words, and the rest (“yet a tiller is working at it”) is all wordplay – in a non-&lit composite anagram, the solution that is defined will re-appear in the wordplay as a reference to itself , here in the form of “it”, on other occasions as words like “such or “so”. In effect, the wordplay here says “YET A TILLER is a rearrangement of (AT plus the name of the thing that grows wild in Brazil)” – so which part produces the other is irrelevant, as neither collection of letters is itself the solution.

    I hope that makes some sort of sense!

13. Thanks Azed and PeeDee – a DNF for me, these are certainly a stretch from the Guardian.
    Please spell out why A=‘it’ in 6d. SA I would have no trouble with.

14. Gonzo@13:  The simple answer is, I think, because Chambers defines ‘a’ as it.  (And all the other third person pronouns.)  No, I don’t think I’ve heard it that way, either.

15. DRC – of course, there is already a definition!  I had completely overlooked that, I couldn’t see the wood for the trees.

16. The OED only shows THEM and THEY as meanings of a as a pronoun: one is dialectical and the other obsolete.  It would be interesting to see what references Chambers have for a=it.  I don’t suppose we will ever get to find out.

    As for its use in Azed: I think the rule is that if it is listed in Chambers then then is fair game.  Knowing Chambers off by heart would be a great asset when solving Azed puzzles.  In fact Azed’s clues are so precise that one could argue that the solvers’ average vocabulary is the only thing preventing Azed being the easiest cryptic of them all.

17. DRC the reason why I find Azed’s injunction weird is that in a normal anagram clue the anagram indicator is not attached to any specific words, yet once one is dealing with comp.anags. you (as would Azed) say in your post @7 ‘because nothing tells the solver that …’.  Why should the solver be told?   For example in this crossword, where he is dealing with normal anagrams, Azed has ‘Meal cooked with liver’.  How does the solver know that it is an anagram of (meal liver)?  It might be an anagram of (meal with liver) or even of (Meal).  And in ‘I was not AB? Possibly’ how do we know that it is (I was not AB) rather than something equivalent to I was, followed by (not AB)*?

    Surely it is perfectly acceptable for the setter to make it difficult for the solver to work out what the anagram indicator applies to. All part of the game, it seems to me.

18. Actually now that I read it the (meal with liver) example is wrong, please ignore, my apologies.  But my point remains: it is part of the setter’s skill to fit an anagram and an anagram indicator seamlessly into the clue: why then do the rules change when it comes to comp. anags.?

19. Perhaps it wasn’t very sensible of me to choose anagram clues that Azed himself wrote.  What about this, from Phi in the Independent last Friday: ‘The fruit of playing harmonicas?’ (giving MARASCHINO)?  The anagram is *(harmonicas) but initially the solver doesn’t know that it isn’t (The fruit of)*, with the answer types of harmonica.  The fact that ‘playing’ applies to the words following it rather than those before it has to be deduced by the solver.  If the Azed rule for comp. anags. were to be used here, the clue would have to read something like ‘Fruit? Playing harmonicas’.

20. Wil, is the reason that there are special rules for compound anagram clues that they do not follow the normal pattern of (wordplay) gives (definition).  In a normal clue the link word “gives” can be replaced by another suitable word or omitted entirely if equality is implicit in the reading.

    Compound anagrams such as the one here are two parts: (definition) and (a statement implying one thing is an anagram of another thing).  The second statement is only true if you have deduced the correct solution.  It needs to be made explicit that the anagram is of another part of the clue (not of the solution).

21. Wil, it has always seemed to me that Azed errs on the side of tolerance when it comes to composite anagrams – can you explain what it is that he has declared unacceptable? An example or a reference to a competition slip would be helpful.

22. I wish I could help, DRC. Without looking back through all the past slips I don’t think I can. My impression is that he has stated from time to time that a break, usually of punctuation but possibly of some words, is necessary. He has also said this in private correspondence with me (I enclosed an SAE once, asking him this question). I’ve also read this in a major survey of Azed’s rules on comp. anags by someone who is as puzzled as I am. At a lunch once (not I think the last one, but the one in Wadham College Oxford) one of the speakers made a jocular remark about establishing from Azed just exactly what his rules for comp. anags, were, and it was greeted with laughter. The audience knew that this was virtually impossible, because they seem to change a bit over the years.

23. Thanks, Wil – I think I’m getting the idea. I suspect that we are talking about the non-&lit form of the composite anagram (as 17dn here), where a definition is provided and the solution is then referenced within the wordplay. This I believe introduces a couple of constraints:

    1. The definition of the solution must precede the reference to it, and

    2. There must be some form of separation between the definition and the wordplay, because otherwise the intended internal reference to the solution cannot be read as such. Here’s a possible clue for FRAME (one meaning of the word given by Chambers is ‘articulate’):

    Articulate foreman could be working on it

    Not a great clue, but superficially sound (FOREMAN* = (ON FRAME)*). But consider the word ‘it’ in the cryptic reading of this sentence – it cannot possibly refer back to the subject in the same clause. Consider some potential real-life examples: “Homework I’m doing it now”; “Your dinner it has gone in the bin”; “Vote she’s postponed it” – in every instance, there has to be some form of break after subject 1 in order to establish a new clause and new subject (I/she/it) for clause 2. “Your dinner? It [your dinner] has gone in the bin”. If the ‘it’ (or ‘such’ etc) appeared in a subordinate clause that would be fine (eg ‘Homework has a way of making you dislike it”), but I wouldn’t like to try to construct a composite anagram clue in such form. In practice, for the cryptic reading to be syntactically sound my clue for FRAME would need to be changed to something like:

    Structure: foreman is working on it

    I hope that makes a modicum of sense!

24. I always thought a comp. anag was something like:

    Mixed something could be something with this. i.e., a full anagram with a partial anagram given the answer but some sort of context between the two.

    See my VHC here: (N Warne)

    http://www.andlit.org.uk/azed/cluelist.php?series=A&comp_no=2023

    Nick

25. Nick, that’s the &lit form of the ‘comp anag’, perhaps best exemplified by Colin Dexter’s superb 1986 clue for WELL-TO-DO, “It’s this Littlewoods could make you”.

26. MAGIC LANTERN – Item gran arranged family slides in.

    Good old Colin. He could sort this out for us.

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