AZED 2,431 Plain

17 comments on “AZED 2,431 Plain”

1. Anyone know how to get today’s Azed? It seems not to have been loaded.

2. It’s there now but as a JPG instead of the usual PDF. It’s best to print it in landscape to get a decent print-out (with Firefox, anyway).

3. Yes, and no option to download it that I can find

4. Thanks for the blog, PeeDee. I think SKID is in fact ski’d.

5. Thanks for the explanations of 24ac and 30ac.  I wasn’t familiar with cassone and I didn’t know the saying about sprats and whales.

6. bridgesong – quite so, fixed now.

7. PIES seem to have turned into PEAS in the explanation of 22ac.

   I feel that ‘dry house’ for AA HO in 19ac is a stretch – ‘dry’ for AA surely doesn’t work in isolation, so AA must be appearing in an attributive (adjectival) sense, modifying ‘house’; I could accept ‘dry house’ for, say, AA INN (“It’s an AA inn”/”It’s a dry house”), but AA HO doesn’t mean anything.

   I have never liked ‘folded’ (30ac), or ‘doubled’ for that matter, to indicate reversal. Both seem to me to clearly describe something being turned back on itself, not reversed or inverted in toto – a ‘folded’ piece of paper is not turned round, neither is someone who is ‘doubled over’ standing on their head (or if they are it’s one heck of a good trick).

8. DRC @7

   Oops!  I think the famous Jamaican dish Rice and Peas must have substituted itself for “rice and pies” in my brain.

   I agree with you re “dry house” and I thought something similar at the time though it didn’t alter my enjoyment of the puzzle: it is clear what was meant and whether AA is an attributive (adjective) or an adjective in its own right is a technical distinction lost on me. It makes for an interesting discussion though!

   In contrast folded as a reversal indicator did take the gloss off the clue for me as it simply doesn’t mean reversed, not even figuratively.

9. Likewise, I didn’t have any problem with the clue for 19ac – I’m just being ultra-picky! Regarding 30ac, several reversal indicators regularly seen in puzzles could be described as questionable, and a certain latitude tends to be granted by common consent, but ‘folded’ and ‘doubled’ don’t work for me.

10. Thanks to PeeDee and Azed

    @1a I cannot agree that AWAY is synonymous with CONTINUOUSLY. I suppose that Chambers gives it, and I know that Collins online and the SOE (1993) does, but both of the latter are demonstrably flawed in their reasoning.

    Collins give 3 examples:-

    Firing away

    Laughing away

    He worked away all night

    In the first instance Collins gives no examples, but their entry for FIRE AWAY states that AWAY in this phrase means IMMEDIATELY, or WITHOUT HESITATION. The insouciance with which they contradict themselves here is instructive when you consider the consider the second and third examples.

    LAUGHING AWAY might commonly be encountered in a sentence such as ” He was laughing away all through the second act of the play”

    I read this as ” He was laughing with gusto/relish/abandon all through the second act of the play.

    The sense of continuity is already provided by ” all through ” thereby rendering an interpretation of  CONTINUOUSLY as AWAY merely tautological.

    Similarly ” He worked away all night”, I read as ” He worked assiduously/conscientiously all night.

    In every reasonable example I can think of AWAY is used as an intensifier referring back to the verb it modifies. If a sense of continuity is required it is provided by other words and/or context.

    I had intended to go on to look at the way the SOED justifies its entry but I think should wait and see if somebody can shoot me down!

    BTW I mean none of the above to reflect on the setter who is entitled to use whatever synonyms the dictionaries provide.

    @10a Are we to take the definition to be VAGRANT ONCE i.e an archaic word for vagrant or is it TRANT for PEDDLE which is archaic?

    @28a Should it be BURNed?

     

     

11. Thanks PeeDee,
    It should be BURNEd in 28ac indeed, and in 2d I think it is R OPEN in (hearty i)* .
    Re ‘away’ – “He was talking away to himself” vs “He was talking to himself”?

12. Thanks for pointing out the burned/burnt error.  Fixed  now.

13. Dansar – I think it is misleading to say that away doesn’t mean continuous because it means conscientiously or something else.

    Take the phrase “he worked away”:

    You take away to indicate conscientiously, I take it to indicate for a continuous period, someone else takes it to indicate in another country.  All of these are reasonable readings of the word away, and accordingly the dictionary records them all.  It isn’t a question of “if one is right then the others must be wrong”.

    Generally, on the subject of dictionaries giving usages that I can’t relate to: that is the reason I use a dictionary.  If I could just simply rely on my own life experience to know the meanings of words then I wouldn’t need a dictionary in the first place.

14. I should correct my earlier comment @13: Chambers doesn’t actually list assiduously/conscientiously for away but it might reasonably do so.  Even so that would not replace the earlier definitions, it would just add to them.

15. PeeDee @ 13&14, thank you for your response. I feel I should point out that my rant was in no way directed at the blog which was excellent as always but rather at what I see as some laxity regarding the compiling of dictionaries. I should probably continue that in the General Discussion section if anywhere but there are still a couple of questions I have regarding this puzzle:

    10a Is it TRUANT which is an archaic word for VAGRANT?

    30a I have known the phrase “set a sprat to catch a mackerel” since childhood but have never heard it with reference to a whale. Is there an alternative version of the well known saying or are we to simply infer WHALE (an even bigger fish) from the original saying?

    BTW along with others I regard folded = reversed as somewhat iffy

16. Dansar@15 – Yes, the ‘once’ applies to the (obsolete) TRUANT for ‘vagrant’; the fact that ‘once’ is separated from ‘to peddle’ in the wordplay by the word ‘having’ makes this certain, and in any event Chambers doesn’t show ‘trant’ as being obsolete or archaic.

17. Dansar: I hadn’t heard of sprats with whales before either but there were numerous references to the phrase on the Internet

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