AZED 2,434

28 comments on “AZED 2,434”

1. A much friendlier competition word than the likes of epilimnion and ubiquarian. Has there ever been one with so many synonyms? (In which case why couldn’t I come up with a better clue? :-D)

2. I don’t understand 1A – how does “me?” relate to ARCHIMANDRITE” (a priest in the Greek Orthodox Church who is in charge of a group of monks)?  What am I missing?

3. The “me” in 1 across refers to the head of monastery referred to earlier to the clue.

4. A puzzle well up to Azed’s usual high standards. Apart from the fact that I would have preferred to see ‘scuttled’ (=destroyed) rather than ‘scuttles’ (=scurries) at 1ac, my quibbles were reserved for the last two clues.

   Azed revives one of my pet peeves at 27dn with the letter A ‘tucking into’ SAKI – the only meaning of the intransitive verb ‘tuck’ is ‘to make an onslaught on food’, and I have never seen the transitive form used reflexively with an implied object (“He tucks into his bed at night” could surely only be written of a gluttonous woodworm). “Tucked into” would be fine, of course.

   In 29dn, strictly speaking a ‘snip’ is a bargain (“something for sale at an advantageously low price”), not a ‘bargain price’.

5. DRC – when driving you could tuck into the gap between two cars.  You could you tuck into the trees to hide.  So can’t the letter A tuck into the letters S A K I?  A is seen “tucking into” SAKI.

6. I agree with Robert #2;1ac is utter nonsense, and worthy of the other weeks Everyman.

   The clue totally ignored the spider but uses the rest to get there. Why would a spider crawl around the ‘head of monastery’ whatever that means?

7. PeeDee @5: Your second example would certainly be a reflexive use with the implied object ‘yourself’, but I’ve never come across either of those expressions (wouldn’t you ‘duck’ into the trees, or ‘tuck yourself’ into a gap between trees, although a cottage might be ‘tucked’ into them?), and google doesn’t seem to offer much supporting evidence. Of the 189 results returned for a search on “tucked into a”, apart from the past active tense being used in reference to eating (one example being in a report on the 2010 world nettle eating championship, wherein the winner tucked into a 74ft nettle), in all other instances ‘tucked’ was used in a passive sense. Not that I think the clue is remotely unfair, it’s just one of my hobby-horses!

8. Maybe it is a regional dialect, I could certainly imagine my mother saying these things. Other examples I could imagine: a book tucking nicely into her pocket, a chair tucking into the alcove by the window.

   You could certainly say she had a book tucked into her pocket, but for me that changes the meaning: it describes a single instance of the book being there rather than the ongoing quality of the book being a good size for her pocket.

9. Ah yes, ‘The book tucks nicely into a pocket’ works for me, but I think ‘tucks’ is being used here in a gnomic aspect to mean (as you suggest) ‘The book will fit nicely into a pocket’ and doesn’t mean that the book is actually going into a pocket at the moment, or necessarily ever will do so. “Birds fly south for the winter” is similar. In a related usage, the present tense can be frequentative (expressing habitual aspect), as in “He cuts his own hair”, which doesn’t imply that he’s doing it now, although he regularly does it. I agree that ‘One tucks nicely into rice wine’ could be syntactically valid for the transitive form of ‘tuck’, but for me it can’t mean that A should be inserted into SAKI, nicely or otherwise.

10. I see your objection now: Azed has to say specifically that the A is or has been tucked into something.  That it might well be so, or that it typically is the case is not enough.

11. Yep – I realise it’s a very fine distinction, and I probably wouldn’t even mention it if the setter were anyone except Azed.

    Just to prove I’m not always quite so picky, I had no issue with ‘me?’ in 1ac referring to the ‘head of monastery’.

12. I do share the feeling that 1ac must break one of Azed’s own rules for that flapping ‘me’.
    Did anyone else start by trying to fit JESUS into 32ac?
    Thanks Azed and PeeDee.

13. The ‘me’ in 1a might be better served by having “before liturgy” moved to the front of the clue. But that would mean taking away the potential of ‘arachnid’ as a misleading definition. (I liked the clue anyway.)

14. In 1a could the “me?” somehow refer to Azed himself?

15. Re ‘tucking into’, this is just one of a number of verbal indicators used habitually by Azed that don’t stand up to scrutiny. He quite often uses eg ‘flicks’ and ‘batting’ as intransitive verbal anagram indicators, but Chambers supports neither of these. Azed is such a stickler for grammatical correctness that I’ve no doubt he’d drop them immediately if he checked their entries in the big red book.

16. Re ARCHIMANDRITE – I think the main weakness of the clue is that in the wordplay the voice is speaking in the third person but in the definition “me” shifts to the first person. I’m sure Azed is not an archimandrite himself, or if he is then there is no way for the solver to know this.  Maybe “him” or “himself” instead of “me” might get around this.

    The only way I can square the surface reading is if the writer (an archimandrite) is musing about a spider being on a senior monk, and then points out the irony of being himself the head of monastery. As Nick @6 says this more than a little contrived.

    Additionally “head of monastery” sounds strained compared to the more natural “head of a/the monastery”.  One can have titles such as “Head of School”, “Head of Finance” so maybe the monk is thinking about the role rather than the specific individual.  Contrived again.

    Most clues are contrived to some extent, where contrived becomes as unacceptable I think is matter of personal taste.  Personally it doesn’t bother me but I would not argue for a moment with someone who says the surface reading of this clue is  nonsense.

17. Richard @15: I’d really like ‘batting’ to be valid, but both of your examples are clear aberrations which I suppose have become ingrained in Azed’s mind through re-use. Less glaring, but I wasn’t convinced by the intransitive ‘scuttles’ in this puzzle either. PS I felt strongly that your clue for CLERIHEW in comp 2,430 deserved greater recognition.

18. Thanks, DRC – I was hoping the second word of my CLERIHEW clue would have a subliminal influence on Azed, but sadly ’twas not to be. Still, I took some satisfaction from seeing that mine was the only *genuine* clerihew on display. Maybe if I’d added “(pair of couplets from Richard Heald in form of clue)”, as I was sorely tempted to do, it might have worked in my favour …?

19. Oh and with regard to ‘tucking into’, thank you, DRC, for not drawing attention to the blatant hypocrisy evident in my LUNCHEONETTE clue!

20. That is frankly superb. Whether the addition would have had the desired effect I don’t know, given that it was a darn good clue anyway, but it certainly ought to have done. I think the slip for LUNCHEONETTE had passed me by – I feel that one could just about make a case for ‘tucking’ being a verbal noun there, but not in a clue from my second published puzzle which included the wordplay “Osbourne ultimately tucking into bats” for MEAD…oops!

21. Yes, I was clinging rather desperately to a gerundive justification there, so I’m grateful for the extra support!

22. If one bats ones eyelids one flutters them.

    I think that justifies batting as an anagrind. It is listed in the list of common anagram indicators in Chambers Crossword Dictionary.

23. Sidey, one can use ‘batting’ as a transitive verb, with eg ‘eyelid’ as the direct object, that’s for sure. The point I’m making is that Azed sometimes uses it INtransitively as an anagrind, i.e. saying “XYZ batting”, where the anagram fodder XYZ takes the place of the subject, and having nothing where the direct object needs to be.

24. …as in this clue from AZ 2,191 for CHIDER – “Edrich batting, combative fellow of old”. Without a direct object, ‘batting’ here can only mean something to the effect of ‘taking a turn at batting in cricket’, which is what is intended in the surface reading but not the wordplay, and carries no suggestion of rearrangement or disorder. One finds that there are more transitive disturbance/destruction-related meanings of verbs than intransitive ones, so a passive or adjectival form of the transitive sense (eg ‘batted’, ‘scrambled’) generally has more chance of being valid than an active form of the intransitive sense (‘bats’/’batting’, ‘scrambles/scrambling’).

    The Chambers Crossword Dictionary is a useful aid, but its lists of indicators have (like ‘flicks’ and ‘batting’) come from the databases (mental or electronic) of long-established setters. Before using the less obvious ones in clues it is wise to consult an appropriate dictionary to confirm that in the form in which you intend to use them they have the intended (and non-archaic) meaning, which is likely to rule out for instance ‘oddly’ to indicate the selection of letters 1,3,5 etc from a word, ‘yearning’ to indicate rearrangement, or ‘rebellious’ to indicate reversal. BTW, I have checked to ensure that none of these appear in Richard’s many successful Azed competition clues 😉

25. I agree with all of 24 apart from “oddly” to mean odd letters. I think there is a case for this one (Chambers unhelpfully doesn’t define “oddly”) and I far prefer it to  “regularly” for short words. Does taking the first and third letter of a four-letter word really establish a regular pattern?

    I also agree regarding tucked in vs. tucks in.

    One of my bugbears is “touring” as a container indicator. It does mean “going around”, but in pretty much the opposite sense of that which is needed to show containment!

    It’s great to see far more comments on Azed puzzles these days, though I hope he won’t be discouraged by such critical analysis 🙂

26. Just don’t try ‘oddly’ in an Azed competition clue. He once wrote: “I’ve noticed in other crosswords and in clues entered for these competitions a growing use of ‘oddly’ to mean ‘taking the odd letters only’, on the analogy of ‘initially’, I suppose. I’m not at all keen on this (and would feel the same about ‘evenly’ if it were used) since I can’t conceive of its being used in this sense in normal language. Be warned. (‘Initially’ is different and quite acceptable in my view.)”

    I agree about ‘touring’. One that Azed allows but I find wholly unacceptable is ‘during’ to indicate insertion – yes, it means “in the course of”, but only ever in a temporal sense.

    It seems to me that it is a tribute to Azed’s reputation for accuracy that discussion of the niceties of clue construction should appear on these threads, and that even slightly questionable clues are such rarities in his puzzles that they warrant specific comment. There, that ought to cheer him up…

27. I never enter clue competitions!

    I too have never seen how “during” could work as an insertion indicator. “Essentially” as a middle letter indicator is another one I’m not keen on, but I’m very much in a minority on that one.

    It all goes show that there is a huge grey area in between unimpeachable indicators and those which are plainly wrong (e.g. “first person” for P, so beloved of certain Guardian setters). No wonder even setters of Azed’s calibre can appear inconsistent in what they accept and what they don’t!

     

28. I hadn’t considered the validity of ‘touring’ as a containment indicator before, but yes, I agree that it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. There are so many indicators like this – ‘rejected’ as reversalind, ‘describing’ as containerind, ‘cooking’ as intransitive verbal anagrind – that dictionaries appear not to support, and yet are widely used even by setters of Azed’s calibre, that one has to just turn a blind eye and move on.

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