AZED 2,440

16 comments on “AZED 2,440”

1. Tiny typo in the analysis of 14 across : RER + OOF, not OFF. Till looking it up, I had not known this was a respectable abbreviation of ooftish, from the Yiddish, rather than a flippant coinage by Wodehouse, who appropriated the word so neatly for the miserly Oofy Prosser. OED citation from 1950: “That a fellow as oofy as Oofy should get the money seemed to Bingo a crime.”  Perhaps OOFTISH has itself come up in Azed in the past. It’s good meanwhile to have a legitimate -EE ending in PROMISEE – didn’t the Guardian recently perpetrate ATTENDEE? (possibly in a Quick rather than a Cryptic). Many thanks to PeeDee as well as to Azed.

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2. OOFTISH was in Azed 2380 clued as “Love of this corrupted? Possibly.”

   I too thought this was on the easy side.

   Stefan

3. Thank you Stefan/MS, for coming up with that confirmation of OOFTISH from more than a year ago – I may have been very vaguely remembering it.

4. Chambers does indeed define REFRESHMENTS (plural) as “drink or a light meal”. I imagine Azed had Constantin Silvestri in mind as the conductor (I certainly did).

5. Phi – yes, you are right, the clue says conductor not composer, I am getting confused.

   I remembered OOFTISH immediately from writing the blog post for Azed 2,380.  Thanks for pointing out the typo, fixed now.

6. Like PeeDee, I am unconvinced about ‘a drink’ for REFRESHMENTS in 9dn. Chambers does equate ‘refreshments’ to ‘drink’, but both are uncountable nouns (as in ‘The sale of refreshments including alcoholic drink is permitted’); Azed’s use of the indefinite article here, however, indicates a countable noun (“I took a drink from the flask”). I think it’s fair to add, though, that when someone says “I’m going for a drink” they often hope that their actual intake will not be countable.

   7dn produced echoes of 14ac in 2,433, where VELLON was hidden in ‘caravel, London bound’. Here the question is whether ‘heart of Hindu Kush’ can reasonably indicate U. Given that in English ‘Kush’ on its own has no meaning while the words in combination form a well-known open compound noun, I think the answer is yes.

   I may have got CYST in 2,439 from the wordplay, but I didn’t deduce ALME similarly here. I can’t help feeling that ‘no longer dancing’ would have been better than ‘not dancing’, which suggests ‘calm’ (=’still’) rather than ‘calmed’ (=’made calm, reduced to calmness’).

7. Thanks to PeeDee and Azed

   I wondered why 9d wasn’t defined as either DRINK or DRINKS, but my main query is with 10a:

   How does IT mean A LOWER ANIMAL.

   BTW my S.O.E.D gives JEE = STIR as a variation of GEE as in GEE UP

    

8. Dansar, one of the definitions of “it” in Chambers is “a lower animal”. Think of the way you might refer to an animal that isn’t your pet as it rather than he or she.

   I surprised myself by getting SCONE straight away – composite anagrams are one of my blind spots. Perhaps it was an easy one though, I can’t tell. Nice clue.

   Thanks to PeeDee & Azed.

9. Thank you Blorenge.

   I did wonder whether LOWER might mean INFERIOR SPECIES OF, but I wasn’t sure there wasn’t an IT breed of MOO COW.

10. I think that it is very hard to justify ‘a lower animal’ for IT unless you accept that the pronominal sense of ‘the lower animal [in question]’ can translate into a nounal sense, as ‘he’ and ‘she’ can, but this is not supported by Chambers or the OED. Chambers does include the phrase ‘a lower animal’ in the definition of the pronoun ‘it’, but the complete definition is “the neuter of he or she and him or her applied to a lower animal”.

11. Re REFRESHMENTS – one of the possibilities I considered was that “a drink” represents refreshments through synecdoche, a figure of speech where a part is used to represent the whole. “A drink” being a representative part used to indicate the refreshments as a whole.  Compare with “a hired hand”, it is the entire body that is being hired here not just the hand.  Maybe “a bite to eat” works in the same way, the implication is “many bites to eat”.

12. PeeDee – “a drink” can mean “an act of drinking”, so rather than being limited to, say, one swig of beer or one glass of wine it could certainly extend to several glasses (or bottles) consumed in a single session, but the act of consuming many glasses of vino surely does not equate to ‘refreshments’.

    If you replace the word ‘refreshments’ in the statement “Refreshments will be served” by ‘drink’ or ‘drinks’ the meaning remains much the same, but “A drink will be served” suggests a pretty parsimonious affair.

13. Hello DRC – possibly you misunderstand my intention @11, my last example is poorly worded and doesn’t help.  I should have written that “a bite to eat” represents “a meal”.  It represents the meal in its entirety: not just the biting of the food but the food, the drink and anything else that goes along with the meal.

    In this figure of speech some parts may be singular and some plural but that is incidental.  The mechanism does not rely on any singular/plural relationship.  I can get a new motor (singular) and the listener understands that I have a new car (singular).  I can get some new wheels (plural) and the listener still understands that I have got a new car (singular).

    The drink is an item (either as a liquid or as the act of drinking) that represents the whole event through a figure of speech, not as a literal drink.  When the captain orders “all hands on deck” one has to forget the literal meaning of “hands” and think of “crew” instead.  An attempt to show how hand (something on the end of an arm) gets pluralised to hands and these hands rise up from below is going to end in failure, the same way that trying to show how an actual drink is going to be pluralised into an event in the village hall is going to end in failure too.

    On the other hand “refreshments” uses a different mechanism, it is a more straightforward pluralisation of “a refreshment”. I think my uneasiness in parsing the clue came form from erroneously expecting both usages to work the same way and so the singular/plural mismatch appears to be a problem.  In fact I think it is irrelevant.

14. PeeDee – I take your point about synecdoche, but ‘hired hand’ is still a countable noun, as is (say) ‘summer’ when used to mean ‘year’. I don’t see ‘a drink’ as an unfair indication of ‘refreshments’, I just feel that ‘drink’ (still a singular, but uncountable) would have been more accurate – for me, ‘a drink’ equates to ‘refreshment’ (something specifically taken, as in ‘a bed for the night’) and ‘drink’ to ‘refreshments’ (something generally offered, as in ‘accommodation’).

15. Thanks DRC, I think I understand you now.  The effect is comparable to that of a mixed metaphor: the use is figurative but too much of a clash between the literal meanings weakens or even destroys the figure.  In this case the countable/uncountable mismatch weakens the figurative use of “a drink” for “refreshments”.

16. Yes, I think that’s about it, but I agree that it’s a marginal call.

    Figures of speech can make things tricky when assessing the equivalence of words and phrases that are connected by a shared meaning: a treacherous person can be described as a ‘snake’ or a ‘weasel’ – does that imply that SNAKE could be defined by ‘weasel’ in a crossword clue?

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