AZED 2,482 by Azed

12 comments on “AZED 2,482 by Azed”

1. Thanks PeeDee, especially for the full explanation of TARANDS, and thanks to Azed of course.
   [There seem to be some odd substitutions in the blue clue text – both ‘ff’ and ‘fi’ have repeatedly been replaced with ‘?’ e.g in 10,34. It’s not a rendering problem, they are like that in the page source.]

2. Thanks PeeDee. I was really looking forward to this blog because we have another error in Chambers. The PIKELET. I and my family (my mother, long dead, and my grandmother, even longer dead) have wondered what this word means. The thing is, quite simply a pyfelet. Chambers does not acknowledge this. OED, a bit grudgingly, does give a nod to the pifelet. Benoni Evans, in Leicestershire Words, Phrases and Proverbs (1848), refers to the “pifelet-stone”. Scollins and Titford, in the magisterial Ey Up Mi Duck! seem mysteriously to ignore the matter completely.

   A pyfelet is not a crumpet. You can check Elizabeth David in English Bread and Yeast Cookery. Furthermore, Chambers seems to think that a pikelet is (Aust and NZ) a “drop scone”. I don’t know what a drop scone is. I cannot speak for New Zealanders but I can tell you that not a single friend of mine in five states of Australia would call a pikelet a drop scone.

   Let’s salute Azed again though. He did have BROAD and PIECE (just recently—he even apologised to women). And now we have the CRUMPET. I apologise also to women. I admire them.

   Stefan

3. Gonzo@1: It’s PDF issue. I find I have to download it and open it in Acrobat reader then print from there. In fact I save it, open the pdf in GIMP, trim it and export to .jpg format, then import that to Word in landscape format, , enlarge, and print that. It’s quicker to do than to describe, but it means I get the puzzle in a decent readable format.

   M S@2: In northern England and South Wales “pikelet” and “crumpet” are the same thing. They are made from the same yeasted dough, but in the rest of the country crumpets are made in a ring mould that makes a thicker product, whereas pikelets are  poured onto the bakestone free-form, and are only a bit more than half a centimetre thick. Drop scones are something else entirely, being made with baking powder, and generally sweetened, They are what  Americans call  pancakes (We also know them as Scotch pancakes).

4. There’s a “C” missing in the solution at 27D

5. I couldn’t see 32dn at all and only got it as there are no unchecked letters.  I can’t believe I missed the hidden letters.

6. I was brought up in Manchester (the UK one) and my mother made pikelets for us when we were children.  They were made from the same wet and over-risen bread dough as crumpets.  If the dough was especially runny that day they spread out in the frying pan and got called pikelets.  If the dough was firm they stood up better and were called crumpets.  Half-way in between I suppose you could call them whichever you liked.

7. Gonzo @1 – the ? characters result from extracting the text from the PDF to put into this web page.  Essentially, PDF documents are pictorial representations of a page.  What you see on the screen when viewing a PDF are a sequence of glyphs (pictorial symbols) not letters of the alphabet.

   Suppose the printer wants to put the word stiff (5 letters) into the PDF.  If he or she puts one glyph per letter then the resulting word looks unbalanced, there is too much space between the i and the two f’s.  Instead the printer makes up a better looking glyph to display the end of the word.  What gets included in the PDF is 3 glyphs: s t and iff.

   The clues in this blog are extracted by a computer program, It gets 3 symbols, s and t which are standard characters in the alphabet and iff which isn’t any letter in the alphabet it has ever seen before.  Hence it outputs a ? character as a placeholder for the unrecognised “letter”.

   I usually look for these and fix them manually before the post goes live, but sometimes I forget.

8. Thanks Goujeers for spotting the missing letter in the grid.  Fixed now.

9. Thanks PeeDee for the interesting explanation of the PDF problem, which also explains why it only affects Azed puzzles. I would say ‘there must be an easier way to do it’ (there’s a Save As Text option in reader) but you clearly know more about it than me 🙂
   Pikelets are finger-crumpets to me.

10. Incidentally, on the pikelet/crumpet thing, my family in London in the mid-fifties used to call crumpets muffins.  There was a song Have you seen the Muffin Man we used to sing if my mother bought crumpets for tea.  (We moved to the north-east of England in the late fifties but I don’t recall coming across pikelets.)

    It wasn’t until my first visit to the US in 1980 that I came across what the Americans call English muffins.  And I discovered you could buy them in British supermarkets and bought some to show my mother that what we’d been calling muffins weren’t.

11. Dormouse – I remember visiting the US and being given English Muffins, a kind gesture by the host to make me feel at home.  I had never seen one before!

    I suspect the name pikelet for a flat crumpet is more of a NW England use than a NE one.  It comes from a contraction of bara-picklet (bara pyglyd in Welsh) which must have crept its way over the border into Cheshire and then Lancashire.

    I now live in Scotland where I have only seen the flat ones called “Scottish Crumpets”.

12. Glorious! I’d forgotten about the muffin. My wife’s sister lived for many years in the USA and came back to Australia with “popovers” for us. Well…

    This thread has become very rude indeed. It might celebrate our language but is surely insulting to Azed, who is just doing his job.

    We have BROADs, PIECEs, CRUMPETs and now MUFFINs. Behave yourselves!

    Stefan

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