Azed No. 2,566 ‘Playfair’

33 comments on “Azed No. 2,566 ‘Playfair’”

1. Thanks PeeDee. SAUNDERS was my first thematic answer, prompted by the possibility of the EF being an encoded DE. That had me looking for FRENCH of course. At that point I had all but FIDGE of the normal answers – I do think the clue for that is unfair: obscure word, allusive wordplay.
   SLU? had me puzzled for a while, not knowing that meaning of ‘traipse’ and ‘lute’ taking a while to come.
   An interesting process of constructing the code grid, thanks Azed.

2. One thing missing from the Playfair rules was what to do if you are encoding a double letter. Apparently you change the second to Z, though that leaves the question of how you encode e.g. BUZZARD.

3. In 1a, ST should be encoded to BS not CS. I think two letters appearing consecutively in a row or column but in the ‘wrong’ order require the most thought to encode correctly.

   I’ve seen various methods of encoding double letters, e.g. encode to the double letter diagonally down and right, or insert a letter unlikely to appear doubled (say X or Q) between each double letter. I think from a crossword perspective it doesn’t matter because the answers should be chosen so that no double letter needs to be encoded, just like the answers to be encoded always have even length.

4. Thanks for the blog , most of the rules missing in the paper but seen them many times.
   I actually thought the four undefined were very friendly and gave playwrights straight away.
   SAUNDERS also gave DEF on the same row which had to be the fourth realistically.
   For once my first guess at the square was very lucky, I put DEF at the start of the fourth row and left 2 letter gaps before and after playwrights as BC was missing. Matching up pairs gave me U in the top left and hence UK and all over quickly for once, I usually have to mess a few times with my first guess to get the square correct.

5. As Matthew@3 very minor typo for very first square.
   Agree with Gonzo @1 for FIDGE the wordplay is very weak
   POLEMIC , MIC is not in my Chambers 93, it is still MIKE, also a microphone is definitely NOT an amplifier . It is a transducer converting sound energy to an electrical signal which may then be amplified.
   TENNENTS is new to me but the clue was obvious.
   Surprised we really need to have SLUT in the crossword, many other words will fit there.

6. Thanks for the (unusually detailed) blog; my solving experience was very similar to yours (I had also forgotten James Saunders). I just guessed UK PLAYWRIGHTS as the key and was delighted to find that it worked.

   Doesn’t the clue for VILL work better if “not” is omitted?

7. Hi Roz, MIC for microphone is in the most recent Chambers. Personally I am fine with a word being used in a technically incorrect manner if it is done outside a technical context. This is a word puzzle is about the English language, not an electronics text book.

   If I was told that the singers in a musical were using microphones then it would be obvious that the speaker is telling me the production uses amplification. One would have to be very obtuse to conclude that the singers have microphones but only for decoration and still have to sing at the top of their voices to reach the back row.

8. Matthew @3 – well spotted. It will take a while to fix this everywhere, I will get on to it as soon as I have time.

9. bridgesong @6 – yes! I had to jump through hoops to find a way to fully explain VILL. Without not it would have been so much easier.

10. PeeDee @ 8 I agree that we should not insist on precise technical definitions for science words in a crossword, however in this case it simply wrong and not even difficult for any person to spot.
    Would you be happy to call a turntable an amplifier ? It has an identical role to a microphone.

11. Roz @10 – no, I would not call a turntable an amplifier, but then I don’t hear people saying that in everyday speech. I do hear my daughter and her classmates (drama students) talking about productions being “miked-up” and similar phrases. I also hear similar phrases used in arts programs on the radio. They mean amplified.

12. Turntable amplifier speakers , identical in form to microphone amplifier speakers. Each has a separate and very different role.

13. I am Playfair-phobic but at least Azed makes these things more palatable by giving a generous hint to the key phrase, so that it’s not necessary to waste hours on the mind-numbingly tedious chore of cracking the code the “hard” way. In this case the coded clues were easy to solve and, thanks to the hint about the abbreviation, UK PLAYWRIGHTS was the obvious choice for the phrase.
    The crossword proper was excellent, of course, and I think slightly harder than Azed’s puzzles have been of late.

14. Quite so Roz, but the English language doesn’t always follow logical rules. If a train pulls into a station then one expects to see the the whole thing, not just the carriages behind the engine. If all hands are on deck then one expects to see entire sailors, not just their hands. The mic stands in for the entire amplification system the same way the train and the hand stand in for the entire body.

15. What a happy Sunday for me last week – I had completed a Playfair for the first time ever! The key was a tic of Azed: if “soak” is in the wordplay it nearly always codes for “ret” (such a useful little word) so PINTER was a good prospect for 25a, confirmed by COWARD. And then a lucky guess for the codephrase (but could it be anything else?) and I was off. I’m expecting to be contacted by a shady figure from Bletchley Park any day now.

16. Miked up simply implies an amplified performance requiring speakers as well of course. Would you call the speakers amplifiers ? They are as much amplifiers as microphones are.
    My last words, if you do not understand already you never will.

17. I got into this with solver COWARD first, although with undefined clues you are never really sure until it all fits. Some good cluing here this week.

    Ref. 8ac – I made this B in ABA? Also 6dn may need explaining to overseas solvers -cockney rhyming slang: RABBIT AND PORK = TALK (=YACK).

18. Hi Roz, the reason one doesn’t say “speakered up” is the same as the reason why one doesn’t say “all feet on deck”. For some reason some phrases get adopted into the language and some don’t. It just happens that “microphone” got used for an entire amplification system and “hands” got used for entire sailors, but “feet” and “speakers” didn’t.

    You arguments clearly show that this is not a logical approach. I agree with you entirely there.

19. Rer 13ac – my take on this clue when I solved it; read it as ‘(it’s) provided with amplifier’. To me I never gave it a second thought.

20. Last example I promise , the pick-ups on an electric guitar are essentially microphones , plug into an amplifier and you increase the amplitude, plug that into speakers and get a very loud sound.
    The pick-ups or the electric guitar are not an amplifier.

21. Re #4., much of the Playfair explanation was missing in the printed paper, but was on the Guardian website, which is open to all.

22. Ros – I agree with that, and your earlier examples. The linguistic process where some parts adopt a meaning beyond their physical form or function is synecdoche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche. It is a feature of the language, not an intrinsic feature of the items themselves. A microphone is not an amplifier, but through the use of language the word microphone can acquire the meaning of amplifier.

23. Well people were saying last week how easy this was and, after I found the complete instructions online (and found an earlier blog of a Playfair to clarify a confusion I had) I set to work. I only managed less than half of the straight clues by Monday night at which point I made my usual decision that I was not going to get any further and put it away. (I do have other things to do.)

    The last Playfair blog seems to be dated in 2015 and I only started getting The Observer delivered in 2016. I think I may have done a Playfair when I was getting The Observer back in the early eighties, but I can’t remember how I got on then.

24. Hello early risers. Wasn’t this a treat?
    I finished it on Sunday in spite of many other things to do, held up a bit by not reading the (truncated) explanation and so puzzled by the lack of definitions in the coded words. Once I’d sussed that, the process was pretty much as you describe it. As a keen amateur actor in better days PLAYWRIGHTS came to me immediately though SAUNDERS had slipped my memory.
    Many thanks to Azed and PeeDee and a particular welcome to anyone who’s never done a Playfair before.

25. I thought the same as bridgesong @6, that 3dn parses more easily if “not” is omitted. Also, my take on the parsing of 8ac was (like Nick @17) B for bishop in ABA (usually striped cloth) making ABBA, which can mean a Syrian or Coptic bishop. Thus it’s a form of &lit clue, meaning a bishop who is not necessarily in striped cloth.

26. For the first time in yonks I didn’t finish an Azed. I only solved Coward, and then the Pinter one was, for me, either Butter or Nutter, impossible to unsee. Never heard of Saunders and having googled him I’ve never heard of anything he’s written.

27. [Of course, for many years on Top of the Pops, bands were mic’d up but miming ;)]

28. Clearly Saunders is less familiar than some other British 20th century playwrights; but in view of the comments by Gonzo@2 and Matthew @3, I’m grateful that Azed overlooked the claims of Alan Bennett (although of course with seven letters he could never have been a candidate).

29. [ Very good Gonzo @ 27, we watch Sounds of the 60s/70s and most on Top of the Pops are not even plugged in. Other shows from that time seem mainly live though, Jimi Hendrix on the Lulu show of all places. ]

30. [I’m not an aficionado of popular beat music, but I recall an embarrassing incident on Top of the Pops back in the sixties where Hendrix found himself miming to Alan Price.]

31. [“Popular beat music” – I like that, Dormouse!]

32. I managed to get all but SLUT, together with all the playwrights. The Playfair reverse engineering I found virtually impossible apart from seeing that DEF were in a line. However, UK PLAYWRIGHTS jumped into my mind and magically everything worked.

33. Matthew@3: I think the neatest way of dealing with double letters is to use the one diagonally opposite, so here DD would become GG and SS unchanged.

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