Azed No. 2,578 ‘Letters Latent’ – Competition Puzzle

30 comments on “Azed No. 2,578 ‘Letters Latent’ – Competition Puzzle”

1. Thanks for the blog , rather tough because of the difference in length between definition and word play.
   I rarely take a break doing Azed but it certainly worked this time, my second go far more productive . Very slight typo in the blog for 9D , underline conifers and 31D the answer is NEREUS. Glad to see we still managed to get a compound anagram for 31D but not sure it is totally fair.

2. Damn and blast I was off by one letter, I had initially thought 1D was VAIVODE, with the V missing which slowed me up working out the quote, I did then find WAIWODE, but couldn’t parse ever for AI, boo to Chambers for not putting them all in one entry (there’s also voivode and other variants). I also didn’t parse NEREU, though the answer was obvious from crossers.

   I genuinely can’t decide if I enjoyed this or not, I only completed it late on Friday having spent at least an hour on it each day from Sunday. Which left me insufficient time to work on a clue to submit, as I’m back to working weekends again.

   Last Sunday I was determined to get a clue submitted, so when the special turned up my heart sank a little. I suppose it doesn’t really matter as I hadn’t actually completed it after all.

   On the plus side I did laugh long and loud when I found the next but one line in the Burns quote.

   Thanks (I think) Azed, and definitely to PeeDee.

3. Blah – you did better than me, I barely made a dent in this one. I recognised that 31d was a compound anagram but couldn’t unravel it.

   Interesting to read the breakdown of the clues anyway, so thanks for the blog PeeDee.

4. Thanks for spotting the typos, fixed now.

5. Thanks Azed and PeeDee. Very enjoyable puzzle, but I share the doubts expressed by others about the legitimacy of a compound anagram in this type of puzzle.

6. Sorry, PeeDee, one other typo in 9dn: it’s not the S that’s been moved (conifers is the definition), but the E – the last of CARSE.
   Like Blah @2, I thought of VAIVODE for 1dn, then came up with VAYVODE, to fit the wordplay, although my dictionary didn’t give that spelling. At that point, I had -U-VERE in the quote, so I was expecting Quivered – until I got the G of 5dn! A rethink then brought me to WAYWODE. Otherwise, I didn’t find this too bad.
   Thanks for the blog.

7. Well, total defeat for me. By the end of Sunday I’d got four answers. Looking at it again on Monday I got no further, so I put it away, Just couldn’t get into it.

8. Gosh, that was tough.

   By dint of investing a fair bit of time and resorting to quite a lot of dictionary-bashing (Chambers dictionary and thesaurus, both in ‘app form’, Bradford’s big red book, Collins Quotation, which thankfully had VARIORUM in the index) I got very close to completing this correctly.

   In the end the KSMS for KOSMOS defeated me, I biffed in KAMS in the end. Looking back I realise that I didn’t see there were 2 rather than 1 missing letter. No prize for me, not even with all my external aids.

   This was by far the toughest single crossword attempted where I’ve come close to finishing, so going to take the positives and all that!

   There were a few nice easy ones to get going, then it got very hard. Even to the end the different in enumeration as Roz says made things hard. Maybe there should have been a double enumeration to show both. Then again maybe that would have doubled the possibility of errors like 27D.

   Few nice ‘words’ came out as they sometimes do in this kind of puzzle, loved RANKURTER, DATETAMP, RUNCE. Maybe an alternate tie-breaker could be to come up with palusible definitions for these ‘words.

   DATETAMP – an engine for compressing time so that a month feels like a week.

   Thanks Azed,and PeeDee for explaining it all so well.

9. At first, I did not understand the instructions, but figured out what was going on with PLSNER. For some reason, I find these “missing piece” clues very hard (so, have found, e.g., printer’s devilry clues utterly unsolvable). I got the verse from “regard not how,” and the solve became much easier after that, because I knew what was missing. Once I stopped overthinking things (forest = trees, not coppice or whatever–hello!), I found the clues unusually digestible, except for 25D, where, for me, at least, both the mutilated and unmutilated answers were obscure.

10. 31D – This marine deity is really the definition so gives NEREUS , but the compound anagram needs NEREU which comes from the word play that has not happened yet. NEREU is the entry though, ambiguous at best and probably unfair.

11. I’ll confess that I took the short cut and did this the “easy” way by looking up the (very apt!) quotation once I’d got “Life is all” and “regard” from the dropped letters. Cheating perhaps, but this still look me longer to finish than a plain Azed.

    I didn’t register the fairness or otherwise of the compound anagram because I didn’t try too hard to unravel it. I seldom do!

12. Hi Roz and others,

    Just to clarify intentions for the blog: I don’t intend my blogs to be a critical review of the puzzle, I only try to explain the solutions to help new and improving solvers get better. I don’t intend to contradict anyone’s opinions with what I write, I only intend to give the most plausible explanation I can find.

    Whether a clue is to be considered “fair” or “good” is for each solver to decide for themselves.

13. I think that’s clear PeeDee. Your blogs are always helpful and factual with clear analysis which is neutral in tone.

    Two further thoughts;

    I meant to ask did anyone else waste time going through the alphabet trying to add a single letter to what I initially thought was an anagram of ‘A LACE’ to make a dress?

    And as I’ve missed the submission deadline again I’ve come up with one I’d like to share for critique. (Very quiet at work today 🙂 )

    Noted edition? Unexpectedly arrive upon missing pen. (8)

14. Blah – I wasted a lot of time trying to make an anagram of A LACE + ?. I even distrusted my answers to subsequent crossers when they didn’t match. I find it amazing how hard my brain will try and ignore inconvenient information to hang on to a gut-felt opinion. I recently read Thinking Fast and Slow by experimental psychologist Daniel Kahneman which explains a lot about this sort of irrational behaviour.

15. I was a little unsure about plug = tamp in 15ac, which I suppose is OK although I can find no direct equivalence in Chambers.

    The Rules and Requests say ‘by Monday week at the latest’, which strikes me as silly. How does this differ from ‘by Monday week’?

    Very nice crossword (which took me absolutely ages), as Azed’s specials always seem to be. Pity he said ‘in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations’. What edition? Not in mine, but Google was good enough.

16. Count me as another who wasted time looking for an anagram of A LACE +1

    PeeDee @12 – I don’t think any of the comments are meant as a criticism of your blog, which is exemplary. Your explanation of 31d definitely helped me see what I was missing there (I got bogged down thinking ‘sad’ might be the anagram indicator).

    Blah @13 – good clue, although I’m not sure the two parts relate to each other convincingly enough in the surface. That could just be me though.

17. My memory of puzzles a week on is hazy, but I think I tried an anagram of A LACE ? too. If there’s a false trail I’ll usually follow it.

    I like that clue, Blah @13, but I have a feeling that Azed would require an indicator to show the letters of “pen” appear in a different order in the fodder. I may be wrong, of course.

18. Glad I wasn’t the only one fooled by working a lace.

    Thanks Widdersbel, I agree with you and originally had ‘In noted edition’ but decided ‘In’ was only for the surface and therefore extraneous.

    Also thanks cruciverbophile, that’s a twist I hadn’t considered thinking that a simple subtraction would be ok in an anagram, but I suspect you may be right.

    There’s clearly more to this setting lark than appears on the surface (pun fully intended)

19. Wil Ransome@15
    I have the 1999 edition of ODQ and the quote is there all right – maybe it has dropped out since?
    I’ve certainly been frustrated from time to time with a variety of puzzles that refer you to Brewer’s, clearly referring to an edition different from the two that I have, one of them inherited from a parent long ago, one more recent.
    Incidentally – not wishing to ‘spoil’ – surely there are two words, not one, in today’s Azed that are not in Chambers 2014?

20. Perhaps a better version of 31D would be: “Marine deity, this sad, hides under sea [turbulently]”? That is the way I read it, but now I agree that the original version does not quite work.

    Also count me among those who could not figure out what purpose “a” served in 8D.

21. Still playing about with a competition clue and although I can’t make it into a decent clue a rather wonderful anagram has appeared on my jotter. This has led me to a composite anagram, which I think is rather difficult and not a letters latent so invalid but I felt it worth sharing.

    This custom edition I rewrote including notes of various scholars in latin.

22. quenbarrow@19: Trying to minimise the spoiler effect, there are certain proper nouns which are not included in Chambers, and Azed does not indicate their presence in the puzzle if he judges that they are sufficiently well known. The rubric says that Chambers is recommended, not that it contains all answers except 28. For some specials, Azed changes the rubric to say that all answers are in Chambers unless mentioned specifically.

23. Pelham Barton@22
    I take your point – a very good one, doing justice to the precision of Azed’s wording, I had wondered about the issue of proper nouns – the one in question, as it happens, well known to me, though maybe less so generally. Looking forward already to the debrief next Sunday.

24. Hats off to the lot of you. I only did a bit better than dormouse @7 and got about ten answers and gave up.

25. I seem to be a bit late joining in this but thanks to all who appreciated this elegant compilation.
    What a delightful quotation- I can’t think it was cheating to look up “Life is all …” in my 1946 Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and the clue word VARIORUM was itself a discovery.
    I found it a fairly steady plod, finishing on Monday evening. 1 Across having a triple loss was helpful. I wonder what the greatest ever number of repetitions in a Letters Latent has been.
    Thanks to Azed and PeeDee.

26. Keith Thomas @25 if TARAMASALATA were to be clued in Letters Latent there is a potential for 6 A to be omitted and
    TRMSLT to be clued (Old writing in hands covered in a dry way ?)

    This Greek dip came up in a Sat “Prize” lately with all the crossers being ‘A’ I think.

27. Quenbarrow I too have the 1999 edition of ODQ and yes the quotation is there all right. Silly of me not to see it. I used the index far too soon and looked for words like ‘regard’; because they didn’t lead me to it I assumed it wasn’t there. I’m afraid I can’t contribute to the discussion on yesterday’s Azed since I seldom do non-competition puzzles.

28. Hello again, it would be really supportive to us (fifteensquared.et) if you all saved the discussion on the current puzzle until next week.

    It’s not about spoilers, it is about fifteensquared supporting The Guardian and Azed. The prize puzzles are a commercial asset to the newspapers, and if they don’t allow comments on their site then we don’t allow them here. We don’t have any formal agreement to publish this material, and we have no desire to become a back-door where you can discuss the puzzle here because “you can’t discuss it there”.

    Not giving away spoilers is important, but fortunately most people show excellent manners in that respect, as evidenced by your considerate posts here. We haven’t yet needed to include spoilers explicitly in the Site Policy, and hopefully we will never need to

29. Keith Thomas@25: I think ENELENE from SENSELESSNESS has been used, though I’ve not been able to find where. (STRESSLESSNESSES is a possible word if the plural is allowable)

30. Wow, I was feeling smug recently at having completed a few Plains, but this one put me back in my place. Got a bit less than half of it, so maybe next time. Trying to deduce obscure solutions from wordplay is one thing, but trying to do so with letters missing is something else again.

    Despite the total defeat, I really enjoyed this.

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