Azed No. 2,602 Plain

14 comments on “Azed No. 2,602 Plain”

1. My major problem with this puzzle was that a crease in the paper version made a couple of clues unreadable.

   Couldn’t parse 24dn, I’d completely forgotten the poet Craig Raine.

2. Doormouse – I was thinking of poet Kathleen Raine. I wonder how many other poetic Raines there are out there?

3. According to Google, PeeDee@2, there seem to be a few including those with Raine as a first name. I didn’t know any Raine as a poet so had to use Google to confirm the answer.
   Talking of poets, I was interested to learn from the Azed slip for 2599 (competition word Desiderata) that Azed hadn’t heard of the poem by Max Ehrmann. Maybe the hippie era passed him by.
   I failed to parse TOTES in this one (to my shame) so thanks for the blog and thanks to Azed as usual for my Sunday challenge.

4. I had a question mark against OPIATE, because I parsed “pastry” as PATE and then of course couldn’t explain how it came to enclose I. VELO seems to be the “reasonably familiar” foreign word not included in Chambers.

5. I got the answer FOREIGNER @ 19ac and parsed the wordplay, but I don’t understand the definition – “boss had no knowledge of this”. Is it a reference to something?
   Bridgesong @4, I also began with pastry = PATE and had no idea what the I was supposed to be half of, then realised it was PIE with AT – and groaned at myself!

6. I’d heard of Craig Raine because of the Martian poetry movement. Don’t think I’ve read any, though. Didn’t know Kathleen Raine.

   Turns out Craig Raine was born in Bishop Auckland, a town I knew well growing up – and my sister got married there in 1980.

7. MunroMaiden@5: In Chambers- foreigner – A job done privately by an employee without the employer’s knowledge (informal).

8. 19ac – I have generally heard these jobs called “rabbits”, a usage which has apparently not made it into the dictionaries

9. Thanks for the blog – Do a FOREIGNER is quite common in the building trade , the term has been around a long time but it is not in Chambers 93 , nor is STEEPEUP .
   I thought MOTOR SCOOTER was obvious but a bit loose. TO actually occurs three times, twice backwards and once forwards.

10. I’m surprised STEEPUP isn’t in Chambers 93 as it’s in Chambers 83 under steep1 (as well as 2014) Roz @9

11. Tim@10 , just checked again, definitely not there, surprising really that an old term will go out and then back in.
    Very surprised about FOREIGNER, it was commonly used in the 80s to mean doing a job unofficially .

12. Yes, FOREIGNER is surprising. I’m sure I can remember it from way back in my youth.

13. I had a look in the OED to see what evidence they have for FOREIGNER. It looks to originally be military slang originating in Australia around the time of the First World War. The first UK usage is military slang in WWII, and the first non-services adoption from the mid seventies onwards. So one would have expected that by the 1990’s there would have a solid case for it being included in a more general dictionary such as Chambers.

14. I immediately assumed “moped” at 35ac would prove to be the past tense of “mope” and not the vehicle suggested by the context of the clue, so resisted the obvious answer almost to the bitter end. Comes of trying to be too clever.
    Thanks Azed and PeeDee.

Comments are closed.