Azed No. 2,611 Plain

12 comments on “Azed No. 2,611 Plain”

1. Thanks for the blog, wrong grid printed for this but was pretty easy to construct after the first two across clues and a few downs. BUMSTER not in my Chambers 93 but I have heard the term, must have come from hipsters int the clothes sense.
   SQUAMA a minor typo in the blog , QUA is AS IN with WEE=SMA going round it.

2. GRADUS , does anyone know more for this? It is just a prosody book in my Chambers, it does mean STEP in Latin but not sure of the definition here. I did it assume it meant the calibration on a scale but I cannot find this.

3. Roz @2, C2014 has”a dictionary of Greek or Latin with marks showing the quantity of each syllable” Short for Gradus ad Parnassum, there is a better and longer explanation here.

4. I can’t make my mind up about SQUAMA. Dictionaries have “qua” as “in the capacity of” (so just “as” rather than “as in”). Brittanica has “in the character or role of (someone or something) : as — used to indicate that someone or something is being referred to or thought about in a particular way” with the example “The artist qua artist is less interesting to me than the artist as a human being.”
   That would then seem to leave two inclusion indicators “in” and “round” which is not very satisfactory (the “round” is not a reversal indicator as the blog suggests).
   I need a better Latin scholar than me. I only did 2 years at school many moons ago (without the benefit of a Gradus!! ) and have forgotten it all.

5. Thanks Roz. I think I must have added the reversal bit on autopilot. Or a bit of a Pavlov’s dog reaction. Now that I think about it more carefully I can’t see why it is there. To me qua indicates “in the place of” (as) rather than as a comparison (as in).

6. Didn’t have much trouble with this, once I had the correct grid. I took the easy way out and printed it off from the website.

7. I agree about “in” and “round” in the clue for SQUAMA an that OLD TOM should be two words. I also thought “turned over” in 21ac wasn’t quite appropriate for an across clue. Apart from that (and the wrong grid!), it was a pleasant puzzle. Thanks for the blog.

8. Hi MunroMaiden – if I turn my book over the parts that were on the left are now on the right, and vice versa. The top is also now at the bottom, but that is another story (for a down clue)

9. Thanks, PeeDee – yes, I guess you can turn something over in a horizontal plane. I have another wee quibble with 28dn: my Chambers (1998) shows DRIB as a verb (with ‘take a little’ as one meaning) as obsolete, but that isn’t indicated in the clue. It might have said something like, “Once take a little girl climbing”. Azed is usually meticulous about indicating obsolete words or, say, Scottish words eg ‘wee’ for SMA’ in 22dn.

10. Thanks TimC@3, my Chambers does not have any detail, I did not think of quantities in relation to syllables.

11. Hi Munro Maiden – the latest Chambers doesn’t help with DRIB. All the uses of DRIB as a transitive verb are marked as obsolete. The best I can come up with as a current usage is that the intransitive “go little by little” might be taken to mean “go slowly”. It might take a little, it is going slowly, a little at a time. Not very convincing!

12. Hello all! Thanks to Azed & PeeDee.. The Obsever decided to give us paper only folk our turn to grumble but, as most seem to have treated it as a Carte Blanche exercise it was a bit of extra fun.- 7+5=12. (had it been a 133X11 week we might have been struggling. GRADUS was familiar as the hymn before the Gospel is sometimes called the Gradual since the reader has to climb steps.
    Now to the monthly tussle to cobble e neat clue for No 2612.

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