Azed No. 2,620 Plain

16 comments on “Azed No. 2,620 Plain”

1. I originally had Harmonic rather than CHOIRMAN. I thought it fit fit the clue almost as well but I had to rethink once the crrossers appeared.
   I also tried to make an anagram of “stall,bad,drear” (as the blog suggests?) and bunged in Stallard Bread with a shrug at not finding it in Chambers. That also didn’t help with the SW corner so strictly a DNF for me. The charade (stand = stall) plus anagram makes much more sense.

2. How strange. I too had HARMONIC. It reminded me of a crossword I came across decades ago. Was it Ximenes? There were two grids, but only one clue to each light, and each clue had two valid answers. I wonder if Azed was aware of that here.

   And I too spent far too much time with things like LARDBREAD AND BREADLARD and wondered what the devil was going on. It is STAND as Tim C says.

   And RED-WUD! Where would our Sundays be without Azed and Chambers?

   Stefan

3. Thanks for the blog, for once I was patient and did not put STALLard BREAD in on my first reading , I was tempted like Tim @1, the Downs made me rethink. ( the blog needs a slight adjustment here) .
   Araucaria once had a special double crossword on Cargoes so I remembered the “cheap tin trays” thanks for showing the poem.
   I think GATED is a double definition , a punishment at Harrow and “with a wicket” .
   I thought for GENOA that ships must be (M)EN but could not find it , I will look again.

4. I see Stefan@2 also misled with the bread, Azed very devious giving us 13 letters which could be an anagram.

5. Inspector Morse pokes fun at DS Lewis in The Daughters of Cain for not understanding “Gated”.

   Stefan

6. Thanks all for pointing out the error with STAND/STALL, I was a bit lazy there writing up the blog,

   Roz – I thought of men as ships as in man o’ war etc. Naval vessels.

7. Agree with Roz @3 that GATED is a DD. The punishment at schools like Harrow (hence the “maybe”) is according to Chambers “to punish…. by imposing a curfew or by confinement to school precincts”.
   C2014 also has man as “a ship as in man-of-war“

8. I have to leave to go a funeral now and won’t be able to answer queries. Would the regulars here please help out anyone with a query on the puzzle. Thanks.

9. I too saw Harmonic, although I already had crossing letters that disproved it. Funnily enough, in trying to solve the anagram of STALL BAD DREAR, I thought ‘Standard bread’ would make more sense….and then I saw it. Roz@3, C98 gives one definition of man as “a ship, as in man-of-war”. Funny that ships are always called She, but can be known as men! Thanks for the blog and especially the poem – an old favourite of mine.

10. Thanks to Azed & PeeDee. I shall dig out my notes but seem to recall this as a fairly smooth solve with dictionary only needed as a final check.
    Thanks for reminding me of Masefield’s splendid poem. I sort of remember all of it. There were some Azed-ish words, “Moidores”, “Quinqureme” and the sound of “salt-caked smoke-stack” to savour. Has anything modern such sounds?

11. Thanks for the men=ships everyone, I should have looked more closely but the answer was obvious and the entry for man in Chambers had too many variants.

12. Thanks, PeeDee. Small point but 6d is METIER not MATIER. Possibly you were autocorrected because your parsing is right. (I was also misled for a long time by HARMONIC)

13. Found my notes. I wondered how many remembered Arsene Lupin (and raffles)
    Also surprised by FOURS which weren’t “PETITS”

14. I knew FOURS, courtesy of my grandmother. Mind you, we had FOURSES: a double plural. They were usually savoury: a sausage roll, perhaps, or a slice of pork pie.

    My French go-to dictionary is Oxford Hachette. It is strange that under “petit-four” you are directed to “four: petit”. And under “four: petit” you are directed to “petit-four”.

    A bit like Chambers. I never knew what “errhine” meant, until I learned it meant sternutatory. And the I learned that both of them meant “ptarmic”. Wow!

    Stefan

15. Keith@13: Arsene Lupin is in the public consciousness again following a successful French TV series on Netflix last year.

16. Thanks brian-with-an-eye @12. Kind of you to ascribe the error to autocorrect but butterfingers may be more accurate. Fixed now.

Comments are closed.