Azed No. 2,667 Plain

21 comments on “Azed No. 2,667 Plain”

1. I also wondered about the ‘affected’ in AGNAIL. Being sure that Azed wouldn’t have two anagram indicators, I convinced myself that given that “infect” is one of the meanings of “affect”, “maybe affected” referred to the (likely) infection that often results from an agnail.

2. Thank you, John. The hardest Azed for me in years. Yet when I went down the solutions, I knew, or once knew, almost all of them. I think Azed was stretching his Ximenean credentials to the limit here and that was probably why.

   I didn’t know timariot and assumed the capital letter in Tim indicated one of Azed’s references to a British politician or some such. I didn’t help myself by positing airwaves at 2Dn.

   Then I had supple for rumple on the grounds that bum is also Scots for toss, hurl. I couldn’t work out the “(penniless)” but it doesn’t work for rumple either. And I made the same mistake by not checking valeta. I went through the dictionary and found that “it’s obscure for poet” is a valid definition for hele and by now the whole grid was a mess. Does Azed do this deliberately?

   AGNAIL was clear enough and I could only assume “maybe affected” was used in the sense of “may be infected” but it was padding—superfluous matter which is a no-no even in Azed’s own words.

   TESLA is what I call a “false hidden”. Asset is a valid hidden indicator but I don’t think “there you’ll have it” is. It’s not me (or “one” or “you”) holding it, it’s the clue. I assumed asset was having to do double duty and thought it a very weak clue. If you look at that SE corner, it would have been simple for Azed to come up with different words so I was surprised.

   PONTAILLER was obscure even for a Francophile and I had to go rummaging for it.

   On the other hand, I will defend Azed for AGHA. There is a sort of implied comma: “… flourished lost, banner with joyful cry” with the “flourished lost” standing in apposition describing banner. Years ago, there used to be a preamble which stated that “punctuation can be ignored” and I would take that to mean also the absence of punctuation. I agree with you about ARIOT though.

   Not my finest hour (or hours—many of them) but not Azed’s either.

   Stefan

3. COTTONTAIL
   If you consider ‘fragrant oil’ as the def, how does the wordplay work?
   Is it not powdered (IN TALC)* containing OTTO (fragrant oil)?
   Or do we take ‘Peter’s friend’ as OTTO (comic characters?)?

   AGNAIL
   Is it an ‘affected’ form of the word ‘hangnail’ (I don’t know if you have such a thing called ‘affected form’. Just thought of ‘affected accent’ and so…)?

4. I parsed COTTONTAIL as per your second line KVa @3 with “Peter’s friend” being the definition. You can take cottontail in the general sense of a rabbit (in C2016) which Peter’s friends were.

5. Thanks for the blog, my annotated clues show all the same problems.
   KVa@3 there is just a slight slip in the blog for COTTONTAIL , the definition is Peter’s friend, maybe Azed does not know she was his sister.
   ARIOT simply does not work. Agree with the blog
   PLED does not need ( penniless). Agree again.
   AGNAIL could have TWO words removed and still work fine.
   PONTAILLER was not in my Chambers93 but the wordplay was clear.
   AGHA I agree with Stefan@2 , in crossword land flourished lost banner can give (fl)AG .

   I thought GLUTEN was very neat with the use of mutton.

6. Sorry, forgot to give the wordplay for COTTONTAIL. Blog fixed now.

7. Quite tricky, just gave up with *ELE to get.
   I agree with some of the quibbles, not with others.
   [tim]ARIOT, can’t see what the fuss is about
   RUMPLE, yes penniless unnecessary but so what? It’s just a bit of extra colour, the extra bit is in brackets.
   GLUTEN had me tutting thinking that EN was an unidentifiable half of a word for mutton, but I like the proper explanation
   COTTONTAIL is just a word for rabbit as Tim C says, which of course is why Cottontail was so called.
   AGHA, while ‘flourished lost banner’ may be standard crosswordese for [fl]AG in the clunky way that clues are often put together, I was nowhere near figuring it out and the backward syntax certainly contributed to that. I laughed at John’s ‘I certainly wouldn’t venture it in a clue-setting competition’ – agreed!

8. Forgot to mention the one I had most trouble with: YERD
   How can this be read so that it makes sense?
   Murrayfield ground? That’s armful I scattered
   Presumably, ‘that’ refers to something that one might scatter that could be defined as Murrayfield ground. So far so good.
   But cryptically, I’m stumped. If the apostrophe s after ‘that’ means ‘is’, then the clue says ‘an anagram of ARMFUL I is the same as an anagram of MURRAYFIELD.
   The only other option is to take ‘that’s’ as ‘that has’, so: ‘Murrayfield ground? That has armful I scattered’ But if ‘that’ is referring back to the first half of the clue, then ‘that has’ is no better than ‘that is’. So taking ‘that’ as YERD gives ‘Murrayfield ground? Yerd has armful I scattered.’ I suppose the two halves are balanced reading it that way, but they’re not linked; the clue doesn’t explain what’s going on, and as a cryptic instruction, I’d take ‘yerd has armful I scattered’ to mean ‘a synonym of yerd + an anagram of (armful I).

9. It’s a comp. anag. (not quite sure what comp. is short for — composite? compound?) and ‘that’s’ refers to the answer, so it’s [Murrayfield] … [yerd armful I]. Not very convincing perhaps, for two reasons: the surface is less than user-friendly; and usually in these clues the answer word is referred to by ‘that’, not by ‘that’s’. Presumably Azed thought that the surface would be just about acceptable with the ‘s, and not without. I suppose he could justify the ‘s as being short for has, and this part of the clue is to be read as ‘yerd’ has (next to it) ‘armful I’.

   Azed’s rules for comp. anags. are byzantine in their complexity.

10. John, thanks for replying. Yes, I get that it’s solution + armful I = anagram of Murrayfield, but don’t see how the clue tells us that. One doesn’t even need two anagram indicators, as (MURRAYFIELD)*ground = YERDARMFULI without more. And then ‘Yerd has armful I scattered’ is grammatically wrong for (YERDARMFULI)* because you can’t apply ‘scattered’ to a phrase like ‘yerd has armful I’. And then there’s no link between the two anagram statements.

11. I did use the word ‘byzantine’, but see your point, although one often sees ‘s in wordplay and it’s to be ignored.

    Once I submitted a clue that had two anagram indicators, one for each part, and it was not only rejected but slated in the Azed Slip. I still don’t understand why, when he seems to allow two indicators in 14ac.

12. John @11 can you remember what the word was? I’d like to read that slip because I always struggle to write composite (yes comp. is short for composite) anagrams.

13. Some notes:

    29Dn: “The Ximenean convention is to allow the omission of punctuation…” (Manley)

    14 and 31: “DON’T WAFFLE. Every clue should contain a definition or equivalent of the answer plus a cryptic treatment of its component parts, and nothing else. (Crowther himself, his italics)

    But consider: “Monn (Caterers) supply beef and grouse (12)” (quoted by Moorey). I think that’s a wonderful clue.

    I had the same concern about Murrayfield but my earlier post was already too long. James is correct: the clue doesn’t make sense. The composite anagram can be glorious (“It’s this Littlewoods could make you (8)”—Dexter, often quoted) or a gruesome yomp with no aha at the end (“Small constellation? There’s lines solemn Scot composed with this one (6)”—Azed). Both Azed and Manley have commented on these. The problem is they get so convoluted that setters lose track and I think that is what happened to Azed here.

    Final aside: did anyone notice the cran last week and the “landed” herrings this week? Is Azed getting mixed up?

    Now I shall get down off my high horse because I worship at the altar: if Azed speaks, I listen. After all these years, decades—pfft! these are just hiccups. Sundays: the first hour, or two (or half the damned day) as my wife will tell you, is to be spent in silent holiness with just the rustle of the turning of the pages of Chambers. Long may they continue.

    Stefan

14. I always call it a compound anagram , it is somewhat like a chemical equation with the letters moving around. I have noticed that Azed often uses THIS and I think it would have worked better with YERD .
    I agree with Stefan for RUMPLE and AGNAIL , they both contain padding. AND NOTHING ELSE is Azed’s own rule.

15. Hello. anyone who’s still reading these. Sunday I was too busy to join in. Thanks to Azed & John for the blog. I didn’t find this all that hard and quite admired the compound anagrams without being too finnicky about the precise syntax.
    Thanks to Stephan for the tribute to Azed’s extraordinary achievement. I claim to have solved every one and also gleefully remember being amongst Ximenes’s VHC along with a whipper-snapper called J. Crowther.
    Now to composing ONE clue for the August comp.

16. I’m even later than Keith, so maybe no-one will read this…. I thought PONTAILLER was a place-name, in which case it should have been mentioned in the preamble, but perhaps it has become a generic word in more recent Chambers than mine. ARIOT: why not just say “In tumult Tim gets detached from old militiaman”? Would that be too straightforward? As regards 18ac, I didn’t notice the surplus s when I was solving, but I think it’s unacceptable. I’m quite happy with punctuation being misleading (as in “flourished lost, banner…..”), but extra letters are surely a no-no. Why not say “Murrayfield’s ground”? That would have been just about ok for surface, I think.
    Stefan @13, I thought the same about “landed” in the clue for MEASE (although I dare say they wouldn’t be called a mease while still swimming in the sea….).

17. Tim C@12: sorry to take so long — I’ve finally located the clue, which was in March 2008 for BINGE: Dreadfully bottled on this? Get to be blind drunk [comp. anag. &lit.; (bottled binge) … (Get to be blind)]. Azed called it a nearly-good clue and said “Here we have two anagram indicators where only one is strictly needed. ‘Bottled on this? Get to be blind drunk’ would be better.”

    But his views on what constitutes an acceptable comp. anag. do change from time to time and it is very difficult to pin down exactly what he approves.

18. Thanks John

19. Sorry mods: indulge a couple of old timers. Who else besides Mr Thomas and myself solved X before Azed was born? Surely there is no one still going who solved, or tried to solve Torquemada.

    MunroMaiden: you sound as if you ought to know more about herring than all the rest of us put together. Murrayfield’s ground is a start but then you have to deal with the apostrophe s in “That’s armful…”

    Stefan

20. Stefan@19 I always like to see what you and Keith have to say . I only usually do crosswords that are in the paper on the day but someone kindly printed off some Torquemada puzzles for me , very different very funny.
    My grandmother had a story that her mother had been the only successful entry for Torquemada , twice. It may not be true, she was prone to teasing me when I was young.

21. Stefan @19, I believe Azed started in 1972, when I was 15. I did start doing barred crosswords round about that time, but I don’t think I ever encountered the Observer until I went to university (my parents took ‘the other’ paper). So I guess I missed out on Ximenes by a couple of years, although I was, of course, aware of the name.

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