AZED 2,391

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A plain puzzle in a 12 x 12 grid from Azed this week.

I have one query (RABAT) and a few quibbles (CLEEVE, ZAIREAN and DOABS) but my vocabulary has as usual been extended.  It seemed to me that there were more definitions by example (all signalled by question marks or “maybe”s) than usual and no compound anagrams.

completed grid
Across
1 ABSINTHIATED Saturated in liquor? Before the day’s coming round bathes in it, sozzled (12)
*(BATHES IN IT) inside AD (ante diem, not Anno Domino).
10 FRATERY Convent cook restricting amount charged (7)
RATE in FRY.  I hadn’t realised that a convent could equally refer to a community of friars as well as to nuns.
11 GLANS Acorn harvests when earth is cleared out (5)
GL(e)ANS.
13 SOOK Very fine market in Marrakesh? (4)
SO OK.
14 MALICE Briefly married, girl showing cattiness (6)
M (arried), ALICE.
15 POLYGENY Cut back on yen twice, information received showing multiple sources (8)
POL(l), GEN inside Y and Y.
17 DIALYSE Remove impurities from face and features thereof (by ear?) (7)
DIAL (face) and a homophone of EYES.
18 TEXAN One in Austin maybe given a 10 reversing and another overall (5)
A X (rev) in TEN.
20 STEVEN Speaker in dialect dialectologist eventually grasps (6)
Hidden in “dialectologist eventually grasps”.
22 CRIMEA Something deplorable accepted in theatre of war (6)
CRIME A(ccepted).
24 RABAT Venue for pilgrims mostly returning to rotate in a way (5)
To rabat (or rabatte) is “to rotate into coincidence with another plane”.  The wordplay suggests that TABAR… might be a place of pilgrimage, but if so I can’t identify it.  Rabat is also of course the capital city of Morocco.
26 HOMERID Seat free for reciter of epic (7)
A simple charade of HOME RID.
30 DROPWISE How e.g. saline is administered (powder is different)? (8)
*(POWDER IS).
31 CLEEVE Trio in vehicles on mountain, rest abandoned for steep feature (6)
I think the wordplay is vehiCLEs EVErest; if so, the first part seems somewhat lame, if not unfair.
32 AGIN Con presenting a trap (4)
A GIN.
33 KOKER Watergate sure involved in end of Dick, Republican (5)
OKE in (Dic)K, R(epublican).  It’s a Guyanese term for a sluice-gate (from the Dutch); by puttting it at the beginning of the clue, Azed avoids having to mislead with a false capitalisation.
34 ABLEIST Discriminatory, potentially bestial (7)
*(BESTIAL).
35 INTRINSICATE Shakespeare’s complex: at home snigger about Act I, puzzled by English (12)
IN SNIRT (rev) *(ACT 1) E.
Down
2 BROOSE Jock’s (not Walter’s) wedding contest? Sounds like several bevvies! (6)
A homophone for “brews”.  The reference to Walter is to Sir Walter Scott, who spelled this word BROUZE.
3 SAOLA Ox-like oriental creature, active in sun, adult (5)
A in SOL, A.
4 NEOGENE Early period? I’ll turn up in river (7)
EGO (rev) in NENE.
5 TREED End of hunt, and hunt’s quarry’s given up, cornered (5)
(hun)T DEER (rev).  To “tree” can mean to drive into a tree or corner.
6 HYMNIST Wesley maybe requiring head of nail in smithy hammered (7)
N(ail) in *SMITHY.
7 ALLCLEAR Welcome signal – endless beer, cellar bursting (8)
AL(e) *CELLAR.
8 TAIG Rude name for Catholic, label that includes Italy (4)
I in TAG.
9 ENCASE Line one’s inserted in rewritten scene (6)
A in *SCENE.  “Line” here is being used as a verb.
12 SEVENTEEN Chamber choir plus one judged to include contingency (9)
EVENT in SEEN.  A somewhat strange definition: does a chamber choir of necessity have sixteen members?
13 SPOTCHECK Police turning up round junction hatch random test (9)
T (junction) in COPS (rev), HECK (which, like HATCH, can mean a half-door).
16 CAMELEER Lawrence often famously happened to look askance (8)
CAME LEER.  The reference is to Lawrence of Arabia.
19 ZAIREAN W. African in S. Africa, one bottling rage (7)
IRE in ZA AN.  I think Azed’s geography has let him down here; Zaire is the former name of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and is unequivocally placed in Central Africa.
21 TRIPOLI Stumble on oil surprisingly in kieselguhr (7)
TRIP *OIL.  Tripoli is defined in Chambers as diatomite, which is another term for kieselguhr.  Azed is so educational!
23 ROLLON Corset line in woven orlon (6)
L in *ORLON.
25 ASSIST Give a hand when honey time is here (6)
AS SIS T.  The equivalence of “sis” and “honey” is perhaps a little dubious.
27 DOABS Sailor cutting turf up to form land between rivers (5)
AB in SOD.  I thought this should have read “lands between rivers” to give a clear indication of the plural form.
28 VIGIA Squaddie getting in the way? Here be danger (5)
GI in VIA.
29 SEKT Sparkling wine takes up less acreage (4)
T(a)KES (rev).

*anagram

19 comments on “AZED 2,391”

  1. Thanks for the blog, bridgesong.

    For 24a, The Tabard was an inn famous for accommodating pilgrims to the shrine of Thomas Becket.

    For 12d, The Sixteen is the name of a choir, but I’m still not very happy with the definition.

  2. Matthew, thanks for explaining those two clues. I should have remembered The Tabard, but I have to confess that I have never heard of The Sixteen.

  3. Thanks Bridgesong. 12d does indeed have an off-the-wall, nay out-of-left-field definition. A knowledge of one of the best combos performing Renaissance polyphony is something not given to all. The Sixteen does not necessarily appear as a group of 16. It’s something to do with the traditional name of a choir at an Oxford or Cambridge college – I can’t remember which. Try their recording of John Sheppard’s motets or Tallis’s Christmas mass.

  4. I think the intended parsing of 31ac is CLE (‘trio [of consecutive letters] in vehicles’) + (‘on’) EVEREST (‘mountain’) [with] REST (‘rest’) removed (‘abandoned’). This seems fine to me – there are only six such trios to choose from in ‘vehicles’.

    I take the point about the ‘land between rivers’ in 27dn, but I think that when used in this sense the word ‘land’ is an uncountable noun (‘he owns land in several counties’), so the definition would have needed to be ‘strips of land between rivers’ or similar.

    The Chambers Slang Dictionary gives ‘sis’ as “a term of direct address whether or not to one’s actual sister”, which I guess makes it close(ish) to ‘honey’. I didn’t have any issue with the clue involving The Sixteen – SEVENTEEN is a horrid word to clue innovatively.

  6. DRC: I agree with your parsing of 31ac (it’s what I tried to indicate in the blog).  I still think “trio in vehicles” is a a weak way of indicating CLE (and there is nothing to say that the letters have to be consecutive, which somewhat increases the number of possible permutations).

     

     

  7. bridgesong@6: I have to say that it’s not a construction that I would use myself, although I think that solvers can reasonably assume that terms like ‘pair’, duo’ or ‘trio’ refer to consecutive letters of the relevant word, as in this clue from 2,295: “Pair changing places, longed for e.g. Christmastime” for YEAR-END (YEARNED with N and E transposed). It certainly seems fair enough to me when the word from which the letters are to be extracted is in plain view. Slightly more questionable, I think, is Colin Dexter’s competition-winning clue for MUSICOTHERAPY, “What psychiater could effect with a trio of Moussorgsky’s?”, which requires the letters MOU to be rearranged as part of the anagram [note also the presence of the word ‘a’, suggesting that several ‘trios’ are possible]. Incidentally, in the competition clues where Azed has allowed ‘trio’ to indicate three letters of a word, they have always been the first three letters.

  8. I had heard of The Sixteen.  I have several of their recordings, although the recording I have of John Sheppard is not by then.    But “Chamber choir plus one” seemed so unlikely as a definition I assumed it was part of the word play (number play?) and was looking for an additional meaning of seventeen to do with contingency.

  9. At least The Sixteen started off with sixteen members, The Temperance Seven started off with nine, which was one over the eight.

  10. I always took the Sixteen as referring to a SATB choir of just four of each voice- Counter-tenors presumably being in place of Altos. The numbers might be adjusted to the demands of a particular work.

    Thanks for the blog birdsong (aka Tweet?) This was one of the rarer times nowadays when I completed Azed on Sunday. Perhaps because there were fewer of the usual newbies.

  11. Keith @10: in fact my pseudonym is Bridgesong, not Birdsong (where a tweet would certainly be appropriate). The song element represents my interest in singing, but it is limited to community choirs, which do not as a rule have any limit on numbers.

  14. Having just completed my initial Tournament Director training, I must warn you that you risk falling foul of Laws 73B1 and/or 74A2 if you start singing before play has ended.

  15. Apologies, hadn’t my glasses on when I typed! As a bridge player I’m ashamed. It’s always annoying if one’s name is misspelt.

    Am sure there are some good jokes to be constructed around a triangle of crossword, bridge and choirs.

  16. Sorry for the slight digression, but is anyone else having difficulty with the andlit.org.uk site? For days I’ve been getting a Forbidden/403 notice via Safari and Firefox.

  18. Ace! That works for me, thank you for the quick reply. I just noticed they linked recently to the andlit.org.uk address on their Twitter feed without any caveat, so perhaps they don’t know it’s a problem.

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