Azed No. 2,738 Plain

12 comments on “Azed No. 2,738 Plain”

1. Thanks Azed and Bridgesong

   12ac: I had raised an eyebrow at this when solving. While I was reading the blog, it occurred to me that maybe Azed meant to put “New Mexican”, but the “New” got lost somewhere along the line.

2. Apologies if the grid isn’t always visible: I have reuploaded it and it seems to be there now. I had the same problem with my Guardian Prize blog yesterday, but Kenmac sorted it out.

3. With the reduced content last week, I started solving earlier and more or less finished by mid-afternoon. – only a couple of clues left to get later.

   Today the Sunday Times was delivered instead. Is there an Observer today?

4. Dormouse @3: yes, The Observer has been printed, complete with supplements, if a little thin for the time of year. It’s certainly available here in the midlands.

5. OK, I can pop over to Tesco later, although how thin it was last week, not sure I’ll bother. I’ve printed off Azed anyway.

6. My LOI was VARE – I’d not heard of either it or Vareuse. It didn’t help that I’d put in SERAPES instead of SARAPES (I didn’t know how “Pares” could mean airmen, but thought I’d check in the dictionary later). Having searched the dictionary for words ending ERE, I realised my mistake and had to start again hunting for -ARE – and, of course, got most of the way through Chambers before I found it! I’d been going at quite a good pace before that…..

7. I didn’t search for the * in *ARE at 12a, having done the rest very quickly. What an unhelpful clue, with the multitude of possible solutions, the superfluous ‘see’ in pole position, and the reliance on a deletion from a foreign jacket that you’re unlikely to get without the first letter, that you can only get by working out the foreign measure that’s clued very unhelpfully, etc.

8. James @7: actually, I found “see” in the clue to VARE quite helpful. I assumed it was short for the Latin vide, meaning see, although in fact that’s not how I have parsed the clue. However, an are is a metric land measure, possibly in use in Mexico, so there are perhaps two different ways of reaching the answer.

9. Apparently, ares are used for land measurement in Mexico, so V(ide)-ARE is likely the right parsing. On the other hand, as PB@1 points out, Vareuse is not Mexican. So it seems a bit of a bum steer – perhaps intended as a nod to the meaing of Vare, but using one obscure word to hint at another isn’t very helpful in my experience.

10. If the first part of 12ac is intended only as V + ARE, that leaves us without a definition for the word VARE itself. Possibly the clue is meant to be a variation on the “& lit” structure, consisting of two lots of wordplay, one of which can also be read as a definition, but that seems an unlikely structure for Azed to use. On some future occasion, it would be interesting to see two bits of wordplay with the whole clue as a definition, or – probably easier to construct – a clue that could be read literally as definitions for two different meanings of the answer but also can be read in full as a single piece of wordplay. Anyway, I think there probably will be something about this clue in the notes that will appear in two weeks time, so we may find out more about Azed’s intentions then.

11. I worked backwards from *AREUSE, parsing “no use” in the usual Azed fashion, and landed immediately on “vareuse.” LOI. Good blog.

12. I was wrong: there is no note on 12ac in the official solution to this puzzle published alongside Azed 2741.

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