A typical Azed outing involving quality time with The Big Red Book: a couple of wordplays still to be decoded and the requisite mystery clue. Thanks to Andrew all is clear now!
Across
| 1 | K(V)ETCH |
| 6 | SCOTERS – T in scores* |
| 11 | RONEO – replace middle of Romeo with N for a type of ancient copying machine. |
| 12 | P(HAR,A)OH – rev(rah) in HOP |
| 13 | ARDENTIA VERBA – (air brave Dante)* – Latin for “words that burn”. |
| 14 | PEN NIBS – the well-known compound not in Chambers. They are dipped in ink. PEN is our female swan. |
| 16 | S,AMOS – ref. AMOS the Hebrew prophet. |
| 18 | TILTED – titled (as a lord) with centre shifted. |
| 19 | LATTICELEAF – (a cattle fiel[d])* – it’s a plant from Madagascar. |
| 21 | ARGAN,D – it’s an oil-lamp and ARGAN is an oil-bearing seed (interestingly unrelated). |
| 24 | AD,RED – Spenserian afraid and RED is redd is tidy up. |
| 25 | ELOG(IS)T – incorrectly enumerated as (13, 2 words) and I don’t see anymore how the EIST is generated from “… once failed to gel encompassing lives?” — I think I did last Sunday when I solved it. I guess I didn’t — Andrew points out it’s IS in (to gel)* and an archaic elegist. Whoops. |
| 28 | ANAL RETENTIVE – (trait an eleven)* – a term describing a healthy portion of the people reading this (and yes writing this). |
| 29 | VIRE,TOT – Chaucerian “rush” and VIRE is a financial term describing a kind of transfer to balance a deficit (hmm… can you say electronic vire?) |
| 30 | PEK(O)E – PEKE is our Chinese export (as in pekinese) but PEKOE’s our local tea I guess. |
| 31 | E(SER[a])INE – physostigmine — where EINE is archaic eyes. |
| 32 | ALDERN – Darnel*: related to alder. |
Down
| 1 | KRAB – rev(bark=quest). Short for karabiner. |
| 2 | V(ORP)AL – Lewis Carroll invention for “nonsense”: rev(pro) in rev(lav). |
| 3 | END,A,MAGE – damage and MAGE’s our sorcerer. |
| 4 | TEE,TO,TALLER |
| 5 | HATE – “aversion” – compound anagram where therapist* = (HATE, trips)*. |
| 6 | S,PINK – a PINK is a “small carnation” and SPINK is “cuckoo flower”. |
| 7 | C(H)ANTER – I found this a very difficult clue – pibroch is a bagpipe tune type of thing and a CHANTER is the actual pipe. |
| 8 | TREBLE-DATED – “living three times as long as man”: DATED is “old-fashioned” but can someone help decode TREBLE = “E.g. Aled J., formerly”? Aled Jones is according to Andrew a well-known (… OK…) Welsh treble (singer). |
| 9 | ROB(L)E – L in rev(ebor) — where Ebor is short for Eboracum (York) thus “handicap” I suppose and the whole thing is a type of oak. |
| 10 | S(H)ARDED – H in adder’s* — meaning “sheltered under dung” where midden is a “dunghill”. A dirty clue indeed! (and quite different from how here at Google we use sharded, basically as a synonym for partitioned). |
| 15 | S(TAR*,L)IKE – yes Spenser would have to spell sic (thus “such”) SIKE. |
| 16 | S(EA,W)AVE – EA for “river” and W for “width” and SAVE for “except”. |
| 17 | WIDGEON – (winged, o)* |
| 20 | F(ERV)OR – Obama’s spelling of “fervour” (unlike Clinton he went to Harvard not Oxford) and what he’s inspired. ERV are endogenous retroviruses. |
| 22 | RANIS – hidden in Lutheranism. |
| 23 | FITTE[r] – “what regular exercise makes you?” is FITTER so “mostly” removes the final letter and FITTE is an archaic song, thus “strain for oldies”. |
| 26 | SE(N)A – “Indian army” |
| 27 | ?EEN – our mystery clue: “One’s never given up – even in the last one?” Again Andrew: it’s rev(ne’er=never)=REEN, a ditch, as in a last ditch attempt. At one point, I had considered REEN but I couldn’t make the definition work. Not surprised. |
Hi Ilan, thanks for this.
8dn – Aled Jones was a famous treble when he was a boy, particularly known for singing “Walking in the air”, though he didn’t sing the version in the film of “The Snowman”.
25ac should be ELOGIST – IS in (TO GEL)*
And 27dn is REEN – NE’ER reversed, and it means a ditch, so the reference is to “last ditch attempt”.
7d: in the comment ‘pilbroch’ should be ‘pibroch’.
Thanks Chunter! (I can see with a name like that you’d have a vested interest in fixing issues having to do with chanter).
Pen-nibs is in earlier editions of Chambers, until at least as recently as 1993, although there is no definition given (its meaning presumably being considered obvious).
I had an unusual experience with this one; normally I have to toil quite hard to get off the mark with Azed. But with this one I got KVETCH straight away; instantly. I used the word a few years ago at a chess site: I wrote that David Bronstein is a great player but a terrible kvetch. It’s funny because it was true.