Putting the words to lights – crossword clues explained in plain English
Hints and tips for completing Sunday Telegraph Cryptic crosswords
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
Apologies for the slow report – it’s been a busy week. This was a fairly easy puzzle, with clues of the usual high standard.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ****
A pretty straightforward puzzle after the two thematic Sundays. Not much excitement on the face of it, but we still get very precise clues, and a little bit of novelty at 20A.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment *****
This took me about twice as long as an average Sunday puzzle, despite having thematic material nearly identical to a puzzle I blogged at the beginning of the 2010 World Cup. I can’t see now why it took so long – there are plenty of anagrams that now seem rather obvious. And I have to tip my neophyte setter’s cap to the clue-writing skill here – as well as the thematic aspects discussed below, he somehow gets away with four uses of SA or South Africa, and deftly marshals the crossword clichés like SAY and ED in 28 and meanings like those of “players”, and “supporter”.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
It’s the fourth of July and the puzzle is from a setter who likes to do themes and has worked in the US for the last decade or so. So no surprise that there’s stuff about Independence Day and the USA, past and present. I guess this is a pretty wide thematic range, but I’m still impressed by the 3 very relevant 15-letter acrosses and a grid where the effect of the thematic material is small – the single extra black square in the top and bottom rows. (The 3-word columns at the edges don’t matter as there are only 29 grid entries.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
Back to the routine format for this report. The content of the grid is not routine – I can’t see any significant presence of those old favourite crossword grid visitors. And the clues are … you know what I’m going to say.
One other thing: The first puzzle of mine (edited by Don Manley) to appear in real print is in this week’s Church Times. For one week you can see it in their online version here. To print from this page with a complete grid image, copy/paste the heading, grid and clues to Microsoft Word or similar. Or print pages 2-4 in landscape if you want a quicker way. [I haven’t checked what happens in browsers other than Firefox – it might print fine as it is in Internet Explorer]
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment *****
For a change this week, we’re trying to show you the solving process in action rather than an explanation of the clues written after the event. Two of us solved this puzzle while making notes about our thoughts, so that you can see two approaches to solving and the differences and similarities between our thought processes.
If you’re reading this to learn something, Gnomethang’s solving experience will be more familiar, and mine may seem absurdly unlikely. Mine is the result of a lot of practice – I’ve been trying to solve cryptics for about 34 years, tackling at least two puzzles a day for more than 25 of those years. I’ve been doing puzzles written by Brian Greer in particular for most of that period – he was probably a Times setter when I first looked (overambitiously) at Times puzzles in 1977, and he edited the Times crossword from 1995 to 2000 (Times xwd editors are setters, who amend clues quite often to achieve their version of the ‘Times style’). You’ll see that even with all that experience I don’t always see everything correctly when I first read a clue – I go up some blind alleys just like everyone else. As well as knowing commonly used tricks very well, the benefit of those years of practice is often seeing the right ‘wordplay structure’ early on, though not always knowing why. You might wonder why, after so much practice that these puzzles are often easy, I still do them. Apart from championship practice and spreading the cryptic crossword gospel, I do them partly because there’s always the chance that something will fox me for a while, and partly because I hope to see some clever treatment of words – in this puzzle, the ‘doubled’ bits of wordplay in 2D and 4D are a couple of examples.
Caveat: Although we’ve tried to record our thoughts accurately, cryptic clues rely on language-based tricks and our brains deal with language in ways that we don’t always understand – if you read books about language by people like Steven Pinker you’ll discover linguistic rules faithfully followed by your brain without your conscious knowledge. So when we’re solving clues, there may important things going on in our heads that we don’t know about, and statements about what we think and don’t think about apply only to our deliberate/conscious thinking.
Continue reading “ST 2541 – as solved by two of us”
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
More Sunday class. As Brian Greer called me an “arch-roaster of chestnuts” or similar a few weeks ago, I suspect he may well have done this before without me noticing properly, but there is very little stale old cryptic xwd material in this puzzle – apart from some one-letter abbreviations like fifty=>L, which are almost impossible to avoid completely, there are just two bits of what I’d think of as “chestnut content”: four=>IV (25A), leg=>ON (4D).
Next Friday’s report will be a bit different. Gnomethang and I will both record our thought processes as accurately as we can while solving next Sunday’s puzzle (2541), and the blog will be a report showing our progress in parallel. The idea is to show you a bit of how we get from the clue to the answer – the analysis you usually get explaining the answer is useful (and all you can be sure of being able to write after the event) but not quite the same. It will also show you that there are many ways to skin the solving rabbit – there will be clues that one of us sees easily and the other misses completely on first look – both ways, I hope.
Continue reading “ST 2540”
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment *****
Watch out for the multi-word definitions in this one – among the def+wordplay clues, only 17A, 27A, 7D and 13D have one-word definitions. Watch out for lots of other good stuff too – three &lit/all-in-one clues, a 13-letter hidden word, and some classic examples of the trick of making you look for synonyms of words when you don’t need to. This is one for aspiring setters to keep as an example of what they should be aiming at – apart from the highlights, every clue has a convincing surface reading and every cryptic reading makes perfect logical sense.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment *****
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment *****
More easy but classy clues this week, in a grid that gives you every word-length from 4 to 12
Continue reading “ST 2537”