Notes for Azed 2,697

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible, by email.

Azed 2,697 Plain

Difficulty rating: (2.5 / 5)

I made steady progress through this puzzle, but the number of clues which I marked as being worthy of comment suggested that it was at least in the middle of the difficulty range, perhaps even a scintilla above the halfway mark. Some entertaining clues, and only a couple of things with which I would take (minor) issue.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to look at clue 13a, “Fruit creation of banana with raspberries (5)”. The name of a melon-like fruit is made up of a chunk at the end of ‘banana’ and a slightly bigger one from the start of ‘raspberries’. The ‘hidden’ clue (aka the ‘lurker’) is probably the easiest sort of all to solve, as the letters that make up the answer are not only in plain view but are in the correct order (or the exact opposite thereof in a ‘reverse hidden’, or ‘rekrul’). They are therefore very handy for providing the solver with a route into a puzzle, particularly a tricky one, but should not be overused – I would suggest  including no more than two in a normal puzzle, and certainly not going beyond three. The challenge for setters is to make them interesting – ‘Chap in Germany (3)’ for MAN is both very easy and very dull. Try to use a natural-sounding phrase as the hiding place, and look at using either a less familiar ‘hidden’ indicator (eg ‘quantity of valuable antiques’ for LEAN) or one of the many containment indicators which can legitimately suggest that one string is to be found within another (eg ‘several male nurses’ for ALMA). Another ploy, seen in the clue here, is to split the hiding place such that solvers have to butt the two pieces together, eg ‘caught between Scylla and Charybdis’ for ACHAR. It’s not exactly a ‘hidden’, but an appropriate clue to finish on is this one from John Henderson: ‘The real reason for the merger meeting of Volkswagen and Daimler? (6,6)’.

Across

11a Reduced height pursued by planes, very fine (8)
I know I said there wasn’t much for me to take issue with, but I think that indicating the seven-letter word which follows the usual abbreviation for ‘height’ (‘reduced height’) by ‘planes’ is pushing things. ‘Route of planes’ or ‘plane operator’ would have been fine.

12a Salad garnish Escoffier’s devised – not the off-licence! (5)
A five-letter informal term for an off-licence is removed from ESCOFFIER’S (ie ‘not the off-licence’) before the remainder is rearranged (‘devised’) to produce the answer.

15a Against hazard I released fish (5)
A two-letter word meaning (among many other things) ‘against’ is followed by a word for a hazard (of the sort that frequently needs to be assessed these days) from which the letter I has been omitted (‘released’).

17a Rape without passion, ecstasy, look, being limited (8)
A four-letter word meaning ‘without passion’ has the standard abbreviation for ‘ecstasy’ and a three-letter word meaning ‘[to] look’ contained within it (‘being limited’).

19a Shellfish tooth, bits in the wrong order (5)
A five-letter word for a tooth or a notch (its Latin meaning), the stem of a longer adjective meaning ‘furnished with battlements’, has its first three letters exchanged with its last two (‘bits in the wrong order’). The result is the shellfish which yields mother-of-pearl.

25a Turk requiring fragrant stuff, tiny amount applied (8)
A charade of two four-letters words, the first being a fragrant oil (and Bismarck’s first name), the second a small amount or a tiny arachnid.

28a Corneal deposit? Philosopher has me accepting this (5)
When the answer is accepted (ie contained) by the letters ME, the result is the surname of a German-American philosopher who was influential in the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research (the ‘Frankfurt School’). In the early 1930s he fled to Geneva and thence to the USA, where the Institute was re-established. He served as an intelligence officer in WWII, and remained in the US when the Institute returned to Europe. He came to wider attention at the age of 66 with the publication in 1964 of One Dimensional Man, which condemned the ‘repressive tolerance’ of modern industrial society and saw students as the alienated elite who would sort things out. They did try, briefly.

34a Boy trapping sea birds – does it help to support budget? (8)
A three-letter ‘familiar form of address’ to a boy contains (‘trapping’) sea birds which are related to gulls and come in various forms; I still recall being attacked by one of the Arctic variety on Inner Farne (thankfully I was, as advised wearing a hat, since they tend to go for the highest bit of anyone they don’t like the look of). I suspect that the answer to the question posed in the definition, might strictly speaking be ‘no’, although a budget is ‘a fixed rudder on a barge’ so we know where Azed is coming from.

Down

2d Old woman’s taken over shift in Scotsman’s cravat (7)
The single-letter abbreviations for ‘old’ (standard) and “woman’s” (an invention of Azed, not infrequently seen) are placed above a word for a relieving shift (or a team race involving such ‘shifts’). The first four letters of the solution constitute the Scots form of a familiar preposition, and the answer is to be found in Chambers under the entry for the latter (there is an indication of where to look against the entry for the former).

3d Final exam one’s working on in overcoat (7, 2 words)
A two-letter preposition meaning ‘working on’, almost invariably in the phrase ‘?? it’, is contained by a coarse jacket in the Levant (and a slang term for a rough great-coat). The answer is (5,2), and is something that one might work towards at Cambridge University. In the cryptic reading, “one’s” could be taken as ‘one is’ (ie the final exam is the result of the wordplay) or ‘one has’ (ie the solver has a two-letter word inside a five-letter one’) – it makes no difference to the rest of the clue.

4d Mug for pet? (4)
The two words that share a spelling in this double definition clue appear in the required senses in this ‘joke’ (I use the word loosely – though it isn’t a ‘dad joke’ because I’m pretty sure my mum told it to me) from the late 1960s or thereabouts: “Don’t put the cat in the washing machine – you might get a sock in the ????”.

9d Drudge had nothing on disposing of bundle outside (5)
The wordplay here involves a (3,5) phrase meaning ‘has nothing on’ (like Adam pre-fig leaf) losing (‘disposing of’) a three-letter word for a bundle from its outside. I wasn’t conversant with the ‘drudge’ meaning of the answer, a word which post-fig leaf Adam had reason to remember.

16d Writer, English, gets wind up inside like a lot of old fossils (8)
The combination of a three-letter word for a ‘writer’ which will be familiar to all solvers of cryptics (but is not the author of “Swann’s Way”) and the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘English’ is placed around (‘gets…inside’) a reversal (‘up’) of a word meaning ‘[to] coil’.

21d Backhand stroke fashioned by Rafa initially to a great extent (7)
The first letter (‘initially’) of ‘Rafa’ is followed by a (4,2) expression meaning ‘to a great extent’. The stroke in questioned would be executed not with a tennis racket but a sword or dagger.

23d Sad sack following one in a fog (6)
I remember reading the Sad Sack comic strips in my youth (I had a lot of American comic books, though I’m not sure where I got them from), but having no idea what a ‘sad sack’ was. I likewise missed the point of some of the names of D.C. Thomson comic strips and characters therein which had clearly been thought up in Dundee (‘King Gussie’ being one that particularly puzzled me). Anyway, the synonym required here is produced by putting the usual abbreviation for ‘following’ and the Roman numeral representing ‘one’ inside a familiar word for a fog.

24d Jacques maybe going topless, about right get-up (6)
The diminutive Jacques whom Eric Sykes referred to as ‘Harriet’ loses her first letter and is placed ‘about’ the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘right’.

26d Sojourn in vague W. European area of old? No thanks (5)
A ‘name given from the 14c by W European peoples to a vast, ill-defined area of E Europe and Asia’ is deprived of a two-letter informal form of ‘thanks’ (ie ‘no thanks’).

27d Bunter was part of it, forgetting Latin in tests (5)
A six-letter word for ‘tests’ has the standard abbreviation for ‘Latin’ removed, the result having nothing to do with the Fat Owl of the Remove or Lord Peter Wimsey, and everything to do with a series of strata, the other divisions of which are Muschelkalk and Keuper.

(definitions are underlined)