Notes for Azed 2,718

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 2,718 Plain

Difficulty rating: (3.5 / 5)

This seemed to me one of the trickiest ‘plains’ of the year so far. There were several answers that I needed to check in Chambers (it would have been one more had the word at 32a not appeared in a puzzle I solved yesterday), and a number of wordplays which required careful unpicking. A pleasant solve, with some neat clues and plenty of the cleverly misleading definitions we expect to see from Azed.

Setters’ Corner: This week I want to consider definitions like ‘Glaswegian child’ for BAIRN. This is the sort of thing we see all the time in puzzles, and it is, I think, universally accepted. But if we saw ‘beagle’ on its own as a definition of DOG, we would say that it is a definition by example, since all beagles are dogs but not all dogs are beagles; the definition must therefore be ‘beagle, say’ or ‘beagle?’. But neither are all bairns Glaswegian – they could come from any part of Scotland or, indeed, northern England. So isn’t this also a definition by example? I think that it is actually a qualification by example, with the core definition being specific (‘child’ and ‘bairn’ being synonymous). While strictly speaking this probably ought to be flagged, solvers don’t expect it and clues would be the worse for such a rule being imposed. It is perhaps something of an anomaly, but in practice there is no difference in cryptics between ‘French friend’ and ‘Nice friend’ for AMI.

Across

1a Vigorously march with pride to end of avenue – and this? (13, 3 words)
An anagram (‘vigorously’) of MARCH and PRIDE TO is followed by the last letter (‘end’) of AVENUE, providing the (3,2,8) answer, normally taken to refer to one very famous structure, although (rather like the Yeats brothers) there is another in the same city, just a short march away.

11a Folly? I’ll have one to rear of grand house, not Anglo-Norman (5)
The letter I (from the clue) and a single-letter word meaning ‘one’ follow a five-letter term for the house and attached land belonging to a nobleman from which the standard abbreviation for ‘Anglo-Norman’ has been removed.

14a With power to gather in piles, albe crookedly, master pocketed (9)
An anagram (‘crookedly’) of ALBE contains a five-letter corruption of ‘master’ shown by Chambers as ‘especially Southern US’ (‘master pocketed’).

15a Poet’s botch, omitting rain from stanza (4)
An eight-letter word for a particular sort of stanza has the consecutive letters RAIN omitted. On looking the answer up in Chambers, you might think that Azed has made a mistake; it is not the Shakespearean sense of ‘an insignificant person’ that we want, rather the pimple. But further investigation shows that the  ‘boil, pimple, or sore’ meaning of ‘botch’ is shown as being Miltonian (“Botches and blaines must all his flesh emboss” – Paradise Lost), so the definition should not be interpreted as  “A poet’s word for a botch” but “A word for something a poet described as a botch”. Azed does this from time to time, although I know from experience that it doesn’t go down well with some crossword editors. Should the fact that the required sense is shown as ‘now dialect’ be indicated? Well, I think one could argue that back in 1667 it was very much part of the language, and Milton might have used the words interchangeably (“That’s a nasty botch/???? you’ve got there, Dryden old chap.”)

16a Time for vigil, avoiding e.g. poisonous stuff (5)
The time when a vigil is likely to begin is deprived of (‘avoiding’) the non-consecutive letters E and G.

20a Like a post, completely ordinary, fastened badly at the edges (9)
The usual abbreviation for ‘ordinary’ has an anagram (‘badly’) of FASTENED surrounding it (‘at the edges’). A neat definition.

26a Foreign bread requiring a long time following order without being warm (6)
A three-letter word for a main division of geological time  follows a ten-letter (yes indeed) word for an order or command from which a seven-letter word for ‘warmth of address’ (which could on occasions be extreme) has been removed.

27a Timber tree yielding oil, not quite enough for oil lamp (5)
A six-letter word for a type of lamp ‘admitting air to both the inside and outside of the flame’ loses its last letter (‘not quite enough’) to produce an oil-bearing Moroccan timber tree. If you don’t know either of the words, a brief trawl of Chambers may be required.

29a Force brake by the sound of it (4)
A term informally used to describe the upholders of law and order, and a homophone for brake², a word which some solvers may have come across when working on their entry for the latest Azed competition.

32a Top pipe requiring something to tune round lines? (5)
My knowledge of music theory borders on non-existence, so whether the three-letter word which contains the usual two-letter abbreviation for ‘lines’ is ‘something to tune’ I cannot say, but it is certainly something to put in a lock.

Down

2d Bit of publicity shifting No. 1 in pop revival (4)
A five-letter shortened form of a ten-letter word, usually applied to a video designed to publicize a pop song, loses its first letter (‘shifting No. 1’). Unlike music theory (vs), I like to think that I know a reasonable amount about pop music, but I had never come across the movement which forms the answer here. Apparently it was the subject of a ‘notorious’ 1995 Melody Maker front cover which proclaimed that a ‘future pop explosion’ had ‘executed’ Britpop. These new romantics redux were the likes of Orlando, Plastic Fantastic, Minty, Viva, Sexus, Hollywood and Dex Dexter. Did they meet with great success? Well, they didn’t manage a UK top 75 hit between the lot of them…

4d Led astray, I dispatched beam inwardly, once void of lights? (11)
An anagram (‘astray’) of LED contains (‘inwardly’) the letter I (from the clue), a four-letter word for ‘dispatched’, and a three-letter word for a beam. The definition is, if not cryptic, at least pleasingly oblique.

6d Tunic cut short from below, cause to change planes? (5)
A six-letter word for a (sleeveless) tunic is shorn of its last letter (‘cut short’) and reversed (‘from below’).

7d Parts of shaft getting switched? Opposite of ease resulting (5)
Like 27a, the two words involved here may both be unfamiliar. The word for the shaft of a cart or carriage (and what Violet Elizabeth Bott would have called the thing underneath a window) has its first two letters exchanged with its last three (‘parts…getting switched’). The result is a word coined by Ruskin to describe the reverse of wealth in the sense of well-being.

8d Mum tucked into rather large drink, just as our forebears did (11, 2 words)
A two-letter word for ‘mum’ is inserted between a four-letter word meaning ‘rather’ and a five-letter word for a large drink; the answer is (4,7).

10d Legatee of female with attractive quality, and gold (7)
A (3,2,2) charade involving words for ‘of female’, ‘attractive quality’, and ‘gold’.

18d Having run in eliminating round, almost finish? Buck up! (7)
The usual abbreviation for ‘run’ is inserted into a term for ‘eliminating round’ which we will be hearing regularly from Paris in the near future, probably because it is a Briton who has been eliminated (I suspect we’ll also have to cope with a lot of people talking about ‘medalling’ and ‘podiuming’). The combination is followed by a three-letter word meaning ‘finish’ without its last letter (‘almost’).

24d Money needed when centre of routine is moved to the fore (5)
A word for a routine task (I think Azed may have misread the definition in Chambers) has its middle letter moved to the start.

28d Sort tax (4)
In this double definition clue, ‘sort’ is a word for something that you might do to a horse to make it more tractable – according to Chambers, at least, although neither the OED or Collins seem to know about it.

30d Bit of old salad? Her leaves showing incipient decay (4)
A Shakespearean word for a little something that might (perhaps) be found in a salad loses the consecutive letters HER (‘her leaves’).

(definitions are underlined)