Notes for Azed 2,590

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.

While I – of course – believe that the views presented are valid, I realize that (i) I am not infallible, and (ii) in the world of the crossword there are many areas where opinions will differ. I say what I think, but I don’t intend thereby to stifle discussion – I would encourage readers who disagree with the views that I express, whether in the blog posts or in response to comments, to make their feelings known…I shall not be offended!

Azed 2,590 Plain

Difficulty rating: (2 / 5)

A very nice Azed, I thought. Although I made smooth progress through it, I felt there were sufficiently few ‘gimmes’ to warrant a difficulty rating close to average – but as always the views of other solvers are very much welcomed.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to take a look at clue 14a, “Expounder of law, penning books in shower? (6)”. The wordplay here is straightforward enough, the solution involving an abbreviation for ‘books’ being contained by a four-letter word for a type of precipitation, with the question mark indicating that ‘shower’ is an indication by example, being only one possible manifestation of the thing. The point of interest here is the definition: the solution is clearly given by Chambers as ‘archaic’, but Azed does not indicate this in any way. It is generally accepted that words shown in Chambers as ‘obsolete’, together with those attributed to a particular author (eg Shakespeare, Browning), will be unfamiliar to a modern audience and should have an appropriate qualification included in their definition. There are plenty of ways that this can be done, and it rarely creates a major problem for the setter to include this extra information without compromising the surface reading. Anything that suggests non-currency will do nicely: ‘old’, ‘neglected’, ‘no longer’ and ‘discarded’ are just a few possibilities for obsolete words, to which examples like ‘Elizabethan’, “Edmund’s” and ‘to Walter’ can be added where a specific source is mentioned. What about words marked as ‘archaic’?  I think this is a difficult area – words like ‘prithee’ and ‘furbelow’ would be familiar to many solvers, but these are exceptions. Most of the words, or individual meanings of words, which are shown as ‘archaic’ are obscure. Then again, there are obscure words in Chambers that have no classification. My own view is that words shown as ‘archaic’ should be flagged, and the Magpie magazine’s clue writing guide takes the same line. I think the omission of a suitable qualifier in this clue is an error, and it should have been something along the lines of ‘Expounder of law once penning books in shower?’.

12a Letter’s rare flourish, part in code transferred to the end (6)
A six-letter word for a code has a part of it (the second, third and fourth letters) moved to the end.

16a Receiving a tonk at the MCG (8)
The usual three-letter word indicated by ‘a’ (in the sense of ‘for each’) is followed by a slang word roughly equivalent in meaning to the Australian informal term ‘tonk’ (‘MCG’ being the Melbourne Cricket Ground).

19a Former injury, a small lump, after rolling over in the sand (8)
A reversal (‘after rolling over’) of an obsolete (‘former’) four-letter word (often used by setters of barred puzzles, almost invariably backwards) for ‘injury’ and a four-letter word for a small lump. The caesura between the wordplay and the definition is very neatly disguised, one hallmark of a good clue.

24a Poorly, with rough breathing? Fell perhaps (4)
My Greek O level has often proved a boon in the cruciverbal world, although I probably remember rather too much of Xenophon’s Anabasis than is good for me. A ‘rough breathing’ on the first letter of an ancient Greek word indicated that an ‘h’ sound should be added to it, so here a three-letter word meaning ‘poorly’ receives an H at the start. 

26a Head for film seasons in Cannes, for holidays (5)
The first letter (‘head’) of ‘film’ precedes the plural of a French word (‘in Cannes’) for a particular season of the year. Apparently the 2021 edition was held in this season, although I’ve watched enough episodes of Call My Agent! to know that it usually takes place au printemps.

30a Tropical plant fringing river always potential threat to swimmers (6)
The wordplay here involves a three-letter word for a tropical plant, the source of Madagascar arrowroot, containing (‘fringing’) the usual abbreviation for ‘River’ and a two-letter word for ‘always’. The spelling of the ‘potential threat to swimmers’ is not the one most commonly seen in English.

31a Caravan owner? One’s stuck behind it, interrupting progress (6)
A two-letter word meaning ‘[to] progress’ is interrupted by (contains) a two-letter word for ‘one’ following (‘stuck behind’) the letters IT (from the clue). I can’t help feeling that ‘Owner of caravan?’ would have improved the overall surface reading slightly, but on reflection it’s a marginal call.

33a Conifer providing everything to fill camp stove? (4)
This is a six-letter word for a type of camp stove with its outer letters removed, what is left being ‘everything to fill camp stove’. Well, that’s what Azed says; personally, I think it’s a bit of a stretch – would one say that IN is ‘everything to fill sink’?

1d Gymnosperm captured in one cadency after another (5)
I’ve used this sort of construction myself in the past, and I must admit to rather liking it as a variation on the usual sort of ‘hidden’ where the answer is in plain sight. Here the solver has to repeat the word ‘cadency’ (‘one cadency after another’) in order to produce the hiding place.

2d Open sandwich with skill held by fork (7)
A three-letter word often indicated by ‘skill’ is contained (‘held’) by a four-letter word for…well, not so much a fork, more a prong of a fork. I did briefly wonder whether ‘held by fork’ could be seen as indicating IN TINE, but even with a bit of latitude it could surely only be ON TINE. However, Chambers gives one meaning of ‘fork as ‘a branch or prong’; and while OED suggests that this applies only to the plural, ‘forks’ being the prongs of a fork, it does give the verb ‘tine’ as ‘to scratch or work with tines’. Both dictionaries therefore lend Azed their support. It seems a long time since I’ve included anything from 1066 And All That, so here’s a favourite piece that seems to further substantiate the fork/prong equivalence:

“Henry VII was a miser and very good at statecraft; he invented some extremely clever policies such as the one called Morton’s Fork. This was an enormous prong with which his minister Morton visited the rich citizens (or burghlers as they were called). If the citizen said he was poor, Morton drove his fork in a certain distance and promised not to take it out until the citizen paid a large sum of money to the King. As soon as this was forthcoming Morton dismissed him, at the same time shouting “Fork out” so that Henry would know the statecraft had been successful. If the burghler said he was quite rich Morton did the same thing: it was thus a very clever policy and always succeeded except when Morton put the Fork in too far.”

3d Aussie tease, one swallowed by sheila (6)
A one-letter word for ‘one’ is ‘swallowed’ by a slang term equivalent to ‘sheila’ in Australia. The solution is a word that I have often heard on cricket commentaries but cannot recall ever having seen in print and which I wasn’t sure how to spell.

5d Food expert accompanying old woman, an aid when shopping (10, 2 words)
Nothing too tricky here, the two words of the solution being clued by the two elements of the wordplay, but I wonder how many millenials are familiar with Robert McMahon, the chef, restaurateur and cookery writer who usually went by his middle name. Although born in New York, he found fame in the UK, where he lived between 1953 and 1984 and from 1994 to his death in 2006. 

8d Giggle when opening fly in underwear (9)
A neat clue which has a six-letter word meaning ‘giggle’ (similar to the one that was Marathon in the UK until 1990) being inserted into (‘opening’) a three-letter word for a wingless fly that infests sheep.

13d Violet maybe eats chops in meat wagon (10)
An anagram (‘chops’, in the sense of ‘cracks’) of EATS inside a six-letter word for the sort of vehicle known (particularly in the US) as a ‘meat wagon’.

23d Radio navigation system getting one traced at sea (6)
None of the editions of Chambers in my library gives the solution here, so Azed must have had to go back a fair way to find it. The name is a contraction of ‘Decca Track’, and it was a long-range enhancement to the Decca radio position-fixing system first commissioned in 1957 and designed to cover specific air route segments, in particular long trans-ocean crossings over the Atlantic Ocean. Only one chain of transmitters for the system was ever installed, linking the Newfoundland Decca chain with the Scottish chain, and the system was rendered obsolete in the 1960s by the industry’s adoption of inertial navigation.

29d This writer’s locked in pound as badly behaved juvenile (4)
A simple wordplay to finish things off, a two-letter representation of “this writer’s” being contained by a two-letter abbreviation for ‘pound’, but whenever the solution here is used in the current sense I am immediately reminded of Richmal Crompton’s wonderful creation, William Brown:

“William was feeling specially aggrieved. This afternoon he had been condemned to accompany his mother to a meeting at the Vicarage. It was the housemaid’s afternoon off, and the cook said that she wouldn’t be left in the house again with that young limb, not if they went down on their bended knees to her, she wouldn’t. She’d pack up and go, she would, sooner. She was a good cook, so Mrs. Brown promised faithfully that the young limb should not be left with her, which meant that the young limb must accompany Mrs Brown to the meeting of the Women’s Guild at the Vicarage.”

(definitions are underlined)