Notes for Azed 2,663

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 2,663 Plain

Difficulty rating: (3 / 5)

A plain puzzle that I originally rated as being of around average difficulty, albeit not without its tricky bits, but on reflection I think that, while there may not have been too many really tough clues, there were a lot that were far from trivial. I know that one regular found it relatively hard going, and I note that there are several other clues which I could on another day have picked out for comment, so I’ve upped the rating a notch. I see from the latest slip that Azed doesn’t like the idea of getting emailed entries from UK competitors (it didn’t sound as though he thought much of the new ‘Rules and requests’ in their entirety, truth be told), but the instructions attached to this crossword suggest that the message hasn’t yet got through to the relevant person at the Guardian.

Clue Writers’ Corner: There are a couple of things to consider when writing a clue for a word like this week’s. Firstly, although the word comes directly from the French language, the headword is not shown in Chambers as ‘(Fr)’, so there is no need to qualify its definition; however, when defining it I would advise steering clear of the eight-letter English word which is much too close in terms of etymology and form. Secondly, while last month’s twelve-letter word offered a wide variety of possible anagrams (albeit pretty uninspiring ones), a seven-letter word offers far fewer permutations and if going down the anagram route I would be inclined to avoid anything that simply uses the letters to form another word or words – eg for TRAINED something like TRADE IN is just too obvious. Some sort of subtractive or composite construction, such as an anagram of AND TRIBUTE without BUT, is far less likely to be used by other entrants (remember, though, that if the bit being subtracted doesn’t appear as a single chunk in the fodder then a second anagram indicator is required).

Across

10a Parts of long robe exchanged? Their weight varies (5)
The last pair of letters in a five-letter word for a robe reaching the ankles are swapped with the first three, producing a rather odd plural form (which I can’t find anywhere except in Chambers) of a Levantine weight more often encountered singly.

15a Religious sign husband held in hand when attached (6)
The usual abbreviation for ‘husband’ is contained by (‘held in’) a five-letter combining form denoting ‘hand’, most often associated these days with practors. The solution is hyphenated, 3-3.

18a River crew laughing helplessly, without ire (4)
The ‘laughing helplessly’ leads to a (3,4) French expression for helpless giggling from which the consecutive letters IRE must be removed (‘without ire’).

20a Clothes were first getting mangled (7)
A charade of a four-letter word for ‘clothes’ or ‘clothing’ and a three-letter past tense meaning ‘were at the front’ (ie ‘were first’).

27a Something in tonic to bring round without delay for Scot (8)
The wordplay here involves a five-letter word meaning ‘to bring’ containing (’round’) a Scots form of an English word which can mean ‘without delay’.

28a Sacred text without date twice translator penned (6)
You may be familiar with SD, sine die, meaning ‘without a date (set)’, but here we have its bigger brother, where die is replaced by anno, making two consecutive appearances with the usual abbreviation for ‘translator’ penned inside (though not between the two).

31a Feature of crocus? It’s seen fringing capsicum (4)
I’m not sure about the phrasing of the wordplay here, which is intended to instruct the solver to identify what could be considered as ‘fringing’ the word CAPSICUM, the answer being expressed in the form (1,2,1). I would have preferred something like “What’s on fringe of capsicum?”

35a Conservatories: large number and not seen among trees (11)
An eight-letter word for a (specific) large number has the consecutive letters AND omitted (‘and not seen’) before being placed inside (‘among’) a word for trees of the genus Platanus.

Down

1d Infestation: chunks of text I consider informally including first sign of that (11)
A five-letter shortened form of a  ten-letter word for ‘chunks of text’ is followed by the letter I (from the clue) and a four-letter word meaning ‘to consider informally’ (or throw carelessly) containing (‘including’) the first letter (‘first sign’) of INFORMALLY (ie ‘that’).

8d Poet’s dubious term in opening passage, line 500 (7)
The opening passage is the sort that the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band memorably combined with the Outro (“Princess Anne on sousaphone / Roy Rogers on Trigger”), and it’s followed by the standard abbreviation for ‘line’ and the Roman numeral for 500. The answer is a one-off from The Faerie Queene, presumed to be a corruption of…well, some other word.

In which her royall presence is ???????;
Ne euer shall I rest in house nor hold,
Till I that false Acrasia haue wonne;

12d Harms body, one slashed terribly in neck – sign of triad? (11, 2 words)
An anagram (‘terribly’) of HARMS BODY from which a single-letter word for ‘one’ has been removed (‘one slashed’) is contained by a three-letter word for a ‘neck’ frequently seen in crosswords and almost invariably indicated by ‘pass’. The solution is (5,6) and the ‘triad’ is a group of musical notes rather than oriental gangsters.

21d Fence not bowled over? His charges are loaded (7)
A seven-letter word for a fence is deprived of the usual abbreviation for ‘bowled’ (‘not bowled’) and followed by another abbreviation from the world of cricket, this time the one for ‘over’.

23d Fleshy plant: hew off nut and cut askew inside (6)
A six-letter word for a type of nut has the consecutive letters HEW taken away (‘hew off’) and an anagram (‘askew’) of CUT inserted.

24d Asian trees, ugly, even bits cut and stuck in pithoi (6)
The odd letters of UGLY (‘even bits cut’) are contained by a four-letter word which describes (at a very general level) pithoi. Our set book for O level Latin was the Aeneid, which was quite exciting at times, but its Greek counterpart was Xenophon’s Anabasis, a dreadfully boring (or so it seemed to me) account of the expedition of the Ten Thousand, which appeared to focus primarily (in the book we read, anyway) on detailed inventories of their stores and provisions, large containers of oil being high on the list. Since ‘pithoi’ is a definition by example, it really should have a question mark or a ‘say’.

29d Anacreontic, maybe? This (not epic) is creation of ancient poet (4)
A composite anagram, where the letters of the solution (‘This’) plus NOT EPIC can be rearranged to form (‘is creation of’) the solution, which relates to Anacreon through the place of his birth.

30d Gandhi, cut off early? It was monstrous (4)
We are not talking about the Mahatma being ‘cut off early’ (having his last letter deleted), rather it is the son of the (unrelated) Rajiv and former member of the Indian parliament who must suffer that fate.

(definitions are underlined)