Notes for Azed 2,691

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 2,691 Plain

Difficulty rating: (3 / 5)

An entertaining puzzle, but not a simple one. The number of clues which I picked out as being worthy of comment was well above average (I have not included them all below, so do ask if there are any others which you would like me to expand on), so I reckon that the difficulty is definitely a little past the halfway mark. 

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to look at clue 27d, “Drunk, having imbibed gallon, sky high (5)”. The usual abbreviation for ‘gallon’ is contained by a four-letter adjective meaning ‘intoxicated’ derived directly from the familiar word for a grape-based alcoholic beverage; the answer means ‘lofty’. So all good. Except that the required sense of the aforementioned adjective is shown by Chambers as ‘obsolete’. Convention (and fairness to solvers) demands that obsolete and archaic words, whether answers or elements of wordplay, are flagged as such – in 28a, 32a, 2d, 3d, 7d and 16d Azed has done exactly that, using qualifiers such as ‘old’ and ‘no longer’. Although it means adding a word or two into a clue, it’s important that obsolete and archaic terms are signposted – beyond the obvious adjectives and adverbs like ‘old’ and ‘once’, there are plenty of others to choose from, such as ‘discarded’, ‘dated’ or ‘forgotten’. Here Azed could have written ‘Dead drunk, having imbibed gallon, sky high’.

Across

11a Cluster of cells, type wherein time’s passed, American (5)
A four-letter word for a ‘type’ which has been deprived of the usual abbreviation for ‘time’ (ie “wherein time’s passed”) is followed by a two-letter abbreviation for a country which is often used attributively.

14a Fine wastage? (5)
A very brief &lit, though not as succinct as TE Sanders’ clue for PADDY-WHACK in Azed comp 221, “Ire-lander?’. Here the usual abbreviation for ‘fine’ is followed by a word meaning ‘wastage’, the entire clue (including the question mark) being a pretty fair indication of the answer.

19a Fair component of some resins, not mine (4)
An eight-letter word for a component of certain resins, which immediately brings to my mind the tops of kitchen tables, has the consecutive letters MINE removed (‘not mine’).

25a A wee bittie whiskey imbibed by soak? (4)
The spelling of ‘whiskey’ makes it clear that it is the letter which it represents in the NATO phonetic alphabet that must be placed inside (‘imbibed by’) a word meaning ‘soak’ – not (on this occasion) SOT, but a word meaning ‘to soak’ or ‘to steep in alcohol’. This is more commonly seen as a noun having the sense of ‘a propitiatory gift or concession’, originally a drugged cake given by Aeneas to Cerberus and nowadays frequently, and figuratively, offered to someone’s vanity.

28a An old field having parts switched for hunt? (6)
A (1,5) phrase equating to ‘a field’ (the term being ‘archaic or poetic”, hence the ‘old’) has its last two letters exchanged with its first four, producing a word which relates to hunting using a particular breed of animal.

30a Mountain plant, strangely pleasing, one picked out (7)
The letter to be removed from PLEASING prior to rearrangement (‘strangely’) is not the Roman numeral representing ‘one’ but the single-letter word with that meaning.

32a Scots engineer, no longer vigorous in energy (7)
The key element of the wordplay is a four-letter word which formerly meant ‘vigorous’ but now is usually seen in the sense of ‘out-and-out’ or ‘absolute’, and often applied to an outsider in a horse race. It is followed by IN (from the clue) and the usual abbreviation for ‘energy’. The engineer’s presence in Chambers is down to his absolute scale of temperature, similar to the Kelvin scale but using Fahrenheit rather than Celsius units (so absolute zero is 0ºR and the boiling point of water 671.64ºR) – it is apparently still used in engineering systems where calculations are done in Fahrenheit.

34a Butterfly? It’s thrown out in air gusts (5)
AIR GUSTS has the non-consecutive letters ITS discarded (‘thrown out’) to produce an answer which some may think of first and foremost as a butterfly, a vigilant Greek whose eyes (post mortem) were transferred to the tail of the peacock,  or a Wishbone Ash album.

Down

2d Amateur in grip of old pro, substantial? (5)
The usual abbreviation for ‘amateur’ is in the grip of one of the many terms dating back to the 17th century for a fille de joie, now confined to the sense of the girlfriend of a criminal or the unmarried female companion of a professional thief. Despite my training in chemistry (or perhaps because of it), the answer here seems impossible to define succinctly, so I exclude it from my own crosswords; I think Azed has made a good stab at it.

3d Dad’s enveloped by homily as of old, gassy stuff (7)
A two-letter word for ‘dad’ is contained (‘enveloped’) by an obsolete word for ‘a place in a church where intimations are given out; hence, a homily’, which shares its spelling with a word that means ‘lying face down’. Those who have watched King of the Hill will be familiar with the ‘gassy stuff’.

5d Ribs? Huge, emerging from college shortly (4)
An eight-letter word meaning ‘huge’ has the four-letter abbreviation (‘shortly’) for ‘college’ stripped from it. The question mark forms part of the definition, because not all of the things indicated by the answer are ribs and it is therefore a definition by example.

8d Roman magistrate? See special one in seat (5)
If the standard abbreviation for ‘special’ is prefixed to the answer, the result is a word for a seat, typically one of three, either movable or recessed in the wall and crowned with canopies, pinnacles, and other enrichments, usually placed on the south side of the choir near the altar for use by the clergy. The singular form is uncommon, and appears under the entry for the plural.

16d Rodent fancying sweet bulbs in quantity – once worth trapping it (9)
A four-letter word meaning ‘[a] quantity’ has a word with an obsolete meaning of ‘worth’ (more familiar, I suspect, as a unit of weight used for gems) containing (‘trapping’) it. The solution is hyphenated, 6-3.

22d Chant involving consecutive trio like wind among the leaves? (7)
A four-letter word meaning ‘[to] sing’ containing (‘involving’) a sequence of three consecutive letters of the alphabet produces a word which describes something the wind does, although a similar word with OU replacing I is perhaps even more evocative in that respect.

24d Fashionable number turned up in this cut? (6)
The two-letter abbreviation for ‘number’ is reversed (‘turned up’) in an anagram (‘cut’) of THIS. The validity of ‘cut’ as an anagram indicator is perhaps open to question.

29d Subject I sat in e.g. poly, missing pass at first (5)
The letter I (from the clue) is positioned (‘sat’) in a seven-letter word for a place of higher education (‘e.g. poly’) deprived of a three-letter word for a pass at the start (‘missing pass at first’).

31d Painful swelling making one miss work in career (4)
The somewhat convoluted wordplay here involves a six-letter word meaning ‘to move very fast’ (ie ‘career’) having the usual two-letter abbreviation of the Latin word for ‘work’ removed.

(definitions are underlined)