Whimsical indicators tell the solver to perform a manipulation which cannot be justified simply by reference to the dictionary. So in the clue “Suppress detailed report (3)” the last letter in BANG must be removed, producing BAN. While the verb ‘tail’ can mean ‘to provide with a tail’, there is no such word as ‘detail’ in the sense of ‘to remove the tail from’. However, this construction is frequently seen, at least in blocked crosswords.
Some of these indicators strike me as more appealing than others, and I have graded the entries in the list from category 1 (I would consider using these myself) to category 3 (very questionable indeed). The inclusion of a question mark (or something along the lines of ‘perhaps’) in a clue can help to point the solver in the right direction.
Note that there is also scope for similar whimsy in definitions, eg ‘unlocked’ or ‘distressed’ for BALD. It’s probably fair to say that whimsical definitions are generally viewed more favourably than their counterparts in wordplay.
I have not included words which need to be arbitrarily split in order to provide the instruction, eg ‘cleaving’ to indicate the removal of C or ‘lout’ for the omission of L; these fall into a separate category and their use in cryptic crosswords has no linguistic basis.
The list below can be sorted alphabetically on Indicator, in either ascending (default) or descending sequence. The Search box allows full and partial searching of the first column in the list.
Date last modified: 27/11/23
Nature of change: Baseline date established
| Indicator | Action | Justification | Acceptability |
|---|---|---|---|
| childless | Removal of CH | 'without children' | 1 |
| debased | Removal of E | 2 | |
| decent | Removal of C | 3 | |
| defaced | Removal of first letter | 1 | |
| defined | Removal of F | 2 | |
| degaussed | Removal of G | 2 | |
| denoted | Removal of N | 2 | |
| departed | Removal of PT | 2 | |
| detailed | Removal of last letter | 'tail' = 'to provide with a tail' | 1 |
| disclosed | Removal of CLO | 2 | |
| disclosed | Removal of last letter | 2 | |
| discontented | First and last letter selection | 2 | |
| discovered | Removal of first and last letters | obsolete meaning = 'uncovered' | 1 |
| discredited | Removal of CR | 2 | |
| disfigured | Removal of FIG | 2 | |
| disjointed | Removal of J | 2 | |
| extra-special | Containing S (or SP) | 2 | |
| extraordinary | Containing O | 2 | |
| footloose | Removal of F | 3 | |
| listless | Removal of first and last letters | 2 | |
| powerless | Removal of P | 'deprived of power' | 1 |
| replaced | Anagram | 2 | |
| reposed | Anagram | 2 | |
| represented | Anagram | 2 | |
| reserved | Anagram | 2 | |
| soft-hearted | Insertion of P in middle | 1 | |
| stoneless | Removal of ST | 1 | |
| sunless | Removal of S | 1 | |
| timeless | Removal of T | 'independent of time' | 1 |
| unanswered | Removal of A (or ANS) | 2 | |
| uncrowned | Removal of first letter | 1 | |
| undated | Removal of D | 2 | |
| unearthed | Removal of E | 2 | |
| unfathomed | Removal of F | 2 | |
| unfocused | Removal of middle letter | 2 | |
| unleaded | Removal of first letter | 3 | |
| unlined | Removal of L | 2 | |
| unlisted | Removal of first and last letters | 3 | |
| unmarked | Removal of M | 2 | |
| unnamed | Removal of N | 2 | |
| unnumbered | Removal of N | 2 | |
| unshipped | Removal of SS | 2 | |
| untrained | Removal of last letter | 2 | |
| upended | Reversal of last two letters (down clue) | 2 | |
| weightless | Removal of W | 1 |
Someone online (in one of those clue a day type feeds that claims to teach novices how to solve cryptics) posted a clue yesterday with “unsalted” for the removal of NaCl. [The clue was “Plain, unsalted barnacle” for BARE.] I think it’s a bridge too far… One might as well have “unbleached” for the removal of NACLO: Unbleached piña cloth, it covers fruit (4) …?
The possibilities seem fairly extensive, but it’s hard to know where to draw the line. Unironed for the removal of FE? “Zero-carbon” for the removal of C? (I imagine most people would assume that indicates the inclusion of OC). Deoxygenated etc etc.
When it comes to what might broadly be termed ‘unorthodox indicators’, the difficulty in knowing where to draw the line is one reason why I don’t generally use them in my own clues, effectively ensuring that I stay on the right side of that line. As I see it, they fall into two categories:
(i) Whimsical indicators, which are real words but are to be interpreted by the solver in a way that doesn’t chime with any of their real-life meanings. These are the ones listed in the Whimsical Indicators section of the Clinical Data, where they are grouped into three categories to reflect my personal view of their relative acceptability; those in category 1 I would be prepared to use, as in ‘childless couple’ for HIT(ch), while those in categories 2 and 3 I would not, eg ‘decent chap’ for (c)HAP.
(ii) Compound indicators, also real words, which are to be interpreted in a way that is consistent with a real-life meaning but which demands a two step process. In the example which you quote, ‘unsalted’ must be pre-processed into ‘without salt’, and a sequence of consecutive letters equating to ‘salt’ then removed from the target. Another example of a compound indicator would be ‘after retiring’ to indicate containment by BED.
The problem that I see with the whimsical indicator group is that the setter is playing fast and loose with the English language: if we allow ‘reposed’ as an anagram indicator, should we not accept ‘banking’ for BARK? I feel that the line between cryptic clue and Dingbat is very easily crossed with indicators of this type.
Because compound indicators do not depend on a non-existent meaning of a word, I am immediately more kindly disposed towards them. Looking at ‘unsalted’, the positives are that ‘unsalted’ does mean ‘without salt’, and the ‘salt’ being referred to in the minuend is indeed sodium chloride (rather than, say, a sailor); the negatives are that in real life it certainly doesn’t suggest that salt has been removed, rather that it has not been added (as opposed to, say, ‘unburdened’, which suggests being freed from a burden), and that ‘NaCl’ may not be familiar to all solvers. if we change ‘unsalted’ to ‘desalinated’, then we tick three out of four boxes, and I don’t think that I could argue with ‘desalinated barnacle’ in a puzzle where solvers could reasonably be expected to know the chemical formula for common salt. I’m not seriously discomfited by ‘unsalted barnacle’, and I think ‘deoxygenate’ (‘to remove oxygen from’) for the removal of O is more accurate than ‘timeless’ (‘independent of time’) for the removal of T (but both strike me as being fair).
In my view, ‘unbleached’ would be unfair: NACLO (or NAOCL as it was in my Chemistry days) is expecting far too much of the solver; ‘unbleached’ doesn’t mean ‘without bleach’; and bleach has clearly never gone anywhere near something which is ‘unbleached’. ‘Unironed’ and ‘zero-carbon’ also fail too many tests for my money. The latter strikes me as particularly undesirable because, as you say, the solver could expect it to yield OC; I do feel that if I saw ‘desalinated’ or ‘deoxygenated’ in the clue I would be alerted to the fact that something a little unusual was going on.
But this is one of those areas where, ultimately, fairness is in the eye of the solver, and (as always) other views are welcomed.
Many thanks, Doc, for the thorough and thoughtful response, which has helped to clarify my thinking. Unbleached was a deliberately provocative example, and as you say, in no way viable. Unsalted still seems a stretch to me – as you say, it doesn’t mean desalinate – and I think it’s not helpful in a series that seeks to demonstrate how cryptic clues “work” for beginners. I suppose I’d have silently grumbled but solved it without much further thought in a published puzzle.
This has reminded me: “soundly” is a homophone indicator that crops up fairly often in backpagers – one for this list? I’d give it a 2 at most, since it has no etymological relation to “sound” in the sense of sonority. It is used by some setters I admire, though. I do find it very helpful to refer to your lists (and the lexicon) when solving, and there are always indicators that are new to me, sound(ly) or otherwise.
I completely agree that the ‘barnacle’ clue is unsuitable as an example of anything except a novelty of borderline validity.
Thanks for ‘soundly’ – I don’t like it, but I’ll add it to the queue for the Whimsical list (category 2) and the Lexicon.
I think you may have touched on this question in one of your weekly postings, but there my memory fails me I’m afraid.
What of the case where there’s more than one instance of the letter in a word? Would, for example, ‘powerless’ applied to PUMP result in UMP, PUM, UM, or any of the above? I anticipate that any potential ambiguity might in itself make its use there rather inadvisable.
And what of, say, “I’m missing”? I’ve a feeling that stirs yet another fish kettle.
I found a comment that I made in the notes for 2,753. A modified version is below.
The clue was “E.g. worker bee buzzing in nut-tree timelessly?” for NEUTER [(NU(t)TREE)*], prompting the question of whether ‘timelessly’ ought to indicate the removal of both T’s and not just one. It seems to me that, in general, if the solver is instructed to remove something from an operand, then just a single instance should be removed – ‘dining lacking in’ surely leads to DING rather than DG. Similarly with ‘setter lacking time’ for SETER, where ‘lacking time’ is shorthand for “having the abbreviation for ‘time’ removed” – there is no indication that the reduction should be repeated. ‘Timeless’ and ‘timelessly’ are a little trickier, not least because they are rather more whimsical and therefore more difficult to ‘translate’, but I am inclined to treat any such indicator as directing the solver to eliminate a single instance of a sequence of one or more letters (by preprocessing, say, ‘timeless’ into ‘without time’). If the requirement is for multiple instances to be deleted, then the setter must make this clear, as in, say, ‘idled, wasting every day’ for ILE.
I would add that in the NUT-TREE example it makes no odds which instance of the letter T is removed, because the remainder gets jumbled up. Where a specific instance of the letter must be removed, as in “finished without degree” for DI(d) or (d)ID, setters on occasion choose to indicate which instance must go, eg by ‘finished without first degree’ for ID. This is not usually considered to be mandatory, since being asked to decide which instance to remove is little different from being told to delete ‘one’ from a word containing an A and an I; the rest of the wordplay and the definition will determine what is required.
As far as “I’m missing”, I think we’re talking about something like “Fellow, important, I’m missing” for MAN [MAIN – I]. This isn’t allowed because the cryptic reading is grammatically unsound – the letter I (rather than the pronoun, as in the surface reading) takes a verb in the third person, so the clue would have to read “Fellow, important, I’s missing”. Of course, substituting ‘one’ for ‘I’ will fix the problem.
I hope that answers the question.
If discontented can be a selection of the first and last letters, can contented mean a selection of the contents of a word?
That question is between you and your conscience! With ‘discontented’, I think one could argue that there are analogous participles which do indeed carry the sense of something concrete having been removed, eg ‘disgowned’ and ‘dishoused’. I can’t come up with anything analogous to ‘contented’ that would have a parallel meaning to the one required; I suspect if one were to accept ‘contented’ to mean ‘having had some of the contents extracted’, one would also have to accept, say, ‘parted’ (fancifully, ‘having had a part extracted’).
Incidentally, I have seen ‘content’ used as a selection indicator in clues. I think this is an error – ‘contents’ is the term for something contained in entirety, whereas ‘content’ refers to a component – the contents of a book are quite different from the content of a book (“Lady Chatterley’s Lover has adult content”).
Your question has also prompted me to reconsider ‘disheartened’, which appears in the list of first/last letter selection indicators, but is a negative of ‘hearten’ and could only be used to describe the figurative removal of ‘heart’ (not ‘a heart’). It could easily find itself relegated to the whimsical list. At the same time, I think ‘downhearted’ should be added to the whimsical list as an instruction to move the central letter of a ‘down’ solution downwards.
Would ‘replaced’, cryptically read as re-placed(=repositioned), merit inclusion in this list; probably as a ‘2’? I look forward to a de-tailed response 😉
Thank you for that.
Yes, absolutely. I think ‘reposed’ and ‘reserved’ also should be there. An interesting one is ‘represented’, which currently is in the main anagram indicator list, but should (I feel) appear there with a hyphen and here without – even OED admits that its examples without the hyphen are ‘somewhat doubtful’.
As I was browsing through possible ‘re-‘ words, I also wondered about ‘repaired’ – would ‘Lena repaired section of motorway’ work for LANE? It might require a new ‘4’ category of its own!