for PIER [PIE + R], and\u00a0most likely\u00a0not thought\u00a0very much about them. But could there be an issue here? Chambers lists the abbreviation R for ‘River’ but not<\/em> for ‘river’ without an initial capital. For a good reason, too\u00a0– the only place the abbreviation is seen (to our knowledge, anyway) is on maps, where ‘R. Thames’, for instance, is a shortened form of ‘River Thames’. And how about<\/p>\n Lively fight with master (4)<\/span><\/p>\n for WARM [WAR + M]? Again, Chambers shows M as an abbreviation only for the capitalized form, ‘Master’, because\u00a0‘M’ here\u00a0is\u00a0in\u00a0reality\u00a0only a component of\u00a0multi-letter abbreviations, eg MA for ‘Master of Arts’ (so even ‘Master’ for M may be an issue, which will be the subject of another discussion).<\/p>\n For many abbreviations\u00a0there is no\u00a0problem\u00a0– they will be capitalized in their expanded form and<\/em> when used in wordplay (eg ‘A\/American’), or non-capitalized in both (eg d\/diamonds, k\/king). And of course if the expanded form of the word appears at the start of the clue then all is well, eg<\/p>\n Street with place for vehicles awaiting hire (5)<\/span><\/p>\n for STAND [ST + AND], since ‘Street’ with<\/em> the capital is absolutely fine for ST.<\/p>\n What is the referee’s verdict? Your views may prompt a reassessment, but the initial judgement is a yellow card – it’s not serious foul play, in that\u00a0the practice\u00a0is not unfair to the solver, but neither is it entirely sound.<\/p>\n Use of non-capitalized words to indicated capitalized abbreviations<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":537,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-foul-play"],"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":false,"span_bottom":false},"number_of_votes":0,"sum_votes":0},"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":507,"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions\/507"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clueclinic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.clueclinic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Yellow-Card.png\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"