by David Astle
Police officers two similar men replaced = SUPERS+ED+ED
Suspended? Previously one would be kept in = ON(I)CE
Unprecedented release just becoming known = RECORD-BREAKING
Trying not to flinch, I folded the paper shut, checked the napkin dispenser for listening devices and left.
QUIZLING 16.1
If a sterile noble is a BARREN BARON, can you go forth and identify these other homophonic pairs?
Jacuzzi brawl (3,4)
Plant fruit (4,5)
Act Christian-like (4,4)
Reader’s past (4,4)
Spun globe (7,5)
Main rule (9,9)
Muscle-weary? (7,8)
Top tantrum (4,5)
Tomato? (5,6)
QUIZLING 16.2
What nine-lettered word is a mixture of a number beside its consecutive number, sounded -out?
QUIZLING 16.3
The homophones of what two vegetables are synonyms?
CHAPTER 17
Nation hunting craft in Italian
canal, say (9)
I still see the dread on my young daughter’s face when I told her we were going to the top of Centrepoint Tower, a 300-metre spire in Sydney. Her fear, I presumed, was acrophobic. But for Tess the nightmare related to bugs. Who in their right mind would choose to visit Centipede Tower?
Linguists know these slips as egg-corns, the ‘fruit’ of misheard words and phrases, named after a child’s own versions of the true word, acorns. In the ‘temple lobe’ of the egg-corner’s brain, babies sleep in the feeble position, while grandpa may suffer old-timer’s disease. Real estate signs are often good for egg-corns, with placards claiming sheik addresses or laundry shoots. A favourite of mine was a lost cat notice pinned to a notice board. The missing moggy was ‘Ginger and white with blue flee collar’.
Away from egg-corns and homophone fluffs, there’s the other mess of human mishearing, or misunderstanding, the one in which boxer Mike Tyson, after so much bad press, longed to ‘fade into Bolivian’. Here the founding culprit is Mrs Malaprop, a character in Richard Sheridan’s play The Rivals. Thanks to this dame’s clumsy tongue, any ill-suited word or phrase goes by the name of malapropism, borrowing from the French word for ill-suited or inappropriate.
A college friend collects these boo-boos like normal people hoard stamps or beer coasters. Her list is impressive, from social piranha to buggering belief. For Rose, a trip to India comprised weeks of scouring menus in the hope of such treasures as cinema rolls and meshed potato. Both sound like dishes you can expect on Kath & Kim, the Australian sitcom featuring two alfalfa females using pacific terms in effluent society.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or take offence when a caustic letter from a solver in 1993 claimed that one of my crossword clues, involving the unsavoury homophone of the Jewish HORA, was anti-semantic.
Language learning in its early phases is all about the ear. A toddler has only sketchy notions of letters, no less vague than semantics, and yet seems to cope by parroting what parents or siblings say. A small child doesn’t care how you spell YOGHURT, or about the word’s Turkish history, just so long as blurting ‘yo-kit’ or ‘yoke-cut’ works on Mum.
Second-guessing pop lyrics enlivens the experience for us literate beings. If we think Madonna is pining for ‘Louise the Bra-Eater’ (instead of ‘La Isla Bonita’) or the Cuban chant of ‘Guantanamera’ is all about a ‘One-ton tomato’, then who really cares? So long as we get to sing along with the radio, the imagined words make as much sense as those in the next tune. A vast amount of early language comes from soaking up sounds and repeating an approximation of what we heard. Until being shamed of course, or corrected, or we go to check the sleeve notes.
I felt like a kid reborn when working on a cargo ship back in 1986, learning Spanish from a deckhand named Javier. A craggy Galician in his early fifties, Javier was born with a crocheted cap on his scalp and a Lucky Strike lodged to his lip. Between puffs, he taught me Spanish. Most nights, from 2000 to 2400 hours, we’d stand on night watch, Javier making small talk and yours truly playing mimic. From Sydney to Oslo, we developed our chat from ‘The sea is big’ to ‘The moon is beautiful’ to ‘Hecho crucigrammas’ (or ‘I make crosswords’).
Spanish and crosswords in fact were my antidotes to the rigours of a long trip. The work was tough, compared to mixing letters. I had to clean the engine room from stem to stern, my body clock unsprung by three months of racing the sun. When I wasn’t scrubbing valves or painting bilge pumps I was trying to relax with a word puzzle – solving or making one – or reading fat books like Moby-Dick and Gogol novels, or else standing on the bridge in the beautiful moonlight, growing bilingual under a watchman’s eye.
Javier had vaguely heard of crucigrammas, but cryptics were another dimension. Keeping things simple, a hostage to the present tense and my own callow vocab, I tried in vain to enlighten the bloke, telling him about ‘trucos’ (tricks) and ‘mal direcciones’, but the sailor wagged his head and laughed. He dug around in his overalls and lit another Lucky Strike. ‘Despacio,’ he said, something of a mantra with Javier – Slowly. You can’t hope to master a language in a hurry, just as cryptic crosswords demand your care and perseverance, whether you’re manipulating letters or voicing experimental sounds.
PUZZLE OVER SECOND SOUND – double homophones
CROW lacks a true homophone, as does SHADE, but put them together and CROCHETED materialises. Does that mean the word when spoken equals black – the one and only crow-shade?
BOW has a homophone in BEAU, just as TIE owns THAI. Together, of course, the pair makes BOWTIE. Yet when the syllables switch positions, the same piece of apparel turns into TAE BO, the aerobic fad of the 1990s. Effectively a clue for this observation could read:
Exercise regime switching formal wear, say (3,2)
Code red, people. We’re about to confront the double homophone, where CRUSADE turns into CREW’S AID (a map? a compass?) or TROUSSEAU can be reversed to seem SO TRUE. Suddenly Bear Grylls can be bare grills, and the solver feels left in the wilds. But don’t fret. The double homophone is a rare bird, asking for your audio range to extend beyond the first sound bite. Here are two samples from The Times:
Tree said to be less healthy on heath = SYCAMORE (‘sicker + moor’)
Puzzle over second sound = ACROSTIC (‘across + tick’)
Can you see the double billing in both? The signposts vary – said, sound – but the trick is consistent. No different in fact than the subterfuge lurking in our current clue, with one added twist.
Let me explain. MAP, as we’ve just discussed, is an all-encompassing suggestion for CRUSADE (‘hearing’ the double homophone as crew’s aid rather than crews + aid). In the same vein BLACK could be the ambient definition of CROCHETED. Entering a similar zone, our Master clue asks you to pair two sounds together, treating the coupling as an entity. Let’s take a look:
Nation hunting craft in Italian canal, say (9)
Helpfully, we know from the grid that the answer ends in A. Secondly, given that the audio signal appears as the tail, we can speculate that our answer is defined by the opening word, Nation. In support of that idea, the extended phrases of Nation hunting, or Nation hunting craft, make little sense in isolation. One glimpse, and we’ve established three things:
We’re after a nation; it ends with A; homophones are implicated.
Often, when two wordplay elements combine, or the wordplay cleaves to the definition, a linkword is used. Common joiners are words like with or on or and, the sort of words that fly below the radar, not just describing the wordplay’s action, but also refining the clue’s surface sense.
Sometimes, to glue the pieces with a little more flair, the link can be a verb such as making or seeing. (For example, Jim too drunk to make cocktail = MOJITO.) Hunting, however, as appears in our current clue, is off-limits: too conspicuous, and it cannot be justified to describe any wordplay operation. Which means the word is a vital piece of wor
dplay, either in its own right or helping to qualify the craft we’re seeking.
The cargo ship that gave me Spanish was not a hunting craft. All she did was roll-on-roll-off Japanese cars and carry steel boxes filled with cane furniture from Malaysia. Along the way the crew enjoyed its share of drama, from stowaways in Panama to a crewman getting arrested for disorderly behaviour in New Orleans. In the north Pacific we lurched hard left to dodge a basking whale. The monster may not have been white, but I still felt like Ahab with his missing limb, cursing the behemoth as I tumbled in my cabin.
As well as being true, the whale story is also your clue-within-a-clue. But if that’s not working for you, then let’s explore Italian canals.
Most puzzle setters will presume the solver has a lay knowledge of geography. When it comes to Venice, say, no fair-minded compiler would expect his solvers to know Canale de Fabbri, or Canale di Fuseri, or any other capillary I’ve yanked off Google Maps. As general knowledge goes, the Grand Canal is pretty much the long and short of it. Anything else is too parochial, too specialist.
Whales? Venice? Or said another way: Venice? Whales?
Since the clue asks for hunting craft, and not its prey, then WHALER is the word we need to try, assuming SEALER, EELER and PRAWNER are out. So then, treating the two sounds as a single unit, could the Pequod of the Adriatic be a VENICE WHALER? Say it isn’t so. But it is, we hear. Say it again. Fill it in. You’ve solved your last – and toughest – homophone, a double no less.
CRUCIGRAMMAS – non-English cryptics and Javier
Before doing Cargo-ship Spanish, I did five years of Latin at high school, reciting the Roman hip hop of amo, amas, ama. Mates and career counsellors would tut-tut on a regular basis. ‘What are you doing a dead language for?’ To which I’d retort carpe diem, which roughly translates as ‘I don’t really know’.
Short of options, I did German too, less dead in comparison, though from an Australian perspective, especially a white-bread, pre-Web 1970s perspective, Deutschland was no less remote than the Circus Maximus. Ancient history or the northern hemisphere: both felt a million miles away, making the offer of a cargo ship, at the age of twenty-five, a chance to break out of a vacuum.
Hopping off in Oslo, tramping south, I found it bewildering to meet Bavarians who actually knew the phrase Guten tag. Not only that, they answered back. I felt like asking, ‘Did you study with Miss Baker too?’
I’d been to Italy before, defecting from the rugby tour when barely out of pimple cream, but even on my second visit, catching up with family, I still felt confounded that Latin didn’t hold much currency in the fallen empire of Claudius.
Dazed from the overnight train, I staggered about the Stazione de Roma Termini wondering why none of the citizens knew what ipso facto meant. What was the problem? ‘Didn’t you invent the bloody language?’ I quizzed the cab driver, in Latin, who shrugged. He took my money and left me on the corner of Via Bari and Via Catanzaro, where I went to find my matertera – which meant aunt – but not in Italian.
Mum’s younger sister, Auntie Glen, had done what I was doing a generation earlier. Back then, also in her twenties, the Roseville girl had fled suburbia to end up in the Eternal City with a wedding rock and a tall Alitalia pilot named Cesare. Once we’d exchanged the usual double kisses, Glen gave me a wad of lire and told me to lose the beard. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘per favore, go find a barber.’
‘A tonsor,’ I corrected her.
She pointed to Piazza Bologna. ‘A barbiere.’
Curiously, Auntie Glen shared the puzzle itch as well. When not creating subtitles for American movies, she worked out these dense Italian word squares in Settimana Enigmistica, a magazine full of wordplay and rebus puzzles – even a splash of Latin. Back in Australia, growing up with Jessie, my grandmother, Glen had likewise learnt to tackle cryptics, but the genre had yet to find a niche in Rome. Instead she got her fix from haphazard dispatches of Herald puzzles – some of them mine – sent by Australian friends. The smell of gum leaves, the drone of lawnmowers and LB’s anagrams were Glen’s three reminders of her patria.
So where was the Italian cryptic, I wondered. Or the Dutch version? The French? How come Javier the Spanish watchman had no idea of what I did for a crust, assuming I was choosing the right words for my explanation?
The closest I came to finding a foreign-language cryptic was Frankfurt, where that city’s paper ran a crossword with a few elongated clues. Yet on closer reading these went closer to puns, rather than abiding by the Cryptic Code of Conduct.
Subsequent research has only confirmed my hunch. The Hindu Times has a lively cryptic made by local setters, as do other outposts of the British Empire. Seems English is custom-made for duplicity. Like the black hole of space, pulling in fragments of any passing dialect, English has the ideal fusion of influences, with its erratic spelling, its promiscuous roots, the multiple shades of sound and meaning – where MOLE can be a mammal, a skin blemish, a breakwater, a spy or (when spoken with two syllables) a chilli-laced chocolate sauce from Mexico. And that’s one word – serving as five – in a language of almost a million.
Anyhow, back in Rome, I’d written half a novel for want of anything else to do. Then Lynda my Aussie girlfriend arrived as a welcome interruption. We hit the road, meandered along the Côte d’Azur and ended up in Spain. It was there in Madrid, just off the city’s main plaza, that we found a flat to rent. She scored a job at the United Nations, typing up reports about the nuclear aftermaths of Pacific atolls, while I played rugby for Madrid University, existing on a false student visa that claimed I was studying architecture.
I constructed crosswords instead, and continued the habit of gathering new Spanish words, striving for fluency, yet so much of my vocab harked back to the ship. I felt trapped inside a Conrad novel, the Spanish version, where all I seemed to know were sea conditions and maritime slang.
Did those six months – living as a Spaniard-lite – impact on my puzzle-making? Yes on both levels – the flexibility that comes with a bilingual brain, and the small jewels I found hiding in a new treasury of words. TESORO, for example, the Spanish word for treasure, is also a blend of SORTEO – their word for lottery. Our word ORDEALS is their anagram for DOLARES, or money. Their RECETA (recipe) is our CREATE.
If I’d stayed any longer in Spain, if the visa scam hadn’t backfired and we hadn’t been banished inside seven months, I might still be an expat like Auntie Glen, bringing cryptic crosswords to the señores and señoras. As it was, I played for the Uni Quince (or fifteen). When I wasn’t stumbling on such marvels as UNO + CATORCE (1 + 14) being a blend of CUATRO + ONCE (4 + 11), I was crash-tackling Basques or getting hammered in return. Towards the end of the season, playing in San Sebastian, I got my chance to learn the hypnotic power of the voice, which seems a fitting way to finish our homophone section.
Javier had described his native village so well that I’d already visited the place in my mind: the deli on the corner with giant wheels of cheese, the stone church, the Virgin and the martyr statues guarding the plaza. I ate salted cod in the bar I’d already imagined, and drank the sailor’s favourite beer, Estrella. But when I sauntered over to the domino tables, asking after Javier, I knew there was trouble by the shadow on the men’s faces. They didn’t wish to speak too much. Instead they gave directions to his home. A further clue was Maria, his wife, dressed in black, and the look of dread in her eyes when I started speaking.
‘Hola,’ I started. ‘Me llamo David. Soy de Australia. Trabajé con su marido sobre el barco…’
‘Venga,’ she yelled, calling to others inside the house, and suddenly the doorway was jammed with three or four faces, a boy in his late teens, and two young women roughly my age, all of them wearing that same startled expression. ‘Habla,’ they said. Speak.
Javier, I soon gathered, their father, Maria’s husband, was dead. His heart had collapsed somewhere in Africa on the reverse run to Sydney, and I pictured those Lucky Strike cartons he stacked like b
ricks in his cabin. I tried to say sorry, to express my grief, to say what a patient mentor he had been, but the family hungered for something else. Talk about anything, they said – your country, your football, your crucigrammas if you must – so they could close their eyes and listen to the cadence of Javier’s voice.
HALL OF FAME: HOMOPHONES
Heard question about identity of Cockney killer? (3) [Times 8376]
On the radio, get bigger hits (6) [Times 8552]
Bound to believe in pronouncement (7) [Orlando, Guardian]
Articulate frontier resident (7) [Patrick Berry, US]
Girl following nose, we hear (7) [Puck, Guardian]
A jousting contest said to be brief (8) [Times 8271]
SOLUTIONS: Uzi, whacks, trussed, boarder, Nanette, attorney
QUIZLING 17.1
There’s a European country that opens its name with another part of Europe. Curiously, the rest of the country’s name sounds like that other part’s typical weather. Where on earth are we talking about?
QUIZLING 17.2
Homophones – such as PRIZE and PRISE – typically share more than a few letters. Yet what five separate homophone pairs reveal not a single letter shared by either partner? Award yourself a prize for naming three pairs at least.
QUIZLING 17.3
Remarkably, this three-letter word has a five-letter homophone, which can then move its end letter to the front to spell a synonym of the original word. Name this unique trio.
Deletions
CHAPTER 18
Outlaw fled outlaw to repeat (5)
Roger Anderson went to school during the 1940s. Writing to the Sydney Morning Herald, Roger recalled a Scripture tutor teaching the class a moral piece of wordplay. If it doesn’t make you see the light, then at least you’ll see how the deletion formula works: