by David Astle
Molest a little higher! = TOUCH UP
Mad? They must be cracked! = NUTS
Of course, when the stars align and the setter is moved, cheekiness plus the rigours of &lit can coalesce. For me that moment came with WONDERBRA:
Naughty piece in fashion wardrobe!
To decode the wordplay: naughty piece is N, joining WARDROBE, which, once fashioned, tailors the underwear.
If it calms your nerves, we can use the word ‘literals’ as a label for &lits, since that’s the way to tackle them – literally. You register the exclamation mark, and you read the clue as its own definition. Think about what the clue might suggest and see if any wordplay supports your early stabs.
So far, among the Master clues, we’ve bumped into three screamers and each of these clues – KASBAH, GEN-X and ETC – own strong &lit tendencies. Connoisseurs can argue about their purity, but all three cases see the answer’s definition carried largely by the wordplay. Our current clue, 10-Across, is our final encounter with the exclamation mark, and again the &lit balance seems on offer. In the next section, let’s do some literal un-mingling.
MEANWHILE … – double- and triple-barrelled &lits
Glance at the grid and you’ll probably pounce on the answer of our Master clue. With every cross-letter in place, no other word fits the pattern. It has to be INTERIM. But that’s less solving than sealing the gaps. For any fan the joy of cryptic crosswords rests in the clues. If this were a quick puzzle, I’d understand your haste. Why bother reading a prosaic definition if you’ve already hunched the answer?
But a cryptic is much more than a single puzzle. Each clue is in fact a tiny puzzle in a larger challenge. If nothing else, the pleasure of sampling these smaller conundrums should prompt you to see how INTERIM is reached:
Central period in time-spread one spent! (7)
Okay, let’s work backwards. We have the answer, so how does the clue get us there? In the &lit tradition, the overall clue reads as an approximation of INTERIM, the time stretching between two points. Too approximate, perhaps, to please a sober dictionary, but sound enough on the puzzle page. So there’s the definition – in toto as Ximenes decreed. What about the wordplay?
Focusing on the pieces, you see that central period gives us RI, the middle pair of period. The next part, in time-spread, could be read as anagram fodder plus signpost. Is that the recipe in action? Reviewing what we’ve collected, RI + INTIME, the outcome of INTERIM is teasingly close, but we have too many letters. Checking the fodder we have INTERIM + I. So how do we lose this surplus I?
Here’s where the clue’s tail comes to the rescue: one spent. Spending is another word for depleting. Once ‘I’ is disbursed from the eight, we have the raw material for INTERIM. The clue, we’ve discovered, uses two categories – anagram and deletion. Some may call this clue style a complex anagram, others would plump for hybrid, while this chapter prefers the triple-barrelled label of anagram/deletion &lit, just to underline how far we’ve come.
Not that our trip is over. Putting to bed the last &lit, we now face the labradoodles in the pack – alias the hybrids. The species might seem friendly enough but that would be to overlook the creature’s natural curliness.
RECIPE PRECIS: &LITS
The pinnacle of clues, &lits mean ‘and literally’, as the wordplay literally acts as the definition. Many set free! (for example) doesn’t just define AMNESTY, but the wordplay yields the same answer. Unlike other categories, the &lit clue obeys any recipe, so long as the wordplay and definition are fused. Brevity and the telltale exclamation mark serve as your best guides.
Hall of Fame: &Lits
Leading pairs to animal home involved him (4) [Aardvark, FT]
Original back to nature author! (7) [Puck, Guardian]
Difficult case (section), ending in operation! (9) [Paul, Guardian]
Alternative, say, to the op? (10) [Times 8641]
Besides the previous filling, might this prevent another? (10) [Paul again]
Result of a piercing tool! (10) [Henry Hook, US]
SOLUTIONS: Noah, Thoreau, caesarean, osteopathy, toothpaste, impalement
QUIZLING 29.1
When a Kenneth Grahame character
Gains the tail, ST,
The SYNONYM for a second character
Among the willows you’ll see.
Name both animals.
QUIZLING 29.2
What six-letter ailment sees the last five letters describe the physical attributes of the affliction’s initial?
QUIZLING 29.3
Autologues are words that literally describe themselves. Ampers& spells ampersand, and inh_man is another way of saying heartless. Can you work out the reasoning behind the way these six words are depicted?
LONDON
e_punge
paci_ _ _ _
hero
bl_nd
d r u g g e d
Hybrids
CHAPTER 30
Almost completed month hosting upstart libertine (3,4)
‘Know any good crossword songs?’
The gauntlet had been thrown by a school in Melbourne. They wished to run a trivia night with a crossword dimension. About 100 people took part, dressed in black and white, determined to crack a crossword, clue by PowerPointed clue. To make Crossnight a proper success, all we needed was the right kind of music.
Plenty of artists, from Bee Gees to Pink, have cut a number called ‘Words’, but could we go one better with a direct crossword mention? Come the night, students burnt a disc of twenty songs with a cruciverbal hint, including:
‘Looking for Clues’ – Robert Palmer
‘Hip to be Square’ – Huey Lewis and the News
‘Across the Universe’ – The Beatles
‘Down on the Corner’ – Creedence Clearwater Revival
Hip hop of course has lent a new chic to wordplay. There’s even an artist called DJ Clue, and a guy called Method Man whose remix called ‘The Riddler’ is all about my favourite lime-green psycho. But finding songs with rock-solid mentions of crossword puzzles was a taller order.
The night went well, by the way. We raised a few grand for a remote health clinic, solved a few clues, but the music challenge lingered. Over the weekend, I combed lyric databases to uncover this bizarre medley:
• ‘Crosswords’ by Tim Finn, formerly of Crowded House. The track describes a couple out of sync with each other – he’s down, she’s across. In bed, he’ll turn, she’ll toss.
• ‘Crossword’ by Jethro Tull – ‘your brain on the train to test’.
• In ‘My Old Man’, Ian Dury and the Blockheads sing about solving a crossword at the airport. Or failing to solve one.
• The Partridge Family released an album entitled Crossword Puzzle in 1973, complete with themed grid on its canary-yellow cover. (Just as Neil Diamond, three years earlier, had converted his face into a dot-to-dot portrait on his Shilo LP.)
• Confucius, reckons Tori Amos in her ‘Happy Phantom’ song, does his crosswords in pen, while in ‘Drug Me’, the Dead Kennedys claim that crosswords are a government conspiracy to sedate the masses.
• INXS mentions crosswords in ‘Simple Simon’, not to be confused with XTC, whose ‘Mayor of Simpleton’ shuns them.
• The all-German metal-heads called Cryptic Carnage have some crossword references in their backlist, such as ‘The Wizard’, ‘The Guardians Awake’ and ‘High Hopes’.
By all means, hope away. There’s nothing wrong with optimism in the face of our next challenge: the hybrid clue. Just bear in mind the words of lyricist Stephen Sondheim, writer of such shows as West Side Story and Sweeney Todd, as well as his own cryptics during the 1970s. His belief: ‘The nice thing about doing a crossword is you know there is a solution.’ Sounds obvious, though compare that certainty to all life’s other problems. Crosswords are built for breakthrough, that piñata euphoria.
And keeping with music, our current clue has a faint underscore of Mozart. Time to segue to the
second movement to see how the clue’s composed.
UP FOR THE RUMBLE – slash method and hybrid clues
The reason that rookies fear hybrids is because of the lengthening of the mental question list. As a rule, facing a cryptic clue, the solver asks two questions:
Where do I draw the line between definition and wordplay?
What recipe is involved?
Along come hybrids, with recipes plural, and the list gains a third question:
Where does one piece of wordplay end, and the next recipe begin?
Clue division, in other words, needs an extra slash or two. Before we grapple with the upstart libertine in our latest clue, let’s slash a beastly schoolmate, as created by Crucible, a Guardian setter:
Beastly schoolmate misbehaved, caught out (9)
Divided into its correct pieces, Crucible’s clue would look like so:
Beastly/schoolmate misbehaved/caught out
Section One is the definition. Two, you can tell, is the anagram, with fodder adjoining a signpost. The tail is a deletion, telling you to remove the caught (or C in cricket shorthand) from a scrambled SCHOOLMATE. In earlier chapters we encountered this style under the banner of compound anagrams, where SUDOKU minus U can be jumbled to make KUDOS. So there’s nothing to fear. We’ve done the miles. We’ve met one type of hybrid and beaten it already.
To expose the mechanics further, let’s break the schoolmate clue into an equation form:
Synonym of beastly = scrambled SCHOOLMATE – C
Distilling the elements further, we can fuse the recipes into a single challenge:
Synonym of beastly = scrambled SHOOLMATE
LOATHSOME is the solution. You ready for another? Just recite that mental list – instead of two tasks, the hybrid demands three. Here’s one from my own collection:
Hawaiian bloke held out long iMac? (3,3,9)
It’s a stiffer challenge this time, with no anagram involved. So, Question 1: Where’s the definition? Question 2: Which recipe can you see? Question 3: What other recipe(s) remain? To give you a boost, I can tell you that the segments fall this way: Hawaiian/bloke/held out/long/iMac
Cross-letters would be a big help, of course. Let’s imagine that our mystery phrase is among the last to join the grid, much like our current hybrid. Hence we know that the middle word is AND. Meaning we’re seeking a Hawaiian, or an iMac, that’s (3, AND, 9).
But which formulas are on display? Here again is the equation approach, with one of three ways of reading what we see:
Phrase meaning iMac = synonym of Hawaiian + MAN (or man’s name?) on the outside + word meaning long
Phrase meaning Hawaiian = synonym of bloke around out (or word meaning out) + synonym of long + iMac
Phrase meaning Hawaiian = synonym of bloke inside synonym of held + word for long + iMac
Feeling peckish? The answer is HAM AND PINEAPPLE, also known as a Hawaiian pizza. The breakdown goes like so – HA(MAN)D+PINE+APPLE. Hybrid clues resemble pizzas in a way, the Four-Seasons kind. If standard clues follow a single recipe, then hybrids combine at least two styles. The kitchen may deliver a Mexicana/Vegetarian – two flavours in one – but ultimately the contrasting slices combine to make the whole.
The moment feels right to wheel out the Master clue:
Almost completed month hosting upstart libertine (3,4)
With a lack of shuffle markers, you can scratch out anagram. Then again, a container clue looks probable, owing to hosting. Second, we can suspect upstart as a pointer for U, which already appears as a cross-letter.
The grid suggests that the first word is either DAN, DEN, DIN, DON or DUN – each a viable word or name. Which candidate is favoured by the wordplay? If we seek a libertine, then the phrase to yield the opening word must be almost completed. How does DONE minus E seem? Can you name a Lothario called DON? Mozart composed an opera about the rogue, one Señor Giovanni, based on the Spanish legend and also the subject of the Byron poem. DON JUAN is your hombre, but how does the rest of the hybrid pan out?
Almost completed (DONE – E) month (JAN) hosting upstart (around U) = libertine
There you have it, a deletion/charade/container all nestled into one, plus a splash of libretto and libido. And like Mr Juan, you proved equal to the hanky-panky.
READ MY LIPS – nobbled novels and lipograms
John Gadsby hails from Branton Hills, an imaginary township short of vigour. Not that Gadsby is all passion and pop, but gradually this chap brings back that missing X-factor by inspiring young folk to add a bit of razzmatazz.
Sound odd? That’s because the paragraph above lacks an ‘E’, the most common letter in English. And that was a mere forty words. Imagine 50,000 words, the Gadsby story from go to whoa, and you’ll understand the feat that Ernest Wright accomplished in 1939. His novel – Gadsby: Champion of Youth – is a full-blooded lipogram, or text excluding certain letters. Arising in Greece, this strange practice was born of literary discipline and/or masochism. Wright himself is a puzzle to unravel, dying, aged 66, days after his opus hit the streets. He would have published Gadsby sooner, but none of the major players thought the gimmick worth the risk, obliging the author to self-publish. (What must have burnt Ernest even more was that the name of the vanity press – Wetzel – boasted two of his taboo vowels, just as his own name did.)
The story of course is written in the present, as the -ed ending of the past participle was too restrictive. A stickler to the last, Wright also dodged such abbreviations as St. (for street) and Mr (Mister). In essence, working from a Tampa nursing home, Wright only had half the dictionary on which to draw. Since his passing, the novel has grown in stature, with French writer Georges Perec paying literary tribute with his own 50,000-word lipogram called La Disparition, published in 1969. The work shadows a band of klutzes seeking the missing Anton Vowl, the whole mystery devoid of E. And if that’s not mind-blowing enough, consider the feat of Gilbert Adair, who translated Perec’s work into English, sans E, under the title A Void.
All this talk of omission and avoidance is apropos of the J in DON JUAN. As you’ll recall, the Master solution carries the alphabet, bar one letter. An accidental lipogram, if you like. Or a thwarted pangram, with J the twenty-fifth and final unique letter to be recruited. As hard as I tried, plying the final three answers to come, I couldn’t find room for the exiled F. Ironic really, given the arrival of an infamous libertine. Of all sagas, even Perec or the brilliant Ernest Wright would struggle to translate Don Juan without recourse to the F key.
RECIPE PRECIS: HYBRIDS
A catch-all formula, the hybrid clue sweeps up two or more recipes. Spooky as that sounds, every rule we’ve met so far is still in effect. If reversal teams up with anagram, then the two signposts (of recession and renewal) need displaying. Same with homophone and deletion – expect cues for sound and removal. Be alive to each word and try to distinguish which is signpost, which link, which fodder, and which definition. That way, you can break up the clue correctly, using the equation method if handy, and stalk the solution step by step.
QUIZLING 30.1
The title of which major hit written and performed by Bob Dylan only uses letters (as often as necessary) from the singer’s own surname? (And what song title by a British songwriter, released a year later, also follows the Dylan restriction?)
QUIZLING 30.2
Can you dredge up a well-known European river that not only sounds like a horse, but also can be mixed to spell a creature frequenting rivers?
QUIZLING 30.3
We have an American state in mind. Delete its opening M, and the remainder can be mixed to spell a particular European. Which state?
CHAPTER 31
Disorientated, guided east of tall
grass zone one slashed (10)
We have B _ M _ O _ Z _ E _ to fill, so let’s stop beating round the bush. Enter BAMBOOZLES – the obvious answer – and on we go.
Or wait. Maybe BAMBOOZLED is what we need. Champs can come unstuck making tournam
ent slips like that, bungling one square in their haste to complete the whole. Both words fit – but which is right?
We have two ways to check: the definition’s case and the wordplay. A past-tense definition must have a past-tense answer. New solvers – and setters too – can overlook this golden rule. Without considering wordplay yet, check the definition’s tense, and you should confirm that last iffy square:
Disorientated, guided east of tall grass zone
Disorientated has the necessary –ED ending. We’re BAMBOOZLED no longer.
Remember this when parsing clues. She in isolation cannot signal HER or HERS. The case must agree. With verbs the trick is valency, a fancy word for how any word combines with others around it. As you know, verbs are divided into two camps – the transitive and intransitive kind, with quite a few swingers who sneak across the border.
In lay-speak a transitive verb requires an object to receive the action. If you chase, then you must be chasing something. Different from when you run, which doesn’t require a fugitive as such. People can run for the sake of it, no object needed. Of course run is one of those bed-hoppers that can answer to intransitive (The athletes run) or transitive (The school runs the carnival). These nuances matter when deciphering the definition element.
Imagine eat is the straight part of the clue. This could mean NIBBLE or DEVOUR, even ERODE or CORRODE, but mis-fires as a synonym of CATER or SATISFY or STRESS (as in to be eaten by worry). A verb can’t perform a function outside its job description, or turn back on itself from clue to grid. If the setter offers itch, then the solver shouldn’t think SCRATCH.
Don’t worry. I won’t be reciting the subjunctive any time soon. Too many souls more learned than I (or is it me?) have wandered into the Grammar Jungle never to return. Language is treacherous, as a cryptic puzzle demonstrates. Even fake ones, such as the outlandish case involving English writer Sir Max Beerbohm.