Azed No 2196 Plain (3 Aug 2014)

Azed No 2200 Plain (3 Aug 2014)

reviewed by Dr Watson for & lit. – The Azed Slip Archive

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UMMER holidays left Dr Watson with very little time to complete and compete this month, so the notes below are somewhat cursory, but fortunately this landmark puzzle has no major traps for the solver.

Notes to the clues:

ACROSS

1. Ornamental moulding, say, form of dragon a new church installed. EGG-AND-ANCHOR (eg; a,n,ch, all in anag.). Egg-and-anchor is what it says – a decorative moulding with alternating eggs and anchors.

14. Missing part of DNA? Doctor inclined to pry, but holding himself back. MONOSOMY (MO, MO (rev.) in nosy). ‘Missing’ in the definition here is a participle rather than a gerund.

15. One associated with detectives is, in short, returning oily servility. SLIME (Emil + ’s (all rev.)). The reference is to Erich Kästner’s 1929 children’s story ‘Emil and the Detectives’, and has been used several times by Azed.

16. Two forms of duck, one very soft coated, lighter. ZIPPO (I pp, all in z, 0). The two ducks are the z (abbrev. for zero) and o. ‘Zip’ and ‘zippo’ are also defined as ‘nothing’ in Chambers, giving solvers a red herring to negotiate. Zippo cigarette lighters have been in production since the 1930s.

19. Kick once queerly miscued catching ball? REQUOYLE (O in anag.). Solvers need to work out whether ‘queerly’ or ‘miscued’ is the anagram fodder.

22. Bluff waiter, on being dismissed, retires. CRAG (garc(on) (rev.)). A neat pun on the geographical sense of ‘bluff’.

32. E.g. burgundy, neat, producing chemical reaction. REDOX (red, ox). All regular solvers of cryptics will have this meaning of ‘neat’ near the front of their minds.

34. Waders honk on Greek island. PUKEKOS (puke + Kos). A ‘Greek island’ will almost always be Kos or Ios. In Slip no 1329 Azed writes “I was taken to task for calling a PUKEKO (lovely word!) a wader, as Chambers does. It isn’t, I’m reliably informed, it’s a gallinule, similar to a rather gaudy moorhen and called a swamp-hen in Australia.”

DOWN

2. Ere e.g. liquor’s distilled, this’ll denote finely wrought case. GROLIERESQUE (anag.). The solution describes book bindings after the style of the 16C bibliophile Jean Grolier de Servières.

8. Bit of a cough making one stop work. HOOP (ho, op). Hoop² is an alternative spelling of ‘whoop’ as in whooping cough.

11. Edible seaweed, over 1,000 bits found on SA tree. KOMBU (K, ombu; ref K symbol). It’s tempting to interpret the o, M and b as ‘over 1,000 bits’, but here it’s the K representing, rarely these days, a kilobit (1024 bits).

13. Fancily trimmed hosiery will include it? SHORTIE (’t in anag. less y, & lit.). Solvers need to find the right place and amount to trim from their hosiery.

20. What Azed has to go through and measure efforts. ENTRIES (en, tries). The & lit. Archive estimates that Azed has gone through 185,353 competition entries in his 22 centuries of puzzles to date.