AZED CROSSWORD 1415

MANATI (Printer’s Devilry)

1.  R. J. Whale: Ro/me’s face is strangely not italic (ref. typeface).

2.  N. C. Dexter: At mention of Pete beating best of the English? Menti/on ‘sorrows’! (ref. P. Sampras, Tim Henman).

3.  A. J. Dorn: That’s another Wimbledon final with noti/ons confounded (ref. Tim Henman).

VHC

D. Ashcroft: We met a show/biz agent running Spanish night-clubs.

P. Biddlecombe: After dinner in old Rangoon, I gave a bur/p.

J. M. Brown: Cricket coach gives bat s/pin practice.

C. J. & M. P. Butler: To sla/ves culture is an imperial privilege.

P. A. Cash: To improve pay, mini/on recently adopted the Social Chapter.

C. A. Clarke: Give a gas/p when central heating is fixed promptly.

E. Dawid: See Scottish bar/s lay on duty-free to serve malt whisky! (Islay).

H. Freeman: With David, co-le/t des res, Ted, from Mike? (ref. D. Coleman, Des Lynam, sports commentators).

R. J. Heald: Old Scrooge stubbornly refused to give: ‘Post/pone Christmas!’

Mrs B. E. Henderson: Sprightly Anglican liturgy displeases me: I like dro/ny bit better.

T. Jacobs: Clippie exposes bus/t to grateful inspector.

H. M. Lloyd: With a steady flow of ginse/ng from the bar, we got plenty of tonic.

D. F. Manley: Azed says, ‘Solving wo/e I swear I don’t want!’ (ref. AZ tie).

T. J. Moorey: Philosophically an eon is an e/on, by God! (see eon in C.).

C. J. Morse: Early railways had steam-e/ngine missions that would be banned today.

S. L. Paton: Will the horse set Cossack company a ta/ngle? (ataman).

J. Pearce: Bat/tle for heroin a hood always wins.

D. Price Jones: Pope’s shocked at seeing ro/t in St Peter’s.

A. Streatfield: Giving bat/tle would honour Wayne (ref. Bruce W., aka Batman).

Mrs J. E. Townsend: See, this bigwig wa/ves proudly showing off to chief.

M. Whitmore: We seek an escaped crusader in the bat/tle the dark knight took (Batman created by Bob Kane).

HC

G. W. Allan, F. D. H. Atkinson, M. J. Balfour, M. Barley, E. Bassett, E. A. Beaulah, J. R. Beresford, S. Best, Mrs A. Boyes, Dr J. Burscough, B. Burton, D. Buxton, I. Carr, C. W. Clenshaw, N. Connaughton, R. M. S. Cork, K. W. Crawford, E. Cross, P. Crozier, M. Cutter, R. Dean, R. V. Dearden, V. Dixon, A. G. Fleming, D. A. Ginger, S. Gould, D. W. Grice, C. R. Gumbrell, R. J. Hannam, R. Hesketh, Mrs D. B. Jenkinson, G. Johnstone, L. T. Killip, F. P. N. Lake, M. D. Laws, J. P. Lester, J. C. Leyland, C. J. Lowe, C. Lusk, Ms R. MacGillivray, W. F. Main, G. R. Mason, K. McDermid, G. D. Meddings, N. Mellon, J. R. C. Michie, C. G. Millin, I. Morgan, R. Murdoch, R. A. Norton, S. J. O’Boyle, F. R. Palmer, R. J. Palmer, D. Pendrey, G. Perry, H. L. Rhodes, N. G. Shippobotham, D. J. Short, M. Sloman, B. Timmins, J. R. Tozer, R. Vaughan Davies, A. J. Wardrop, Dr M. C. Whelan, P. O. G. White, M. A. L. Willey, J. Woodall.
 

Comments
A welcome return, clearly, for an old favourite. The small handful who dislike PD are heavily outnumbered by those who enjoy its special challenge. (I don’t know who invented it – Ximenes or Afrit, perhaps?) Mind you, a PD puzzle takes an age to compile, and there always seem to be one or two words which cause special difficulty in cluing. This time it was ARBITRAL which I found especially tricky and which, probably as a result, puzzled a number of solvers. For the record, the undevilled version read: ‘So far, bit rally-drivers have finished was a doddle’, with ‘the’ understood before ‘bit’. Hardly deathless prose, I admit, but it makes sense of a sort. Can anyone suggest something better? There were 281 entries, with very few mistakes. Twenty or so had STAG for STAP, which I reluctantly allowed though it strikes me as making inferior sense (‘Early man was close to the first ages’). The other major cause of trouble was ESTRADIOL, an American spelling implied at the entries for estrogen and oestrus, and given explicitly in Webster’s and other large US dictionaries. I tried to signal this in the note below the clues without giving too much away, but perhaps it would have been better simply to state that it was an American spelling. Annoyingly, the note recommending Chambers referred to a 1988 edition, a misprint for 1998 which left some of you bemused. I can assure you that I would never base a whole puzzle on an old edition of C., or at least not without announcing this unusual step loudly and clearly. One final point regarding my clues: ADIT and AGREE were not deliberate red herrings for DITA and EAGRE, though I can hardly expect you to believe that!
 
I chose MANATI for you thinking that it offered plenty of scope for PD treatment (not knowing that it’s also a town in Puerto Rico, by the way), and I wasn’t disappointed. Rather too many plumped for ‘emanation(s)’, so this idea required specially good treatment to rise above the rest. Mr Moorey’s clue, incidentally, came accompanied by a citation from a major dictionary in which (a)eon is defined inter alia as, in the language of philosophy, ‘an emanation or phase of the supreme deity’ (whatever that might mean!). In general I prefer PD clues which involve breaks in more than one word in the clue, though this is certainly not a firm rule. Other popular ideas included Tim Henman and Batman. The commonest mistakes people make in concocting PD clues are these: 1) Beginning or ending the clue-word at a word-break in the clue either before or after omission. The preamble warns against this specifically. 2) Sacrificing the sense of the undevilled version to that of the devilled version, i.e. letting the tail wag the dog, as it were. Ideally both versions should make some sort of sense, but if one must make less it should always be the devilled version. An example from the competition was: ‘These angles aid navigation’, where the full version (‘The seaman, atingle, said “Navigation”) is close to nonsense. 3) Trying to work a definition of the clue word into your clue. This is unnecessary and earns no extra marks. 4) Overdoing the devilry for its own sake. This can be impressive but often looks like gratuitous self-indulgence and makes life unnecessarily hard for the solver.
 
My apologies to Mr C A Clarke, who should have featured in the Annual Honours List in last month’s slip, having received four VHCs in the course of the year. The omission doubtless happened because for one of those his name appeared as C.Clarke. My fault. I hope he has by now received his consolation prize.
 
And finally, the announcement of next month’s results will be delayed by at least a week. My wife and I are off to Tuscany again for our summer holiday. Oh, and Tom got a 2.1.