| With quite unfriendly letters and the Australian context, this was a hard word to clue concisely, and the strain shows in a lot of the entries, though there's little unsoundness. I liked 39 for its entertaining surface and nice use of 'digger', and 1 and 19 also read well. 26's several puns create a good penny-drop, and put it a little way ahead of 24. I was less keen on the Sussex cricket clues because they were mostly on the long side (30 just missed the points for this reason). Some clues that ruled themselves out were: 8 – 'a couple of characters from Vancouver' is too vague for V and U; 33 – I like a clue to have some wordplay as well as a definition, however clever; and 22, which I didn't understand at all, I'm afraid. |
Not a good month.
The definition of DUCKSHOVE needs (a) to be a verb (present tense or infinitive – not a present participle as in 4), (b) to be an intransitive verb (see Chambers) (so none of “abstract” 12, “gull” 9, “con” 13 “lift” 26 and “trim” 44 will do) and (c) (if it is to be completely fair) to indicate that the word is antipodean or at least (as 28) not English English. Very few clues ticked all these boxes. (My own wasn’t one of them – I failed to notice until it was too late that “duckshove” in the sense of “cheat” was intransitive.) Another bear-trap was “hove”, which is the past tense of “heave” only in certain specific nautical phrases (eg, “hove to”, “hove in sight”) or certain obsolete senses. Although Chambers gives “to rise like waves” as a meaning of “heave” (Clue 1), I strongly suspect that even a sailor would say “the ocean heaved” not “the ocean hove”; similarly with the past tense of “heave” in the sense of “vomit” 33; “lifted sailcloths” 3 is perhaps on the borderline, but “sailcloths” (plural) is a very artificial usage in either sense of “lift” and hardly an equivalent of “ducks” (plural). The surfaces of several of the clues were unconvincing (one even meaningless) – eg, 5, 6, 11, 14, 21, 22, 23, 32, 42, 43. 31, perhaps the most imaginative clue of the lot, unfortunately includes an indirect anagram, while “don’t follow a line” seems iffy as a definition; a great shame, because “Not half dull, Chekov’s plays” would have been a splendid anagram (though “play” would have been sounder). Three clues with promising Australian cricketing surfaces (30, 40, 45) were marred by definitions that were simply too far from the meaning of “duckshove”; 30 also needed an apostrophe-‘s’ after "Sussex".
All that leaves precious few clues to chose from. Top billing to 39 – 4 points. Not a great surface, but perfectly acceptable, and, uniquely, a fully sound definition with a sound subsidiary indication. The lack of an antipodean indicator being the least important of the criteria for the definition, 2.5 points each to 24 and 36. 1.5 points to 18- some clever wordplay, but "fault" instead of "responsibility" in the definition is a definite weakness. 1 point each to 12 – marred by “scoring” – and 20 – "Sussex" is in the wrong position. 0.5 point to 16 for ingenuity, though the surface sense of the second part is pretty strained, and, perversely, to 31, despite all its serious flaws, for imagination. I can’t justify the remaining 1.5 points. |
