Never a cross word – 12

Tags

anagrams, crossword puzzles, cryptic clues, learning methodologies

One of the attractions of looking at English through the medium of cryptic crossword clues (which, I should explain to new readers, is what this series is all about) is that you are led in unexpected directions.  The following clue, for example, takes us into the world of chess.

It is from the Daily Telegraph Puzzle 27,510 of 7th June, 2014 and reads:

Man on board to consider going back round Gibraltar initially (6)

If I had not given the game away (had not given you a strong hint about the answer) you would not necessarily have thought of a man on board as being a chess piece.  You might have imagined the answer was something to do with a sailor (who works on board a ship) or a company director (who sits ‘on the board’ of a company).  Your first thoughts might even have been that the solution was something to do with surfing, skate-boarding or snow-boarding!  The way the crossword compiler teases you with possible interpretations is part of the challenge – and shows how important it is to have a wide command of the English language.

Anyway, I will tell you that in this case the solution is a chessman, but which one?

Whenever you see the word ‘initially’ it is a sure sign that one is dealing with the initial letter (ie the first letter) of the preceding word.  So ‘Gibraltar initially’ just signals the letter G.  The clue has nothing to do with Gibraltar as a place – although I suspect the person who made up the clue chose Gibraltar to mislead you into thinking the answer had some nautical meaning (ie something to do with the sea or sailing). The clue could equally well have read ‘ … round Guildford initially’ or ‘ … round Guinea initially’.  All we need do is bear the letter G in mind.

The next thing to focus on is a synonym for ‘consider’.  If you ‘consider’ something you think about it.  But what is the ‘going back’ doing?

The ‘going back’ tells us that we should write the word we choose for ‘consider’ down backwards!

So if that word is THINK, we should write KNIHT!

Put those letters ’round’ the G of Gibraltar and Hey Presto! (what a magician says when he or she performs a conjuring trick) we have KNIGHT – a man on a chessboard!

If you are a chess player you will know that the knight is unique in being the only piece which can jump over others.  It moves two squares forward and one to the side or one square forward and two to the side, in a pattern known as an L-shape.  If you are a reasonably advanced speaker of English you will know, of course, that the initial ‘k’ in the word ‘knight’ is silent.  The definition and phonetics are here.  In fact, in modern chess ‘notation’ (shorthand for identifying the pieces and recording their moves) the silent ‘k’ is acknowledged by using N for knight, a convenient way of avoiding confusion with the King (K).  (You may still come across Kt as an abbreviation for Knight in older chess notation.)

You will see from the definition of ‘knight’ that it can mean far more than a chess piece – and for historical reasons the word is associated only with men. In the UK, distinguished people may be recognised by the monarch for services to various causes.  Men who receive a ‘knighthood’ are entitled to be addressed as ‘Sir’.  The female equivalent is ‘Dame’.

Next Friday in the UK (the day after Christmas Day) is known as Boxing Day.  It is a public holiday so I will take a break from blogging until the New Year.  I will, however, leave you with some ‘homework’ to keep you occupied.

Try this from the same crossword puzzle as mentioned above.  The only hint I will give you is that it is an anagram.

Area in front of stage where theatric pros will cavort (9,3)

I wish all readers a Merry Christmas and success and happiness in 2015.

Bill Tyrrell

http://www.patentlyenglish.com/

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Never a cross word – 11

Tags

anagrams, crossword puzzles, cryptic clues, learning methodologies

I will start this week by giving you the answer to last week’s anagram.

If you recall, the clue read:

The deal now being organised is shabby (4-2-4)

I hope the first thing you did was to look for 10 letters which might be mixed up (the hint that we were dealing with an anagram was the phrase ‘being organised’).  The letters in THE DEAL NOW look promising.

The second thing you should have done was to consider what the answer actually meant.  It seems pretty clear that if we are right about the clue being an anagram of THE DEAL NOW, then the answer must mean ‘shabby’.

If you did not know the meaning of ‘shabby’ I hope you looked that up.  A link to the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is here.  As you can see, there is more than one meaning.  Mostly, ‘shabby’ is used as an adjective, either (a) to describe someone dressed in worn out clothing; or (b) to describe mean and unfair behaviour.  It is only the first of these meanings we need consider here.

This is a difficult anagram to solve because the answer is an idiom you may not have heard of.  The solution – which comes from mixing up the letters in THE DEAL NOW – is …  DOWN-AT-HEEL.

‘Down-at-heel’ (sometimes hyphenated and sometimes not) is a way of describing someone who is dressed in worn out clothing, with the strong implication that the person is also poor or perhaps has fallen on hard times.  Indeed, down at heel meaning ‘short of money’ (another word for which is impoverished) is how UsingEnglish.com defines it; see here.  The same source notes that the US expression is ‘down in heel’, which is something I did not previously know.  The idiom originates from the appearance of shoes that are so old that the heels are worn down.  It was first used, apparently, in 1732; see the online Phrase Finder, here.

It is amazing what one can learn from a single cryptic clue – which is, of course, the whole point of this series!

There is space remaining to look at a slightly different type of clue, this time one which illustrates a partial anagram.  In other words (unlike in the example above) the answer is derived partly from an anagram and partly from something else.

The clue, from the Daily Telegraph ‘Toughie’ Crossword, No 1250 (2nd September, 2014), is:

Loving letters don’t manage to capture new man (3,4)

I will do this one for you since we have not come across anything like it before.

The answer is FAN MAIL.  You will be aware that film stars, pop singers etc receive hundreds, if not thousands, of adoring letters from their fans each week.  Those letters are called ‘fan mail’.  So ‘fan mail’ is one way of defining the first two words – ‘loving letters’ – but what is the remainder of the clue doing?

As we will see, the rest of the clue leads you to FAN MAIL as well!

If you ‘don’t manage’ to do something (in other words do not succeed) you ‘fail’.

So let’s take those letters: ‘FAIL’,  and keep them in mind.

The words ‘new man’ are where the partial anagram comes from.  If you take MAN and make it ‘new’ (mix the letters up) you can (among other possibilities) get ‘NMA’.

Now ‘nma’ is not a proper word in English, but look what happens if you put it inside the letters of ‘fail’ – i.e. ‘fail’ is split so as to capture ‘nma’.

You get:  FA NMA IL

And that is why we know for sure that ‘fan mail’ is the correct solution!

No-one said it would be easy, but I hope you are enjoying this rather wacky way of looking at the English language.  Please let me know.

More next Friday.

Never a cross word – 10

Tags

anagrams, crossword puzzles, cryptic clues, learning methodologies

This week’s Friday post raises an interesting point about English pronunciation, a subject which never ceases to amaze me.  I remember being astounded to learn that the word ‘ghoti’ could, in theory, be pronounced as ‘fish’ if the ‘gh’ is pronounced as in ‘tough’; the ‘o’ as in ‘women’; and the ‘ti’ as in ‘nation’!  See the Wikipedia entry here for further explanation and, for those who find it helpful, the phonetics!

Those who are new to this blog may wish, before continuing, to look at previous posts for an explanation of where I am coming from (an idiom for the point I am making or what I am trying to achieve). In short, cryptic crossword clues are used in this series as a basis for helping reasonably advanced ESL students to explore the richness of the English language.

The following clue is from the Daily Telegraph Prize Puzzle No. 27,660 of 29th November, 2014 and reads:

Tough street, sinful it’s said (6)

In the UK certainly, and perhaps in many other English-speaking countries, there is a commonplace abbreviation for ‘street’, which is St.  If you live at number 12, Queen Street, for example, a letter addressed to you might well have on the front of the envelope: 12, Queen St.  So ‘street’ in our cryptic clue could be the letters ST.

Now let’s turn to ‘sinful’.  A possible synonym for this could be WRONG.  If you are committing a sin, and are therefore sinful, you are doing wrong.

But, not so fast: there are more words in the clue than that.  We have to account for the ‘it’s said’.  The reason those words are there is to indicate that when the preceding part of the solution is ‘said’ (spoken) it should be written down as it would be pronounced.  In this case ‘wrong’, when said, would be heard as ‘RONG’.  Thanks to our wonderful English pronunciation the ‘w’ in ‘wrong’ is, of course, silent!

You can probably see where we are going with this.  If you take what we now have:

ST (street) + RONG (sinful it’s said)

we have a new word, STRONG, which of course can mean ‘tough’ – the first word in the clue.  The six letter word STRONG is therefore the solution.

Clues in which you actually write what you hear, irrespective of the correct English spelling, are not common but are satisfying to solve.  Words or phrases that hint at a clue like this are, for example: ‘it is said’, ‘one hears’, ‘audibly’, ‘overheard’, or even ‘when broadcast’, referring to how a word would sound if broadcast over the radio (an old-fashioned word for which is ‘wireless’) or on the TV (commonly referred to as ‘the telly’ or sometimes as ‘the box’).

There is enough space remaining in this post for another anagram to test you.  This is harder than those we have encountered so far since the answer is idiomatic.

The clue, adapted from the Daily Telegraph Puzzle No. 27,659 (28th November, 2014), is:

The deal now being organised is shabby (4-2-4)

As you can see the answer is three words (hyphenated) and I will tell you the words which hint at an anagram are ‘being organised’ (in other words some other letters found in the clue are organised, or rearranged, in a different way).

Good luck.  The answer will appear next week.