Never a cross word – 21

Tags

crossword puzzles, cryptic clues, learning methodologies, words within words

Never a cross word is 21 today!  I hope you are enjoying this quirky way of exploring the English language.

Last week I left you with this clue, from Daily Telegraph Crossword Puzzle No. 27,724 (13th February 2015):

Insect to escape by the sound of it (4)

Did you get it?

The answer is FLEA, which is a well-known biting insect.  It is correct because it sounds, when pronounced, exactly the same as ‘flee’, a verb which means to escape or run away. The wording ‘by the sound of it’ was the hint that one was dealing with a clue of this kind.

Now let’s turn to two clues from the Daily Telegraph Crossword puzzle published a couple of weeks ago on Valentine’s Day (14th February).  Both involve interesting vocabulary.

The first reads:

Break articles held by British Queen (8)

As soon as you see the Queen referred to in a cryptic clue you can be almost 100% certain that the letters ER are involved in some way.  Why?  Because the official title of the British Queen is Elizabeth Regina (regina being Latin for queen).  Her father was George Rex (GR).  If you visit the UK you can spot (see) these letters on our characteristic red Post Office (PO) boxes (usually referred to as ‘post boxes’).  The letters ER or GR indicate in whose reign the post box was made and installed.  To be strictly accurate, I should say that one sees EIIR, the Roman numerals II indicating that the present Queen is Elizabeth the Second.

We now suspect that ER is an abbreviation for the Queen – but what could an abbreviation for British be?  I think one can reasonably guess it is BR (although this is slightly questionable – BR is normally the country code for Brazil!).

And what about ‘articles’?  An article is usually an object but there are other possibilities (a newspaper article for example) – and you should know by now that cryptic clues are rarely straightforward. A less obvious meaning relates to English grammar: you will recall that the words ‘a’ (or ‘an’ if the next word begins with a vowel) and ‘the’ are called the indefinite and definite articles respectively.

If we work on the basis that the answer starts with BR and those two articles (A and THE) are then ‘held by’ (contained within) ER we have the 8 letters we are looking for.  The answer is derived as follows:

BR E A THE R

or BREATHER

Why breather?  Because taking a breather is idiomatic for taking a break from work or some other activity (see here).  ‘Let’s take a 10 minute breather’ could be an invitation to some colleagues to have a few minutes relaxation.

In this clue the crossword setter cleverly put ‘break’ and ‘articles’ together to make you think you were actually breaking something – worse still, an item belonging to the Queen!  The answer instead meant ‘break’ in a different sense.

The next clue is also an example of a clever deception.  It reads:

Hamlet character needs endless noxious drink? (8)

The first thing one thinks of is that the answer is a character in Hamlet – one of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays.  However, not so fast!

In an earlier post (Never a cross word – 18) we came across the word vile meaning extremely unpleasant.  It is also a synonym for noxious, defined here.  If VILE is substituted in the clue for noxious and is ‘endless’ (missing a letter at the end) it could be VIL.

The final word in the clue – ‘drink’ – might be many things.  An alcoholic drink could be gin, vodka, wine, whisky, rum – you name it (a way of saying that the list goes on and on).  This is where we need a flash of inspiration, since if we are right about VIL we need a five letter word which can naturally follow those letters: VIL VODKA would not make much sense!  But we have not considered ‘beer’ yet – so what about lager?  Lager is a type of light beer which might just fit the bill (provide what we are looking for).

If we put VIL with LAGER we get:

VILLAGER

Why is villager correct?  Because hamlet means a small village (see here). A character (person) who lives in a hamlet (a hamlet character!) could therefore be described as a villager. The answer had nothing to do with the play Hamlet after all!

Although hamlet may sound an obscure word, it was used in the last main paragraph of Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech, which you can read here.  Furthermore, the suffix -ham is frequently found in place names since ‘ham’ was Anglo Saxon for village.  Of course, what in ancient times were mere hamlets are in most cases now large built up areas – for example Durham, Birmingham, and Clapham, an area of South London.

Finally, try this clue (from the same crossword) over the weekend.  The answer is a word everyone will have heard of and you will find a hint earlier in this post.

Post Office stocks exciting picture (5)

More next week.

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Never a cross word – 20

Tags

anagrams, crossword puzzles, cryptic clues, learning methodologies, words within words

Last week I left you to solve this clue:

Runner allowed to take part in different heat (7)

Did you succeed?

The way to approach the clue is to find a three letter synonym of ‘allowed’ that can be inserted into (i.e. take part in) an anagram of ‘heat’.

A word for ‘allowed’ is LET (‘I let him go out’ means ‘I allowed him to go out’) and an anagram of heat could be ATHE.  Although ATHE is not a real word that does not matter for the purposes of working towards the final solution.

You should now be experiencing the not unpleasant sensation (note the double negative) of words flashing in your brain. If LET is inserted into ATHE the word ATHLETE can be formed.  Athletics has numerous disciplines but of course an athlete can be a runner, the first word in the clue.

In this instance the hint that we were dealing with an anagram were the words ‘different heat’, meaning that the letters in HEAT were placed in a different order.  As we have seen in earlier posts many ways can be used to suggest an anagram.  An amusing example occurred in Daily Telegraph Crossword Puzzle No. 27,724 published on Friday, 13th February, 2015 (for a comment on the significance of Friday 13th see last week’s post).  The clue was:

Greedily eat egg or bananas (5)

Here it is the word ‘bananas’ that hints at an anagram.  Why bananas?  Because to go bananas is modern English slang for becoming a bit crazy.  In the right context it can also mean getting angry or emotional.  Sometimes the word ‘absolutely’ is added to make the expression even stronger.  ‘If you borrow his bike and damage it he’ll go absolutely bananas’ is an example – and for some others please see here.

To return to the clue, we need 5 letters to go bananas or go crazy – in other words to get mixed up.  The most obvious choice is EGG OR which can be rearranged to give the word:

GORGE

Gorge is the answer because as a verb it means to eat a lot or eat greedily.  You could even gorge on bananas!  There are other meanings of the word also – see here.

Sometimes the answer to a cryptic clue is the name of a well-known person.  Here is an example from the same crossword as above:

Wild terrain bird occupies shown by quirky illustrator (5,8)

Perhaps the first thing to focus on is the peculiar word quirky, which, oddly enough, means exactly that: peculiar.  You can see it defined here.  The word quirky itself could even hint at an anagram but we are forced to abandon that idea because ‘illustrator’ is not enough to provide the 13 letters we need in total.

Let’s instead explore what ‘wild terrain’ could be.  The answer is ‘heath’.  A heath, defined here, is an area of uncultivated land.  It is similar to a moor but generally has more grass.

A bird could be many things.  In this case it is a robin – a common bird found in the UK with a characteristic red breast.  It is often depicted on Christmas cards.

Finally we have to deal with ‘occupies’ since every word in the clue is there for a reason.  If the robin is on the heath it occupies it.  Or, put another way, the heath could be described as the heath [the] robin’s on.

And that, believe it or not, gives us the answer:

HEATH ROBINSON

William Heath Robinson was a cartoonist and illustrator best known for his drawings of crazy and totally impractical contraptions (pieces of strange machinery).  You can read about him, and see some of his work, in this interesting article.  If you scroll down to the third of his illustrations you will see a device for taking a photograph of yourself, nowadays known as a selfie!

Heath Robinson’s name has entered the English language – and, although I doubt that many young people today will be aware of him, you can still hear those from an older generation describing a piece of home-made equipment as being a bit Heath Robinson.

One of the great things about exploring the English language through cryptic clues is that you never know quite where you are going to end up.  To quote a Beatles’ film (and song) title, it is something of a magical mystery tour.  In this post alone we progressed from athletics to going bananas (if not gorging on them), crossed a heath, met a robin, and concluded with a discussion of the eccentric Heath Robinson and his quirky contraptions.  I wonder what intriguing vocabulary we will encounter next time we take to the road.

There is just space to leave you this clue to solve:

Insect to escape by the sound of it (4)

The answer will appear next week.

Never a cross word – 19

Tags

anagrams, crossword puzzles, cryptic clues, Friday 13th, learning methodologies, words within words

Today is Friday 13th, which in many Western cultures is thought to be unlucky.  I hope you are not paralysed with fear as, according to Wikipedia, some people apparently are!  You might be intrigued – or perhaps depressed – to know that, statistically, the 13th day of the month is very, very slightly more likely to be a Friday than any other day of the week.  There is a complex mathematical proof of this you can look up if you want to (it is way over my head) but, hey, we are here to study English not statistics!

Last week I left you with this clue to work out:

Authorities could create best towpath here (3,6,4,2)

I did tell you an anagram was involved but that was not strictly necessary: as usual there is a hint in the clue, in this case the words ‘could create’.  Since we need 15 letters to mix up one can be pretty certain that the letters in ‘best towpath here’ are re-ordered to give a four word phrase meaning ‘authorities’.

Did you get it?  The answer is:

THE POWERS THAT BE

This is an idiom for those in authority – members of the government for example – who make up the rules.  If you work for a company you could describe the senior management as ‘the powers that be’. You can see a definition and the origin of this expression here.

Let’s turn now to two clues from Daily Telegraph Crossword Puzzle 27,391 published over a year ago (20th January, 2014).  I have chosen these because both are constructed in a similar way.  They demonstrate how inserting just a single letter into one word gives another word with a totally different meaning.

The first clue reads:

Close relative runs into trouble (7)

As we saw last week it is important to keep one’s mind open to interpretations beyond the obvious.  In this case ‘runs’ is used, not as a verb, but as a noun – a cricketing expression.  If you know nothing of the game of cricket you are at something of a disadvantage.  But suffice it to say (I need only tell you) that batsmen on one side try to score as many runs as possible before, in one way or another, the other side gets them ‘out’ (for an amusing description of the game see here).  In fact, even that small amount of knowledge is superfluous (unnecessary) – all you really need to know is that an abbreviation for runs in cricket is simply the letter ‘r’.

Now we come to the word ‘trouble’, and in modern day English you often hear the word bother, defined here.  You might say to someone: “I don’t want to be any bother but please could I have a lift to the station?” (a lift – in the USA this would be called a ‘ride’ – means travelling in someone’s car).  And a cockney might refer to being in a spot of bother with the law, meaning ‘in trouble with the police’.

Note also the commonly used exclamation ‘bother!’ to express being mildly annoyed by something.

You can probably see where we are going with this.  If you put the letter R (for ‘runs’) inside the word BOTHER you can make the word:

BROTHER

which of course is the answer: a close relative.

The second clue reads:

Alien girl takes team leader to heart (7)

Here again there is a bit of trickery going on.  The reference to ‘team leader’ just refers to the letter ‘t’ – the leading letter in the word ‘team’.

What is harder to find is a 6 letter word for ‘girl’ since – if what is required is a first name – there are so many possibilities.  In this case the name is MARIAN (as in Maid Marian, who, according to Wikipedia, was the ‘love interest’ of the legendary character Robin Hood).

If MARIAN now takes the letter T ‘to heart’ (ie embraces it) we arrive at the solution:

MARTIAN

A Martian is, of course, an alien from another planet: a mythical creature from the planet Mars popular in science fiction, notably H.G. Wells’ classic novel The War of the Worlds (1898).

For homework, I will leave you to wrestle with (struggle to solve) a partial anagram from the same puzzle:

Runner allowed to take part in different heat (7)

Good luck. The solution will appear next week.

Never a cross word – 18

Tags

anagrams, crossword puzzles, cryptic clues, learning methodologies, words within words

Welcome – or welcome back – to Never a cross word, the blog that teaches authentic English through the unusual medium of cryptic crossword clues.

If you read Never a cross word – 16 you should have had no difficulty with the clue I left you with last week.

It read:

Some devil erupts, getting more unpleasant (5)

This was another example of the answer being ‘inside the clue’ – in this case formed from ‘some’ of the letters in ‘devil erupts’.  If I highlight the letters in question you will see it immediately:

devil erupts …

Yes, VILER is the answer, the comparative of the word vile, meaning extremely unpleasant or obnoxious.  You can use the adjective ‘vile’ in many different contexts – when referring, for example, to a vile temper, a vile smell or vile language (swearing obscenely).  It is coincidental that vile is an anagram of ‘evil’ but it can mean much the same.

As regards vile people, Shakespeare summed it up very well:

“Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile.”  (King Lear, Act IV, Scene II)

Further examples of the use of the word may be seen at this helpful link.

Two clues now from Daily Telegraph Puzzle No. 27,709 of 27th January 2015.

The first is another example of taking letters away from one word to generate another.

The clue reads:

Radio problem?  Three characters get ejected as conclusion (9)

The first thing to think about is what happens if you are having a problem with your radio.  Assuming the radio is working, the most common problem is one of crackling or buzzing noises and poor reception, sometimes caused by faulty electrical equipment nearby.  This is a phenomenon known in English as interference.

Of course, that is not the answer since it is 3 letters too long.  However we are told that three characters get ejected (thrown out).  The word character can have many meanings and according to the Oxford English Dictionary is one of the 1,000 most frequently used words.  Normally one thinks of a character as an actor in a play or someone’s character being their personality and qualities.  However, a less commonly used meaning is to denote a symbol or letter of the alphabet (one can speak, for example, of Chinese characters).  We should therefore try to eject or remove 3 letters from INTERFERENCE to leave a word meaning ‘conclusion’ (the last word in the clue).

The answer is to delete the letters TER to give:

INFERENCE.

An inference is the noun from the verb ‘to infer’ which means to draw a conclusion about something based on evidence and reasoning.  For a definition of inference see here.

The second clue is another example of a partial anagram:

Tip, having massaged sore back (7)

I think we can safely infer, based on past experience, that the crossword setter is trying to fool us!  The answer is unlikely to be in any way straightforward, and the word ‘massaged’ hints strongly at an anagram.  However, the words ‘sore back’ cannot form the anagram since there is one letter too many.  But what if the anagram was simply of the word ‘sore’, added on to a 3 letter word for ‘tip’, meaning ‘back’?  That would fit the clue.

The tip of something can be the END – the tip of a snooker cue, for example, is placed on one end of it.  And an anagram of SORE is ORSE.

Put the two together and one gets the answer:

ENDORSE

If you endorse something you agree to it and give your support, which is another meaning of the verb to back.  A politician may back, or give his or her backing to, a proposed act of parliament, for example.  The definitions of endorse and back (note the many meanings) may be found here and here.

In this clue the crossword setter cleverly used ‘sore’ and ‘back’ together to trick us into thinking the answer was something to do with an aching part of the body.  The fact that the solution had nothing to do with a back in the more common anatomical sense shows how important it is to open one’s mind to other interpretations – or, to quote an over-used modern idiom, to think outside the box! This is one of many reasons why I believe the novel teaching methodology used in this blog should be helpful to advanced ESL learners.

There is just space to leave you with this anagram from the same crossword:

Authorities could create best towpath here (3,6,4,2)

This will provide an interesting talking point next week.