Due to unforeseen circumstances there won’t be any clue hints this week. You guys are going to have to work a little harder.
Feel free to post here to discuss the crossword to work things out amongst yourselves.
Best
David
About the Setter
David Stickley has been writing crosswords professionally since 1995. His cryptic puzzle, The Stickler, reached number 4786 before being axed in July 2013 due to cutbacks. David has been published in the NYT and the UK's FT.
Hi David
Love the weekly AFR puzzle. Never easy. I’m in the nearly category, usually getting at least 80-90% correct each week and 100% about 1 in 3.
But I do get a little annoyed on occasion.
Last week it was ‘isinglass’. I had no idea. I asked around my contemporaries and only 1 said he knew the word but when I pushed him he had no idea of the meaning.
My point is cryptic is good, obscure is not
More than happy to be told that the word is commonplace but I really doubt I will ever see it again.
Please no more obscurity
Tx
Graham
Hi Graham,
Thanks for your feedback. “Obscurity” is a constant balancing act for a setter, both with choice of words in the answer grid and use in the wordplays of clues. My vocab isn’t great, so if I don’t “know” the word I have to rely on my major references to give me a broad picture of the acceptance of the word. Generally, I won’t use a word I’m not familiar with if it appears in just one or two of my major references (Macquarie, Australian Oxford, Chambers and Collins), is labelled “rare”, “dialect”, specific to somewhere outside Australia or has many spelling variants. I try to make sure it is at least one of my concise dictionaries, but that’s not so important to me.
I don’t use regional slang, US-only terms, British slang that appears in most cryptics worldwide. To me, the soundness of the wordplay is just as important as the correctness of the definition, after all, cryptic clues give you two ways to the answer. And that’s the catchall for me with for words that may be a little less known: a simple wordplay. Difficult words need simple wordplays, so that they can be discovered even of the solver has never heard of them.
When I first learnt cryptics in year 10, our class spent the week solving the Guardian that used to appear in the Sun-Herald in NSW. As a 15-year-old, many of the answers were beyond me, but would persevere with wordplays to nut the answers out, It sometimes took the whole week, but I enjoyed the process and learning new words. That’s the other side of the coin – I have people contacting me thanking me for introducing them to new words and terms.
So, back the ISINGLASS: I did provide what I think was an easy clue to offset the uncommon nature of the word.
I can’t guarantee that words like this won’t appear from time to time, as a word’s obscurity is hard to define, but thanks for making me aware of your thoughts – I’ll take them on board.
Hi
I knew it (ie isinglass) from
The lyrics to the song Oklamaha”
“With isinglass windows you can roll right down
In case there’s a change in the weather”