Australian Crosswords

I’m not a big reader, in fact, I rarely read novels, unlike my wife and friends who always have a book on the go. It hasn’t always been that way. As a youngster I lived in the school library, working my way through Tom Swift’s adventures and books of similar ilk. It was only when I had to read books for English subjects that I lost interest, an interest that would never return. Having a career in IT didn’t help, with technical publications dominating my life. However, every now and then, a particular author or series tickles my fancy and I’ll put some effort in. A friend once lent me a title by Kathy Reichs, a forensic anthropologist who based her murder mysteries on real-life cases and her extensive experience. Her stories were turned into a successful TV series, called Bones.
A while back I was searching for information on an upcoming Kathy Reichs book, and I came across a review of a past title. This reviewer blasted the author for getting the lyrics of a song wrong as sung by one of her characters. The reviewer obviously forgot that he/she was reading a work of fiction, where nothing has to be real or factual. Sure, a book set at a particular time in a particular place needs references to establish authenticity, but as far as characters go, they can do, say, and think anything they like, and, in fact, need to for a story to work. Who’s misheard songs lyrics, or made up lyrics when they can’t be fully remembered? Everyone. In fact, an author may intentionally use such a situation to highlight something about a character – a failing memory, a hearing problem or something learned secondhand, perhaps. It’s a work of fiction where a character’s mistakes in facts or language are part of the story.
It’s the same with cryptic clues. While the tools of the trade are words presented in a grammatical framework, the rules of language don’t have to be strictly adhered to, they just are because that’s the best way to present clues. Nothing worse than a clue that makes no sense, a mismatch of tenses, or a clue structure that doesn’t “say what it means”. You might be wondering why I’m talking about this, as I’m the Stickler, yet I included an intentional language mistake in a clue this week, favouring clueing soundness over grammatical soundness.
10-down is Item coated with lead – unusual road building material (8,5). Can you see my deliberate language breach? Taking advantage of the modern age’s adjectival ignorance, I’ve left out the hyphen between road and building which is actually needed to make the term an adjective, and thereby giving sense to the sentence. As separate words, road has to be a noun and building taken in a verbal way. Some setters might even join the words as roadbuilding or road-building, add a question mark and ask the solver to take a leap and separate the term before proceeding. Here, that would mean spanning the wordplay and definition which just has to be taboo. Instead I am relying on the solver reading the words and seeing nothing wrong in how I’ve expressed the clue. If that happens, then the clue can be solved in the normal way without a second thought.

As a professional setter, nothing is more important to me in a clue than the definition. Let’s face it, a clue without a reasonable definition is no clue at all. Even if a wordplay is clunky or convoluted, having an unambiguous definition gives the solver more than half a chance. That’s why, for instance, a definition that is an example of the answer isn’t good enough without saying so. I recently saw “breakfast” define “meal”, which, of course it doesn’t.
To me, any information included in a definition has no right being there unless it has a role in helping the solver pinpoint the answer. So “American hue” = “color” wouldn’t be right without the “American” part, and likewise “white dish” = “plate” makes no sense because “white” doesn’t contribute (even though plates may be white), or help the solver, narrow down the answer. “blue gem”, on the other hand is totally appropriate for “sapphire”, even though “gem” by itself would work just as well.
Here’s a clue from a local paper: “She objects to a qualified examiner (9)”. [PRO + TESTER]. When I see “she”, my mind goes to answers that must be female, possibly an actual person or something more generic that ends in “ess”, for example. There’s no reason, more, it’s erroneous, to define an answer as having a gender when it doesn’t. Maybe it’s a way of promoting one sex or the other, and that’s fine when appropriate, but here it just confuses solvers and is wrong.

What do you think?

The &lit type of clue, where the wordplay is also the definition, is a thing of beauty even if it’s not, per se, a typical cryptic clue. There’s usually no indication that everything is doing double duty (apart from a possible and definite “!”, or a more indefinite “?”), so a solver may well not work out the duplicity until the clue has been solved. Believe it or not, good and true &lits are fairly rare, however, opportunities pop up while clueing all the time. What do I mean? For an &lit to “work”, the wordplay has to be manipulated in such a way that the definition is formed, so when a wordplay starts feeling like a matching definition, I get excited. This excitement happens relatively regularly, but, it often turns to shrugs as getting it exactly right is really hard. Here’s an example: in doing a clue for LORD recently I explored hidden options as the OR makes hiding the answer pretty easy. Next step is to use words that relate to the answer/definition so it all has one context. At this point, earL OR Duke came to mind, and after checking some dictionaries, thought this would be great and had &lit potential. However, after much wasted time and a fruitless hunt for a “piece/section” word that could complete the definition properly, I gave up. Close but not close enough. Did I miss out on an &lit here? Why don’t you have go?