Australian Crosswords

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?

A few weeks ago, while constructing a grid of words for The Stickler Weekly, the phrase “one in a thousand” came up in the list as an option. Over the years my process of choosing words to clue has changed from a general “it looks ok, so use it” to “I must have a clueing idea before including it”. I’ve had too many cases where a word proved hard to clue, slowing me down, and the result was often an inferior clue. By giving just a little consideration to how a word or phrase might be clued, a much better grid results and the clueing process (having been partially done) is much easier. In this case there’s good anagram potential (7 consonants and 7 vowels), so there’s a fallback clueing option if other constructions don’t work out. I can also see a number of words (ON, AT, US, AN, THOU, SAND, AND) that can be used as is or with synonyms, so a container/anagram clue might also be possible. It was while I was thinking about all this that I realised the phrase, when considered cryptically, “created” a word. One (I) in [A + M (Roman numerals for a thousand)] = AIM. By itself, AIM doesn’t define “One in a thousand” (the answer forms the wordplay, rather than the wordplay forming the answer), and even with a suitable definition, AIM needs more wordplay to actually give the solver a chance of unravelling it. I’m happy to use this kind of thing, with wordplay that tells the solver what’s going on, so I added this to the list of possible clueing options and moved on to the definition side of the equation. The phrase must have good coverage across my references (as an international cryptic I want to see it in at least one English, one US, and one Australian reference) and have enough and appropriate synonyms so that there’s choice when trying to seamlessly join with the wordplay. It was at this point I hit a snag. I found the term in Chambers and Macquarie only, and no US references had it. There was plenty of good synonyms available, but just not enough coverage. It was close though. Then a revelation: the term “one in a million” popped up as the more common term (inflation over time, I suppose), and I realised my AIM idea worked for both terms (M = million). Being not unique, I abandoned the AIM idea completely and picked a different word for the grid altogether.