Australian Crosswords

I’d like to talk this week about choices made by setters when writing a clue. We’ve established before that setters can take the construction of a clue like 15-across in this puzzle: Upstanding people accepted by retired gentility (10). [FINE + MEN inside RET giving REFINEMENT] This clue could be Upstanding men accepted by retired gentility (10) or simply Fine men accepted by retired gentility (10). Very little effort is needed to make it easy, moderate or hard by just replacing a few words. The clue ultimately used reflects the choice of the setter, that is, whether a setter wants that particular clue to be easy, moderate or hard. This choice may be made to keep the whole crossword consistent in difficulty or possibly to present a balanced grid (that is, some may be hard, others easy and some somewhere in between).
I’d like to show you a recent clue published in an Australian paper that, as a setter, confuses me. Organised religion’s discontented worshipper (8). When I solve, I look for key words that could indicate what’s going on. I pick the obvious one first, try and solve based on that, and move on to another if that doesn’t work out. Here ORGANISED and DISCONTENTED stand out as possible anagram indicators, with DISCONTENTED potentially being an indicator of removing the entire contents of a word leaving the first and last letters (it should have a ? if used this way). Either way, that leaves WORSHIPPER the likely definition. Taking this approach, I tried a few things but nothing worked, so I tried another approach: A word for DISCONTENTED + a word for WORSHIPPER meaning “organised religion”. No joy. I realised if this was the path, ORGANISED would be largely redundant, so I went back to my original approach, this time looking for any words that could be made from the letters of RELIGIONS. I eventually came up with LIONISER, which means DISCONTENTED is used to remove the middle letter G. That certainly left me discontented! The question here, though, is why the setter chose to use DISCONTENTED (which employs a made-up use of the word anyway) to remove just one letter of the contents, when they could have easily used DISHEARTENED (still made up, but potentially much more accurate and recognisable)? It could be argued, of course, that the contents is G and the containers are RELI and IONS, but that makes DISCONTENTED a variable indicator, with multiple options. Great for a setter, but a nightmare for solvers. But why use it when something better is available? There’s only one explanation, as both provide a reasonable surface reading: DISHEARTENED is too easy and obvious and the setter wasn’t happy with that, and was prepared to sacrifice accuracy and, for me, fairness, to make the clue more difficult. I’ll leave you to judge whether such a decision is one that is to the benefit of the solver.

One of the things my old neighbour asked me about was what he called “order of operation”, that is the sequence a solver takes when processing a wordplay. His main question related to whether a clue that flowed left to right with no assumed word groupings (imagined brackets) was superior to a clue where assumptions needed to be made. Here’s an example of each from last week’s crossword: 1) 19-across Call about right to join card game (8,6).  2) 12-across Bond managed by head of taxation in suspicious circumstances (8). The first one can be taken from left to right processing exactly as is stated in the clue; the second one requires the solver to join two elements and put them inside another. The second one has another parsing possible, so the solver must work out which one is in effect. As a setter and solver, I see the work needed to be done by the solver here to be part of the game, same as working out, for example, whether a word is part of a device or fodder, and what word form a particular word takes. When I’m setting, any assumptions will involve groups of words, but the order will always be left to right unless the wordplay contains positional indicators that say otherwise. I might include punctuation to mislead, but I won’t leave punctuation out that potentially changes the order in which indicators operate. That is, an operating adjective will appear ahead of its fodder, not behind it with an implied comma (as is commonly seen in modern-day cryptics). Clues like A B in, where what is really meant is A with B in, will never appear in a Stickler. I think this is where order of operation can create convoluted clues: a combination of implied bracketed wordplay and indicators operating out of order. Clear as mud? So, which is superior, 1) or 2)? In this case, I see them as basically both the same, and although 1) might be seen as being easier, 2) certainly doesn’t present many problems.