Australian Crosswords

Not long ago I talked about the problems that can occur in cryptic clues if care isn’t taken to avoid potential issues that may cause offence. While a cryptic clue is usually not to be considered as a statement/phrase in its own right (due to the two-part nature of most clues), it may still offend especially if the solver isn’t that familiar with cryptic clues. There’s an exception, of course, in the case of &lits, where the entire clue can be read separately as wordplay and definition. Last week a letter appeared in The Age (“Slipping under radar”) highlighting a clue that caused concern for a reader (and I suspect many others too). The clue for SHINER was Visible punishment for her sin? (6), and it appeared last year in a cryptic in the Herald-Sun which is published in Victoria. The reader had complained to the paper but received no reply, so she wrote a letter to the “opposition” who were only too glad to print her concerns. I can’t confirm, but it seems this cryptic is published in all News Ltd’s mainland dailies, and it replaced The Stickler in The Daily Telegraph. Clearly this is a clue from a bygone era – sad that it would have been deemed acceptable at any time – but it’s age is irrelevant: it just shouldn’t have been published. There’s no excuse either, as the News Ltd cryptic is a syndicated one, which means it’s either created for a publication and then sold to others, or created for an agency that sells it multiple times. Regardless, it must have been checked and approved a dozen times across the world, so a flag must have been raised at some time. I have the sneaking suspicion the whole crossword could be an old recycled one that wasn’t checked with a modern eye as such necessities require subediting work that just isn’t done these days.

I’ve done a piece on my clue for LOUNGE, a word that appears to have options and not hard to clue, but presented me with a few problems. A bit of time and effort produced a good clue that I knew was lurking. It’s an ordinary word, but not one that turns up as an option to include all that often when I’m grid-filling. However, some words that are 3 and 4 letters in length turn up all the time, and these words can be just as tough to clue for the tenth time as any difficult word. Modern software tends to lead a setter down a grid of least resistance path, trying to make the grid-filling process as easy as possible. This means words with common letters pop up regularly as the common letters get used as the crossing letters with other words. The more common letters in the intersections, the more word options there are going forward. This can be controlled by the setter to some degree by picking less optimum words down the recommended words list, but common 3 and 4 letter words tend to fill those last spots regardless.
Tackling a common short word for the umpteenth time can be daunting. There’s a tendency to fall back to hiddens or double definitions, and some words have obvious breakdowns to exploit, but these approaches get taken up early on, so new clues for the same words aren’t that easy to find.
A few weeks ago REST turned up as a word choice. I’ve clued this 12 times before and have a bit of a love/hate relationship with it. On one hand it’s perfect for hiding in multiple ways, but there are no anagrams, charade options are limited and there are no container-type clues available. The big plus seems to be that REST has true double-definition possibilities, but it’s one of those that I have reservations about, as REST = OTHERS/REMAINDER is rarely used without “the” in front. Try using REST with this meaning without the “the”. As a result, using it in a double-definition clue, even though I have done before and no-one would actually care, doesn’t sit well with me. So what’s left? It happens that I’ve used “OR” inside “REST” to clue RESORT before and this combination came to mind as a option to work with this time around. Although 2-letter words are notoriously hard to work with in container/contents and therefore subtraction situations, the English language came through this time and the resultant clue: Take a break, or not, in holiday centre (4)  is one I’m very happy with. Not difficult, but there’s enough deception through language and punctuation to disguise what has to happen, and the surface is a perfect match of definition and wordplay. So I think there’s a lesson here: no matter how many times a word has been clued, there are always more clues to be found.