The Stickler Weekly 102 Solution

Cryptic crosswords are all about definitions. You can’t have equation between clue and answer without some kind of definition IMO. Back in my cryptic learning days at school in the 1970s we used to solve The Guardian cryptic every week in class. Occasionally they’d be a clue like this: NATO enterprise (anag.) (14). Another was a quote from literature with a missing word used as an answer. Even back then, as a novice, I didn’t see the point of such clues. It was simply a mental unscrambling exercise that yielded no personal reward at all. Thankfully these types of clues are no longer used, recognising that solvers need a definition and a mental workout to generally be satisfied. The first cryptic clues were punny definitions, now called cryptic definitions. As time went on different devices were added, but mostly in addition to the definition, after all that is what crosswords are all about and the one thing a solver should be able to rely on.
Recently I saw a blog post encouraging the (physical) blending of wordplay and definition, with the intention of disguising the definition. There was no indication in the clues offered that warned the solver about the language abuse, so solvers were expected to consider every word at the beginning and end of each clue as not words at all, but possible parts of wordplay and definition. With proper indication, there’s plenty of freedom available to mess with wordplay, but the definition MUST stand alone. No blending, no connection via a hyphen, no multiword terms that have one foot in each camp. These types of clues might look good from the setter’s side, but they simply ask too much of solvers. In most cases how such clues work won’t be realised until after an answer is found through the cross-letters, which is bad enough when a difficult wordplay is involved but diabolical when the definition part of the clue is hidden from the solver.