The Stickler Weekly 127 Solution

I’m on record (somewhere) as saying that you can’t construct a good cryptic crossword without putting a lot of thought into the choosing of the words in the grid. There are a couple of key reasons for this: a good cryptic crossword doesn’t have any obvious weaknesses, such as an odd or obscure answer, so making sure all words suit the solving audience is important, and secondly, prudent choices at grid-building time, where possible wordplay breakdowns have already been thought about, should yield a set of clues without any obvious deficiencies. I use a couple of guidelines to help me when selecting words – words should be in concise dictionaries if possible; words unknown to me should be in multiple dictionaries and not listed as rare, regional, obscure or archaic; words that exist in just one dictionary shouldn’t be used (look up the word “miserable” in Chambers – it’s a noun meaning “very weak tea” – great meaning to impress people with but no good to use as such in a crossword); and “internet-only” words and terms should be used with extreme caution. I’ve learnt to double-check words I know and not rely on my memory as my personal experience is not everyone’s personal experience, especially when creating an “international” cryptic such as The Stickler Weekly. A few years ago in a Financial Times crossword I was chastised for using “stock” as a definition for “ski pole”. I first skied in my early 20s and the things I used in my hands while skiing were always called stocks. Little did I know this is largely an Australian term and not known to the majority of Financial Times solvers.
A few weeks ago Steve Ball questioned my use of Gathering = Boil, which leads me to say that not only should answer words be appropriate for an audience, but all words and their meanings used in clues should be too. (That is, of course, if, as a setter, you have consideration for your solvers). It’s no good picking all words from a concise list if you use North American, internet-only or obscure meanings of a word in clues that solvers have no hope of knowing. While I don’t think Gathering = Boil falls into that really obscure category, it maybe was stretching people’s general knowledge that little bit too far. My problem in this case was again that the equation wasn’t foreign to me and so I assumed it was more common than perhaps it actually is.