The Stickler Weekly 130 Solution

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.