I’m not sure what forum to put this in. Mods, feel free to move it.
I’ve been working on British cryptic crosswords for a while, specifically from the London Times. I find them very challenging but I can usually figure them out eventually.
But I’ve just come across a clue/answer that I simply cannot understand:
Clue: No end of chicken in China cooked like this?
Answer: FRIED
I get the “chicken cooked like this” part, I think. The rest baffles me, especially “China”.
My best attempt- but it is a retrofit. Not sure I’d have gotten it without working backwards.
No end of/chicken in China cooked/ like this
No end of: Rife
Chicken in China cookeD (the D is the “end” of the phrase)
Rife +D, “cooked” (rearranged)= Fried. A method of cooking.
Isn’t it weird to use “cooked” as where the D comes from and also to signify that it’s an anagram? Similarly, isn’t it odd to use “no end of” to get “rife” but also to point to the end of something?
I’ve definitely seen cryptic clues where you both parse the clue into its bits and use overlapping clues.
Whether this is doing it, I don’t know, but that’s the best I could do.
Wow. I’m kind of glad I stick to conventional crossword puzzles.
Was it “like this” or “like tins”?
“like this”
Thanks, that could be it.
Just checking; I’d been looking here, which has it as “tins”.
I thought it was playing on cockney rhyming slang: “China (plate)” = “mate” = “friend”.
FRIEND - N (“no end of chicken”) = FRIED
Aha, that might be a better explanation of how “China” comes into it.
Clues involving rhyming slang are especially hard for me, since I don’t know much.
Just don’t let anyone call you a berk.
I like that a lot. Good idea!
For those who don’t usually do cryptics, the clues are usually les umm cryptic. One of my favorites- Desert Animal Arrived And Left (5)
Ha! I kept looking at the clue trying to get “friend”. I’d gotten everything else, including removing the end of chicken from “friend” to get “fried,” but couldn’t figure out how the hell “friend” would enter the scene.
Camel
Born on the Fourth of July is like The Thin Man (4)
I hope someday you will branch out and try cryptics again. When I was young I loved traditional crossword puzzles and never understood the few cryptics I saw. The cryptic clues seemed nonsensical and almost impossible to solve. But I was wrong. I just didn’t understand the rules.
At some point I tried cryptics again and was able to figure out a few answers, and they were kind of fun. I started reading the rules of cryptics and began to appreciate just how much fun they were and could be.
Each clue is a little riddle. You simply have to figure out what kind.
Take a clue like this:
My car hit a Toyota (5)
If you do not know the rules of cryptics, what do you do with that? But if you understand that most cryptic clues are two parts, (one part traditional clue, one part wordplay) you can figure it out. Indeed to solve a cryptic clue it is often as easy as just splitting that clue:
My car hit/ a Toyota.
The traditional crossword clue is “a Toyota”. The wordplay is “my car hit”. In a cryptic clue one of the rules is that an anagram needs to have a word telling you to anagram. In this case it is telling you to “hit” (scramble) the letters of “my car”. Answer: Camry.
Cryptics give you two chances to solve the clue. One is wordplay, one is definition. The challenge is to figure out which is which. Once you get the hang of it you may find yourself searching for the few places you can reliably find cryptics and discover it hard to go back to stuffy regular old crossword puzzles.
I wish I could. I’ve tried on and off for twenty years; I’ve done tutorials; I know the categories of clues. They still absolutely infuriate me, and will take a well constructed NYTimes puzzle any day over them. Don’t know why my brain doesn’t gel with them — on paper I should love them, but maybe it’s because I just suck so bad at them (but also because even when I learn the answer and the trick, I just don’t like how the answer is arrived at.)
I was catching up on some “Private Eye” cryptic crosswords from a few weeks ago and, lo and behold, there was this clue…
China expels republican “devil” (5)
Answer being …? well I suspect the good dopers of this parish are now well equipped to hazard a guess.
I had a great post written out explaining my history with cryptics, but I must have hit some magic key because the editing window ate the whole post. Fuck Discourse; I’m not retyping it.
Here’s a good puzzle: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/SatPuz03242018.pdf