That looks like it’s only a single clue, though. Where’s the other part?
The UK cryptic crossword scene is in fact, sometimes more “freewheeling”: whilst clues are often – as Chronos says – “two [parts]… one clue based on wordplay or letterplay, and one a straight definition”, it’s not a convention set in stone, that things have to be exactly that way. The clue-setter can more or less do whatever he likes, so long as there is some sort of twisted sense to his thought processes, and his clues are not just crazily random and impossible to work out.
Yes - sometimes clues are just clever allusions, as above. You also get double or triple definitions where the clue consists merely of different definitions of the answer. One from Tuesday’s Guardian:
Old timer (6,4)
Second hand
You can find more double and triple definitions on the Guardian crossword blog (can you tell where I do most of my crosswording yet?). Including this gem:
Jack sprat wouldn’t talk (4,3,3)
Chew the fat
OK, I never would have got that on my own. I kept thinking it would be some multiheaded thing like a Chimera, not a person.
But a single clue means a lack of redundancy. In an American crossword, it’s OK if there’s one answer you can’t figure out, because American crosswords don’t allow unchecked squares. That is, every square is part of both an across answer and a down answer, so you can completely fill in a word without knowing anything about it, if you know all of the words that cross it. In cryptic crosswords, though, any given word will have only about half of its squares checked, which means that you don’t have that source of redundancy any more, and need another source to be fair.
Nevertheless.
I mean, I feel your pain. I have left countless crosswords with one answer uncompleted because I couldn’t solve the last clue, or even work out what word would fill the gaps. But more fool me, then.
Yeah, for cryptic crosswords in the US, the rule/convention is that all clues must have both “parts.” (There are also “puns & anagrams” puzzles that are looser and more freewheeling, but I haven’t seen many of those lately.)
There’s another British one from long ago, which has always tickled me. I’m not sure whether – assuming knowledge of the piece of silly verse alluded to – it would fulfil the US rule as set out by Thudlow Boink.
Background: there’s a limerick, much liked over here – about an old fellow of Lyme, who married three wives at a time.
The clue was: “Model Baltic city fog, like the old fellow of Lyme”. The answer, TRIGAMIST (if a bigamist has two wives…): i.e., like the chap in the limerick. Made up of:
Model T Ford
Capital of the Baltic state of Latvia: RIGA
Fog = MIST
I recall seeing that rule violated, or at least stretched, once. It must have been in Harper’s or The Atlantic; the clue was:
Toy soldiers (6,3)MINUTE MEN
And since we’re sharing, another one I remember from years ago:
Picasso beginning to paint a blue lake orange (5)PABLO
“TRIGAMIST” is fair. Either “T RIGA MIST” or “Like the old fellow of Lime” clues for the same answer. It might be tough if you’re not familiar with that limerick, but tough isn’t the same thing as unfair.
That’s the way my thoughts were tending; just wasn’t sure whether (quite widely-known) doggerel, would qualify as something approaching a definition.
I used to occasionally pick up Harper’s magazine if the articles looked interesting and I’d do the puzzle. It always felt like kind of a slog, though; I’d get maybe 2 or 3 answers per day and it would take me most of the month to finish. I always liked the cleverness of the clues and the way the puzzles were constructed, and there was usually a moment of triumph at figuring out the theme, but it was always an effort to get there. But then I read this thread, and I was getting most of the clues pretty quickly, so I thought maybe I’ve got these things figured out now.
So I picked up the current Harper’s and now I’m slogging again.
I don’t see that anyone answered this. The phrase “at sea” or “all at sea” means “confused”, in reference to being literally out at sea, in an unfamiliar environment without comforting landmarks to guide and orient oneself.
In the context of a cryptic crossword, it’ll mean “scrambled”, i.e. take an anagram of something.
Usually, yes. But “at sea” could also be a part of a “charade” where other parts of the answer are combined with a word meaning “sea”.
And alternately, it could be the definition of the answer itself, depending on the context of the overall clue. But in this case, it indicates an anagram.
That’s where it gets tricky. I saw the ‘bad romance at sea’ and assumed (wrongly) that it would be an anagram of Romance and Sea - because sometimes ‘Bad’ or ‘Badly’ can be used to indicate an anagram of certain words (other indicators of anagrams include ‘broken’, ‘drunken’, ‘messy’, ‘spoilt’ etc).
Got it wrong.
No, I’m not starting cryptics again - not starting cryptics again, not starting cryptics again…
Well, that could be bad “romance at sea” (an anagram of those three words) or “bad romance” at sea (an anagram of the first two words)… there’d have to be something else to the clue.
If it was “Graphite Construction has bad romance at sea”, it might lead to CARBON MADE.
In a decent puzzle, the wordplay grammar will hopefully make more sense than that. It is hard to see how “bad x at y” means “mix up the letters of x and y.”
[QUOTE=Sangahyando]
The UK cryptic crossword scene is in fact, sometimes more “freewheeling”: whilst clues are often – as Chronos says – “two [parts]… one clue based on wordplay or letterplay, and one a straight definition”, it’s not a convention set in stone, that things have to be exactly that way.
[/QUOTE]
Indeed. Those clues that have no wordplay part and just a misleading definition are called “cryptic definitions”, and there will often be one or two of them in a UK puzzle. The way I look at it, the definition part of cryptic clues, and indeed of US-style non-cryptic clues, is often rather cleverly disguised. In British-style cryptic puzzles, if the setter deems the misdirection sufficiently ingenious, they may omit the wordplay part entirely. CDs usually hinge on some word or phrase that needs to interpreted differently to its apparent meaning in the clue.
[QUOTE=Stanislaus]
A big part of solving cryptics is learning certain common bits of wordplay for common letter combinations (or just letters)
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Yes. It takes a bit of time to pick up the lingo. Until you are automatically thinking “ST” when you see “street”, or “N/S/E/W/NE/SE/NW/SW” when you see “point” (since they are points of a compass), you will struggle with cryptics, and as you say, in the case of UK puzzles it means having to know a fair amount of Brit trivia.
One thing that can help is to identify which end of the clue, if any, is more likely to be the definition. Sometimes it is pretty obvious. Then you can either try to guess the answer and make the wordplay fit, or look at the wordplay and see what comes out of it.
“Cryptic definitions” are fairly common in American-style puzzles, perhaps three of them per puzzle being typical. Usually, though, they’re marked with a question mark at the end of the clue, so you know that something’s up, even if it takes some thinking to figure out what.