Not your ordinary crossword. Not even your ordinary cryptic crossword. Once you answer the clues, most of them have to be changed in some way (anagramed, homophoned, relocated, etc.) before being put in the grid. Which makes working backwards, from the grid to the clues, pretty damn tricky. Two weeks, it took.
My brain hurts.
I know there are a few other cryptic solvers here, did anyone else tackle this one, and was it as difficult as I think? It’s called Obedience School.
Thanks for the puzzle. I got it done in about 30 minutes. Nice little brain warmup.
Tramp meets the parents, first encounter. (4)
Jeez. I don’t even know how to begin. 
Any hints?
Have you done any cryptics before? You have to break the clue into two pieces, and each piece leads to the same word. Typically (but not always), one of the pieces is a relatively straightforward definition, and the other is wordplay of some sort.
For example:
“Bother shortstop in fit”[spoiler]Break it into “bother” and “shortstop in fit”. ‘Shortstop’ is abbreviated SS. Another word for ‘fit’ is HALE (as in “hale and hearty”). “Shortstop in fit” is HASSLE. And to bother someone is to HASSLE them.
Other red flags in clues are words like ‘heard’ or ‘spoken’ (which mean the answer involves words that sound alike), ‘confused’ or ‘stirred up’ (which mean to rearrange letters).
Cryptics are not everyone’s cup of tea.[/spoiler]Now use one of the six rules, Fetch, Speak, Roll Over, etc. before you enter that word in the grid.
I said this one was hard. Do you think I start a thread for every puzzle I finish?
I do the Puzzler every month (best cryptic puzzle out there, IMO), and that was the first one in a long while that I’ve had to put down and come back to later. The “jump” option in particular made it hard to be sure how an answer would fit into the grid.
The hardest ones are where they have a long list of fake book or movie titles, and the clues can overlap between titles, AND you don’t know which answer goes where.