I love cryptic crosswords, but I’ve found that for the really hard ones, what you just said isn’t always true. For example, I’ve been going through a collection of puzzles from the London Times. There have been many cases where even when I know the answer, I don’t understand how it works.
For example, this clue:
“Revise poem by unknown at Scottish festival (6)”
The answer is MODIFY.
I understand “modify” means “revise” but the rest of clue baffles me.
Yeah, as an American, many of those British clues (and answers) are meaningless to me.
It’s frustrating because I can get about 3/4 of the clues on those puzzles. They’re hard, but I do eventually figure them out. The other 1/4 I just cannot understand at all.
Ok, answering my own post I just figured it out. “Mòd” is a Scottish festival. (Never heard of it, just found it on Google.) “If” is a famous poem by Rudyard Kipling. “Y” is an algebraic unknown.
Whew!
You know what I miss? Headlines. It used to be, any news story would start with a one-line summary, in large type, that would tell you the most important thing about what happened. You’d have to read further for the details, of course, but you’d at least get enough to decide if you needed to read before, and if it was something actually new or just the same thing you’d already heard about. You’d at least get an overview of everything happening, just from reading the headlines. They’d say things like “Man walks on moon”, or “Dewey Defeats Truman”.
Nowadays, though, it’s all things like “Scientists make new discovery that will change everything”, or “Does this spell the end for President Biden?”. You can’t learn anything from ledes like that.
Speaking of games. About 5 years ago, my wife and started playing chess. I was taught how to play… God, 50 years ago. I taught my wife, and she had become quite good. We both very much look forward to it, to the point that if we are separated due to circumstance, we play online (still working on that a bit).
We both have very ‘mind’ intensive jobs. But as we are getting older, it’s a good way to keep things above your shoulders working. I would strongly encourage people that are retired to keep that noggin working.
It’s much better for communication (instead of laughing at TV), and a great way to catch up on all the music that we love. And, even after 27 years of marriage, we are both learning more about how each other thinks. It’s very interesting.
Much better than whatever BS is on TV.
That’s one good thing about a print newspaper. For the most part, they still use real headlines that tell you the gist of the story. I still subscribe to my local paper, and just by reading all the headlines I can tell what’s going on. As opposed to reading news on the web, where the “headlines” are largely clickbait.
I once saw a British clue for a crossword( seven letters) “Let’s eat sloppily in a mariner’s port.” I never got the answer, although I understood it when the answer was given to me,
I’ve been getting grumbly lately about trying to find what the headline promised in an article…and not finding it at all, or maybe in just one sentence in the last paragraph. So many click-baity headlines. I’ve got to stop reading news apps on my phone.
Besides the clickbait headlines, stories are no longer written in the inverted pyramid style. In traditional journalism, news stories were constructed with everything you needed to know in the first paragraph, tapering off to less important details. This probably hailed from the days of hot type where stories had to be made to physically fit on a page. So the end might have to lopped off.
Now most news stories are written in a feature-article style with unfolding exposition so you have to read all the way to the end to get to the point. Infuriating!
Tell us!
The word “sloppily” probably implies the answer is an anagram of Let’s eat.
So it would be in a Mariner’s port comprising those seven letters.
The local TV news tells us 1. How to feel, 2. What the local moron says, 3. WTF they’re talking about.
I haven’t watched any TV news in 20 years.
Seattle
Ninja’d! Well…slowly. I was away for 3 hours.
I got that in a few seconds. But that’s not bragging, because I find those are the easiest, and they’re the only clues in a British crossword that I can get. The others are totally opaque.
Same here (not local news at least…I’ll watch national news on occasion depending on circumstances). I can get the weather on my phone in an instant. Google maps is better for traffic. I can see the game scores of local teams easily. The rest seems to be who was shot today and maybe one fluff story about a local teen winning a science fair at their high school.
No thanks.
I don’t watch national news either. I get all my news from online sources. I subscribe to the local paper-- what’s left of it, poor thing-- and several national publications. I find out about a lot of stuff here. The Dope is a good news aggregator.