| Yet More Devious Devices |
Indirection! Another variety of spelling is the directional clue. Some words make another word, or words, when spelled backwards. Try this one:
Because you know what kind of thing to look for, that shouldn’t have been too hard. “Roe” is the definition, and if we spell “reed” backwards, we get “deer”. Easy peasy - but would you have spotted it so quickly if you came at it without a context? And left/right isn’t the only direction in which we find words aligned in a crossword. Furthermore, we may not be given the actual letters to be reversed, but simply a clue to the word containing those letters. The following is a typical clue variation:
Although you may well have worked out the answer, the clue doesn’t make much sense as it stands. But it if is a clue to word six down and not word six across, the light will dawn.
A deity = GOD, and here it is going upwards instead of downwards - it “arises”. You will find quite a few clues which make some reference to the vertical alignment of the answer. Look for words like “arises”, “goes up” etc. in “down” clues. And also watch for spelling clues once (or sometimes more) removed, as in deity=“GOD”, which are very common.
Yes, it’s our friend the hamster again, but how does the clue work? The definition is, of course, “a wheel runner” - for hamsters are known to run around in wheels in their cages. This clue breaks the word into “ham” and “ster”. A ham is a cured pig’s leg. So far so good, and note the way the “cured” parses initially as a verb - as something being done to the “wheel runner” and not as an adjectival participle describing the leg of the pig. You have to free your mind from the exigencies of normal grammar to crack cryptic clues. The setter will deliberately create such false grammatical relationships in order to confuse you. Here “after” looks like a conjunction making an adverbial clause of time - something happened at a later point in time than the medical attention to the wheel runner. Following that line of thought will merely produce confusion. What the “after” means here is simply that the two parts of the word are being presented to you in the wrong order. Something comes after the “ham” to produce the answer. How do you disperse the sugar in a cup of tea? You “stir” it. But the animal is a “hamster” and not a “hamstir”. This part of the clue is indicating the letters “ster” - which isn’t “stir” but sounds like it! That’s what the “we hear” is indicating - a homophone - something that sounds like what is indicated, but isn’t exactly what is indicated. So we have HAM followed by (sounds like “stir” =) STER. I never said it was going to be easy, did I? What about:
There are a variety of ways in which an extra letter, or maybe a small group of letters, can be indicated as extra components in a spelling clue. “A short sailor”, for example, might supply us with an A and a B - A.B. = “Able Bodied” = an abbreviation used to refer to a sailor. “Detectives” might be used to indicate “CID”. Sometimes some key word like “initially” may indicate that we are to use an acronym or common abbreviation. A “direction” could be L for left or R for right. But here “direction” is a point of the compass - North, South, East or West in abbreviated form - any ideas now? “Laker” looks like a surname as it stands, but obviously as likely as not we are going to have to ignore the misleading capitalisation . What is a “laker”? Something that is connected with a lake? What’s a mute pale? Or are we being mislead? “Takes direction” appears to indicate that an N or an S or an E or a W is to be added to something, but what? Is it “mute pale” that takes the direction? Or is it pale? Is “mute pale” defining two words which are combined to make the new word that has the extra letter? In some clues, that could well be the case, but having such a short target word here makes it unlikely. Do “mute” and “pale” go together to make double definition of the word that gets the letter? What can be both “mute” and “pale”? I’ve no idea... Ignore “mute” for a moment then. What other words mean “pale”? “Pale and wan”? WAN + S = SWAN. Aha! And a “swan” is both a mute and a denizen of a lake - maybe Swan Lake. Obviously, then, there was a double definition of the target word, separated by the spelling clue section. All fair, but that extra definition of “swan” gave us too much information and in a way which was deliberately misleading. Mr Kryptikon was being a very devious...
I’ll leave you to work that out, with the comment that we can remove letters as well as add them. I don’t think it should cause you too much trouble. If you can’t solve it at all, click here now for the answer... On the next page I will look at some niceties of layout of target words within the crossword blank.
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