In the sample clues below, the links take you to explainers from our beginners series. The setter’s name often links to an interview with him or her, in case you feel like getting to know these people better.
The news in clues
“What’s a PM to do,” wondered Laura Kuenssberg in January, then the BBC’s political editor, “when even kids joke about his future?” Could the same be asked of crossword setters?
9d Threads about plugging Boris Johnson’s statements? (6)
[ wordplay: abbrev. meaning “about” inside (“plugging”) word denoting “Boris Johnson’s statements?” ]
[ RE inside FIBS ]
[ definition: threads ]
Put another way, what does it mean when Eccles’s clue for FIBRES defines the word FIB with sole reference to you?
Latter patter
Here’s a typically elegant jumble from Nutmeg:
7/1d Engineer can request a book, needing to start afresh, it’s said (4,2,6,3)
[ wordplay: jumble the letters of (“engineer”) CANREQUESTABOOK ]
[ definition: expression for “to start afresh” ]
Before social media, one of the best places for assertion and hearsay was this paper’s entertaining Notes and Queries section. The expression BACK TO SQUARE ONE was discussed there, with one reader mentioning a charming tale that many say they recall reading in the Radio Times.
Before television, you might listen to radio commentary of football matches while looking at a diagram of the pitch printed in that magazine. To help you picture where the action had got to, the pitch was divided into eight notional rectangles. And, it’s said, every so often the commentators would inform you that the ball had gone “back to square one”.
This being Notes and Queries, another reader sternly insists that throughout years of following the game in this way, he never heard the expression … and the Oxford English Dictionary agrees:
this is unlikely, as the system was abandoned several decades before the first record of the phrase
There is a little more investigation to be done, though it seems more likely that some especially vicious snake on a Snakes and Ladders board may be the culprit. Investigation part one: the OED mentions the Radio Times entry for 28 January 1927 but I can’t see anything relevant there.
Investigation part two: the earliest record mentioned is 1952. There is an American thriller titled Saigon Singer which the Library of Congress says was published in 1946; the copy at the Internet Archive has this exchange:
As usual, I’ll send this to the Oxford word-hunters … unless you know of anything earlier? Meanwhile, the subject of our next challenge is another activity with a “square one”. Reader, how would you clue HOPSCOTCH?
Cluing competition
Many thanks for your clues for DIESEL. What lovely letters they have proved to be. GappyTooth gets the audacity award for the perky “Vin (as in van, perhaps)“, although I’d be hard-pressed to specify the precise audaciousness.
The runners-up are PeterMooreFuller’s seamless “Regularly getting de-icer – Shell garages have litres of the stuff!” and Smallboat01, who takes us somewhere completely different with “Squeezed into ladies’ elegant jeans?”; the winner is Phitonelly’s on-point “Drivers deal regularly with this product”.
Kludos to Phitonelly. Please leave entries for this fortnight’s competition – as well as your non-print finds and picks from the broadsheet cryptics – below.
Clue of the fortnight
As usual, if the words look like they go together, we must consider that they don’t, as Hectence tricks us in her quiptic clue …
6a Look old on mother’s ruin (6)
[ wordplay: synonym for “look old” next to (“on”) old-fashioned synonym for “mother” ]
[ AGE next to DAM ]
[ definition: ruin ]
… for DAMAGE. Cheers all.
Find a collection of explainers, interviews and other helpful bits and bobs at alanconnor.com
The Shipping Forecast Puzzle Book by Alan Connor, which is partly but not predominantly cryptic, can be ordered from the Guardian Bookshop
