Puzzled by David Astle

Author:David Astle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2012-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER – Wynne’s fix and wiggle words

Pity a man like Leonhard Euler, the Swiss number-cruncher whose doodles now serve as the bedrock for the sudoku empire, 200 years later. Or Arthur Wynne, the man to omit a © among those seventy-two other letters he wove into his diamond. Soundwise, you have to say, Mr Wynne missed a win. If only he’d been a little shrewder, his family might now be making money hand over NEIF.

Which leads me to the other reason I sympathise with Wynne. Even a century ago, NEIF was a dodgy word, a Shakespeare term for fist. Speaking as a fellow setter, NEIF represents a clumsy escape from a tight corner. In hindsight a minor tweak could have put NEIL or NAIF into vertical column N-8 – but no. Arthur opted for Scots via Old Norse, a word that was quaint and dialectic even to his peers.

Even the best of us do it – running one dubious entry that stands apart from the grid’s more familiar fill. Last year I succumbed to LOST CAT in one puzzle, and OPEN TEAM in another, two lacklustre phrases added in the name of preserving a high number of themed answers. The lapse can only be forgiven if the remainder of the puzzle is pleasingly dense. Often a shocker like LOST CAT can be the difference between ten themed entries, and a whopping fifteen or so. Which option do you choose?

The great Araucaria yielded to TREK CART in 2004 to allow the grid to carry a lengthy quote. In America, among the tighter grids that Wynne ordained, the claustrophobia is relieved by such wiggle words as roman numerals, acronyms, third basemen and phrase chunks such as OF A, or IS TO. No argument from me – Americans are crisscross wizards, with US software the rising leader in this regard. More to the point, the odd peccadillo is pulp by month’s end, and a solver forgives that rare cop-out if the overall mix is rewarding. Yet poor old Arthur went for NEVA – that Russian river – plus a few other fishy terms, including TANE (an archaic piece of Scottish dialect clued as One), and now his diamond is forever.

Anyhow, that’s the bad news. Better news relates to the current clue we’re solving. When first listing words to include in the Master Puzzle, I was keen to share an entry that Arthur himself had selected back in 1913. But it seems I was overlooking the words of LB: ‘After the first dozen entries, the crossword takes over.’ And so it proved with this puzzle.

Don’t worry. It’s not a LOST CAT – but it is a compromise. After BINOCULARS and IRON and several other terms had grabbed their berths early, I had little choice but to modify my ambition, captured in our second homophone:

Soundly ushered back and docketed (9)

Tuning your ear, you’ll recognise soundly as the aural signal. So what is being sounded? Neither ushered nor ushered back offers abundant synonyms. At

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