The Times How to Crack Cryptic Crosswords. Tim Moorey
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Название: The Times How to Crack Cryptic Crosswords
Автор: Tim Moorey
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Развлечения
isbn: 9780008285593
isbn:
HIDDEN CLUE: Parched inside Kalahari desert (4)
Indicators for hidden clues:
Commonly some (in the sense of a certain part of what follows), some of, partly, are unique to hidden clues; within, amidst, holding and in can be either hidden or sandwich indicators.
A variant of the hidden clue is where the letters are concealed at intervals within the wordplay, most commonly odd or even letters. You are asked to extract letters that appear as, say, the first, third and fifth letters in the wordplay section of the clue sentence and ignore the intervening letters. Note that there will never be superfluous words in such a clue sentence, making it easier to be certain which letters are involved in the extraction.
Here is one such clue in which you have to take only the odd letters of the bar for the solution.
HIDDEN CLUE: Drink in the bar regularly (3)
Some other indicators for hidden-at-intervals clues:
Oddly, evenly, ignoring the odds, alternately.
5. The takeaway clue
A takeaway clue involves something being deducted from something else. This can be one or more letters or a whole word. In the example below it’s one letter, R, which is an abbreviation of right, and get is an instruction to the solver. It should be noted that sometimes you will find abbreviations signposted, e.g. “a small street”, more usually not, e.g. “street”. You will find in the Appendices a list of those most frequently appearing in crosswords and all of those used in the clues and puzzles of this book.
TAKEAWAY CLUE: Get employed right away in Surrey town (6)
In our second example, it’s the last letter that is to be taken away to leave the solution:
TAKEAWAY CLUE: Silent Disney movie unfinished (4)
Indicators for takeaway clues:
These tend to be self-explanatory, such as reduced, less, extracted, but, beware, they can be highly misleading, such as cast in a clue concerning the theatre, or shed in one ostensibly about the garden. Some indicators inform us that a single letter is to be taken away. These include short, almost, briefly, nearly and most of, all signifying by long-established convention that the final letter of a word is to be removed. There is more on takeaway indicators such as unopened, disheartened, needing no introduction and endless on here, which deal with letter selection indicators.
6. The reversal clue
The whole of a solution can sometimes be reversed to form another entirely different word. In addition, writing some letters backwards or upwards is often part of a clue’s wordplay, but for the time being we are concerned with reversal providing the whole of the answer. This is a clue for an across solution:
REVERSAL CLUE: Knock back beer like a king (5)
This is a reversal clue for a down solution (see below for an explanation of why this matters):
REVERSAL CLUE (DOWN): Boat however turned up (3)
Indicators for reversal clues:
Anything showing backward movement, e.g. around, over, back, recalled.
Do be aware that some reversal indicators apply to down clues only, reflecting their position in the grid. The example above of a down clue uses turned up for this purpose; other possibilities are overturned, raised, up, on the way up and served up.
7. The letter switch clue
Where two words differ from each other by one or more letters, this can be exploited by setters so that moving one or more letters produces another word, the solution. Here is an example in which you are instructed to shift S for South along a word meaning coast to produce a fish. You are not told which of the two s’s is to be moved but trial and error will eventually show it’s the second.
An extra point to be brought out here is that if a pause or comma after the first word is imagined, the instruction should become clearer. This imaginary punctuation effect is common to many crossword clues; see Chapter 4, here, for more on this point.
LETTER SWITCH CLUE: : Fish move south along the coast (3,5)
There is also a form of letter switch in which letters are replaced rather than moved; see Chapter 8, here, for more on this.
8. The all-in-one clue
In many crossword circles this is also known as & lit. However, I have found my workshop participants usually consider this too cryptic a name! It actually means “and is literally so” but people tend to puzzle over that at the expense of understanding the concept.
In fact, it is a simple one that I prefer to call all-in-one, which is what it is: the definition and wordplay are combined into one, often shortish sentence which, when decoded, leads to a description of the solution.
ALL-IN-ONE CLUE: Heads of the several amalgamated Russian states (5)
This clue relies on the letter selection indicator heads (see here) to provide the solution. Most of the clueing techniques outlined earlier can be used to make an all-in-one clue (see examples in Chapter 8, here), always provided that the definition and wordplay are one and the same.
Probably the commonest type is an all-in-one anagram, with an anagram as part or all of the wordplay and no extra definition needed because it has been provided by the wordplay. Here is an example:
ALL-IN-ONE СКАЧАТЬ