Huh 4
Crossword setters are solvers too. It’s not just seeing what tricks the Joneses are pulling (which is an important part of the habit), but the habit itself. How else do you think I fell into this racket without an urge to gobble cryptic puzzles?
But that’s not to say I crack each grid in three minutes flat – though I’m not club-footed – or I fail to fathom every offering on the page. If I don’t solve most clues, I take equal retro-pleasure in how the deceit works.
Most clues. Not all. Gorging on a slew of good crosswords this last week or so, all from UK setters, I suddenly have eight clues in want of your good-hearted clarification. Here are the first four:
Alternative identity given by Asian name, for example = ALIAS [Times No 8344]
Excite radium in bone = STERNUM [Moodim, Financial Times]
Treat about five for more than the shortest distance = CARVE [Cinephile, FT]
Country bumpkin named rain-forest tree = QUANDONG [Sunday Times No 628]
(Any clues as to how these clues operate will be manna.)
April 24th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Asian Name = ‘Ali’ , for example = ‘as’
Treat = ‘cure’ , five = ‘v’ (you should know after today !
) … gets CURVE – (more than the shorest distance, as the shortest distance is a straight line.)
April 24th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
This may be too obscure, but there are a couple of Kung Fu films where the ‘bumpkin’ hero is named Kwan or Kuan.
April 24th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
CURVE, not CARVE, of course. Thanks Matt. Lazily I treated ‘treat’ to mean ‘care’, not ‘cure’ – suspecting CARVE related to short cuts of some kind. Back to my Euclid I’m afraid.
[As for 5 = V, yes, I had that part sorted!]
Hmmm, ALI as Asian name: what do others reckon. Sounds a little ethnotypical if that’s a word. Not too colonial is it?
In the meantime, let’s give Kuan a swift chop in the shin. Surely that can’t be the way of enlightenment…
April 25th, 2009 at 8:50 am
Any chance it could be STIRRUP rather than STERNUM? Though I can’t explain why Radium would just be ‘R’ rather than ‘RA’
April 26th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
You’re on the money with STIRRUP, I reckon. In which we case – with R for Radium- we’ll need to cite a Moodim error, as well as a solver’s error for bunging in STERNUM!
Thanks for the sagacity, Matt.