| Comments on the competition |
|---|
| 1. |
|---|
| Looks like a close run thing, with no outstanding entries. 10 is excellent although (minor quibbles) perhaps "in Britain" and "and" are unnecessary, and I don't know if "b" for "billion" is an established convention. I make it joint favourite with 49 despite the latter's rather imprecise definition. Are the nounal definition in 15 and adjectival use of "fad" in 20 acceptable? – I'd like to see confirmation in the explanations. 22 is certainly too long, as is the explanation, although the writer's enthusiasm for his or her subject cannot be denied. In 23 "terms" to indicate last letters is surely not on. 34 has an unfortunate drawback in that "natter" could be interpreted as "nutter" rather than the intended "hatter". The EU lollipop lady in 44 seems very contrived. Unfortunately 46 has no apparent misprint. |
| 2. |
|---|
| Loved the enchanting biology lecture at Clue 22 and could only just resist giving it all my votes and skewing the system – but resisted! |
| 3. |
|---|
| I must have spent more time composing this clue than any other. I could only see the options DOOL+ALLY and OOL in DALLY apart from the anagrams (not many). And yet surprisingly there were some good clues. Favourite was 13 which, despite the lack of explanation was easy to work out, and 17 was probably the best of the anagrams. The remaining points were shared among the also- rans. |
| 4. |
|---|
I'm bored with the financial crisis, so the bankers/bonkers clues would have had to be exceptional for me to vote for them, and I didn't think any were. There were, however, some real gems to enjoy. Thanks to the composers of the following five:
First, for five points, I choose clue 48; it's terse, the surface is immaculate and the misprint is hard to spot as both 'toy' and 'bath' offer scope. Brilliant.
In second place I put clue 29. A masterpiece of brevity, in which the misprint could appear at either end. I only put this second to clue 48 for its use of 'dictionary' words/definitions.
As third I choose clue 32. The use of 'while away' is wonderful and the surface is entirely plausible. 'Lock' could be a number of things (and 'away' could be 'sway').
Fourth place goes to clue 35. A simpler clue than the above three, and with an easier-to-spot misprint, but I'm swayed by the convincing surface and the clue's brevity.
In fifth I put clue 26. It's rather stop-start, but I enjoyed 'McCoist'=ALLY and the image is a pleasing one. |
| 5. |
|---|
The bankers were all nicely topical, but didn't seem to read that well for the most part. Those that were too long I also discounted fairly quickly. E.g. 10 was too complex, with both adding and removing the same letter being too much.
48 5 pts – Neat and excellent surface
17 4 pts – Best of the (fairly obvious) OLD LOYAL/ALLOY anagrams. "Dad" is a nice misprint
43 3 pts – Another neat clue and with good surface. "Can" for "loo" is nicely misleading
49 2 pts – Another good anagram and surface
5 1 pt – I had to give one of the "bankers" clue a point and this seemed the best of the bunch |
| 6. |
|---|
| Misprints clues are a gift for the setter – a huge choice of definitions and all of them misleading – so with a word like DOOLALLY to clue I was expecting something special, and I wasn't disappointed. My initial shortlist ran to nearly 20 clues. 'Bankers' was an ideal definition and very popular, and I chose 3 and 6 as the best of about 10 very good clues that used it, both with topical and fluent surfaces. My other points went to clues that read well and took full advantage of the misprint. 48 and 49 both read naturally and had a nice cryptic twist, and 27 and 32 had good images. I was less keen on clues where the misprint didn't alter the clue much, such as 2 (bad play/mad play – it's much the same), and also on ones where the wordplay was unnecessarily convoluted such as 19 (the solver has enough to do decoding the misprint without the Wikipedia seach for Mars=iron in order to discard it from 'molars'). 22's Dolly the sheep takes the award for the most DOOLALLY clue, but I don't think its author was expecting to win the competition. |
| 7. |
|---|
As I think someone said last month a good clue should have a sound, credible 'surface'.For this reason I discarded quite a few of this month's offerings. I am also not too keen on a reliance on topical references to recent events (e.g. 3 "as just shown" and 13 "Gordon's grief" etc…).
Other comments:
10 A bit contrived in my opinion. B(ritain) is added only to be removed again. This seems to me to be against the principles of good cluewriting and brevity. Why is it there? In this case, in my humble opinion, Britain's inclusion would only be justified to make up the sense, if it were in part retained after the 'removal'.
40 "Mental state of many". Surely this is defining a noun not an adjective? Likewise 15 "Carp fever", although I do have a soft spot for Maddocks' obsessive pursuit.
42 Dopey. Is this a definition of 'doolally'? I don't think so.
45 "John". As with some of the other clues I had this idea. However I decided that to be sound it needed to be at the beginning of the sentence to disguise the fact that john (toilet) does not have a capital J (both my Chambers and OED specify this). As this did not work so well, I dropped the idea. Maybe I am being rather too pedantic.
46 "Round the bend". Have I missed something here? Spelling seems perfect to me!
Anyhow I scored 49 – 5 pts. Clever use of words all round. 48 – 4. Simple with a nice surface. Also 35 – 3, & 38 – 3. |
| 8. |
|---|
An excellent collection of clues this month. I had to discount clues that in an average month I would have given 4 or 5 points to. First place I decided had to go to 49 for its originality, completely misleading yet natural surface reading and interesting misprinted definition.
Apart from that I found it impossible to choose between another seven clues and so had to dilute votes accordingly. Of the BANKERS clues, 11, 18 and 23 were the best for their topicality and neat surface readings. Clue 10 was over-complicated and clue 9 irrelevant, but all of the others with BANKERS would have had a vote if I'd had enough to go round! Of the LOO clues, 30 and 32 were most natural. For originality packaged soundly and neatly, 34 and 48 also shared my second-tier votes. |
| 9. |
|---|
| A lot of good clues this month and much less unsoundness than usual, so several deserving entries (eg, 2, 5, 6, 11, 14, 17, 35, 45) missed out to very strong competition. In the present climate, it was hardly surprising that bankers/bonkers should have proved irresistible to many (including me). Two of these clues (3 “Bankers, as just shown, advance lolly recklessly” and 4 “Bankers carry on pocketing money having fallen short all round”) stood out as having more convincing topical surfaces than the others; 18 “Delay to bonus allocation? Every second counts for investment bankers” was very craftily constructed, but seemed a little less apposite than the other two. In the end, however, I gave top spot to the sheer economy of 48 “Toy ducks left inside bath” and to the ingenuity of 49 “With a dental problem returning can filling wait?” – though 48 would, I think, have been even better with the more natural-sounding “in” rather than “inside”, while “with a mental problem” in 49 strikes me as a bit too clinical for “doolally” (whatever Chambers may imply). 27 “Had boring delay on Circle Line” had a pleasing simplicity and 38 “Many a supporter standing behind Aberdeen's goal” a particularly good misprint. Chambers has to be the arbiter in this context, but, to my mind, “doolally” has much more of the flavour of “bats”, “bonkers” or “zany” than of the more sober and serious “mad”, “mental” or “with a mental problem”. [Sorry. I didn't notice the useful new comments feature until I had pasted the above.] |
| 10. |
|---|
35 5 pts for its simplicity and reads OK both ways
49 4 pts for misprint being perfectly disguised
43 3 pts also not obvious misprint
34 2 pts nice compound
3 1 pt best of the 'bonkers' |
| 11. |
|---|
| Not a bad lot at all! Several ticks and double ticks on the first run-through. Lots of bankers of course, including some reasonable ones that just missed the top five. No 23 captured the mood of a nation with its surface meaning and therefore gets my top vote. |
| 12. |
|---|
| My personal preference for brevity was challenged by 22. It was just pipped in my list by 48 and 29, but it was the clue I would most like to have written. |
| 13. |
|---|
Is this the best ever set of clues for one of these competitions? Many of them would in a normal month have been my top choice. It seems unkind to give some of them so few points.
Perhaps this isn't quite demanding enough: an actual setter will have to compose a misprints clue with a particular letter missing (or the correct one), not any old letter.
My choices: 1st: 32 (2.5 points); 2nd=: 3, 18, 34, 39, 49 (1.5 points each); 7th=: 10, 14 (1 point each); 9th=: 5, 6, 13, 23, 27, 29 (0.5 points each). |
