CCCWC October competition voters’ comments
Clue no. 3: Bankers, as just shown, advance lolly recklessly.
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A clue to DOOLALLY (Misprints).
4 comments refer to this clue (from 4 competitors, 0 others)
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| Comments on the competition |
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| 1. |
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| 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. |
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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. |
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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' |
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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). |
