CCCWC October competition voters’ comments
Clue no. 35: Loyal old mongrel is off its lead.
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A clue to DOOLALLY (Misprints).
3 comments refer to this clue (from 3 competitors, 0 others)
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| Comments on the competition |
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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. |
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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' |
