CCCWC June competition voters’ comments
Clue no. 7: Award no mark
Back to competition result |
All the comments |
Other competitions
A clue to OSCAR.
2 comments refer to this clue (from 2 competitors, 0 others)
Move your mouse pointer over any bold clue number to see the clue.
Here is the text
| Comments on the competition |
|---|
| 1. |
|---|
| Not a vintage collection, I thought. Some interesting ideas seemed to me to be flawed. While 4 is fine by me, I know from bitter experience that some editors would demand an second anagrind for "tin" since its letters are nonconsecutive. The idea in 8 demands "homes" in the cryptic reading; likewise 21 with "initiate". 12 surely needs recasting to bring "new" to the front, where it can legitimately be capitalised. Several clues use "no" for the O, which I cannot see any justification for (if so my apologies to the composer of 7, which I should otherwise have supported) |
| 2. |
|---|
Two clues 15 and 33 – 3.5 points each – stood out for me for their originality, creating convincing and (quite fairly) misleading surfaces supported by deft and sound wordplay. 1 – 2.5 points – offers a neat, economical composite anagram (though, personally – and no doubt I’m in a minority – I dislike the dash convention, which seems to me less elegant than indicating the clue word by “this” or equivalent). 36 – 1.5 points – was very pleasing, but I am slightly doubtful about “ops” = “works”. I thought 9, 28 and 52 – 1 point each – the best of the many other (often perfectly acceptable) clues based upon an anagram of “actor(s)”, largely because they had the most natural-sounding surfaces, and 52 the most satisfactory of the many outsize vehicles and the like. 42 – 1 point – neatly manages to use the statuette definition while creating an ostensibly archaeological surface.
Four other clues perhaps require comment. It was with regret that I had to reject the splendid brevity of 38 with its Buddy Holly echoes. Unfortunately, despite the author’s words of explanation, “Oh” cannot mean the letter ‘O’. In maths, if A=B and B=C, then A=C, but it doesn’t work that way for words. “O boy!” would have been sound, but a less satisfactory surface. For me, the almost equally succinct 7 was self-fulfilling! I couldn’t accept ‘O’ = “no”, as opposed to “nothing” or “nought”. 48 was potentially a reasonably good initial-letters clue (“leading lights” being a satisfying indicator in the context), but unfortunately “of” was asked to do double duty, which surely won’t do. And, as is depressingly often the case in these competitions, the claimed &lit isn’t one: not only does “honour” play no part in the subsidiary indication, but the sentence as a whole doesn’t define OSCAR. The ingenious 30 falls down because “one gold-plated” is, surely, much too vague to pass muster as a definition of OSCAR. |
