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| Cryptic Crosswords Part Eleven |
Find out how you fared with Charades clues and fill in some more spaces in our Cryptic Crossword as we examine the solutions to the clues I set in the last post.
Last time we looked at a more advanced type of wordplay clue, the charade. These clues challenged us to piece together the answer from individual segments using an overall definition as a guide. Of course like all things cryptic, it wasn't quite as simple as it seemed. I left you with a whole slew of clues to get your teeth into; which, if you got them all, will have left your grid almost complete.
Except for that really long interesting one right through the middle that I'm making you all wait for. Ive said it before, puzzle setters are evil, I'm just evil and on your side! Here are the solutions to our charade clues.
One Small Step7 Across: A penny per fruit. (5)
The definition here is fruit, which of course doesn't help one jot as there are plenty of five letter fruits.
What gives us the answer is the wordplay, a penny is crossword jargon for 'p' or occasionally 'd' if your dealing with someone a little older. The other word we need to decrypt is the odd little word 'per' here it's standing in for the word 'each, that gives the answer 'peach'.
8 Across: One is in a location, smells fishy. (6)
Oh how deliciously cryptic this one is, 'a location' is 'place' and 'one' here is representing the letter I as in Roman Numerals, although don't be surprised if you see it clueing an L instead. Putting an I into the word place gives 'plaice', definitely fishy!
14 Across: Genial boy comes before culture, why? (6)
Here we start with the definition and then have the charades. We want a word which means genial and to get it we have 'boy comes before culture, why?'.Why, or course translates to 'y' in our answer and boy could refer to 'he', that leaves us for a word for culture, and 'art' fits the bill for the number of remaining letters. So that's 'he' before 'art' and then 'y', or hearty, which is a good synonym for genial.
22 Across: Ingests North Eastern flipper and is ingested. (5)
To ingest something is to 'eat' and since North Eastern clues to 'NE' a North Eastern flipper must be 'EN' that gives 'eaten' which is a word for ingested.
4 Down. See drunken exclamation is fashionable (4)
Of course here 'see' is cluing the letter it sounds like, so that just leaves us for a drunken exclamation. Where not looking for an kind of rude word here, in fact we want 'hic', which gives us 'chic' a decent word for fashionable.
9 Down: Fifty Gear remix is massive.(5)
Of course this is nothing to do with rap, it's a charade clue containing an anagram indicator. The clue is saying, solve the charade for fifty, add it to gear and solve that as an anagram. Fifty goes to 'L' via roman numerals and 'lgear' reorders nicely to 'large'.
You might have had to google the ID-TEN-T if you're not technologically minded. It's an in joke used amongst computer techs to let each other know that the cause of a computer problem was an idiot. I, D, 10, T of course looks like that word. So the cause of an idiot error must be the person operating the system, that would be the 'user'.
That's your lot for the exciting world of charades, we've just got a few more clues to fill on our grids before we can upgrade ourselves from beginners to novices!
Until next time, keep puzzling.
photo credit: Martin LaBar and taberandrew via photopin cc
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