Weekend Australian, Sunday Times 617
Had to tear this away from the dog who wanted it for breakfast. Studded with his favourite titbits: wrong parts of speech (WPOS), "cryptic defs", pseudo-cryptics and &lits that don't work plus the added sustenance of an incomplete anagram. Get some today!
Across
1. TRANSEPT. Anagram of "patterns". The anagind is "funny". Didn't make me laugh, but.
5. ORANGE. It's a town near Bathurst. The literal is, presumably, "Colourful".
9. IMPROVED. "Being better" = "The answer is something that means 'better'". "Monkey" = IMP, as in a naughty young thing? "Discharged" = ROVED: an obscure meaning of "rove" -- Chambers has "to discharge (an arrow, etc) at random (obs)". So the whole thing is looser than knicker elastic in Cockburn on pay night.
10. NUTMEG. "Put back" tells us to reverse both GEM and TUN ("cask").
12. ORATE. "Florid" = ORNATE, "but not new" (remove the N).
13. BROCHETTE. Anagram of "retch to be". The anagind is "sick" -- certainly had this effect on the dog. A brochette is a spit in the sense of a skewer. Literally, a little prick!
14. DIRTY LAUNDRY. Attempt at a "cryptic definition" -- "usually spun before the public sees it"; playing on the phrase "to wash one's dirty laundry in public" and the ambiguity of spin/spun in the political sense. The knicker elastic has snapped completely with this one.
18. OFF THE RECORD. Same type as 14 above. "Didn't speak for minutes"; playing on the ambiguity of "minutes". Elastic chucked floorwards by now.
21. GIPPSLAND. Anagram of "Slapping" and D ("daughter"). The anagind must be "down". Except it isn't one.
23. SCORE. "Nick" in the sense of "notch", a knife-mark in a bit of wood.
24. EASELS. Anagram of "Leases". Easels have three legs, but do we think of them as tripods (1 down)?
25. PLANTAIN. "Everyday" = PLAIN? "Insect" = ANT. A plantain is a kind of sugarless banana (which isn't a fruit anyway but a diploid). It's cooked as a vegetable in tropical regions.
26. SEESAW. A gnome is a short statement encapsulating a general truth (e.g., "This stupid bitch can't set crosswords"). A saw is also a proverb or maxim. Literal = "in the playground" -- WPOS again.
27. ODYSSEUS. Supposed to be an anagram of "soy" and "used". But that leaves us one S short. Anaginds (two of them!) are "special" and "when cooking".
Down
1. TRIPOD. "Fall over" = TRIP. "Act up" = OD ("do" reversed). The literal is "stand".
2. APPEAR. "A soft" = AP ("piano", soft). Plus a fruit that actually is one.
3. STONEFISH. Anagram of "Those fins". There is no literal, so we must assume a very clumsy attempt at an &lit. "Deadly" might be an anagind. Who knows?
4. PRESBYTERIAN. Anagram (Zzzzzzz) of "try + be Persian". Anagind = "When disguised". Perhaps Dot missed out on the fact that BRITNEY SPEARS is an anagram of PRESBYTERIANS with "converted" as the anagind?
6. ROUGH. It surely is! Indeed, the rough is "just off the fairway"; but "Sandpiper heard"?? There's a bit of a tendency among the Poms to think the Australian accent is roughly(?) equivalent to that of the East End of London. Which it is not. And even there, in the East End, "sandpiper" is not pronounced like "sandpaper". Sandpaper may be rough, but, yet again, we have the WPOS cardinal error.
[[This arises because we can say "Sandpaper is rough" and "Sandpaper is a roughly coated paper used to smooth materials such as wood". But the "is" works differently in each case. In logical notation we would distinguish the first from the second as follows. /S =ƒ(R)/ as opposed to /S =def x/ where the first shows "rough" (R) to be a property of S and the second shows "a roughly coated paper used to smooth materials such as wood" (x) to be a definition of S. If we use the first where we need the second, we get one of the many versions of the WPOS problem. As Bill Clinton famously said: it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.]]
7. NEMATODE. Anagram (how many Zs are there?) of "Demon ate".
8. EAGLE EYE. The literal is "This may help you see". Then we put EYE ("spy") around AG+LEE ("silver sediment"). "Lee" can be used to mean "sediment" but that obsolete usage has now become the more normal "lees".
11. MOLLYCODDLED. Spoonerism of "collie" and "modelled". Not a lot of fun really. Suppose Spooner's collie needed his breakfast too.
15. UPRISINGS. "In America" = Put something inside U ... S. What you put in there is PRISING ("forcing").
16. CONGRESS. No idea what's going on here unless "It" is supposed to refer obliquely to shagging.
17. OFF-PISTE. Getting very piste off with pseudo-cryptics. This just doesn't make any sense.
19. POMADE. (Ramson for Englishwomen trying to write crosswords?) The "Writer" is POE. "Nuts" is MAD.
20. TENNIS. Another bad "cryptic definition".
22. SALSA. It's a sauce ("Saucy" is yet another WPOS) and a dance.
