Charlie Methven

Quick cryptic crossword No 86 Quick cryptic crossword No 86

Dice is back - hope you enjoy!

Common ‘addiction’ somewhat symbolic of feeble-mindedness (6)

King Edward’s one dropping packaging rubbish (6)

Make time for first sighting of shark, maybe capturing it (3,2)

#cryptic #crossword

www.theguardian.com/crosswords/q...

For those who missed it yesterday (and who give a damn, obvs.) here's the link to my November #cryptic #crossword:

crossword.info/skirwingle/p...

Sample clue: Run through what traffic lights do (5)

Cryptic crossword No 29,858 Cryptic crossword No 29,858

Just the sort of weather for Soup, don’t you think? 🤔

#cryptic #crossword

When this has come up on Fifteensquared before people have pointed out that if you note down one diamond in bridge (e.g. 1 D, I think?) you're using it in the singular. That's why I made it singular on the list. Should be diamond(s) really but I didn't want to have to go and change metre(s) etc

Lovely clue here... I love how it's almost Schrodinger's catty

Minute Cryptic - 21 November, 2025
"Small diamond rings upset love... you've done it now!" (6)
🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣
🏆 0 hints – 2 under the community par (9,800 solvers so far).
www.minutecryptic.com?utm_source=s...

Lol. Tricky because your i and n tokens* could also be parsed as a single token leading to i...

*stop trying to make "tokens" happen, Charlie

Roman numerals - Wikipedia

Check it out. Mercifully not used in normal puzzles en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_n...

Thank god for that. 😁 Next thing to try would've been hammering my own head

Agree we probably have enough conversations like this one, but can't help asking if you think newsreaders are being inscrutably colloquial when they talk about e.g. "the Labour business secretary" rather than "secretary of business of Labour"? 😁

But as it stands there's nothing at all inconsistent with 👍ing "rally first" & "yeti* head" as analogous to real-world phrase "party leader" while 👎"first rally" & "head yeti" on the grounds that "leader party" is obvs not = to "party leader".

*posessiveness of "your" also a complete red herring!

Very logical to me. I think what happened is @crypticblah.bsky.social took you 👎ing down "rally first" on surface-applicability grounds as you objecting to it cryptic-grammatically, which *would* have been inconistent with approving of "your head".

I partly wasted mine trying to buy the new one and being told it's not out till tomorrow...

So @lowdowncryptic.bsky.social endorsing "rally first" or "your head" on that basis in no way implies endorsement of "first rally" or "head your" any more than it implies endorsement of "magic primary" - primary being an adj that's not established as a noun

The 1st-letter indicators "head of teacher" & "first of wife" are surely using "head" & "first" as nouns equiv to "leader" & "introduction" rather than as adjs. The arg for "rally first" & "your head" is that they're variations of thos nounal uses, not adjectival ones.

(Except in the sense that the noun "first" is obv derived from the ordinal)

I think you're misclassifying "head" and "first" as adjectives here? LB (and my) arg for "your head" and "rally first" is that head/first are nouns attributed to the fodder same as "party leader" is a leader attributed to a party. That's why "head your" doesn't work - adj don't come into it

From the first Methuselah puzzle:

🚨Police leader probing strange deaths (3,8)
🚨Beaming traitor keeps lead from DI Fleming? (7)
🚨Superintendent sets example, arresting sucker (6)
🚨Bent coppers i.e. people in deep may be shown up by this (9)

mycrossword.co.uk/cryptic/487

Well I assumed helipad, but even if it it's not abbreviating anything, I think it'd still be legit on the visual principle - O looks like a ringlet etc

Ruby Wax has appeared in every episode of Taskmaster

I wouldn't say 'utterly' as you can argue a shared resource is the only way to be really fair, but yes my aim with this is partly to expose the dustier abbreviations to some sunlight

helipad with a massive H

It's funny that these are a) abbreviations and b) some of the largest letters you'll ever meet

The "usual suspects" tickbox sort of does the latter if you mean usage in modern crosswords. If you mean marking abbreviations in common use in real life in 2025 I think that's harder to rule on. I could potentially add tags for Collins at some point

Yeah... there's just not a snappy way to say "abbreviations or synonyms leading to single-letter fodder"

You could paste the clues into a spreadsheet and colour-code there or even set up conditional formatting so they're coloured based on the contents of an Easy/Medium/Hard column. I do that for checking variety of devices

Ooh maybe? Did electronic scales exist when Chambers was first wrought though? Doesn't seem like the kind of thing that'd have made it into subsequent updates, but maybe

Cheers! Those bonus numerals seem fair enough in advanced puzzles, but wanted to warn everyone else that you're not expected to learn them!

😬 oops, of course. This is the last thing they need right now as well

Hope it's useful!

Yeah I think someone suggested that when I asked before... Thanks for the other suggestions!

Hope it's useful! It's gonna save me a lot of time too I think