ShopBIG 218 Judge Sums Up
January 11, 2011 by The Judge
Filed under The Judge Sums Up
We were thrilled to receive mountains of mail telling us how much you loved the Christmas edition of BIG with all the extra contests. We hope to bring you another bumper issue later in the New Year.
Perhaps the Christmas Demon was a little easier than usual, or you were all inspired by the seasonal good cheer, as there were not many errors noted by
our judges.
For ‘Anglo-Saxon freeman’ at 18ac some of you found this as CHURL, which we found as an alternative spelling. We found CEORL in the Oxford and Collins dictionaries.
Most of you put WASSAIL for 24ac ‘Mulled wine at Christmas’ but do you know the origin of this word? It comes from a Middle English phrase meaning
‘good health’.
Wassailing was a ceremony held in autumn to ward off evil and to drink to the health of the cider apple trees, so that they would yield
good crops.
A couple of incorrect vowels were noted in answers to 56dn and at 62dn. ‘Exuberant’ was EBULLIENT and ‘Palaeozoic marine creature’ was TRILOBITE.
In the Bigcash we spotted a couple of entries with ACCUSED for ‘Whipped up’ at 40dn. Our clue would perhaps have been easier with (interest) after it, as the answer we needed was AROUSED i.e. whipped up /aroused interest. This fitted with PHOBIA for ‘Anxiety disorder’ at 50ac.
At 136ac the answer to ‘Aromatic burning stick’ was INCENSE not INSENSE.
A similar error occurred in the Goliathon where ‘48ac ‘Authorising’ was LICENSING not LICENCING.
The ‘Predecessor’ at 60ac was a FOREBEAR and not a FORESEER.
‘Mistreat’ was ABUSE and not ACUSE at 179dn and ‘Unknowing’ was UNAWARE not UNAWAKE
at 192ac.
Since Christine’s Cryptic was a competition in this issue I thought it timely to pass on a few tips to help those who are unsure of the tricks in these addictive puzzles.
Clue 1ac ‘Take a bow when Dora leaves courtyards transformed’ required you to remove ‘Dora’ from ‘courtyards’ and then ‘transform’ the letters left to make CURTSY, the answer to ‘take a bow’.
For ‘Extremely choosy apprentices have options’ at 5dn the straight part of the clue was ‘options’. ‘Extremely’ was a trigger to look at the extremes of ‘CHOosy apprentICES’ to find your answer.
The clue at 23dn, ‘Girl often found with fool following march’, was a play on the girl’s name April. April Fool’s day follows the month of March.
We had a couple of queries about our Diamond clue 21ac ‘Wind instrument’. Our answer was TUBA and a few readers called to say that the tuba is a brass, not wind instrument. The truth is that we are both right. Wind instruments are those where sound is made by a vibrating column of air. In the orchestra the wind is made up of woodwind and brass. Many woodwind instruments, such as the flute and piccolo, are now more commonly made of metal. The Oxford describes a tuba as a’ large brass wind instrument’.
