A couple of lines in atrocious poetry

The answer is “Ballad”. 

There’s a promo on the puzzle page of the Listener that claims that finishing a cryptic crossword in one sitting increases your brain cell count by 100. If that claim is true, the Listener is still good for at least one thing.

I can usually polish off the Dompost cryptic in a couple of sessions.

The holy grail is the Times Cryptic. I once got within two clues of completion. It probably took days. Often, I’m lucky to get two. Checking the solution sometimes leaves me none the wiser. What for instance, is a “Siskin”? The clue was “Bird is spotted, sitting in hide.” I can almost see how it works, “hide” = “skin”, but I’d never have got it. Other times, any relationship between the solution and the clue remains opaque to me.

Family legend has it that my father & my grandmother would race to complete the Times crossword & neither would take more than 10 minutes or so. As clever as I know they both were, I’d have to have seen that to believe it. For starters, I can’t see them having two copies of the newspaper, and photocopiers had yet to be invented.

Cryptics are funny things, sometimes the clue is so elegant – “Men from London, Washington, Paris and Wellington?” The answer is “Capital fellows”.

Clues are exercises in lateral thinking, they can take you down blind alleys until suddenly, a whole different way of attacking the problem occurs to you, revealing a whole raft of new possibilities. Some solutions are head-smackingly obvious after hours of tossing words and meanings around. Some are instantly recognisable – “A willing account?” is “Testament”.

Sometimes you know the answer, but you don’t know why.

Sometimes you think you’ve got it right, but you pox up a whole section making the wrong letters fit. Clues are by nature ambiguous.

If you’re not familiar with them, usually a word or phrase in the clue signifies the definition of the solution . In the clue in the title to this post, “A couple of lines in atrocious poetry” that word is “poetry”. Other words are clues to how the word is constructed – an “a” and two “l”s in another word that means “atrocious”. Ie, “bad”. “In” is the clue to construction in this instance.

Other indicators, including “badly”, “disrupted”, “out” and “reform”, for example, indicate the answer might be an anagram. Eg, “The early reform could be so tough.” The answer is “Leathery.”

Here are some others, if you see these words in a clue, they might represent some specific letters or acronyms, or heh, they might not:

• Church = CH 
• Sailor/Seaman = “RN” or “TAR” or even “SALT” 
• Nurse = “RN” 
• Soldier = "RA" 
• About = an anagram or “RE” 
• Leader = the initial letter of another word in the clue 
• Queen/Her Majesty = “ER” 
• In = could be quoted somewhere else in the clue 
• Firm /Concern = “CO” 
• Direction/Point = Either “N”, “S”, “E” or “W”. 
• The French = “LE” or “LA” 
• The Spanish = “EL” 
• English = “E” 
• English church = “COE” 
• Backwards/Back/Return = reverse the order of the letters 
• Say/Heard = the solution sounds like something else. 

Cryptic crosswords are a matter of practice; you can get to know the style of the crossword compiler too.

Some inscrutable automaton with a vocabulary the size of a planet compiles the Times Cryptic.

WTF, for example, could “Yours truly had failed to score, say, getting the bird” (5 and 4 letters). I figure the last word might be “duck”. But that could be a red herring, (or, a “Likely irrelevant catch for a Soviet trawler.”)