Apologies for the lateness of this update. I made the mistake of flying off for a long weekend in a foreign land and have been well below par since my return. But I was heartened by (almost) all the comments in reply to my question last month as to whether you found the Quick puzzles too hard or too easy.
There were those who disliked having straight anagrams as Quick clues and some opposition to foreign words and phrases, especially Latin. But, in general, a more typical response came from Rob R: "The Clue Improvement Committee is well oversubscribed, the Obscure Word Complaint Bureau has more members than obscure words… Stand up to the onrushing tide of the equivalent of fast food in the crossword universe." Emboldened, I shall keep battling on.
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One contested clue/solution is an example of how technical accuracy and general usage cause crosswording problems. A recent Paul clue (in a Cryptic as it happens – No 26,256 for 10 May – but the problem could equally have arisen in a Quick) had the definition, 'It's bang in the middle' for EPICENTRE.
There was a complaint to the Readers' Editor about the appearance of such a regrettable but common solecism in the Guardian. The issue was that an EPICENTRE, as we all know, is the point on the Earth's surface immediately above the centre of an earthquake and is, therefore, not bang in the middle of anything but is only as close to it as you can get without digging. The complainant added wearily that he was "resigned to the fact that this is a lost cause as far as day-to-day usage is concerned but, since the whole point of crosswords is wordplay, I do feel that it is better to be precise in that context."
To me, it is not a lost cause but a wrong cause. Seismologists may not like it, but EPICENTRE now also has another common meaning, ie the central point of some, typically difficult or unpleasant, situation. The Oxford Dictionary of English gives as an example, 'the epicentre of labour militancy was the capital itself' and Collins gives 'the epicentre of world sprinting'. We are all against solecisms, but this is not one such.
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A further note on how Police Constable Rees spelled his first name in Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood (Easter Cryptic puzzle No 26,238, 19 April). I am indebted to Maskarade, the setter of that puzzle, for the information that in the 'definitive' early edition of the work the spelling was 'Atilla'. The editor noted that Thomas always spelled it Attila in his hand-written drafts. Later editions all seem to have Attila. So we do know what Thomas wanted, or at least what he wrote, which leaves unanswered the question of why, in that case, the original editor deliberately used the other spelling.
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The May Genius (No 131 by Picaroon) got a good entry: 36 on the first day and 320 by the deadline. We nearly had a new winner in the First Past The Post stakes in Ross F, but there was one error in the entry. The first four correctly across the line were DJM from France, Tony C, Noms, and PSC from Australia.
Congratulations to Toni Whitehead from Oxford, who is the winner of the May Genius puzzle.
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