Setting Things Right: The Manifezto Pt.5

Hi all, welcome back to Setting Things Right, aka The Manifezto. The usual caveat: these are just my ideas and opinions – please do add your own thoughts and disagreements in the comments!

Previous posts:

• Part 1: Say What You Mean

• Part 2: The Duck-Rabbit

• Part 3: Types of Rabbit

• Part 4: Anatomy of the Common Rabbit

Part 5: Making Modifications

Last time, I set out the various elements that could make up a 'definition & wordplay' clue: a definition, building blocks (tokens and fodder), indicators (modifiers, constructors, qualifiers), and links. You might not need all of them in a single clue, but Rabbits can be surprisingly complex animals!

Everything within the clue must play a role contributing to one of these elements – if it isn’t contributing, it is simply convenient filler, and that won’t do! It’s unfair because it gives solvers a red herring, it’s inaccurate because it doesn’t say anything let alone what it means, and it lacks style ... because of both those points. A clue with filler fails on all counts.

And crucially, when all those elements are put together, they have to make sense as a complete self-contained representation, description or instruction: the cryptic grammar has to work independently of the surface reading.

Definition and building blocks

To recap, these are the elements that any wordplay and definition clue must include in one way or another.

The definition is simply an accurate representation of the answer. Building blocks provide the raw materials for the solver to work with, either as direct fodder or indirect tokens.

Tokens are elements that represent some word or concept, but unlike definitions they don’t carry any further meaning beyond generating a letter, or set of letters, for the solver to play with. They are often synonyms or abbreviations, or maybe ‘representations’ such as “ring” for O or "rugby posts" for H. They could be more complex phrases too: HE might be “male” as a synonym (listed as a noun in Chambers), “helium” as an abbreviation, or “that fellow I'm talking about” as a phrase, say. Once ‘resolved’, it is the letters generated that are of prime importance.

That said, you do still need to consider the 'format' or 'nature' of your token within the context of the clue as a whole. If your token is a verbal phrase, say "they're playing" for ACTORS, you can't then treat it as if it were a noun: "they're playing after France" doesn't get you FACTORS, because that phrase isn't a 'thing' that can go "after" another 'thing'; you'd need your token to be nounal to work properly – "those playing after France", maybe. Or, if your token is qualified as a homophone, maybe "reportedly expensive" for DEER, you can't then start to chop and change it: "reportedly expensive, on reflection" doesn't get you REED, and "reportedly expensive around France" doesn't get you DEFER, because the 'soundalike' nature of your token has been destroyed; who knows what a backwards or split homophone sounds like? More on such nuances later! But basically, a token is simply an indirect means of generating some fodder ...

Rather than giving an indirect token, the alternative is to provide the necessary letter(s) more-or-less in ‘plain sight’ as fodder: just using the word “he” to give the letters HE, say, or having a set from which those letters can be easily extracted by some means: “wHEn” without the sides, “tHrEe” with just the even-numbered letters, or half of “HEad”, perhaps. Or maybe even – on the rather 'less' side of 'more-or-less plain sight' – the "characters preceding if".

So we might have:

• Robbery – that man is tense (5)

Which parses as:

• Definition: “Robbery” / HE (a token, “that man”) + IS (fodder given in plain sight, unchanged) + T (a token, “Tense” – an abbreviation this time)

We have a definition and some building blocks. And we don’t need any further elements, they can just sit side-by-side as a charade. But as a surface, it’s not great. So we might look to include other elements to improve the surface reading, whilst ensuring that the cryptic breakdown of the clue as a whole still makes sense. That’s where modifiers, constructors, qualifiers and links might come into play. In this instalment, we'll concentrate on modifiers, but many of the considerations – in particular, the idea of cryptic grammar – are relevant to all of the possible elements. (I'll leave the re-working of HEIST as an exercise for the reader!)

Modifiers

So, sometimes you’ll just provide the letters as they are, but often you’ll want to modify them somehow – by anagramming, reversing, just taking the first of them, and so on. Essentially, there are two main ways in which this can be achieved, and a couple of rarer possibilities too.

Rearrangement

The first main means of modification is rearrangement: using the entire set of letters but changing the sequence in which they appear. This could be done in an orderly way, where a specific sort of rearrangement is required, or a disorderly way, with the letters pretty much randomly redistributed.

Anagrams

A disorderly rearrangement is, of course, what we refer to as an anagram. There are a huge number of ways that you can indicate a set of letters being anagrammed – see the lists here at MyCrossword or the Clue Clinic for plenty of examples. Often these can be very whimsical – in what way can a set of letters really be considered "drunk"? – but within that whimsical realm they do then have to be used in a grammatically correct way to apply to the fodder. Basically, anything that suggests rearrangement, disorder or disruption could potentially work. Those lists I've recommended include the relevant ‘part of speech’ or ‘function’ for each indicator – as an adjective, adverb, verb, etc. This affects your choice of anagram indicator (or anagrind, as it’s sometimes known), to ensure it works in a grammatically correct way.

So, for example:

• Strange doctor supplies precious stones? (7)

Here we have an anagram of STRANGE to give us GARNETS: precious stones (although they’re not always precious, hence the question mark at the end). “Doctor” will be found in any list of anagram indicators, but the problem is that it’s an imperative verb; it only makes sense before the fodder it’s applied to. It translates or parses as “make an anagram out of”, so the clue breaks down as:

• Strange (fodder) doctor (anagram indicator) supplies (link) precious stones? (definition)

With the cryptic reading, our Rabbit, being:

• The set of letters STRANGE make an anagram out of gives the definition

And whilst the surface reading is nice and clear (we have a decent Duck), the cryptic reading just doesn’t make sense, grammatically (our Rabbit is a Rabtib). Instead, we need the anagrind to apply properly to the fodder:

• Doctor Strange supplies precious stones? (7)

“Doctor Strange” (note the capitalisation) is a known character, and he might conceivably supply precious stones for some reason, so we still have a surface that makes sense with the anagrind in the right place. So now we’re OK? Not quite. The parse is now:

• Make an anagram out of the set of letters STRANGE gives the definition

Which again doesn’t make sense grammatically. For that linking “supplies” to work, we’d need to have, say, “Making an anagram out of ...”, i.e., “Doctoring Strange ...”. That works, but destroys the surface reading – “Doctoring Strange” doesn’t make sense from that perspective. So, we also need to make sure the clue as a whole provides a proper illusion: both a meaningful surface – a Duck – and an independent, grammatically correct cryptic reading – a Rabbit. How about:

• Doctor Strange to supply precious stones? (7)

Now we have both a Duck and a Rabbit; the parse is:

• Make an anagram out of the set of letters STRANGE to give the definition

Yay! Now it works as a grammatically correct instruction to the solver.

Another example:

• Animal disturbs leaf blade (6)

Here we have an anagram of ANIMAL to give us LAMINA, a “leaf blade” (yes, check Chambers!) But “Animal disturbs” doesn’t make sense. 'Disturb' is a transitive verb: it needs an object to act on. If an animal disturbs, it has to disturb something. In the surface reading, the animal’s disturbing the leaf blade, but in the cryptic reading the “disturbs” needs to apply to the set of letters ANIMAL – and an intransitive verb just can’t do that job in this way. Even “Disturbs animal” makes no sense: we can’t simply switch the order as we did with our strange doctor above. And whilst “Disturb animal” (now using the anagrind in the form of an imperative) or “Disturbed animal” (changing it to an adjectival form) would make sense in terms of the cryptic grammar, we’d lose any sort of reasonable surface Duck: “Disturb animal leaf blade” works cryptically but is meaningless from a surface point of view. To get round the problem, we could instead use an intransitive verb:

• Animal warps leaf blade (6)

If that set of letters ANIMAL “warps”, it means that it “becomes perverted or distorted”. It doesn’t need to warp something, but applies directly to the subject – the set of letters ANIMAL. (It's still a poor clue, stylistically, as the surface is rather clunkily odd. But I'm not going to hone it any further, as there’s another possible quibble affecting the construction, which we’ll come to soon. Perhaps you've already spotted it?)

Nounal anagrinds

Note that ‘noun’ is not included as a part of speech in those lists. A noun can’t really act on fodder to modify it. Let’s go back to GARNETS:

• Maybe precious stones in strange arrangement (7)

Parsing the anagram in this example essentially gives: “The set of letters arrangement”, which doesn’t really make sense as that noun isn’t acting on anything. Whimsically, it could be argued, it does enough to suggest the anagram, with the fodder STRANGE acting as a sort of pseudo-adjective maybe, but for me that’s just a bit too jarring. Especially with so many possible ‘legitimate’ anagrinds out there, it usually feels a bit of a fudge to resort to that sort of trickery. “Arranged strange precious stones?”, say, gets you the same basic surface without compromising the cryptic grammar. If you’re determined to use a noun, you can often get around the problem by using a nounal phrase instead: "An arrangement of strange precious stones?", say. That “arrangement of fodder” does provide the necessary sense of the fodder being acted on and transformed. For more on nounal anagrinds, see Raider’s insightful blog post on the subject.

Further considerations

Another point to note with fodder is that it is treated as singular: “the set of letters XYZ”. To some extent that’s just convention, as you could argue it might parse as simply “the letters XYZ”, which would be plural. But I think it’s more accurate and fairer to view the fodder as a singular block.

• Misshapen garnets are weird (7)

For the surface, it’s tempting to use “are” there, but the clue then parses as “When messed about with, the set of letters GARNETS are something meaning ‘weird’ (i.e., STRANGE)” ... which isn’t quite right, grammatically: it needs to be “is”. And that is still the case when the fodder appears, on the surface, to be split up:

• Weird rants, e.g., are out of order (7)

The fodder is still just a singular set of letters, RANTSEG, even though there’s some distracting spaces and punctuation involved. (By the way, I’ll look at punctuation in a separate post. Often it can be unfairly distracting as it can change the meaning of the cryptic reading – but here, that’s not the case.)

So, if you really want to treat fodder as plural, you should (as a matter of style as much as anything, though I’d argue also for accuracy and fairness) explicitly present it in that way. Perhaps “ABC and XYZ are transformed ...” or “The characters in XYZ are rearranged ...” would provide a sufficiently explicit presentation of plural fodder?

One more point regarding anagrams: although, in general, using a token to provide your anagram fodder is unfair – it’s just too much of a leap – you can use relatively simple tokens in a limited way. Not synonyms, but abbreviations (or representations such as “ring” for O) – these can be seen as relatively direct. To ensure they remain sufficiently direct, they should usually use the actual letters involved: “street” for ST, not “way”, or “doctor” for DR, rather than “medic”. Very common or simple tokens – maybe C for “about” (circa) or Roman numerals I, V, X, etc as their corresponding numbers, such as “5” or “five” – also feel fair. Again, it’s a case of using your judgement to decide if any tokens within your anagram fodder are clear enough to remain fair to the solver.

But one consequence of this, in my view, is that your fodder is no longer just a set of letters, but a set of elements: some letters, and some other bits like ST or DR represented by tokens. Think of them a bit like Scrabble tiles – your letters are your regular tiles, but something like “doctor” gives you a special single tile with both letters DR. So, when you rearrange the tiles, that DR is indivisible.

• Awful new doctor, a former royal? (6)

Here the anagrind is “awful”, and it applies to the set of elements N, E, W, DR and A. They’re rearranged as A, N, DR, E, W for the disgraced ex-Duke. The DR has been kept intact in the anagramming process.

• Awful new doctor, a prison guard maybe? (6)

But here we have the rearrangement as W, A, R, D, E, N ... the DR has been split up and reversed. In my opinion, that’s moved over the line into unfair indirectness, as your token is undergoing some further transformation. Whilst in this case it’s not a huge leap, it is still essentially asking the solver to resolve a token and then use it, ‘disordered’, within an anagram – which to me feels unfair as it has become too indirect. Opinions certainly vary on this!

Orderly rearrangements

Any rearrangement could be regarded, technically, as an anagram. But sometimes the rearrangement is not just a seemingly random change in the sequence. In our earlier example, ANIMAL was anagrammed to LAMINA. But that’s a very specific rearrangement: it’s a reversal of the letters in the set. It’s not wrong to clue such rearrangements as anagrams (no rules!) – they maintain accuracy and fairness – but it mightn’t be the most stylish choice.

There’s another potential advantage in using a more orderly rearrangement. You need to use your judgement as to whether you should use a token to provide your set of letters or to give it to the solver in plain sight as fodder. But, generally speaking: if your rearrangement is ‘orderly’ then it’s fair to use a token to generate the fodder; if the rearrangement is ‘disorderly’ (so, an anagram) then it becomes unfair to expect solvers to spot it.

So, what sorts of 'orderly' rearrangements might you employ?

• Reversals: the set of letters is presented in reverse sequence; e.g., ANIMAL to LAMINA

• Cycling: the set of letters remains in the same sequence, but has 'cycled' around; e.g., WINES to SWINE (shifting each letter one place to the right) or SITAR to TARSI (now cycling three times)

• Movement: a subset of the letters has moved to a different position; e.g., BREAD to BEARD (just moving the R), or DEARER to REARED (swapping the two end letters)

As with anagrams, there are plenty of ways to indicate such rearrangements. Rather than providing any lists here, I'd recommend those provided by MyCrossword (for reversals) and The Clue Clinic (which also covers other sorts of 'movement', referred to there as 'drag & drop').

Having already looked in quite some detail at anagrams, it's sufficient here to say that all those same considerations apply when thinking about indicators for orderly rearrangements. That is, you need to carefully choose your indicators so that they make grammatical sense in the overall cryptic reading. In other words, pay attention to your cryptic grammar!

Top to bottom or right to left?

So I'm sure you'll be relieved that further detailed consideration of every possible sort of rearrangement isn't necessary here. And indeed, as we move on to selections below, and next time – when I'll look at constructors, qualifiers and links – that same basic consideration of cryptic grammar, that we've covered already when looking at anagrams, is what's essential. The fine detail and niceties of particular indicators all make for fun quibbling and good-natured argument, but really the argument is the same for each element of wordplay: are you really "saying what you mean", and are you doing that fairly?

Regarding orderly rearrangements, the only thing over and above what we've already seen with anagrams is to do with whether clues are Across or Down. If you want to reverse something in an Across clue, you can't use an indicator like "rising" that suggests vertical rearrangement; if you want to move the R in BREAD to get BEARD in an Across clue, you can't really say that the R is "moved downwards". For me, the opposite is also true. For example, using "back" in a Down clue doesn't feel quite right: moving "back" suggests something horizontal; for a Down clue it would need to be moving "up", perhaps. Of course, the clue itself is always presented 'horizontally', so you could argue that you are indeed moving your ANIMAL "back" or "from the east" to get LAMINA, which you then enter in its place in the grid, that just happens to be a Down light. Personally, though, I'm not especially keen on that, simply from a style point of view; if an answer has to be entered in a particular orientation, then the clue should reflect that.

Selection (and reduction)

The second main means of modification is selection: taking just part of the fodder.

What parts can you select? Well, any parts you like! The caveat is that you need to be able to clearly indicate your intention without compromising your clue by requiring overly complex instructions. Selecting the 2nd, 3rd, 6th, 8th and 9th letters from a set is likely not going to be feasible. Parts that you can 'elegantly' select include:

• Individual letters – the 'head' or first letter from the set, the 'tail' or final letter, the 'middle' letter (if there are an odd number of letters, of course), or specific letters such as the "second" or the "penultimate", maybe. Note that some solvers regard SLIs (Single Letter Indicators) as a bit of an easy way out for the setter – after all, you have a vast array of possibilities for choosing sets of letters that only need to include one crucial element. Whilst I broadly agree, I do think there's still considerable skill, or art, in finding just the right fodder to provide a really pleasing surface: I'm a huge fan of setters like Dave Gorman (Bluth, Fed, Django) who use plenty of SLIs but always find le mot juste (for both the fodder and the indicator taken together) to keep things interesting and amusing, rather than just a plethora of convenient "initially"s and "finally"s.

• Subsets of letters – the 'sides', the 'middle' pair of an even set of letters, the 'alternately' or 'regularly' appearing letters, or more complex selections of 'primes' (letters in positions 2, 3, 5, etc), 'squares' (1, 4, 9, etc) or any well-defined sequence. As with SLIs, the 'impact' of subset indicators may be diminished as the selection becomes more sparse: for example, finding fodder from which you can select alternate letters is impressive; using every third letter perhaps a little less so, as your options are wider; using every fourth letter is beginning to get, arguably, a little too easy for the setter – although, as with SLIs, much depends on how stylishly you can pull that trick off!

• And then there's the 'inverses' of all those, too – everything except for the first letter or except for the odd-numbered letters, say. These might often be dealt with via reductions like "largely", "endlessly", "ignoring the odds" and so on.

Again, I'll leave lists of specific indicators to MyCrossword and the Clue Clinic. Just as with anagrams and other rearrangments, the indicators are often very whimsical, although also often in quite a prosaic way – is it really natural to refer to "the set of letters XYZ, initially"? Probably not, but again, within that whimsical realm, it maintains a grammatical consistency and logic. (As a slightly obscure aside: if you've had any experince with functional programming, using computing languages such as LISP, then working with sets in this way may feel a little more natural.)

So, rather than reproducing an exhaustive list of possible indicators for all sorts of selection, it suffices here to simply repeat: pay attention to your cryptic grammar! For example, "April first" parses as "The set of letters APRIL first", which doesn't really make sense – you need "First of the set of letters APRIL", or "the set of letters APRIL, firstly" to provide something that, whilst in that second case undeniably whimsical, and arguably bordering on unnatural, does make grammatical sense. Because there are no rules (instead, only our three principles of accuracy, fairness and style), there's no need to trawl through specific examples: whatever your choice of selection, the same considerations and principles apply – does it really "say what you mean", does it do that in a way that's readily interpreted, and does it help to provide some amusement or interest?

When considering fairness, I noted that (in general) tokens can be used fairly for orderly rearrangements but only in a very limited way for anagrams. What about selections – tokens or fodder? The fairness there largely depends on how much of the fodder you want to select. If it's just a single letter, say, it's almost certainly asking too much: "Animal, initially" could be A for Aardvark, B for Bison, C for Crocodile, etc; a token is simply unfair. If it's all but one letter that's usually OK: a "short animal", with a bit of context from the definition or crossers, say, could fairly be BISO(n). And anywhere in between likely relies on your (and your testers') judgement and common sense: "animal regularly" for ADAK ("aArDvArK") feels completely unfair, whilst "half an animal" for VARK seems reasonable.

Rarer modifications

Before signing off for this lengthy instalment, remember I mentioned there are other ways of ‘modifying’ sets of letters beyond rearrangements and selections, though these are used far less frequently. For example:

Mappings translate your letter set in some clearly defined way. Earlier, for example, I mentioned "the characters preceding if" as a way to indicate HE. You're not rearranging IF or selecting any part of it.

Extensions take your fodder and ask you to add to it. Perhaps you might want to "double the money" in PRIMER to get to PRIMMER, say.

But you do need to be careful with such constructions. They are unusual, so to be fair to solvers they have to be absolutely clear and precise. If you can find a way of modifying your fodder that remains accurate, fair and stylish, then you don't need to restrict yourself to just the 'usual' constructions. On the other hand, those 'usual' constructions have developed over the years because they are accurate, fair and stylish, and there are still plenty of original ways to make creative use of them (else all crosswords would be packed with chestnuts) – trying something completely novel is taking a bit of a risk.

One type of relatively novel wordplay occasionally encountered, that's essentially an extension, is the letter bank. Here, a set of letters, which must all be different, is supplied – NETS, say – and the solver is asked to use that set as a 'bank' from which to select a larger set – TENNESSEE. Perhaps "Nets providing you with all you need ..."? But is that accurate? To me, not really. The fodder set NETS still only gives you one of each letter, and the language you'd need to really describe or instruct what you want – to really "say what you mean" – becomes too complex to be viable as an elegant clue. How do you clearly imply to solvers that they should select one T, two each of N and S, and four Es, and then rearrange them? I'm certainly not ruling out the possibility: over many years of solving, I do recall once seeing a letter bank clue that I felt did enough to provide an accurate and fair indication ... unfortunately, of course, I didn't at the time commit the details to memory, and I can no longer recall the actual clue! I may also be doing the device a bit of a disservice in that, over in the US where I understand it is considered more favourably, there are particular requirements or conventions that help to determine a letter bank's fairness. But I'm afraid I have to say, in general the letter bank concept just doesn't work for me.

Summary

• The building blocks – the fodder given directly, or generated via tokens – can be modified in various ways to help construct a clue

• Those modifications are usually either rearrangements of, or selections from, the fodder

• Rearrangements can be orderly, with the changes being made in a well-defined manner, or disorderly anagrams

• Orderly rearragements include reversals, cycling and movement, and can generally apply to either 'plain sight' fodder or fodder generated by a token

• Disorderly arrangements (i.e., anagrams), in order to remain fair to solvers, can usually only apply to 'plain sight' fodder, not fodder generated by tokens – with some limited exceptions such as simple abbreviations

• Selections can pick out any subset of your fodder, provided you are able to indicate that selection accurately and fairly

• Whether or not you can fairly use a token to generate fodder for a selection depends largely on how much of it you need to select

• Whatever modifications you make, the key is to always ensure the clue as a whole provides a grammatically correct representation, description or instruction alongside its definition: pay attention to cryptic grammar or you'll be drawing a Duck-Rabtib instead of a Duck-Rabbit

Next time we'll round off this deep dive into the 'definition & wordplay' clue by thinking about the remaining elements: constructors, qualifiers and links. (Perhaps a thought to consider in advance: is "Paul" an example of a McCartney? Or, is "McCartney" an example of a "Paul"?)

Til then, cheers!

Fez