As happens many days, I was struggling with the Guardian cryptic earlier this week. I was infuriated by one clue: “Primate said to be capital.” Five letters.
The answer was Lemur, the primate part of the clue. “Said” meant it sounded like a capital. Apparently, that would be Lima. This drove me bonkers. They do NOT sound alike in my house, nor in much of what we still, laughably, call the UK.
Many of us can and do pronounce the letter “r.” Likewise, “ur” for many English speakers does not sound like “a.”
I’m putting this down to southeastern/Home Counties bias. Is anyone else as bothered about this sort of thing? There are some days when I need a Valium just to get through listening to people talking on the BBC - and I’m sure it’s getting worse.
It always irritated me after my favorite Celtic player of the Eighties took his nickname with him when he downgraded to Manchester United. Let me explain: In Glasgow, the nickname Choccy was a pun on chocolate eclair. English fans translated from the Glaswegian and came up with Chalky (which sounds almost indistinguishable from Choccy in Scotland). However, that rendered the nickname meaningless. So now you know.
Surely the two words sound sufficiently alike for a crossword clue?!?
After all, you got it right!
Have you ever tried setting a crossword? Give the guy a break (although actually that clue is a bit over- easy I reckon).
Off-ish topic: my favourite ever crossword clue was (pretty easy, but):
Hi Rod. It was kind of the last straw after a day of people “correcting” my accent.
My revenge would be to appoint a Bristolian setter. Add an “l” to all words ending in “a.” Those of you unfortunate enough not to know much about my fair home town never believe this, but in Bristle we don’t recognise that, for example, “ideal” and “idea” are two distinct words. Nor do we accept the things we put on our roofs before the dawn of the ubiquitous satellite dish sound different from the word for an extent of space (aerial v. area.)
Another classic (which I first remember from an Isaac Asimov story, but also saw in a crossword.) The forum is auto-formatting it unhelpfully, at least on my IPAD, there are several spaces between the B&D.
