ChatterBank66 mins ago
Sunday Times 4584
26 Answers
Folks,
5d. (6) n?e?e? Missing, as was masseur reportedly. Is this needed or needed. I only very occasionally complete one of Mr. Meyer's crosswords and I don't want to muck this one up. A case can be made for either. Any advice would be appreciated.
Many Thanks,
ossian
5d. (6) n?e?e? Missing, as was masseur reportedly. Is this needed or needed. I only very occasionally complete one of Mr. Meyer's crosswords and I don't want to muck this one up. A case can be made for either. Any advice would be appreciated.
Many Thanks,
ossian
Answers
Neither seems holly satisfactory to me. I don't see how missing can be 'needer'. But I don't see how a masseur can be a 'kneaded'
10:30 Mon 07th Apr 2014
It wouldn’t be an absolute ‘natural English’ substitution, Ossian. As setters we aim for that, of course, but, failing that, we look for grammatical logic. If you take a sentence like “The team’s performance was impressive” you could instead say “The team’s performance impressed”.
Although this clue goes a small step further by basing itself on the synonyms ‘massage’ and ‘knead’, the principle is the same. There is an extra level of difficulty, I suppose, in that the past tense verb is equated to the person doing it, but that’s fair. For example, none of us would see a significant difference between “He won” and “He was the winner”.
Although this clue goes a small step further by basing itself on the synonyms ‘massage’ and ‘knead’, the principle is the same. There is an extra level of difficulty, I suppose, in that the past tense verb is equated to the person doing it, but that’s fair. For example, none of us would see a significant difference between “He won” and “He was the winner”.
Except there’s no reference to the person being kneaded. Remember the clue wording is ‘was masseur’. Cryptic clues frequently use what we call ‘newspaper headline’ wording; we’re free to remove unessential words such as ‘the’. So ‘was masseur’ equates to ‘was the masseur’, and by logical extension you can read that as ‘did the massaging’, or ‘massaged’ – hence ‘kneaded’.
Phew!
Phew!