Listener 3942

[meabby]

I'm trying to teach myself how to understand and do The Listener Crosswords from the Sat Times. Can anyone give me some help and hints to get me started with this weeks?

[kettledrum]

Can I suggest that that you cut out and keep The Listener Crosswords for several weeks - if not months - and carefully go through the clues and the answers when they are published. Try to understand how they are arrived at, and if you don't / can't , ask for further explanation / elucidation here.
If you want to speed the process up a bit, buy a book of Listener Crosswords and work through them asking for explanations when necessary.

[kayakamina]

There is some useful information and a discussion forum on this;

http://www.crossword.org.uk/

[bunstance]

meabby, this week's Listener is of the "jigsaw" type. That means it is a process of solving as many clues as possible first, then seeing if you can fit them into the grid. You are given that the answers are in alphabetical order, which gives you a bit of help from the start, and you get a bit more information as you solve clues, but you can't at first put anything in the grid, so you get no help from crossing letters.

The good side is that this means the clueing has to be relatively easy, otherwise the whole thing would be near impossible. The clues to this puzzle are, by Listener standards, very straightforward, though a certain amount of "difficult" vocabulary is used. "Getting started" is the easy bit: see how many clues you can solve by yourself to begin with (remembering the clues from the alphabetical order). If you can solve enough clues, it might be worth playing around with seeing if you can put answers in the grid. But most of us can remember that solving even just one or two Listener clues was a worthwhile achievement in our early attempts. The important thing is to keep trying each week, and to see how all the clues work when the answer is published. An analysis of every puzzle appears at http://www.crossword.org.uk/gregson.htm

The other thing that will help is the right set of solving aids. Chambers Dictionary 2003 or later is essential, but if you get the CD-ROM you have the option of using wild-card searches and even scanning the full text to track down definitions. Another excellent aid is Bradford's Crossword Solver's Dictionary. Sorry if this is teaching grandmother to suck eggs, but I don't know your previous experience.

The Listener is great fun and well worth persevering with. Good luck!

[ichkeria]

A series of articles has been appearing underneath the Listener Crossword for the last few months, as you may or may not have noticed, which provides a lot of useful hints.

I recommend the link quoted by kayakamina. Most Listener aficionados, who might otherwise be on hand to offer similar advice, steer well clear of sites like Answerbank, as they are afraid, with justification, that someone will spoil their enjoyment of the puzzle by giving the game away (themes, answers to clues etc)
Generally speaking the people on here exercise commendable restraint when it comes to the Listener, and I hope that continues. Apart from anything else, "short cuts to inspiration" as I would euphemistically call them, are rarely instructive in the long term.

[meabby]

thanks - i'll keep persevering with them - one day I'll get there. Trying crosswords that are cryptic etc is so much more fun and a challenge thanordinary general knowledge ones (which the internet makes far too easy).

[Quizmonster]

Nobody - not even a Listener aficionado - need have his/her enjoyment of the puzzle affected in any way by what appears here on AnswerBank.
With a heading such as the one above..."Listener 3942"...it is surely clear to even the meanest intelligence, never mind the usually relatively bright Listener solver, that "Here be dragons!" With such a crystal-clear indication that they might see that which they ought not to see, all they have to do is not click into the thread. It could scarcely be simpler.
On that basis, Meabby, I believe the answer to the first clue is ALATE. One = a and dead = late...together, as alate, the word means 'having wings'. Good luck with the rest.

[cruciverbali]

Meabby, once you have completed the 4 quadrants there are clearly 24 possible ways they can form a larger square grid. Only one results in the appearance of the correct 'advice', and The Listener often uses foreign language quotations.

[ichkeria]

Quizmonster misses the point again (well done).
The original post on this thread was a perfectly innocent one asking for help in general terms on how to get started with the Listener. There was absolutely no discussion of the puzzle until you butted in with your usual rant about the sacrosanctity of the Listener.
I never suggested that anyone's enjoyment was spoiled by these discussions - as I say, true Listener folk avoid these threads like the plague until after the closing date.
But you protest so strongly that methinks someone somewhere must have done something to upset you ...