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Crossword roundup: is it extrovert or extravert, and is it nucular or nuclear?

Global Summit To End Sexual Violence In Conflict<br>LONDON, ENGLAND - JUNE 10: US actress and UN special envoy Angelina Jolie listens as co-host Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague makes his opening speech at the start of the four-day Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict on June 10, 2014 in London, England. The four-day conference on sexual violence in war is hosted by Foreign Secretary William Hague and UN Special Envoy and actress Angelina Jolie. (Photo by Carl Court - WPA Pool /Getty Images)
Angelina Jolie and William Hague, 2014. Photograph: WPA Pool/Getty Images

The news in clues

A fortnight ago, we looked at Claymore’s splendid clue for a timely phrase; now it’s Knut’s turn, with a surface suggesting a different polity ...

18ac Political gambit gets Latinos furious with Pence (4,8)
[ anagram (‘furious’) of LATINOS and (‘with’) PENCE ]

... but the definition referring to the same SNAP ELECTION. If you missed that puzzle, it’s “ram-packed” with topicality and you should solve it straight away. In the following day’s Independent, Dutch gave his or her take on the cause and likely effects of that snap election, in a pithy clue ...

33ac May essentially divides Britain with pet project (4)
[ middle letter (‘essentially’) of MAY, in between (‘divides’) abbrev. for ‘Britain’ and synonym for ‘with’ ]
[ A, in between B and BY ]

... for BABY. And a couple of days and/or a generation later, Giovanni (known locally as Pasquale) seemed to afford us a peek behind the scenes at the Three Brexiteers in his clue ...

6d Men in leadership roles could make Theresa gruff, I fancy (6,7)
[ anagram (‘fancy’) of THERESA GRUFF I ]

... for FATHER FIGURES.

Latter patter

A couple of thoughts dogged me as I finished a recent Friday Independent puzzle, set as it so often is by Phi. Firstly, why didn’t I know that a reveller might be described as a ROVER? And why was the software not showing that I had completed my mission?

The answers were (a) that a reveller simply is not a ROVER and so (b) I had not completed my mission. The clue in question was this:

15d Outgoing partygoer taken in by wayward text (9)
[ synonym for ‘partygoer’ inside anagram (‘wayward’) of TEXT ]
[ RAVER inside EXTT ]

Phi’s hidden theme, it turned out, is words for which alternative spellings are knocking about. So why was I so sure of my “extrovert” spelling that I was willing to overlook that the reveller might be a RAVER? Well, it’s the version I most often see. But it’s not the one used by Jung, who pretty much invented this sense of the word and wrote “der extravertierte Typus dagegen fühlt sich, indem er handelt, ins Objekt ein.” Quite.

On reflection, “extra-” is a pretty common prefix, certainly more so than “extro-”, and perhaps that was what Jung had in mind when he apparently told a correspondent that EXTROVERT is bad Latin. That exchange is described by psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, who reckons that the O version first appeared in a 1918 paper in the American Journal of Psychology and stuck around long enough to take over as the most common spelling, however bad its Latin. Hence Beet in the same paper a few days later:

19ac Old car entered into races and not withdrawn (9)
[ prefix denoting ‘old’, then car marque inside abbrev. for specific races ]
[ EX, then ROVER inside TT ]

Meanwhile Phi also included MINUSCULE (threatened by the upstart MINISCULE), ARTEFACT (see ARTIFACT) and others which he discusses in a comment at solvers’ blog Fifteen Squared.

Our next challenge is of the same stripe. It started as a non-standard pronunciation of “nuclear”, uttered so many times that dictionaries began to list it as a variant pronunciation, and now even as a variant spelling. Reader, how would you clue NUCULAR?

Cluing competition

Thanks for your clues to BHANG. There were some lovely swerves away from narcotic surfaces, like DameSweeneyEggblast’s Baedekerish “Stay near Bangalore initially for recreation in India”, JollySwagman’s “British humour’s antiquated principally – no good – but this might make you giggle” and Encota’s “Host’s top hit – Eats, Shoots and Leaves – intoxicating”.

The runners-up – Lizard’s “Drug could be ‘smack’, heroin being injected” and Alberyalbery’s “A type of drug – GHB with an awful mixture” – are both bang-on-topic and dimly ominous; the winner is Catarella’s sneaky “Intoxicant is the root of brewer’s droop”.

Kludos to Catarella; please leave this fortnight’s entries and your pick of the broadsheet cryptics below.

Clue of the Fortnight

Here’s another clue from the Beet puzzle mentioned above ...

11ac Hague regularly pursuing Oscar-winning actress, one half of team Brangelina? (11)
[ every other letter (‘regularly’) of HAGUE, after (‘pursuing’) surname of Oscar-winning actress, and half of the letters of TEAM ]
[ AU, after (Natalie) PORTMAN + TE ]

... which directed the solver away from PORTMANTEAU for a while by bringing to mind one of 2014’s unlikely friendships.