Crossword roundup: words that mean their opposites

The news in clues

Vlad uses the old, sly trick where the solver is misled about whether or not to acknowledge a capital letter:

Here, “stormy” is not Stormy Daniels, the author name used by Stephanie Clifford in her extraordinary memoir; it is one of the hundreds of thousands of words setters have used to indicate an anagram, in this case of EISENHOWER.

Just as misleading, just as fairly, is Hoskins – who kicks off an Independent puzzle with this:

Partly because the expression is, well, a little arsey, it takes the solver some while to realise that “I can’t be arsed about” needs to be read as “the letters of ‘I can’t be’, once they’ve been arsed about” … making the answer CABINET, a putatively decision-making body that is, at the time of writing, overseen by a politician named May.

Latter patter

Staying with rudeness, those chemists who get to name chemical elements are surely the rudest people in science. Beautiful blue cobalt gets its name from an underground goblin; brilliant argon is apparently lazy; astatine is, they insist, unstable; osmium is smelly … and then we have the element that’s an element of a clue by Chifonie (whose love of hurdy-gurdies and ballroom dancing make up part of that setter’s Meet the Setter).

Here we are looking for a PLATITUDE, also known as a bromide, from the chlorine-like element bromine. But here’s the puzzle. “Bromine” was named using the Greek βρῶμος (stink) because, to be fair, it reeks.

Despite that, its compound bromide might be given as a sedative and bromide has since come to mean a tediously dull person or remark, making it a word coined to mean horribly offensive, which is most often used to mean horribly inoffensive.

Reader, do you have other examples? My mind goes to “passion” (probably from the Latin for the most awful suffering) and to the subject of our next challenge. Also from Latin, and once used to mean something similar to “horrendously impure and beneath your notice”: reader, how would you clue SOPHISTICATED?

Cluing challenge

Thanks for your clues for QUINOA. The audacity award goes to MarthaFBrowne’s “Lamentablemente, aqui no hay comida tipica andina (sign in Bolivian bodega)”. Martha, I appreciate your apparent confidence in my Spanish, just as I appreciate the errors the rest of you have pointed out here and on Twitter in my recent attempted Spanish solve. The ingenuity award, meanwhile, goes to Schroduck’s “Algonquin Oak Room hosted trendy corny bunch?” (references available on request).

The runners-up are Steveran’s wasteful “Trendy dish left unfinished on sofa regularly” and Sandwichfeet’s “Queen okay regularly eating trendy superfood”; the winner is Notgethithatonharry’s repetitive “Endlessly ask short boat-builder for grain”.

Kludos to – should I call you Harry? – and please leave any entries for this fortnight’s competition and your picks from the broadsheet cryptics below.

Newish device?

Every way of decrypting a cryptic clue was once the fancy of some poet, translator, spy or other misfit. Philistine, as we learned from a Meet the Setter, is a reasonable person, but here asks for something I’m not used to:

Our most likely path to enlightenment is an unusual one: we wildly stab at the definition (“remove growth”), use crossing letters for the answer (SHAVE) and only later process the wordplay: namely, S+HAVE (SHAVE) is not unlike (“that could be”) S+OWN (“sown”).

I for one appreciate being – occasionally – messed about in this way and the annotated solution for this fine prize puzzle is now available.

Clue of the fortnight

There are some words that I have never been able to remember how to spell. The English language has recently conceded a fifth taste, but since I have seen this Japanese word for deliciousness rendered with various combinations of “n”s and “m”s, I’m never confident rendering it in print, or in, say, a crossword grid.

Happily, Matilda in her quiptic (the steppingstone for quick solvers scared of the cryptic) leaves no doubt:

So we start with a U, flip the letters of IMAM and get UMAMI. Yum, and thanks to Matilda.