Don’t know what the problem was last week, but today I was able to get both this week’s puzzle and last week’s. So there’ll be some catch-up posts on the way in the next day or two; I’ll back-post them to keep the puzzles and solutions in order.
So without further ado...
Link to puzzle: http://www.thenation.com/article/179136/puzzle-no-3320
Degree of difficulty (by standards of this weekly puzzle): hard. The great thing about this one was how consistent it was. No easy sections, but I got the entire thing in one go. Usually I’m stuck for a little while on one or two answers.
Hozom’s comment: Parsimony, in which Hot and Trazom respond to the flak they got over 3,316 (solution here). I was pretty sure of the answer to 21d, but less so about how the clue was intended to work. Turns out I had it right--it was a phonetic reversal (<~CHEER< / <~REACH<). Hot and Trazom explain that the homophone indicator was there in the clue, but some people read “loud ovation” as all definition instead of “ovation” being the definition and “loud” being an indicator. I see it now, but I’m still not convinced that the phonetic reversal is entirely by the book. However, we’ve been warned that the rules may be bent once in a while to make a clue more amusing.
So while Hot and Trazom were referring to whether or not there should be superfluous words in an indicator, the post title “Parsimony” works on another level too: the challenge of parsing a good cryptic clue. Not to mention it’s a fun word for the weekly clue-writing challenge.
3,319 and its solution will be posted tomorrow: solution 3,320 will be posted Monday.
A phonetic reversal is not a bending of any rule. We give the example DEAN / NEED in our solving guidelines, under homophones. And we wrote a Word Salad post on phonetics (http://www.thenation.com/blog/172274/i-hear-you) in which we explained that phonetics can be applied to many clue types, and provided examples.
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