I'm a relative newbie at crosswords, so please forgive me for using this forum to ask some very basic questions. I spent some minutes googling, but couldn't find a good overview that would answer them specifically. I recently did an old puzzle and saw some answers that threw me a bit.
The first clue was "deserving praise", answer "MERIT". To me the parts of speech don't seem to match - "deserving praise" is an adjective, while MERIT is a noun or verb. Is there an interpretation I'm not seeing, or is this a mismatch? (If the latter, is that common?)
The other was "Actress Parker", answer "POSEY", as in Parker Posey (unless there's a Posey Parker I don't know about). I have seen many clues like [descriptor] [last name] where the answer was [first name], but this is the first time I've seen the name order reversed. In this case I would've expected a blank to be used to signify the departure from convention: "Actress Parker ______". Again, is this "allowed" or frowned upon?
Thanks for clearing up my confusion about the basic rules :)