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Unclued - look up PLING in Chambers, and look closely at clue!

I was wondering about 20d as well, so thanks gem94. It would never have occurred to me to try that! The clues are very, very tough but (mostly) meticulously fair. The exception is the wordplay leading to OLE, which is an interjection, not a noun.

I'm limping in as a late finisher. Annoyingly, getting the theme some time ago didn't mean I could then sail through the rest of the clues. I'm still stuck on 13a and 9d, which - as nobody else has asked - will probably be dead easy. That leaves only the parsing of the definition in 7d, viz 'slammer following face-off?'

I don't submit these puzzles but if I don't know an answer I fret about it for three weeks. Yes, I do need to get out more.

Jaye: for 16ac the working is 'large number' + 'participating in' + 'a' = 'settlement'. The intersection of 27a and 8d has I in both entries.

As so often happens, as soon as I'd posted I remembered an abbreviation from my school German. 13a and 9d followed swiftly. Only 7d still to understand.

ionacarr: thank you! I'm all straightened out now. My mistake was that I blindly believed the last part of post #16 in this thread, and somehow completely missed the correction in post #21. So I had the wrong letter in the first square of 8D, and the wrong letter in the second square of 16A.

Well done Novice for spotting the entry method so soon.

IonaCarr, SLAP can be suddenly, HOT can be violent. The whole : a big shot on goal in hockey.

Thanks gem and to again novice who saved me hours of going down blind alleyways leading nowhere. The jumble idea would have only got me so far.

Thanks Meursault - I'd got it into my head that the answer was SNAPSHOT (Chambers offers 'sudden' for SNAP as an adjective, so I assumed Sabre was stretching a point, as with OLE). Just as well I don't submit any more.

I have a full grid - that was a struggle.

I do have one question - if we have to replace all the entries in the NW/SE diagonal that are also in the theme word, with what do we replace the 'E's?

Regarding replacing E (23A) - I thought the same. Used the third E in the theme word just to make the diagonal correct. Perhaps somebody has explanation of why it should be this - that apart.