Crossword Help Forum
Forum Rules

Not all crossword people are over 70.
Films have been made since 2000.
Modern songs are not all from the 60's and 70's.
Not everyone is a religious expert.
Latin and greek have not been taught in all schools for many years.
The UK includes areas outside of the South East.
There are other accents apart from Cockney.
London is not the only city in the UK to have areas or parts.
Key to loud military toff with academy degree is just one collection of poor excuses for a clue.
1930's jazz is not particularly well known outside of a certain demographic.
Plants are lovely but there are almost 400000 species so, have a heart.

Well said.
PS I like Setters (especially Gordon Setters ! )

Excellent post, Tango!

I'll bear these points in mind when I set PR!
Would be good to have you back, Tango.

You know when you've been Tango'd!

Oh and...

There really are too many species of bird (and particularly ducks) for a normal person to cope with.

Ditto fish

The French. Spanish ladies. A German. Surely you can come up with something more interesting if your clue runs out of steam?

"Bloke briefly in a US city consuming hot fish" (7) and it's myriad friends are not whole clues. It results in a collection of random letters so that ONLY once you have a few others put in you can guess the answer.

Let's do this.

A US city is clearly "ny" (there are only a couple of thousand to choose from but an abbreviation of New York is clearly the outstanding candidate).

"Cov" absolutely must be a brief bloke, It couldn't be me mat, ma, hi, m, or any other of the 10,000 other possibilities I can think of since well, we are living in 1927 after all.

Oh look I might have an h and I guess that "a" is allowed since he put one in the clue.

So I have noychav. Wow yes its a fish!!!!!
I guess.... Anchovy. Right.

Dear Solvers

Several of the points are well made, and I would like to think that I try to avoid at least some of those pitfalls. A particular dislike of mine which I would add to the list is 'man' (or 'little man') for ED, NED, BILL, TED, SID...et AL.

However, I would also add a plea of behalf of setters. I don't think that most of us mind the discussion of a few individual clues in our prize crosswords which are still open for entries (I certainly don't), but please don't discuss the denouements of themed puzzles which are still 'live'. We spend days, and typically weeks, constructing themed puzzles (often without any financial reward whatsoever) and to see the endgame given away on a public forum makes us wonder why we bothered. The effect is heightened when this happens on the same day that the puzzle is published, even though the closing date is a week or two away and there is still plenty of time for a solver to reappraise the problem prior to seeking assistance. Thank you.

To avoid confusion.

There has been no reference to a themed puzzle here in this thread, I assume you mean more generally.

You are absolutely correct.

And let me add that as a setter I reckon that I find poor clues, particularly those with faulty syntax in the wordplay, at least as annoying as you do!

Nice to hear that.

A particular bugbear of mine is the missing letter. Seems to me that a clue must be "whole".

We had the three laws of robotics, here are my personal three laws of crosswords!

A reasonably educated adult of any age should be able to solve the clue without needing extra letters from other clues or resorting to clearly specialist knowledge.

The clue must have one and only one valid answer.

No letters in the answer must be unaccounted for and no extraneous letters should be suggested by the clue.