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wigwam

8th July 2019, 19:15
Struggling to parse 13a, final one for me to understand, any help appreciated.

Got the theme and method of scrambling, quite a few new words for me here, still in the process of upgrading to harder cryptics. Been a nice few weeks of listeners to get into, really, finished a few and got a strong foothold in others.

Quite sure we'll get one soon I can't even start...
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malone

8th July 2019, 19:22
Wigwam, my parsing is sometimes dodgy, but here goes...

The first word in the clue is extra. The first two letters of your answer = have, then 'succeeded', abbreviation, then a three letter word for 'a' (£5 a head, same as £5 ...head'). Star is the definition.
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wigwam

8th July 2019, 20:01
Yeah, clocked the extra word and had the answer, figured the succeeded part but didn't see have as the first two, new to me.

Three letter word as 'a' instead of 'with' makes a lot more sense as that's what I was trying to shoehorn.. Doh!

Thank you, can sleep soundly now.
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smellyharry

8th July 2019, 20:29
I’m with smithsax, thought the endgame was borderline unfair as too difficult to find. Am intrigued by Malone’s comment. I put just about every combination of the words in the quote into google on friday night and got nothing. I guarantee that the first 4 words were not producing the answer at that point. I didn’t use quotation marks - I don’t know if that makes the difference? Maybe that is the learning point?

I don’t know if anyone knows how google works as to whether the quotation marks make a difference, whether several thousand listener solvers searching over the last few days would make a differences to what google returns or how else this would be?
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malone

8th July 2019, 20:46
Smellyharry, I learned the hard way - I didn't use the quotation marks a few weeks ago, got nowhere then and someone here then put me straight!
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smithsax

8th July 2019, 21:33
The significance of quotation marks is that google will search for everything within them as a complete single string. If something significant like the title word is missing then it returns nothing. Without quotation marks each word is searched for separately and returns are based on the numbers of hits for individual words and any of their combinations.
So if you search for a phrase and an author without the quotes you can get loads of irrelevant hits.
My problem was I only used quotation marks which contained an incomplete string of words - hence the miss.
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smellyharry

9th July 2019, 08:40
Thank you both, this is going to save me a ton of time on future puzzles I suspect. Most helpful.
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0pt0

9th July 2019, 16:28
Eventually found the quotation, so jumbles now resolved, but I still cannot parse 4 down. I have TOE? Any hints appreciated.
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malone

9th July 2019, 16:44
There's a three-letter 'writer of mysteries' with 'ordinary' inside. The definition is the last four words.
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0pt0

9th July 2019, 16:53
Many thanks Malone. I had not heard of that writer, but I have now.
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