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My query concerns the use of a capital letter In the above crossword number 7 for the current year 2020.
6d is: Shows mercy to Josh trapped in dish (5,4) I have an answer which is the name of a dish but the second word is in fact a verb which relates to josh with small j and not capital J which surely is someone's name.

Do the rules of crossword compiling permit this kind of deception or has the compiler broken a rule in an attempt to disguise what otherwise may be too easy a clue otherwise?

Thanks

mop

Rules exist to a point but Setters do have the job of trying ti make our life a little harder.

Typo * to

Hi, mop,

This is a tricky one, and my impression is that different setters follow different conventions. It would not be acceptable to use lower case where the usual meaning would demand upper case. For example, it would not be acceptable to use “will” to hint at Shakespeare. The clue would have to capitalise as “Will”.

Some setters will use a capital letter where the clue uses an abbreviation. For example, in this week’s Listener Crossword, one clue uses “King” to indicate the abbreviation R for rex (lower case in Chambers), which is translated in Chambers as “King” (upper case). Other setters have no problem in using “king” (lower case) to indicate R.

In your clue, most setters would not object to the misleading capitalisation of “Josh”, but some would.

Hope this helps.

The convention in puzzles where strict standards of clueing are applied is that using a lower-case letter to start a word which must be interpreted by the solver as a proper noun (eg eve when you mean Eve) is a no-no, whilst the reverse - using an initial capital for a common noun (eg Josh when you mean josh) in a place where capitalization is not otherwise required - is considered undesirable but acceptable. The latter is usually justified by an argument along the lines of "The name Eve can never legitimately be seen written as 'eve', but the verb josh can on occasion legitimately be seen written as 'Josh', eg at the start of a sentence." Of course, getting the ambiguous word to the start of a sentence solves the problems, but is not always possible.

As wintonian says, when it comes to abbreviations the rules go out of the window. 'R' is an abbreviation for River on maps (not 'river') and 'Rd' for Road (in addresses), but 'river' and 'road' are universally accepted. Oddly, the use of 'Stokes' in the middle of a clue to indicate S might raise a few eyebrows (the abbreviation is for 'stokes'), but it's actually 'less wrong' that king, queen, rector or river=R.

Thanks to all for the comments and thanks specifically to Spoffy for this particularly comprehensive explanation.

It is what it is, as they say, and I think I can regard the matter as closed now to save others from having to take the trouble of further replies

mop