3's A Crowd-Pleaser
6 March, 2012
Making crosswords for a crust, you soon twig that the most recurring batch of words will be the shortest – those piddly threes like ERA and ADO and SKI and EMU. You know them well, as they keep cropping up.
By the same token, clueing these beggars can be tough, as the anagram approach is usually out, and far too many angles have already been tried. Hence a nifty clue, like the one in today’s Times, caught my eye. The answer, as you guessed, had three letters, and the clue read this way:
Not the first to unlock cage
The answer is PEN, being OPEN minus O to make cage. Neat, sweat and the impetus of this week’s Storm. Pick any three-letter word you like, and make an ab-fab clue. Looking back over the best-clue archive, I found these pearls:
Eggs fit for Croesus? = ROE
Line delivered in sarcasm = ARC
A hollow victory makes one bristle = AWN
Early bird rejecting a worm, oddly = MOA
Beautiful stuff, but can you match it? Doesn’t matter if two players choose the same word, as the clue angle will most likely differ. To add a pinch of salt to the contest, let’s set up the clues as things to solve. Just use your byline, plus the clue number, so we can keep track of the influx. For example, to get your engines purring:
DA1: President shakes leg for love
DA2: Drag diametrically away from Orient?
DA3: Minor slash
Let’s skip proper nouns and other names, keeping our focus on words only. Feel free to solve each other’s offerings as we wend, and let’s all put forward our best three 3s by ale o’clock on Thursday. Wit and lol will see a lot of fun.
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