Today’s post is different – instead of introducing a new category of clues, this post will give you all a mental workout. Fear not: all the clues given here use only the cluing techniques you have seen so far. To help you, I shall provide their clue-type in a comment at the bottom of this post. Take a stab at these clues before you look at the comment. Think of this post as a mid-term review 🙂 I shall post all answers by this weekend.
Please note: Setters frequently use punctuation marks to mislead solvers. You would be well advised to ignore commas, hyphens, etc. Also, British stands for B or BR and Sailor usually stands for AB (for Able Bodied Seaman). And a ? tells you to look for an example, not a synonym.
1) Anglesey spending year struggling to become member of African Union (7)
2) The best riders keep pace (6)
3) A minion’s tortured complaint (8)
4) Out-of-date tricorne? (3,3)
5) Supports British experts (6)
6) Go off around hill (3)
7) Dustin Hoffman film mentioned people in Africa (5)
8) Exercise and Indian drink proposed by Spooner (3,3)
1) The deletion (with an anagram of the remaining letters)
2) The “embedded” clue
3) Anagram
4) Double Definition
5) Charade
6) Reversal
7) The “audio” clue
8) Spoonerism
Here are the answers to the above 8 clues:
1) Anglesey spending year struggling to become member of African Union (7)
This is a deletion with an anagram thrown in. And so we have an Anagram of (ANGLESEY – Y) = SENEGAL
2) The best riders keep pace (6)
The answer is embedded in this clue and it means pace, which is STRIDE
3) A minion’s tortured complaint (8)
This is a straight-forward anagram (of a minion’s) that yields INSOMNIA
4) Out-of-date tricorne? (3,3)
A DD clue; and the answer is OLD HAT
5) Supports British experts (6)
A charade that means supports; and we get our answer from BR + ACES
6) Go off around hill (3)
A reversal type clue. To go off is to rot. And going backwards we get TOR, which means a hill.
7) Dustin Hoffman film mentioned people in Africa (5)
‘Mentioned’ indicates an “audio” clue and so when we say it aloud, we will hear the name of a popular Dustin Hoffman movie but the answer of 5 letters is the name of a people in Africa which is TUTSI (the movie was Tootsie)
8) Exercise and Indian drink proposed by Spooner (3,3)
This clue contains a spoonerism. The answer is the name of an exercise / martial art. In the good Prof Spooner’s hands (or is it mouth?) this would sound like an Indian drink. The answer is TAI CHI, the Indian drink being CHAI TEA.