The Stickler Weekly 32 Solution

A few weeks ago an old Stickler clue turned up on the newsgroup, rec.puzzles.crosswords (rpc). The thread is here. The clue was: Treat containing cold centre is special (4-3). The solver had the answer CHO(C)-ICE, but wondered whether the phrasing of the wordplay was incorrect. The clue appears to ask for “C” inside a word for “treat”, but in fact ends up being “C” inside a word for “special”. I believe there are two ways to read it, made possible by the inclusion of the word “is”. I could say “under the table is a cat” or “a cat is under the table” – to my mind perfectly valid and normal speech and identical in their meaning. Don’t you agree? So, “containing cold centre is special” is equivalent to “special is containing cold centre” – it’s all in how you read it. Thankfully someone came up with the right interpretation and the original poster was fully accepting of the explanation. However, another person questioned the structure and claimed it was “crosswordese” (stuff only found in crosswords) and should be discouraged so that new people wouldn’t be put off by it. At first I was offended by the response, but realised the problem wasn’t crosswordese, but that the wordplay wasn’t considered mainstream. Surely most cryptic clues contain crosswordese of some kind, everything from dictionary-only abbreviations, incomplete sentences, clues that make no sense when read, and wordplay structures like A holds B that are never used in everyday language when defining or describing things. Get rid of crosswordese and there wouldn’t be much left.
I don’t use this “CHOC-ICE”-type structure very often, and if I do the clue hints for the puzzle will point to it, but I think it should be fine. After all, cryptic clue solving is all about interpretation and it’s the job of the solver to discover which way is the right way.