The Stickler Weekly 78 Solution

Solvers may be totally capable of solving a crossword but not necessarily be able to explain their results. I believe it’s the haphazard way that most people learn about solving cryptic crosswords that creates an imperfect methodology, one that only gets found out when put to the test by someone new to the cryptic world. It’s imperfect because its been built up over time with inconsistent input from others and loads of assumptions that seem to stand repeated testing. As the average solver tends to cut their teeth on the same crossword every day or week, their view of the cryptic world is shaped to such an extent that moving beyond their first regular crossword may not be possible. It so much depends on the quality of the starting crossword – if it’s well-written then solving harder, well-written cryptics won’t be a giant leap as the fundamentals learnt at the early stage still apply – if it’s poorly-written such that not much has to be understood to find answers, then it’s unlikely the solver will be able to progress without significant help.
I was reminded last week that some things we take for granted, like how a sounds-like clue works, are in fact not as well understood as they should be. This probably comes about simply because a proper explanation was never given, just a couple of examples, leading to an incomplete picture of what’s really happening. In most cases sounds-like clues end up with two terms that sound alike, but how the indicator is applied is in most cases irrelevant as the length of the answer and the intersecting letters dictate what’s entered. In this Stickler Weekly’s 26-down, “TWO” and “TOO” had to be assessed and only one is right according to the structure of the clue. As “outspoken” can only act on “overly”, this must be the wordplay, and the rest (“Pair”) must be the definition leading to “TWO” as the only viable answer.