Listen With Others

Yes folks, you guessed it … another setter’s debut, this time from Danda. Two Little Words starts off with just two little sentences in the preamble, so, unless it’s got something tricky up its sleeve, we might be on for an easy week. The only slight concern was that the seven unclued entries were equally divided between two types! It wasn’t rocket science to reckon that one (or more) would fit both types!

I must confess that it didn’t start off too well, with just a dozen or so solved in my first pass through the clues, taking about 20 minutes. After that, however, everything sped up nicely, and the grid was finished in well under two hours. I visited a couple of blind alleys! The first was thinking that the unclued entry in column 2 must be INNOCENT. The other was after I saw CHEAP in row 6 and, being such a happy soul, thought CHEERFUL would go nicely with it. How tawdry that the hidden phrase was CHEAP AND NASTY!

So the unclued entries turned out to be: SHODDY, LOVELY, SIXPENNY, INEXPENSIVE, INDECENT, A DIME A DOZEN and NAUSEOUS. It wasn’t initially obvious exactly how the seven entries were allocated to the two parts of the phrase. It needed Chambers to come to the rescue. It shows that ‘shoddy’ is “cheap and nasty”, and ‘lovely’ fits one of the definitions under nasty: “very good (esp US slang)“. So the allocation of unclued entries is as follows:

 
A nice bit of fun then from Danda, and just the question of whether to highlight ‘cheap and nasty’ in the grid!