Listen With Others

Eighteen months ago, Apt’s first Listener had Hofstadter’s Law as its theme. This basically says that things take longer than you think, even when you take that into account. I think some Listeners fall into that category for me. This week, Apt had the honour of providing first Listener of the year.

Apt chose to slot an extra word into each clue, the first letters of those in the acrosses giving a phrase from a play and some of those in the downs giving definitions of new entries which needed to appear in the grid.

Apt’s clues were fairly forgiving, and the grid was completed in shorter than average time. My favourite was probably 34ac Fly [economy], or part of “jet-set” section (6) which was a simple hidden TSETSE. Actually, ‘simple’ didn’t describe it for me, since it completely passed me by on first reading. Perhaps it was the quotation marks that boggled me, since 5dn Strike [tendentious] passage from translation (4) gave me no such problem.

The unclued entries were easy to complete, and together with the first letters of the extra across words gave “All debts are cleared BETWEEN YOU AND I” from Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice. I won’t say that it is top of my pet hates, but ‘between you and I’ instead of ‘between you and me’ is pretty high on the list.

Once I had dispensed with the extra down words that were definitons of words revealed by changing all the Is in the grid to MEs, the first letters of the remaining extra words gave R P R T C E E O R I H C O N Y. ‘Incorrect hopery’ was my first guess, and HYPERCORRECTION was second — or was it third, which was lucky because I’d never heard of the word before.

Thanks to Apt for a gentle introduction to the year. Probably got it wrong!

For those of you who may have been wondering what is top of my list of pet hates, it’s people who, normally in text messages, use ‘should of’ instead of ‘should have’, as in “I should of known better”!