Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivriniel
This one,  oh my god - wait -
'sounds like u' Mi - (where's the 'r') -u- 'half-hearted eddy' (oh my god - that's a double leap 'vortex' 'half-hearted' 'vor'. And spirit, of course, makes sense.
I would have thought
A sound to annexe you and a half-hearted eddy, the music of Elvish Spirit. |
I
love Elvish Spirit as a straight clue for Miruvor! That's perhaps an example of the straight clue being slightly cryptic - as it could be spirit as in
fea or someone's spirit/personality, but it actually means alcoholic spirit. Like spanner or butter or flower.
Mount is another one we've had fun with in the past as a 'straight part of the clue.' It can sometimes mean a mountain (like Mount Doom), but we've also used it to mean a horse (someone's 'mount' is their horse (they mount it to ride it)).
About
annexes - often I'd have said 'joins' or 'fuses with,' but the other fun thing about writing cryptic clues is trying to make the clue sentence make some kind of crazy sense - so if an alien (in this case ET of the Steven Spielberg film) is annexing ten valleys, it sounds like he's invading them and trying to colonise some land).
'Annexed' has sometimes been used in Real World history, I think, when one country has colonised a neighbouring one.
Swallows was a new one that Galadriel55 taught me - when one word or set of letters swallows or completely surrounds another. (Swallows, runs back, returns, joins etc are usually words telling you what to do with the letters, not part of the letters themselves, but they might not always be).
And occasionally we have clues Tolkien-themed but not of Middle-earth. Galadriel did a fantastic one (a few pages back, I think, but not too many), in which each answer was one of J R R Tolkien's family. I once wrote a clue where the straight part was 'hamlet' (small village), but the answer wasn't a Shire or Bree or otherwise Middle-earth village, but Sarehole, where Tolkien and his brother spent a substantial part of their early childhood (which is documented in Humphrey Carpenter's biography and well-known in Tolkien-lore). I have also used both The Eagle And Child and its nickname The Bird And Baby as passwords.