Crossword help, though I doubt anyone out there will be able to help

@emmasfriend 😐
Now I feel really dim!

@ninalanyon Crossword compilers often write three-part clues, but you need work out which part is which. The three are the "source code" as it were, a method hint, and the synonym for the answer.

They all have individual styles too, so though some of these instruction-clues may be fairly general they don't work for all.

So:


Three parts:
(1) "Some" is this compiler's hint that the answer is hidden within -
(2) the next bit of the text, to find -
(3) the synonym or definition for the last phrase.

The some is therefore the "men for centuries" to mean "adminster vigorously".



It is not as Emmasfriend suggests. Instead:
(1)"one may", for which-
(2)"questionably" hints this is an anagram we need "seek" for -
(3) the word for an "old farmer" - you also need remember to take the meanings of adjectives broadly.

'

The first I cracked, 1 Across as well, needs some national general knowledge, as it holds a definite British reference.


In British crosswords, "Engineers" often cites the Army's Royal Engineers regiment, so that immediately suggested "RE".

"Bagging"... Hmmm.
"Broken bulb debris"

Got it. 'Bagging' means the letters RE embrace an anagram ('broken') of "bulb", and the answer means "debris".

"RUBBLE" (R - ubbl - E).

'

17A had me puzzled for a while.


I knew "copper", and often other metallic elements' names, almost always mean the chemical symbol, "Cu" in this one. Just as letters, not as the element itself. That's a start. I could not solve the words crossing it so had no letters already there to help, and could not see where 'Cu' would fit.

Then I recalled the phrase "Cut in", meaning the 'interrupt' whose synonym we seek. Let's test it:

CU+/IN

Of course! Though now commonly replaced by the American word "can", the usual English word for the food container used to be "tin" (from the tin-plate[d steel] of its material).

There we are: CUT IN, with the 'T' from 'tin' taken by CUT.

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Try a crossword from another newspaper and I'd probably be stuck, because it takes a while, helped by later examining the answers, to learn an individual compiler's style.

The hardest I see regularly are those in the Radio Times. As this is a TV and radio listings publication, some of its very cryptic clues might be related to sports and entertainments. If so, it compounds the difficulty for me, as my knowledge of those subjects is very limited. Typically holding 40-50 words, I rarely solve more than about half a dozen!

@emmasfriend Correct for how to solve "enforce" but sorry, you've gone astray for the method to find "yeoman".

It's an anagram of "One may"; and crosswords tend to avoid slang as that may not be sufficiently widely known. Where a word is slang, the clue is sometimes annotated to say so.

See my longer reply to Ninanylon for how it works.
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Your "Yo man!" would work if the clue is something like:

"A very informal greeting, we hear, for old farmer."

"We hear" shows a spoken synonym for a possible "very informal greeting" sounds like the one we want for the "old farmer".

@rahulkrish34 Thank you!