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You have got to be rather smart to solve a cryptic crossword, you have been told. Haven’t you? Well, that’s true only in a demoralising sense. You see, smartness is not something that you have to be necessarily born with and otherwise doomed to survive without. Like bicycling, walking, cutting a vegetable, solving a rubik’s cube, writing or typing, smartness is just a proficiency or skill we develop with respect to a particular task. And you can substitute cryptic crosswords for any of the aforementioned everyday tasks and that sentence would still be true!
Was the above clue fun to solve? Did you get a kick out of understanding how to work out the answer to a cryptic crossword clue? Did you enjoy being given a random sentence that ultimately leads to a completely unexpected but totally decipherable answer? Do you feel like you could use some help to guide you towards the answer for each of the 20-30 clues that usually bamboozle you in each puzzle? Well, look no further!
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The Hindu Cryptic #13300 | Afterdark | 27 Across
Clue explained:
Commercial earnings? Try to change sides cleverly (8) CLUE:
: abbreviation, substitution Clue types
: cleverly Definition
: AnswerADROITLY
We need an 8-letter word here that means ‘cleverly’.
Another word for ‘commercial’ is “advertisement”, an abbreviation for which is AD.
Another phrase for ‘earnings’ is “Return On Investment”, which can be abbreviated as ROI.
From the fodder ‘try’, we literally get the letters TRY.
“Left” and “Right” are examples of the two ‘sides’. They are abbreviated as L and R respectively. So, ‘change sides’ is an instruction that we must substitute the L for the R in TRY, and make it TLY.
Altogether, that spells ADROITLY, our 8-letter meaning ‘cleverly’!
