Crossword 778 answers and explanations

By David Tossman In Cryptic Crosswords

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Why are crossword setters and headline writers like English learners in Moscow? Because they all have an unreliable grip on articles. Russian, like all Slavic languages I'm told, simply doesn't have articles, so native speakers, having learnt and become otherwise quite fluent in English, often have difficulty with articles and so skip them. “Is good idea.” One of the trickier conventions in crossword clues is that articles, particularly a and an, are arbitrarily significant or not, a nice little ambiguity to keep the brain churning. Thus some clues read like normal ...

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