| MANSPLAIN (9) (ended 2 days, 17 hours ago) |
A guy's vehicle, say, to slowly but surely explain something as though you've never really learned anything in your life ever and need this spelled out point by excruciating point and at no point letting you interject to say that you know the basics or (heavens forbid) the entirety of the subject, or worse even taking advantage of that interjection to reexplain something even more, because there's no way you could ever know it if he didn't break it down to the molecular (if not atomic!) level for you (9) |
So this is a cryptic clue, right? What that means is that we've got a definition and some wordplay, and notably the definition _has_ to be at one end or the other. So if we break it down, we can sort of attack it from both angles and see which side seems more likely - "a guy's vehicle", while possibly a definition here, would leave so much for the wordplay that it seems ridiculous, and also, that's a pretty broad definiton, especially here, where it's not in the middle of a full crossword so we could at least attack it later after getting a few crossings (crossings are the letters you get after finding some of the words that "cross" this one). Now, the word "say" might jump out to us here - that's a good eye! It's what's called a "homophone indicator", which means it alerts us that we want something that sounds like something near it. In this case, we might think that "vehicle" could be "plane" - that's a promising start given that can be spelled a few different ways. If that's the case, that suggests that the bit before it, "a guy's", is also part of the wordplay. We could try something like "his" but that doesn't really lead us anywhere. But hear me out - what if it's _also_ part of the homophone? In that case, it could be "man's plain", which we'll note has the correct enumer- oh my gosh I almost forgot to explain what the number at the end is! See that (9)? That means that our answer will be 9 letters long, and will specifically be a single word (if it were two words, like "quiet down" that'd be enumerated (5 4) - see how the numbers match the lengths of each word in order?). Okay, so, putting that all together, we get MANSPLAIN, our answer! Let me know if you need any more clues explained! |
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