Cryptic Étude: Homophones

Homophone clues rely on words that sound alike but may be spelled differently—think ‘fare’ and ‘fair’ or even ‘title’ and ‘tidal.’ In cryptics, you can spot homophone clues by their sound-oriented language: ‘audibly,’ ‘heard,’ ‘spoken,’ ‘on the radio’, ‘broadcast’, etc. Like Spoonerisms, however, homophones require an extra step. In addition to the definition (at one end or the other) and the wordplay indicator (here, something referring to sound or speech), there is the fodder-the words that you need to play with to get to the answer. As with Spoonerisms, homophone clues require you to think of synonyms of the fodder word or phrase in the clue to order for you to find the correct homophone answer. For example, take this clue from one of my earlier puzzles: Little Man Zed recited “Capital Near the Oregon Trail” (5). So, we can ignore the punctuation. And we know that the definition is going to be on either end of the clue. When we see the word “recited” that tells us we might be dealing with a homophone clue and, if we are, the homophone word fodder is on one side of “recited” and the definition is on the other. The geography reference seems to be far more specific and more likely to be a definition than “Liitle Man Zed.” With a limited number of state capitals in that part of the US, the solver will soon likely find Boise, which is pronounced “Boy-zee” or, put another way, Little Man Zed. Please note that this puzzle is 100% homophone clues. Some of the homophone indicators are at the beginning, some are in the middle, and some are at the end. They will be oral or auditory themed clues or phrases.