HAND, as we have seen, often clues a manual worker of some kind, but not always, because most of us have TWO hands - left (L) and (R), so NO HANDS means removing all the Ls and Rs from a word, WITH ONE HAND means removing all but one of the Ls and Rs, CHANGING HANDS means either that the R in the word is swapped for an L (or vice versa), or if the word has both an L and an R in it, that they swap places, and WITH BOTH HANDS means you have to insert both L and R into the word somewhere.
I loved this, but I have discovered a small issue.
4a and 3d both have two potential solutions. ANGEL and ANGER are both reasonable solutions for 4a, YOLKS and YORKS are both reasonable solutions for 3d.
Might be similar to how “Royal returned beer (5)” could be LAGER or REGAL. Difficult to keep these ones unique.
Though, to be fair, "for" in 3d would probably have clued me in if I hadn't already placed the L for 4a.
Sally 🤓1:47 · 2025-04-16T07:14:48.915Z
Isn't that part of the fun of crosswords? That there can be more than one answer until the correct one is confirmed by a word that crosses it?
Good catch, Connor. Yes, I was relying on the FOR in 3 down, but it is way too ambiguous and it's a problem that the ambiguous clues intersect on the problematic letter.
Fun and educational as always, thank you! Got to the same place as @ConnorD — still trying to notice the fine distinctions of "for" and "to" and so on to know which clue half is definition and which is wordplay.