1A: I must apologize for being American! It won't happen again
3D: I think "umps" is more common in day-to-day speech. Like, everyone would understand "umpires," but it just sounds more natural to say "umps." I guess being American did happen again!
1D: To me, "rad" and "neat-o" are in the same register and, more or less, from the same time period: I wouldn't call them specific to the young. I much more identify them with the '70's.
5A: So the parsing for this is Banishes = ousts; tilts = jousts; "delayed" means start "jousts" after the first letter I acknowledge that the specific meaning of tilts is not common, but we still use it in phrases like to go full tilt
E Ang 🤓6:29 · 2024-01-09T12:01:30.344Z
Took my time with this today lol - but I do have to say 1A was a pretty inspired clue. The use of 'spirit' and 'reanimating' together threw me off for ages, so I didn't catch the actual definition. Great stuff as always. FWiW, I use British English most of the time myself, but don't mind American English in crosswords (given that I do the NYT daily, I kinda expect it - and for a lot of constructors to be American, anyway).
Thanks! I am really pleased with 1a as well. I take the same approach to the British / American English question. I'm American, so I'm going to use the spellings / language that I am comfortable with. I think the "Britishness" of some Cryptics can be a barrier to people who would really like the puzzle type otherwise. If they can wet their feet with more "American" cryptics and then move to the British ones, great. Or we can just develop a really strong, robust American Cryptic Scene!