When your indicator is a verb, watch your tenses.
The wordplay part of a cryptic clue usually has two components: the word that indicates what you need to do to solve the clue (the “indicator”) and the word or words that you need to do it to (the “fodder”). Here’s an anagram clue as an example:
Making the word “sister” crazy – anagramming it – gives you the solution: “resist.”
So far so good. The issue comes in with the fact that the indicator needs to serve double duty:
It has to indicate what kind of clue you’re dealing with while at the same time giving a good, clean surface sense.
In the clue above, the indicator word “crazy” achieves both purposes, but it’s not always that easy.
Consider this anagram clue:
Exponential calculation involves algorithm (9)
You don’t need to know anything about math to see that the surface sense here communicates a complete idea, so our surface sense is fine.
The issue is what happens when we isolate just the cryptic half of the clue:
involves algorithm
While it’s true that you can scramble the letters ALGORITHM into a solution – “logarithm” – that’s not what the clue is telling you to do here. In the present tense, “involves” just means “includes” – there’s no actual indication of anagramming.
But watch what happens when we put the verb into the past tense:
Exponential calculation involved algorithm (9)
Here, “involved” still works as a verb in the whole clue, maintaining the surface sense. At the same time, though, when we isolate the wordplay half of the clue:
involved algorithm
… “involved” doesn’t act as a verb anymore, but as an adjective describing the noun “algorithm”. When you describe something as “involved,” you’re saying that (according to Merriam-Webster) it “has many parts or aspects that are usually interrelated.” In this sense of the word, “involved” easily acts as an anagram indicator.
So with indicator verbs, tense matters.
Another way that verb tenses get tricky in cryptic cluing is making sure the definition and wordplay halves of the clue match. Consider this one:
“In France, the pain sucks the life out of you”
This clue doesn’t work. The intended solution is LE + ACHES, but “In France, the pain” gives you LE + ACHE — there is no S at the end.
To work properly, the clue should be:
“In France, the pains sucks the life out of you”
… which gives you LE + ACHES. But to do this both “aches” and “leaches” have to end with an -S (in other words, either a plural noun or a third-person singular verb).
While it is true that “pains suck” and “pain sucks,” but there is no way to make the two words “pains sucks” work together grammatically.
In this situation, my best advice would be to try to clue the word some other way.
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