Battled through Saturday’s Araucaria from the Guardian - when I say battled, the main problem was with not knowing that ‘trope‘ is a figure of speech. Even with my clever-clever masters’ degree in Applied Linguistics I had never heard of a trope. So this clearly demonstrates once again that cryptic crosswords are much easier than standard puzzles. Given the crytic clue it became clear that there the word had to exist.Well the clue was ‘River reduced into drink (figure of speech) … ‘ - what else could it be?

For my favourite clue (and the one that made us slightly ill), look at the ‘favourite clues’ section!