A cross word

[lnr]

At work there's a small bunch of us who gather at coffee time in the morning (and indeed tea time in the afternoon - though I less often join them for that) to do crosswords. As it's quite a large group we tend to print out six copies of each, and one person fills in the answers while we all join in working them out. Mostly we do the Guardian Cryptic, resorting to the Times Club Monthly and Guardian Genius only in desperation. And we've been working our way through the back catalogue too, since they're available online.

This morning's crossword is by Quantum, Guardian number 22,284 and is about 10 years old. So when we got down to the last clue and we're just a bit stumped as to *why* exactly the answer is correct we can't turn to fifteensquared.com for the solution for a change. The clue is:

Say I'll be in the road or at sea (6)

So we came up with an answer of "island" - it fits the definition "in the road or at sea", fits the crossing letters, and if you say "I'll" it sounds like "isle" which is the first part, but we just can't get the "and" bit to come out. We've confirmed it's the right answer (the solutions are online) but it's really bugging us :)

Anyone want to put us out of our misery?

Comments

[sparrowsion]

Traffic island? The "Say I" is a bit misleading in that case.

[ylla.livejournal.com]

I want it to be something to do with 'be' and 'is land', but can't get there!

[ms-cataclysm.livejournal.com]

I don't think that there's anything there that you're not getting. You could argue that the word "be" indicates something that is an isle, rather than "isle" itself but it's a bit thin. I tested this on my husband who likes to do this crossword as fast as possible and he hadn't even noticed the slight clumsiness of the clue -it may be that with your more thoughtful group approach that you've noticed something that just slid past other solvers.

[livejournal.livejournal.com]

Hello! Your entry got to top-25 of the most popular entries in LiveJournal!
Learn more about LiveJournal Ratings in FAQ (https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=303).

[lnr]

We do tend to like to thoroughly justify each answer, and find it a bit disatisfying if we know it's right but can't work out the cryptic part properly. I'm one of the weaker solvers myself, so often ask people to explain clues :)

Astonishingly cross-posting this to Facebook and Twitter and sending the link to the crossword folk at work has got this post up to number 7 in today's most popular Livejournal posts. I think this says a lot about the popularity of LJ of late!

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

I think that's probably it too, but I don't find it terribly satisfactory.

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

I'll be = I'll arrive = I'll land?