By David Astle
Lynne Cairncross, this masthead’s puzzle editor, queried my streaky bacon. Her problem was the streaky bit. In bacon terms, streaky means ribboned with fat. No question on that front. Where the trouble started was the vernacular.
If you don’t know how a cryptic clue works, let me explain. As a phrase, streaky bacon has charade potential, the breakfast option divided into chunks. Charades treat words as verbal necklaces, where each bead is defined in sequence. Bacon, say, I defined as a painter, while streaky equated to lucky. Hence my clue: Fortunate painter gets some breakfast, perhaps (7,5).
There’s always more to learn when it comes to words.Credit: Jo Gay
A tidy charade, casting each “bead” in a new light, all the better to mislead the solver. Except the clue never ran. The issue was streaky, prompting Lynne at proof phase to write, “Just not sure that streaky here is a match for fortunate. You have a lucky streak, but …”
Initially, I thought she was joking. Surely streaky means lucky. Doesn’t everyone know that? If you crack Wordle in one move – what I call a whole-in-one – you’re streaky. Car spot outside the venue? Streaky. Score a scratchie win? Streaky. No ifs or buts: streaky and lucky are the same.
In July, for instance, I’d added to Broede Carmody’s feature about taboo words in parliament, where dill and patsy are off the menu. Bastard too, urging me to defend its innocence: “Some of my friends are bastards in the best kind of way. Be they old bastards, streaky bastards, ungrateful bastards.” No queries arose. No hair-pulling. The episode confirmed my belief that every reader knew the streaky I knew.
Convinced, I hit the Macquarie, only to trigger a chill in my gut. There, streaky means marked by streaks (like that bacon), or varying in quality. In Green’s Dictionary of Slang, streaky is defined as irascible or patchy. No hint of lucky.
Aside from hair, or bacon, or naked interlopers, the other common streak is lightning, evoking the flashy iffiness of luck.
Slowly my life began to vanish before my eyes, my rugby years, every putt-putt game, that boxed trifecta in 1982. How could streaky do this to me? People, where did our complicity go? Still numb, I surfed the web for snippets, informal headlines made to extinguish the gaslights. Yet once I excluded Streaky Bay from my terms, the vertigo only worsened. Rihanna’s hair stylist, apparently, is doing “streaky highlights for summer”. While cucumber slices, I learnt, are ideal for cleaning streaky mirrors.
Soon my quest reached William O’Rourke, NZ’s new bowling speedster, who admitted to ESPNcricinfo: “I’ve been pretty streaky this season …” Aha, the smoking gun! But then I clicked the link to read the quote’s extension: “… pretty hot and cold with the ball”.
Historically, streak and stroke are cousins. Both derive from Old English, where strica is a line of motion, arising from the strig- stem of strigil, the Roman scraper used to stroke water from a bather’s skin. Aside from hair, or bacon, or naked interlopers, the other common streak is lightning, evoking the flashy iffiness of luck. Arguably, if a stroke of luck is sustained it becomes a lucky streak, yet no official glossary supported that final adjectival step of streaky.
I’d lucked out, in a bad way. Lynne was right, and my adolescent dialect wrong. Clearly that streaky breakfast at 10-down demanded a fresh serving. Hence, my redrafted clue: Philosopher after hot and cold breakfast option, perhaps (7,5) Blushes spared, bacon saved, I’m now looking sideways at every other word I presume to know.