If I had it all to do over again, I probably wouldn’t have let abbreviations and partials into the Ubercross C.
You can give cryptic clues to those (and I did), but an answer like DECL. or A GUN (“Son of ___!”) isn’t as rewarding an answer as a full word like DECK or STUN. Acronyms like NASA and NAACP are sparkly enough, but I look at those partials and just think, “You were afraid, T! Afraid of not being able to finish without them!”
In any case, straying from the dictionary in that way meant that I had a few answers that were all consonants or all vowels. We’ve already covered alternating clues, the ones that take every other letter out of a string, like getting CATS out of “chastise.” These are similar, but the letters they take out are either all consonants or all vowels…
Marty
stops
for famous tough guy (2.,1)—MR. TLook at “Smelly Egg”
vocals transcribed
(3)—EYE
Or at least all potential vowels. (I’m not exactly sure which side the “y” comes down on in EYE, but it’s definitely a vowel in “Smelly,” so it works.)
Consonants are “stops,” and vowels are sometimes called “vocals.” Besides those two synonyms, however, it can be a challenge to come up with a good indicator for this type of clue that doesn’t give the game away:
Openmouthed
at hazards for car club (3)—AAA
And some strings that seem like they’d be ideal for this sort of thing, like RHYTHMS or MR. MXYZPTLYK, are surprisingly difficult to “vocalize.”
There’s one more vowel-related trick, though, that can be useful for really long answers, the kind you’d only use in a ridiculously big crossword puzzle: the changed-vowel clue. I used it only once in the Ubercross C, so I think of it as a weapon of last resort. The following example is not the one I used, but it’ll give you the idea.
Tale of tense marital dialogue
with altered vocals:
“Wahoos’ fraud! Five are gone, wily foe!” (3’1,6,2,8,5?)—WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
I’m not pretending the “dialogue” here has a lot of surface sense, but one can imagine it as a poorly translated argument in a foreign film.
Are there any other ways to “filter” a long string into a shorter answer? Well, there are special qualities that certain letters share beyond whether they’re vowels or consonants. The four letters A, C, G, and T are tags for DNA, though they don’t spell much (aside from the DNA-focused movie Gattaca, which used their letters on purpose). The letters A, B, C, D, and F are grades; A-G are musical notes; and A, H, I, M, O, T, U, W, X, and Y are mirror images of themselves.
But really, you’re better off treating these qualities as the basis for a letter bank than trying to pull them out of a longer string:
Notes
coffee variety (5)—DECAFFeature widely used in Twitter
DNA
(2-3)—AT-TAG (@)
I drifted into talking about letter banks again, didn’t I? That happens all the time at parties.