Quick Cryptic 2718 by Joker

An &lit clue, as the whole of the clue is both the definition and the answer.

I biffed this one, not knowing of a composer called Hart. The first Google hit for “Hart composer” is Lorenz Hart, half of the Rodgers & Hart team that wrote multiple Broadway hits, but he doesn’t quite work because he was the librettist: he wrote the words, not the music.

Doing more digging, the only composer called Hart I can find who doesn’t violate the “no living people” rule is James Hart, 1647-1718. But that seems unfeasibly obscure for the Quick Cryptic, so I guess I just don’t know what was in Joker’s mind here.

Our second &lit in a row.

A word that I knew existed, but couldn’t confidently have defined.

Edit: I didn’t even notice the typo here during the “solve & blog” process. But I’m confident that’s all it is: for “small” in the clue above read “smell”.

“I rate this as excellent” is a close relative of “This is assessed as excellent”. There’s probably a better example (the subjects and objects of the verbs don’t correspond in that example), but it’s close enough for me.

You have to avoid the temptation to define ‘mitten’ as ‘glove in cold season’.

‘Tackling’ is obviously being used as the containment indicator here, but I’m struggling to come up with a usage where “to tackle” could mean “to contain” or “to include”. Anyone?

1) “That was a mean thing to do.” 2) “The mean value is…” 3) “But what does this gesture mean?”

Conic sections are the curved shapes you get when a plane cuts through a cone: ellipses, parabolas and hyperbolas (I looked it up). I last encountered these in O-level maths in 1984, and about the only thing I remembered is that a circle is just a special case of an ellipse.

The MOT test is the British annual test for roadworthiness of vehicles over a certain age: it was named after the Ministry Of Transport, which no longer exists, but the name stuck.

kind = type = style.