EV1666
Drop by proXimal
Setter’s Blog
Dropped letters give THE GREAT PLAGUE and ANNUS MIRABILIS, indicating the year 1666; APPLE drops in its column onto the head of ISAAC NEWTON.
When I saw EV1666 was coming up, it seemed ripe for bagging as a slot for one of my puzzles based on the puzzle number. The Inquisitor hit puzzle 1666 a couple of years ago, I remembered, and a quick check confirmed that their theme was the Great Fire of London. Not wanting to repeat that, I did some research on the year and came across the phrase ANNUS MIRABILIS which has applied to several different years including 1666. I have a thing about using Latin phrases in puzzles, as they are less open for solvers to guess using word pattern matching and so the theme can often remain hidden for longer. I thought I needed some other event to pinpoint exactly which ‘annus mirabilis’ was being referenced – THE GREAT PLAGUE has the same number of letters as ANNUS MIRABILIS and did continue from 1665 into 1666, so that seemed appropriate. Probably the most well-known event after the Great Fire of 1666 was the purported apple-dropping related to Isaac Newton’s gravitational musings and that seemed quite an easy thing to be able to replicate in a grid with one entry of APPLE dropping onto ISAAC NEWTON at the bottom of the grid. It just remained to decide a gimmick to generate ANNUS MIRABILIS/THE GREAT PLAGUE; with the theme relating to ‘dropping’, letters latent was an obvious choice with each entry dropping a letter to form a new word. I always like to have real words in the grid, so I was glad when I managed to achieve a grid-fill – often you see letters-latent puzzles which produce non-words and that seems a bit messy to me.
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A full review of this puzzle can be seen over on fifteensquared.