EV 1690 (Hints)

Enigmatic Variations 1690 (Hints)

Nob by Vismut

Hints and tips by Phibs

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In contrast with the AI-fidelity of my fellow blogger, I decided to continue on my technologically promiscuous way by giving ChatGPT the chance to answer the question “In a themed crossword puzzle, we have to find the name, title and nickname of a person who is in some way connected with ‘nobs’. Any ideas?”

With barely a pause for thought, ChatGPT replied:

“Based on the clue “a person who is in some way connected with ‘nobs’,” it sounds like the answer might be related to someone in British aristocracy or high society, as “nobs” can refer to upper-class people or aristocrats.

One possible answer is: Name – Lord, Title – Bertie, Nickname – ‘Nob’.

This references a common nickname or slang for aristocrats, with the name “Lord Bertie” being a plausible nod to British upper-class titles, such as “Lord” for a member of the aristocracy. Lord Bertie is also a character in P.G. Wodehouse’s novels (though not exactly a direct answer, it fits the theme of nobility).

Does that fit with your crossword puzzle’s theme?”

Bertie Wooster didn’t have a title, and I’m not sure he’d have taken kindly to being called ‘Nob’ (who would?), so I’m not too hopeful.

Preamble: Clues are given in alphabetical order of their answers and must be entered into the grid where they will fit. In 12 clues, a NOB’s word must be removed before solving; read in normal clue order the first letter of each of these clues gives a thematic expression, which is missing something removed from the person whose nickname and title complete the two unclued entries. Solvers must highlight a name (11 contiguous cells), circle the letter which has dropped vertically and insert one entry number.

We have a jigsaw, with the added challenges of two unclued entries and twelve words which must be removed before the clues in which they appear can be solved. It sounds as though the stowaway words are linked, so once we’ve got two or three we might be able to spot others. A look at the grid and the clue enumerations shows that there are just two 12-letter entries, both clued; if we can get the answers, then one of them will be the entry across the top, and there must be a 6-letter answer that starts with the first letter of that entry, a 5-letter answer that starts with its third letter, and so on for all eight entries that hang off the top row. If one 12-letter answer were INTOXICATION, that would demand that there be a 6-letter answer beginning with I, a 5-letter answer beginning with T, a 6-letter answer beginning with X etc, and because the clues are in alphabetical order of their answers, we may well be able to rule out some of these possibilities for one of the two answers. Of course, there are the two unclued entries to consider, but we can immediately see that there are two 9-letter grid entries and only one clue with a 9-letter answer, and since in a symmetrical 12×12 grid there will always be an even number of entries with a given number of letters, identifying the length of the other unclued entry is not hard.

We need to keep track of those extra words as we extract them, but we won’t be able to make much sense of their first letters until the grid-fill is well advanced, because they must be read in normal clue order, so the first clue is the one that yields the 12-letter entry across the top, the second gives the 7-letter entry at the left side of the row below, and so on, with all the acrosses coming before the downs.

Remember to write the answers against the clues, even ones that you can put straight into the grid, because their sequence can be very informative. If the answer to the first clue is ACID and that for the fourth clue is ALKALINE, then you know that the answers to the two intervening clues lie alphabetically between these. And if consecutive answers are EGGS and HAM, then there is no clued answer that begins with F or G.

* Spenser’s embellishment? Door and sconce Anita made (9)
The word ‘made’ appears here as an anagram indicator – while some of the meanings given by Chambers might suggest that it is valid, I struggle to think of a sentence in which the word on its own (without, say, ‘into’) suggests rearrangement of the thing ‘made’. The definition is somewhat fanciful, depending as it does on the Spenserian sense of a familiar verb carrying through into this noun.

*  Bishop Stroll in church entertaining fine feathered friend (12)
The wordplay leads to elements of 1, 6, 2, 2 and 1 letter, one of them taken directly from the clue, with a single manipulation. Remember that in barred puzzles hyphenated words are enumerated as single entities, so DOUBLE-ENTRY would be shown as ‘(11)’.

*  Goes by railroad train (6)
A 4+2 charade (the ‘by’ can be ignored), where the choice of ‘railroad’ over ‘railway’ suggests that the second part is an Americanism.

*  Halt nut with bear beginning to ravage presenter (7)
The tricky element of this 3+3+1 charade is the ‘bear’ in the middle, not the most obvious meaning of a word more familiar in the sense of ‘to feel as a debt’.

*  Ancient huge blue monster after skipping saint (5)
The word ‘blue’ might be seen as an imperative meaning ‘squander’ or an adjective meaning ‘obscene’ – either way, rightly or wrongly, it introduces an anagram where an abbreviation is removed from the original fodder.

*  Loud disciple losing coat in outdoor entertainment (4)
The ‘disciple’ that loses its ‘coat’ to provide three letters of the answer is the name by which a particular apostle is usually known.

*  From the south news of bean leaves with figures (5)
You can be confident that this clue leads to a down entry, since ‘from the south’ indicates a reversal of two words, the first of which is an informal Australian term for ‘news’ or ‘information’, often preceded by ‘good’ or ‘dinkum’.

*  Opening square block dropped off edges is not in use (5)
You need to imagine a comma between ‘off’ and ‘edges’ in the wordplay, where ‘edges’ is a verb that leads to a 6-letter word.

*  Wild West sheriffs – Yankee hiding with amateurs (6)
Here a single letter in a 6-letter word is replaced by another.

*  Geoff’s second noggin under bar for philosopher (5)
The key element of the wordplay here is yielded by ‘bar’, although the required 4-letter word is not so much a synonym, rather an alternative way to achieve security.

*  Brief laziness cycling round western edge of French galleries (5)
Here you need to identify a 5-letter word for laziness of a sinful kind and subject it to three modifications, starting with the loss of a letter and finishing with the gain of one.

*  Snubbed Scottish pound snow (4)
An easier version of this clue could read “At no time snubbed snow”.

*  Glaswegian daughter’s children and shy son missing canine (3)
The principal element of the wordplay equates to ‘shy’, while ‘canine’ leads to one of those random abbreviations – if ‘canine’, why not ‘incisor’ and ‘molar’? – that are found in Chambers.

*  Without cases, watch over dated billet for school break in Florida (6)
An awkward wordplay to deal with, not least because the 4-letter word that loses a 2-letter abbreviation doesn’t mean ‘watch over’ unless it is followed by ‘for’. The rest of the answer is contributed by an obsolete Irish word meaning ‘to impose (soldiers) on a community which is required to support them at a fixed cost’, a clipped form of the 6-letter word for what the HMRC do to your income before they tax it.

*  Twitter now interrupting OAPS excitedly playing son’s hit for musicians (12)
The name of the platform formerly known as Twitter is included in the first of two anagrams.

Definitions in clues are underlined

It won’t take long before a pattern emerges with the stowaways, such that their brethren can be pre-extracted from other clues. Once the grid is nearly full, the natural order of the clues can be established and the extra words put in the intended order, revealing the (incomplete) thematic expression. You may (like me) not know the title or nickname, but the web will readily oblige. When it comes to finding the name, Vismut is revealed to be an orthodox Chalicean, but note that while the cells to be highlighted are not all in a straight line, they do form a continuous chain (touching at least corner to corner). If you’ve read a bit about this person’s lineage, you will probably guess what the number of a particular entry is going to be, and so it turns out.

Most of the clues were suitable for blind-solving, with the extra words generally being easy to spot, and the 12-letter entries provided a flying start to the grid-filling. The web was a boon when it came to verifying the unclued entries and the name, albeit it seems unlikely that the individual could claim any credit for the expression – it is not in Brewer’s, and appears to be a 20th century invention with variants that would not be consistent with this derivation. And ChatGPT’s offering? Well, it was a good distance from the bull’s-eye, but it didn’t miss the board either.

Phibs Toughness Rating : 🥾🥾🥾 (Some tricky clues, but suitable for all except barred puzzle novices)

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