EV 1708 (Hints)

Enigmatic Variations 1708 (Hints)

Two Domains by Kcit

Hints and tips by Phibs

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I felt it was time to give ChatGPT a chance to shine, so I asked, “A themed crossword puzzle called Two Domains requires us to move letters from the main grid into a row above it and a row below, which, we are told, are the two domains, and contain ‘appropriate items’. What might these be?”

ChatGPT’s verbosity was clearly set to ‘extreme’, with the following being just a fraction of the response:

“Nice puzzle — fun mental gear-shift. Without seeing the grid I can’t be certain, but here are the most natural readings of “two domains” in a themed crossword of that sort, plus how you’d test each one against the letters that end up in the top and bottom rows.

Strong candidates for the two domains

Animals / Plants

Top row spells animal names, bottom row spells plant names (or vice-versa).
Test: do the rows give living things (cat, trout, oak, fern)?

Fruits / Vegetables (or Food categories)

Rows list edible items that belong to two kitchen domains (fruit vs veg; dairy vs meat; drinks vs snacks).
Test: are the words all edible and split naturally into two food groups?

Tools / Clothing / Household — two functional domains

One row could be “things you wear”, the other “things you use to fix stuff” (or any paired life domains like Kitchen / Bathroom).
Test: semantic consistency of each row’s words.”

There was a lot more, including three further possibilities, advice on how to pick the right one from the six suggested options, and details of what ChatGPT could do to help me further. Whilst I liked the idea of testing words to see if they were edible (“Mmmm…hypocotyledonary”), I wasn’t quite sure that Kcit and ChatGPT were on the same wavelength; perhaps I should have mentioned that our setter lives in a land down under.

Preamble: From the answers in each column, two letters are removed, one to the top row, one to the bottom. Where there are two entries in a column, the upper entry sends a letter to the top row, the lower to the bottom row. Where there is only one entry in a column, that entry loses two letters, but the first omitted letter may go either way. Clues are to the full word and solvers must determine the letters to be removed. The top and bottom rows are the TWO DOMAINS and contain appropriate items. Enumeration indicates cells available; Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended

Good news as far as I’m concerned – we have clues entirely without gimmicks. And the across answers are to be entered normally. Things are a bit different when it comes to the down answers, where there are two distinct situations:

(i) A column that has two entries, eg the second column. Here one letter must be omitted from the upper answer prior to entry (eg at 2d) and put into the top row cell directly above, and one letter must be omitted from the lower answer (eg at 23d) and put into the bottom row. Depending on where the omitted letter occurs relative to the unchecked cells, either the omitted letter can be identified precisely based on the checkers or there will be two possibilities. So in the top and bottom rows of these columns we will either have a definite letter (A) or a choice of two letters (A/B).

(ii) A column that has one entry, eg the first column. Here two letters are to be omitted from the answer prior to entry (eg at 1d), but they can go in either direction, hence the possibilities for the top row will be the same as for the bottom row. Depending again on the help provided by the checkers, each omitted letter will have either one or two possibilities (A or A/B, C or C/D), so the best we can hope for is that at both top and bottom we will have A/C, but we could have (A or C/D), (A/B or C), or, in the nightmare scenario, (A/B or C/D).

We need to make a note of the down answers as we get them, although existing crossers may enable us to enter some or all of the modified answer; if the answer to 2d were APHID and we had P??? then we could enter PHID and put A in the top row; if we had ?P??, we could only enter the A.

When solving the down clues, don’t forget to increase the length shown in brackets, based on whether their answers share a column (add 1) or have a column to themselves (add 2).

Across

1a  Feature of case? Worker’s initially gruesome observation after death (8)
A charade of three elements in a 4+1+3 pattern, the ‘worker’ potentially being a hired one.

11a  One name in Celtic’s list describing certain transfers? (6)
The two single letters here (one of which comes at the start of the answer) when combined with the definition (nothing to do with football, despite what the surface reading might suggest) may be enough to get you to the answer, whereupon you can check the remaining four letters in Chambers to confirm that they make up a Scots word for a list or selvage. Don’t forget that in barred puzzles hyphenated answers are enumerated as single words, so MOCK-UP would be shown as ‘(6)’.

15a  Very good housing for one American plant (4)
Just as in the last puzzle that I blogged, we are asked to treat ‘for one’ as being synonymous with ‘for example’ – at least I’m getting inured to it now. It contributes two letters to the answer, the other two being a familiar word which can be used as ‘an exclamation of agreement, surprise, etc’, ie ‘Very good[!]’.

20a  Soldier declining serviceman‘s award as a trifle (3)
It’s usual for three-letter entries in barred puzzles to be fully checked, but here we have one with an unchecked central cell. A five-letter term for a private in the British Army loses two letters which form the abbreviation for a particular award made to servicemen.

21a  Ancient mythical river not at first simple for antiquarian (4)
This one is hard if you don’t know the obsolete word for ‘simple’ (which bears some resemblance to a word in common use with the same meaning) or the five-letter name of the river in Greek mythology (‘the waters of oblivion’), drinking from which would cause a serious bout of amnesia.

25a  Footballers embracing John’s style (5)
If you read ‘footballers’ as ‘football administrators’, it may help you get to the two-letter abbreviation which combines with one of the many names given to the ‘smallest room’. The answer, though I hate to admit it, immediately puts me in mind of Peter Andre.

28a  US student losing head when eating a large fish (4)
The US student is one in their second year (in a shortened form), while the ‘a’ is not part of the definition.

29a  Glaswegian works on roofs, shooting back to take in front of house (6)
The key to the wordplay here is a five-letter word for a particular type of clay-pigeon shooting in which targets are projected at a variety of shooting angles in a semicircular range.

31a  European country turning sinister (5)
Each of the three words in the wordplay makes a separate contribution, although as it happens the country is European.

32a  Soldiers run when cornered by mostly irritable commander (8)
The soldiers here are the ones often indicated in cryptics by ‘gunners’; they are joined by a single-letter abbreviation, the combination being contained by most of a word for ‘irritable’. It seems to me that when you ‘corner’ something you cannot possibly be either side of it, but I think we know what the setter is trying to tell us.

Down

1d  Stoned German endures American equipment in haste as before (9, four words)
Four elements, 1+3+1+3, produced by the first four words of the wordplay, are contained by an old three-letter word for ‘haste’, which you may need to work back to after identifying the familiar expression which forms the answer.

9d  Pennsylvania town, area without support, on the rise (4)
There are two ways to interpret this clue, such that you manipulate either the abbreviation for ‘area’ and a four-letter word meaning ‘without support’ or just a five-letter word meaning ‘without support’. The answer is the name of a ‘Census-Designated Place’ in Pennsylvania, which makes it more of an area than a town; it might get OMD fans singing to themselves.

19d  Power ray a stimulus for burning in some places (5)
Like 21a, both the key (five-letter) part of the wordplay and the answer itself may be unfamiliar, the latter being shown by Chambers as ‘dialect’ (ie ‘in some places’). The ‘ray’ shares its name with a Park which was home to a team which now plays at the Stadium of Light.

20d  Leading spinner getting second stumped (5)
The only function of the word ‘getting’ is to link the elements of 3, 2, and 2 letters which make up the answer.

24d  Legislature not initiating branching out (4)
A six-letter word for a legislature that, depending on your age, you might associate with Ancient Rome or the US is ‘not initiating’ (to be interpreted as ‘not starting’).

27d  Vatican City ruling curtailed content of Mahabharata? (4)
A single-letter IVR code satisfies the first two words of the wordplay. The definition relates to the language of the Mahabharata, although I’m not sure that ‘content of Shakespeare?’ would be valid for ‘English’.

Definitions in clues are underlined

Having filled the grid, we have four ‘definites’ in the top row, along with two in the bottom row. One cell in each row has four possibilities, and the rest have either two or three. It makes sense to focus on the row with more known letters, so I started by looking at the last seven cells on that top row. By choosing the most likely letter from those on offer, I was able to come up with a word that seemed to have a potential connection to the theme. Working on the basis that this was correct, I eliminated the relevant possibilities from the bottom row, leaving four cells at the end of this row that suggested another word which seemed well suited to its position. From there, it was simply a matter of working out what might complete the two rows, the first entry in the bottom row being the trickiest. After completing the top and bottom rows, all that remained was to put the unused letters in the appropriate places in the main grid. Job done.

Some of the clues were quite tricky, as you would expect when there is no gimmick in play, but the most difficult part of the puzzle was probably getting a toehold in the endgame.

Phibs Toughness Rating : 3/5 (Not without its challenges, but suitable for all)

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