EV 1710 (Hints)

Enigmatic Variations 1710 (Hints)

Immutable by Vismut

Hints and tips by Phibs

+ – + – + – + – + – + – + – +

Always keen to steal a march on the setter, I told Claude, “A themed crossword puzzle asks us to identify an ‘immutable’ character, and we are required to add coloured circles into the completed grid. Who or what might this immutable character be?”

Within seconds, Claude had everything worked out.

“This sounds like a crossword puzzle with a visual element where you’ll need to add colored [sic] circles to reveal something “immutable” after completing the grid. The “immutable character” is most likely referring to a rainbow or the colors of the rainbow themselves. Here’s why this makes sense:

“Immutable” meaning: The colors of the rainbow always appear in the same unchanging order – Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet (ROYGBIV)
The colored circles: After solving the crossword, you’d add colored circles in specific squares to spell out or reveal rainbow-related words, or the circles themselves would form the pattern of a rainbow
Common crossword theme: Rainbows are popular puzzle themes because they combine wordplay with visual elements

Alternative possibilities could be other “immutable” sequences like:

The alphabet (always in the same order)
Musical notes on a scale
Days of the week or months

But given the colored circles requirement, a rainbow theme is by far the most likely answer.”

Right Option You’ve Got By Interpreting Vismut, perhaps? Let’s hope so.

Preamble: Extra words in some clues are synonyms for different words which each form a square in the grid within which a circle, touching all sides, must be drawn. In 14 other clues the wordplay gives one incorrect letter. Read from the grid the correct letters name an IMMUTABLE character. Read in clue order, the incorrect letters indicate what colour to fill the grid and how many circles to fill with what colour. Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended.

We’ve got an unspecified number of clues which contain an extra word that must be removed before those clues can be solved – the cryptic reading won’t ‘work’ while the stowaway is still on board. And in another 14 clues, the wordplay yields a string which differs by one letter from the answer – so if the clue were “Setter is turning over mildly obscene material (6)”, the wordplay gives SISMUT [IS< + SMUT], the answer is VISMUT, the incorrect letter S, and the the correct letter V. Henceforth I will refer to the output of the wordplay in these clues as the ‘olafa’ (one letter away from answer). As the solve progresses, I will be noting the incorrect letters against the 14 clues, and putting a pencilled ring round the corrected letters in the grid, since it is from there that we will be reading the character’s name.

Across

5a  Very windy, navy lower sail-cloth (9)
An anagram, a single-letter abbreviation, and a word that means ‘lower’ as in “You need to lower your head when passing through a small doorway” make up the olafa, with a letter needing to be corrected in the first part.

14a  A Yankee horse carrying a Bolivian today (7)
Elements with lengths of 1, 1, 4 and 1 (two of which are on plain view in the clue) take part in the wordplay, which leads to an olafa. It appears that the Constitution of Bolivia lists 37 official languages, and the answer here is one of them (the definition in the clue is slightly odd – I think I would have favoured something like ‘…carrying top-grade Bolivian tongue’).

18a  Pensive poets stage international restricted by directions (9)
A three-letter word for a stage, perhaps of a race, and a single-letter abbreviation are contained by the rarely-seen plural of a specific direction.

20a  Picks fifty to hide in odd niches hosting dry run for military defence (10, two words)
The stowaway adds to the difficulty of this one, where there are two separate insertions into an anagram, the first of a single-letter abbreviation and the second of a two-letter abbreviation plus a single-letter one.

27a  County redeployed troop stopped by low rotating bridge (10)
Here the ‘ingredients’ are an abbreviation, an anagram, and a three-letter word meaning ‘low’ or ‘unhappy’ which is rotating inside the anagram. The incorrect letter is in the first element of the olafa.

34a  Worshipped priest skipping broadcast (5)
As the clue is written, if the two-letter abbreviation for ‘priest’ is skipping (staying away from) anything, it is the ‘broadcast’, but in fact it is omitted from a word meaning ‘worshipped’ in order to produce the olafa.

41a  Company stake retaining cycling shop’s big blazer (9)
A four-letter word for a company ‘retains” a word for a shop which is ‘cycling’, ie a letter or letters from the end must be moved to the beginning. Incidentally, the fact that there is a link between wordplay and definition (here the apostrophe-s) means that this is not one of the ‘incorrect letter’ clues, because in such clues the wordplay and the definition lead to two different things, so a link (eg ‘is’, ‘from’ or ‘for’) which suggests equivalence would be inappropriate.

Down

1d  Stood out for it in colours for Americans (6)
The wordplay here tells us that a three-letter word meaning ‘stood [for election]’ should be replaced by a two-letter abbreviation (often seen indicated by ‘it’) in a seven-letter word for colours in a specific range (one of the groups known to Claude).

2d  Lynx with unlimited vital fluid – saliva ferment (7)
Working out that this involves an anagram (‘fluid’) of one complete word in the clue and another missing its first and last letters will get you to a group of seven letters, but only six of them are right and the first letter of the answer turns out to be the corrected one.

3d  Scottish ego supports mother before young girl (6)
One three-letter word ‘supports’ (ie follows in a down clue) another word of the same length. The ‘before’ is apparently there to indicate that the answer is shown by Chambers as ‘archaic’ (or ‘poetic’), although I don’t think it will be unfamiliar to any solvers. The adjective ‘before’ is itself shown as ‘Shakespearean’, so we might have been better off without it.

6d  Prevent Bachelor becoming Master of Arts in one Semitic language or another (7)
In this clue featuring a stowaway, a letter in the name of the most widely spoken Semitic language is replaced by two letters, thus producing the name of another Semitic language.

13d  Deities caps initially near previously pure waters, but not lake (6)
There’s a stowaway to be disembarked before you can sort out the wordplay, the key element of which is the six-letter plural of a word which has an archaic sense of ‘pure water’ but is more often associated these days with glands/nodes.

21d  Support of the country left mountain range crossing one motorway (8)
The olafa here is produced by putting two single-letter abbreviations either side of a five-letter word which itself contains a Roman numeral. The answer means ‘the character of the country’ or ‘country life’, so the definition is somewhat off the beam.

31d  First nation’s dwelling contracted in US city (5)
The “first nation’s dwelling” is a 3-3 Western Australian and Victorian native word for a hut

36d  Ancient cobbler in Perth casually flipping curses (4)
I can’t remember ever seeing a definition with three qualifiers before, and I doubt I’ll see one again. The answer here is a Scots form of a word shown by Chambers as ‘old informal and dialect’ – since Scots is a dialect, the ‘casually’ is unnecessary, but it’s not an ‘extra word’ in the context of this puzzle. The ‘curses’ are probably more familiar as ‘prohibitions’.

Definitions in clues are underlined

Having filled the grid, we’ve got the name of the ‘character’ (if necessary, the web will confirm their more common name), along with three words – the first telling us the background colour for the grid and the other two indicating how many circles we have to fill (which should match the number of extra words) and the colour to use. If we’re going to draw a circle inside a square formed by a word, realistically that word must have four letters. Putting the ‘character’, the colours, and the title of the puzzle together, we can make a good guess at what we’re looking for, and considering possible synonyms for the extra words confirms the relevant letters. Having found the appropriate number of squares, we can draw the circles, colour them in, and then shade the background. Job done.

The clues made up a pretty tricky set, particularly when you take into account that there were two gimmicks in play and we didn’t know which clues were affected. It wasn’t strictly necessary to identify the extra words or their synonyms (one of which was a bit iffy), but doing so wrapped things up nicely. What about Claude? While I don’t think that the character here could truly be described as ‘immutable’, which may have set him off on the wrong track, equally a rainbow couldn’t be described as a ‘character’, so on balance I don’t think this was his finest hour.

Phibs Toughness Rating : 3.5/5 (Suitable for all, but some of the clues are quite challenging)

---

Could new readers please read the Welcome post and the FAQ before posting comments or asking questions about the site.

As this is a Prize crossword, please don’t put any ANSWERS, whether WHOLE, PARTIAL or INCORRECT, or any ALTERNATIVE CLUES in your comment.

Please read these instructions carefully – they are not subject to debate or discussion. Offending comments may be redacted or, in extreme cases, deleted. In all cases the administrator’s decision is final.

---