EV 1718 (Hints)

Enigmatic Variations 1718 (Hints)

Wanted by Kruger

Hints and tips by Phibs

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Since I couldn’t see anything in the preamble that would give ChatGPT a fighting chance of identifying the theme, I asked instead, “Why might a crossword setter choose the pseudonym Kruger?” I was pleased to learn that this was “a fun and subtle question — and in crosswords, setters often choose pseudonyms that have wordplay, personal resonance, or a hint of mischief built in.”

I have edited the remainder of response for the sake of brevity (not ChatGPT’s core strength), but the gist was:

There are a few plausible reasons why a crossword setter might choose the name “Kruger.”

1. A pun on “cruciverbalist”. “Kruger” sounds a bit like “cru-” (as in crucifix, cruciverbalist, i.e. crossword setter). The hard “kr” sound at the start evokes crossword, cruciform, and crux — all Latin roots meaning “cross.” So “Kruger” could be a sly nod to crosswords themselves.

2. Allusion to “Kruger” as a slightly intimidating or tough name. Names like Kruger (e.g. Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street) carry a slightly menacing or mischievous undertone. A setter might adopt it to suggest that their puzzles are fiendishly tricky — that solvers should beware!

3. Reference to Paul Kruger (historical figure). Paul Kruger was a South African leader (President of the Transvaal in the late 19th century). Some setters pick names from history, either as an homage or just because the sound is memorable. If the setter has any South African connection, this might be a personal nod.

4. Playful allusion to “Kruger Park” (wildlife, challenge, safari). If the setter enjoys hiding “wild” clues or creating “puzzles to hunt through,” the name could evoke the idea of a safari — exploring and discovering — like the famous Kruger National Park. This would fit nicely with the spirit of crossword solving as exploration.

So prepare yourselves for a cruciverbal nightmare with added wildebeest.

Preamble: Each clue contains an extra word that must be removed before solving. In clue order, these words contribute letters to a phrase in one of two ways; in eight cases the first and last letters are used and in the remainder the position of the word within the clue indicates the position of the required letter within that word. This phrase identifies the eight unclued entries and solvers must highlight two clued entries that were, in the first instance, associated with them. Contents of the grey cells can be arranged to give what was WANTED which must be written below the grid. Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended.

There are eight unclued entries, mostly unnumbered. Every clue contains an extra word, and will not be properly solvable while that word remains. In the clue “Setter’s wig swiftly pinched by Starmer, maybe after one’s lost (6)”, the wordplay has RUG being contained by KE(i)R, the answer is KRUGER, and the interloper is ‘swiftly’ – this word actively interferes with the cryptic reading of the clue. This is the third word of the clue, so if the extra word yields a single letter (as most will), that letter is the third letter of ‘swiftly’ ie an I; if it yields two letters, they will be the first and last letters of ‘swiftly’, ie SY. I will be keeping a note of the single letters beside the clue, with the two-letter options in brackets beside them – this should help me to spot the emerging message. Note that when the interloper has been removed, the surface reading of a clue may become grammatically unsound.

There are two ways that setters can go about incorporating extra words in clues. One is to integrate them fully into the clues from the outset, which can make them very difficult for the solver to spot. The other is to retrofit them, as I did with ‘swiftly’ in the example – this typically results in many of the extra words being adjectives or adverbs which have no recognized cryptic meaning, and when solving clues of this type one should keep an eye out for words that fall into this category; adjectives and adverbs which are not cryptic indicators very rarely appear in normal clues.

Across

13a  Single statue initiated using clay (4)
A ‘hidden’ clue (lurker) can be made a little trickier by plonking the extra word in the middle of the hiding place, and an indicator like ‘using’ makes it even less obvious.

14a  Scatter rarely used powder but not over overgrown entrance to rosery (5)
Having disposed of a superfluous adjective in the wordplay, we are left with a five-letter word which can describe a powder of any kind but is usually applied to a particular sort found in the kitchen; this word must lose one letter from inside and have another letter tacked on to the end. The ‘rarely used’ reflects the fact that Chambers gives the answer as ‘rare’.

19a  Like Marmite, mark saline “admittedly not special” (5)
Once the clue has been pre-processed by removing the quotation marks and the stowaway adverb, the key element of the wordplay is a five-letter word for ‘saline’.

33a  Many seafarers about to oblige midshipman (7)
Here the extra word has been craftily hidden, and appears to be very much part of the clue. Once it has been eliminated, the reverse of a four-letter word is followed by a three-letter one meaning ‘to oblige’ or ‘to bind’. The answer is an alternative spelling of a word that appears quite often in barred puzzles.

34a  Thatcher, about to finally retire, knocked back delightful wine (6)
The stowaway here is once again a ‘nothing’ word; the wordplay involves elements of 2, 1 and 3 letters, the last one being ‘knocked back’. The ‘to’ should be ignored – it is a neutral juxtaposition indicator having the sense of ‘beside’ or ‘near’.

37a  Considered giving up marijuana although, at first, possibly took heroin (4)
The extra word occurs in the middle of a ‘select a letter’ construction in this clue where a single letter must be removed from a five-letter word.

Down

1d  Village part-time vegetable store to bear investigation? Nonsense (7)
When the superfluous adjective has been removed, we have a charade of a three-letter dialect (hence the ‘village’) word, which could also have been indicated by ‘use selfishly’, and a word meaning ‘to bear investigation’ as in “That excuse just won’t bear investigation”.

17d  Woman’s subsequent brood no longer cycling (4)
Identifying the interloper isn’t too hard, but you still need to know the archaic (‘no longer’) word for a pheasant’s nest or brood which is ‘cycling’. I’m not keen on ‘woman’, ‘man’ etc on their own being used to indicate a random forename, but that is what we have here – the required name is probably most closely associated with an extraordinarily prolific 20th century children’s author.

20d  What other steak is for tea? (9)
The underlining shows that this is an &lit (all-in-one) clue, where the entire clue serves as both the wordplay and an indication of the answer. You have to supply the missing word in the statement “[the word] STEAK is ———— [to make the word] TEA”.

26d  Trim, stupid Glaswegian upset fellows (4)
After another superfluous adjective is ejected, the resulting clue is ambiguous, as either of the elements surrounding ‘upset’ could be modified by it; in the event, it acts on the ‘fellows’, who are of the academic variety.

29d  Lorraine’s wording for answer here is most hostile (6)
The words “Lorraine’s wording for” could be replaced by “French for”.

30d  Greek mountain’s ludicrous speedy descent starts later (5)
One of those two consecutive adjectives has to depart from a wordplay which involves a six-letter word, with ‘starts later’ being equivalent to ‘missing start’.

31d  Right to regard questionable Australian paediatrician (4)
A 1+3 charade leads to the name of an Australian pathologist (though Chambers suggests that he was a paediatrician) who gave his name to a syndrome which appears in the Big Red Book.

32d  Interminably praise attractive archipelago (5)
Rather like 17d, the difficulty here is not with evicting the stowaway, or, indeed, parsing the clue. But the archipelago is usually known by another name (not that I’d heard of that one either) and the ‘praise’ word is hardly in common use, although its last four letters constitute a word with a very similar meaning.

Definitions in clues are underlined

You should be able to work out some of the unclued words from the crossers. If these when taken together mean something to you, then you will be able to work out the others; if not, then I would recommend googling the first five words of the phrase as a single search term (ie within quotation marks). Having identified the theme, completing the unclued entries (one of the eight-letter ones may require a little more work than the rest) shouldn’t prove too tricky, nor should finding the two clued entries which must be highlighted. It just remains to rearrange the letters in the grey cells and to write the appropriate word underneath the grid.

Some of the clues were reasonably chewy, but the extra words being largely of the (at least apparently) retrofitted kind made things a bit easier. Anyone who solved a particular Ifor puzzle earlier this year may well have experienced a sense of partial déjà vu, and the web should have filled in the blanks for anyone to whom the theme was unfamiliar.

Phibs Toughness Rating : 🥾🥾🥾 (Some reasonably tricky clues, but suitable for anyone who has a few EVs under their belt)

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