Enigmatic Variations 1721 (Hints)
At the Bottom of the Grid by Ifor
Hints and tips by Gabriel
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I submitted the preamble to OpenAI which to be fair found it completely incomprehensible and proposed several rewrites and offered to: “suggest alternative single-line preambles with different tones (concise, cryptic-setter-house style, or very-solver-friendly)” – is this an improvement: “In greyed columns missing bars, solvers must follow the name spelled by extra letters from down clues to form expected bottom entries, then rearrange and divide each to reveal what was actually seen, all resulting entries being real words or names”?
Preamble: Horizontal bars have been omitted in the greyed columns. Clues to down entries in the remaining columns each contain a letter to be removed to enable solving; these can be ordered to spell the name of someone expecting to see the entries AT THE BOTTOM OF THE GRID in the three columns as the result of his instruction. Solvers must rearrange some of the letters in each of those columns and add one bar to each to reveal what he actually saw, to his surprise. All changes to grid and clues create new words or names. Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended.
The preamble makes it clear exactly which down clues have an extra letter – this is convenient given that often the instructions will vaguely say something like “some clues”. Overall, most of the clues will prove to be accessible.
Clues:
Across
18 Appropriate liturgy for Milton (5)
As the underlining indicates this is a double definition but I admit I had to “manually” (meaning using a search tool) extract a list of Miltonian terms from the dictionary.
27 Part of column, complete and hollow inside (4)
“And” is just cryptic fodder yielding 2 letters to be inserted into another 2-letter synonym which is pretty versatile (I counted 26 meanings).
28 Dullard content to ease focus of crossword (3)
This clue uses two different ways to indicate “centrality”.
38 Not one second class in Black Bob’s subtle disguises (6)
“Phone-a-friend” help needed! Wordplay requires removing some letters from the fodder. This shouldn’t have been hard to parse since a phrase like “Black Bob’s” heavily signals that it’s needed literally.
Down
1 Variance of facts, namely within poorly prized headless whim (11)
The wordplay here is somewhat convoluted: a 5-letter jumble containing a 2-letter Latin abbreviation followed by a decapitated 5-letter synonym. And of course we need to find an imposter as well.
3 Religious icons start to develop odd heads now and again (7)
For a change, “odd” doesn’t indicate an anagrind but is literal fodder.
9 Promote candidate in Exeter, ignoring vote and closing time around Reading (11)
Two things to say: sometimes Reading isn’t a town and Exeter is needed literally. Don’t forget you need to find an imposter. And there’s a one-letter representation for a synonym involved.
13 We constructed stable base providing hire of crew with plane (8, two words)
There’s an imposter involved (most of the downs generate one, so that isn’t surprising). The two-word term for the definition was unfamiliar to me though it turns out I was familiar with an instance of it: years and years ago a colleague of mine at a certain big tech company (not Google) spent an obscene amount of money to hire a plane and crew to fly their racing cars from Seattle (you can guess what company now) to Scotland to do some laps. For the weekend. I wasn’t invited.
29 Uniform in holes, shivering after freezing hard (4)
The tricky thing here is to identify an imposter that once removed creates a useful cryptic indicator – itself a removal indicator.
36 Bearer of keys has to have opening completely lowered (3)
At some point the answer became clear and I could see why it was generated from the wordplay. To understand the definition, I recommend looking up “key”.
Definitions in clues are underlined
I had to use an anagram solver to figure out the jumbled name. Once I had it, I needed some wiki gymnastics to figure out what “he actually saw”. At least the preamble ensured I knew what columns to focus on and we also know that we are going to be left with real words which is a helpful constraint. In summary, a very hard endgame (exacerbated by my lack of attention in Divinity classes at school) balanced by mostly tractable clues.
Toughness: 3 out of 5 on the difficulty scale.
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