EV 1722 (Hints)

Enigmatic Variations 1722 (Hints)

Observer by Hedge-sparrow

Hints and tips by Phibs

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Today marks a welcome return to the EV stage for a setter whose previous puzzle in the series was Different Relation, back in November 2023.

I didn’t need any help from my AI friends when it came to explaining this setter’s pseudonym. Although Prunella modularis is commonly known as the hedge sparrow or dunnock, there is a similar dialect word for it – as well as the blue tit – which just happens to be Hedge-sparrow’s surname. Although he has also been part of a double act called ‘Avian’, I can find no record of him having set as Blue Tit, perhaps because he might then be expected to accept peanuts for his compositions.

Preamble: Eleven single-letter clashes mark points where a camouflaged OBSERVER infiltrates the grid, passing over wild forest glens. In the initially filled grid, her usual equipment (10) must be used to expose ten symmetrically positioned thematic characters, no longer safe in cave, sadly. All entries in the initially filled and final grids are real terms. Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended.

The clues are normal, but in eleven instances the required contents of a cell in an across entry will conflict with the intersecting down entry which shares that cell. If an across entry LINE were to share its third cell with the fifth cell of the down entry COLUMN, the across entry would require an N in the shared cell, while the down entry would require an M, so there would be a clash. If the N were to take precedence, the down entry would become COLUNN, which is not a word, so it is the M which is to be entered in the cell, such that LIME and COLUMN are the two grid entries. We need to keep track of both the eleven letters which (like the M in my example) have gone into the grid and the eleven which (like the N) have been displaced.

The words ‘passing over wild forest glens’, if read as a cryptic wordplay, would appear to contain two indicators – the first of two words and the second of one word – plus some fodder. If this interpretation is correct, we would expect to see a particular pattern emerging in the displaced letters.

Across

6a  Shaggy dog story originally by ham (6)
A single letter selected from a word in the clue is followed by a five-letter alternative spelling of a familiar four-letter word for the ham, or for a particular joint on the hindleg of a quadruped.

14a  Battles revolutionary experienced across Earth (5)
The ‘across Earth’ indicates that the preceding component in the wordplay contains a two-letter word for the personification of the Earth in Greek mythology.

15a  Beat veteran off doorstep (6)
A three-letter word equating to ‘veteran’ must be removed from (‘off’) a nine-letter word

23a  Flipping low mortgage’s initial rate enthrals fellow lodger at Harvard (8)
The regular solver of cryptic puzzles will see the phrase ‘flipping low’ and suspect that the first word indicates reversal and the second refers to the distinctive sound made by cattle. They would be correct in their suspicion. Don’t forget that ‘Y X contains’ in a wordplay can mean the same as ‘X contains Y’.

26a  Make uniform short at the back with tabard halved in size (11)
The four textual elements involved here are ‘short at the back’ (1 letter), ‘with’ (3 letters), ‘tabard halved’ (3 letters), and ‘size’ (4 letters).

29a  Retrospectively take on company embodying love for sea creatures (8)
The reversal indicator at the start of the wordplay applies to a concatenation of the five-letter word for ‘take on’ and the two-letter abbreviation for ‘company’.

Down

1d  Corelli’s first trio includes Italian stringed instrument (7)
A single letter selected from a word in the clue precedes a four-letter word for a set of three (‘trio’), with an abbreviation being sandwiched between them.

6d  Swing round and pull Director-General out of mire (4)
A two-letter abbreviation is removed from a six-letter word which Chambers graphically describes as ‘a slimy precipitate’.

20d  Scanned volume, then flew out of Japan (6)
A single-letter abbreviation is followed by a six-letter word from which a single-letter abbreviation has been removed.

24d  Pacy S American native no contest for witch doctor (4)
An eight-letter word for ‘a practitioner of the occult, a type of witch doctor’ is deprived of a four-letter word for a contest, often involving boxers or wrestlers, which is a rather more genteel way of describing a fight.

26d  Ringing tone’s hollow sound jarred (6)
In both 23a and 26a a four-letter word in the clue also appears in the answer, but split into two parts; in this clue, which takes advantage of apostrophe-s being both a possessive (in the surface reading) and a shortened form of ‘is’ (in the cryptic reading), such a word appears unaltered in the answer. The ‘jarred’ that constitutes the definition is an informal term which Chambers at one time showed as specifically Irish (which it appears to be); the OED doesn’t have it at all.

28d  Cycling judge behaves impertinently in Colorado Springs (6)
‘Colorado Springs’ could have been any location in North America, since its only function here is to indicate the geographical classification given to the answer by Chambers.

32d  Impression sent up about a thousand old-fashioned folk in the US (5)
The ‘impression’ is the sort that might have been stamped in wax to guarantee the authenticity and/or integrity of a document.

34d  Again join retreat, late Queen having been ousted (5)
I believe that the word ‘late’ here is meant to indicate that it is the instance of a single-letter abbreviation for ‘Queen’ near the end of the six-letter word meaning ‘[to] retreat’ that must be removed, although if such a qualification were considered necessary I would have preferred ‘inferior’.

Definitions in clues are underlined

Having identified and resolved the clashes, we find that the displaced letters are as expected, and the victorious letters when ‘un-camouflaged’ reveal the identity of the observer (I’m not sure why the preamble specifies ‘her’ rather than the gender-neutral ‘their’). From there, establishing the ‘usual equipment’ should be no problem, and ‘no longer safe in cave, sadly’ bears a distinct similarity in cryptic terms to the bit about forest glens. You may already have spotted one or two grid entries which could be thematically modified, but if you haven’t then a good plan is to find the instances in the grid of a couple of the less common letters from ‘safe in cave’ and to look at how they might be changed, using the ten letters from the item of equipment. Having identified one or two of the changes, the rest should follow. No highlighting to do, so just check that all your grid entries are real words and submit your completed puzzle.

The clues were tricky enough to present a challenge, but not so hard that one is likely to hit a brick wall. The preamble guided us very nicely through the stages of the puzzle, and the final modifications, each of which produced two new words, were extremely satisfying. A puzzle which repaid the effort that was required to solve it.

Phibs Toughness Rating : 🥾🥾🥾/🥾🥾🥾🥾 (A first-rate puzzle which is suitable for all except beginners, although less experienced solvers may find it slow going)

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