EV 1730 (Hints)

Enigmatic Variations 1730 (Hints)

Popular by Skylark

Hints and tips by Phibs

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There was nothing in the title or preamble for the AI contingent to get their virtual teeth into, so I asked Claude, “Shelley wrote a poem ‘To a Skylark’; could you write a five-line verse along the same lines to a lady crossword setter called ‘Skylark’?”

Claude’s creative side sprung into action, and he rapidly offered:

Hail to thee, bright Skylark of the grid!
Weaving words where black and white divide,
Your clues like songs from puzzling heights soar high—
Each cryptic hint a gift ingeniously hid,
Teaching us to think, to parse, to see with keener eye.

That’s really rather good – it even has a suitably dodgy rhyme between lines two and four (cf ‘wert’/’heart’ in the original).

Preamble: In each of 17 clues, there is a misprint in the wordplay part; correct letters, in clue order, spell out the first four words of the most POPULAR part of the theme. An extra letter must be removed from every other clue before solving, spelling out an instruction involving 21 cells in two straight lines. Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended.

We know that every clue must be corrected in one of two ways before it can be fully solved, but we don’t know how any individual clue has been distorted. Seventeen have misprints in the wordplay, so if the clue to SKYLARK were “Kentucky lake found by Channel Island bird”, the wordplay has (KY L) in SARK, and the F in ‘found’ must be corrected to a B to produce ‘bound’. However, if the SKYLARK clue were “Kentucky loach eaten by Channel Island bird”, again the wordplay has (KY L) in SARK, but this time ‘loach’ must lose the letter A to produce ‘loch’, abbreviation L. These examples highlight something to be looking out for in clues of such types – words rarely seen in crossword clues which can be changed by the replacement or removal of one letter into either (i) a familiar indicator (eg ‘bound’) or (ii) a word with a single-letter abbreviation (eg ‘loch’).

We’ll need to remember that in the ‘extra letter’ clues, the bonus letter could be in either the definition or the wordplay. I’m going to have two columns next to the clues, one for removed letters and one for the correct letters from the misprinted clues; once the messages start to take shape, we may be able to deduce the correct/extra letters from some of the unsolved clues.

Across

1a  Describes distinctive parts of hunts chasing erratic suspect (13)
This is a type (i) extra letter clue, where ‘chasing’ becomes a containment indicator.

11a  By centre of barge, nickname plants (7)
It’s the first half of the wordplay (pre-comma) from which the extra letter needs to be removed, but the the tricky bit is getting from ‘nickname’ to a word which describes a name assumed by its bearer, not given by others.

15a  Southern gall to be inattentive (7)
Determining that ‘gall’ is the word to be modified isn’t hard, but working out that its third letter has been misprinted is more difficult, the resulting vowel sequence being an uncommon one.

23a  Sheriff’s officers spying trouble blocking blows (13)
The wordplay elements are of 5, 3 and 5 letters, with the first requiring a well-concealed misprint to be corrected.

25a  View ignoring lord overt benefit (6)
The two-letter abbreviation for ‘lord’ is removed from a six-letter verb to produce the first part of the answer; the extra letter is in the last word of the wordplay, and the required meaning (two letters) of the resulting word is far from obvious.

27a  Shy faking in Portugal duplicate (4)
A type (i) misprint clue, similar in construction to 1a.

Down

2d  Praises coast’s weather feature (9)
If it weren’t for needing to identify the letter to be removed, it would be easy to biff in a word beginning with the same seven letters as the correct answer. It is the second letter of a word in the clue that has to go.

5d  Create walls of Roman soldiers’ billet in the past (6)
The extra letter is in the first part of the wordplay, while in the second half ‘walls of’ is used as a first/last letter selection indicator, although this seems a bit of a stretch given the definitions of ‘wall’ given by Chambers.

7d  Top hints for bars (5)
The imperative indicator here results in a six-letter word being deprived of its first letter.

14d  Cell‘s professional to continue without one taken (9)
A three-letter contraction is followed by a (5, 2) phrasal verb which loses a single instance of a particular abbreviation resulting from a type (ii) removal.

22d  Tracked sly Aberdonian director outside hot working (8)
A four-letter Scots (‘Aberdonian’) form of a word in the clue and a single-letter abbreviation contain an anagram – but not of a word which appears in the clue as written.

25d  Southern English stream Oscar interrupting plaint briefly (6)
This is hard. The answer is a Southern English variant of a word which most people would now associate with Scotland, and removing the letter from the obvious candidate in the clue leaves you with a lot of possible six-letter words which could lose their last letter while gaining a letter part way through – this one is sometimes used in salads, and could be cryptically indicated by ‘ignite alien’.

26d  Whimsical, almost cute, holiday (6)
Another toughie – an unusual spelling of a three-letter word meaning ‘whimsical’ (or an old interjection indicating disapproval, which might be followed by ‘on you’) combines with all but the last letter of a four-letter word; this is indicated by a word in the clue after it has surrendered the bonus letter, but it’s not the most obvious synonym.

32d  Stiff prince misses introducing Queen’s heraldic design (4)
The first three words of the wordplay, after misprint correction, result in a four-letter word from which a single-letter abbreviation has been removed. These three letters are then placed around another single-letter abbreviation.

Definitions in clues are underlined

Given the four words from the theme, some help from Google (if required), the instruction, and a highlighter pen, the experienced Chalicean should have no problem finding the two groups of cells to be selected. Job done

All the difficulty here lay in solving the clues, which was no easy task given that the gimmicks seemed to be randomly interspersed. The endgame was a piece of cake by comparison.

Phibs Toughness Rating : 🥾🥾🥾 (Those not used to gimmicked clues may find it hard going)

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