Enigmatic Variations 1755 (Hints)
Advertising Ploy By The Moonlighters
Hints and tips by Gabriel / Jpeg
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This puzzle is from setter(s?) we have never encountered before and the advertising ploy being referenced leaves us with some questions. Can we figure out what is going on? Only a handful of clues (well, 15) require alteration so many are normal. And of course, we too welcome John Henderson to the EV (a busy man on weekends given Inquisitor Saturday and EV Sunday)!
Preamble: Fifteen clues require three consecutive characters to be removed prior to solving. Changes leave single letters or real words but may require adjustments to spacing and/or punctuation. In seven across clues, these letters provide an introduction to the individuals who should be highlighted in the completed grid (34 cells, in the form of their ADVERTISING PLOY) ; four others provide a source. In four down clues they show the location of the thematic representation. Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended.
Obviously we’ll need to keep track of the extra trios and see if they start to reveal something semantically sensible. At least we know we have to find extra substrings of exactly 3 letters (which reduces uncertainty somewhat).
I did consult our favourite LLM and it managed to produce a couple of bleeding obvious insights: (1) most clues are normal but some aren’t and require some wrangling but the trio removal should leave real words (2) and “Keep Chambers Dictionary handy”. Dude, I sleep with it under my pillow.
Clues
Across
1 Jam sandwich and off-roader in crash, not h[alf] bad (8, 2 words)
This UK term for a vehicle can be formed by containing a word inside of a jumble that loses a letter. Reminder to be on the lookout for superfluous trios.
15 Tune inside of rockets, due for tweaking (5)
The wordplay to form this noun requires a charade of part of a word and a short jumble, but which part of which word?
19 Improve focus of the French band (6)
A charade of a short foreign word (which one?) and a band that became popular in the 1990s yields the definition.
23 Henchman’s atypical task (6)
This henchman takes a hat off to a lady. Put two short words together to form the name.
26 Two-way transmitters misrepresented 0 and 6 (7)
This term for cells is formed from an anagram, the trick is getting the right set of letters to anagram.
40 Perhaps stud’s to finally run off with babe (6)
This word for a bit of jewelry is formed from an anagram. I needed “phone-a-friend” to work out the letters and the anagram indicator here.
47 At first, Del nicked B[art]y dried grass for one driven to score (5)
A composer (aka scorer) requires two letters to be preceded by a defining noun.
48 Letter primarily sent to old fellah urgent? Reportedly not (8)
In our BRB this is listed as a two-word phrase. It is formed from a short word for a letter, an initial letter, a short word which could also be for another letter, and a common word. The underlining might be misleading (another trio alert!).
Down
7 Flyer’s two pens? (8)
Combine two different four letter words that could both be (different) synonyms of the same third word to get this type of flyer.
9 Red bees mix with black wasps (8)
This genus can result from an anagram. The anagram indicator is an unusual one (somewhat political).
18 Perhaps Dior’s dapper teen tries dancing with King’s scout (7)
A fashionista can be formed from a short fashionable noun with a jumble with a certain one letter latin abbreviation removed. Trio alert.
34 Where Jenn’s innards take in meal? (6)
The underlining (lack thereof) suggests the type of clue here. A charade of a part of a word followed by a short word containing a single letter abbreviation of Latin origin.
35 Leading convergence for a German (5)
This hyphenated part of a vehicle is a charade of a prepositional synonym and a foreign indefinite article.
44 Past trouble with rings (3)
An archaic spelling of a plural noun is constructed from an abbreviation and a plural of a letter.
Definitions are underlined.
Quite a few annotations here since the clues were a little tricky to solve but once we got the extracted letters and, with a bit of research, we found the source (thank-you the Usual Suspects, namely, Google and Wikipedia) and were able to unravel the mystery. It led to quite a nice rendition in the grid as well.
Difficulty: 3 / 5
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