Comments on: Enigmatic Variations No. 937 – Upheaval by Raich

By: mc_rapper67

mc_rapper67 — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 13:42:23 +0000

Raich – thanks for your kind words – and also for giving us some insight into the thinking behind this puzzle.

I have made corrections to a couple of the clue parsings above – where I had taken a slight detour in (fortunately) arriving at the correct answer/entry…

By: Raich

Raich — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 14:23:59 +0000

Many thanks, mc_rapper67, for that extremely comprehensive and detailed blog which is excellent.

Thanks also to all who commented.

Yes, the idea of the puzzle, hinted at by the events revealed by the extra letters, was that the ‘Upheaval’ was the FALL of COMMUNISM and RISE of DEMOCRACY with the latter moving therefore upwards and other downwards, swapping places. I thought, in relation to the final step, that to refer to the thematic clues in the preamble might be too much of a giveaway as there were just four of them. I always intended that real words would appear to confirm the correct change had been made. That made it a very hard grid to construct. I thought it better to mention the ‘real words’ aspect in the preamble to help the solver. The editor added a pencil warning, which was very good, and should have helped further to show that clued answers as initially placed did not give the final grid.

By: Mike Laws

Mike Laws — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 01:10:10 +0000

Let’s not beat about the bush. There’s nothing wrong with googling (with a small g), but I personally prefer it to be a last resort.

However, some themes will have to be googled unless the solver happens to be particularly familiar with the subject, especially now that dead-tree reference sections in libraries are becoming extinct.

By: mc_rapper67

mc_rapper67 — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 23:01:35 +0000

Wil – I was fortunate to deduce the substitution early on – but took ages to find RISE and FALL to justify it…

Thanks for the update, Gaufrid – and I have to admit I initially entered, and submitted with, ‘Senga’, just on the parsing of the clue and the missing ‘o’ – assuming that it was probably one of the aforementioned place names. On writing the blog, and cross-checking with the rubric, I realised that I had missed a trick, and it was probably a name rather than a place, but it wasn’t in my (electronic) version of an earlier Chambers, which dates back to circa 1993.

In the end – confessions of a short-cutting close-to-deadline blogger – I have to admit to using a ‘popular Internet search engine’ to find the link to ‘slender’…

By: Gaufrid

Gaufrid — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 00:34:22 +0000

Hi Wil
Senga is in Chambers. It is in the appendix ‘Some first names’ where it as indicated as being “a backward spelling of Agnes more likely from the Gaelic seang meaning slender”.

By: Wil Ransome

Wil Ransome — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 21:58:37 +0000

Nice crossword, but I fell at the final hurdle, never realising that DEMOCRACY and COMMUNISM had to change places. My attention was on SENGA, which isn’t in Chambers: I was therefore expecting that there was some kind of upheaval (anagram, perhaps) of that word and some other that I couldn’t find.

It always seems a bit odd (The Listener does it too) for one to be told in the preamble that Chambers (2008) is recommended and then to have a word that isn’t in that dictionary (surely senga isn’t one of the place-names in Collins). Seems a bit unfair to me.