Enigmatic Variations 1208: Unknown Commitment by Kruger

[If you’re attending York S&B please see comments 32&33] - here

I don’t know if I am speaking for the other EV bloggers, but to me every fourth EV puzzle is a bit of an UNKNOWN COMMITMENT… What have I let myself in for this week?! Will I be able to finish and blog it?! So, what level of commitment does Kruger have in store for us this week?…

The preamble states that:

“In eleven clues the definition contains a single misprint that must be corrected before solving. In clue order, the correct letters give a phrase that identifies an UNKNOWN COMMITMENT that has affected some answers (clued without definition) on entry. Unchecked and mutually checking letters in thematic entries could make HYPOCRITES BLOW UP TOWPATH, and numbers in brackets refer to entry lengths. Chambers Dictionary (2014) is recommended, but does not contain one thematic item.”

A relatively short preamble, with not too many complications, by the look of it…and so it turned out, for your correspondent at least. After a scan through and some initial cold solving, there were some clues that seemed to have possible misprints, and some that weren’t obviously defined – although I initially solved 33A as P+OW – OW, that hurts! – and briefly wondered if we were heading into Batman/superhero cartoon territory.

So, of the first few undefined clues I managed – BONNET, PROD, ITCHWEED – it was clear they were shorter than their entry positions, and would probably need something inserting – or adding before/after. And the preamble didn’t say anything about blank spaces, so the inserts/additons should be of discernible length once the initial clue was solved.

This thought process was developing whilst the misprinted letters were also starting to take shape, although nothing obvious jumped out at me. Fortunately there were a high percentage of crossing letters in those thematic/shorter answers, and I think the penny dropped once it became clear PROD had S_W inserted, and THR_UST had E_T…confirmed by what looked like TAMWORTH over in the right-hand column.

So, SOW, ELT and TAMWORTH – any sow-lver (tam)worth his or her bacon should have been able to (old) spot a pig or two in there:

And with a bit of teasing out the misprinted letters started to spell out A PIG IN A POKE.

So far only PROD, PRY and possibly THRUST (as in engine power) had any obvious link to ‘POKE’ – but some swift Chambers checking confirmed the other items – POUCH, BONNET, ITCHWEED, and STOOP all have poke-y connotations.

So there you have it – seven little piggies in pokes, and the Chambers definition of the phrase includes the words in the title: “A thing bought unseen, or a COMMITMENT made to something UNKNOWN or unknowable”…which is where I came in at the start!

Although familiar with the phrase, I have to admit I wasn’t completely sure of its precise meaning – I think in my mind I was mixing the it up with things like making ‘silk purses out of sow’s ears’, or ‘putting lipstick on pigs’ – i.e. that the phrase has some sort of negative implication. But as it stands, it doesn’t necessarily mean something negative – it could be a huge positive!

In summary – I felt this was a nicely constructed puzzle and denouement, relatively gentle for an EV, for which any blogger is eternally grateful (thank-you Kruger!), and as punishment for which I will probably get a real ‘pig’ of a puzzle in four EVs’ time!

One last point on the preamble – I don’t have a copy of Chambers (2014), but my older paper and electronic versions don’t seem to have DUROC or OLD SPOT, whereas the preamble only says one of the thematic items is not in Chambers (2014). I have wondered in the past if setters are somehow incentivised by Chambers, or the newspaper crossword editors, to include one or two words that are only in the latest version…to try to persuade us to shell out for an upgrade(?!) But this may be a paranoid conspiracy theory too far, and anyway in this case we were given an explicit set of unchecked/mutually checking letters to double check…and Wiki-oogl-ing to confirm any last uncertainties is ‘free’, although there is probably an entire university doctorate somewhere debating that last statement…(;+>)