Enigmatic Variations No. 1287: Go For It! by Kruger

Well, on the scale of ‘Fifty Shades of EV’, this was a masochistic 40-plus for your correspondent…Kruger exhorted us to ‘GO FOR IT!’, but I staggered across the line like a marathon runner in a black-and-white Olympics Pathé newsreel…

The preamble states that:

“In GO FOR IT, the definition in 17 clues contains a single misprint that must be corrected before solving. In clue order, the correct letters give a phrase (ignoring the definite article) which explains how answers must be treated on entry; each answer must be treated in one of three ways, and numbers in brackets refer to entry lengths. Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended; one entry is a variant spelling found in the Oxford Dictionary of English.”

So, every answer must be treated, and we can’t use/trust enumerations, as they are for treated entries, or start to narrow things down with crossing letters…which effectively implies that every clue needs to be cold solved! (At least until any PDM shines a light on things…)

Nothing else to do but to go for it!…After a while (Tuesday morning, so 48 hours or so after printing this off) I had about 18 solved – my first being CALDERA, which was 3 longer than its enumeration, and almost all the others just being one longer than their grid positions. By the Wednesday morning, I had two items of knitwear – a PULLOVER and a CARDIGAN, which MATCHED their enumerations…so this seemed to be a significant find – most answers one letter longer, a couple that were several letters longer, and a couple that matched – and the preamble mentions three different treatments…

An initial PDM came when I realised/guessed that the common element across the one-letter-longer clues was the letter T – and once I started to pencil these in without their Ts they seemed to dovetail together nicely. The second PDM came when CALDERA had to fit into ‘?ALD’, so it has to drop ERA – ERA can mean ‘time’, T is an abbreviation for ‘time’ – so a common thread here. But enough of threads – what about the knitwear?…

It all (finally/almost) fell into place on the Friday morning – the corrected misprints had been few and far between amongst all the other efforts, and by focussing on these – and finding ECUADOREAN  as the ‘South American’ in 10A, I hit upon NO TIME LIKE (the) PRESENT’. Those missing Ts, and the dropped ERA and AGE (in menagerie) had to be ‘NO TIME’. And the ADORE, LOVE and DIG in ECUADOREAN, PULLOVER and CARDIGAN were ‘likes’, replaced by synonyms of ‘present’ – NOW, HERE, and AIM.

I had 80-90% of the grid filled, but I was still missing a LIKE and a TIME, and had several to finish off in the bottom few rows.

Suffice to say that some letter crunching and grid-staring ensued, not helped by 3 days in a New Forest campsite with no internet, lots of rain, and my working copy becoming a smudgy creased mess… Once back in civilisation, I eventually tracked down GOS(SAME)R, KE(TT)LE and (T)SUGA (‘one with trunk’ – a tree, of course…I had been going round in circles looking for a trunked-animal!).

LOI – and not satisfactorily parsed yet – was (SPAN)DRIL – a space for decoration amongst ornamental plaster/mouldings – and I had this done just in time to submit by e-mail on the Wednesday evening…phew…

Wow – not much more to add except interested to hear if anyone else found this similarly hard work – or if you breezed through the T/TIME/LIKE/PRESENT device like a Usain Bolt…and also if you can explain SPANDRIL better than I have. I also didn’t spot the entry that is a variant found only in the OED – I thought I found all of these in Chambers…

Thanks (I think!) to Kruger – and as I hit ‘publish’ on this I am about to print off a copy of your Inquisitor 1501 to torment me further this weekend…