Welcome back to Paddock, whom we last met in March when we played with Scrabble tiles. This time we are Using Better Words …
From the off it was clear that this was another tour de force of construction, both in the clueing, where six clues were made of six shorter ones, still making (sort of) overall sense like some puzzles of old. All the 36 led to four-letter words, not of the rude variety (yet), each to be placed in a four-cell square tile, and (with the help of bar lines marking the start of each word) building into a conventional grid.
The clues had to be cold-solved, but came out fairly easily – though one at least felt ambiguous (C5 “fish – group swapping river for lake” gave LING (from RING) but could have given CRAN (from CLAN). The eventual construction resolved the ambiguity of course but it demonstrates the scale of the challenge Paddock took on.
The construction of the jigsaw creating the conventional grid was also a work of art, even if it did create the paradox of a crossword with most of the answers unclued and the crossing not giving much help.
We were then told in a second paragraph of preamble that Paddock had in fact begun with a different grid, but on seeing that the four-letter words in it (as opposed to the ones on the cells) were open to salacious misinterpretation, he had added a seventh clue-set to clarify their intent, but then in an abundance of caution, changed those entry words for ones with a letter changed from the originals which were sans reproche (TART becoming TOIL, WEED becoming DEED, BASH becoming LASH, TOOL becoming TOIL, NAIL becoming SAIL and BANG becoming BANE). That meant that the rest of the grid then had to be updated to what we had just solved. Anagramming the pairs of changing letters from the six words just listed produced BOWDLERISING to put beneath the grid.
This all made sense once it had sunk in and came out very satisfactorily, but it felt a tad strange solving the final answer before working out the story of its genesis, though I’m not sure it could have been done differently?
Although it wasn’t too hard a solve, we were grateful for a glass of ALE along the way (one of us was actually in a bar – a taverna in Ellinikon …) and we hope that the relatively short gap between Paddock’s puzzles doesn’t mean he has to serve too long a SENTENCE (having had LETTERS and WORDS) before we meet again.
I’m glad it made sense to you (two, I believe) and that you solved it. For me this was what a crossword (quickly checks meaning) shouldn’t be. Cold solve the whole thing (I solved about 90% of them) and then fiddle about with it some more. Many a cross word was uttered during the non-solving.
Think I have to agree – not a crossword, even though I did enjoy it. Closer to a crossword than Sabre’s a couple of weeks back, but still a jigsaw
Subtitle made me laugh!