29 comments on “Inquisitor 1599: A Little Rough Justice by Penumbra”

1. I can help with (iv):
   The top left of the page has a big red “i “ on a black background.

2. I struggled with some of the “hints” as well, but (iv) was one I did get, as per Bridgesong above. Pretty straightforward and enjoyable overall, and a nice tribute to the i.

3. I enjoyed solving the clues, knowing that they were all subject to the same special treatment, although with some of them it took a bit of trouble to determine the correct extra letter from the wordplay. Also, there seemed to be a large dose of obscure words and meanings in this puzzle, causing it to take a long time to complete.

   I had difficulty getting started with the endgame because the ‘assertion’ is not in my ODQ. I had similar trouble to kenmac’s with my first Google search, as it didn’t yield anything, but I did find what was required with an ‘exact’ search. I got the author’s initials as a result of that, and they in turn helped with two clues that I had not parsed fully.

   Hints (i) and (ii) made no sense to me, but the other two confirmed what I found – or nearly so. I can see that the two ‘examples’ are thematic (describing qualities of the ‘i’ in a pithy way), but are they examples of ‘a happy quotation’? The hint in the title was easier to understand than that!

   GOING comes from GOUGING, which means ‘swindling’.

   Thanks to Penumbra for a good, head-scratching puzzle and an entertaining theme. And thanks to kenmac for the blog.

4. I think the two diagonals are good examples of “A happy quotation”.

5. Didn’t enjoy this one. Complicated preamble and some tough clues. Walked away after a few sessions. Opsimath wasn’t the setter…

6. Enjoyed — thanks to Penumbra and Kenmac. Tough enough to be an interesting challenge but not so much as to cause headaches.

   FIRM FAIR PRICE: I took this to be a happy quotation in the commercial sense, since I certainly wouldn’t be happy to be quoted an unfair price that was subject to change at the seller’s whim. But WISDOM IN WORDS seems to be a definition of a happy quotation rather than an example of one.

7. Ylo @ 5

   Setter name corrected – thanks for pointing it out

8. Bridgesong @ 1

   I tend to work on a copy, which consists of the puzzle without all the fluff.

   So, IMO, preamble should state:
   “Will be in plain sight, provided that you are using the original newspaper complete with the puzzle’s usual logo…”

   (joking)

9. Thanks to Penumbra for the puzzle & kenmac for the blog. I don’t remember finding this one that tough at all.

   I took hint (i) to lead us to “I spy with my little eye”.

   The parsing for “17 Washington’s casual swindling consigns half of US to be had (5)” isn’t correct as it stands:
   the wordplay is GOUGING (as Alan B says @3) minus U (half of US) with one G being extra; the definition is “to be had” as in something like “what’s the going rate for a pint of beer here?”

   To finish off, I just highlighted the two diagonals and didn’t dwell on the quotations (real or made up) that much.

10. Can anyone explain how 44a leads to SIMNEL and not SIMONEL?

11. Alan B @10: “Evangelical follower” is Simeonite, shortened to SIM – see Chambers.

12. Thanks, HG @11. I never thought of that. Simeonite is a better match anyway than Simon, or even Simeon.
    As for GOING, I thought ‘going for £1’ = ‘to be had for £1’ – similar to your example.

13. Alan B @ 10

    44a now corrected. I was never happy with it but I just never noticed the extra O.

    Thanks

14. Surely one of the highest proportions of obscure words in an IQ for a long while? Given that, I actually quite enjoyed this, though there were a few clues – like 12A – I didn’t much like: obscure word clued by an obscurity and no way of working it out without doing a dictionary search, unless you knew that ‘bun’ meant a dry stalk or the more common synonyms of backveld. I also spent a few fruitless minutes searching through my copy of the paper looking for occurrences of the two ‘happy quotations’, which I thought were going to turn up somewhere in the fine print.

15. I enjoyed (very nearly) filling the grid but came unstuck on the end-game.  Like others despite having almost all the letters I didn’t find the quotation via some Google searches.  I wasn’t going to buy the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations just to look this up!  I spotted most of the words in the grid but that didn’t help me to reverse engineer the quotation either.

    As the crossword element of the puzzle was over I lost momentum and gave up.  Having seen the blog I think “hints” was on optimistic way of describing them.  Hints should help you to decipher the puzzle.  In this case solving the puzzle seems to be the way to decipher the hints.

    Thanks to Penumbra and kenmac.

16. I wonder if the hints were included to help those of us who either didn’t have a copy of the ODQ or, like me, had one which was too old to include the quote. I bought my copy of the 4th edition around 20 years ago when I first started solving (or trying to solve) the Inquisitors and before the days of Google. I couldn’t find the quote through Google but it seemed pretty clear that the centre square had to contain an I to provide the “happy quotations” along the diagonals, hints (i) and (ii) confirmed it, and hint (iv) gave how it should be entered. I never did work out hint (iii).

    Thanks to Penumbra for the puzzle and the hints, but please can future quotations be a bit more accessible? Thanks as well to Kenmac for the blog.

17. I have an older ODQ but used online reference facility via local library card login to find the quote. Without that facility I’d have been stuck as I’ve been housebound with a bad back.

    As almost every week so far this year, the Inquisitor was harder for me to solve than the Listener. If I remember correctly I really enjoyed some of the clues.

18. I enjoyed this and didn’t see any issues at all with the endgame. Granted the quote wasn’t exactly jumping out of Google but the hints made perfect sense to me

19. PS – I did mean to take issue with the definition of Y-LEVEL as a ‘measuring device’. That’s not what my Chambers says.

20. Regarding the quotation being obscure and “hard” to Google… If you put the quotation into quotes when Googling – so “You can get a happy quotation anywhere”, then you’ll get loads of hits on the exact text entered rather than the individual words, and a page full of results for that exact quote. That’s how I did it, anyway. 😉

21. Jon_S @20 – my experience was that if one knows the exact quotation then yes, putting the exact text in quotes will get an exact match.   The downside of this is that if one guesses even a single letter of out place then the double quotes guarantee that nothing at all will be returned. If you knew the exact phrase already then Google would find you the exact phrase. 

    This isn’t meant as a complaint, just an observation that the words used in this particular phrase made it hard find without an ODQ. I think one of the reasons I gave up was wading through page after page of trite happiness quotes complete with sugar-sweet pictures of sunsets and puppies was just too much for me to handle.

22. I’ve been following the thread with interest, and I’m relieved to see that some of the concerns raised have now been settled by later contributors. Thank you all, with special thanks to kenmac for the detailed analysis.

    Let me begin with apologies for my two clear failures.  First, despite having encountered the problem before, I quoted only ‘ODQ’ as the source.  Looking now at my ODQ4 (1992) I find that OWHJ is nowhere to be seen, yet twelve years later in ODQ6 (2004) there he is, with no fewer than six entries, a remarkable new-found distinction.  Without ODQ6 and serendipity, the puzzle would never have been created.  Secondly, of course, it was an oversight not to specify ‘two words’ when clueing OLD TOM.

    The hints seem to have flummoxed some solvers.  What I wanted to convey was that a lower-case i was required, not merely a straight homophonic I for an EYE.  In grid line 7, the sequence of five cells was meant to suggest ‘I SPY with [i.e. beside] my *little* i’, as noted by HolyGhost @ 9, while the title was a rendering of ‘A *Little* i for an EYE’.  The only hint that led directly to the colour was the allusion to the logo.  I had no idea that some solvers would not have that prominently before them.

    As for the quotations in the diagonals, I’m not sure that WISDOM IN WORDS is a definition.  ODQ provides ample evidence that a quotation can be ‘happy’ (in Chambers: ‘apt’ or ‘felicitous’) regardless of whether it is fatuous, lachrymose, amusing or – sometimes – wise.

    To Bingybing @ 19: your comment raised a smile, as my original clue used ‘support’ as its definition.  Our Crossword Editor pointed out that I had misread Chambers.  And he was right!

23. @Penumbra

    Apologies you’re quite right. I shouldn’t have doubted Mr H and team!

24. Hard work – and I didn’t have any colouring implements, so I just pencilled/shaded the ‘i’ and put a large arrow saying ‘imagine this is red!’ Fingers crossed for that bottle of champagne/prosecco/Hotel Chocolat/box of Lindt chocolates…

    You can also get ‘I SPY’ leading to the central ‘i’ from cells 3e, 4e, 5f and 6g in your grid – deliberate, or coincidence? – would that be accepted instead of the more obvious horizontal I SPY?

    I also used the ODQ online with library card number logon – a wonderful and free resource, for the effort of registering with your local library: just go to ‘https://www.oxfordreference.com/‘ and enter your library card number in the ‘Sign in with your library card’ option…

25. Quite tough I found, but enjoyable as ever. Longish preambles don’t put me off as they’re generally a sign of something that is going to be hard-won. The words anywhere and quotation started to evolve and that was my way in, like others using Google search with quote marks. I managed to get the hints but didn’t click with “my little eye”, thanks to HolyGhost for pointing that out. 17a’s parsing totally baffled me. Bravo to those who unravelled that one.

    The quotation wasn’t in either of my ODQs (obviously both too old) , MC’s tip at #24 is one I’ll be taking up. And yes, it’s a shame the value of the prize has gone down over the years, as well as dropping from three weekly winners to just the one. I do send in my entries and my win rate has decreased sharply recently. Hopefully that’s also a sign of more entries since the move to the i. Of course, we almost lost the IQ so I’m eternally thankful for its continued brilliance, prizes or not.

    Thanks again to Kenmac for another comprehensive blog and to Penumbra for both the fun and clever puzzle as well as the forum contribution. Great to see setters joining in.

26. I enjoyed this, but didn’t finish. I couldn’t identify enough of the quotation to make any sense.
    Is anyone able to explain the title? Maybe I missed this in the blog – sorry!

27. Susan – “A Little Rough Justice” is “an i for an eye”

28. Of course! Thanks for explaining.

29. I almost finished! SYNURA is not in my Collins (Millennium Edition) and I went through every possible anag of YRSAUNA minus one letter.  For 17A, I started with ‘goosing’ rather than ‘gouging’ — plausible but wrong; answer was correct but I ended up with an ‘O’ rather than ‘E’.  I think GOING is like when people are taking mugs of tea from a hatch (as in a church, say) and there’s one left; you say to the lady with the teapot, ‘Oh, is that one going?’  I.e. to be had, on offer, available.  And OWHJ is not in my ODQ, 3rd or ‘New’ Edition.

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