Inquisitor 1754: Motto by Phi

12 comments on “Inquisitor 1754: Motto by Phi”

1. A grid with paired clues, after solving a few it became apparent that the pairings were all symmetrically placed, thus leaving the eight centralised clues to deliver the eight extra letters. Endgame was pretty straightforward and nicely done – a nice gentle puzzle, very characteristic of Phi’s offerings I felt.

   Thanks to Phi for a fun and engaging puzzle, to PeeDee for the blog and to fellow commenters for sharing their thoughts.

2. Thank you Pee Dee for standing in for me. I will be back next week.

   I failed to spot the fact that the grid was symmetrical and found the pairings simply by the fact that the clues were close together and that the definition/wordplay pairs were always of the same length! It didn’t seem to make any difference. I confess to being surprised that Bohr had a Latin motto!

3. Spotting pretty quickly that the paired clues were symmetrically placed made this a fast solve here, as I rattled straight through them. Enough of the motto was guessable enough to Google the rest, which was handy as the one answer I was struggling with was NUB. An enjoyable way to spend a little time on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

4. All thanks to Phi and PeeDee for an enjoyable puzzle and write-up. Maybe because I’d recently been rereading some of Ian Stewart’s excellent pop-maths books, I was struck from the start by the symmetry of the grid. When the count of unpaired entries matched the number of “special” clues I guessed the wordplay had been swapped in all the mirror-pairs. Luckily 2/5 and 15/16 were gentle enough to provide a way in.

5. A game of three halves for me – first, stare at the clues for half an hour thinking “I’ll never get any of these”; second, stumble over one clue/answer combination by accident and figure out how it works; third, find enough letters to Google the endgame, after which the remaining clues fall into place quite easily.

   Regarding the “verbal examples”, the blogger is right about Oxymoron, which describes examples such as bittersweet but it also itself an example as it means “sharp-foolish”. I for one didn’t know oxymoron was an oxymoron.

   I wasn’t sure about “spendthrift” however: while two opposite words have been put together to create a new word, spendthrift is now defined as “spending money in an extravagant way”, so is no longer an oxymoron. Whereas “bittersweet” means “bitter and sweet”. Although by that thinking oxymoron isn’t actually an oxymoron any more either…

   Either way though a very enjoyable puzzle with a novel methodology, so thank you!

6. didn’t do myself any favours by bunging in NIETZSCHE when i had a few letters of NIELS BOHR in. thanks to phi for a tough but fair puzzle!

7. Davey @6

   I think I did the same – d’oh!

   Thanks to Phi, as always.

   And many thanks to PeeDee for stepping in.

8. Solving this was not as fearsome as it first looked to me after reading the preamble. My first four answers came from the last four clues (29d to 35d) and my first two ‘special clues’ were 24a and 36a, each yielding ‘O’. From these I learned how to treat the clues and was able to work through the grid.

   The theme came early from NIELS BOHR, which I recognised as a strong possibility from the four letters I had (IE and OH). I read about Bohr’s and others’ achievements in Physics in that era some time ago but did not remember the motto. which was nevertheless easy enough both to look up and to enter.

   The pairs of clues were very well done, some of them being quite tricky to resolve. I liked the reflective (rather than rotational) symmetry of the grid, which complemented the theme.

   Thanks to Phi and PeeDee.

9. This crept up on me overnight, so I’ve only just put up my blog: http://phionline.net.nz/setters-blogs/motto/

10. Nice to read the blog: I don’t normally think enough about how these things get created. I enjoyed the puzzle; ‘contraria’ into a search engine led me to the answer while I still had many clues unsolved. Thanks to Phi and PeeDee.

11. Right from the off I was thinking Rene Descartes until I had sufficient crossers for the bottom row (and of course word finder(s))A distant memory of Physics led me to a pdm and a google.
    Nice puzzle from Phi and well blogged

12. As Mshoatt @1 said, it soon became apparent that the pairings were symmetrical and the clues to the eight non-mirrored entries would produce the eight extra letters, and then things fell into place quite quickly. Finding the motto led me to amend my entry at 12a from NEB to NUB – Chambers indicates that EX can also mean “wife” & has an extra X.
    Thanks to Phi and first-time IQ blogger PeeDee.

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