Enigmatic Variations No. 1547: Elementary II: Rising Costs by Hedge-Sparrow

My esteemed fellow-blogger Mister Sting pondered last week as to whether ‘EV 1546 Elementary I…‘ might be the start of a series – and this would seem to be borne out by the appearance of ‘Elementary II’ this week…

The preamble states that:

“Two thematic entries are unclued. From six clues, before solving, a word must be removed, suggesting a thematic circumstance. For all other clues, before solving, a letter must rise to the clue above, and a letter come in from the clue beneath (skipping the six clues referred to above), this effect wrapping around from the top of the across clues to the bottom of the down clues. For all clues, changes always result in real words.

In clue order, the rising letters spell out an instruction. To demonstrate RISING COSTS, solvers must follow the instruction and highlight two synonymous thematic states, (6) and (7), appearing as a result, which are an effect of one unclued entry and a cause of the other. All entries before and after changes are real terms. Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended; 38 and one other final entry are in Collins.”

A two-paragraph rubric – almost unprecedented! And it took a couple of reads, then several re-visits during solving to get any idea what was going on…

In the meantime, the only thing to do was to jump in and see what the clues might render – noting the 13 x 11 grid. I’ve seen the slipping, or rising, in this case, letter device before, and it does play tricks with the mind as you scan the current and next/previous clues to see if any words might be candidates to be increased/decreased by a letter and still make sense.

My first couple to fall were 18A PURSUED and 21A ASSESS.

18A seemed to be wanting us to ‘doctor’ USURPED to get PURSUED (dogged), which suggested that maybe RAIN was the word to be removed – one of the six. (But RAIN is actually part of RAIN-DOCTOR…more on this later!).

Similarly, the ‘Judge’ in 21A looked like a definition for ASSESS, with the last S coming from the end of graveS’, which meant that ‘sips’ must be indicating ASSES. So, could it be ‘simps’, with an ‘m’ coming up from the next clue? And to get the ‘last’ of graveS, we’d need to send the E of least up to the previous clue.

Phew – two down, and only 37 more to go!…

And so it continued, for a while, with a few educated guesses along the way – OUSTING a probable anagram of T(W)O SUING, with W moving up; a Cornishman’s (d)inner being a PASTY; YEMEN being an anagram of ENEMY and an Asian Republic (well, I think of it as more of an Arab republic, but it is just about on the edge, in ‘Western Asia’…); SIGMAS being Greek characters. Etc.

And gradually the grid began to fill, and the shifting letters began to start making something like a sentence. Also, the extraneous words – which all turned out to be parts of words in the clues, but are all words in their own right – revealed themselves: SNOW, WATER, ICE, POND and RIVER, to add to the aforementioned RAIN. So the ‘element’ of the title seems to be WATER, in various forms – whereas last week’s theme incorporated AIR. No prizes for guessing where III and IV might go!

And the shifting letters, neatly punctuated by the water-words, eventually gave ‘RAISE TEMPERATURE BY ONE OR TWO DEGREES’. And at some point along the way I had realised that the unclued top row must be GLOBAL WARMING, and the unclued part of the middle column must be WILDFIRES.

It took a bit of grid-staring before the penny dropped – there are only five Ts in the grid, ‘t’ being an abbreviation for ‘temperature’, and if they each moved up one or two places, or degrees, they still formed real words – PASTY became PATSY, with SHIRTY becoming THIRTY. OUSTING became OUTSING, with ASSESS becoming ASSETS, and THIRTY becoming THIRSY, then THIRST, and so on.

The end result of all this temperature rising, global warming and wildfires (all serendipitously topical, as the UK tries to cope with record temperatures this week) turn out to be THIRST and DROUGHT:

 

All a bit gloomy, but a necessary elbow in the ribs to remind us – and the next generation – about what is coming. I found this quite hard work – and felt the strain of it being a blogging week, so I put some extra effort into it on the Sunday and the Monday – and some of the early-morning-lying-awake-because-it’s-too-hot hours – and got there some time on the Tuesday or Wednesday.

Elementary, my dear Hedge-Sparrow!

 

Across
Clue No	Rising letter / Risen letter / Removed word	Solution / Entry	Clue (definition underlined) Logic/Parsing (extra letters in brackets)
9	R – ‘anger’ / A – ‘Arab’	AIRER	Ranger carried by Rab’s horse (5) A_R (Arab) around (carrying) IRE (anger) [horse’ as in clothes horse, airer]
11	A – ‘biting’ / I – ‘main’	LEAMED	Man baiting me beamed on the way out (6) LEA_D (main) around (biting) ME [LEAM being an archaic, i.e. on the way out, word for glow, or gleam]
13	I – ‘final’ / S – ‘slope’	UNDERLIE / UNDERLIT	Lope away from vertical column’s finial to avoid stress (8) UNDERLI(N)E – stress, avoiding N – final letter of columN [to UNDERLIE can be to slope away from the vertical]
14	S – ‘un’ / ‘E – ‘bare’	UNPEG	Remove fastening from sun lamp, wanting tan (bar legs) (5) UN + (LAM)P (removing, or wanting, lam – tan, or beat) + (L)EG(S) (legs, bare, or with outer letters removed)
16	E – ‘cut’ / T – ‘start’	ROLL	Star character’s cute line (4) ROL(E) (character, cut by one letter) + l (line)
18	RAIN	PURSUED	Dogged rain-doctor usurped (7) anag, i.e. doctor, of USURPED
19	T – ‘hugs’ / E – ‘tare’	TOUGHS / ROUGHT	Old tar turning on criminal thugs and hooligans (6) TO (O, old, plus T, tare, turning to give TO) + UGHS (anag, i.e. criminal, of HUGS)
21	E – ‘last’ / ‘M – ‘simps’	ASSESS / ASSETS	Judge sips least bit of Graves (6) ASSES (simps, American slang for simpletons) + S (last bit of graveS)
24	M – ‘en’ / P – ‘spit’	SPINET / SPINES	Sit guarding men rotating instrument (6) SPI_T around (guarding) EN
25	P – ‘air’ / E – lead’	SHIRTY / THIRST	Ill-tempered lad leaving pair time to engage in fling (6) SH_Y (fling) around (engaging) (A)IR lead letter leaving air) + T (time)
26	E – ‘cor’ / R – ‘ergo’	ISONOMY	Independent ego with no core equal rights (7) I (independent) + SO (ergo) + NO + MY (cor!, interjection indicating surprise)
31	R – ‘lean’ / A – ‘papa’	RELY	Learn to respond, avoiding pap (4) RE(P)LY – respond, avoiding P – papa, phonetic alphabet
34	A – ‘ye’ / T – ‘valets’	YEMEN	Enemy crushed? Aye – beside vales in Asian republic (5) Anag, i.e. crushed, of YEMEN; YE + MEN (valets) [a rare example of double wordplay!]
35	T – ’round’ / U – ‘misused’	TENDERED / RENDERED	Offered ten old pence to get rotund deer that’s been missed (8) TEN + D (old pence, from LSD) around DERE (anag, i.e. misused, of DEER)
36	U – ‘nit’ / R – ‘country’	GRANGE	Ran into unit possibly heading west for former county house (6) G_GE (egg, or nit, heading west) around RAN
37	R – ‘mine’ / E – ‘ante’	MAINE	Miner ant invades state (5) M_INE around (invaded by) A (ante)
38	E – ‘muss’? / B – ‘band’	POSSESSEDNESS	Bedevilment muses sensed to the rear of ship, and ahead (13) POSSE (gang, group, band) ahead of SS (steamship) + EDNESS (anag, i.e. muss, or scramble, of SENSED)
Down
Clue No	Rising letter / Risen letter / Removed word	Solution / Entry	Clue (definition underlined) Logic/Parsing (extra letters in brackets)
1	B – ‘union’ / Y – ‘lady’	GAUL	Aged Frenchman’s bunion initially bound by local young lad (4) GA_L (young lady) around (binding) U (union, initially)
2	Y – ‘class’ / O – ‘dado’	ORDER	Classy cap doffed by dad? (5) (B)ORDER – dado rail, or border, doffing cap, or removing top letter – for a Down clue!
3	ICE	BEER	Type of liquorice sinking right to the bottom of Scots broth (4) B(R)EE (Scottish for brew, or broth) with R (right) sinking to the bottom, again, for a Down clue = BEER
4	O – ‘lire’ / N – ‘lines’	LILLE	French city lies within Loire, overlooking river (5) LI(R)E overlooking R (river) and inclding LL (lines) = LILLE
5	N – ‘take’ / ‘E – least’	ALERTS / ALTERS	Last out, having taken in warnings (6) ALE_TS (anag, i.e. out, of LEAST) around R (recipe, Latin, take…)
6	E – ‘at’ / O – loads’	MANY	Lads, beginning to munch, ate all (4) M (first letter of Munch) + ANY (at all)
7	SNOW	IMPUGN	Attack weed, lopping with tool when finishing off planting snowdrops (6) (W)IMP (weed, lopping off W, with) + UGN (GUN, or tool, with G, last letter of plantinG, dropping = UGN)
8	O – ‘pens’ / R – ‘crave’	NEED	Young Glaswegian hooligan opens Ecstasy in cave (4) NE_D (Scottish, i.e. Glaswegian, for young hooligan) around (penning) E (Ecstasy tablet)
10	R – ‘shot’ / T – ‘hearts’	INRUSH	Sudden inward spurt, one hears, runs short inside (6) I (one) + H (hearts), around NRUS (anag, i.e. shot, of RUNS)
12	POND	EUROPOL	International law-enforcement agency briefly ponders arresting unionist hack over uprising (7) E_R (ers, briefly, or dropping last letter) around (arresting) U (unionist), plus OPOL (LOP, or hack, plus O, over, cricket, all over, or uprising)
15	T – ‘casing’ / W – ‘Fawkes’	GUSTY / GUTSY	Fakes (perhaps) casting stone, being fitfully emotional (5) GU_Y (Fawkes, perhaps) around (casing) ST (stone)
17	W – ‘to’ / O – ‘founder’	OUSTING / OUTSING	Throwing out two suing funder (7) anag, i.e. founder, of TO SUING
18	O – ‘psych’ / D – ‘dinner’	PASTY / PATSY	Maybe Cornishman’s inner power – rash, but not psycho, ultimately (5) P (power) + (H)ASTY (rash, without H – ultimate letter of psycH)
20	WATER	HEMPEN	Waterhen swallowing tips of endangered marsh plants having fibrous quality (6) H_EN around (swallowing) EMP (tips, or first letters, of Endangered Marsh Plants)
22	D – ‘ma’ / E – ‘heated’	SIGMAS	Uniat hated abandoning Saint Ignatius for mad Greek characters (6) S (saint) + IG(NATIU)S – losing NATIU (anag, i.e. heated, of UNIAT) and replacing it with MA = SIGMAS – Greek letters
23	E – ‘state’ / G – ‘gripping’	SYRTES / STYRES	Sierra estate, at the front, ripping tyre badly in Milton’s quicksands (6) S (sierra, phonetic alphabet) + S (State, at the front), around (gripping) YRTE (anag, i.e. badly, of TYRE)
27	G – ‘sun’ / R – ‘grasp’	SENSE	Gasp, on edge having sung as replacement for tenor (5) (T)ENSE – on edge, swapping T (tenor) for S (sun) = SENSE (grasp, or understand)
28	R – ‘Ian’ / E – ‘heaving’	OURIE	Iran’s shabby envoy having case (5) (C)OURIE(R) – envoy, heaving, or throwing away, case, or outer letters
29	E – ‘Nil’ / E – ‘Eastern’	ZERO	Bearing ascendant king astern, cross Nile (4) Z_O (dzo, hybrid, or cross-breed, of cattle) around (bearing) ER (R, rex, king plus E easterm, ascending to give ER)
30	E – ‘dam’ / S – ‘swan’	PENS	More than one wan dame needing start of summer (4) PEN (dam, confine) + S (start of Summer)
32	S – ‘Mother’ / r – ‘bread’	YEAN	Smother elderly Academician wearing Japanese bead (4) Y_EN (Japanese bread, or money) around (wearing) A (Academician, as in RA = Royal Academician)
33	RIVER	ODES	Meandering riverside one abandons after duck lays (4) O (zero, duck) + DES (anag, i.e. meandering, of S(I)DE, abandoning I, or one)