Let me start by saying that while of course I’m pleased to be blogging the Inquisitor for Fifteensquared, I wish it could have been under different circumstances. Big shoes to fill.
This week’s puzzle is by Phi, who is a fairly frequent contributor to the series and a setter I generally find to be quite accessible, probably thanks to familiarity with his weekly standard cryptics.
The preamble was reasonably straightforward:
In the final grid all entries except the unclued ones are in a simple letter-for-letter code. Six clues each contain a redundant word – taking the first or last letters of these words in order will spell one thematic word, while the last or first letters spell a second thematic word, together identifying the coding principle. The unclued entries are also thematic: of the six entries, four form two pairs (one ignoring a definite article), while a fifth is of two words. Solvers should ignore punctuation.
My first thought on reading was that I would not be erasing most of the letters and re-entering them into the grid in coded form, but calling on the services of a spreadsheet, the odds of either messing it up or tearing a great big hole in the middle of the paper being fair to middling.
I was fairly sure on starting that the wordplay would lead to uncoded entries, but it would only be on entering my FOI, FREE, that I would be sure, some doubt having been raised at 1ac where “there” for “particular place” was a a little too tempting. Thankfully though wordplay led to real entries, which meant that the SW and NE corners of the grid were filled in comfortably before lunchtime Saturday and with little ado.
The other two quarters though had a number of four letter answers (the bête noire of many a solver) that crossed thematic entries that, it had become clear, were in a format that would only lead to plain text following the final encoding stage, and so I found myself grinding to a bit of a halt.
Usually the unclued entries might have been decipherable at this point in the solve, offering up crossing letters, but in the format we had them this was never going to be the case. Having identified five out of the six redundant words we were looking for, I therefore decided to have a go at cracking the code to work out what some of the other crossing letters might be.
As the first two were QUICKSAND and VOW, the chances of finding words using first and last letters looked slim, to say the least.
QUICKSAND
VOW
OBESE
REGULAR
ALDERSHOT
A lifetime of staring at a keyboard both in and outside of work then came to the rescue, with the strong possibility of a likely looking QWERTY. Taking the other first or last letters also leading to a sensible looking DVORAK, KEY at 32d filling in the missing pieces, it seemed probable that I was on the right track.
A Google search revealed that DVORAK is indeed an alternative keyboard layout that is alleged to be more efficient for touch typists. Solvers sharper than me will have noticed that Dvorák is also the name of a pretty noted composer, and with Phi’s predilection for such things being well known too, it would not have come as much of a surprise. As I tend to be a bit blinkered when solving, and am not usually that sharp on a Saturday, needless to say I didn’t notice, but instead concentrated on cracking the code.
Ignoring the keys in both keyboard layouts with punctuation, and the numbers too, the two sets could be laid out side by side as per the below, giving our key.
| Q | W | E | R | T | Y | U | I | O | P | A | S | D | F | G | H | J | K | L | Z | X | C | V | B | N | M |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| P | Y | F | G | C | R | L | A | O | E | U | I | D | H | T | N | S | Q | J | K | X | B | M | W | V | Z |
Encoding then the letters from the unclued entries I had, and applying a little logic, quickly did lead to a number of works that Google again confirmed were by Dvorák: (The) SPECTRE’S BRIDE, SLAVONIC DANCES, RUSALKA, and NEW WORLD. I had some doubt as to whether the second should also have started with the definite article (we were told in the preamble to expect only one), but most versions of the title seem to have it without.
Decoding all the themed letters, and entering them into the grid (I did so for the unchecked letters too, though we didn’t need to, finishing with an incomplete grid feeling very wrong somehow), gave enough checking letters to complete the last two quarters.
All that was left then was to encode the grid, as laid out in the first sentence of the preamble. It was possible of course to do this by hand, but this is the kind of thing spreadsheets and VLookups were made for, leaving a full grid, with only the unclued entries in plain text.
All of which was lots of fun, and fairly straightforward, so thanks to Phi for a great puzzle.
| No. | Clue | Answer | Redundant Word | Wordplay |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Across | ||||
| 7 | Hard to avoid particular place offering pleasure (4) | NICE | NICHE without the H (hard) | |
| 11 | A practice no longer accommodating American characters (5) | AURAE | A URE (obsolete practice) around A for American | |
| 13 | No place in middle of sequences for release (5) | UNPEN | NP (no place (of publication)) inside the middle letters of (seq)UEN(ces) | |
| 14 | British con in prison (4) | BRIG | B RIG (con) | |
| 15 | Quicksand halted day in local dune, requiring retreat (5) | ENDED | Quicksand | D for day in a reversal of DENE (dialect form of dune) |
| 16 | Farmer organised comfort, but offering no repetition (7) | RANCHER | RAN CH(e)ER (comfort without the repeated E) | |
| 20 | Iodine used in a short story as a poison (7) | ACONITE | A CONTE (short story) containing I for Iodine | |
| 23 | Unconstrained ocean feature fine at the front (4) | FREE | REEF with the F for fine moved to the front | |
| 24 | Runs into expert, an old pro (4) | DRAB | D(R)AB giving an old word for whore (pro) | |
| 25 | Rings, vexed about phosphorus in cell (7) | OOSPORE | O O (rings) + SORE (vexed) containing P for phosphorus | |
| 28 | Islamic prophet? I support that chap… (7) | IBRAHIM | I BRA HIM for an alternative spelling of Abraham | |
| 29 | …this chap I leave going round rugby posts – ah, well (7) | HEIGH-HO | HE I GO (leave) containing two H‘s (the shape of rugby posts) | |
| 35 | Appropriate vow given by tense couple (4) | DUET | vow | DUE (appropriate) + T (for tense) |
| 36 | Ice-hockey needs Slovakia getting trophy after setback (5) | PUCKS | SK (the abbreviation for Slovakia) + CUP, all reversed | |
| 37 | Air filled by variable dunghill (5) | MIXEN | MI (X) EN which is a word for a dunghill, apparently | |
| 38 | Jack replacing first of thin cotton cloth (4) | JEAN | J (Jack) replacing the L in LEAN | |
| Down | ||||
| 1 | Stupid American bored by a bit of fooling around (6) | JAPERY | JAY (US slang for a stupid person) containing PER (for each or a) | |
| 2 | Scottish girl, not English, is one with siblings (4) | QUIN | QUINE (Scottish word for a girl) without the E (English) | |
| 3 | Obese prick favouring daughter (4) | PROD | Obese | PRO (favouring) + D |
| 4 | Rabbit, domesticated in the end? Not entirely (6) | TAPETI | PET (tamed) contained by TAIL (the end, almost) | |
| 5 | Cold not requiring island doctor (4) | GLED | GELID (cold) without the I (island) – meaning to spay, or doctor | |
| 6 | One who drops in, taking up a casual chat (4) | PARA | A RAP (casual chat) all reversed | |
| 8 | Malaysian city, one with a lot of aspiration to rise (4) | IPOH | I + HOPE (aspiration) all reversed to give a Malaysian city | |
| 9 | Location of the late uproar about European measure (8) | CEMETERY | CRY (uproar) containing E (European) and METE (measure) | |
| 10 | Access regular space on plane, perhaps (6) | ENTREE | regular | EN (a printing measure, space) + TREE (a plane is a tree of the genus Platanus) |
| 12 | Mexican greeting a mate bearing street map? (6) | ABRAZO | A BRO (mate) containing AZ (an AZ guide, or street map) to give a Central + S American embrace, esp in greeting | |
| 17 | Copper interrupting pub worker, possibly for grilled food (8 | BARBECUE | BAR BEE (worker, possibly) containing CU (copper) | |
| 18 | Quarrel after third of deals not closed (4) | AJAR | A (third letter of deals) + JAR (quarrel) | |
| 19 | Pope imprisoning us, repeatedly telling no-one? (8) | HUSH-HUSH | HH (His Holiness the pope) containing US, all done twice | |
| 21 | Club in Aldershot with soldiers turning up inside (4) | IRON | Aldershot | IN with OR (Other ranks, soldiers) reversed inside |
| 22 | Man hot, bothered – stinging insect? (6, 2 words) | IO MOTH | IOM (the Isle of Man) + an anagram of HOT to give this moth whose larvae sting, thus the ? | |
| 26 | Setter over touring Seychelles after upsetting treatment without drugs (6) | PHYSIO | PHI (the setter himself) containing a reversal of SY (Seychelles) + O (over) | |
| 27 | Cross old man, in conclusion, is to say more (6) | EXPAND | X (cross) + PA (for old man) all contained in END | |
| 30 | Cycling murderer will do for old people (4) | INCA | Our favourite crossword biblical murderer CAIN, cycled to give INCA | |
| 31 | Male fairly quiet? Must be the narcotic (4) | HEMP | HE + MP (mezzo-piano, fairly quiet) to give a fairly commonplace drug | |
| 32 | Separate key debate dismissing appropriate technology (4) | COMB | key | COMBAT (debate) without the AT (an abbreviation for appropriate technology) |
| 33 | Attractive sycamore gutted with axes (4) | SEXY | The S and E from the ends of sycamore + XY | |
| 34 | Reason for church in France to end up without power (4) | DIEU | The French for God given by DIE (end) and UP without the P (power) |
As usual, I enjoyed Phi’s quality clues, which were very satisfying to solve. After solving all but two of them (JAPERY and DIEU, which I got much later with the help of the thematic items), I found that I had identified all six redundant words, from which QWERTY and DVORAK were easily recognisable. (I was already aware of the less common Dvorak keyboard.)
It then became clear what I had to do, and I thought the thematic design, involving a cipher using two related but differently-ordered alphabets, was a brilliant idea, giving the setter a task as well to accommodate some ‘unfriendly’ letters in the thematic entries (before decoding). I’m a fan of Dvo?ák the composer, but until this puzzle came along I didn’t know RUSALKA.
I liked the two crossing answers with -HH- in them, one being a pair of goalposts, the other being the Pope – very neat.
Thanks to Phi for an excellent puzzle and to Jon_S for an excellent blog. (Jon, I always enjoy reading your comments on these blogs. Well done for taking on such an interesting but challenging task.)
(When I drafted my comment in a text file I spelled the composer’s name with the correct diacritic over the letter ‘r’. I see that it has been rendered as ‘?’ In my comment @1. I believe the mark is called a caron or wedge.)
An enjoyable enough crossword, but in my opinion encoding the normal entries at the end was tedious and added nothing (I don’t know why I bothered…no-one’s going to check up on me!). Luckily the one Dvorak piece I know appeared in the grid so the theme popped out nicely (although since the redundant words first emerged for me from the down clues I thought I might be on the look out for and anorak).
Thanks as usual to the setter. And to the blogger…kudos for an excellent debut.
Enjoyed: many thanks to the ever-reliable Phi and to Jon_S. I don’t have much to add to the blog and @1 above except the confession that — having recognized DVORAK in both capacities — I spent some time staring at a printout of a Dvorak keyboard with the QWERTY layout written in, hoping in vain to get something from the direct key equivalents. (Did anyone else do that?) Eventually the sensible approach dawned on me, but oh the embarrassment.
Phil @3
I actually decided not to encode/decode the entire grid. I was satisfied with knowing that I had to! I have the excuse of being in a kind of limbo between a matching pair of eye operations, and excessive grid-filling – and reading, even – is tiring and unwise.
David @4
Yes! I did try decoding one thematic entry key-for-key, but as it produced nonsense either way I was forced into trying the correct way. I actually enjoyed having to sort that out.
The endgame here highlights the curious ongoing lack of a prize for the Inqy. Who in their right mind is going to bother encoding the whole grid when there’s no-one to send the solution to!? It’s not as if we’re going to have a delightful PDM on seeing that, say, ELBQI appears in the SW corner….
Less daunting than I expected from the preamble. The two thematic words fell out fairly quickly and I was able to fill some encoded encoded letters in the shaded cells. This was a bit fiddly since (a) I did not know whether I should convert Qwerty to Dvorak or vice versa and (b) there are 2 versions of Dvorak – in fact the original was not to be used. This led to 4 possibilities for some of the letters. I then spent far too long down the wrong alley, trawling for alternative keyboards (of which there are many). Finally, NEW WORLD jumped out at me and I was away, with a little help from Wiki. Like others I did not bother to encode the pencilled in rest of the grid.
Thanks to Phi for a pleasant journey (unlike last week!) and thanks & welcome to Jon S for a comprehensive debut to the blogger’s world. (A New World for you?)
Humbly disagreeing with previous commenters, I thought the rubric was an unclear mess leading to my first DNF in ages and a rather frustrating weekend.
For a start, In the final grid all entries except the unclued ones are in a simple letter-for-letter code made it ambiguous as to whether to initial clue answers could be entered into the grid at all, or be changed before entry. Only when I had solved 10 or so did I realise that they fit normally, and entered them in pencil.
After that, solving proceeded apace and I soon had an almost-finished grid with QWERTY and DVORAK deduced as an obvious coding mechanism, though it was not clear in which direction the coding would have to be done.
I then proceeded to map the coding key-for-key as they are laid out on a keyboard so for example A=A or QWERTY R = DVORAK = P. Of course this didn’t work and while I noted Solvers should ignore punctuation, I expected this to be in the answer, not in the coding layout. It never crossed my mind to simply take the letters in order starting with the first one – obviously other solvers did, but I still struggle to see why this would be a sensible thing to do.
Many fruitless hours later (and having called a friend) I accepted my DNF in frustration.
I also thought In the final grid all entries except the unclued ones are in a simple letter-for-letter code was unnecessary complicated – why change all the clued entries as well?
I liked the theme and think there could have been a great puzzle here with the simple instruction of: Complete grid as normal – Find coding mechanism (using keyboard layout) – Use coding mechanism to change silvered entries from gobbledygook to thematic words.
Thank you nonetheless for the effort but this one wasn’t for me.
Ditto to everything that Alan B said @1.
David Langford@4 – yes, we puzzled as to whether we had to overlay the two keyboards as well.
Thanks to Jon_S for joining the IQ blogging team. Thanks also to Phi – we had never heard of a Dvorak keyboard!
Like the previous week I solved most of the clues but unable to understand what the heck was going on. Obviously I looked to the extra words to come to my rescue.
Unfortunately although I had identified the first 5 of the 6 extra words correctly they were so unpromising I assumed they must be wrong and soon gave up. Never heard of the DVORAK keyboard, which didn’t help.
Uncannily, arnold (@8) has highlighted something about the preamble that I might have mentioned if I hadn’t thought that my comment was long enough already.
I too thought the first sentence was confusing, as it is written in a way that states a fact and not give an instruction. It implies that in the solvers’ completed grid (i.e. the first diagram above) the unclued entries are in plain text, not in code. But, as that is nonsense, it must actually imply an instruction to be applied at the end, which is to decode the six encoded (unclued) entries and encode all the plain text (clued) entries.
One would expect an instruction to be applied at the end to be worded as an instruction and placed at the end of the preamble. I like arnold’s suggested simple instruction sequence, even to the point of not requiring the solver to modify the clued entries.
None of this further comment on my part detracts from my views on the design of this puzzle and the clever idea behind it.
I too have tried to include the relevant diacritical marks in the blog, but WordPress has tended to replace them with question marks as well. Rare to get an acute, and umlaut and a hacek into a single blog (and I’m not even going to try to give the hacek its own hacek here).
http://phionline.net.nz/setters-blogs/key-issues/
My feelings about this are almost entirely in accord with arnold @8. Why was the bit about punctuation right at the end of the rubric when it was required much earlier for the encoding? And yes, we had to determine Qw… -> Dv… or Dv… -> Qw… by trial & error but that was OK. But I did finish.
Thanks to all involved, and a welcome to Jon.
Solved and parsed all but two clues (1D & 34D), found the six redundant words and so worked out the QWERTY & DVORAK, which led me to the idea of possible keyboard letter exchanges, but then the tragedy of last Thursday afternoon struck, so I put this down and didn’t go back to it, utterly unimportant as it now was for me, so making record a DNF.
I was happy with the preamble but had exactly the same experience as arnold @8. So, disappointingly DNF.