The PINK combo delivers another centenary puzzle.
Preamble: All across answers, including the unclued one, are modified identically; numbers in brackets refer to the spaces available. Except for the first and last, each across clue, in order, contributes a letter to a thematic pair of adjectives. The letter is the one immediately before the first instance of a thematic letter. All down entries are normal. The wordplay in down clues ignores every instance of a specific letter. Solvers must highlight the unclued entry that applied in the United Kingdom.
Given that all down entries were normal, I made a start on them. When I’d reached the end of the down clues I hadn’t solved a single one (apart possibly from 8d YEE-HAW, which isn’t in 0Chambers) – mild panic loomed on the horizon. However, I fared better with the across clues, and having solved a handful I realised that their answers were all a letter shorter that the space available. So I returned to the downs with renewed hope and soon slotted in 3d ILKLEY, 4d YIELD, 7d DOYLY, and 9d NYLGHAU; things were definitely looking up. I plugged away, and when I was about 40% of the way through it suddenly came to me that the unclued answers were JULIAN at 11a & GREGORIAN at 10d, so I felt that the Y’s meant that we were looking for something to do with the switch of calendars in 1752 in the UK.
The clues were quite variable for me, some now coming quite readily and others needing a fair bit of digging out, particularly four in the lower half that had two occurrences of Y in the answer. And 12a PER was fiendish! Also in passing I noted that in general the Y’s affected a crossing entry – IODYRITE didn’t – and TROMBONES at 15d was the only down answer without a Y.
OK, job done apart from deciding which one of JULIAN & GREGORIAN to highlight. It seemed like it should be the latter, since by 1800 that was the calendar in use in the UK, but I should really turn my attention to the thematic pair of adjectives. I could have guessed that the thematic letter to focus on was D but for good measure I checked all 26 (actually I got a spreadsheet to do it for me) and sure enough the letters preceding the first D’s spelt EXCEPTIONAL COMMON. (And I spotted that the first and last across clues – the ones to ignore – both started with D, so no preceding letter. Nice touch.)
After a meandering investigation I discovered that a COMMON year is one with 365 days, and an EXCEPTIONAL COMMON year is one that would normally be a leap year (with 366 days) but isn’t because it is divisible by 100 but not by 400. Consequently, 1800 was just such a year in the Gregorian calendar but a leap year of the Julian calendar, and so GREGORIAN is the one to highlight.
A couple of points. I’m not sure what role “local” is playing in 2d – indicating slang, maybe?
And I would have expected all answers to be in Chambers: YEE-HAW isn’t, as far as I can tell.
Thanks PINK – see you again in a couple of years, if not before.
| No. | Clue | Answer | Wordpla[y] |
| Across | |||
| 1 | Death no longer had effect, love coming first (5) | OBIT | BIT (had effect) after O (love) |
| 6 | Giving up clubs for one defending racket (7) | CEDING | C(lubs) EG (for one) around DIN (racket) |
| 11 | See preamble | JULIAN | – |
| 12 | A malicious fellow, sex-deprived perhaps? (4) | PER | VIPER (malicious fellow) ¬ VI (6, sex-, combining form) |
| 13 | Yankee regularly having onset of some chronic dull pains in the past (5) | AKES | (y)A(n)K(e)E (som)E |
| 14 | Tablet or tab permits pushed back (6) | STELE | E (Ecstasy, tab) LETS (permits) all< |
| 15 | Monitor all letters without rights to further updates involved (9) | TELLTALE | [ALL LETTERS ¬ (furthe)R (update)S]* |
| 16 | Caught duck with weed in Garden State (6) | IDAHO | homophones: EIDER (duck) HOE (weed) |
| 17 | Horrid person about to pursue previous affair in retirement (5) | OGRE | RE (about) after GO< (affair, archaic) |
| 19 | Oddly, crowd backed harsh naval conflict? (7, 2 words) | COD WAR | C(r)O(w)D RAW< (harsh) |
| 21 | Spies in despair after money returned in due course (7) | MOSSAD | SAD (in despair) after M(oney) SO< (in due course) |
| 23 | Leaders from Europe turn up in case (5) | ETUI | E(urope) T(urn) U(p) I(n) |
| 25 | British rule wildly more obscene (6) | BLUER | B(ritish) [RULE]* |
| 29 | Rain wore out protective metallic disc, perhaps (9, 2 words) | WEAR IRON | [RAIN WORE]* |
| 30 | Introduce one to home nearest to village (6) | NEIST | I (one) in NEST (home) |
| 31 | Check bar opening in Tottenham does? (5) | DEER | DETER (check) ¬ T(ottenham) |
| 32 | Finally, nurse where we live having to apply balm directly onto this? (4) | EUK | (nurs)E UK (where we live) |
| 33 | Good man, impounding hat in probe (7) | STILET | ST (saint, good man) around TILE (hat) |
| 34 | Pretend elderly doctor’s within opportune time for some (7) | SEMBLE | MB (doctor) in SELE (opportune time, dialect) |
| 35 | Delivered bouquet earlier (5) | SENT | SENT (obsolete spelling of SCENT, bouquet) |
| Down | |||
| 2 | He accepts local produce from milk not tuberculin tested (5) | BU[Y]ER | BUTTER (produce from milk) ¬ TT (tuberculin tested) |
| 3 | Type line, middle of Othello, revealing Moor’s location (6) | ILKLE[Y] | ILK (type) L(ine) (Oth)E(llo) |
| 4 | Produce that is left behind in the end (5) | [Y]IELD | IE (that is) L(eft) (behin)D {or maybe … (en)D} |
| 5 | Soaring in close, it’s these northern seabirds (7) | T[Y]STIES | (clo)SE, IT’S T(hese) rev. |
| 6 | Butternut and wood sorrel in boggy copse (8) | CAR[Y]OCAR | OCA (wood sorrel) in CARR (boggy copse) |
| 7 | Small portion further reduced? It fits on a plate (5) | DO[Y]L[Y] | DOL(e) (small portion) |
| 8 | Finals of Cambridge degree this year won wrangler’s cry of excitement (6) | [Y]EE-HAW | (Cambridg)E (degre)E HA (hoc anno, this year) W(on) |
| 9 | One’s belly laugh startled one ruminating about India (7) | N[Y]LGHAU | (o)N(e) [LAUGH]* |
| 10 | See preamble | GREGORIAN | – |
| 15 | Woman turned up with doctor’s instruments (9) | TROMBONES | MORT< (woman) BONES (doctor) |
| 16 | I’d to keep ordinary ceremony as a means of producing rain (8) | IOD[Y]RITE | I’D around O(rdinary) RITE (ceremony) |
| 18 | Fish belonged at sea after heading off without number (7) | GOLDE[Y]E | [(b)ELONGED]* ¬ N(umber) |
| 20 | Swamped by escalating proportions, documents members of sect (7) | [Y]EZIDIS | SIZE< (proportions) around ID (documents) |
| 22 | University masquerade that’s delightful (6) | [Y]UM-[Y]UM | U(niversity) MUM (masquerade) |
| 24 | Russian workers losing heart, no longer displaying skill (6) | [Y]AREL[Y] | AR(t)EL (Russian workers) |
| 26 | Insubstantial former investment holding (5) | [Y]EST[Y] | (inv)EST(ment) |
| 27 | Rubbish clue-writer’s third in Azed (5, 2 words) | M[Y] E[Y]E | ME (clue-writer) (Az)E(d) |
| 28 | Kiwi expert, holding 1st in Ecology, most respected in Academy (5) | DO[Y]EN | DON (expert, NZ) around E(cology) |
I’m glad it wasn’t me blogging this one as I settled for Julian – 1800 being a leap year but I never did work out what the extra letters spelled. Also, I didn’t see the significance of the Ds. Well done H___G____ and thanks to the [S]PINK consortium.
I guessed that GREGORIAN was the highlighting based on a search of both dating systems and the year, but gave up after some considerable time trying to find the adjectives. I’m still not sure why D is the thematic letter?
Hard work but very rewarding and I loved that the “identical modification” of the across clues was to add a Y to each of them, meaning they all “leap years” per the Julian in 1800, whereas the down clues don’t, per the Gregorian 🙂
The only squabble I have is the use of D as a “thematic letter” – I couldn’t figure out why this would be the case. Because “AD” is related to years? Or D for days in a year? I thought this should have just been described as “the first instance of the same letter in each clue” rather than a “thematic letter”. But I had happened upon ‘exceptional common’ in my research earlier, so eventually deduced it by process of elimination.
Overall though, great fun, thank you PINK and HG.
It’s kind of brilliant (as Arnold has helpfully elucidated) – but also hard work. I diligently went through all letters in the first relevant clue (not knowing how to do spreadsheets), eventually landing on ‘d’. Like others, I failed to see why D is thematic, or feel motivated to work out which calendar to highlight. But I did enjoy the grid-fill challenge, so thanks to Pink and HG.
I lYked this
Surely liYked? 😉
I had to have two goes at this. I solved 11 Across clues and only one Down clue at first and could not see where to go next. Returning to it the next day, I managed to solve three more clues (including two more going Down) and then found that I had answers to nine clues on the right of the grid – which was enough to get me started. When I saw that the Across entries could be written in around the letter Y from the Down entries, it was reasonable to assume that this pattern would continue throughout.
I guessed GREGORIAN from the letters I had and pencilled in JULIAN across the blank 7-letter entry on the left. The rest of the puzzle then became a moderately tough Inquisitor crossword with some very nice clues, of which DEER, ILKLEY, NYLGHAU and MY EYE come to mind as favourites. Unusually for an Inquisitor, though, there were two or three clues that I could not fully parse, and PER went in on the definition only (‘A’). Thanks to HolyGhost for the complete explanations.
I saw no indication of what the ‘thematic letter’ was in the Across clues, but that hardly mattered. I made a quick list of possible letters, using a clue with not many words in it, and, as I went through that list, most of the letters ruled themselves out by being the first letter of a clue, or by not appearing in one. E and U were valid but yielded nonsense. D, my third try, produced EXCEPTIONAL COMMON – which I had just read about in the Wikipedia article on the year 1800.
This was an excellent puzzle by the fearsome foursome, so thanks to them all.
Too much for me, this one. Hampered by lack of time I have to record a DNF, but there were some splendid clues, particularly 12A for PER which I thought was exceedingly cunning. A fun and entertaining puzzle with a clever grid construction.
Me_sat… @8
‘Exceedingly cunning’ indeed – I have already admitted that I had to bung in the answer (PER) on the strength of the definition alone, but my general difficulty with subtraction-type clues showed me up here. I guessed it might be based on PERV but was rightly dubious about it. Congratulations to HG and anybody else who parsed it fully.
To be quite frank, after struggling for half a day with the wordplay for 12a PER I did seek help and got a nudge in the right direction.
I had left that cell empty. Guessed VIPER correctly for the fellow, but didn’t know where to go from there. Thank you for clearing it up!
Not merely exceedingly cunning, but a very clever way of resolving the X/D issue demanded by the message. Of course I speak with gratitude as well as admiration, as one of the three not saddled with that responsibility.