Want to scare me straight off the bat? "Some of the across clues are "Letters Latent"". Crap. My least favorite form of clueing (I'd almsot prefer printers devilry). And only some of them, great.
My memory is a little flaky, but I think I tried one Lavatch puzzle before ("Fallout") and it was nearly an empty-gridder. What else do we have here...
Down clues are two clues side by side (and each has the same number of letters) with a separator word.
Well so much for my brilliant idea of working on the down and eaving etters atent unti ast.
Breathe easy, the first across clue isn't letters latent, it's A,B in G,BED. The second one looks like a definition of Noble and a Frenchman in P-E, Rene is too short, Alain? PALA(T)INE. I solved a letters latent! And I have a first row. 11 looks like it could be AIR(H)OLE and maybe these letters latents aren't going to be too bad. 12 is a straight out ODENSE. Thinking I'm going to get a lot more of these latent lettery ones, I attack the rest of the acrosses. I like 20 - SA(P)ONIFIES, 33 is a non-latent DAHLS, 36 is a nearly giveaway (H)EDGING, and 38 looks like some anagram of SSSNAT. I've got a decent part of the grid filled in!
Can we guess at some downs?
2,25 - I can see the first half is AIRMEN, which has to be 2. So NUCLEAR is the extra word
3,19 - I can see the second half is BIOLYSIS (Lavatch must be a scientist), which has to go in 19. CALLED is extra
4,24 - some atlassing tells me that PINEGA is a Russian river, and has to go in 24. IN extra
Having the first letter of most of these downs is helping.
5, 32: First half looks like GAES, the other half then has to be DE-- - DEAN?
6,30: POLIO is the rather uncomfortable second half (and fits the first two letters at 6).
7,28: Finally one where both halves appear - LE(H)AR and VIS,OR!
8,27: ANISE (fits 8), INFOLDS is extra.
9,26: WEALD is the second half (remember that one from Carte Blanche!), goes in 26.
10,13: TETRAHEDRA (more science!) is the second half, and goes in 13. A director starting with E and having 10 letters has to be EISENSTEIN, let's write him in at 10. OBVIOUSLY is probably the link word
14,21: ummmm, no clue
16,22: The second part is an anagram of SALE meaning a woman, ELSA or LESA, either would fit at 16. or 22...
This is looking more promising, back to the lers laen. 15 is HI--S which probably means HINGES without an E, and little cokehead Martina Hingis is our tennis player. And hello - this row reads TRIVIAL-HINGS. If 14d starts with a T we've found our phrase!
17 is (R)EASSU(R)E - E ASSUME minus the M.
Penny drop moment at this point... there's four whole words in those across clues, and so far it seems at least three of them don't have letters latent! THER-P-O--H- got to be THE something OF THE. RAPE? Google tells me that THE RAPE OF THE LOCK is a poem by Alexander Pope and it contains the words "What mighty contsts rise from trivial things"!!!! The first letters from the down clue words have to make an 11-letter word that comes before LOCK. I have NCIAMITO... COMBINATION!
Very excited by this find, I bashed out the downs... the B has to come from BRITAIN in 14,21. TENNO is the first part, and confirms my idea at 14d. Chambers Word Wizards suggests BRIAN ENO as a possibility for the letters in 3D (Hey, Brian, you're in Word Wizards!), wordplay words, BRAIN(move the A), E,NO. Knowing I need a latent A gives me TENAILLON (and suggests 4D wasn't BOVINE, but BOVRIL), and ANN(E)XATION for 23.
I have a completed grid!!!!! Now what... replace TRIVIAL THINGS with ALEXANDER POPE of course. That solves... nothing. Something's got to appear in another row.
Looking at the grid, head-smack moment... there's an X in the fourth column. It's a COMBINATION LOCK, I have to move the columns, and rather neatly, there's only one L in the second column, one E in the third and so on. Our three ambiguities are that there's three A's in the first column, two E's in the 8th and three E's in the last.
I printed off a new grid and wrote in the new columns and saw... nothing. Four rows looked like possibilities, so I wrote them out again, with all the possibilties for the ambiguous letters
Still nothing... back to the preamble... the theme's last line. Oh, what's the last line of the poem...
"And 'midst the stars inscribe Belinda's name". There's BELINDA, and if we choose our combination write, she's in GEMINI.
Lavatch - this was hard and fun. I spent lots of time on it, and where initially I was dreading it, the lttrs latnt didn't turn out to be so bad. This is one of the most involved Listeners that I've gotten to the bottom of, many many steps.
This is a long long report, but I really liked the puzzle. And I got it! Another point to George in the battle and a slight lead is restored.
Current tally: George 15, Listener 12. Current streak: George 2.
8 comments:
Nice one George.
For once, I latched onto the theme almost immediately, and the combination lock idea was fantastic, because I guessed what I was looking for.
This one was a contender for best Carte Blanche still gets there, by a whisker); just enough challenge and just enough landmarks to lead you on. My only criticism would be that there were too many proper nouns, but it can't be easy to compile such an intricate puzzle without having to have a little more freedom.
Miles here and I left my first comment 3 weks ago having made an attempt to start #3989.
Now I'm looking at the answers and I'm not much wiser.
OK I filled in 5 correct solutions plus 1 with a clue from another blog (so I don't really cound that).
But I'm starting to worry that my volcabulary just isn't up to this!
I'll submit some plaintive enquiries until someone bores of me and tells me to shut up!
First one: 1 across - OK I see the wordplay - but does this clue have no definition?
Second: 6 across - I had palatine in my head. (I went to Durham University for which the Student Newspaper was the Palatinate) but I just don't have PALAINE in my dictionary. It's the Chambers 20th Century Dictionary awarded to me as a school prize (OK sorry) in 1976. Is there one with a whole other language in?
This is the trickiest thing in getting started with the Listener - answers are not always entered as the actual answer - the preamble sometimes tells you exactly how to enter answers, sometimes it gives hints. In this case it's Letters Latent (my least favorite), where one letter is left out of the answer - in this case, the wordplay leaves the letter out.
1 across isn't letter latent, it's just B in G, A BED and the definition is "crew" (in chambers, past tense of crow - boast or swagger).
6 across is letters latent - the wordplay gives ALAIN (Frenchman) in PE (borders of PrincE), but the definition gives you PALATINE.
Letters latent means most of the across clues aren't real words, which makes it an extra pain to solve, but Chambers word wizards helped me with a few by taking the letters I thought were there and adding the latent letter and doing an anagram search, a search for SSSNATE got me SNASTES, which goes in 38 without the E
I don't do a full clue analysis in this blog, there is one by Gregson in the Crossword Centre, but I can try explaining other clues if you want to leave a comment or email me (glheard@gmail.com)
re: Proper nouns, there were a few, weren't there? The only one I hadn't heard of was Dagestan, which was the last entry I made in the grid. Knowing there was a latent T helped a lot. Brian Eno showing up on word wizards was a trip.
I have every sympathy with Miles. Even with practice the Listener can be pretty difficult - read George's blog for the year to find that out.
On Chambers, I would say that the most recent edition is a must really. It doesn't have a "whole other language" in it, but it always amazes me what new words are in each edition. I keep the old ones downstairs and the new one upstairs!
Thanks all - I think my main problem was that I assumed the grid entry had to be a word - rather than being a word with letters missing.
This also explains why I've gazed open-mouthed at printed solutions and wondered where solvers get their extended vocabulary from.
I won't witter about individual clues here if there are better places to look.
But - without access (yet) to the appropriate Dictionary - it strikes me that crew is probably only the past tense of crow in American English?
A bit live dive/dove?
I suppose I expected the Listener Crossword - being a UK English creation - to contain UK English solutions - or is that just Limey word-snobbery on my part?
Direct comment to Miles - a copy of Chambers is really necessary here, not only is it Limey Word-Snobbery, it's Big Red Dictionary Limey Word-Snobbery.
One of the first things that attracted me to the Listener was looking at some solutions that appeared to be random letters thrown in the grid, and how you could decode (or arrive at) them.
OK....point taken!
I've always found the pleasure in crosswords is that moment when you realise you're thinking the same way as the setter.
I'm still finding these tough though - tougher still when the words just don't appear in the big red book - SNASTES ?
I shall persevere.
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