Having had a post up a few days early, I now have one a week late. Holidays do get in the way.
I hope everyone has had a good time solving all the extra puzzles that come around at the festive season. I think I’m now through most of them, so its safe to put up another one for you. It’s an Enigmatic Variations puzzle from 2014, which means it’s covered by fifteensquared, as well as the subject of a setter’s blog here. Links to those blogs are given with the solution.
I spent part of the holiday reading through Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style: The UK Edition. Benjamin Dreyer is a leading copy-editor at Random House and an entertaining guide to style and grammatical issues. And he likes the semicolon, always a reassuring trait in an editor. He has even revised his book to acknowledge that, just occasionally, UK and US usages differ. Giving the reader laugh-out-loud moments in a treatise on something as potentially dry as grammar is a recommendation at any time.
It is definitely building to summer here, and we have had a few days of high 20s temperatures. As yet New Zealand is secure against the latest mutations, but there’s a renewed pressure to log visits to offices, shops and so on, to ensure that movements are traced and contacts are confirmed. While I’m not yet planning to revert to more frequent updates on the site (for one thing I’m regularly out at work), I am certainly going to get back on schedule with an update next week (it will be an old Beelzebub puzzle).
There’s nothing unexpected in the published puzzle line before then – indeed, most of my January puzzles have now occurred, and you’ll have only the regular Friday Independent puzzles to tackle.
Thanks for the book suggestion. I’ve ordered it and will be keen to read his take on things. The Chicago Manual of Style is definitely not a fun read.