This is the annual appearance of the APEX puzzle – for the history of the series see here. The 2023 puzzle was designed very much in the style of one of Eric Chalkley’s favourite approaches, and you can find it here.
The past week saw another appearance by Pangakupu in the Guardian, and there were lots of comments on both the Guardian’s own page for the crossword and on fifteensquared. There were some comments on the apparent Ninas contained in the grid, which raised a few smiles, and I thought I might share some of that with you. I held off calling the blog ‘The perils and pleasures of Ninas’ since the annual celebration of the APEX puzzle takes precedence!
Many people noted that the central column of unchecked letters spelled HIRIWA, the te reo term for ‘silver’. (NB I am carefully stepping around the actual name of the language given WordPress’s aversion to macrons.) One commenter, who has been keeping a detailed check on my appearances, noted that this was numerically inadequate – there have not yet been 25 daily puzzles; but, if you count the Genius puzzles, there have been more than 25 Pangakupu puzzles. Something else was clearly going on.
Some then turned to the second row – another sequence of unchecked letters, this time spelling PHI O LOVE. With the appearance of ANNE in still another set of unchecked letters, certain solvers were speculating on a silver wedding celebration.
Actually, Marjorie and I are coming up to 36 years in October, a time when we turn to each other around the 15th and ask: “Wasn’t it our anniversary on the 1st?”. I have no idea what the iconography of wedding anniversaries has for 36 (marquetry? daffodils? – no, apparently it’s bone china). The real reason that HIRIWA appeared was that this was my 25th grid for the daily puzzle, but the editor has been using all the right puzzles just not in the right order. You will see this very clearly in one of the forthcoming puzzles.
In any case, not every hidden te reo word (or words) will relate to the number system. The puzzle coming up in April contains one relating to our garden, and there’s a geographical theme in another further down the line. What is intriguing is that, once you start including such elements, people start finding them when they aren’t there – or perhaps I mean ‘weren’t deliberately put there’. Someone spotted that 1 across in the last Pangakupu was also spelled out, acrostic-like, by the initial letters of the first seven down answers, and the PHI O LOVE in this week’s puzzle is another such event – a fluke. (It is also a fluke that I had two flukes in a row.)
The fifteensquared comments included a very detailed observation about similarities between the Pacific languages and how the Samoan loanword for ‘silver’ transliterates precisely to the te reo version. I have tried generally to avoid loanwords (KIRIKITI was a bit hard to skip for no. 22, though), but this shows how they might still sneak in. One hint for anyone seeking out hidden words in future grids is to remember that many of these languages are strongly vocalic – I once worked with someone whose surname was Aupa’au – so look out for sequences of vowels, and simple alternating vowel/consonants far more than in English. Even where you see NG or WH in te reo – they’re digraphs, and should really occupy a single cell. (However, if you ever see a Scrabble tile marked NG and 10 – that’s from the Klingon set.)
April is looking rather quieter than March in puzzle terms. The usual Friday appearances in the Independent are augmented in the first half of the month by a Telegraph Toughie from Kcit on 2nd April, and that forthcoming Pangakupu puzzle on 10th April. Back in a fortnight with another update – but there’ll also be a blog on the recent Enigmatic Variations puzzle popping up on the site later this week. As long as I now go off and write it, that is…
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