The new puzzle this week is completely new: a recently-finished Beelzebub.  Beelzebub means ‘lord of the flies’ in Hebrew, but is in English dictionaries nonetheless (what did they call the Hebrew translation of Golding’s novel?)

English, as a language, is insatiable in its acquisition of words from other tongues. This comes, at least in part, from a sequence of invasions from Europe, as well as the later creation of an Empire upon which to draw (anyone for tiffin?) This has led to a lot of mistranslations, mistransliterations and general ill-usage.  I dare say it happens the other way – I seem to recall reading how ‘mansion’ had been adopted into Japanese, where ‘man-‘ is already a prefix denoting size. And so now ‘-sion’ is used with a variety of Japanese prefixes to indicate different sizes of building.

This topic has swum to the surface as a result of a recent Azed puzzle which included the entry WHANAUS, defined correctly in terms of family groups. However, the M?ori alphabet does not contain the letter S, and plurals are identical to the singular. (Indeed, ‘wh?nau’ is actually a five-letter word, since the digraph ‘wh’ is a letter in te Reo, as is ‘ng’.) There is presently here a focus on improving general awareness and usage of te Reo, so this sort of thing does tend to stick out, even to a novice like myself.  I still sense a tendency to bung an S on the names of plants and animals (e.g. Kiwis) and so on, but there’s a greater appreciation that the words used for everyday life should be used accurately.

M?ori has a very different structure to English, which I find fascinating, even as I flail to get on top of the vocabulary. I cannot see how you could write a cryptic clue in the language, though there is a word for crossword: pangakupu (or riddle-word, to use its components). The setter of this month’s Guardian Genius puzzle uses that as a pseudonym, so I assume it is someone over here. I knew too that Pangakupu had set a couple of daily puzzles for the paper, with the comments speculating that s/he might be me. So I betook myself to the relevant pages on the Guardian site, and read the comments there (and on fifteensquared, for that matter). Guardian puzzles do get a lot more comments than doled out to us poor souls on the Independent, don’t they?

There was some debate about a hidden announcement specifically stating Pangakupu=Phi. I couldn’t see anything there saying that – I did unearth KAITIAKI in the first daily (it means Guardian; tiaki is a verb meaning to guard, while kai- is a prefix identifying the human agent doing the verb’s action; nothing to do with food, though ‘kai’ does mean ‘food’ as well).  But I couldn’t see anything in the second daily from last month, which would be a terrible oversight on my part as a Nina-hider.

I did see some odd, and perhaps thoughtless, comments that expressed surprise that M?ori had a word for ‘crossword’ – a rather more colonial mindset than you’d expect from the Guardian, I thought. Before I forget, I have tried to use correct spelling, which includes placing macrons above vowels. (These lengthen the vowel when the word is pronounced.) Alas, while WordPress happily allows me to include them in my draft, they seem to get converted to ‘?’ on publication. As it happens I’ve only had to use them on the letter A in the above, so just replace every ‘?’ with – ah – well, you see my problem.

August has quite a few of my puzzles appearing. The current (5 August) issue of the Church Times has one, and next week sees a Times Quick Cryptic on 9 August, and a Telegraph Toughie on 11 August, while there’ll be a 15×15 Times Cryptic on 17 August. All in addition to the Independent Friday appearances.

 

 

Well, not quite, but this week’s storm resulted in a huge slip – pictures here. That heap of earth blocks the road out of Stokes Valley to the south. There’s a smaller one further along – scroll down a bit for a picture of that one.

The road north is usable but it’s quite a round-the-houses approach to going south, and the bus service has been more or less randomised. Traffic is backing up so that it takes something like an hour simply to get out of the valley. The weather has improved greatly , but it is likely to take until Tuesday to remove and stabilise the slips (let alone the houses perched on the edge) and getting in and out is going to be fun, especially during rush hours. We will see what it’s like tonight as we have to go into town for an opera gala. 

But we’ll be starting early, which limits the time here. This time round there’s an old Beelzebub puzzle – there hadn’t been one for a while. I’ve put up an interactive option. (I really must get round to seeing how that shows up on my phone…) As so often, you’ll find a blog on it on the fifteensquared site.

As noted last time, there’s a Kcit Enigmatic Variations puzzle on 24 July. If you’ve been following the sequence in recent weeks – yes, it’s Elementary IV. Who knows when the sequence will end? Might be worth keeping a weather eye on things.

Aside from that, I have a Jumbo in The Times on 30 July, and a Church Times puzzle on 5 August, shortly after which I shall be back here with another puzzle, I hope.

 

I thought I’d dip a further toe into the waters of solving barred thematic puzzles online. The puzzle this time is an Enigmatic Variations puzzle from 2016. This mean there is a setter’s blog (though I think that has disappeared into the archives page) and a fifteensquared solver’s blog, neither of which you should consult until after you’ve solved.

There has been a lot of debate about whether barred thematic puzzles can be solved online or interactively. I looked over a few in preparation – I had to reject a ‘Carte Blanche’ puzzle where the grid pattern had to be determined by the solver. But this 2016 puzzle, which requires some jumbled entries, seems perfectly doable online. I haven’t attempted the technicolor solution The Telegraph produced (I don’t think it gives much away to say it merits a technicolor solution), but I might be able to get a version if anyone is keen.

It would be useful to know how people get on as a contribution to the debate.

I decided on an EV puzzle (which is out of my intended cycle) because the date it would have appeared would have clashed with an actual new EV puzzle on 24 July. I’ll post a further reminder with my next update, which will be on the actual weekend it appears, but I may as well signal its approach now. Otherwise there’s a Times puzzle on 12 July, as well as the Independent Friday regulars.

I have just received the September issue of GAMES magazine, which is mildly irksome as I hadn’t finished the August issue’s puzzles yet. (Yes, it is July – as far as I can make out, the e-version appears way, way before the dead-tree option gets to the shelves.) There’s a feature article on the growing numbers of American cryptic puzzles, which I may return to in a future blog (possibly September…). It contains some questionable statements – did you know that American cryptics have ‘strict rules about cluing structure that are not applied in the more freewheeling British puzzles’? And there is the customary assertion that you need to reference ‘pop culture and slangy phrases’ (the ‘newest flavor of fill’) to move with the times. But there is surely nothing more likely to anchor you in the past than a cultural reference that no-one remembers.  I am a great admirer of American cryptics, but it is seriously irksome to find you cannot be certain about a final unchecked letter because you do not know the name of an actress in a soap opera that has never been exported, or the name of a recently retired baseball player.  (Of course, the Brits retaliate with cricket abbreviations and Coronation Street…)

 

I’ve taken quite a few tests for coronavirus over the past few weeks, as I’m one of those people who tends to run a mild sniffle throughout the winter months (exacerbated this year by some unseasonal pollen and the need to have round some pittosporum saplings). 

But Monday’s was finally positive, and what I thought was a bad cold, if not influenza, turned into everyone’s favourite bugbear. As far as I’m concerned, anyone advocating catching the thing so as to develop herd immunity should be required to do so, possibly repeatedly. It has not been a splendid week, and I’m still very tired a lot of the time. Most of the symptoms are abating, though the cough is threatening to hang around (rather like the 100-day cough I had in late 2019), and I’m working through my usual constellation of stuff that goes with the end of a ‘normal’ ‘flu. 

The tiredness and aching remain irksome, and so there won’t be a full update today. I have added a blog on Run to Seed (LIstener 4714) now that the solution is up. It’s also a quiet fortnight in terms of puzzles – there are just the usual Friday appearances in the Independent on 1 and 8 July. (Regulars will recall that the first in the month very definitely has a theme at present.)