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Inquisitor 1386: This House Believes

I have always been drawn to linguistic oddities and I’ve used them to make what I consider ‘joke’ puzzles – puzzles that are not too difficult, and are intended as much to raise a smile as detain the solver.  They come along unpredictably as I tend to have to wait to notice something odd, and then wait while it transforms itself into a puzzle.

This was a case in point: I spotted the PROSTITUTION/CONSTITUTION pair a long while ago.  (There is surely a good joke lurking in there somewhere.)  Noting that these weren’t exactly antonyms, despite their prefixes being generally considered so, led me to produce a few more examples, most of which made their way into this puzzle.  I don’t recall finding an example where there wasn’t something at least disjointed between PRO-X and CON-X.

But what to do with it?  The list sat in my ideas file for a while until glancing at it one day I started thinking about PRO and CON in the voting or debating sense, and the final puzzle sort of dropped into place more or less immediately: an odd number of affected answers, some way of identifying which were PRO and which CON (redundant words in clues, as it turned out), and a result.

Most of the remnant words were short, so there was a pressure towards a smaller grid, and so it proved.  But in constructing it I boxed myself into a corner – my excuse is that the (for want of a better word) rhythm of an 11×11 grid isn’t quite the same as a 12×12 – and I ended up with two barred-off squares.  So I turned that into a virtue, and avoided solvers having to write the result under the grid by entering the Y and the N from the outset.  Always something slightly spooky about turning to the puzzle and finding it prefilled, I feel.

I didn’t have a preconceived outcome in mind – I just jotted down the alternative meanings and fitted them in as I went along, merely ensuring a 4-3 split.  Then the preamble, with its slightly unexpected last sentence, tying in to the title, but not to the main body of instructions – hopefully enough to set solvers thinking.

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This is the website of Paul Henderson, who sets crosswords for The Independent (London) under the pseudonyms Phi, for the Daily Telegraph (London) under the pseudonym Kcit, and anonymously for The Times (London) amongst many other outlets. For a more detailed biography see the About Me page.

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