Transfiguration

I can be absolutely sure when this idea came to me. I found the other half watching the key scene from The Aristocats on YouTube – the sequence where the jazz band crashes down floor by floor in a Parisian house.

And, of course, I was left with the earworm, and slowly the rhythmic stress split the first word so that I ended up with: “Every ‘body’ wants to be a ‘cat’”. Hmm – replace BODY in several words with a four-letter cat (LION, PUSS)? I felt that words with ‘body’ in them might be a little similar, and certainly the wordplay would have to deal with the same semanteme on a regular basis. So how about synonyms of ‘body’ being replace by types of cat?

That looked more promising. I listed some synonyms for ‘body’, allowing for its various interpretations, and then a list of cat words, and looked for overlaps in terms of length and proportion of common letters. (I mean, I didn’t want to have to change all of them…)

There weren’t so many good matches, though COLOURPOINT/CORPORATION was a standout. My favourites went in, and I engineered a few clashes so that solvers would have some hints as to where entries would need to be changed.

Three answers remained unaffected by clashes, and I wanted to point solvers towards those in some way. So I decided that each of the five changed answers would have the definition ‘body’. Normally an editor might carp at such repetition, but here it was an added prod to the theme. In fact, the editor reminded me to reinsert ‘body’ into one of the clues when I absent-mindedly changed it during a rewrite.

Enjoy the earworm.

 
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