Inquisitor 1660: Caroline by Penumbra

27 comments on “Inquisitor 1660: Caroline by Penumbra”

1. A little too much guessing in the end game for my liking. I went with $ for the 4th cell, but could conceivably have gone with a whole host of choices. Lucky those chocolates aren’t up for grabs, as there might have been appeals to the judge over equally valid, alternative solutions. 😉

2. Hmm. Nice neat grid fill followed by nod of admiration when WONDERL& gave the gateway to the themed items. £BURY and E@ANSWILL followed quickly and my admiration grew at the setter finding Charles related words that all contained common (keyboard) symbols.

   I didn’t know the Ray Charles song but it was easy to guess’n’google. But how to enter the IS? The preamble uses the word “consistent” so the indirectness of IS becoming = seemed at variance with this. And since this is about symbols, what about the apostrophe?

   As for PRADO – well, I’d never have got that if it weren’t for Crossword Solver Forum. It’s a loose connection and an obscure (I think) symbol, and this one required a higher level of telepathy than I possess.

   Nice idea but the final stage was too far open-ended for my liking.

3. A DNF for me, although the gridfill was reasonably straightforward.  I got Poundbury and Eatanswill and Wonderland, but didn’t get Prado or the Ray Charles song.  Presumably the Charles-themed puzzle was specially designed to fit in this slot (1660).

4. Not Wonderloaf, then. I actually got &, and @, but the others were out of reach. I thought of petaohm, but there was no Caroline involvement. Seeing the answers I reckon = is really stretching it. Very (too) much guess what the setter might have been thinking of and googlechecking.

5. If you put an exclamation mark (or PLING) into the middle square, you can see STAPLING coming down vertically. And Charles H Gould was one of the first to patent a stapler. It was good enough for me, but it throws off the letter count, so I suppose it’s not the intended solution. Still, it supports the general feeling that this puzzle is not well-defined.

6. Some words of apology are called for.  I know a few other setters well enough to say that we are as dismayed as our solvers are when we haven’t chosen a theme or written a preamble (in this case, both) that leads to a clearly understood, unique solution.  I expected the Ray Charles entry to raise eyebrows, as WHATD is not ‘equivalent to’ AY, but I’d seen = for IS used in another puzzle, long ago, and thought it was worth a try.  The ingenious suggestion of $ is brilliant, and it’s on the keyboard too, which was what I intended as ‘consistent’ (but, sorry, the apostrophe falls outside the thematic cell and I can’t get too worked up about it, as the omission of a foreign accent is often not mentioned in a preamble).

   By now readers will be aware that the symbol for radian is not on the average keyboard and so cannot have been intended.  What I imagined was that solvers would easily get @ and &, and possibly £, which would make them look for other symbols *that could be associated with a Charles*.  But the challenge was inherently unfair, as there is an odd-one-out among the five.  ‘In part, cryptically’ is true of the entries that appear normally with a cryptic symbol, but I ought to have added (something like) ‘in one case, entirely cryptically’.  The Crossword Solver forum debated PHOTO (with ‘h’ as the symbol), PRESTO (using a musician’s symbol) and PRADO, but all of those assumed that the format was the same throughout.

   I fear there will be cries of ‘foul’ when the solution is published.

7. Penumbra, my bad – somehow my mind saw the apostrophe between the D and the I (don’t know why now). Of course it does indeed fall outside the thematic cell and can be ignored.

   It looks like nobody has got the intended solution for the middle square (I’m glad it wasn’t PRADO) and it may well be that we’re the ones who need to apologise when we see the solution.  I await it with interest!

8. I admired the original concept and design behind this puzzle: it must have taken some imagination, research and effort to identify people named Charles whose interesting creations had names that include words for signs and symbols.

   Unfortunately, though, the endgame was beyond me. Not knowing what to do with the silvered cells I got a bit of help from a friend who gave me POUNDBURY (which I have never head of) and WONDERLAND (which I knew). I then got EATANSWILL under my own steam, but I found the subject much too broad. There are many possible symbols and an even greater number of words for them, as well as a lot of creative people named Charles. I was fixated on the third creation being P?O and the fourth WHATD?AY, and it turns out I was right, but I didn’t know those creations and would never have got them. I had some fun with WHATD-YES-AY, and therefore wanted (literally) to put a tick in the box, but the real answer was more obscure than that.  I also thought of PRESTO for the middle one.

   I enjoyed solving all the clues, although I had queries with two of them. HG has cleared up 28d FLARES for me (I was looking for a subtraction indicator), but in 11d ESTHER I don’t see how ‘Girl’ can indicate ‘her’: cryptic (and English) grammar would seem to require an article in front of ‘girl’.

   Thanks to both Penumbra and HolyGhost.

9. I enjoyed the grid-fill, noticed Bury and Wonder, but I didn’t feel compelled to spend too long on the endgame, which is just as well. It’s a very nice idea, but I think the combination of difficulty and obscurity (in two cases) is perhaps a misjudgement. When I went to Poundbury, it was a bit of a ghost town, more like a set than a living place, but that may have changed.

   Thanks to Penumbra and HolyGhost.

10. Penumbra – I admire your sense of fair play and welcome your apology, from a setter that’s a very rare event in itself (I hope it marks a trend). As you say, the preamble could have been more helpful and more accurate. On the plus side, I think this was (for the most part) an enjoyable puzzle – thank you. I’ll probably be one of those crying ‘foul’ when the solution is printed but, after your intervention, very quietly).

    Thanks for an interesting and thorough blog HolyGhost – I admire your honesty regarding the help you received. For those who can’t ‘phone a friend’ it’s good to see the Crossword Help Forum getting a mention in the same light. Now I’ll go back to the puzzle and see if I can finish it properly.

11. My first IQ DNF for ages, I enjoyed the grid fill, but the endgame was beyond me. I got Wonderl& but failed with all the others.

    Bravo to Penumbra for coming onto the forum to explain the background and difficulties to the construction. Despite the confusion that has arisen with some of the answers, it’s a great idea for a puzzle.

    Great blog from HolyGhost and nice to read about some of the solutions and non-solutions folks devised. It’ll be intriguing to see the solution this weekend.

12. Like Phil R@11, this was our first DNF for ages. We also enjoyed the grid fill and were pleased to find 3 out of the 5 symbols. As others have commented, an intriguing idea. We accessed the Crossword Solver Forum and used the hints to find one more symbol but eventually gave up on the last one. We will be interested to see the final solution.

    Thanks Penumbra for your comment – much appreciated.

    HolyGhost – thanks for the blog. When we struggle with a puzzle, we often think of the poor blogger who has to compile the blog. We hope that he/she/they are making more progress than we are!

13. Great blog from HG. Yes a gentle gridfill often leads to a tortuous endgame.I liaised with Louise for this. She saw £BURY and WONDERL&

    I saw E@ANSWILL and WHAT’D(IS)AY thanks for is being=.

    We thought the middle one could  be PHOTO PhO

    Neither of us saw PRADO or its connection and i cant see RAD being c-is that a constant?

    And i still dont understand CAROLINE.

    And many thanks to Penumbra popping in.

14. copmus@13: Wikipedia tells us that Caroline is derived from Carolus, the Latin for Charles. So Caroline architecture, for example…

15. Well Penumbra, I have no complaints about the final answer. Westward HO! is brilliant. I would never have got there, but I do appreciate having been well and truly misled. I do think the rubric could have led me to that PDM rather better, but the wait was worth it!

16. Indeed Westward HO! is quite clever — I was in the PRADO camp — should have realised that there’s no keyboard character for the symbol Rad (which is… actually I don’t really know).

    One minor comment: the “!” is actually not a substitution since it’s literally part of the title unlike the other comments.

17. @16 Strangely enough I’d wondered about putting ! in my one (still) unfilled square, not for the ingenious reason at @5 nor for the true reason, but because I too was trying to make it PRADO and had hopes that ! might be text-message-speak for “great” or “terrific”, i.e. “rad”. But I couldn’t quite persuade myself and so can’t chime in now with HA HA I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG!

18. Westward Ho! is too clever for its own good.

19. …’foul’ (but not ‘FOUL!’)

20. Foul.

21. I’d never have got the Westward Ho! connection in a thousand years. There certainly should have been an indication in the preamble that one of the entries was fully cryptic, but in the light of Penumbra’s generous apology above I see this as an error of omission rather than a deliberate attempt to cheat the solver. Not foul for me then, but a case of inadequate direction which let down an otherwise fine puzzle.

     

22. Sorry, despite Penumbra’s apology which I think is deficient – editor your comments re the preamble being sufficient are very much required.

23. I was close but didn’t quite get there with Westward Ho! I considered xOH equally with PxO but never thought to read it the other way. The one I would never have got was the fourth one with ‘=’ = ‘is’.
    I agree with cruciverbophile @21 concerning the preamble, and I too appreciated Penumbra’s comment on this page.

24. I put Westward Ho! in my submission and never thought it could be anything else until I read the blog.

25. Penumrbra’s understanding of “consistent” seems to be that the symbols are all on a standard keyboard.
    Many solvers (that have commented) seem to think that “consistent” means that if we replace the symbols by their standard interpretation (@ for AT, & for AND, etc) then we get ‘the thing created by … Charles’. (Even then, = for IS is a bit suspect.)
    I’m in the latter group.

26. In his editorial note today, on publication of the solution, John states “It seems that no one (other than the setter) had noticed that 1660 was the year of… the Restoration of Charles II.”
    Well, bridgesong, in his comment @3 above, said “Presumably the Charles-themed puzzle was specially designed to fit in this slot (1660).” What did bridgesong mean by that? Only he can answer! (At the time, I and many others, it seems, missed the significance of that remark.)

27. Sorry, I got ‘today’ right, but the solution to this puzzle was published a week ago.

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