26 comments on “Inquisitor 1655: Write-off (29) by Xanthippe”

1. All filled, in but total bafflement as to the endgame. Guess what I’m thinking of…

2. Another IQ where the grid fill was pretty easy (albeit I can never remember the positions of letters in the alphabet, so wrote the letters above the grid), but the endgame took an absolute age. I was convinced at first the 29 referred to letters in the alphabet again for far too long until I finally thought to take the title at its (extremely unlikely) word. Symmetry is never my strong point, so I used a spreadsheet for the shading once more to avoid mucking up the grid. To my surprise I think I got it right.

3. Awful endgame.

4. The first thing I noticed was that despite the lack of bars in the grid the numbers made it perfectly clear where the virtual bars were, and the grid was easy enough to read as it got filled.

   It wasn’t obvious why two entries were jumbled, but they caused no problem. It was a simple enough task to extract the message referring us to the title but not so easy to interpret such a ‘cryptically vague’ hint. I looked (and hoped) for an alternative pointer to the theme, but clearly there wasn’t one.

   I couldn’t make ‘write-off’ mean anything relevant, but I thought of three ways of interpreting ’29’: the word AMNIA (29a), the ‘Twenty-niners’ (a sect named Bishnoi, which appears in the grid as Bish [=20] and noi [=9] crossing each other), or simply a cell count. The last of these seemed the most promising. 29 was a rather large number of cells to shade – what would that achieve? It was the last sentence of the preamble that forced me to think along the right lines. If I were to treat the shaded cells as blocks I could well find a way to leave only real words in the grid – and it worked!

   The 29-letter word came as a revelation on reading the blog. I had no idea what it meant anyway and would never have found it or even looked for it. I was impressed enough already with the design of this puzzle, but seeing how the gridfill had to be achieved with that long word taking up all that space is something else.

   Thanks to Xanthippe for a great puzzle and to kenmac for the enlightenment.

5. Clearly there are those who know there is a 29 letter word for ‘write off’, and those who leave the scene rather early after a quick grid fill. I was in the second camp, but I see the cleverness, if not the route.

   Thanks to Xanthippe and kenmac.

6. As others have said, the grid fill was not too difficult but we puzzled over the two jumbled entries. We did not imagine the ‘answer’ to be a 29 letter word – we were thinking it may be 2,9!

   However, the word was eventually found by looking on our Chambers app for any 29 lettered word. The ending was very satisfying as was filling in the grid – not sure though about the long time in between.

   Thanks kenmac – always impressed by your grids! Thanks to Xanthippe too.

7. I had no trouble filling the grid, except that I seem to have entered POT instead of POI at 4 dn.  I can only assume that this was a temporary aberration, as the wordplay was clear enough.  Sadly, this meant that even after deducing the 29 letter word (with a little help from a hint I found online) I couldn’t quite achieve symmetry.  I can only blame my own careless error.

   I wasn’t entirely clear if the assertion that entries in the final grid were real words included or excluded the shaded cells.  Excluded, I suppose.

8. I found this an easy gridfill and completed it in one session. I even found the instruction without difficulty, but then complete bafflement. Were the cells symmetrical, e.g. O, I H, and X, or where they symmetrically positioned? Shaded cells aren’t usually blocked out in Inquisitor puzzles so how could the result be any different to the original? The instruction suggests that the title’s answer is some kind of instrument to do the shading, e.g. a pencil of some kind. I’m sorry, but the instruction simply doesn’t say what the setter means – to me at least. It may be of passing interest to note that the Chambers definition of “write-off” (with a hyphen) is “to damage or destroy irredemiably” which just happens to have 29 letters. This was of no help whatsoever! I was brought up to believe that the longest word in the English language was “disestablishmentarianism” at 24 letters so never thought that there would be one of 29 letters. I wouldn’t know how to search for it anyway.

   You may have gathered that I’m not impressed by the endgame, but thanks to Xanthippe for introducing me to a word I never knew existed. Special thanks to Kenmac for the enlightenment.

9. Being familiar with the F-word, I’m in the happy camp. I didn’t have a dictionary to hand so the endgame helped me clear up one or two lazy assumptions. Howard L, when I grew up the longest word was antidisestablishmentarianism (as in “Anti… is a very long word. How do you spell it?”…groan). Thanks to K and X.

10. Howard L @ 8

    Did your mentors never introduce you to the 45-letter:

    PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS: a form of pneumoconiosis caused by very fine silicate or quartz dust?

    PNEUMOCONIOSIS: any of various diseases caused by habitually inhaling mineral or metallic dust, as in coalmining

11. Just to say, I knew the F-word, but there was another one used when I was failing to make sense of the preamble.

12. Who else remembers when the Guinness world record book contained all this stuff – longest words, anagrams, palindromes, alphabets and so on?

    Enjoyable puzzle, by the way – and imaginative clueing gimmick duly noted.

13. Thanks Phil@9. I meant to include the “anti” at the beginning but forgot. Still only 28 letters though. Thanks also (I think) to Kenmac@10 for the 45-letter word. If nothing else, it may impress my grandchildren.

14. After a straightforward grid fill, the endgame took forever to dawn. I worked out quite soon that by blacking out cells, there was a blocked grid to be found. But I couldn’t see how to do it or what the justification was.

    At last I thought to look for a 29 letter word that fitted the letters in the potential blocked cells, and bingo. Normally I dislike puzzles with long endgames, but this was brilliant. Just brilliant.

    On the strength of this and his/her recent Listener, Xanthippe is muscling in to join Ifor and Chalicea for my joint No 1 favourite setters of advanced puzzles.

15. Same as others, gridfill and instruction were fairly easy to complete. I got help finding the 29-letter word, and then all was clear, almost. I shaded the N at the centre of row 5, but its partner at the centre of row 7 was a T whereas I needed a P. Eventually spotted the correct partners using rotational symmetry.
    I didn’t have a problem with counting forward and backward alphabetically. I learnt to say the alphabet backwards when I was at school, and can still do so, and in less time than I can say it forwards.

16. Awful puzzle. Ludicrously simple gridfill followed by a requirement to read the setter’s mind. Possibly the most irksome IQ I can recall. Can’t believe there are plaudits for it.

17. I don’t see any need to read anyone’s mind. Once one had the thought that the title is a crossword clue, all that was needed was to google “29 letter word” and Bob’s yer uncle

18. Thanks to Kenmac for the blog and all for the comments. I seem to have split solvers on this one. As R says realising the (29) must refer to the answer length to the clue, however unlikely, is the key to the final step. I’d not come across Kenmac’s 45 letter word but see that it’s in Chambers. Pretty sure I’d not have been able to get that into a grid of any reasonable size!
    Talking of clues here’s an old one for any solvers that have not come across it before:
    Overloaded postie

19. My longest word is in North Wales!

20. Not falling for that one (again), Xanthippe ?

21. If the title is a crossword clue, then it’s an awful one.

    No wordplay and a very tenuous definition.

    The fact that solvers used the word length to reach the answer and not the words in the clue is telling.

22. In line with several others, an enjoyable solve let down by a frustrating and (for me) fruitless endgame. I was stuck on the belief that ’29’ referred to the number of cells involved, but across multiple words rather than one. I also failed to see how ‘shade’ would result in only real words being left in the grid.

    Thanks to Xanthippe – I’m usually a fan! – and I did like the novel way of producing a message.

23. Easy grid-fill? – yep.
    Brick wall? – yep.
    After 4 or 5 days asked for nudge from fellow bogger (kenmac) – ‘read title as a “straight” crossword clue’.
    OK – so FLOCCI…. Then I shaded all the cells with letters from FLOCCI…  that were in symmetrical positions as the instruction said but didn’t quite mean – so I included the O in first row, second column paired with the I in the last row, penultimate column for example – and what a mess.

    Got there in the end, but not a great puzzle for me. Thanks kenmac and Xanthippe.

24. Ylo @21
    I agree the title is not really a clue – that sort of vague pointer to a key is usually called a hint, and hints are not supposed to give much away.  Whatever we call it, we had to find the answer to it and shade it.  In most caes it was as you say the enumeration ‘(29)’ that got solvers over the line rather than the word ‘write-off’, which was not close enough to the meaning of the long word for it to be much of a hint.  My experience was a good one because I (unintentionally) had no encounter with that long word or with the meaning of ‘write-off’ – I was left just to appreciate the result of working out the right symmetrical pattern of 29 ‘shaded’ cells to block off a reduced number of real words.  On another day I might not have ‘got’ this – I’m not having a very good year this year with setters’ hints.

25. Dreadful puzzle.

    Gridfill absurdly easy for a barred crossword followed by an ill thought out endgame.

    Yes it was clever to hide a blocked grid in a barred one but all of the difficulty came from the solver having poor information. Write-off is an awful definition for the long word and only people searching for 29 letter words would get there.

    Puzzles should never be about reading the setters mind

26. Bit like Marmite this puzzle :). Like many others I filled the grid very quickly, but got stuck on the end game. The “clue” wasn’t clear enough for me. Congrats to Xanthippe on a very clever grid design though, very impressive. I had wondered why there were no bars in the original grid before coming here to get the answer, so many thanks to Kenmac too, otherwise I would never of known how or why.

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