Inquisitor 1752: Mind That Spot! by The Ace of Hearts

10 comments on “Inquisitor 1752: Mind That Spot! by The Ace of Hearts”

1. A relatively small grid this week, 12×12 with only 37 clues to answer, but relatively complex, as answers needed mutilation and were, for the most part, unreal words derived from the true answers all of which were of unknown length! Took a couple of days to complete – endgame words were relatively easy to spot since they had to be real words, the definition itself being lifted verbatim from Chambers. A nice puzzle and a fun solve from start to finish.

   Thanks to The Ace of Hearts for an entertaining puzzle, to HolyGhost for the blog and to fellow commenters for sharing their thoughts.

2. I don’t always get on well with puzzles when answer-lengths are not given and the wordplay is incomplete, but this puzzle, while giving me plenty to think about, was a pleasure to solve. I think it helped that only 8 clues had more than one letter deleted.

   It was a good set of clues, and I liked having long answers to fill in (they give an impression of more rapid progress!). The clue I liked best, though, was LUSTRA (minus the L), almost my last one in (the last being HALACHA).

   The theme came to me only when I had solved all but my last four clues. Of the letters extracted from the clues I just had to change THRESHELDS to THRESHOLDS (arising from the dual answer at 25d: HALIDE/HALOID). After seeing BEWARE in the grid I got the rest pretty quickly.

   Thanks to The Ace of Hearts and HolyGhost.

3. [HG
   The answer to 8d has come out as F[A]L[A]CH[A] instead of H[A]L[A]CH[A] in the blog.]

4. I was hoping for a relatively uncomplicated puzzle this week, and so it proved. I think I enjoyed it more than HG. Thanks to AoH and HG.

5. This was fun and not too brutal (additional thumbs-up here from my wife the classics scholar). All thanks to The Ace of Hearts and HolyGhost.

   As for the title, I wonder how many solvers had a flashback to I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again in the days when every mention of the dog’n name (“We’re in a tight spot!”) would be followed by Tim Brooke-Taylor doing his peculiarly silly WOOF!

6. As a rookie to i puzzles I scraped to the phrase
   I knew 13 was BARB but I forgot the abb BARBQ(phoning a friend helped)
   I finally worked out the weird phrase which didnt produce anything on Google until same friend said to use punctuation marks-Euereka- I could see CAVE CANEM and BEWARE OF THE DOG
   but didnt manage to fill the grid as the remaining clues were very tricky

   Learning curve .

7. Alan B @3: F -> H now done. Thanks. (I thought people hardly ever looked that closely at the table.)

8. I found it good enough fun although the last few entries (bottom right) were very hard work, so I was close to giving up before I figured out ESRAS.

   However, the phrase spelled by the extra letters seemed a bit superfluous this time, as Beware of the Dog = Cave Canem, whether inscribed on thresholds or not?

   And one final small point, I had 26d as [L]USTRA[L] which an additional, but deleted, L at the end.

   Thanks everyone.

9. Arnold @8
   I wondered about LUSTRAL at first. As lustrum is a five-yearly ceremony, ‘lustral’ would mean ‘five-yearly’ (or ‘of a five-yearly ceremony’). In the clue, ‘for at least ten years’ implies two or more such intervals (or ceremonies), so I concluded the answer had to be the plural LUSTRA.

10. Not having real words in the grid always makes the grid fill a little tricky, and in this case a fair bit of backward engineering was required to get the definition. The likely looking definition from the letters omitted and resultant highlighting certainly helped with a few I was struggling with at the close. A middling solve in terms of difficulty as it turned out, and one that I enjoyed, so thanks. 🙂

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