Listener 4928 Leo You Can’t Have Both

Leo’s first Listener was called “Unfair”. It wasn’t of course – but it was tough, as were its successors. We’re expecting a fair but firm ride today in their fifth …

Leo clearly likes multiple gimmicks and word manipulation, and this time’s preamble tells us that answers to 24 clues clash in 12 cells; letters resolving the clashes “row by row” spell out a thematic word – so a 12 letter word, one letter a row. That extra information allowed us to find the word about halfway through our solve – INCONSISTENT – and zero in on the remaining clashing cells.

Meanwhile we are also told that all other clues need a letter added to enable, and the letters spell out a thematic feature of those clues and their entries. The last words were not be missed because the whole process was gobbledygook until we realised that both the final letter in the entries had to be omitted and a final letter in one of the words in each clue supplied. The latter spelled out INCOMPLETENESS.

Finally, five of the final entries were not real words (19a astrO, 6d ameboiD, 8d peddlinG, 15d airmarshaL, 17d umpiragE) and the omitted letters anagrammed to a thematic name.

INCOMPLETENESS had already rung bells, and a check with Google confirmed that “Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems establish that in any logical system powerful enough to do basic math, you can’t have both completeness (every true statement can be proven true) and consistency (the system will never produce a contradiction). You get to pick one; you simply cannot have both.”  So GÖDEl went below the grid.

For us at least these mechanics though on the complex side weren’t too hard to work out, but the clues also added a layer of difficulty since they were indeed fair but did give a firm ride – often requiring some imaginative leaps. So in 14a “Rabbits having nothing for a snare (4)” was indeed quite a snare. The crossing letters gave TOU? but that wasn’t going to give us what we needed. The U looked like a clashing cell, so TO??. Now TOIL is common crosswordese for “snare” or “trap” so we took that to be the definition. But what about the rabbits? Fortunately one of the DASH team likes watching cricket and twigged that the weak players at the end of side’s batting line-up are rabbits in the TAIL. So TAIL, put O for A, and we have TOIL, but we remember that it’s a clash and a further change of TOIL to TOOL allows TRIUNES to become TRIONES. Phew! (BTW hands up of you have ever seen the plural TRIUNES in real life… You’ll be thrilled to know that you can do so in the academic paper “Script Cure with Transactional Analysis and Triology” published in the International Journal of Transactional Analysis Research & Practice – but we gather it’s also used in Marvel comics, so there.)

Other challenging leaps were from “errant child” to TERROR, linking “Brylcreemed” to POMADE, getting the extra letter at the end of “parseC” (ASTRO-  being an introduction to words for similar things to it), and spotting “Disney’s” as an Americanism marker – and so on. The hardest for us was 2d “____: they can represent threes with unity (7)” where the answer was surely TRIUNES (see above), but the wordplay? We tried to use the underscoring as a link to the previous clue “Princess Kate accepts historical tribute” for SKAT but that didn’t help. After what seemed ages the penny dropped that the wordplay was something like I and UN in TRES (though that is unities in three not threes in/with unity) or U in TRINES (though U = united not unity) or (probably better) UNE in TRI-‘S clunky though that is… so the answer was part of the clue, represented by the underscores. Perhaps a certain level of deviousness is needed to force us back into using our native wit not aids and AI.

There were others of course which were easier and others which were simply neat – like the extra letter turning “Antony” in “AntonyM”, carefully placed at the beginning of the clue. So all round, an excellent set. We did struggle though for evidence of Oenophile Club membership, but Ant and Dec are DECANTing, and hotel residents at a ski resort (34a) are fond of a tipple so Cheers! to Leo and many thanks for the puzzle.