PUZZLING

It would be unthinkable to continue without expressing a grateful blanket acknowledgment to Mr. Richard Maltby, Jr. His puzzles every third week for New York magazine have set the standard for America in new kinds of diagrams and in clarity, cleverness, and originality of clues.

Instructions:

Each clue indicates the answer in more than one way. In addition to straightforward definitions, clues may also contain puns, plays on words, anagrams (“The ability to lead people in confusion is a charm – CHARISMA), or embedded spellings (“How it zeroes in distinguishes a cannon”). Another common type of clue is word construction, where the answer is built of component parts. Example: “Directions: Halt! Turn around! Hold in!” Solution: “Halt” (STOP), “Turn around” (STOP becomes POTS), “Hold in” (put IN inside of POTS) and the answer is POINTS, which is also the straightforward definition answer to “Directions”. All abbreviations are acceptable as long as they are in current usage (e.g., TV, p.d.q., etc.). Isolated letters may be indicated in a variety of ways -as compass points (“North” in a clue might indicate the letter N, likewise for E, S, W); Roman numerals (the figure 1,000 in a clue might indicate the letter M, likewise for D, C, L, X, V, I); grades or scores (A, F, “zero” = 0, “love” as in tennis = 0); musical notations (P, F for soft or loud respectively). Parts of words may be used (IVE or just V might be indicated by “Midwives”).

The one paramount rule is that the clue sentence, with a little repunctuation, will tell exactly how to get the answer, with all letters accounted for.

Heavy black lines in the diagram appear where there is no relationship between two adjoining letters, so they indicate the beginnings and ends of words. Parenthetic numbers after the clues give the lengths of the answers. Whenever this number of letters is the same as the number of squares allotted in the diagram, the answer may be entered directly into the diagram. In the cases where there are fewer squares in the diagram than letters in the answer, the solver must discover the one way to accommodate the extra ones.

An added hint: This puzzle contains six proper nouns and one foreign word.

Send the completed puzzle with name and address to Puzzling, D The Magazine of Dallas, 2902 Carlisle, Dallas 75204. All correct solutions will be held for one week, at which time a drawing will be held to determine the winners. As this month’s title suggests, first winner will receive a $25 cash prize. Runner-up will receive a free one-year subscription to D. Winners and completed puzzle will appear in the March issue.