The basic premise of the Printer's Devilry Clue is that the printer has removed a string of letters from an intelligible piece of text and then closed the gap to disguise the omission in such a way that the remaining text is coherent but no more plausible than the original, whilst avoiding excessive changes in punctuation and spacing. As well as closing the gap in the devilled version, in the best undevilled versions the gap should not be situated between words ( e.g. I returned to archery club after trying beginner's golf).
Competitors offered 23 different ways to introduce ARCHER into their clues, with the 7 most popular being mARCHERs (3, 22, 24, 26, 31 and 39), wAR CHERish (13, 29, 35, 37 and 38), bAR CHERoot (2, 6 and 16), patriARCH ERotic (11, 12 and 28), StARC HERoic (17, 20 and 36), afAR Cherish (8 and 21) and fAR CHERries (18 and 34). CHERry also featured in clues 4 and 7 and CHERish in clue 30.
The most successful clues avoided all or most of the pitfalls listed above. Four clues missed the basic requirement to close the gap after removing the clue word (4, 10, 19 and 26) whilst in another couple the gap was between words in the undevilled version (22 and24). A significant number of the PD clues were far more plausible than their proper versions (1, 5, 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 33 and 38, whilst an even larger number were at the other extreme and lacked sufficient coherence in their own right (4, 6, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 30, 31, 32, 37 and 39), with five clues lacking plausibility in either version (2, 7, 14,28 and 40. Just three competitors introduced an unnecessary definition of ARCHER (2, 17 and 27) and five further clues suffered from excessive devilry, sometimes involving too many changes in punctuation (5, 7, 9, 17 and 40).
This turned out to be one of the more challenging tests for aspiring clue writers and in the end the points were divided more or less evenly between the remaining clues. |
