| Other Devious Devices |
A Good Hiding! Sometimes the letters of the target word are presented to us in other ways. Consider this:
It shouldn’t take much consideration for you to spot that “hamster” is to be found within the words West HAM, STERn - ignore any capitalisations or punctuation within a clue: it is a convention that such things may be used purely as a distraction. “Pouched pet” is, of course, the definition. This is a “hidden word” kind of clue, and the “in” is an instruction to look for a hidden word. No geographical information is required and the pet is not a stern one. Because hidden words are pretty easy to spot, many distractions in the way of false punctuation and capital letters may be used to make them more concealed as is possible. You have to fight the grammatical preconceptions that your brain will come up with on seeing the printed version of the clue: you will have to parse (analyse grammatically) the words and letters again to find a new way of interpreting them which may well appear to go against the normal rules of natural grammar, though still be an entirely valid analysis in grammatical terms of what is there. Click here now for more examples of hidden words.
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