Found this last week in old stack of magazines. My knowledge of French writers threw me a curve because I entered Racine and it took up the CRE that was needed elsewhere.
Group A 12 could also be “IMP”. That tossed me for a loop.
I was doing fine on the trigram two-step until I put in "sprout" for "seed", leaving without the letters for "Proust"!
@Ann Young I did the same. Had to cheat to this post and saw “sesame” - the seed I needed. A good challenge!
I especially appreciated the penultimate paragraph ... luckily my 12 year old son saw what I didn't see.
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Initially, I groaned when I saw I wasn't going to get one of the standard non-Acrostic variety puzzles, but once I got going I quite enjoyed it. Certainly more fun and enjoyable than Puns & Anagrams, and nearly as challenging as a good Cryptic. I'd do this again.
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I was struck by the strange circumstance that there was one trigram I couldn't get from column A, and one from column B. The first two answers I tackled in column C were the Greek ones - and they supplied my two missing elements! Very lucky.
Clever puzzle. Lots of things in motion. I enjoyed it as something new.
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Excellent puzzle.Lots of work to do and discover new things. I mostly filled in the combined words and then worked backwards and I had to double back and start over in certain spots. Only disagreement I thought brunet was spelled "brunette" Hope to see more of this soon. Thank you Mt. Suarez
@ann douglas BRUNET is not a very common word, but strictly it is the correct spelling if it refers to a man, similar to the BLOND/BLONDE distinction.
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[SPOILER ALERT]
Lost Leaders was so easy at the beginning that I got eight of the ten answers without having to even bother with the stuff on the bottom. Then I got MONGOOSE by searching. But then I hit a total wall, with only one answer remaining.
So only then did I have to use the bottom clues. I finally got EXASPERATION from “Texas” and “operation”.
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“Trigram Two-Step” was totally new, very challenging and very enjoyable.
I made up my own big diagram on paper.
After I searched to learn what is a trigram, it went quickly at the beginning. I started to get bogged down while doing the “Combined” column.
[SPOILER ALERT]
I got B-10 only by working backwards toward the end.
I realized that because of the CAR in A–4, the zodiac sign must be CANCER. That left NCE, and so I finally got ENC
for B-10.
I also got B-3 only by working backwards, even though I wound up feeling surprised at myself for not picking up “seesaw” for “___saw”. When I got SESAME from MAS in A-9, only then did I get SEE for B-3.
I also had a lot of trouble getting PROUST. Searching for French writers had not done any good. I finally remembered it after realizing that it had to be made from TOR and SUP.
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P.S. to Caitlin: I strongly agree with your observation that the instructions made it seem much harder than it turned out to be.
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Uncovering the six-letter answers without the solving aid would have been quite a challenge.
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@Etaoin Shrdlu
Loss Leaders, for the most part, filled itself in without considering the hints at the bottom.
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