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. |
The term “Printer’s Devilry” suggests a scenario in which a printer takes malicious pleasure in removing a sequence of letters in a text in such a way as significantly to alter the meaning, to an effect that is amusing, shocking or even insulting to a third party such as the author of the original text. Accordingly, in my view, in a Printer’s Devilry clue:
a. the undevilled version should make good sense and should either be in idiomatic English or at least be credible as something read or heard, eg, in a newspaper headline or as part of an overheard conversation;
b. the devilled version should also make good sense and, though the English may be rather looser, it should not be too wildly unidiomatic or lacking in credibility;
c. the meaning of the devilled version should be as far removed from that of the undevilled as possible, either starkly contradicting it or saying something completely different;
d. the difference should, as far as possible, be such as to raise a smile or, had it been achieved by that eponymous printer, to give him the malicious satisfaction that the title suggests;
e. it should be the transition from undevilled to devilled that achieves that effect and not the other way round, ie, it should be the devilled version that is amusing or shocking.
Clearly, it is far from easy to achieve all that, when given the word / sequence of letters to be omitted, and it becomes harder still if one adds the requirement f. that “the breaks before and after the word omitted (before and after omission) [should] not occur at the ends or beginnings of words in the clue”. Which is no doubt why even the example of a Printer’s Devilry clue routinely given by Azed and on this message board is itself so lack-lustre and why so few of the clues entered in most Printer’s Devilry competitions really cut the mustard.
Clues that seem to me to fail to meet each of the above criteria are:
a. 5 9 10 33; b. 4 6 13 17 37; c. 1 3 15 30 35; d. most of them, though a few that do offer this fall at a different hurdle instead; e: 11 12 28 39; f. 24. |
