KK Challenge 4—Hybrid

I was told that in the old days, treasure hunt questions were very different from what we have today. There were mostly observation in nature. Hunters were asked to count the number of trees or lamp posts etc. Clues were mostly straightforward with hardly any sophistication.

Throughout several decades, hunt questions have undergone major tranformation; and in my opinion it is still happening today. The level of sophistication had also come a long way. Cryptic clueing has become the order of the day. At first only some basic ideas of the cryptic crosswords, e.g. anagrams or reversals etc were adopted into hunt questions. But today almost all these themes have found their way into hunt questions.

Notwitstanding the above, however, it is sometimes difficult to set treasure hunt clues strictly based on pure cryptic principles. Sometimes, the CoC still needs to find ways to merge the observation questions with the cryptic style. The result is what one might term as a hybrid between the two.

Q34) Go to the capital of England to combine the engine.

If I had a choice, I would have preferred to use the word "assemble" instead of "combine". It creates a better storyline and more meaningful surface reading. But I decided against it because after I did a bit of checking, I found that the meaning of the word "combine" might be slightly different from "assemble".

As I said, the question is a kind of hybrid, i.e. it resulted from the merger of two main portions because the intended answer consisted of two words. But I joined the two portions into a single sentence, thus creating a little bit of deception to the solver.

The first thing to realise is that "the engine" covers the second word in the intended answer. It means that we are looking for a signboard containing the word "motor". That should help the hunters narrow down the search substantially.

The next step is to treat the cryptic portion of the question, viz:

Go to the capital of England to combine.

In the above sentence, the words "the engine" are no longer there. We have taken care of that part of the question, i.e. MOTOR. Now the cryptic crosswords expert can see that the word "combine" is the definition for the clue. It means that we have to solve the rest of the words in that sentence, and whatever we come up with must agree with "combine".

Now "capital" is the initial indicator. Therefore:

capital of England = E

We need to find something found on the signboard to go to the E (capital of England), and that should give us "combine". The equation is like this:

[?]+E = COMBINE

So now we just need to figure out what that question mark (?) is. By thinking along this line, the solver, scanning the sector, will find the word UNIT, because UNIT + E = UNITE, which can agree with COMBINE.

A34) UNIT MOTOR

I am happy to note that a few teams found this answer. If indeed they solved the clue, instead of merely a blind guess, I consider it a fine achievement. It shows that our local hunters have improved.

Coming back to the word "assemble", I wasn't very sure if it's a good idea to equate UNITE to ASSEMBLE. Checking through my Thesaurus, I found UNITE = COMBINE, but not UNITE = ASSEMBLE. When I think deeply about it, UNITE might possibly be equal to ASSEMBLE too. But in the end I decided to play safe and settled with COMBINE.