PCAKK Treasure Hunt—Repetitions

Humans are animals of habit. In whatever we do, there is a tendency to repeat the manner we do it. Small actions while we walk, eat, sit; the way we twitch our noses or scratch our heads whenever someone asks us a question. Likewise, we also have the tendency to repeat the way we say things, or the way we write some sentences.

Clerks-of-Course are also not immune from habits. In the case of Team Kena Tembak, I find it interesting that they have the tendency to repeat words in their clues. In their past hunt, they gave us:

Q) INSERT AND INSERT IN BETWEEN.

A) THE S'WICH

Notice the repetition of the word INSERT. The "INSERT AND" instructs the solver to put "AND" into the word found on the signboard. The "INSERT IN BETWEEN" is the meaning of the result of that action. It means that when AND is inserted into S'WICH, we will get SANDWICH which is INSERT IN BETWEEN.

In yesterday's hunt, we had:

Q) CUT END TO END, CLOSE IN THE END.

A) RESTORAN ERA

A "bolded" question which I failed to solve. CUT END refers to the letter T which is the end letter of the word CUT. That T is to be brought to the END of a word found on a signboard. In this case, that word is ERA. The result of that will give ERAT in the end (of the process). ERAT is a Malay word which means CLOSE.

The question has 3 ENDs in it. All of them have different roles. The first END is the cryptic indicator to extract T from CUT. The second END (used here to give instruction to the solver) tells the solver to connect the T to something else. The last END takes the informative role of telling the solver what he will get at the end of the process.

Later on, we saw yet another question in which the CoC used repetitive words in his clue:

Q) CALL ONE OF THIS ONE OF THIS TO BE DIRECT.

And it absolutely drove me up the wall! At first glance, it looked very much like a typo—perhaps the CoC forgot to delete the extra ONE OF THIS when he was amending the clue? But that is not possible here, at least not possible for a team like Kena Tembak. Therefore, keeping an open mind, the repetition must be so on purpose.

Now where should one start with such a clue? Well, I'm sure there are many ways to arrive at the answer, but what I did was to focus on the words THIS in the clue. That word is referring to a word found on the signboard, i.e. the intended answer. The next step is to try to narrow down the search, if possible, from whatever we can find in the other words in the clue. And here, I saw something interesting. What word can be replaced by the word THIS in the clue? Perhaps we can start by making a learned guess.

Whatever that word is, it must be in a plural form. Why? Well, because it is a grammatical requirement in the English language that whenever the noun is preceded by the words "ONE OF", that noun must be in plural form. We say, one of the cats; not one of the cat. We say, one of the houses; and not one of the house. Therefore, on account of grammatical requirement, the word we are looking for on the signboard must be plural.

And now we come to an interesting problem. Within the sector, there is a shop named SPADE. Most of you would undoubtedly know the common phrase: Call a spade a spade, which means being direct in what you say.

If the question had been:

Q) CALL ONE THIS ONE THIS TO BE DIRECT.

I would've been happy with SPADE, because ONE can be equated to A, as in ONE dog = A dog, though admittedly the clue looks awful this way. So SPADE can replace THIS in the clue without violating grammatical rules. But because of the additional word OF, I was hoping to find SPADES to be grammatically perfect. I thought SPADE (without the S) was a decoy—a red herring. Looking at the clue as it was, if THIS is SPADES, then ONE OF THIS would be ONE OF (the) SPADES = a spade. At least that was my thought process.

But my mistake was that by the time I went through that sector over and over again, in the end I did not just tembak the SPADE anyway. For the intended answer was indeed SPADE eventhough it's grammatically wrong.

Interestingly, earlier within that same sector, we had a similar situation:

Q) LOVE AFTER VICE.

A) SINO

When we read the question, we saw SINO (in our minds) without even walking the sector yet. We searched high and low for SINO but couldn't see it. Instead, we saw AUSSINO. However, after a long search, and still failing to find SINO, we tembak AUSSINO anyway. And of course later it was revealed that there was indeed a SINO elsewhere within the sector! I'm still kicking myself for not tembak-ing in the case of the SPADE!