I have, on many occasions, been criticized for my obsession in grammar. Whenever I set hunt questions, I've been known to use grammar as one of my weapons to trick or deceive the hunters. And all too often they would fall right into my many traps. I've said that many Malaysians are not very particular about grammar, even amongst the English educated folks. When they hear people speak or write in English, most of them are very forgiving when they witness grammatical errors.
A) MEGATEC
A simple anagram riddle where "entangled" is the anagram indicator, and the fodder is "came" and "get". It means that we need to rearrange those letters in the fodder to form a new word, which is then spotted on the signboard. As you can see, when you rearrange the letters in the fodder, you can get MEGATEC.
The solution is airtight in that all the letters found in the fodder are used to form the new word, which is the required answer, MEGATEC. However, when reading the question, that sentence appears strange in the grammatical sense. The word "came" is in past tense, whereas "get" in present tense. So although the solution to the riddle is cryptically perfect, the question itself is not so impressive in the grammatical sense.
Ideally, we as setters should try very hard to ensure that both the question and the solution be grammatically perfect. However, sometimes it is not possible to have grammatical accuracy in both the question and the solution for numerous reasons. In the above example, grammar has been sacrificed in the question because the setter's hands were tied by the letters that he had at his disposal to form the word MEGATEC. In such a case, then the sacrifice should be made in the question. Under no circumstances should the solution be plagued with grammatical errors - or in fact of any kind of errors!
Q) Seen at the end of 4 months, it's one way to get the answer
A question that I spent perhaps up to 15 minutes to set for the KK Challenge 15. I would usually take much lesser time to set a cryptic question. But the unusually long time spent in crafting this question was because I was trying very hard to find a way to make it grammatically perfect in both the question and solution. In the end, however, having considered the nature of the riddle, I found no way out, and was therefore forced to sacrifice grammar in the question.
This type of question can be solved partially on paper, but it is almost impossible to solve fully unless the hunter is in the hunt sector and has spotted the signboard. Only when he has spotted the signboard can he then solve the question fully and confirm its accuracy.
So what can be solved on paper? Well, "it's one" can point to the letter "i", because "i" is ONE as a roman numeral. What else? That word "way" can also be connected to other words like "Jalan", "Lorong", "Road", "Avenue" etc. But it's not so easy to solve "Seen at the end of 4 months".
The solver must scan the hunt sector until he finds this board, and hopefully he can then make the connection between "Seen at the end of 4 months" and those letters "BER" on the board, since the "I" and "LALUAN" are already covered by "it's one" and "way" respectively.
Well, to make the long story short, "BER" can be seen at the ends of SeptemBER, OctoBER, NovemBER and DecemBER. So that's fine. However, although this is a perfect fit for the solution, it would mean that the question is grammatically inaccurate! The question says, "Seen at the end of 4 months...", when it should have been "Seen at the ends of 4 months...". The only difference is that letter "s" at the end of that word "end".
Most Malaysians when reading the question would not even realize the difference anyway. But as a setter who's obsessed with grammar, it pains me immensely to see an imperfect sentence like that! The error, though unspectacular to the extent that would warrant severe criticisms, is still worth noting anyway. After the hunt, I discussed in private this issue with several master hunters, and thankfully they all seemed very forgiving. The discussion even went up to Grandmaster Hunter Jayaram Menon who was kind enough to give his opinion. He said, "Yes, it does stick out - but not to the extent of raising eyebrows...I would also disregarded the plural with the same phrasing of the question".
There are other examples, of course, when grammatical inaccuracies are allowable, or at least tolerable, in cryptic questions, but that's for a separate discussion in a different post.
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