Ah, shit, I’ve forgotten the spoiler tags!
To demonstrate the searcher I just created: Find one of the three 7x7 word grids that contains these ten Presidential candidates: CLINTON, SANDERS, BIDEN, TRUMP, CARSON, BUSH, FIORINA, KASICH, RAND, WALKER.
Nothing clever: I was staring at all 44 solutions. Naturally I hoped to fit a thirteenth number-like word in where the empty was; not finding anything I ostentatiously placed a ‘Q’ there.
Here’s a different sort of puzzle. Warning: It may be difficult; you’d better Fire up Wikipedia!
Find the thread that links the following 15 famous people together. (The criterion is slightly fuzzy; quibblers stay away!)
- Alfonso VIII, King of Castille and Toledo
- Douglas C. Engelbart, invented computer mouse
- Galileo Galilei, discovered Jupiter’s moons
- George of Cambridge, future King of U.K.
- Gilles de Montmorency-Laval, Baron de Rais, serial killer
- Henry VII (Tudor), King of England
- Honoré de Balzac, influential author of La Comédie Humaine
- Isaac Newton, Master of the Mint
- John Calvin, Protestant reformer
- Ladislaus the Posthumous, Duke of Austria, King of Hungary
- Oliver Heaviside, reformulated Maxwell’s Laws
- Richard (Earl) Howe, First Lord of the Admiralty
- Richard of Wallingford, designed astronomical clock
- Roger Bacon, “Doctor Mirabilis”
- Tamerlane, great conqueror, founder of the Timurid Empire
Here they are:
W F C B U S H
A I L I ? R K
L O I D P E A
K R N E M D S
E I T N U N I
R N O S R A C
R A N D T S H
? F C B U S H
W I L I ? R K
A O I D P E A
L R N E M D S
K I T N U N I
E N O S R A C
R A N D T S H
R F C B U S H
E I L I ? R K
K O I D P E A
L R N E M D S
A I T N U N I
W N O S R A C
R A N D T S H
All are the same except for the orientation of WALKER and whether it shares its R with RAND.
All were white men. (Slightly fuzzy on Tamerlane; quibblers stay away!)
The puzzle has one happy property:
If you get the answer, you will be absolutely certain it’s the intended answer.
In the year one dies, another is born, and so on and so on, from Alfonso down to George
And, as I correctly noted:
Drat! I should have made it harder.
Is the fact that Newton was born the year Galileo died a very well known trivium? I almost omitted one of the two, making the challenge Who’s missing from this list?
Heh. Well, I enjoyed it nonetheless!
Which is what I keep forgetting when I make my puzzles! (Is anyone still trying this? Is it time for more hints?)
Hint #2/100:
This puzzle was directly inspired by the following statements from the post just before it:
All of those apply directly, and perhaps even more so, to my puzzle.
But one statement does not apply to my puzzle at all:
After all, I did choose a word that screamed “Mountain!”, didn’t I? Just one, though. Most of my words scream something other than “Mountain!”.
I’ll spoil this even though I’m 99.8% certain that it is NOT the intended answwr.
[SPOILER]Mountainous.
All the others are adjectives that might be applied to a human person. (Fishy is marginal.)
(Nevermind adjectives that might apply to part of a person, e.g. “Her bosom was mountainous!”)[/SPOILER]
Haha, yes, the difficulty with these puzzles is that one can come up with all kinds of rules for all kinds of word lists, and who’s to say why the intended one should be any better than any of the alternatives?
But, no, that’s not my intended answer.
(This is one of the things I regret about my puzzle. There’s nothing objective behind it but one person’s say-so. It’s just some particular list of words someone happened to put together, that happens to contain some words and not other ones.)
It is true that I made all the listed words adjectives, but the fact that most adjectives are capable of being applied to humans is just a fact about English (well, common across most languages, presumably) and not about this particular list.
My puzzle is rather unfair. You will not find the intended answer without making use of Google or Wikipedia or some such reference. And you certainly cannot explain the rule to anyone else without pointing them towards the same reference.
God, I write with so much distracting fluff. If I cut that out, everything would be more straightforward. For example:
The excerpt I’ve quoted here could’ve been enough in itself to find the answer.
I got nothing.
The history and linguistics of my list of words is surely too obscure in itself; my hope with this puzzle was that, though I designed it to be difficult to Google directly, I could nonetheless get people to search with the right terms in the right way and land upon the answer key. But, perhaps that was a long shot.
Oh well. Sleep on it for tonight and try later, if you like. (Though if you decide to abandon the puzzle entirely, it’s no skin off my nose.)
(For what it’s worth, I’m still stuck on your WINTER, AUTUMN, …, puzzle, but I think I’m almost there. Perhaps another small hint (and I do mean small!) would help finish things off?)
Oh, I apparently missed this addendum in a previous post:
As I understand it, it’s actually a year apart, but looks very similar because of a calendar shift. It’s a piece of trivia I’ve heard before, though I didn’t remember it in the context of this puzzle till after I’d already guessed the concept and gotten knee-deep into the verification. But I like the idea of removing two people from the list and asking the puzzle-solver to fill in the blanks!
Er, that’s not worded well at all. What I mean is
In some sense, both dates were in 1642, and in some sense, both dates were in early January, but all the same, they were a year apart! Anyway, only the former sense matters for your puzzle. What I do remember is that Newton was born on Christmas, which he was, in some other sense.
Sure. I did make reference to the riddle and my family gathering. The riddle was supposed to be timely and relevant for our weekend together, but certain circumstances prevented it from being so.
Anyhow, you might want to add one of these two words to the list (but not the other):
HAPPINESS
BIRTH
++++
Another hint for your riddle would be helpful too… though I think maybe you just gave one…