It’s been tickling my brain for weeks, and it’s been keeping me up at night. I asked the puzzle-creator for clues and he wouldn’t budge. Until I asked, and guessed repeatedly, over the course of many days and finally was able to extract the following info:
Pic #1 is meant to depict Mikhail Gorbachev. But the word intended here is a cruel, immature nickname for the splotch on his forehead. It is an English word.
Pic #2 is most likely intended to be “eye.”
Pic #3 is a synonym for “flies.”
Pic #4 is probably not simply “pepper” but rather some word associated with pepper, like “sprinkle” or “season” or “shake.”
The final answer here is a recognizable, three word phrase. In English.
Please help me if you can. And I thank you. Sincerely.
The only word I know of for that kind of mark is ‘port wine stain’, which is neither cruel nor immature unless you have a really low opinion of wine drinkers or vintners.
I really can’t think of any childish nickname for that birthmark. Some, like disfigurement, blemish, defect, or stain would be negative, but not childish. There’s also strawberry birthmark, even though, like derleth says, it’s a port wine stain.
I also don’t get why the ‘flies’ would taken away straight after ‘eye,’ so perhaps it’s eye and bug, or look and flies, or even eyeball.
Huh, you got me. I really hope you aren’t (figuratively speaking) correct - it was bad enough that we never got an answer to that one, I hope we do this time! By the way, it was 14 k of g in a f p d. The answer to 14 k in a g d p is of course obvious :).
In response to the OP, it seems to me that the minus sign before the flies means that the flies have to be subtracted in some way to get the answer, But the only synonyms for flies that I can think of are “bugs” or “insects”. I have no idea about the rest of it, except the final picture could mean “spill”.
Wrong track. Note what the OP said: Pic #3 is a synonym for flies. Like gnats or pests, or possibly soars, if we take the alternate meaning of flies.
I’m kind of inclined to go with soars, since the disparaging name for Gorbachev’s birthmark could include the word sore. If that’s so, though, that’s an awful rebus.
How about eyesore? Then the first three pictures could be eyesore + eye - soar = aye aye. The answer is a three-word phrase. I can’t think of anything other than aye aye captain, but maybe there are other expressions with aye aye. Sticking with the naval theme, the overturned pepper shaker could be capsized.
I’m not a big rebus guy so I’m not sure and perhaps someone who does them more often could answer: are the letters that are subtracted (the flies/bugs/whatever in this case) typically all represented at that point? That is, if the word were “flies”, does that mean that F, L, I, E and S are all present, or can it be “flies” and, say, the “F” doesn’t have to be there?
Well, see that’s a problem. There’s no one rule. The “F” could be phonetic, or an actual “F”. The minus sign could actually be a dash! (Though I doubt it)
The flies could actually stand for “bugs” or “pest” or something along those lines.
Hence my little note to Fofer upthread… I only get two days off in a week and I’ve spent most of my day trying to figure this out!!
The worst part is that I’m probably over thinking it. And I still think the book title is a good angle. I wonder when this puzzle was posted?
