»  Solutions to puzzles in my VDARE.com monthly Diary

  June 2022

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For relief after some heavy-duty math in May, in my June Diary I offered the following wordplay problem.

Brainteaser:  Below are twenty pairs of syllables, each pair separated by a space. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to insert into each space a new syllable that makes a word out of the syllable to its left, and another word out of the syllable to its right.

So for the first pair, find a syllable xxx (not necessarily three letters) so that "Backxxx" is a word and "Xxxrobe" is also a word. It's harder than you'd think … but nowhere near as hard as last month's cake-cutting exercise.

 1.  Back  ________  Robe
 2.  Bar  ________  Der
 3.  Bor  ________  Ive
 4.  Com  ________  Ey
 5.  Cur  ________  Ted
 6.  Door  ________  Stone
 7.  Ex  ________  Tive
 8.  Fire  ________  Ways
 9.  Foot  ________  Son
10.  Fret  ________  Mill
11.  Ham  ________  Tuce
12.  Hand  ________  Body
13.  House  ________  Man
14.  Mis  ________  Tain
15.  Pre  ________  Ence
16.  Prow  ________  Ence
17.  Pur  ________  Able
18.  Sun  ________  Tee
19.  Tas  ________  Rant
20.  War  ________  Well

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•  Solution

 1.  Backward, Wardobe
 2.  Barren, Render
 3.  Border, Derive
 4.  Common, money
 5.  Curtain, Tainted
 6.  Doorkey, Keystone
 7.  Explain, Plaintive
 8.  Fireside, Sideways
 9.  Footstep, Stepson
10.  Fretsaw, Sawmill
11.  Hamlet, Lettuce
12.  Handsome, Somebody
13.  Housework, Workman (or Houseboat, Boatman)
14.  Mischief, Chieftain
15.  Present, Sentence
16.  Prowess, Essence
17.  Pursuit, Suitable (or Purport, Portable)
18.  Sunset, Settee
19.  Tasty, Tyrant
20.  Warfare, Farewell

[I lifted this from Willard R. Espy's Almanac of Words at Play — still, after fifty years, one of the best wordplay collections. This is Espy's entry for November 15th.]