"What Is In A Name?"

[Richard B.]

Thank you, thank you, Brian. Well done! You guys have been great.

[BrianMac]

Solution and explanation below.

The first thing many people noticed is that the phrasing of the title, "What is in a Name?" is strange since the phrase is usually "What's in a name?" [Thanks, Al!] Hopefully this got you thinking about the word IS, which is embedded in eight grid entries. These entries are also identified by clues that may have seemed a bit strangely worded, because each such clue uses the word IS. The letter combination IS does not appear anywhere else in the clues or the grid, save the title, the prompt and the clue for the central across entry.

That central across entry is EDGAR ALLAN POE, clued as "author of "The Gold-Bug," a short story that is a hint to the meta." I personally have not read The Gold-Bug (probably should), but I know that it revolves around a secret message hidden in a letter-substitution cryptogram.

Hopefully, with this in mind, you went back and looked at the eight IS entries and noticed that:

ED is ON
G is ELE
AR is TA
AL is TER
L is AS
AN is E
PO is ED
E is EN

This yields ONELETATERASEEDEN, which can be parsed as ONE L / ETAT / ERASE / EDEN.

Unfortunately, in French, "state" is often written L'ETAT, and my initial prompt erroneously described the first answer as "a debut novel," when it is actually classified as an autobiography. This led to some understandable confusion over whether the first two entries were ONE / LETAT or ONE L / ETAT. Thanks to Barbara K for pointing it out and apologies to anyone who got tripped up by that.

I wish I could have gotten the solution to be something other than a list of random words. I tried like heck to get two legitimate phrases that encrypted to each other, but had no luck. Either the encrypted phrase or the decrypted phrase had to be nonsensical, if not gibberish. The closest I got was MEN, CRAM NOW (clued as something like "instruction to male students the night before an exam"), which decrypted to CIPHER with four IS phrases. For bonus fun, see if you can figure out what those four phrases are, or click the spoiler box below:


MENISCI (plural of MENISCUS)
CRISP
AMISH
NO WISER



Thanks everyone for solving. I'm glad most people seem to have enjoyed it. There will be a new Muggle Meta by Al Sisti tomorrow. If you have a meta puzzle you would like to contribute, please reach out to me or Al and we will add it to the queue. Or feel free to post it to the Muggle Puzzles section of "Other Puzzles."

[FrankieHeck]

Wow, that's great, Brian! I didn't solve it. I read the description of the Poe story, and then made a chart of all the letter frequencies in your puzzle, and wondered what to do next. Oops!

[Hector]

Terrific puzzle, and a fun extra credit exercise.

[boharr]

Bravo!

[Dplass]

Very very clever. Too clever for me. Would never have gotten it without a huge series of hints from Brian. Thanks Brian, for the puzzle and the hints.

[TMart]

Nice puzzle. I got as far as finding all the “is”’words and looking for cryptogram/type substitutions, but got lost after that. Side bonus, though - I read The Gold-Bug for the first time and really enjoyed it!

[OGuyDave]

My rabbit hole, and you're going to like this one: Went from "Gold Bug" to chemical symbol AU, which is the beginning of 7A. Its clue is "A3 or A4", so I looked at a list of the third and fourth letters that followed any "A" in the grid. Yeah, went far with that one!

TFTXWD

[Al Sisti]

My rabbit hole, and you're going to like this one: Went from "Gold Bug" to chemical symbol AU, which is the beginning of 7A. Its clue is "A3 or A4", so I looked at a list of the third and fourth letters that followed any "A" in the grid. Yeah, went far with that one!

TFTXWD

I could write a book about chasing wrong approaches in meta-solving. Oh wait... it's been done.