1. CIRCLE is a jumble of CLERIC, another word for priest. Can you scramble ten more clergy (including PRIEST) to satisfy the clues below? Warning: the first two answers involve foreign men of religion.SQUARING THE CIRCLE doesn’t mean bashing four corners into a ring. Rather, it refers to trying to draft a square with the matching area of a given circle. Easy on paper, but the challenge has so far proven impossible. Hence the phrase applies to any task that seems to lack a solution.
Keeping shapes in the loop, another circular phrase is to REINVENT THE WHEEL. This relates to any supposed breakthrough, when really the achievement is a glorified replica of what already exists.
On the easiness scale, reinvention is as simple as JOINING THE DOTS. A blueprint is there to follow, just like the child’s puzzle where a line drawing has been replaced by a chain of numbered points, awaiting tracing. To join the dots is to reach the obvious conclusion from the details in front of you.
Unless you THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX (or SQUARE). The phrase harks back to a famous dot-to-dot puzzle created in 1914. Its maker was Sam Loyd, a New York chess master with a passion for puzzles. Faced with a square—or three rows of three dots—the solver had to join all nine dots using just four straight lines. Only novel thinkers considered taking their lines to imaginary points beyond the square’s confines.
1. CIRCLE is a jumble of CLERIC, another word for priest. Can you scramble ten more clergy (including PRIEST) to satisfy the clues below? Warning: the first two answers involve foreign men of religion.
(a) Talking pig movie (4) _ _ _ _
(b) Injure (4) _ _ _ _
(c) Noted barbarian (5) _ _ _ _ _
(d) Curtain (5) _ _ _ _ _
(e) Kayaked (6) _ _ _ _ _ _
(f) Pinafores (6) _ _ _ _ _ _
(g) Fight back (6) _ _ _ _ _ _
(h) More intense (6) _ _ _ _ _ _
(i) Pixie (6) _ _ _ _ _ _
(j) Intervening periods (8) _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
2. TOILNUDGE
The letters above hold a nine-letter word relating to global circles. Starting with O, there’s also an eight-letter word here that may mean ‘joined the dots’! Can you name both words?
