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Thanks Nelson, it's reassuring to know I wasn't alone.

I may of course be wrong about the umlaut, and I didn’t intend to sound so dogmatic in #15. It just made sense to me as a way of justifying the absence of the diacritic in the German spelling, and seemed justified by Chambers, as Malone said, so being lazy I stopped looking for anything else!

Quisling, I am sure you (and I and probably many other solvers!) were correct about the umlaut. Chambers has 'sign' in its definition, and Collins has 'mark' , so the preamble seemed reasonably fair to me. 'Diacritical mark' or 'accent' would have been too explicit, preambles are often a little sneaky.

Thanks Malone, that’s a very good point about how the preamble needed to be worded to be fair without being too explicit.

Thanks, Quisling. I think there's definitely more leeway in preambles than clues -so long as we don't encounter anything inherently unfair or wrong. I probably wouldn't have accepted sign= umlaut as a clue, but it wasn't one!

quisling.

I wasn't in any way being critical of you. (Or even diacritical.)

Nelson, I quite enjoyed your point - about the 'sign' - and it was good to hear what others think.

I agree with Quisling that the sign is the umlaut, but I think I’d have preferred “diacritic” or “accent” (even though the latter is not quite linguistically accurate) in the preamble. Perhaps that would have been too much of a giveaway? It’s a trivial point anyway and doesn’t distract from this lovely puzzle. The thing I love about Vismut’s puzzles is that I always learn something new.

Hi loge

Yes it is a trivial point - as I more or less said when I made that post. It was just something to float for conversation. And yes, it was indeed a lovely puzzle, neither too easy or too hard. Just right.

I'd heard of the 'confessor' and spotted the name of the ( how shall I say this without it being a spoiler? I'm going for 'genuine').

Without that I wouldn't have been able to make any sense of the slightly oddly phrased statement made by the surplus letters. But forming this statement as an anagram of the description was pure genius.

Nelson, I enjoyed your post and certainly didn’t take it as a criticism. I agree, too, that Vismut’s puzzles are top-notch, and I appreciate the good humour on the IQ threads.

Loge, thanks. I’m relaxed about wording in preambles because I get the understandable reluctance to give too much away about the puzzle’s theme. You only have to look at the discussion caused by the apparently innocuous phrase “four distinct thematic colours” in Eck’s wonderful Magpie Prize puzzle last month to see how easily setters can get into trouble. It certainly helps my blood pressure that I never submit!