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Ah right thanks - I had the wrong letter for “elegant shop..”

And I would add to drxx’s advice about apostrophes that the apostrophe for the five letter word goes on the end of the word, not inside it.

louweed
Sounds like you made the same mistake as me (see my rambling post #126).
Good luck with the rest of the endgame! I think it's worth persevering but others have expressed differing opinions.

Only just finished this beast. The first time in ages I have had to delay starting this weeks puzzle in order to complete last weeks.
Which is a good thing.
Well done Twin.

louweed, and others a bit mystified by the 'what must replace' and the 'second instruction', it DOES read a bit weirdly and took me a few goes to parse it! The 'what must replace' is words 1-7, and I would punctuate this by adding an apostrophe *before* the last letter in word 1 and *after* the last letter in word 6.

jif73, yes, it is really the first word of the second instruction that we 'extend' to those 'letters that have no such replacement'. The second and third words of the second instruction form a sort of predicate to say what the first word is initially applied to.

I just kind of launched in to doing the replacement, and once I'd started it became clear what was going on and I kinda gradually guessed with inevitable foresight what that final thing to do was going to be...

Like smithsax, I took all week over this puzzle and it's the first time for a while that my solving of the next week's puzzle has had to wait just a bit until I'd finished the one before! That's largely because of all the cold solving that was needed. I got there in the end, though, and this thread resolved just a couple of parsing queries I'd had.

I sort of agree with ALL the comments, positive and negative! It's a mixed bag of a puzzle for me. Hard, but tractable. Tedious in places, and delightful in others. Brilliant in its conception and execution, but spoiled by a few glitches that could, I think, have quite easily have been tidied up.

There was a lot that could put people off this puzzle. The amount of cold solving required is daunting, and the clues aren't particularly easy at that! I got to about thirty before starting grid entry, and I see that others have commented similarly. I then started doing some trial-and-error guesswork, making some outrageous assumptions, to start getting words into the grid so that the emerging messages could help me solve the remaining clues. It all worked out, though, thankfully. Then I nearly threw in the towel at the replacement phase because that just sounded so tedious, but I'm glad I persevered because it wasn't as bad as it seemed it might be and as the final shape emerged it was just awe-inspiring. Utterly brilliant.

I do think it's a shame that the archaic or dialect markers were missing from some clues, others used a bit of a strained definition -- I do realise that the endgame put some pretty aggressive requirements on the clues, but some of the problems could still have been solved. For example, unless I've misread something the last printed clue actually mismatches its solution in part-of-speech, which is something I don't expect in Listener crosswords and could be easily fixed without affecting the endgame at all. Given the amount of cold solving that was needed, just a little more care to tidy up that initial solving experience would have put the crown onto an already very very clever puzzle. I did enjoy it, on the whole, greatly though, so thank you Twin and thank you to everyone who posted comments and encouragement that urged a doubting me to continue to the end of it!

Having tortuously finished this puzzle - I went back to it after completing yesterday’s - I don’t see how to submit it except by erasing virtually all my hard work. Is that what is expected, with nothing to show for all the intervening stages? Any guidance? Thanks.

Yup, that’s it.

Historically, Listeners have involved erasing anything between half the grid - as per the recent Penfold’s triangle - and Every Single Entry - to submit literally a blank grid - so your depleted final grid is exactly what’s required.

I feared as much. I hate these when so much effort has been put into the completion, with virtually nothing to show at the end. I remember one of the first puzzles I ever did had a Cheshire Cat and at the end you erased the whole grid apart from its GRIN! Oh well!

Yeah, I'm not keen either on the ones where you then end up erasing most/all of your hard work, especially when it means you might have had missing/wrong entries and these get wiped out. This one is a little less bad than that, because your hard work *does* provide a vital seed for the endgame. The ingenious nature of this endgame slightly, but not entirely, offset this disappointing aspect for me :-)

What. A. Puzzle.
V busy at work currently so taken me 10 days (and only completed thanks to the nudges on this forum) but I am *definitely* in the love-it camp.
The mind boggles at how much time and effort it would have taken to construct. And totally unambiguous too. Thank you Twin. Bravo!
Best of the year so far for me...