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Really struggling with the 2nd across 12 letter word. Can somebody give me a hint?!

Cross with myself on this one. Got the grid, bar a couple of crosses, in reasonable time and then resolutely refused to follow one particular line of enquiry.
Many rabbit holes later, I finally looked where I always should have done.
Clever puzzle, with typically tough clues, and a satisfying endgame (at last). Thanks, Sabre.

Mandyrob0704, definition is first three words. But you'd probably already worked that out.
Think how the answer might end, given the definition.
Not sure that I can give you more.

Having cold solved no more than three clues and looked at this thread I have concluded that this one is just too difficult for me. Before I go and have a little cry in the corner of my office could I please ask for a hint on 1 across? It is dispiriting to me that I cannot come up with any ideas at all.
Best of luck to the rest of you!!

I can think of a very easy four letter answer to 1a. But what do with it!?

William - ignore the enumeration and then try and solve it. It’s pretty straightforward then

Progress! I have found a consistent way to treat 3 of the 4 modified ones. No idea what is going on with the 4 word description though.

Agreed.

A useful Listener observation is that when the preamble has something along the lines of ‘whose numbers in brackets are the lengths of the resulting grid entries’ it means that the original answer is modified in a way that changes the entry length.

K2 - unsurprisingly, the four altered answers are all treated in the same thematic way, albeit it would be hard to find at least two of the exact modifications without a word-finding dictionary…

Can anyone offer any sort of vague hint as to the four word description? Even saying how long the longest string of letters that can be fully derived from the letter-pairs is? I have tried every letter-pair, tried to build forwards and backwards but come up with nothing. I take it that it is in English.