Jan 252013
The answers can be divided into two groups such that a word in Group 1 clues a word in Group 2… but only after two letters are removed from the second word. These bigrams can be reorganized to spell the phrase TWO ASPIRIN.
ATTEMPTS = TRIES (STRIPES – SP)
BARBECUE = GRILL (GORILLA – OA)
CONFRONT = FACE (FIANCE – IN)
FAVORING = PRO (PRIOR – IR)
LUNA = MOON (MOTOWN – TW)
A couple of people asked if there was a logical, puzzly way to order the words so that the answer spelled itself out. No. I figured once you had the initial aha, you wouldn’t be thwarted by the need to rearrange five pairs of letters.
I was thwarted. Well, OK, I didn’t really put that much work into it after getting the insight, but having them sorted alphabetically wasn’t spelling anything, and they didn’t anagram to a ten-letter word, and I sort of set it aside at that point, figuring I was missing an ordering mechanism. (Which is a lesson in solving and one in construction: in the former case, it’s “don’t assume there’s an ordering mechanism”, and in the latter, it’s “solvers may resist anagramming while they look for an ordering mechanism”.)