Listen With Others

I found by far the hardest part of this puzzle was making sense of the extra words.   And the second hardest was being certain I had all the right extra words!

The slightly strange outcome was that, having being able to identify which words must have something ‘addable’ to them, it soon became clear that the 2-letter additions were the 2-letter abbreviations for the right-hand column of the periodic table.  SO I could work out all the insertion points and I then assumed we were drawing the number 18 (given these are Group 18, I understand) through those points.  So I think I had completed the puzzle without making any sense of the extra words.  I am going to feel very foolish when it turns out that I’ve missed something entirely!

So on Saturday morning I returned to the puzzle – just because – to try and make some sense out of those extra words.  In 25a I wasn’t quite sure if it was ‘are’ or ‘advanced’, though hoped in either case it would simply deliver an ‘A’ in the wordplay & so wouldn’t matter.  And in 19a I wasn’t too sure if ‘frustrated’ or ‘moved’ was the anagram_indicator.

It took me most of the day – on-and-off – to decide that these must clue the ‘source’ of each elements’ name.  So SUN gave Helium, NEW gave Neon, RADIUM gave Radon, OGANESSIAN (the Russian physicist) gave Oganesson etc.  None of this changed what I had in the grid but was an enjoyable additional puzzle!

Cheers,

Tim / Encota