Discuss [Untitled] here

[Newboy]

Huh ... O K Thok!
Gosh, I offer apologies ... please look over some edits.
So, if need hints then ...

I think initial letter is now apt.
You can readily triumph if strictly longest taken.

[Newboy]

Hold on now ... in rubric Tinhorn noted:

[Tinhorn]

[/dev/joe]

There are three parts to the rule, one of which has that tricky little condition associated with it, and two of which have been heavily clued of late. Once you understand these two parts, go back and re-read the original puzzle, or my earlier submission, or the other few posts cited as having fully complied with the rule, keeping the rules you know in mind as you do so. The third part will not be hard to see. I really wanted to write something like this in compliance with the rule, but it is just too hard.[/nr]

[3iff]

Thanks Newboy, knowing solution and happy...

Paragraph enigmas likely perplex X-Ray engineers!

[Guest]

The official, posted solution, seems to be simpler than the one described here. What was left out of it?

[MatthewV]

The solution posted was what I was orginally given. If the rules evolved slightly while people were solving this, they were not included. Tinhorn: if you want the posted solution to be different, please PM me and I will change it.

I also can't remember if Tinhorn wanted the title to be "Untitled" or "[Untitled]".

I created the flavor text (and had a painful enough time doing it!) that I almost didn't double check my work. When I saw that I had used a word in equal length as the one I set aside as the longest, I didn't feel there was a problem. If you have the set of numbers like (1, 5, 12, 6, 6, 12, 10) twelve is the largest number even if there is two of them. And there was an apostrophe (yeah, I didn't start a word with an apostrophe. 'Tis sad.) doesn't that count as a fraction of a letter?

[Tinhorn]

***NOTE -- VISIBLE SPOILER FOLLOWS, SINCE SOLUTION IS ALREADY POSTED***

I had intended "longest" to mean "strictly longest" -- I realize this is somewhat ambiguous. Merriam-Webster's 11 defines the "-est" suffix as able to mean either "unsurpassed" (which allows for ties) or "surpassing all others" (which does not allow for ties). We had this discussion in my high-school calculus class (relating, for some strange reason, to whether the red light on a traffic light was always the highest -- but what about horizontal traffic lights?) some 25 years ago.

So to sum up. The body of the puzzle has a strictly longest word in each sentence, so that there is no choice of which word is to be transposed. I sent the official solution using the word "longest" *meaning* "surpassing all others," but I grant that reading the solution itself could lead one to interpret "longest" as meaning "unsurpassed." Presumably, though since the puzzle is initially given without the solution, the rule to be gleaned is the rule in which "longest" means "surpassing all others," as originally intended. The addition of the flavortext throws things a bit up in the air, through no fault of the editor.

Side note -- In my line of work, patent law, you interpret the claims (which come at the end) in light of the written description (which comes earlier). Therefore, if interpreting my submission as a patent, the word "longest" would likely have been interpreted as "surpassing all others," since that is what is reflected in the earlier material. But perhaps the question is close enough that "whoever has the better lawyer" would prevail, as is often the case.

Thus, to sum up for a second time, and equally because the apostrophe adds an uncertainty to the mix (is it supposed to be included in the transposal, perhaps with a word like " 'tis "?), I suggest changing the flavortext to:

"In the Labyrinth hallways, you behold notably ancient runes ..."

And the solution by adding the word "strictly" before "longest."

As we say in the law, I apologize for any inconvenience my lack of clarity may have caused.

And a postscript answer to MatthewV -- the puzzle was accurately listed as [Untitled], somewhat necessary as an actual title that met the rule might have given it away. (And the brackets were necessary, in my view, to reflect that there is no title, rather than that the title is in fact Untitled, which wouldn't work.)
_________________
Some of us prefer illusion to despair. -- Nelson Muntz

[Thok]

One thing that would make the puzzle more aestetically pleasing in my mind would be to require that each word in a sentence have different length (so you in each sentence you have exactly one word each of length 1,2,3, up to the length of the anagrammed word). But that would also have been much more difficult to write.

[MatthewV]

*fixed*

[Guest]

"There are three parts to the rule, one of which has that tricky little condition associated with it, and two of which have been heavily clued of late."

What exactly are the three parts? It seems to me that the solution is more clearly described as consisting of two parts.

[/dev/joe]

Three parts, one of which was implied by the puzzle and which several people seemed to deduce but omitted from the actual solution.

1. The initial letters of the words in each sentence anagram to a word in the sentence.
2. This word is longer than any other word in the sentence.
3. The words so formed, in order, spell out another sentence (perhaps a rather terse one, due to the inability of using many small words).

In my original solution post I cheated a bit by using the Roman numeral I at the beginning to represent a "sentence" by itself to represent the word I in the hidden sentence.