New word order | 22 August 2013

In Competition 2811 you were invited to take an existing word and alter it by a) adding a letter; b) changing a letter; and c) deleting a letter; and to supply definitions for all three new words.
 
First of all, apologies for any unintentional ambiguity in the brief. Most of you got it but a few complained that my instructions weren’t as clear as they might have been. The idea was to revert to the original word at each stage of the exercise.
 
This challenge goes down a storm over at the Washington Post, which regularly throws down the gauntlet to followers of its magnificent ‘Style Invitational’ contest. It proved equally popular this side of the pond and the entries came flooding in.
 
Alison Zucker impressed with Litterature: free newspapers abandoned on public transport as did Peter Goulding with Frostitute: a person who performs sexual favours for money above the Arctic Circle. I also liked Derek Morgan’s Fausterity: a cutback in government funding for grand opera and Juliet Blaxland’s hippocraic: the jollity surrounding any event involving horses.