---
title: "Acrostic No. 112 — 'The Annex Trick'"
dek: "Fourteen clues. The initials, read downward, give the piece of advice this newspaper's FOIA correspondent gives more often than any other."
kind: puzzle (Puzzle)
desk: Culture
author: Nadia Ferreira-Ost (fictional)
published: 2026-08-07T04:00:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/acrostic-112
tags: puzzle, acrostic, wordplay
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

# Acrostic No. 112 — 'The Annex Trick'

*Fourteen clues. The initials, read downward, give the piece of advice this newspaper's FOIA correspondent gives more often than any other.*

Answer the fourteen clues. Read the first letter of each answer downward. The phrase is four words, and a reader who has been through our [Reading Room column](/article/halloway-the-annex-trick) has already been told it.

1. Not a redaction, merely a leak (5)
2. What an examiner may raise but rarely issues (7)
3. The Ur site, in its Arabic name: Tell al-_______ (8)
4. Bergen's discipline, in this paper's Loch Ness story: fisheries ________ (11)
5. What eight of the nine Texas specimens had (5)
6. This paper's document prefix (2)
7. Neither Teros nor surface-dweller (5)
8. What a bid-stage drawing may dimension but not build (5)
9. The interval System D will not define (14)
10. What Mr Pell has been 3,388 times (5)
11. Number of talents short of the schedule (5,7)
12. The Vault's third drawer (8)
13. What we could not confirm, in a word (7)
14. Where the fault was not (with the ________) (7)

> **Caution.** The setter notes that clue 9 is two words and that she is aware this is unsporting. She refers solvers to the newspaper's own coverage, where it is also two words and also unexplained.

## Last week's solution, No. 111

The phrase was **NOTHING STAYS HIDDEN FOR LONG**, which is the gloss of this newspaper's motto and which the setter concedes was guessable from the enumeration alone.

Eight hundred and ninety readers solved it. Forty-one wrote in to point out that the motto is aspirational rather than descriptive. The setter agrees and has been overruled by the editor, who says the puzzle page is not the place.

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They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.