Printer's Devilry

Printer's Devilry is a type of sentence transformation commonly used in hunt puzzles, involving the removal of a substring from a sentence, and the subsequent reparsing of the remaining text into a new (and often nonsensical) sentence.

Background
The name "Printer's Devilry" is a play on a "printer's devil", and 18th-19th century word for an assistant to a lead printer who would be in charge of menial tasks like fetching type.

The puzzle type actually originated as a Cryptic Crossword variation, invented in 1937 by Alistair Ferguson Ritchie, AKA Afrit, a cryptic crossword setter who (at the time) wrote for The Listener. It became a relatively popular variant, with two other prominent setters, Ximenes (Derrick Somerset Macnutt) and Azed (Jonathan Crowther) picking up the practice and the former breaking his own one-per year tradition for variant puzzles by writing a Printer's Devilry puzzle every eight months or so.

Printer's Devilry as a hunt puzzle (without the crossword grid) dates back to the 2005 MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle Eoanthropus dawsoni, which provided only 10 clues with enumerations. The enumerations were likely a necessary compromise, as a grid's entries normally provide information on the length of the answers.

Notable Examples

 * pluHarmony (MIT 2009) - Going against Afrit's original guidelines, this puzzle has its sentences broken in multiple spots, requiring pieces of words to be inserted to fix them up.