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All you need to do is, try figuring out the people who called Ana.

This is a story from a very famous incident happened with a friend of mine and we call it

UTILISING C - (C for the weird call she received)

Disgusted Ana threw away her plate. It cracked and scattered everywhere.
Ana was a little freaked but damn nervous. So was I, which was quite rare.
After a while there was a deep silence. It was deafening.
All of a sudden, the phone rang. That broke the quietness and was alarming.
The phone call was for Ana. She guessed it right using her wit.
If she was all set to solve the puzzle. I was also ready for it.

-

After the call, her friends laughed at Ana.
Yet in her failure, Ana found a lot of joy.

What is so special about the above two paragraphs? Is it hiding something? Yes! Two words to form a third. After solving the above, if you ask me what to do with the stuff you've found; I will say "Hey, I now demand interpretation". So, go ahead and interpret what you have found!

To make things more easier, here's a fill in the blanks for the final answer!

'"_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ " "_ _ _ _ _ "(ANSWER TO THE ABOVE) "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _"'

Can you identify who really called Ana?

HINT

There is only one important Anagram in the puzzle which gives the context of the puzzle

(Note-The - sign is very important once you solve the 2 paragraphs. I believe you will get the idea though.)

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  • $\begingroup$ "from a very famous incident" -- do you actually mean that? I mean, once this is all solved will we all say "oh yes, I heard about that years ago"? Or is the incident famous only in the fictional world of this puzzle? $\endgroup$
    – Gareth McCaughan
    Feb 13, 2017 at 13:06
  • $\begingroup$ @GarethMcCaughan No trivia tag. Yes, its a fictional story part. English is a tag to start with. $\endgroup$
    – Techidiot
    Feb 13, 2017 at 13:11
  • $\begingroup$ Yes, I noticed the "english" tag (and also something else). I wasn't looking for hints about how to get started, just clarifying your meaning :-). $\endgroup$
    – Gareth McCaughan
    Feb 13, 2017 at 13:30

1 Answer 1

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First of all,

note that UTILISING C is an anagram of LINGUISTIC. I'm sure this isn't coincidence, so this must be the "important anagram which gives the context of the puzzle".

The two paragraphs

are separated by a minus sign; I bet what we're doing is forming one word from each paragraph and then removing the second from the first (maybe it's a substring, or maybe we remove those letters and rearrange what's left or something).

So,

"the context" is "the linguistic moment". What might that mean? There's a book of that title but it doesn't appear to be relevant. Rather, we're looking for some linguistic terms.

Ana's name

is unusual, though of course not unheard-of. I'd thought it might be a hint at anagrams, but OP has indicated that the only important anagram here is the one in the title that was obviously an anagram even without such hinting. In the context of linguistics, there's the grammatical term "anaphora" (hinted at by "Ana for" in the title of the puzzle!), which is what happens when something refers back to an earlier thing (as e.g. with most uses of pronouns). Every line before the "-" has at least one example of anaphora (it, so, it, that, she+it+her, it). Curiously, the two lines after the "-" conspicuously avoid anaphora but have cataphora (forward reference) instead: "her" on each line.

In comments here and Sphinx's Lair chat, Techidiot has confirmed that indeed the two stanzas

are meant to lead to the terms ANAPHORA and CATAPHORA

and we are then meant to

subtract them in some fashion, as I speculated above -- leading to a 7-letter word which is, however, not an English word.

After some further discussion in TSL chat, it turns out that the intended process is

to subtract off the common -PHORA suffix and then append the two words yielding ANACATA, which is then approximately a Hindi word (more commonly rendered "anekta", I am led to believe by others in TSL, though I know no Hindi myself) one of whose meanings is "stack". Why Hindi? Well, the first letters of "Hey, I now demand interpretation" are H,I,N,D,I, and of course interpretation and translation are kinda the same thing.

So then presumably the blanks

say PUZZLING STACK EXCHANGE.

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  • $\begingroup$ Lovely! You have got almost everything for the first part. I won't let your attempt go in vain. Yes, the first paragraph is about Anaphora(check the title). Now, you can check what is the second paragraph about and apply the "sign" for the two, which you have again, rightly guessed $\endgroup$
    – Techidiot
    Feb 16, 2017 at 14:25
  • $\begingroup$ Maybe we should list all anaphora/cataphora and their antecedents/postcedents and see if that means anything (first letters maybe). This leads to: HASATATAAT/ISWITSIHSI for the first paragraph, not very promising, but maybe I've missed a few... $\endgroup$
    – Levieux
    Feb 16, 2017 at 15:24
  • $\begingroup$ @Levieux There you go. You got the second word. Now, applying the "-" sign gives you a 6 letter word(may not be from the english dictionary). Take it and approach the next part of the puzzle. $\endgroup$
    – Techidiot
    Feb 16, 2017 at 15:33
  • $\begingroup$ @Techidiot: HASATATAAT or ISWITSIHSI is the 2nd word already? Or do I need to skip some letters? $\endgroup$
    – Levieux
    Feb 16, 2017 at 15:35
  • $\begingroup$ @Levieux It's Cataphora. Check the sentences. (I feel like I gave it up) :) $\endgroup$
    – Techidiot
    Feb 16, 2017 at 15:35

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