Prof. Scott Weiss (see solution)
After solving this puzzle, you'll have seen a lot of four-letter words (and maybe used a few yourself!) Each of the twenty-four clues below leads to a four-letter word. Your job is to match them up with the twelve letter pairs. In one clue's answer, you can replace the first letter in a pair with the second, and (possibly) rearrange all four to get the solution to another clue.
For example, the first letter pair is E S. Suppose to clues on the list were "Kilmer's occupation" and "Beats". The answer to the first clue would be POET. Change the E to an S, and anagram to get the word TOPS which answers the second clue.
After you've solved all the clues, take the three letters common to each pair, and write them in order as implied by the letter-pairs. (Following our example, the first three-letter group would be POT or OPT or TPO or TOP, etc.)
You can take one letter from each group to spell out a clue to another four-letter word. In fact, you can build three clues in this way, each using a different letter of the group. (As a minor hint, each clue is a three-word phrase.) Solve these last clues, and then put the answer coming alphabetically first between the second and third answers alphabetically to get the final solution.
1 E S
2 B N
3 A K
4 A E
5 N R
6 K Y
7 L N
8 P W
9 A U
10 L O
11 D I
12 B L
CLUES