It was a little less satisfying that this puzzle allows the secret message to be determined without even seeing the grid.
@Sir Derf : I haven't tried running the letters through an online anagram solver - but even if one did so, I'd imagine that there are plenty of words and/or phrases which could theoretically be made by either/or including
or excluding some or all of the grid letters making up the clue words ...?
That said, even if someone were willing to spend the time needed to re-type all of the clue words (or to use some kind of OCR software, maybe) - and then more time running the large number of possible resulting combinations through an anagram solver, wouldn't that be (a) incredibly labour-intensive, and (b) rather not much fun, even if - again more theoretically than practically, surely - scientifically interesting, perhaps?
Or have I simply missed some kind of quicker and/or more apparent - to others than myself - short-cut to working out, or perhaps just guessing, the 'secret word or phrase' - which, for me, wasn't at all obvious (quite the opposite, in fact!) until AFTER solving quite a few words of the puzzle?
Not that I'm asking you to post the answer you've arrived at - which would very much spoil the fun! - but rather just wondering about your method.
[ Hey, look above this bit - a new (to me) formatting toy! An 'Insert Horizontal Line' command... ooh, shiny! ]
PS :
@Jake65 : Ha, thanks for noticing! Having FAR too much time on my hands, I can sometimes think of little
better other to do than altering and/or re-designing my Net profiles, signatures, and so on (of which I have only a few)... well, excluding the famous quote usually attributed to Voltaire, which I adopted as my byline in 2020 and which now appears as a perma-fixture everywhere where I even have any kind of signature etc.
That apart, though, where I *can* mess around with the rest of the signature, I often do - and as far as The Sayings of Laurelin's Mum go (NB: she called me many things, although Laurelin wasn't one of them!)... I recall her using that particular one frequently, from my early childhood onwards - and there were many more, too, since (believe it or not)
L. Mater was even more verbose than her [now intermittently] loquacious offspring!