by David Astle
Obviously the word ‘nescience’ is relatively unfamiliar, and hence my choice of the anagram recipe. Veteran setters develop a hunch for knowing when any answer is a challenge to grasp, and so go a little softer in the clue, with anagrams the kindest option of all.
Trust me, I toyed with some doozies before publication. Did you know NESCIENCE, say, combines six compass points and three Roman numerals? That aspect alone could invite a fiendish clue, but I resisted. Why? The answer is the Piñata Principle.
Crossword-making has been described as ‘the art of losing gracefully’. In other words, everything a setter makes needs to be unmade. Those Lego blocks again. Or, to use the piñata metaphor, consider that a crossword is useless if it doesn’t crack open. Forget the frills, the garish paint: if that paper belly refuses to spill its treasure then soon the good people at your party will stop taking a swing.
Roger Squires, the most prolific crossword-maker on the planet (with more than 64,000 puzzles published in more than 470 papers and magazines), regularly applies the Piñata Principle. Known to many as Rufus in the Guardian, Squires must have known that ORMOLU lies beyond most vocabs, and so opted for an anagram:
Rum loo embellished with gilt decoration (6)
Scarcely the sleekest of his million clues, but fair. The signpost is clear, the fodder obvious, leaving the last part (‘with gilt decoration’) as the definition. One hefty clout and the clue bursts open.
Rare words matter in crosswords – solving or setting, quick or cryptic. Just because recondite (which means obscure) is obscure in its own right, this shouldn’t jeopardise the word’s selection. One reason people turn to crosswords is to have their vocabs exercised, excited, extended. Thanks to Araucaria I’ve annexed my vocab with such oddities as zori, otary and chasseur. (You’ve just met, in order, a Japanese sandal, an eared seal and an agile soldier.) Not that every puzzle should teem with archaisms. But now and then, adding a quaint specimen to the usual parade is part of the puzzler’s brief.
A good thing, too, if you listen to the makers of the Collins English Dictionary. For every new edition, lexicographers decide which words will join the book and which older residents have grown obsolete. In comes Google, and out goes oomancy (divination by eggs). Words resemble muscles; they wither without use.
So in stepped HarperCollins, creating the Save The Last Word Project. For the new edition scheduled for 2010 there was a list of twenty words that were destined to be culled. Among the endangered species were malison (a curse), agrestic (uncouth) and nitid (bright). Writers and celebs were approached to do a stint of verbal philanthropy. Choose a word and foster it. Humorist Stephen Fry was thrilled to adopt fubsy (short and stout), while poet Andrew Motion fell in love with skirr (a whirring of bird wings in flight).
Use it or lose it was the message, making the adoption scheme a challenge of sorts. If any of the chosen words failed to appear across six separate sources, from press to print, online or on TV, before a set deadline, then euthanasia was applied.
When it comes to sustaining rare words, crosswords perform a kindred duty. In recent years I’ve supplied oxygen to ABSQUATULATE (decamp) and DEHISCE (to burst open), but in the end the people will decide what stays and what goes. Here in the Master Puzzle I’ve thrown a lifeline to NESCIENCE, the long-lost cousin of ignorance. Whether that’s enough to ensure the word’s survival, I don’t know.
QUIZLING 2.1
What’s the lazy way of converting these four words into anagrams?
ELBOW GOTHS RIFTS TAPED
QUIZLING 2.2
SEW and RIP sit in WIPERS. Using every letter once only, can you scramble each word (and brand) below to make a pair of opposites in each case?
ALFRESCO DYNAMITED THEOLOGIST STOLICHNAYA
QUIZLING 2.3
What iconic mode of transport is ‘parked’ in the anagram of VERY COSTLY OLD ROAD MACHINES?
CHAPTER 3
Enhanced means to focus on
scatterbrain locus (10)
Ted Validas is an old friend of mine. Like me, he crafts puzzles for the daily press. Or make that crafted – past tense. The guy disappeared in mysterious circumstances some twenty years ago, never to be seen again.
Back when I knew him, Ted made a variety puzzle, with anagrams a common ingredient. Breezy stuff, like mixing common words to find well-known authors – RENEGE for Greene or CLEARER for Le Carré. Should a solver write to him to extend the list, adding STUPOR for Proust, say, or VIOLATER for Voltaire, Ted would write back in good spirit, never missing a beat, always signing off his letter in the same way: Yours verbally, Ted Validas.
Now and then, when Ted made a botch of a piece of trivia, calling Daleks robots instead of armour-clad mutants from the planet Skaro, for example, or getting confused between Celtic and Gaelic, then the puzzler would take the flak. He’d vow to get it right next time. Yours verbally, Ted Validas.
But after six years of correspondence, he vanished. His puzzles kept appearing in the paper, people kept writing in, but the name Validas fell off the radar. If people tried looking up his name in the directory or calling the switch at the Herald to seek an extension: nothing. The man was a ghost, his ongoing puzzles the only trace that he ever existed.
So where’d he go? The answer remains a riddle. One solver sent a Christmas card to the Herald in 1991, thanking Ted for twelve months of brain-bending, but the envelope was left to moulder in the mailroom, addressee unknown. Other readers sent mail to nitpick or cajole, offer other ideas, but nothing lured Ted from the void. Instead they received the usual replies, using the same font, the same tone, but this time round the name at the bottom was another character called David Astle, whoever he was.
In case you haven’t twigged, you can call off the dogs. There’s no need to drag the harbour. Cancel the helicopter. Ted Validas and David Astle are the same animal. Back in 1985, when I first started making Wordwit, a variety word puzzle, I thought it wise to invent an alias. Maybe it was nerves, or modesty – or a fundamental dread that the format would fall on its face.
Thankfully, it didn’t. Week by week, learning on the job, I kept tending the small box near the back of Section One, and the feedback kept flowing. Wordwit thrived. It ran birthday competitions and readers’ puzzles, played with headlines and punchlines, acronyms and anagrams: the whole verbal toy box, drawing a loyal following as the years rolled on.
Location helped. The feature sat below the daily crossword, which I’d also begun to make around the same era. Stuck on a certain clue, you could give Wordwit a look, or vice versa. The puzzles were natural companions. Now in its twenty-sixth year, Wordwit continues as a Section One diversion, and I continue to make it.
Or Ted Validas did, that first stretch. A daft name in hindsight, but Delta Davis sounded porno, while Levi Saddat had the whiff of zealot. Writers of course have a long tradition of resorting to pen names, with anagrams a common disguise. Theodor Seuss Geisel, best known as Dr Seuss, also plied his trade as Theo LeSieg. Another American, Edward Gorey, wrote a series of macabre books for kids under the manifold egos of Ogdred Weary, Wardore Edgy and Mrs Regera Dowdy.
Then there’s Gwen Harwood, the Tasmanian poet who longed to break the male monopoly of published poets in The Bulletin magazine back in the 1970s. So Gwen hatched a plan. Before too long the asexual W. W. Hagendoor found great success as a contributor. Though perhaps the most surprising member of this curious club is an inventor.
Alexander Graham Bell felt cursed by celebrity. As father of the telephone, his name was recognised before he arrived, all but eclipsing the person attached to it. Fine if you want the VIP treatment but not so hot if you want to write a paper on lizards.
That’s right. When not playing with sound waves, the Scot was looking under rocks. In later years Bell wrote an article on reptiles, but knew that if he submitted his story to National Geographic under his given name, then (a) his piece may well be accepted on the strength of his fame alone, or (b) a thousand readers will see the byli
ne and say, ‘Hey, what’s this talkie-machine chappie doing cavorting with iguanas?’
Hence Bell muddled his last two names to invent a no-name naturalist, his magazine piece running in 1907 under the title of ‘Notes on the Remarkable Habits of Certain Turtles and Lizards’ by H. A. Largelamb.
Meanwhile, several other writers have kneaded their own letters to coax characters into life, like the mysterious biographer called Vivian Darkbloom who haunts the pages of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Almost restrained compared to Richard Stilgoe, the British writer who couldn’t be cured from fiddling with himself. In his 1981 anthology, the Richard Stilgoe Letters, all thirty stories feature characters drawn from the author’s name. We meet Israel Rightcod the trawler boy, Italian Olympian Ricardi Hotlegs and a choirmaster named Elgar I Chordist.
Speaking of music, we have one more side trip before grappling with the Master clue. For this yarn we return to England, home of the cryptic, where a gifted clue-monger and a famous musician shared a talent for orchestrating letters.
HENDRA VIRUS – anagram codenames and solo lyricists
Crossword-makers turn to anagrams like Catholic nuns to rosaries. Neither vocation can quit their sacred fumbling, intoning spells as they go. Consequently, when not teasing solvers with anagram clues, many setters torment their own names in order to create a pseudonym. The custom was illustrated best in the Listener, the one-time radio magazine that boasted possibly the most difficult cryptic of its day. Browsing back copies you’ll find the works of Robin Baxter (alias Nibor), Richard Rogan (Aragon), Jack Gill (Llig) and Jeff Pearce (Caper), to name four.
Chris Brougham QC was another setter to uphold the tradition. After taking silk in 1988, Brougham spent his daytime hours navigating the byways of bankruptcy law. By night, however, the lawyer entered different corridors, dreaming up crosswords for the Spectator, The Times and, at one stage, the Listener, under the cover of Dumpynose. For all the smirks the alias triggered, Dumpynose was a practical solution, as BROUGHAM offers little in terms of anagrams. (Does RUMBA HOG work?) So the QC chose to jumble PSEUDONYM instead.
Editing crosswords for the Wall Street Journal, Mike Shenk faced a similar dilemma. Anagram-wise, SHENK is a tough ask, yet Mike as editor saw the wisdom of crafting a fresh byline as contributor. Hence the arrival of two mystery women, MARY-ANNE LEMOT and NATALIA SHORE. Any ideas? Suffice to say that few New Yorkers suspected Shenk had manipulated NOT MY REAL NAME and ANOTHER ALIAS.
Which leads us to Bert Danher, a Liverpudlian horn player who made scores of brilliant crosswords when not performing music. Inventive and witty, this popular compiler wowed Guardian solvers under the veil of Hendra. In his prime, Bert provided crosswords for the five major UK papers, with the Guardian joining his roster of The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times and the Independent. All this, and blowing the French horn for the Liverpool Philharmonic. Yet perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this setter’s life dates to his childhood.
Bert’s mother was Ann McCartney, sister to Jim. Through the tragic death of Bert’s father the two families were drawn even closer, the future puzzler spending whole stretches with the McCartneys during the Depression. If jazz wasn’t blaring on the radio, then Uncle Jim was teaching Bert the art of cryptics. Not only did those ad hoc sessions nurture a stellar career, the bond they created also saw Bert become the godfather of Jim’s first son, a moptop named Paul, the future Beatle.
Sharing a passion for words and music, the two cousins enjoyed a strong rapport, despite the gap of sixteen years. Arguably this lifetime affinity, or the seminal influence of Jim in both lives, helped to fashion one of the finest anagrams in music history.
Paul himself is cagey on the subject, telling reporters that the title of his 2007 album, Memory Almost Full, is merely a phrase borrowed from his voicemail, a metaphor for modern life, he said, but other observers favour an alternative theory. Scramble the title – MEMORY ALMOST FULL – and you’ll spell FOR MY SOULMATE LLM (or Linda Louise McCartney), Paul’s long-time partner and co-founder of the rock band Wings. Linda, sadly, had succumbed to breast cancer in 1998. Is the title a coincidence or a dash of anagram brilliance? The ex-Beatle’s staying mum. But there’s no question that verbal agility runs through the family. For evidence, turn to Paul’s first-cousin-cum-godfather, a stylist known as Hendra, and you’ll see the calibre of his mixology:
If I tail car carelessly that will be unnatural = ARTIFICIAL
World Cup Team poorly dressing after shower = TALCUM POWDER
Stalling in faulty air contraptions = PROCRASTINATION
Saw three pigs turning aside = STAGE WHISPER
In my book this fab four is as lyrical as anything Bert’s younger cousin composed. And that’s just the maestro’s work in the anagram category. A tough act to follow, but the Master clue is beckoning.
FAME AT LAST – embedded signposts and Robin Lucas
Where normal people collect beer coasters or teaspoons, I prefer signposts. Not the street-corner kind, but new and sneaky means to indicate an anagram. Rolling Stones is one example, and Dire Straits another. Most folk see two English rock acts, but I’m inclined to read both bands as sly instructions to make ONSETS and ARTIST. Likewise a mixed blessing is GLIBNESS, while pasta salad is TAPAS. If the perfect signpost sits cosily beside its fodder, throwing the solver off guard, then how wonderful to find names and phrases that do the job already?
Off guard, in fact, is another good example, bearing in mind that off means sick or askew. So suddenly off guard is not just a word meaning unwary, but a cryptic pairing that leads to A DRUG. Over years, collecting these covert couples, the list began to look like this:
Off-centre = RECENT
Off-roading = ADORING
Sneak off = SNAKE
Paired off = REPAID/DIAPER
The mania persists today. I’m always on the hunt for new signposts. Like NEW, for instance, a word asking solvers to renovate the adjacent letters, thus giving up such clue tricks as New Ager (GEAR or RAGE), New Orleans (LOANERS) or New Testament (STATEMENT). Then there’s the beauty of both elements – signpost and anagram cluster – fusing into one whole. Newcastle, say, can pave the way for CLEATS to be clued like so:
Newcastle climbing gear (6)
Likewise, LEDGES comes from sledgehammer, and SHORE from horsewhip. Pushing the envelope, you could also argue that spinaches yields CHASE (as in spin-ACHES), and offensive, ENVIES (think off-ENSIVE). Good old Burma, nowadays known as Myanmar, could betray MANY, since mar is a crossword-word for spoil.
You get the idea. Embedded signposts are fiendish, and therefore not so rife across cryptic puzzles. (We setters do show some mercy, you know.) Nor is the ploy new, as noted in a 1968 collection of Guardian puzzles. John Perkin, crossword editor at that time, urged solvers to be watchful of ‘decidedly tricky’ anagrams. He then provided two examples:
Les Miserables – or Turning of the Screw = WRETCHES
Sweet miscreant = NECTAR
Subtle and sadistic, the best clues test how far a recipe can go, while never losing sight of the Piñata Principle. Now that you’re awake to embedded signposts, let’s take a new look at the Master clue:
Enhanced means to focus on scatterbrain locus (10)
By itself, scatterbrain is a fair signpost, a word suggesting ditzy and disorganised. Then again, scatter also does the trick, freeing the word’s other half – BRAIN – to combine with LOCUS. And bingo, you have a ten-letter cluster.
Before confirming the answer, let me tell you why I chose this clue – and answer – for the book’s central puzzle. The year was 1990. The clue appearing in a November cryptic was a benign anagram:
Robin Lucas tweaked optic gizmo (10)
The answer arrived the following week. The envelope was nondescript. The opening line read ‘Fame at last! I was thrilled to be an anagram in your cryptic crossword …’. My eye drifted down to the sender’s name and there was the florid signature of Robin Lucas, a solver from Mudgee in New Sout
h Wales who’d almost spilt her coffee over the usual breakfast challenge. Even with a pair of BINOCULARS I couldn’t have foreseen such a sweet coincidence, where one random answer happened to be the name of a reader who’d confront the same anagram. I said as much in my reply, thanking Robin for taking the time to write. And it being 1990, the last year of my professional camouflage, I ended the letter the only way I knew: Yours verbally, Ted Validas.
FURTIVE SIGNPOSTS
Here’s a glimpse of a few more furtive signposts I’ve gathered
over the years.
battleground (gives you tablet)
castor oil (coats – when you ‘roil’ CASTO)
feeding frenzy (feigned)
flesh wound (shelf)
Gordian knot (adoring)
halal butcher (Allah)
hypnotherapy (phoney)
madrigal (grail)
odd couples (close-up)
odd man out (amount)
shipwreck (hips)
shortcake mix (track shoe)
Steinlager brew (generalist)
windowpane (weapon – when you ‘wind’ OWPANE)
QUIZLING 3.1
Antigrams are contrary anagrams. UNITE, for instance, hides UNTIE. Can you figure out the words that inspired each antigram here?
FLUSTER
MORE TINY
NICE LOVE
REAL FUN
TRUE LADY
QUIZLING 3.2
What two Greek letters can be scrambled to spell two new Greek letters?
QUIZLING 3.3
When ants swarm the rug, a picnicker can be alarmed. To prove the point, can you mix ANTS with PICNICKER to make a hyphenated word for terrified?
CHAPTER 4
Discourteous shift is dispatched,
subcontracted (10)
‘O fat male,’ says the comedian.
The crossword-maker frowns. ‘How do you spell oh?’