Puzzled

by David Astle

  ‘O,’ says the comic and the audience erupts.

  The crossword-maker gazes at the scaffolding on the ceiling. ‘Is it Tom Somebody?’

  The comic frowns. ‘I thought you made puzzles for a living.’

  ‘I do, but this is showbiz.’

  ‘Show hasn’t even started.’

  Again the audience laughs. ‘One more,’ says the comedian. ‘What can you do with big melons?’

  ‘Mel Gibson,’ I say, exhausted, and the audience’s cheer is more Bronx than joyous. The pain is over – for everybody. The comedian stows his script. ‘Seriously, fella, I thought you’d eat anagrams alive.’

  On paper, I felt like saying. In private, yes. Not with spotlights on my head and pancake make-up on my face. The comedian was Paul McDermott, host of the offbeat quiz show Good News Week. The anagram game was his idea of a warm-up, tossing me phrases that hid celebs like Meatloaf. Thankfully, the cameras were yet to roll, as the game felt more like an ambush. As cool as VERY COOL TUNE may have read aloud, I’d never spotted COURTNEY LOVE while baking under a 500-watt globe.

  To be honest, I was on the show to plug a novel, not crosswords. But flogging fiction can be a hard sell, so the publicist played the crossword card, sneaking me sideways into the Good News gig, using the ruse of Meet the Puzzle-maker to smuggle the novel into the conversation.

  The very reason I should have seen the ambush coming. Instead of scoffing sandwiches in the green room I might have been wiser playing Scrabble, priming the reflexes, but there’s a limit to switching letters under pressure. Next time you visit the circus, don’t expect to see Alphonse the Amazing Anagrammer on the bill. People struggle to convert spoken words into anagrams, even those people who make crosswords for a living.

  The job is made for pen and paper. If I ask you to find a singer in ONLINE GUY, I’m sure you’d uncover NEIL YOUNG in good time. It’s a simpler task. All the bits are there. Much tougher if you hear the phrase I’M A JERK BUT LISTEN and try to grope for JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE. Nothing compares to seeing the letters on the page, as well as knowing what shape the outcome might take.

  This last advantage is the crossword luxury. (Mix RUSS and NED into a word for strip.) Before any disarray begins, the clue pre-empts the result. Then again, away from puzzles, our minds can jumble VELCRO to stumble on to CLOVER without great call for wheels and dashes. The difficulty climbs in sync with the letter tally, making the popular Target puzzle a tricky assignment.

  Found in umpteen newspapers, Target asks solvers to find as many words as possible from a scrambled nine-letter word. To spice up the recipe the words must be four or more letters long, no plurals, no proper nouns, and each word must include a nominated letter. Usually that letter is encircled by the remaining eight, much like a bull’s-eye inside a target, and spatially a great help with mental acrobatics.

  GREAT HELP, in fact, was one cluster I recall. Somehow TELEGRAPH jumped straight out. Target puzzles can topple that way. Other times, like the morning I was on the radio, you’ll be staring at alphabet soup.

  The interview was set to be an audio tour of a newspaper’s puzzle section, telling listeners how the various puzzles are assembled, from Wordwit to Target, plus the number twins – sudoku and KenKen. I’d taken twenty minutes to prepare, going through the day’s quick and cryptic clues in case any needed explaining. I’d even filled in the number squares and nailed APOCRYPHAL, the Target word. Perfect – until I glanced twice at the Target diagram. Wait, APOCRYPHAL has ten letters, not nine. I’d made an error. Was it APOCRYPHA? No, the mix had an L, and only one P anyway. Holy crap, what’s hiding in YOYPCHARL?

  Seconds before the chat began I started reliving the Good News nightmare, the bogus whizz sitting in the spotlight. The small talk started. I must have sounded like a trauma victim, vacantly discussing puzzles with my mouth while my brain was a blur of YOYPCHARL, or CHYLYPARO, but nothing worked.

  In my defence, POLYARCHY (government by many) is up there with nescience and fubsy. Not that the interviewer ever asked, knowing better than to spoil the solution. Instead she quizzed me hard about my looming unemployment.

  DA: My what?

  Radio journo: Aren’t puzzles being outsourced?

  DA: Imported, you mean? The Australian getting its crossword from the London Times?

  RJ: I’m talking bigger picture. Who needs you, for example, if computers can make the puzzles for us?

  DA: Well, sure, um …

  RJ: Makes sense, right? Brave new world, and all that.

  DA: With anagrams I guess –

  RJ: If Deep Blue can beat Garry Kasparov in chess, can’t a computer be programmed to turn out grids and clues?

  Rather than record my stunned response, let’s leave the whole train wreck and tackle the subject of cyber-clues, not just the software, the anagram engines, but also a seven-letter word that caused a moral shit-storm.

  GREAT HELP – machine-made puzzles and naughty subtext

  Target is a lucrative franchise, though the people responsible are not so much compilers as software operators. Every day the puzzle is generated by an inbuilt program, the game itself supplied by more than one contractor.

  Sudoku is the numerical twin, a brilliant format inspired by the genius of Leonhard Euler, a Swiss number-cruncher back in the 1700s. His Latin squares – a grid of figures adding up to a common sum in all directions – have inspired modern puzzlers to refine the format. The word sudoku is Japanese for ‘the numbers must remain unmarried’. As well as being addictive, the puzzle is ideal for any microchip to manage; a simple program is capable of spewing out a million variations before morning tea. Both Target and sudoku are machine-friendly: a closed set of variables within a fixed grid. Sound a bit familiar? A little like crosswords, right?

  Perhaps that’s what the current mayor of London, Boris Johnson, believed. Before taking public office Johnson was a journo, and part of the radical decision in the mid-1990s to replace crossword-setters with computers.

  As deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph, Johnson and his colleagues saw sense in the move. Other diversions, like chess problems and pub quizzes, could be drawn from databases, so why not cryptics? Already the paper owned a deep archive of past clues. Rarer words like POLYARCHY may have lacked a companion clue from history, but more common entries were linked to dozens of clues. Keen to save a penny, editors warmed to the notion of human-free grids. And if machines weren’t smart enough to craft a decent clue, then why not program the database to fetch and match?

  Readers were appalled. Overnight, puzzles lost all subtlety. There seemed to be no pulse behind the pastiche. Recipes duplicated. Puns and words overlapped, or whole formulas were missing. The flak grew so heavy that the Telegraph went back to the human touch, while Boris Johnson decided he’d try the relative calm of politics.

  No question though, computers have been a godsend for word puzzles, for both making and solving them. Once upon a time, when pen and paper were the lone tools, compilers had to fill grids and wangle anagrams using grey matter only. Mixing, in fact, is what computers do best, on top of helping crossword fans find what words may fit a selected sequence. (FLIPPANT and ELEPHANT, say, share their even letters and thus could fit the same grid entry.) But mixing and fitting are not the same as generating fresh clues, complete with surface shine and deception. This human dimension lies beyond the ken of software commands – so far. Until such time, I still have a job to fulfil, borrowing whatever computer tools I can grab.

  Again, as with Target and sudoku packages, the Web abounds in anagram generators. Many are gratis, some need subscription, some you pay to upload. In testing the range you’ll come across slow ones, moody ones, shallow and archaic ones. Just like when choosing a car, you’ll need to experiment to see which engine suits your anagram lifestyle.

  Anagram Genius is one proven vehicle, the first major generator of its type, the software developed over six years by Cambridge entrepreneur William Tunstall-Pedoe. Come release day, back in 1994, G
enius enjoyed widespread coverage. Even Johnson’s Daily Telegraph was part of the hoopla, with the paper bragging that its own masthead could be massaged into DEEP EARTHLY LIGHT, HIGHLY DATA REPLETE or GLADLY PRE-HEATHITE in forty seconds flat. But that was tame compared to the ruckus at the Daily Mirror, the paper running a front-page story in 1995 to promote the new device. The article carried a photo of the then Health Secretary, Virginia Bottomley, accompanied by a headline screaming I’M AN EVIL TORY BIGOT.

  Other mixers carry such names as Anagram Artist, Anagram Ferret, Nanagram or, one that recently imploded, Errata Among Range (an anagram of ANAGRAM GENERATOR). Personally, I can recommend Wordplay Wizard, a package created by an ex-editor of the Listener crossword, Ross Beresford. Thanks to his toy I discovered that DENNIS TITO, the first tourist in space, had TENDONITIS. No doubt the gag-writers on Good News Week had similar tools. There’s no sin in that. I might spend ten minutes a day just playing with anagram machines, throwing in a phrase like SWEATING BULLETS (because the letters look so ripe) and seeing what flashes back. The anagram clue below, in pre-Mac times, might have taken more than an hour to craft:

  Nervous about wellbeing status = SWEATING BULLETS

  Another game I’ll play with software toys is to seek out verbal flukes, like uncovering two eight-legged creatures (SPIDER and CRAB) in CRISPBREAD. Or trying the game in reverse, entering two painters (DALI and MATISSE) and getting ASSIMILATED.

  Of course, some anagram engines can be puritan, much like the Target puzzle that refuses to include ‘naughty bits’. Search all you like, you won’t find BUM and DICK in certain online crunchers, a fact that has provoked the plea among Target solvers for extended anatomy. Every month, it seems, a paper must face the moral dilemma of ignoring CLITORIS in SOLICITOR, or explaining how SPINE can be legit if PENIS doesn’t seem to exist.

  The practice is a type of bowdlerism, where slang and genitalia have been wiped from the database, just as Thomas Bowdler, back in the early 1800s, circumcised the Bard’s ‘prick of noon’ in Romeo and Juliet for the nicer ‘point of noon’. Seasoned Target fans don’t bother listing ORGASM for IGNORAMUS, while AROUSING is borderline. In Target-ville, sex and the twenty-first century don’t exist. If you chance upon MODEM in MODERNISM, bad luck. And don’t even bother with the C-word in TRUNCHEON – it ain’t gonna happen.

  Unless the unthinkable happens, and just as many solvers see the smut before any solution is disclosed, as occurred in the Washington Post in 2008. The puzzle was called a Scrabble Gram, sponsored by Hasbro, the board game’s licence-holders. To reach the maximum score, you had to rearrange four racks – each with seven tiles – into the longest possible word. Here’s how the racks appeared:

  EUTTSXB

  AIYDDTK

  EEIVLHC

  EOODSPP

  For Americans at least, rack 2 would be a cinch, the KATYDID (or cricket) part of every US summer. Then come VEHICLE and OPPOSED. Leaving just the top rack for the good people of DC, possibly the hardest of the four. Oh Lord, surely not – BUTTSEX!? Since when has that depravity snuck into Random House? The phones ran hot. The switchboard melted. The paper fell short of placing an apology, though the furore gained a lavish irony in the next morning’s solution, where SUBTEXT was revealed.

  As one user quipped in a puzzle forum, ‘Well, the inventor of Scrabble was a guy named Alfred Butts ….’ But enough dirty talk – for now at least. Time to examine 25-Across in the Master Puzzle, our last anagram clue.

  RISE OF THE NEW – everyday jargon and subtractive anagrams

  Forty years back, a word like ‘subcontracted’ came with a hyphen. Two centuries before then, the same word didn’t exist. Nowadays you can’t spend a working week without running into a subcontractor, or subcontractee, or maybe even operating under a subcontract yourself.

  As the world changes, so does language. Out with fubsy, in with fax. Until fax turned quaint, getting dumped for text, which has since lost its ‘e’, and so on. The whirligig never stops. In fact, even ‘whirligig’ is on thin ice.

  Unlike the answer to our current clue, a robust ten-letter term that’s growing more robust as each year passes. According to the Shorter Oxford, our mystery word was born around 1981, most likely debuting with a hyphen. If so, that coy attribute has since been lost, the term now part of modern conversation. On Google, this mystery word registers close to six million hits, compared to the 150,000 incidences of nescience. And if you want further proof of how ubiquitous this onetime piece of jargon has become, then this chapter has already used the word in passing.

  So let’s refresh the memory banks. Here’s how the clue reads:

  Discourteous shift is dispatched, subcontracted (10)

  Taken as a whole, the clue suggests the working realm. At least that’s the surface sense: a rude bunch of workers getting the sack, their new employment terms reduced to a subcontract. But don’t let the clue’s surface distract you. Ignore those images of open-plan offices, and focus on the building blocks.

  Where’s the signpost? Shift looks like the standout, but that’s leaving too many letters to disturb. To the signpost’s left is DISCOURTEOUS which has eleven letters, while ISDISPATCHED to the right has twelve – and we seek an answer with ten. To use a phrase common to working life: Help Wanted.

  As a category, anagrams are split into two kinds – the simple and the complex. The first sort we’ve met in the last three chapters: signpost plus fodder equals answer, as defined by the clue’s other part. While scatterbrain was tricky for its embedded signpost, the rest of the game followed along orthodox lines. Going one more step, complex anagrams can spread their fodder across a longer phrasing, such as this deft sample from the Guardian, composed by John Halpern, a superb innovator known to many fans as Paul:

  Ground rich with deep crack = DECIPHER

  The words to grind are rich and deep, to give a word meaning crack. Note how the fodder words sit astride with, the clue reading much like a recipe instruction: add X to Y to make Z. In complex anagrams, the fodder needs minor assembling before the shake-up can start. That may entail adding – or taking away, as the next clues demonstrate. The first was styled by a setter called Flimsy from the Financial Times, while the other is drawn from my own scrapbook:

  Tape’s broken, not a bother (4)

  Wet sitcom broadcast minus copyright (5)

  As the label suggests, subtractive anagrams ask you to remove a few letters from the fodder before anything else can happen. Of course, to keep things fair, a clue must flag both operations. Let’s look at that first clue. Can you see the two indicators? Broken is your anagram signpost, and not – the word – tells you to exclude. Sure enough, if we break up TAPES (not with an A) we make PEST, a word meaning bother.

  In the second clue, the hint of double-play is also there – to mix (broadcast) and to trim (minus). Mix SITCOM minus copyright (or C) and you’ll create MOIST, as clued by wet. Let’s put the Master clue back in the frame:

  Discourteous shift is dispatched, subcontracted (10)

  Same deal, just a few more letters to handle. Where are the signs? As you probably figured, the anagram signal is shift. Except that now we know that deletion is also on the agenda, as echoed by the word dispatched. What word or letter needs dispatching, or sending off, before the mixing can start?

  Remember those words of Azed back in Chapter 1: ‘A good cryptic clue contains three elements.’ And what are they again? A precise definition. Fair wordplay signals. And nothing else. So don’t overlook that little word is. No clue-word appears in vain. That tiny is, in fact, provides you with the letters you need to dispatch from a shifted DISCOURTEOUS, the new incarnation meaning subcontracted.

  I’ll make it easier for you: C E U R O S T U D O. (It might also remind you of a certain radio interview where the announcer forecast the downfall of human puzzlers, usurped by software packages.) Certainly the DJ had a point, watching the likes of Target and sudoku falling into programmers’ hands, but the day clue-mongers are OUTSO
URCED to the microchip will be the day that robots run the asylum.

  COMPLEX ANAGRAMS

  Usually less tricky than they sound, complex anagrams ask you to scramble letters – with a twist. Perhaps a letter is thrown in before the shuffling, or extracted. Perhaps the anagram fodder doesn’t sit primly in one cluster, but is supplied in separate bundles. This duo from the Financial Times will help you tune your radar to recognise the tactic.

  From Falcon: Play in match and be beaten = MATCH + BE = MACBETH

  From Styx: Bonus remuneration removed from dodgy taxpayer = TAXPAYER – PAY = EXTRA

  HALL OF FAME: ANAGRAMS

  Les, Tom, Dicky and Harry (6) [Cox & Rathvon, US]

  Every second letter an ‘a’ – bananas? (9) [Satori, Financial Times]

  Doctor accepted as trainee astronaut (5,5) [Times 8559]

  An acrostic puzzle in Latin (5,5) [Taupi, Guardian]

  Being out of one’s class in semis, beaten badly (11) [Times 8380]

  UFO, for example, circling above Britain (12) [Crux, Financial Times]

  SOLUTIONS: Molest, alternate, space cadet, Costa Rican,

  absenteeism, abbreviation

  QUIZLING 4.1

  We know that HER MEN COLLAPSE hides former supermodel

  ELLE MACPHERSON. Can you refashion each phrase below to

  fashion a model past or present?

  HAILED POSH

  UNHINGED CELEBS

  SMOKES? TA

  VAIN LADIES TANGLE

  HELIUM KID

  NIGHTLY INSTRUCTOR

  QUIZLING 4.2

  Scrabble pros don’t play BARONET, when REBOANT – meaning resonant – may draw a futile challenge from their opponent. Heeding this advice, we’ve played these weird sevens on the board, despite the same tiles holding which far simpler words?

  AMBONES

  SONANCY

  FLANEUR

  DYELINE