by David Astle
ZINCITE
OOCYTES
PTYALIN
TRISHAW
QUIZLING 4.3
If ‘squandered zillions’ is LOST LOTS, can you figure out these other anagram pairs? Each coupling involves words of four or five letters.
Loathe warmth
Exorcises?
Start pub-crawl
Eco-lit
Fruit blemish
Mud-brick home
Bedtime story
Ulna locale
Charades
CHAPTER 5
Nebraskan City Circle gives old
lady a laugh (5)
Cornflakes
Goalpost
Trousers
Menace
Lentil
Obviate
Perpetual
Domino
Radar Trap is a code puzzle I make every week for the Herald’s Metro section, a list of eight words or names encoded into symbols. Usually the topic is declared, like Famous Stutterers (Porky Pig, Aesop, Noel Gallagher) or Things You Shake (Polaroid photo, drug habit, Etch-A-Sketch), while other weeks the task is twofold: cracking the code, and then determining the theme that unifies all eight.
What links friendship, say, with mozzarella, truth, limousine, hamstring and imagination? (All can be stretched.)
Or these five movies: X-Men, Muriel’s Wedding, Notting Hill, Forrest Gump and Rear Window? (Each film has a main character in a wheelchair.)
So how about our opening list? What quirk links ‘Cornflakes’ and the rest? This was the challenge facing Sydneysiders in 2008, trying to find a common thread with a prize up for grabs. Search engines most likely came to the rescue, with rescue the operative word.
How well do you know your history? All eight words were code names for World War II operations, from bombing runs (‘Obviate’) to propaganda mail-outs (‘Cornflakes’). Hardly household names, but the terms were urgent business some sixty years ago. And once you solve our current Master clue you’ll have a ninth code name for the list. But instead of turning to codes or anagrams, this clue entails a new formula.
Players of charades, the popular mime game, will know the rules already. You get a name like Liverpool, say, and you break the city into halves, pointing to your liver, then acting out a swimming pool. Breakdown, in fact, is the crux of charading.
Potentially, any movie or famous name can be broken into pieces – sounds or syllables or smaller words. At first glance, Mahatma Gandhi looks a nightmare to dismantle, but then you unpick the seams and see five fragments: MA-HAT-MAG-AND-HI.
To illustrate how crosswords have adopted this game, let’s choose a WWII operation. MENACE looks perfect, the coupling of two smaller words, MEN + ACE. Clue-wise a setter may go this way:
Guys superb when facing danger (6)
Guys are MEN. Superb is ACE. Marry them and there’s a synonym of danger. So what is ‘when facing’ doing? The cryptic term is linkword, namely any word helping to bring the other two elements together. Seldom desirable, sometimes linkwords are unavoidable. This may run contrary to Azed’s dictum – two elements in every clue and nothing else – but wordplay and definition won’t always mesh. It’s best to view links as visible stitches that keep two panels compatible.
Selecting linkwords has its own art. Choose the right one, and the word will not only describe what’s happening in a wordplay sense (since men and ace are physically facing each other), but also contribute to the clue’s overall surface meaning.
Let’s try Operation Two, a naval attack on Sumatran oil-fields code-named LENTIL:
Pulse fast – close to 49 (6)
Here the marriage is cosier, as LENTIL can be defined as pulse. Pair that with fast – not just the essence of Lent but also a word supporting the notion of heart rate – and the cardiac trap is sprung. For added bait, the leftover IL translates as forty-nine in Roman numerals, the figure supporting the pulse idea. As the linking phrase, close to means both ‘beside’ and ‘roughly’, serving the needs of surface meaning as well as wordplay command.
Now we move on to DOMINO, the last operation listed. The clue below was styled by America’s best cryptic setter, Henry Hook, a gifted recluse from New Jersey. You’ll see more of Hook’s handiwork as the book unfolds, but for now consider this gem:
Monk in oxygen mask (6)
Unlike my first two efforts, Hook has avoided a linkword. The best charades work this way. Here the wordplay side (monk in oxygen) spells out DOM+IN+O, where Dom is the common title for a Catholic monk. Yet the stroke of genius is how neatly the word oxygen – or O – sidles with mask, not forgetting that dominoes are not just spotty blocks but also those half-masks that the Riddler fancied.
Coincidentally, the Master clue enlists the letter O as well. Charades are prone to isolating single letters (O), or letter clusters (IL), as most words when separated won’t be as neat as the Mahatma. Take GALLIVANT, say. Broken down, we get GALL + IVAN + T, or G + ALL + IV + ANT, and so on. When playing charades, or building clues, you’ll often need to convey a non-word chunk among the larger units. Such a challenge takes guile. Let’s look more closely at this special nastiness.
STORM CENTRE – Ximenes vs Araucaria
Shirl O’Brien is an anagram of HORRIBLE SIN, but you won’t meet a sweeter crossword compiler. The Brisbane mum of five has made more than 1200 puzzles for that city’s Courier-Mail under the alias of Southern Cross. Now in her eighties, Shirl has quit the local gig to spend more time with her grandkids, though she still draws a puzzle income, exporting her brand of homespun humour to the United Kingdom. Notably, Shirl belongs to a select group of females making cryptic puzzles at the top level, as well as being a very rare Australian who compiles for an English audience: her work appears once a month or so in the Guardian, under the code name of Auster.
‘A lovely man called Custos, whose real name was Alec Robins, suggested I go with Auster, which means the southern wind.’ Shirl can’t help a girlish snigger when she recollects this. ‘These days, with my flatulence, that’s a good name for me.’
Alec Robins – one letter switch from becoming BINOCULARS – was a veteran setter for several British papers, the Guardian included. Together with a setter code-named Ximenes (christened after a torturer during the time of the Spanish Inquisition), Custos helped draft the rules of cryptic crosswords. Notably, both Custos and Ximenes, whose real name was Derrick Macnutt, taught classics at prestigious colleges, but maybe that’s no coincidence, since a head for strange tongues often implies a good head for puzzles. And so it was, in 1966, that the two teachers took a break from Cicero to collaborate on a bestseller entitled Ximenes on the Art of Crossword. (Guess which compiler had the bigger profile.)
While both authors have since moved on to that great conundrum in the sky, the impact of their manifesto still ripples through Cryptopia. Not least in the matter of charades.
‘Alec was a purist in that regard,’ recalls Shirl. ‘For him a phrase like CIVIC CENTRE is not an indication of the letter V, while CENTRE OF GRAVITY was fine. The difference is a matter of grammar.’ Mind you, there are times when Shirl still signals a letter like B with the phrase BOTTLE-OPENER rather than OPENING OF BOTTLE, flouting the puritan rule book and feeling a minor pang of guilt. ‘I’ll look up to heaven and say, “Sorry Alec” because he wouldn’t have liked that.’
Bottle-opener, by the lights of Custos and Co, is a horrible sin, in fact, and should never denote the letter B. Just as Radio-head is lazy shorthand for R compared with the probity of Radio’s head, which looks daft on the page. To see where your impulses lie, browse the list below and pick which samples seem a reasonable signpost for the letter R:
start of race
middle of April
end of summer
ringleader
birth centre
never-ending
If you reckon the first three examples are the only fair ones, then you belong in the Ximenean camp. This posse makes up the hardliners, setters and solv
ers who insist on every clue being thoroughly sound in both grammar and execution, even at the expense of creative tangents or a dose of lateral thinking.
However, if you can live with all six listed samples, chances are you belong in the libertarian camp, the opposite mob. As a solver, I’m guessing, you don’t mind facing a clue that seems a little out there, either in its wording or in how the wordplay functions, so long as the Piñata Principle prevails. No matter the mischief, the answer must be gettable, especially in reverse, when solution and clue are held to account.
The golden rule of cryptics was coined by Afrit, a Listener compiler of the 1930s whose real name was A. F. Ritchie. Dubbed the Afrit Injunction, the rule reads: You need not mean what you say, but you must say what you mean.
Despite the flame war between the two crossword schools, this dictum is central to both approaches, from the exacting Ximenes to the loose-limbed Araucaria, alias John Graham of the Guardian. For a sense of the latter, try this charade for size:
Garment of polyester not cotton? (7)
If the answer is SINGLET, can you see why? Because polyester (versus cotton) has a SINGLE-T. True-blue Ximeneans would be appalled – a rubbery clue, a deviant whim, not a verb in sight – but I reckon it’s funny, and inventive, and Araucarian – the other word to describe libertarians. Besides which, the Afrit Injunction has been obeyed.
Athens versus Sparta, Crips versus Bloods – the two camps have been scrapping for decades, despite having so much in common. Naturally, everyone wants their puzzle to be concise and witty. Regardless of your flag – Ximenean or Araucarian – the principles of neat wordplay and sound definition don’t alter. You still desire seamless clues with vivid imagery and subtle traps. To return to the classroom for a moment, I think the Ximenean is much like the classics master who demands a clinical translation of Virgil, while the Araucarian heads up the art department, splashing colour on the canvas to mirror the galaxy that Virgil wrote about. Both executions require great skill. Both delude and delight. And as with art, a solver will decide what they like.
So what about 22-Across, our upcoming charade? Does it lean in a Ximenean or Araucarian direction? Let’s see:
Nebraskan City Circle gives old lady a laugh (5)
The state abbreviation for Nebraska is NE. Will that be required? The state’s capital is Lincoln, and its largest city is Omaha. Are we on track? The answer is yes, regardless of where the clue leads, as good solvers will toss up all those scenarios, keeping attuned to what the clue is murmuring.
Let’s stick with the OMAHA theory. All the more since that has five letters, and we already know that O is the answer’s opener, thanks to BINOCULARS. Encouraged, let’s see if the wordplay backs us up.
To isolate the wordplay, remove the alleged definition – Nebraskan City – and see what’s left: Circle gives old lady a laugh. Good news: Circle may suggest an O, leaving us with the tricky sequence of MAHA. Is it M + AHA? What about MA + HA? Read the words carefully. Presuming gives to be the linkword, then old lady = MA, and a laugh (singular) has to be HA. Congratulations, you’ve just un-pieced the puzzle’s first charade.
Although OMAHA, the answer, gave little cause for British Intelligence to celebrate sixty years’ ago. If the old lady is laughing in our current clue, then the old guard was furious back in 1944.
MULBERRY (BUSH) TELEGRAPH – D-Day Crossword Mystery
GOLD was a fluke, they thought, just like SWORD. And then came JUNO, the Roman goddess of marriage. A few feelers started twitching down at MI5, the military intelligence office. What are the odds, they must have argued. The Daily Telegraph, reduced by wartime to a measly six pages, had kept its crossword. Worryingly, the same puzzle had bleated three code names – GOLD, SWORD and JUNO – each one a classified landing spot for the D-Day invasion planned in a few months’ time.
But still, went the reasoning, aren’t these compiler chaps into the classics? Gold, sword, Juno: the very stuff of myths and legends. Operation Overlord remained on track – 6 June 1944 – when a fourth clue made the pages:
One of the USA (4)
What the dickens? UTAH had nothing to do with Homer or his sea stories. The word in fact embraced a different maritime yarn, namely the Normandy beach assigned to the 4th US Assault Division, the western flank of the D-Day operation, and that was five weeks off.
Journalism has a saying – once is an occurrence, twice a coincidence, while three times is a trend. Does that make four a conspiracy? High treason?
To make matters worse, these puzzles had a precedent. Two years before, in August 1942, there was the Dieppe Debacle. The planning had taken months: the spy reconnaissance, the stealthy gathering of infantry and airpower. The target was a French port close to the Belgian border. As Chief of Combined Operations, Lord Mountbatten was intent on wresting Dieppe from German hands in order to gain a beachhead in northern Europe. The raid was two days from swooping when up bobbed 18-Down in the bloody Telegraph crossword: French port (6). Crosswords of the era happily blended quick clues as well as the evolving genre of cryptic.
But what tormented MI5 was DIEPPE, the answer. The timing was alarming. After the raid, where casualties were high, the government had no choice but to appoint Lord Tweedsmuir (the son of John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps) to investigate the culpable compiler – who is a man you’ve met already. Like Custos and Ximenes, another classicist with chalk dust on his fingers, Leonard Sidney Dawe had pioneered the Daily Telegraph crosswords and also ran the Strand School in London. Students dubbed him Moneybags, a reference to his initials (LSD – pounds, shillings, pence). With his severe Prussian haircut, Dawe at first appeared as a most likely Hitler snoop, though Tweedsmuir found nothing to support the impression. As the investigator went on to remark, ‘We noticed the crossword contained the word Dieppe and there was an immediate and exhaustive inquiry which also involved MI5. But in the end it was concluded that it was just a remarkable coincidence – a complete fluke.’
Such tolerance evaporated in May 1944. On the eve of Overlord, the Telegraph crossword ran a fifth hush-hush location, fresh on the heels of UTAH. On 22 May, just two weeks prior to US General Dwight D. Eisenhower launching the assault, this clue ran:
Red Indian on the Missouri (5)
The Missouri River, for those unfamiliar with American geography, flows through Great Falls and Sioux City, as well as a city called Omaha, a name that honours the area’s original people. If Omaha rings a bell for you, imagine the alarm bells sounding in Westminster. Not just a light cruiser in the US Navy, Omaha was also a classified nook in the Normandy coastline. Give this Dawe fellow a damn good grilling, came the communiqué.
By this stage, with the Blitz in recent memory, the Strand School had been evacuated to the safer vales of Surrey. Dawe himself was living with his brother-in-law, Peter Sanders, a senior member of the British Admiralty, causing further jitters. The home was in Leatherhead, which Ximeneans would despise as a signal for L, but let’s keep with the action. In Dawe’s own words: ‘They turned me inside-out and … grilled my brother-in-law. They went to Bury St Edmunds, where my colleague Melville Jones was living, and put him through the works. But they eventually decided not to shoot us!’
Again, MI5 decided, the words seemed to be a mind-boggling fluke. Dawe had no inkling of the covert plans. Nor did the flukes stop. Only days from D-Day, a few more military secrets dropped into the grid. Among the answers were MULBERRY (code for a floating harbour off the French coast), NEPTUNE (the initial naval assault) and OVERLORD (seriously).
Historians put the D-Day Crossword Mystery high on the list of all-time great coincidences, but the oddity gained a new chapter in 1984. A former Strand School student, Ronald French, was reading a forty-year anniversary article about the whole episode and felt compelled to contact the paper.
It seems the fishy vocab of Leonard Sidney Dawe was less an accident than a whim of geography. The school, in its Surrey location, was close to an army camp for US and Canadian tro
ops. Just fourteen at the time, Ronald French was mesmerised by the men in khaki, as were dozens of other schoolboys, many of whom played truant to see army life first-hand. And when men talk, boys listen. ‘We all knew the operation was called Overlord,’ recalled French in a follow-up article by Val Gilbert, the Telegraph’s puzzle editor. ‘Everyone knew the outline invasion plan … Omaha and Utah were the beaches they were going to –’.
From spoken word to crosswords, the story took one more step. Juggling the chores of teaching and puzzle-making, Dawe regularly challenged his students to create crossword interlocks as an intellectual test, giving the lads graph sheets and pencils to see what they could do. What they did was almost overturn the course of World War II.
Though let’s leave the last word to Chief Command, the original think tank that dreamt up such terms as OMAHA and MULBERRY. Nine months after the critical success of D-Day, with the Nazi empire retreating deeper into Germany, the Allied forces conducted a series of secret negotiations in Switzerland. Top-ranking officers on both sides of the conflict were involved, a chance to negotiate a Nazi surrender in a civilised way. Such high stakes made the secrecy of Operation Crossword all the more crucial.
RECIPE PRECIS: CHARADES
Often a lack of signposts can open your eyes to the charade category – especially if the clue carries a word like and or other coupling cues, namely with, beside, by, on, along, next to or after. The slicker charades avoid any so-called joiners, such as old lady a laugh yielding O+MA+HA in our Master example. Often a clue’s brevity will put charades on the suspect list. And remember, keep your eyes peeled for abbreviations – see the box at the end of the next chapter.
QUIZLING 5.1
Scramble CHARADES to find
Two verbs similarly defined.
QUIZLING 5.2
The last name of this notorious gangster is an item of clothing