Puzzled

by David Astle

  plus a single unit – just as his nickname is an item of clothing

  plus a single unit (in a casino). Who’s the felon in question?

  QUIZLING 5.3

  Can you ‘canonise’ your first answer to create your second?

  Crook/yet, say = ILL/STILL. Solving six or more is sterling stuff.

  buzz/twine

  tree/hide

  mature/band

  OK/layer

  eager/seam

  girl/boy

  girl/girl

  move along/walk

  move along/walk

  CHAPTER 6

  A weir worker set … (7)

  Wait, before we start, let’s check that clue again. W-E-I-R. Is that the right spelling? I mean W-I-E-R just looks wrong. But then again, we have PIER, which is correct. Or is it PEIR? How about we run the spellcheck?

  Wish I’d had that impulse four years back. One thing you learn in the puzzle game – never presume. The moment you think you’ve made a spotless crossword, a blooper will bite your backside. Maybe a charade skips a vital piece, a clue number is out of whack … or maybe you think that WEIR is spelt WIER.

  Without trying to duck for cover, I reckon my lapse links back to Old French. That’s the language to filter the Latin pera, so giving us the modern-day PIER. Meanwhile WEIR, with the vowels transposed, is an Old English word adopted from Middle German. Dumbly, on the eve of publication, I’d taken the two words as owning identical tails, so making the fatal move from PIER to WIER (sic). The late switch was a bid to resonate a longer entry in the grid, namely WARRAGAMBA, the principal dam supplying the sprawl of Sydney.

  To clue WARRAGAMBA I’d chosen the charade path, breaking the word into bits: WAR, plus RAG, plus A, and then MBA (a Master of Business Admin). The clue took this shape:

  Water supplier fighting newspaper article, gaining business

  honour (10)

  Can you see each Lego block? Water supplier is your dam. Fighting = WAR. Newspaper article = RAG + A (the indefinite article), followed by the degree. As tough as the answer may seem, the dam is a household name to most Sydneysiders. A twisted but fair charade, until I spoilt the effect.

  The original answer to 21-Down in this 2007 puzzle was PIER, which once owned the charade clue – Dock food rationing at first. (Again, dock is your definition, food is PIE, and rationing at first indicates R.) Yet during the proofing, I turned PIER to WIER (thinking of another word for ‘dam’) and my fate was sealed.

  The slip went to press and the uproar began. Emails jammed the Herald’s inbox, decrying the standards of public literacy. Lethal injection was thought too kind a punishment. At Crikey.com.au, the Australian e-newspaper, one reader seized upon ‘nadir’ – a classic crossword-word meaning an orbit’s lowest point – to characterise the fiasco. Tellingly, this reader was Richard Walsh, the former publisher of Oz magazine.

  For those too young to recall the 1970 scandal, Oz was charged by Britain’s Obscene Publications Squad with conspiracy to corrupt public morals, or more specifically for the act of depicting Rupert Bear with full wedding tackle. The Old Bailey trial enlisted the likes of John Mortimer QC for the defence, with assistance from Australian lawyer Geoffrey Robertson. Yet despite having weathered all that heat, Richard Walsh saw WIER as the nadir of modern journalism; if not the misspelling itself, then how such a booboo was ever allowed to make the page.

  I wasn’t too happy either. You make a mistake that dumb, the anguish lingers. If this paragraph contains a spelling mistake, then you and I may never notice. Or if we do, the chapter perseveres. But goofing a crossword answer is an applied type of sloppiness. Even now reliving the trauma is undermining some expensive therapy.

  But Walsh was right. The proofing phase at the time of the error was shabby. He called it lamentable, whereas I think the better word is fractured.

  Just like a charade, the Fairfax newspaper system (which included the Herald) was momentarily broken into bits. Before we consider the worker in our current clue, let’s jump in the time machine and see how puzzle-proofing has worked (or not worked) over the years. But I must warn you, the pong of bromide is strong.

  AHAB’S WOODEN LEG – proofing and unpicking clues

  When I first made crosswords for the Herald, back in 1983, the word ‘internet’ didn’t exist, while ‘outsource’ was a toddler. Preparing the grid meant using a marker pen to block out the squares and then a felt-tip to etch the numbers. Clues I typed onto postcard-sized triplicate sheets – white on top, then pink, then yellow. Next I folded the bundle into an envelope and addressed it to the puzzle editor.

  In those early days Ron Nichols was the man in charge. A veteran journo with a dry wit, Ron typeset the clues on his Visual Display Unit (a Jurassic computer), turning my scribble into a grid as crisp as a chessboard. He’d then send the proof sheet back in the post.

  Industrial love letters, the Fairfax proofs could be smelt a few blocks away, suffused by a mix of bromide and chemical resin. Braving the aroma, you’d comb the clues for typos, then phone through any corrections. (Yes, we had phones in 1983.) During our chats, Ron and I would swap notes, seeing if we agreed on nuances, and the amended puzzle was put to bed, ready to appear inside four weeks. If the WIER business represents the nadir of proofreading, then possibly this one-on-one relationship was the zenith. Not that errors didn’t occur, but at least editor and setter were wholly answerable for any screw-ups, as it should be.

  This rhythm persisted for fifteen years. From 1983 to the late ‘90s, the mail system kept both parties in contact. Despite the odd glitch, the exchange held strong, the follow-up calls keeping bungles low as well as ensuring a rapport between setters and their continuum of editors. And what a continuum they were. I can’t hope to list the Herald’s complete sequence, as the puzzle chair has been a swivel seat for years. Though I can tell you that Ron eventually made way for a Kansan named Jack Ames with a penchant for linen suits and William S. Burroughs. After Jack came a pocket-sized rock-chick named Deb, who needed to remove her latest piercing to speak on the phone, and then came the Taylor clan: Rebecca, Naomi and Linus. The current gatekeeper of Puzzle Land is Lynne Cairncross, an ex-journo with a passion for botany and gluten-free chocolate tortes. Yet undoubtedly the queen of editors is Harriet Veitch, the spare-parts player who has filled as many breaches in the crossword roster as she has different roles across the paper.

  Critic, columnist, profiler – Harriet has worn many hats in her twenty-three years on the staff. More recently you’ll have seen her byline near the back of Section One, as Harriet is now the paper’s obituarist, reducing the late and great to eloquent biographies. ‘I get to be a nosy parker for a living,’ is Harriet’s take on the gig, which is very Harriet. Her plummy voice evokes all things proper, and yet the message is often mischievous.

  Against other editors, Harriet stands alone for her free-ranging trivia. She embodies the maxim once uttered by Lindsey Browne, the Herald’s iconic compiler, which was: ‘A good journalist knows a little about everything.’ That journo is Harriet, a woman as cosy with Tudor lineage as with identifying which Bee Gee in a photo is which. (If you want her number as phone-a-friend for the next quiz show, stiff cheese – she’s booked.) After years setting the TV guide, Harriet has as much of a handle on Malcolm in the Middle as she does on Malcolm X.

  One day I clued LIPIZZANER as a Spanish horse. But HV was quick to report that even though Lipizzaners are synonymous with the Spanish Riding School, that school is based in Vienna and the breed itself comes from Slovenia. And she was right, damn it, as well as being genial about it.

  A trained subeditor too, Harriet is a spelling whizz. Ironic, in fact, given the deadly IE/EI switch in Harriet Veitch’s own name. Whenever we trade emails I need to murmur the mantra: I before E except after C, or V in her case, but after R is OK.

  Regardless of the editor, that was the system. Setter mailed the puzzles; editor posted the typeset proof; corrections were discussed over the phone. When the
internet arrived, the only variation was a sidestepped postman. New puzzles came by email, while proofing remained a mail-and-phone affair.

  Until 2000, when a different letter arrived. The sender was Rebecca Taylor, the puzzle custodian of the day, and her opening line was ominous: ‘From July 31, the Sydney Morning Herald crosswords will be following new production procedures.’

  In a word, Pagemasters. Filling a niche, doing a lot of slog-work for papers, Pagemasters is an outsource operation that takes care of share listings, cinema sessions, weather, horoscopes and puzzles. Suddenly the tête-à-tête of editor and setter became a ménage à trois. Rather than sending Wordwits and crosswords to Fairfax, I sent them to a production bunker in Melbourne, and their staffers mailed me back the proof to check. Before too long the mail component vanished and this tangled triangle existed wholly online, with setter, typesetter and editor remote from each other.

  Our mission of course was to squash all bugs before the puzzles appeared in public, and we didn’t always succeed. Owing to the disjunction of the new system, the lines of answerability blurred. Where did the buck stop, and whose inbox had the latest version of the buck? Wires often crossed, one party oblivious of the action of the other two. Or a word like WIER was entered, yet not sighted by the editor, the bungle reaching the morning papers. Clearly, where two people could once get a puzzle to the page in good condition, three could not.

  At least, not then. We took a while to right the wrongs. Nowadays one regular worker in the outsource bunker is allocated the puzzle hat to ensure continuity.

  Now, triggered by the Wier Fiasco, all correspondence entails three parties, and all changes require follow-up attachments. Step by step, the dance is choreographed down to the last comma.

  Of course, no matter how tight the system, lapses occur. Somehow Lynne Cairncross and I considered the Library of Alexandria as one of the Seven Ancient Wonders, rather than that city’s lighthouse. The boo-boo made historians wonder too.

  Even Margaret Farrar, among the first and finest of crossword editors, made a comical lapse during her reign at the New York Times. At the helm from 1942 to 1968, Farrar single-handedly checked clues, seldom missing a beat, or a typo. Long John Silver, however, caused a minor splash. The pirate had appeared as an answer recently, Farrar remembered. Loath to have the same name repeated so soon, the editor needed a quick clue for WOODEN LEG. So it was Farrar who opted to ditch Silver for another mariner, making the revised clue read: Captain Ahab’s distinguishing characteristic. The gaffe was detected by an eight-year-old solver, who wrote to the paper wondering why Ahab now had a wooden leg instead of an ivory one, as in Moby-Dick. For her part Farrar was wondering what kind of eight-year-old solved the New York Times crossword, let alone read Moby-Dick.

  ANT MUSIC – cryptic shorthand and multiple meanings

  After all this talk of brain-fades, have you fired up your nerve cells? We have a charade to solve, right? Let’s put the clue on the table:

  A weir worker set … (7)

  A weir is liable to be A + DAM, since weir has few other synonyms, and the letter A can’t afford to be redundant. If our theory holds water, what seven-letter word starts with ADAM? Checking a large dictionary, you’ll find three. One is a greenish cousin of zinc – ADAMITE – and the other is a surname, ADAMSON, both nominees failing to satisfy the clue. Leaving us with ADAMANT. But if that’s the answer – why? If a weir is A DAM, then how can worker render ANT?

  Regular solvers will be wise to plenty of cryptic shorthand. Point, the word, will often mean a compass point, being N, E, S or W. Journalist is ED. Way is RD or ST. Sport can be PE or PT – just like your gym class – or perhaps RU or RL, the two rugby codes. Cricket is another favourite, with team (XI), maiden (M) and duck (O) entering the fray. Any chemical element, any American state, any chess piece can imply its shorter self. In the same vein, every puzzle enthusiast will know that worker, the word, is liable to denote ANT.

  Perhaps the logic harks back to Aesop, whose fable of the industrious ant has invaded the Western psyche. Then there’s Biology 101, where we learnt that most colonies are subdivided into various castes, from drones to soldiers to workers, just as bees (another option for worker) are classified. Yet after years of clueing I can tell you that the most compelling reason for ANT earning such a simple definition gets down to the word’s importance. Language is riddled with the little varmints! We can’t escape their constant quantity. Unwanted but incessant, an insouciant word like ant guarantees the setter an elegant and pliant indicator… Making ADAMANT our odds-on answer –

  Adam Ant, did you say? The post-punk singer with paint on his face? No, not him, tempting as it was to add a dash of glam pop. But then I went cold at the idea. In coming clues you’ll be trying to uncover a Renaissance figure, then a novelist from the 1800s, as well as a 1960 movie and a spot of cyber slang. Adding Adam Ant would have been cultural overdose. Besides, I found Antmusic irritating.

  I opted for a shot of plain vocab instead. But wait a tick – where’s the definition? What is set doing there? And what about those scary dots in the clue’s tail?

  Best way to explain the clue’s finale is to take a side trip into the dictionary, where SET is the Zelig of lingo, the pinnacle of versatility. The Oxford English Dictionary allocates twenty-five pages to this active midget – that’s some 60,000 words (give or take) to capture the protean life of ‘set’. From Lego set to set the table, from sport to nautical terms, music to slang, from transitive verb to intransitive, set has close to 200 meanings, a synonym for ADAMANT included.

  The moral of the story? Take extra care around those little words, and even more so those of an elderly persuasion – such as out, get, take, do, round – as these are masters of misdirection. Each owns so many meanings you need to be aware of which nuance is operating. As for those dots that end our charade, Chapter 24 will unveil that mystery. But first we have a pressing appointment with a cheerleader …

  IN SHORT

  Charade clues frequently call on abbreviations, since a word like TENACIOUS won’t break into neat fragments the way ADAMANT or STUBBORN can. Instead, a setter may try TEN + AC [current] + IOUS [debts]. Below is a mere glimpse of other abbreviations you might encounter across cryptic clues, charades or otherwise.

  AB (sailor)

  AD (nowadays)

  AM (morning)

  B (born, bowled)

  BA or MA (graduate)

  C (caught, cold)

  CA (about, circa)

  CE, CH or RC (church)

  DR or GP or MO (doctor)

  E (drug)

  ED (journo)

  EG (say)

  EP or LP (record)

  ER (queen)

  ET (alien)

  F (fellow, loudly)

  H (horse, heroin)

  IE (that is)

  IT (computing)

  L (line, learner, left)

  M (married, maiden)

  MP (politician)

  NT or OT (books)

  OP (work, opus)

  P (quietly, parking)

  PE (sport, gym)

  PR (publicity, spin)

  R (river, right)

  RE (about)

  RL or RU (football)

  SOS (help)

  ST (street, way)

  T (time, shirt, model, Model T)

  U (turn)

  X, Y or Z (unknown)

  Also watch out for point (E, N, S or W), note (A to G), chess

  pieces, chemical elements and Roman numerals.

  QUIZLING 6.1

  Each charade leads to an item of office supply. Enchanting +

  assessor = MAGIC MARKER.

  lofty + fairer

  squeezebox + abrade

  dopes + limit

  sensed + prediction

  fix + fruit drink

  main + expert

  QUIZLING 6.2

  Ironically, what form of fortune-telling can break into a

  charade saying: ‘cheers bunkum’?

>   QUIZLING 6.3

  My first is in one, but not in two;

  My second’s in two, but not in three;

  My third is in two, but not in one;

  My fourth is in three, but not in two;

  My fifth is in five, but not in one;

  My sixth is in one, but not in five;

  My last is in eight, and the puzzle’s twist

  Is technically the answer doesn’t exist.

  CHAPTER 7

  Early curve superb on cheerleader

  (7)

  Sex sells. Sex sizzles. It diverts and distracts. It titillates and shocks, makes us laugh and leer and catch our breath. Sex is how we got here, and sex is not going away.

  Birds do it. Bees do it. And according to Cole Porter, even educated fleas do it. From the torsos printed on cereal boxes to the smoky glances of night-time soaps, sex stalks every waking hour. We hear it in song, read it in scandal. You may even be enjoying the bona fide article on a regular basis, though as Shakespeare is quick to remind us, ‘Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?’

  And is it not natural, then, that sex should bob up in crosswords too? After all, we are dealing with the twin realms of double entendre: the cryptic clue and the loaded phrase. Under ‘sex’ your average thesaurus lists close to 100 words, and that’s barely breaking into a sweat. Score. Do. Shag. Mount. Each offering so flexible – the perfect toys for a fertile mind.

  Done well, sex can add zing to a clue, a dab of raunch, a comic image. The crunch comes down to execution. One false move and innuendo can topple into smut. Like so many things, composing naughty clues is about establishing the right mood. A cheeky connotation is provocative with a small ‘p’, as opposed to offensive. But that balance is hard to strike, as the setter tries to guess a solver’s tastes. In the end, the same clue is as likely to make one reader smirk as cause another to go purple round the gills.

  Comedians call it ‘working blue’, and once you sit through the first gig you’ll know in your bones, hopefully your funny bone, whether the performer warrants an encore. Speaking of performance, here’s a clue I made a few years back: