by David Astle
Next morning the travellers left and I returned to my creosote duties. By December I was back in Sydney, house-minding for a friend in Dulwich Hill. Making puzzles and writing – what other life could I expect? Clearly, if I wanted a view of the harbour I’d need to invent something like Post-it notes or kidnap a dowager’s chihuahua for ransom.
Around this time the Time-Life gang threw a party, a chance to reunite with my fellow militants. The office was lined with tinsel, the inner courtyard a makeshift bodega. Again, as on the farm night, Tracy and I could chat without the clock ticking. She admitted that her romantic weekend in Armidale was no great shakes. Perhaps the relationship wasn’t working, she said. Not an invitation, as such, but a ray of light if I had any plans to know her better. What about a cliff walk, I asked her. ‘From Bondi to the cemetery and back again?’
Metaphysical, sure, but the girl took the bait. This was 1988, before the same track was crowded with chin-up bars and bike racks. The weather toyed with Tracy’s long brown hair. The heat kept climbing, growing into a Sydney thunderstorm, and by the loop’s end I suggested a thing called Eggs Perico.
Despite its fancy name, the meal was just Venezuelan for scrambled eggs. As a chef I’m a reasonable crossword-maker, though the lunch was set to uncover a deeper truth. The house at Dulwich Hill was a mess. Tracy did her best to ignore the kitchen’s junk while I broke eggs and warmed the pan. That’s when she noticed the graph paper on the table.
‘What’s this?’
‘A crossword.’
‘I know it’s a crossword, but what it’s doing here?’
‘That’s how I make them.’
Irish in complexion, Tracy is pale for starters, but sitting at the table the girl went ghostly. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
She tapped the graph and said, ‘This.’
The butter was burning. I was missing the significance. Then she read a clue aloud, 1-Across, ‘Heavy metal fan a leading Snag.’
‘What about it?’
‘That’s the Armidale clue. You wrote this?’
No, I felt like saying. I just do the Down clues and some black-and-white fairies visit overnight to add the Acrosses. Of course I wrote the bloody thing. That was my job. Yet the puzzle side of life had never surfaced in our conversations. The weird thing being, the clue for HEAD BANGER (where a leading ‘snag’, or sausage, may be dubbed a head-banger), was the very clue to make Tracy chuckle over a month ago, 400 kilometres away, seeking a moment of warmth in a glacial weekend with the boyfriend. As it happened, HEAD BANGER was the whimsy that made her smile, and so did the man with ticks in his legs who was just then melting butter, and suddenly those two men were one and the same, standing in front of her.
I’m tempted to call the moment eerie but that word’s overdone in crosswords. She couldn’t believe the boy on the kiwi farm was the boy inside the crossword, the same boy who had made her laugh while trying to get some breathing space from the Armidale boy in a long weekend that felt too long. ‘I love cryptics,’ she said, and the rest of our lives felt almost straightforward in comparison. In the space of one puzzle, Australians At War became a couple of Australians in love, anointed by coincidence and the giggle-value of a random clue. To be honest I can’t recall how the Eggs Perico worked out, but I’m grateful for another recipe, a slangy double meaning my future wife worked out, a clue that made her smile all those years ago.
CHICKEN INCIDENT – homonyms and heteronyms
Often, when I think of double meanings, I recall that strange head-banger moment in a Sydney kitchen, or remember another story – about a boy called Luke. He was nine, a sweet kid whose dad was an old friend.
The meal was BBQ chicken. Luke was the eldest of four, chomping on a drumstick when his dad asked, ‘So what did you do at school today?’
‘Homonyms,’ said the boy.
‘What are they?’ asked Maggie, his sister.
‘Like bark and bark,’ said Luke. ‘You know, how tree has a bark and a dog has a bark, but they’re different.’
The table was inspired. These sounded fun. Jo, the mum, held up her wine and said, ‘Like stem on a glass and stem on a flower.’
Stuart rocked his hand. ‘They’re kind of related, aren’t they? Maybe stem on a plant and stem the flow.’
‘Or chicken,’ said Luke, pointing to his plate. ‘There’s chicken on the farm and the chicken you eat.’
The room fell quiet. Stuart coughed and said, ‘They’re the same thing, mate.’
Luke’s face dropped. He stared at the drumstick and then his mum, who nodded. The boy left the table. That was ten years ago. He’s been a vegetarian ever since.
Language is duplicitous. We take the word rock as a solid place, only to discover it’s a verb, meaning wobble. We’ve already seen how set has 200 meanings, and that’s one cranny in the dictionary. In a split second you’ll realise that split and second both wear other masks, in other places, as does every synonym of the same term: flash, tick, mo, wink, shake, instant, twinkling. Older words, like set and second, commonly own several meanings, gaining layers as English evolves. Look at cob, which can be three different animals (a male swan, a squat horse or a black-backed gull) on top of being a cylinder of corn, a clay mix for building, a lump of coal.
This single (song) book (reserve) has type (kind) and pages (servants) and chapters (franchises) and letters (mail). This sentence (stretch) has (laughs) a subject (servant), an article (story), an object (complain) and a raft (float) of brackets (supports).
Returning to the clue that made Tracy grin – Heavy metal fan a leading Snag – we have the definition as opener, where a heavy metal fan is slangily known as a HEAD BANGER. Next comes a pair of alternative definitions, re-slanting the solution’s two parts. Leading is HEAD, and snag the nickname for a sausage, or BANGER. SNAG of course is also the acronym for Sensitive New Age Guy, explaining the capital letter in the clue, a bid to have the solver imagine the modern male as a Motörhead tragic rather than a sausage.
Double meaning clues are good places to begin a crossword. For starters, their brevity can often expose their category. Take these snack-size samples:
Career ladder = RUN
Fit exec = SUIT
Less inclined to sweet-talk = FLATTER
The recipe tends to be short due to the wordplay element being no more than a second synonym of the answer. Not that all double-meaning clues are brief. As you can see, the clue for FLATTER is standard length and the same applies to HEAD BANGER. And likewise 9-Down, our latest clue:
Giant flower shop online (6)
As always, the dilemma comes down to the split. Do we isolate Giant, or Giant flower, or maybe the more absurd idea of Giant flower shop? Or maybe the answer lies in the cyberspace angle.
Can you name any online flower shops? Google can – more than 5,000,000 of them – with no dominant name jumping out. Thankfully, says you. What sort of puzzle expects its solver to know some e-florist? Fear not. Crosswords can’t afford to dabble in small-b brands – the human or the corporate kind. Proper nouns must be reachable through wordplay and a sound general knowledge. Should either be unfair, then the compiler isn’t keeping their side of the bargain. Hence my choice of a Web retailer with perhaps the highest profile – the online giant that is AMAZON.
Whoa there. A brand name? Am I getting bankrolled by private interests to make this Master(card) Puzzle? Before I face that charge, let’s tidy up 9-Down, our maiden clue in this category.
Amazon can help you buy books on botany, or bucketfuls of fresh flowers, or a magic wand that hides a cloth flower in its tip, but Amazon is no flower shop online, let alone a giant one. Instead it’s simply a shop online. Meaning the clue’s other half – Giant flower – is the answer’s second definition. So how does giant flower equal Amazon?
After the Chicken Incident, the week young Luke turned vegetarian, he may well have tackled heteronyms at school – words like polish and Polish that resemble each other but vary in pronunciation. P
uzzle-makers love them almost as much as we cherish double meanings. Does does, for example, mean deer or a form of the verb to do? Is row a paddle or a spat? Is flower a blossom or something that flows? In our ‘current’ clue, the ‘flowy’ idea applies, the Amazon river the biggest ‘flow-er’ on the planet, just as shower can be drizzle or an exhibitionist.
As for those payola accusations, I’m guilty to a point. Smack in the heart of the Master Puzzle is the taint of trademarks, a registered company holding court in a central clue. What was the kickback? Do I own shares in Amazon Inc.? Why sully a perfect pastime with talk of dot-com merchants or the whiff of corporate interests? Read on to realise you’ve branded me all wrong.
CLUES R US – brand names and copyright
Slumped in your Jacuzzi, sipping Kahlua from a Thermos, you are living the decadent life of trademarks. But fat cats and fashionistas aren’t the only suckers for labels. The deeper we enter this millennium the more brands enter our conversation.
Jacuzzi was named after the Jacuzzi brothers, who dabbled in bubbles. Kahlua was a Mexican distiller, since bought out by Pernod, another brand. As is Thermos, coined by a Scottish chemist, James Dewar.
Excluding guns and publishing houses, this chapter alone has borrowed a clutch of brands already, from Google to Xerox, Post-it notes to Zero. The minute you Hoover the Lino, ride an Escalator, open Facebook, you’re inviting brands into your life. Velcro, the fastener stuck inside LEVEL CROSSING is a trademark, and so is the Zipper, its alternative. Name your game – Frisbee, Yo-yo, Trampoline, Hula Hoop. Yep, all brands. Nowadays we can hardly move without colliding into a TM (or a word that started life as one).
Puzzles aren’t exempt. Besides, as soon as you see that NINTENDO is INTEND in NO, what compiler in his right mind can resist?
I recently made a puzzle with a chocolate theme, filling the grid with 15 well-known products, from Cherry Ripe to Kit Kat. Several of the clues called on double meanings:
Faint chocolate = FLAKE
Chocolate piece of cake? = PICNIC
Bar laughter = SNICKERS
Curiously, despite all the trademarks on display, the only solver to complain was a Lake Macquarie woman who demanded I avoid such high-sugar temptations in the future as she was trying to shed her Christmas excess. ‘Having my puzzles come with calories,’ she wrote, was giving her no chance.
You’d do well to find any compiler who dodges trademarks altogether, whether it’s an overt reference to an online bookstore or accidental lapses like kerosene and lanolin, gunk or heroin. In all my years of crosswording, turning RENAULT into NEUTRAL, or seeing AEROBIC as a ‘chocolate pen’, I’ve never drawn any major flak from solvers or stakeholders – except once.
The year was 1991, the same year Tracy and I wed in Melbourne. The letter came via lawyers representing the Sony Corporation. The matter regarded ‘Clue 19-Across of the Sydney Morning Herald cryptic, 5th ult.’ Midway down the page I found this lyrical burst of legalese: ‘WALKMAN ® is an Australian registered trademark No A351776 in class 9.’ This was followed by more poetics: ‘Preserving the value of a trademark is both in the public interest, as a trademark is both the public’s guarantee of quality and reliability, and in the interest of the industry generally. It is particularly important in Sony’s very brand-conscious industry.’
Forthwith I promised to eschew and desist from any use of Walkman® in future puzzles, but of course this amounted to a Band-Aid solution.
RECIPE PRECIS: DOUBLE MEANINGS
Generally the skinniest clues on the page, double meanings don’t need a signpost. Instead, you get a double dose of definitions. While some examples (like FLATTER in this chapter) can carry several words, most are brief. Even when triple meanings come into play, like the FT’s Cincinnus who gave us MANDARIN – Tongue is orange, and that’s official – the result is typically lean.
QUIZLING 13.1
What two golf shots – plus a slang word for golfer – are also computer terms?
QUIZLING 13.2
What pizza ingredient, mainsail section, Alpine projectile, trumpet blast and two generic flowers become approximate synonyms when treated as verbs? Remarkably, half the words rhyme with each other.
QUIZLING 13.3
Explain how BUTTON, elevated
Equates to PIPE, relegated.
CHAPTER 14
Decrease anaemia remedy?(4)
We know about question marks. If one appears, then wordplay or definition is likely to be curly too. Away from crosswords, the meaning of the word BEACON is as clear as the object it describes. Yet taking the lateral route, the same lighthouse can mutate into a jail sentence – your chance to BE A CON.
Keeping with CON, could CONTEST be a trick question – in other words a quiz designed to deceive? Or CONQUEST, a bid to escape? Or CONFORM, a rap sheet? Every time I see a flashy salesman preaching the virtues of a time-share condo, I revel in CONDO nursing two words for swindle. So let’s get lateral, and go direct to the next Master clue:
Decrease anaemia remedy?(4)
Where’s the trap? Look closely at decrease, as this is the more flexible word. By that I mean it has the best chance of stepping outside its standard meaning. Just like CON, DE is a versatile prefix, taking on multiple guises, including removal (as in debark or dethrone), reversal (decompose, deactivate) or departure (detrain, decamp). We all know DEMOTE means to move down, yet can’t the same word mean to cleanse of dust particles? Can’t DESPOT play a similar game? Keeping the momentum, a longer list might read like this:
decay: annihilate atoll
decider: oust booze (see deport)
define: quash a penalty
delight: darken
device: purify
When the farmer’s wife attacked three blind mice, was she detailing? Canadian author Margaret Atwood, in one of her short stories, wonders if remember is the opposite of dismember – the rejoining of severed limbs. Lateral flexibility lies in countless words. Yet to expect a solver to see a word like depot and automatically imagine the removal of hemp plants is clearly demanding too much. Far more likely, a clue will deliver its strangeness from the opposite direction, an incentive to see the answer afresh. Paul of the Guardian does so with BEACON:
Do time and make light of it?
Or, returning to DEPOT, could the clue read:
Remove marijuana from terminal?
Again, a question mark alerts you to a twist in perspective. Though with our Master clue, the word you need to re-see is sitting on the page – decrease. A similar trap was set in the clue for AMAZON, the treachery resting in flower, a heteronym. Yet this time round we face a trap based on lateral meaning.
If CREASE means to rumple, then is DECREASE to smooth or iron? Wait a minute. Isn’t IRON a means of fighting anaemia? Without getting too Dr House, I know that iron is produced by haemoglobin in the blood and stored in places like the liver and marrow. If your haemoglobin decreases, then your system soon craves iron. This kind of tangent alone makes me love crosswords. Sudoku may tune your logic, yet no other puzzle can take you to Brazil in one clue, the liver the next, with Alfred Hitchcock in between. On top of that is the benefit of getting your brain to embrace the idea that LIVER, the body’s purifier, can also refer to a human being in general – or one who lives.
Premium compilers make you see common words as if for the first time. The best clues play between familiar words and their unfamiliar qualities. GORED, for instance, not only describes the matador’s fate but also what happens to his clothes when injured. President OBAMA must be freezing, since the man equates to zero degrees, or O+BA+MA.
Different from puns, a word’s lateral version is a new interpretation of how to read what you see. Even the word LATERALLY can suggest a fifth-set comeback, or late rally.
The visual equivalent of this offbeat thinking is the Magic Eye puzzle. You know those squares of funkadelic wallpaper printed in magazines? Stare at the pattern long enough and a 3-D Titanic will rise from the blur, or a spa
ce shuttle, whatever image is encoded below the surface. Of course, for some of us, that pay-off doesn’t occur. You may gawk for minutes and get nothing but eye strain. But give it time, loosen the brain, and you may be delighted by the hologram beaming back.
Lateral thinking demands the same faith. True, you may not realise that IMPLORE refers to FAIRY TALES, or imagine ALIMONY and EXCLAIM could share their meaning, but give the game time, and one day the Titanic will rise.
This ‘magic eye’ is a vital tool for cryptic solving. It’s like the chess player who sees the board so many moves ahead of the present moment. You see the reality in tandem with the game’s potential. Lateral thinking, in a word sense, is the deeper strategy lying below a crossword’s mechanics.
Just don’t expect to be Bobby Fischer in your first few puzzles, or first few years. But the more devoted you are, the more intuitive you become. The key is training your eye away from crosswords too. Small things – like seeing TESS in DELICATESSEN, or noticing that Fe, the symbol for iron, ends KNIFE, a metal tool – are steps in the right direction. Let the mind meander and it will become readier for battle.
But let’s return to IRON, and why this word lies in the Master Puzzle. Back in 2008, writing an essay for Meanjin quarterly, I tried to capture the day-to-day mania that goes with puzzle-making. The word I chose as a demonstration tool was IRON.
ALCHEMICAL REACTIONS – rare gleams in common words
Iron has been corrugated, galvanised, pumped, wrought. The stuff has been around for ages. Yet put the word on paper, and IRON tells a new story. Apply heat and the letters make curious patterns. What you see below is a symptom of the craze I own for a headspace, a cry for help perhaps. Anyway, here goes:
Mixing IRON with its symbol Fe, I spell ON FIRE.
Applying more flame, I note how IRON in reverse reveals NORI, a seaweed source of iron.
NORI can also be read as NOR I – and not iodine? And not me? So who then? The answer: I, RON.