by David Astle
Meantime NOIR means black in French, though iron the mineral is red in the raw, while NOIR the genre sees Harry Lime on the silver screen.
Pluralise IRON and out steps the actor, Jeremy. Mix the past participle – IRONED – and DE NIRO makes a cameo.
Still with cinema, IRON MAN – the movie – opens with a mixture of MINOR, the legal opposite of MAN.
Weirder still, IRON MAN renders FE/MALE, a truer opposite of the macho hero, and an irony in any language.
Soundwise, IRON mimics ION, its own constituent.
Just as IRON is central to ENVIRONMENT, both on the page and on the ground. And not overlooking IGNORING, a word that holds our metal backwards.
Globally, IRON is one country code (RO for Romania) nesting in India’s IN.
Rolling IRON backwards in the alphabet, sliding every letter back three places, uncovers the word FOLK.
So how did folk respond to this essay at the time? With pity, for the most part, and who can blame them? Anagrams aren’t enough. Verbs, nouns, names, titles: I crave to uncover the dictionary’s secrets. As soon as a new word enters the language – bling-bling or the irukandji jellyfish – I want to explore the new pattern. English of course has a limit on how many newcomers it can handle, meaning we lateral thinkers need to stare longer at household words, trying to find a novel vein in their composition.
At one level, the art of crossword-making compares to a kind of alchemy, turning the everyday iron of human expression into gold. One setter who takes this challenge to heart is John Young, alias Shed in the Guardian. Note the glister he lent these common words, each with the double meaning formula:
Perverted aptitude = BENT
One who pinches child = NIPPER
Threaten to go out with the disemboweller = GUTTER
With Shed, the alchemy analogy is even sounder. When not shaping clues, Young has devoted several years to encoding online conversions of ancient manuscripts, including the doodlings of Sir Isaac Newton. The gig inspired a treatise in 1998 entitled Faith, Alchemy and Natural Philosophy. Seems that mysticism is never too far away from the art of crossword-making, that occult knack of making IRON dazzle in a dozen different ways, most of them laterally.
WOULD SIR LIKE PAPPADAMS? – vowel dumps and alternative spellings
All this fuss over decrease and we’ve barely glanced at the Master clue’s other morsel. Anaemia stands out for owning far more vowels than consonants, joining other oddities like amoebae, nouveau and evacuee. Scrabble players dub them vowel dumps, not a lyrical name, but useful to know when nursing the Hawaiian alphabet in your rack.
Hawaiians, by the way, have a vowel fixation. You won’t find a word from their culture where two consonants are side by side. One glance at Oahu, or aloha, or ukulele will tell you as much. This last word, curiously, shares a link with anaemia.
Sir Arthur Evans, the man to discover the Palace of Minos on the island of Crete, was an archaeologist. Indiana Jones, on the other hand, is an archeologist. Notice the difference – AE versus the plain E. This spelling debate has been raging for eons, which were once known as aeons, since the word derives from Ancient Greek.
Already in this chapter I’ve sprung haemoglobin on you, which Indy would spell without an A. Americans, in fact, began the pruning, turning paediatricians into pediatricians and selling the Encyclopedia Britannica door-to-door. Anaemia suffered a similar fate, becoming anemia in the USA, while squabbles continue in Great Britain.
As part of a clue, and not the solution, anaemia is an acceptable risk. Bang in front of you, the grey area will be recognised by solvers of either camp. (Grey on the other hand is emphatically gray in America.) Such local variations haunted Clint Eastwood in the 1993 movie In the Line of Fire. As Special Agent Frank Horrigan, our man is out to thwart an assassin intent on killing the President. The cut-throat race is finally making headway when up bobs the word UKULELE.
Or that’s how Frank spells it. Agent Chavez, his contact, reckons it’s UKELELE. The spelling is crucial, as the right combination is the seven-button number for the San Diego office, which Frank needs to reach before a bullet finds its mark. The dilemma captures the risks inherent in borrowing words from other tongues.
Chiefly an oral culture, Polynesia gave us ukulele via speech, and we haole types have been second-guessing its spelling ever since. While most of us have settled on Frank’s version, the Oxford Dictionary is still hedging its bets, offering the alternatives of ukelele, ukalele and eukaleli.
Even when the source language has a written tradition, translation can still give rise to dispute. Open any tandoori menu and your choices can range from pappadam (papadam? puppadam? poppadum?) to chapatti (chapati? chupatti?).
Another foreign dish, filched from Persia, holds the record for culinary options, with the Macquarie Dictionary listing pilaf, pilau, pulao and pilaw. In the territory of proper names, that of ex-Libyan ruler Muammar al-Kaddafi is only for the brave to run in a puzzle. The issue isn’t politics, but a spelling debate. In fact some readers may recall The West Wing opened its majestic run with a crossword spat in the 1999 pilot episode. Here’s a snippet:
Chief of Staff Leo McGarry: Seventeen across is wrong .
It’s just wrong. Can you believe that, Ruth?
Staffer Ruth: You should call them.
Leo: I will call them. [long tracking shot through the West Wing] Margaret! Please call the editor of the New York Times crossword and tell him that Khaddafi is spelt with an ‘h’ and two ‘d’s and isn’t a seven-letter word for anything.
Eventually Leo is connected. What follows is a glimpse of the passion nursed by so many crossword solvers, as well as the perils of playing with alternative spellings:
Leo: Seventeen across. Yes. Seventeen across is wrong.
You’re spelling his name wrong. What’s my name?
My name doesn’t matter! I’m just an ordinary citizen
who relies on the Times crossword for stimulation.
And I’m telling you that I met the man twice and I’ve
recommended a pre-emptive Exocet missile strike
against his air force so I think I know how to –
Click. The phone goes dead.
LATERAL COUPLES
Decrease, we’ve seen, may well mean iron, just as warbling may refer to a medal (war-bling). Flex your brain and see if you can spot the lateral links between these 15 couples:
B-team/subside
firefly/sack race
border security/hemlock
glee club/joystick
callbox/title fight
letterheads/Y-fronts
canned beef/toxin
ninepin/square leg
coma/understate
pay phone/wagering
demon drink/impale
reallot/zillion
dunces/thickset
substandard/torpedo
doe/party drug
travel permit/triplet
HALL OF FAME: DOUBLE MEANINGS
Close walrus relative (4) [Paul, Guardian]
Break silence (4) [Dogberry, FT]
Trendy a while ago, like vinyl records? (6) [Fawley, Guardian]
I order fish (7) [Times 8558]
LSD, but not pot, is in this drug box (5,4) [Times 8097]
Still together (2,3,4,4) [Orlando, Guardian]
SOLUTIONS: seal, rest, groovy, grouper, upper case, at the same time
QUIZLING 14.1
This device, designed to stretch out your dough, is a word for wealthy beside a means of accessing cash. Weirdly, no part in all this is connected to money. What’s the device?
QUIZLING 14.2
Cleave means to separate as well as to bind together. Also starting with C, what’s a simpler word that owns the same two contradictory meanings?
QUIZLING 14.3
If Generous sort = KIND, can you solve these other double meaning clues? Mixing the six initials of the correct answers will solve the double clue, Fix brush.
Look n
oble (4)
Moved camp (8)
Condition jockey (5)
Consider host (9)
Cattle drive (5)
Summit custom (10)
Homophones
CHAPTER 15
As mentioned, weather to get
hotter? (5)
Chair/Resign/Felt
Say the words aloud. Does a certain comedian crop up? Not working for you? Then try the trio of Eye/Sarcasm/Off.
Can you hear Isaac Asimov? Better than Jerry Seinfeld in the first example? Sketchy, I know, but say these clusters quickly and I’m sure the casual eavesdropper will hear Jerry and Isaac loud and clear. I hope. Since there’s always that doubt in the world of sound. Compare a Seinfeld episode (where bomb sounds like balm, or cumin comes out koomin) with Wallace and Gromit (which prefers short-a grass and a very long-u in alluring) to realise English is fickle.
Nowhere is that truth clearer than in the homophone category. Until now, clue styles have dealt in letters, or tested meanings (straight and lateral), yet that kind of comfort deserts us in the realm of sound.
I remember entering an audio debate in 1983 with a solver named John Le Gotha over the question of PAWPAW. The impetus was a Wordwit puzzle. Solvers had to find a word of twin halves (such as dodo or beri-beri) where either syllable sounded the same as three other words. PAWPAW did the trick, I thought, as each half mimicked poor, pore or paw. Yet John Le Gotha heard things differently.
PAW + PAW, he wrote, may equal two PAWS on the page, but as soon as you marry those halves that lavish awww sound gets clipped closer to a pair of oars. Measure this corruption, Le Gotha went on, against the purity of AYE-AYE, either the sailor’s consent or the possum-like lemur of Madagascar, whose twin parts likewise own three homophones – eye, I and ay (the poetic word for alas) – yet preserve their sound quality once coupled.
Small beer, but these issues loom large in the world of homophones, where one person’s ado will never be another’s adieu. I’ve always considered Ovid, the Roman poet, as matching a Cockney version of hovered, though that whimsy was scorned in 2009 when I ran this homophone clue:
Latin poet and Cockney hung around in recital (4)
Latin poet, of course, is OVID. In the wordplay half, hung around points to HOVERED, and Cockney we know signals the h’s stripping. Recital, the final word, is a homophone signpost, your cue to utter the wordplay’s outcome to reveal the answer. I’ll talk more about signposts and homophone rules in the coming section, but let’s get back to that Latin poet, as the argument matters.
To many solvers, their OVID went closer to mimicking off-id (not of-id), same poet, different emphasis, meaning half the public had no idea what a Cockney was doing with an old Roman in the first place.
OVID and PAWPAW typify the delicacy of sound. In 2008 I spent a good week squabbling with the crossword editor, Lynne Cairncross, over a BLOW-UP DOLL. The clue in dispute read this way:
Swell welfare invoice a comfort for the prurient loner (4–2,4)
With BLOW-UP DOLL as answer, I’d always presumed the issue would be about tastelessness. I was wrong. Taste played second fiddle to sound.
Teasing out the clue, we’re looking at a hybrid, where a double meaning (Swell for BLOW UP) meets homophone (welfare – or dole – matching the sound of DOLL). Lynne was less convinced. DOLL in her ears did not echo dole. ‘I don’t pronounce it the same way,’ she wrote, in her first email. ‘My husband doesn’t either.’
But I do – that was the hitch. DOLL and DOLE. Say them together, swap them around, utter them in random order and you’re all but chanting a singular sound over and over.
For proof, I wrote DOLL and DOLE on two separate cards and tested their pronunciation with students at the college where I teach. I even spelt D-O-L-L down the phone to Mum to see if her bias was mine.
Such a speech test recalls the infamous Parsley Massacre of 1937 in which soldiers serving the Dominican tyrant Rafael Trujillo used sprigs of parsley in order to identify Haitians among the population living in the border area. ‘What’s this?’ they asked. Should the response be perejil, with the fricative j of pedigree Spanish intact, then the speaker was safe. However, if the j was soft, the speaker was shot. Ultimately, some 30,000 speakers were executed, owing to a j’s phonetic qualities.
Lynne and I recognised that our stand-off centred on a shibboleth. The Bible’s idea of a password, a shibboleth refers to a term that distinguishes two clans. It stems from the Book of Judges, where the Hebrews of Gilead detected incognito Ephraimites thanks to their inability to pronounce the Hebrew word for flooded stream, or shibboleth. Stumble and you were smote.
Asimov, that sci-fi writer who sounds like Eye/Sarcasm/Off, refers to a shibboleth in the chemist community. Write UNIONISED on a slip of paper, he said, and dozens will pronounce the word the obvious way. But show the slip to a chemist, and he or she will utter the word as un-ionised, betraying their vocation. In the same way, two execs may glance at RESIGN, the pessimist pronouncing the synonym of quit, while the optimist stresses the first syllable, intoning a command to renew his contract.
Lynne and I did not resign over Doll-gate. The poll results were a mishmash and rhyming dictionaries had a bob each way. In the end we agreed to disagree. Lynne laughed, ‘I can’t believe I’ve spent two days talking about the sound of a blow-up doll!’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘That sounded the same as dole.’
‘Let’s move on,’ said Lynne.
GETTING WARMER – homophone signposts
In the game of charades, an ear-tug signals a rhyme. LIFE, say, may be too vast to portray through mime, so a quick pull of the lobe could lead to the portrayal of KNIFE. This tactic tells your guesser that the target word is a rhyme of what they’re seeing.
In cryptic crosswords that ear-tug compares to a homophone signpost – a word declaring the sonic dimension. Run your eye (and ear) over these four examples:
Heard sweet animal = MOOSE
Moved material, say = SWAYED
Ten years of rotten report = DECADE
Indulges Chinese vegetarians on the radio? (7)
Heard is high on the list of signposts, along with all its variations – we hear, in hearing, overheard, hearsay and so on. Asked another way, the first clue could be posed as a riddle, ‘What animal sounds like a sweet?’ MOOSE echoes MOUSSE, so the beast is snared.
Ditto for SWAYED, a mimicry of SUEDE, or material. Notice how the audio signpost only applies to the wordplay, and so needs to stand beside that element, much like anagram signposts need to adjoin the fodder.
DECADE, the third example, relies on report as the ear-tug. Voice the word DECAYED (or rotten) – report it – and ten years emerge, or DECADE. Or do they? When I tackled this clue in a Telegraph collection, my ear wasn’t convinced. More of the sex-doll scandal, in a way. Homophones are subtle creatures, which leads us to Chinese vegetarians.
Read it again: Indulges Chinese vegetarians on the radio. Where to start? Let’s break it down. Rarer homophone clues will call on cuter hearing aids, so to speak – such as so to speak, or slyer signposts like pronounced, vocal, outspoken and utter.
Another left-field signpost concerns airwaves. Take extra care with any mention of broadcasting (a nod to either anagram or homophone), registered and announced. Of course radio is the other eccentric signal, which the final sample uses.
Can you name Chinese vegetarians that sound like a word for indulges? Come to think of it, can you name a Chinese vegetarian full stop? Well, here the question mark joins the game; the definition is liable to be looser. Why Chinese in the first place? Why not vegetarians and leave it at that?
Testing another tangent, how many synonyms for indulges can you list? MOLLYCODDLES is too long. So what about SPOILS? RELAXES? PAMPERS?
Wait, if not PAMPERS, what about PANDERS? Suddenly those Chinese vegos make sense, the PANDAS of the airwaves leading to the PANDERS in the grid. Time to indulge in the Master clue:
As mentioned, wea
ther to get hotter? (5)
Kindly, we have the audio signpost coming first. As mentioned is a classic phrase suggesting sound. So what’s another word for weather? Does this mean weather in general, or what a forecast dishes out? Or there may be a third option, with weather meaning to endure.
Once more the question mark invites caution, as the definition could be devious. To get hotter may apply to increased fury or spice or raunch or a dozen other tacks – the weather even. Let’s see what letters the grid can offer.
C is the answer’s initial, thanks to COSIMO at 1-Across. This alone puts CLIMATE back in the gun, the only candidate so far to match that detail. CLIMATE sounds like CLIMB IT, which is almost there. What if we shrink the word to CLIME and test the homophone of CLIMB? Can climb mean to get hotter? It does where weather is involved, the column of mercury climbing the tube, and giving you the confidence to enter 1-Down.
Though before you do, double-check if it’s CLIME or CLIMB. Which word is mentioned in order to create the other? A quick check will tell you that CLIME is spoken to render the other, so CLIMB goes in the grid. Yet before we tackle the next two homophones, a word about the weather.
SMALL VOICE OF PROTEST – partisan clues
Despite the movie’s name, Mercury Rising is not about global warming but a code inside a crossword. The film stars brew-swillers, the aural equal of Bruce Willis, an FBI agent trying to protect an autistic kid called Simon from an evil bureaucrat called knickerless-could-row, that is Nicholas Kudrow, played by Alec Baldwin.
Simon, we discover, is the only living American who can break the National Security Agency’s code called Mercury. As a bragging exercise, the code-makers bury their new cipher in a puzzle, asking any successful solver to call the agency’s number. Simon obliges, enraging the cryptographers. Their only solution? To kill this pre-teen savant, as he poses a threat to federal security.