Puzzled
Page 15
Life-or-death politics may seem misplaced in a crossword, but some compilers embrace the edgier subjects. Damn it, we love them. CLIMB could inspire a dozen different clues, from charade (C + LIMB) to hidden (acrobatic limbo), yet the homophone option felt tailor-made for making a geothermal statement. Stepping through what recipes we’ve already met, let’s take a look at a few more political ‘statements’ in the guise of clues. Sleuth (alias Philip Marlow) composed this one for the Financial Times:
Role in law spun – typical of Blair = ORWELLIAN
This wicked anagram aimed at the day’s prime minister recognises that Orwell’s real name was Eric Blair. Then we have a brazen container clue, this time from the Guardian’s Arachne:
President who is snide about English-speaking nation = SARK(OZ)Y
Or a hybrid, pairing anagram with charade, appearing in the same puzzle:
Our men going off to join American legion = NUMERO+US
Or a hidden, such as this Times gem:
Chancellor conceals big fiddle = CELLO
And finally two of my own, a double meaning and a homophone, both with a drop of satirical acid:
Scrub US president = BUSH
Monkey with outspoken craft in the Howard years? = TAMPA
This last answer alludes to a Norwegian cargo ship that saved several hundred Afghan refugees from the Indian Ocean in 2001. Effectively, the vessel became a seaborne prison as the Australian government wavered about what to do with the castaways. The result was a makeshift policy dispatching the Afghans to a compound in Nauru until more red tape could be fetched. The name of this policy – PACIFIC SOLUTION – has 15 letters, the ideal crossword length, and the central plank in my partisan theme. To clue the entry I took my chance to score a political point via anagram:
Howard’s cop-out worsening pitiful occasion!
RECIPE PRECIS: HOMOPHONES
Listen up. Sound is all in the homophone clan, hence the signposts below (some more subtle than others) opt for audio. In the next two chapters we’ll hear about double homophones, and how the formula can fall into hybrid clues, but for now, cock your ear to these warning calls:
announced, apparently, articulate, as they say, auditor, broadcast, by the sound of it, caught, echo, given voice, hear, in audition, in auditorium, in canal, in conversation, in speech, invoice, noisily, on the airwaves, on the radio, orally, outspoken, picked up, pronouncement, register, related, reported, say so, sound, spoken, they tell us, utter, vocal, we hear
QUIZLING 15.1
If urn-yells mimics Ernie Els, can you arrange each cluster below to sound out six more famous names?
pacy, fins, care
nerve, shark, villa
jaw, yet, jelly
riff, nicks, furphy
luck, rubble, sand
honour, corers, kino
QUIZLING 15.2
What beverage owns a homophone that describes what you’ll do if you drink too much of the same beverage?
QUIZLING 15.3
Two words. One means approval, the other opposition. And amazingly, when both words are changed into their homophones, the result is a new pair of opposites. What are the four words?
CHAPTER 16
Soundly ushered back and docketed (9)
In late December 1913, Arthur Wynne stared at the emptiness. With no snippet off the wires, no retail ad, the New York World subeditor cursed the space on the Amusements page, wondering how he’d ever fill it. Deadline was looming. So desperation struck – he invented the crossword.
Or Word-Cross, as Wynne called it. Diamond in shape, with a hollowed centre, the diagram comprised 72 squares with small numbers inscribed on all the outer and inner extremes. ‘Fill in the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions,’ he wrote below the diagram. To give solvers a fighting chance the grid also sported the hand-drawn letters of FUN in the upper quadrant.
This took place in the same year in which the zipper was invented, the era of Henry Ford’s assembly line and of Yorkshire’s stainless steel. Down under, the first sod of Canberra was turned. The new world was evolving, but was it ready for its first crossword? Or word-cross – or wait, was this puzzle truly the first?
Even today, arguments simmer over whether Wynne’s work can lay claim to being the prototype. The Guinness Book of World Records affords the honour to an English children’s magazine named St Nicholas that ran a solid word-diamond in 1875. Its mystery compiler was ‘Hyperion’, named after the Titan god of light, yet their creation lacked squares or clue numbering.
In fact, Wynne himself grew up in Liverpool, cracking puzzles in St Nicholas with his grandfather. Word squares – or magic squares – were regular features: prim waffle patterns where every word appeared the same both across and down. Yet none mirrored the modern crossword, complete with diverse answers, tabled clues and inscribed numbers.
To enhance his innovation, Wynne made his clues pretty basic. Opposed to less, for example, was MORE. A talon was a CLAW, while DRAW was What artists learn to do. Longer entries were equally generous with A written acknowledgement being RECEIPT, and REVERIE A day dream. Really the only devils were A Russian river (NEVA), A fist (NEIF) and NARD – An aromatic plant. At the time, leaving for vacation, Arthur had no inkling his stopgap remedy would spark a frenzy across the eastern seaboard, and later the world.
Sequels followed quickly. Wynne’s paper ran a second word-cross before the year was out, as well as a bank of readers’ creations into January. Word-crosses, by that stage, had switched into being cross-words, possibly due to an editorial slip, the hyphen soon lapsing in tandem with the pastime’s rising fever.
At the craze’s height, the New York Library limited consultation time for dictionaries. The B&O commuter trains between Maryland and Ohio stocked reference books to assist the passengers’ puzzle-solving. Broadway musicals saluted the novelty with songs, including the classic ‘Crossword Mamma, You Puzzle Me (But Papa’s Gonna Figure You Out’).
Chequered patterns seized Greenwich Village boutiques. Puzzle talk emerged in sermons, classrooms and even divorce proceedings. (Plaintiff Mary Zaba of Chicago mournfully described herself as a crossword widow, suing her husband for neglect. She won, her contrite fellow agreeing to reduce his daily fix to three grids.)
Nonetheless there remained one more space to fill – the bookshelf. A woman known as Aunt Wixie was chatting with her nephew, Richard Simon, in 1924. She wondered why she couldn’t find any crossword book for her daughter to solve. Later that week, Simon scouted the stores to confirm the market gap. He got in touch with his old mate, Max, from Columbia. Under the banner of Plaza Publishing, the two young men bought puzzles from across the newsstand at $25 a pop, binding them into one volume with a pencil attached. The resulting sales surpassed 300,000, providing the seed capital for the publishing empire we’ve come to know as Simon & Schuster.
About this time, British papers tested the format on their own readers. The first UK crossword, it’s believed, appeared in 1922 in Pearson’s Magazine, the cradle of such distinguished writers as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. The puzzle’s slow migration across the Atlantic might be explained by the attitude displayed in an article that appeared in The Times around this period. Entitled ‘AN ENSLAVED AMERICA’, the piece accused the crossword of ‘making devastating inroads on the working hours of every rank of society’. Five million man-hours, estimated the writer, were squandered daily. The Land of the Free, England feared, was so no longer.
Before too long, however, the fever soon crippled Old Blighty too. By the late 1920s, most magazines and papers carried the black-and-white menace, though The Times itself – just like the New York Times – resisted the fad till nearer World War II when bleak news needed some kind of nostrum. The Sydney Morning Herald followed suit, the first crossword appearing in 1934, adorning the women’s supplement.
Beyond America, and spicing Wynne’s original recipe, came the cryptic element, though the move from definition to
wordplay was organic, a slow experiment between the setter and the solving public.
Prime mover in that regard was Oxford poet and translator Edward Powys Mathers, who found a niche in The Observer from 1926 onward. His maiden cryptic appeared in January of that year, a puzzle called Feelers, with a weevil-shaped grid and tentative instructions to match: ‘This, the first problem, is, as it were, a putting out of feelers from setter to solver, and from solver to setter. A beginning has been made ….’
And a positive impression. The British appetite was primed for cryptic. One reason for this must rest in a strong tradition of parlour games, with Queen Victoria herself an addict of wordplay and acrostics. Then there’s Alice in Wonderland, the secular gospel of British childhood, a fantasia rife with letter-play. A third theory is straight-out envy. If a former colony can invent a new verbal form, then Britain felt honour bound to reinvent it.
Whichever the case, Mathers is seen by most as the man to marry the American interlock with wry Anglo clues, choosing the alias of Torquemada after a prominent torturer during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. (A generation later, inheriting the same gig, Derrick Macnutt selected the fellow torturer Ximenes in honour of the genre’s forefather.) The coming decades would see the art form evolve, with quotation clues and naked anagrams changing into slimmer specimens that Ximenes went on to codify.
Yet cunning as these early setters were, surely the oldest crossword debt must be repaid to Arthur Wynne. Rather than cower in the face of a blank page, Wynne decided to crisscross words and clue them. In a small way our latest Master clue – Soundly ushered back and docketed – rejoices in Arthur’s act of desperation.
DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER – Wynne’s fix and wiggle words
Pity a man like Leonhard Euler, the Swiss number-cruncher whose doodles now serve as the bedrock for the sudoku empire, 200 years later. Or Arthur Wynne, the man to omit a © among those seventy-two other letters he wove into his diamond. Soundwise, you have to say, Mr Wynne missed a win. If only he’d been a little shrewder, his family might now be making money hand over NEIF.
Which leads me to the other reason I sympathise with Wynne. Even a century ago, NEIF was a dodgy word, a Shakespeare term for fist. Speaking as a fellow setter, NEIF represents a clumsy escape from a tight corner. In hindsight a minor tweak could have put NEIL or NAIF into vertical column N-8 – but no. Arthur opted for Scots via Old Norse, a word that was quaint and dialectic even to his peers.
Even the best of us do it – running one dubious entry that stands apart from the grid’s more familiar fill. Last year I succumbed to LOST CAT in one puzzle, and OPEN TEAM in another, two lacklustre phrases added in the name of preserving a high number of themed answers. The lapse can only be forgiven if the remainder of the puzzle is pleasingly dense. Often a shocker like LOST CAT can be the difference between ten themed entries, and a whopping fifteen or so. Which option do you choose?
The great Araucaria yielded to TREK CART in 2004 to allow the grid to carry a lengthy quote. In America, among the tighter grids that Wynne ordained, the claustrophobia is relieved by such wiggle words as roman numerals, acronyms, third basemen and phrase chunks such as OF A, or IS TO. No argument from me – Americans are crisscross wizards, with US software the rising leader in this regard. More to the point, the odd peccadillo is pulp by month’s end, and a solver forgives that rare cop-out if the overall mix is rewarding. Yet poor old Arthur went for NEVA – that Russian river – plus a few other fishy terms, including TANE (an archaic piece of Scottish dialect clued as One), and now his diamond is forever.
Anyhow, that’s the bad news. Better news relates to the current clue we’re solving. When first listing words to include in the Master Puzzle, I was keen to share an entry that Arthur himself had selected back in 1913. But it seems I was overlooking the words of LB: ‘After the first dozen entries, the crossword takes over.’ And so it proved with this puzzle.
Don’t worry. It’s not a LOST CAT – but it is a compromise. After BINOCULARS and IRON and several other terms had grabbed their berths early, I had little choice but to modify my ambition, captured in our second homophone:
Soundly ushered back and docketed (9)
Tuning your ear, you’ll recognise soundly as the aural signal. So what is being sounded? Neither ushered nor ushered back offers abundant synonyms. At times this shortfall (remember the Chinese vegetarians?) can be helpful, making a shortlist of options even shorter. Yet here the scarcity of possible synonyms can also make you agonise.
Past tense, ushered is another word for LED, or GUIDED or DIRECTED. But what about the back part? If you’re led back to a place, are you being re-led? Re-steered? Could that be the drift? If a moviegoer has left her seat halfway through the film, is she then re-seated by the usher? Say that again. RECEIPTED. That’s what I thought you said!
Wynne himself had used RECEIPT, but that didn’t fit, so the -ED is the compromise. In that regard, most dictionaries accept receipt as a verb, but what about the word’s cadence? Do RECEIPTED and RESEATED own matching emphases? Tell you what, why not inflate a blow-up doll and thrash out the issue with her? I’m more concerned with a deeper crossword peril, a curse I call Accidental Voodoo, and a clue-word like ‘docketed’ is a prime example. Time to move from Arthur Wynne and focus on a parking fine I received outside my local noodle bar.
FROM DIAMOND TO CRYSTAL – omen clues and Accidental Voodoo
I churn out a metric tonne of words and clues every year so it’s only natural – or supernatural – that some of my selections will be published with eerie timing.
Like that parking ticket. Admittedly the sign said No Standing, and the noodle bar wasn’t an emergency, but when I re-seated myself in the Subaru and noticed the yellow slip under the wiper I felt peeved and jinxed at the same time.
Part of me blames RECEIPTED. Pitiful, I know, but maybe if I’d chosen another Wynne word, or tried a second recipe, then I’d never have ended up buying a curry laksa for the equivalent of $195. RECIPE, in fact, can be found in RECEIPTED, followed by TED – a bear. Was that a safer bet? Abolish all talk of dockets and tickets, so ditching the chance for bad juju to intervene …
I realise how loco this sounds, but there have been occasions in my thirty years of puzzle-making where I’ve felt eerily responsible for a series of unfortunate events.
Roh Moo-hyun, for one, the former president of South Korea, is not a name you hear every day. Yet in May 2008 I went with ROH for an answer in a Omega puzzle. Back then I saw no harm in recruiting the gentleman, his first name at least. South Korea is an Australian neighbour after all, and Omegas revel in current affairs. Sadly, the decision backfired three days after the puzzle ran to press, a headline screaming: ‘KOREANS MOURN ROH AFTER SUICIDE PLUNGE’. You could understand my goose bumps.
A similar grim coincidence involved Bea Arthur, the Golden Girl, who died the week another Omega appeared, prompting the Pagemasters gang to send a list of other VIPs they were eager to curse. For a while I gained the mantle of Dr Doom. Even a generic word like AVALANCHE, in August of the same year, coincided with an ice cornice detaching in the Kosciuszko National Park, entombing a snowboarder.
Ghoulish, flippant – I run the risk of being called either, I know. Or worse – New Age. But when the hex descends I feel like a voodoo priest, summoning heartbreak on all those named.
Being rational for a moment, I realise that one ROH MOO-HYUN outweighs a hundred BONOs, BRAD PITTs and TONY BLAIRs – a thousand names who pass through a puzzle with karmic immunity. Yet when the creepy echo occurs, you can’t help but overhear it.
Like the day I saw a verbal quirk in the name of champion surfer Layne Beachley. I ran the whim in a Wordwit to appear beside the features section. Unfortunately, Beachley happened to be the cover girl that week, and not for the happiest of reasons. In a story called SHOCK WAVE, she bravely discussed the story of her own adoption for the first time. Suddenly the anguish was on public record – 27 September – the day Beachley shared her
harrowing past, as well as learning that her surname can be mixed with L to make BELLYACHE.
Staying with the ocean theme, I clued TSUNAMI on the eve of the 2008 Samoan disaster. And then I opted for LETTERMAN on the week of the TV host’s blackmail revelations.
All compilers are prone to such chilly flukes. Ann Tait, a stalwart setter at the Daily Telegraph, had the fright of her life in 1990 when her clue for BLUE MURDER (Outcry caused by Tory assassination) appeared two days after the IRA murdered Conservative MP Ian Gow in a car bomb.
Yet in 2006, thank God, one omen clue was saved from appearing. The answer was ZOO, one letter short of ZOOM, I noticed, so inspiring your first glimpse at the deletion formula:
Steve Irwin’s property career cut short (3)
An archaic meaning of ‘career’ is to speed, or ZOOM. And cut short makes it ZOO, an enterprise the Irwin family own in Queensland. Spookily, the clue was set to go in the same week that a stingray crossed Steve’s path. Suddenly the wording looked ghoulish, malign. But a last-minute change ensured that the Irwin reference was avoided, as a harmless ZOO clue, a charade involving a Zulu leader and two ducks.
Yet as grisly as the Irwin clue could have been, the eeriest example of crossword voodoo was a triple whammy in 2003. I was solving the Times on the day a book was being launched, a true crime story I’d written with Senior Constable Joe D’Alo of Victorian Police. An insider’s account of a murder case, One Down, One Missing shadows the investigation of two police officers shot during stake-out duties in 1998. Controversial for several reasons, not least due to Joe’s inside status and the consequent threat of suspension, the launch attracted a fair amount of publicity.
We’d tried to keep the book under wraps for as long as possible, but the secret was out and the TV crews were swarming. Before the event, dodging any media, I took time out in a city café, seeking solace in a crossword. These were the clues I read: