Puzzled
Page 19
More recently, as computers dominate decoding, we’ve started to glimpse into the wonders of genetic codes and cosmological data. Across IT, codes have become a new way of speaking, as well as building walls against viruses and hackers. From trog days to blog days, humans have found a need to repack the message. Or hide the message, in the case of cryptic crosswords. Here’s our current enigma:
Koran avidly studied by Arab holy leaders here! (6)
As in the Cretan tablets, the answer seems to rest in foreign geography. The surface meaning murmurs a place in the Islamic world. Here, reads the final word. But where?
To pinpoint the right location, let’s test-run a second clue, much as Ventris contrasted Greek with Linear B. Written by Armonie of the Financial Times, this sample shares a key element with the Master clue, which only shrewd cryptographers will detect:
Fool starts to imagine death is only temporary (5)
Look carefully. Compare the two. Before reading the next paragraph, can you figure out what aspect the two clues share?
The gist is starting, or being in front, as both signposts suggest: leaders and starts. Are the cogs now churning?
As you know, acronyms are words or names made up of initials, such as scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus) or kippers (kids in parents’ pockets eroding retirement super). Sometimes overlapping is involved, whereby ‘Canadian oil, low acid’ creates canola, or South Western Townships yields the South African enclave of Soweto, but the pure kind relies on initials.
Acronyms, or Abbreviated Coded Renditions Of Names Yielding Meaning, inspire the code category of cryptics, though in more subtle guises. Typically, upper-case initials – like COLT (City Of London Telecom) or ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) – signal a standard acronym. Yet in clue mode, the idea is camouflage, which is why acronyms in the wider world become acrostics in a cryptic setting.
When Arthur Wynne woke the world to crosswords, the next puzzle craze to follow was a reborn version of acrostics. The strongest fad in this regard remains the scattered quote, where a line of verse, a quip or wisdom is broken down into its letters and reassembled into a list of words – a colossal anagram in effect. These words are then arranged in such a way that their initials will spell the quote’s origins. Imagine that Ralph Waldo Emerson, say, is the source. Then the wordlist’s initials might spell RWEMERSONESSAYONNATURE. Little by little, as clues are solved, the gained letters are sprinkled into the diagram by order of coordinates, and Emerson’s quote on nature is eventually revealed.
You won’t be shocked, then, to hear that our two code clues, the Armonie example and the current Master clue, maintain the acrostic tradition:
Fool starts to imagine death is only temporary (5)
Koran avidly studied by Arab holy leaders here! (6)
Now can you see the acrostic answers? Think initially. In the first clue the phrase starts to alerts you to the next sequence of initials, spelling IDIOT, or fool. Meanwhile the Master example uses leaders as its nudge. Read the preceding six leaders and you unveil KASBAH. The exclamation mark, as we know, is the cryptic way of declaring that the wordplay fulfils a double role. Here the definition, the Arabic quarter of a city, is also a prime location to see the Koran avidly studied.
Though don’t think that code clues always hinge on initials. True, the most popular strain play in this space, but variations exist. Some, you’ll see, involve garden gnomes.
PENAL CODE – code variations and schoolboy stunts
The Boat That Rocked, released as Pirate Radio in the US, is a clever name for a comedy, at least from a cryptographer’s point of view, since the second letters of each word combine to spell HOHO.
And just like HOHO, not every crossword code you meet will operate with initials. Take this bunch, all drawn from my own archive:
Doc, for one, added two vaccine grams after seconds = DWARF (second letters)
Fretted guitar harmony, like Everclear medley by thirds = IRKED (third letters)
Laggards in prank keen to throw trash into Law Faculty = KNOW-HOW (last – or ‘lagging’ – letters)
Other clues may refer to the hearts of words, or ask you to count across a certain word, rather than the clue itself, such as every third letter of JOCULARITY spelling CAT. And going to crazier lengths, there was one code thirty years ago that asked readers to isolate every thirteenth letter. I should explain.
My last year of high school was 1979, the same year in which a plaster gnome was kidnapped from an English garden. The crime made the press due to the abductors sending postcards from around Europe. As if written by the gnome, every message expressed the joy of freedom and a growing self-awareness. A bit like leaving high school, I suppose.
Maybe that’s why some of my mates committed a copycat crime, stealing pixies from surrounding suburbs and planting them around the senior campus. We had a dancing gnome, a fishing gnome and a laughing gnome, though the principal wasn’t so jubilant. For reasons unknown he summoned me into his office to discuss the hostage situation.
‘You have a soft spot for the little people?’ he asked.
‘Sorry?’
‘The gnomes and whatnot.’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘My sisters liked Enid Blyton when they were younger, Big Ears and so forth.’
‘What about the garden variety?’
‘My nana has a few frogs in her birdbath. She lives in Normanhurst.’
The conversation was going nowhere, so the boss went for the throat. ‘Did you write the code in the school magazine or didn’t you?!’
‘Oh,’ I blushed. ‘Yes.’
As literary editor of the mag, I’d favoured a more refined cipher than your basic acrostic. The booby trap sat in the editorial. The key phrase marking the subterfuge was ‘speaking in a superstitious way’.
Somehow I’d hoped that students would pick up the hint, isolating every thirteenth letter to find the message. Though most students needed telling. The gag did the rounds of the grapevine, and so reached the staffroom as well.
For the record, the encoded phrase was an affectionate insult aimed at the mag’s overseeing teacher. DUDLEY IS A GARDEN GNOME, it read, AND SMOKES DOPE TWICE DAILY. Clearly gnomes were the zeitgeist. As soon as I fessed the code the principal didn’t care whether I’d stolen the gnomes or not – my punishment was restoring each sprite to its rightful garden, liaising with local police, and fulfilling a fairy godfather sort of role.
At the far end of the gnomic scale, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger chose a simpler code to rankle authorities in 2009. Or did he? In essence the Governor’s letter explained to the State Assembly why he was rejecting a portside project, yet in code the same communiqué said something else. Down the left margin, in acrostic style, the eight initials spelt I FUCK YOU. Yours sincerely, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Freakish, said an office spokesperson, Aaron McLear, who also noted SOAP and POET had flukily occurred in the margins of previous letters. Loving a challenge, the statistics department of Berkeley went on to calculate the odds of the expletive occurring by accident, bearing in mind the frequency of U and K as common English openers, and came up with one in 8,031,810,176. Monkeys have a better chance of banging out a sequel to Arnie’s blockbuster, True Lies.
RECIPE PRECIS: CODE
Codes are fairly rare, and can catch you napping for the same reason. If you see words like leaders or initially, then your answer may be staring right back. Ditto for the rarer formulas, where the second, middle or end letters are recruited.
HALL OF FAME: CODE
Journey starts in the red, ends in the black (4) [Times 8955]
Sir as heard in Bangalore primarily? (5) [Times 8366]
First of December every year our tax return fiddled (5) [Times 8647]
Tips on friendship do as nice Christmas presents (5) [Times 8597]
Cement, in part, lasts during any cheap renovations, you claim (6) [DA]
Revolutionary House of Commons history
is mentioned in new Hansard, initially (2,3,4) [Times 8252]
SOLUTIONS: trek, sahib, toyed, poses, gypsum, Ho Chi Minh
QUIZLING 20.1
Who are the only two US presidents whose surnames can be spelt exclusively using the letters that end the surnames of any other US president?
QUIZLING 20.2
While Johnny Depp never appeared in HAIR, he did bob up in a 1993 movie whose title spells HAIR with the second letter of each word. No tangling needed, can you comb his backlist to find the film?
QUIZLING 20.3
All seven numbers below are animals. How many can fly? (You may find a calculator will shed some light.)
300
338
733
900
5181
35009
90439034
Exotics
CHAPTER 21
Pizza centre behind which French
grill?(4)
Fresh from codes, you’ll be glancing at a phrase like pizza centre and nursing the possibility of Z, the centre of pizza. Check the grid, and the idea will firm on seeing the Z of VENEZUELA. So where does that take us? We need a four-letter word, ending in Z, meaning what?
If pizza centre gives us the Z, then this part of the clue is the wordplay. Jumping to the other end, therefore, we can isolate grill as the likely definition. Or maybe French grill is up for the task, but that makes as much sense as pizza centre, in terms of a definition. Safer to single out grill as the answer’s meaning. Hence a straight clue might read Grill (4), with three dashes and a Z.
RAZZ in some quarters can mean to tease or criticise, a shrinking of the word raspberry. As a noun, RAZZ equates to badinage or a reprimand. But grill? The link looks flimsy. Besides, does RAZ – with one Z – mean anything in French? Non.
QUI, on the other hand, is how Parisians say who, or whom, or that, or which. Behind which French, says the clue. Place Z behind QUI (which French) and there’s your match for grill. But wait, is that really fair? Since when does a solver need to be bilingual? You don’t. But a petite bit of knowledge comes in handy.
I don’t speak French, but like most people can claim eau and le and all the other Gallic staples. You may be a fluent French-speaker, but that’s not vital in order to be a solver – just a plus. On paper, my grasp of German and Italian is modest, and I can speak a Tarzan Spanish at best, but that doesn’t allow me to throw in a traves (‘across’ in Spanish) or unten (‘below’ in German). Such practice is verboten. Though these exotic clues of Auster, aka Shirl O’Brien, are totally bons:
King Charles possibly upset Spain and the Spanish (7)
Sprinter, the German, remains inside (6)
The first combines anagram and charade. The second is a container. Because exotic is less a recipe than a chance to warn you about this crossword ploy. Without great fuss, Auster’s clues expect you to know the definite article in a foreign language – Spanish and German respectively – and not much else. SPANIEL is the King Charles in question, where a jumbled SPAIN annexes EL. While DASHER does the job in Clue 2, seeing DER (German’s masculine the) enclose ASH, or remains to create a sprinter.
Crossing the border, my next two clues presume a soupcon of French:
Seduced the French professor (3,2)
Lament route, oddly or French-ly! (3)
Another article lesson, this time leading to LED ON, or LE + DON. The second clue is RUE, an alternation formula.
When you’re in the erudite hands of Araucaria, or wrestling a denser puzzle such as Beelzebub or The Listener, your bilingualism will be more greatly quizzed. And that leads us back to the Master answer, QUIZ, a word which owns a most curious backstory.
WHO’S WHO OF CLERIHEW – creating words and verses
Several querulous words call on Q, from question to query, inquire to inquest. Even the bickering trio of quarrel, squabble and quibble can often pivot around a question. The reason for this Q-connection traces back to Latin, where quaestio meant question, and quaestors were treasury officials asking how every last centavo had been spent.
(As for why the Romans plumped for Q as their inquisitive signature, don’t ask. Numerous English words have similar clans, such as the GL-words of illumination – glint, glow, glisten, glitter – or the SL-words of ooziness, the –ACK words of impact, or the W-words that dominate questions themselves. This area of language is known as sound symbolism, or phonaesthemes, where cognate terms cluster under a similar banner, gaining strength through association.)
Most likely then that QUIZ is one more cousin in the nosy Q-clan, but when it comes to derivations, who can resist a piece of Irish folklore? James Daly was the man in question. The Dublin theatre owner bet a chum in 1790 that he could create a new word inside twenty-four hours. The bet was made, impelling Daly to hire a gang of ragamuffins with a peculiar brief. I can just imagine the conversation:
‘I want you to scrawl QUIZ all over town,’ said Daly. ‘That’s Q-U-I-Z.’
‘What’s it mean?’ asked a waif.
‘Exactly.’
Come first light, when Dubliners woke to the graffiti, theirs was the same question. What was it? A secret test? A pseudonym? The hubbub became a quiz of sorts, and so the stunt endowed a new word to the Oxford, and Daly made a tidy profit. Allegedly.
Codswallop, I’m thinking, but the story has stuck with me for years. Some kids long to fly to Mars or drive fire engines, but I’ve always yearned to coin a word. Hundreds have managed the feat, from inventors (Laszlo Biro) to scientists (Georg Ohm), from Milton (pandemonium) to Shakespeare (unreal). Journalists have left their fingerprints too, with such words as blitzkrieg, metrosexual and flying saucer first appearing in newspaper copy.
Then again, you may have uniqueness, a maverick perspective or burst of radical thinking on your side. If a grim existence is not Orwellian, it’s likely to be Dickensian or Kafkaesque. If I said the Daliesque dreamscape was the breast I’d ever seen, then that would be a Freudian slip.
So what would be my original word? At twenty I lacked the flair to invent a notable salad. My crossword job was only just beginning – a little premature for injecting self-made neologisms into the mix. And that’s when the verse idea hit home.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley was the trailblazer. The humorist had stylised a poetic genre that I introduced to the English class I was teaching. ‘Look at this,’ I told them, handing out a photocopied sheet.
At just four lines, the clerihew is a ragged biographical poem with a rhyming pattern of AABB. To give you an example, here’s Clerihew himself, in clerihew form:
Edmund Clerihew Bentley
Wrote humorous novels and columns intently.
But his lasting claim to fame
Is inventing this style of ill-scanning ditty that bears his middle name.
When not teaching English, back in the mid 1980s, I was fixing up a manuscript, the book called Marzipan Plan that was written back in Rome. The story was set in a crummy carnival, where the tattooed woman speaks a tongue that nobody recognises, a gibberish to everyone around her. What makes her seem stranger still is that she devotes her spare hours to reading offbeat scripture written in her own language. Verses in fact, each of seven lines. Here’s a taste of one:
Vanar thrame mitpa doma
Ep elg luldi onuc paun
Rarkue nac obar moda
Nus gwid vanar losp u pan
Omun omun logro choth
Shembla fhavo eubi hotch
Plell orh peeg lunthum spovern
I called theses strange little poems ‘qerlams’, a word I hoped would reach the dictionary one day, or at least do the rounds of Year 8 English classes. If you take a closer look at the mumbo jumbo, you’ll notice how the line-ends rely on anagrams instead of rhymes, with a mixing pattern of ABABCCD. In other words, the third line ends with a blend of the first line’s final word, and so on. Line D’s final word in this case, the qerlam’s finale, scrambles the seven lines’ initials – an acrostic with a twist.
Needless to say, Operation Qerlam was a fiasco. The book did OK but the verse never found its niche in the lexicon, unlike quiz or pandemonium. Probably best to summarise the fiasco as a clerihew:
David Robert Astle
Only has till
2040 or so, mixing letters at his desk,
To work out what it means to be Astlesque.
LAZY DOG – pangrams and alphabet jigsaws
Harking back to QUIZ, our answer for 13-Across, I’m prompted to move to the next related subject.
Stop. Have a second read of that last paragraph and what do you notice? Don’t worry. It’s not easy to see. Then again, if you share my obsession, you can’t read a shopping list without this kind of thought simmering in your head. Milk cartons, cereal boxes, comic strips: anything that has letters will instigate an alphabet search. Studying English in my final year of school, I spent as much time memorising the lines of Donne and Eliot as seeing if ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Pru-frock’ contained a Q.
So the opening paragraph, you’re thinking, holds every letter. Or does it? Take a closer look, and you’ll see there’s no Y, making the sentence one letter short of a bona-fide pangram, those quick-brown-fox creations that use all of the alphabet. The Master Puzzle follows suit, omitting a single letter. For all its KASBAHs and GEN-Xs, the pangram ambition fell one letter shy. The quirk is like a Nina, a wrinkle in the cloth only fellow obsessives would see. So which letter is it? Creeping closer to a completed grid, treat that question as your bonus quiz.
Pangrams, to return to brown foxes and the lazy dogs they hurdle, remain the Holy Grail for word-lovers. Years have been sacrificed to the cause of producing the shortest possible, a sentence holding every letter at least once, and still making sense. Among the more notable attempts, with letter count provided, are: