Puzzled

by David Astle

Also a revolutionary pick-me-up (7) [Crux, FT]

  Pretentious Brazilian returning greeting in Paris (7) [Viking, FT]

  Irregular design – zigzag on reverse (7) [Bonxie, Guardian]

  SOLUTIONS: speed, refer, odder, reviver, bonsoir, wayward

  QUIZLING 26.1

  Hannah is one of few six-letter names that read the same either way. What’s the only common six-letter word with this property? (As a clue, think of one sunbather versus another.)

  QUIZLING 26.2

  Complete this palindromic sentence:

  Anne, I vote more cars race [where to where]?

  QUIZLING 26.3

  Written vertically in capitals, TOMATO appears unchanged as a reflection. What famous American Indian of eight letters can perform the same trick?

  Spoonerisms

  CHAPTER 27

  Seafood nibble causing pains for Spooner (4,5)

  ‘Not many men have achieved immortality by a happy slip of the tongue,’ read one obituary of Reverend William Archibald Spooner – writer, preacher, lecturer, but most of all: bird-watcher. Sorry, word-botcher.

  Remarkably, Spoonerism (later to drop its capital) reached the Oxford Dictionary while the man still lectured at the same university. With debatable accuracy, the definition reads: ‘the accidental transposition of the initial sounds, or other parts, of two or more words’. The debate is twofold.

  For starters a single word like lockjaw can be spoonerised into jock law, and then there’s the iffy business of accidental. Spooner fluffed his words, no doubt. Orating for sixty years, from pulpit and lectern, a fellow can be forgiven for tripping over his tongue. But where does a verbal goof end and folklore begin?

  Numerous sources suggest an undergrad named Arthur Sharp to be a generous font of these verbal gags, invented on campus for the sheer fun of wordplay. Queer dean for dear queen, and so on. Many gems appeared in a collection edited by Sharp, who also went on to become a preacher.

  According to the same obit, published in the Herald in 1930, Spooner was only ever recorded as making the one eponymous booboo, and that was in 1879 when naming the upcoming hymn as ‘Kinquering Kongs, Their Titles Take’ instead of Conquering Kings.

  Mind you, Spooner was fond of his own legend. Through press stories and humour columns, not to mention the dictionary honour, the man became an accidental celebrity. Or maybe a deliberate one? The debate goes full circle.

  Factual or fudged, the famous slung-tipper (tongue-slipper) has been attributed with these examples:

  To a lazy student, the reverend says, ‘You have hissed all my mystery lectures and tasted nearly three worms. I must ask you to leave Oxford at once by the town drain.’

  At a wedding, he advises, ‘It is now kisstomary to cuss the bride.’ And during another service, he tells a parishioner, ‘I believe you are occupewing my pie. May I sew you to another sheet?’

  Spooner spends a day looking for a pub called The Dull Man in Greenwich, when the tavern he wanted was The Green Man in Dulwich.

  Notice how some of these entail the exchange of internal syllables rather than the swapping of initial consonants, as typifies the modern spoonerism. Today, if a crossword-solver spoonerises tailpipe, they’d end up with PALE TYPE rather than the nonsense of TILE PAPE, despite either tweak being a Spooner trademark.

  Speaking of pale types, the reverend was a man with paper-white skin. Not quite albino, Spooner was an unusual character to behold. Colleague and biologist Julian Huxley described his friend as ‘one with very pale blue eyes and white hair just tinged with straw colour’. Chronically shortsighted, Spooner had to hold books centimetres from his nose. Such eye strain, the spectacles, the striking pallor would inspire another Oxford don to create a famous character. Can you guess who?

  Here’s a further clue: Spooner had seven children by his wife, Frances, and was often seen hastening from hall to chapel or back again. Observing this was a maths professor called Charles Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll, creator of the Alice books and himself a wordplay genius. Staggering to think that the notable fluffer of words can brag of his own fluffy avatar in world literature, namely the White Rabbit.

  Then there’s the other issue of Spooner’s brain. Without getting bogged down in clinic-speak, so much of Spooner’s life embodied what we call the Absent-minded Professor Syndrome. Each of these reputed episodes stands as evidence:

  Asked whether he likes bananas, Spooner replied, ‘I’m afraid I always wear the old-fashioned night-shirt.’

  According to cohort Huxley, Spooner remarked of a missing college fellow, ‘I’m afraid that when he hears what we did at the college meeting yesterday, he’ll gnash his tail.’

  ‘Her late husband,’ said Spooner of a church widow, ‘was eaten by missionaries.’

  It’s bizarre to reflect that the one clue category to salute an individual commemorates an Englishman who ostensibly suffered a cerebral disjunction. Even if these scraps are hearsay, so much of the Spooner story suggests the man’s miswiring.

  Conjecture is rife, of course. Did Spooner suffer from a medical condition or was he a natural at rubberising words? The diagnosis is moot and the clinic is shut – but the irony remains. It reads like a cryptic joke, in fact, having history’s greatest word-botcher central to a hobby praised for keeping words and memory intact. Or so runs the anecdotal evidence. What are the white mice of Brisbane telling us?

  CRACKERS AND CHEESE – mental stimulus and ageing

  The Queensland Brain Institute is a neuroscience centre on the banks of the Brisbane River. Much like an office block of the mind, the Institute is dedicated to investigating how we think and how best to thwart the onset of dementia.

  One area of research has been messing around with mice, seeing how their neurons fare as a result of exercise. ‘Put an old animal on a running wheel,’ said Professor Perry Bartlett, the centre’s CEO, ‘and production of new nerve cells goes up more than twofold.’

  Subsequently, the mice are better equipped to tackle a maze, the vermin equal of a puzzle. In the same article, Bartlett echoes the idea. ‘Keeping the brain in good shape through a combination of physical exercise and cognitive activity as basic as doing a cryptic crossword could be part of the key.’

  The crunch of course is ‘could’. CAT scans and mouse wheels can only reveal so much about the neural pathways. In 2003, American neurologist Dr Joe Verghese and his colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York published the results of a marathon study. The team kept tabs on 469 elderly citizens, none with dementia, and followed their fate for the next two decades, measuring their mental capacity at regular intervals. All the subjects gave details of how they stretched their brain and/or their body during that period.

  On the brain side, the activities rating highest were puzzles, reading, board games and playing musical instruments, with dementia less likely to occur among the subjects involved in these pursuits.

  ‘According to our models,’ Verghese wrote, ‘elderly persons who did crossword puzzles four days a week (four activity-days) had a risk of dementia that was 47 per cent lower than that among subjects who did puzzles once a week (one activity-day).’

  On the body side, the best deterrent against mental fog was ballroom dancing, beating general exercise, housework and babysitting. (Bear in mind, these were people over 80, so hang-gliding was out.) Though all categories rated favourably, a foxtrotting cruciverbalist with good social networks (and perhaps plenty of Omega-3) may have a better chance than most of making sense in their twilight.

  Playwright Michael Frayn puts it well in the Chambers Book of Azed Crosswords. To introduce these devilish puzzles, Frayn writes, ‘Here are a hundred of the precious pills all at once. And if one a week keeps the geriatrician away, a hundred together (perhaps taken in conjunction with a few bananas and bars of dark chocolate) must surely be the elixir of youth.’

  Though perhaps a Times clue from 2008 says it best. You may need to readjust your nerve cells to the anagram mode:<
br />
  Of outstanding ability till brain decays = BRILLIANT

  B-CHORD ON THE KEYBOARD – spoonerism clues and phrase answers

  ‘Hey Dad,’ said my son, Finn, sniggering among his Year 8 cronies, ‘say this quickly.’ He slides a sheet of paper towards me and I read the familiar verse:

  I’m not a pheasant plucker,

  I’m a pheasant plucker’s son.

  I’m only plucking pheasants

  Till the pheasant plucking’s done.

  More than likely I peddled the same gag when I was fourteen, given that the spoonerism’s a staple of smutty jokes, lame riddles and cryptic crosswords alike.

  From a setter’s point of view, the spoonerism is a renegade alternative when more obvious approaches misfire. HIGH-BORN, another word for privileged, or blue-blooded, is one such entry. The awkward clump of consonants rules out an anagram. Double meaning? HIGH has all sorts of tangents – school, intoxicated – but BORN far fewer. Maybe homophone: HI BORNE (welcome carried)? This is the clue-making process – the steady elimination of wordplay options until the right one emerges:

  Aristocratic Spooner to purchase trumpet

  Thankfully, from a solving point of view, every spoonerism clue will cite the word-botcher by name. While you may encounter a break from this rule, Spooner (the name) is your true watermark.

  Kinder than that, many spoonerism clues provide the actual words you need to manipulate. In my HIGH-BORN clue, for example, if the crossword was geared to a simpler level, I might consider:

  Aristocratic Spooner to buy horn

  These next two show similar mercy:

  On-line guide might sap Spooner (4,3)

  Was Belle Spooner a biographer? (7)

  The first clue hails from 2000, when terms like online and sitemap (your answer) had yet to shed their hyphens. BOSWELL of course satisfies the second clue, an overhaul of Was Belle.

  Perhaps the time is right to talk about spelling in regard to our latest category. So far, in the three samples we’ve seen – HIGH-BORN, SITE MAP and BOSWELL – the transition from one phrase to the answer has entailed a shift in letter patterns. Might sap yields SITE MAP, and not SIGHT MAP as a purer swap might involve. Same as HIGH-BORN, which gives buy horn (and not the bogus phrase of bigh horn). In other words, the sound pattern survives the transit, though often the letter clusters capturing those sounds will vary. And just as importantly, no homophone signpost has to warn you of this spelling drift.

  With that in mind, let’s move away from the spoon-fed spoonerism, where the actual words in need of mangling are presented, and look at clues where the words are given indirectly. Like these:

  Handy brew handy, according to Spooner = NEARBY

  (spoonerism of BEER NIGH)

  Spooner’s crone snoozes in mining dumps = SLAG

  HEAPS (HAG SLEEPS)

  Indirect spoonerisms call for heavier lifting. It’s even tougher when the fodder you need to manipulate is rolled into a single definition. Here’s one such clue from my own backlist:

  Free squat for Spooner? (3,2)

  If the question mark doesn’t warn you of a looser-limbed approach, then brevity is a further alarm. What word for squat has two syllables for starters, enough to tweak at least? Thinking from the other direction, what phrase meaning ‘free’ owns the letter pattern of (3,2)?

  LET GO could work. Test your hunch and spoonerise it. There’s your reason for the question mark. GET LOW has been translated into squat, the solver needing to take that extra leap of imagination.

  Some compilers abstain from spoonerisms, while the Guardian trio of Paul, Araucaria and Orlando are recidivists. I’m a sucker for the reverend’s charms as well. Come Shane or Rhine, the Master puzzle had to have one:

  Seafood nibble causing pains for Spooner (4,5)

  Warning: this is a hard nut to crack. A key reason is the paucity of information, taking a leaf from the squat clue. Does PAUSING CANES mean anything? No. Do we need a new phrase meaning CAUSING PAINS? Not quite.

  Coincidentally, another spoonerism from my archive uses seafood as well, its answer a piece of encouragement:

  Draw confidence from Spooner’s fishcake = TAKE HEART

  (hake tart)

  Regardless of difficulty, at least you know the recipe involved. On top of that we have some helpful letters, making the endgame a fairer battle. The layout is this:

  C _ A _ / _ _ _ C K

  Different solvers make different marks to signify a phrase, either in the grid or in the puzzle’s margins. Since this is our first phrase, I thought it timely to show you one technique, using slashes to measure out the spaces. Flukily, the very first phrase to appear in a crossword, as condoned by pioneer editor Margaret Farrar, was thought to be SOFT-SHELL CRAB.

  Does this bit of trivia help you? Any tasty phrases spring to mind?

  Standing in a fish-and-chippery some eighty years ago, a boy called Bunthorne saw the fluke of GARTONS Vinegar. Six months ago, waiting for my own cod to fry, I started dreaming up the Master Puzzle in my head. That’s when I saw the richness of CRAB STICK. Like few other phrases, the snack can be switched into a pair of synonyms: STAB and CRICK, two kinds of hurt. And if that’s you groaning in the background, relax. The pleasure of solving the spoonerism recipe will long outlive the pain.

  RECIPE PRECIS: SPOONERISMS

  Spooner is your trigger. Should the reverend’s name bob up, start switching whatever initial clusters are on offer. The direct version gives you the keywords cold – like SANE CHORE to yield CHAINSAW – while the indirect kind alludes to the fodder in need of flip-flopping – in this case rational task may indicate SANE CHORE, and then you apply the spoon. (Notice in both examples how the CH transfers as a single piece, not just the C.)

  QUIZLING 27.1

  What simple warm-up exercise,

  Seeing athletes leave the ground,

  Can be spoonerised to make

  A ‘shock’ beside confound?

  QUIZLING 27.2

  When spoonerised, this eating area found in most modern malls creates a word meaning ‘spoke lovingly’ beside a word meaning ‘acted aggressively’. Name the venue.

  QUIZLING 27.3

  In the reverend’s deck of playing cards, where the king of clubs is the cling of cubs and so on, what cards can pair with the four clues below?

  Bath hint

  Helper’s nook

  U-boat noises

  Floozies’ fowl

  Rebuses

  CHAPTER 28

  M_ _E (4,2,4)

  My physical fix for the first few years after school was rugby. After six years of the three Rs sport was a welcome antidote and I swigged it deep like an ice-cold beer.

  Coming and going over six seasons I racked up 100 games with the Gordon Rugby Club, a place that saw me evolve from smart-mouthed teenager to smart-mouthed twenty-something with a drinking problem.

  Well, not really. Just Saturday nights, when the novelty of booze combined with the blokey camaraderie. They were wonderful times, those parts I remember.

  Being on the field was even more addictive. Skill-wise I wasn’t on the Wallaby radar but I made up for my deficits with exuberance. Yet for all the sweat and grunt my principal legacies to the club were not sport-related, but verbal. With an ear for parody, I took to bastardising songs, overhauling lyrics to suit a tribe of North Shore numbskulls in the postmatch celebrations. Some of those numbers may still resound under the grandstand today, who knows?

  The Tartan Times, a scandal sheet I scribed with a second-rower named Scoop, was another landmark. As the name suggests, Scoop was in charge of the dance-floor gossip while my beat was the Wisecrack Department. If I wasn’t spoonerising SMART FELLA, I was turning All Black legends into lewd anagrams.

  My proudest legacy, however, was doubtless the introduction of SCHULTZ BAKING POWDER. Before I go there, however, I should outline the basic principles of rugby, the line-out included.

  The sport is known as brutal poetry, with Team A try
ing to plant the ball down Team B’s end, and vice versa. Part of the tussle entails what’s known as a line-out, where the eight bulky types from Team A stand cheek-to-jowl with their rivals from B, leaping for a ball that is tossed in from the sideline. To best disguise where the ball is going, a code is required, and our code for several seasons was SCHULTZ BAKING POWDER.

  The phrase is not original, but a coinage of Dmitri Borg-mann, our palindromist extraordinaire. In case you haven’t noticed, SCHULTZ BAKING POWDER has 19 letters without a single repeat. Even better, the three words allowed the line-out code to pinpoint three locations. Imagine the call was ‘Limerick-65’. Ignore the numbers, a total red herring, and focus on the word’s initial. Since the L of LIMERICK is in SCHULTZ, the thrower knows to hit the first position. If the call is ’1–2-9’, then ONE, starting with O, means the final position, as O is found in POWDER. Opponents had no chance. So sound was the code that most grades in the club adopted the subterfuge, though not all.

  The farce occurred on a drizzly day at Chatswood, our home ground. We were playing Randwick, our mortal enemies, with ten minutes left on the clock. Rain was thickening, and a finals berth was up for grabs. Mud made the game a test of wills. Every yard was vital, every maul, every line-out. A clumsy tackle saw Drano, our best jumper, wrench his ankle. Medics fetched a stretcher to cart him off.

  Enter a plumber called Lurch, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but his height was the key. If he could win the line-out jump we might steal the edge.

  ‘Call is Charisma-99,’ I yelled.

  ‘What?’ said Lurch.

  I took out my mouthguard, made the message clearer.

  ‘Ninety-nine what?’ Lurch yelled back.

  ‘Change call,’ I belted out, thinking spelling was the hitch. ‘Call is Horse-81.’

  Lurch waved his hands. ‘Hang on,’ he said to the referee. He turned back to me and said, ‘Where’s the fucking ball going?’