Puzzled

by David Astle

  ‘King Kong-34,’ said our jumper at Position Two, and the ball flew in.

  At the next break Lurch asked about the code. ‘Schultz baking powder,’ I whispered, and Lurch blurted, ‘Huh?!’

  The Randwick players relished the confusion. I sensed my own talent was at risk. Every week, in close selection disputes, the coaches chose the best side for the paddock. And one reason I gained a regular place in decent sides was my Rain Man ability to decode enemy systems. In many ways I was a Station-X geek a few generations out of sync. Randwick was my Third Reich, so to speak. Even in this current mud battle I’d already cracked their code, reducing their throws to tatters, yet here was a plumber blowing our advantage as precious time was ebbing away.

  ‘Who the hell is Schultz?’ Lurch wanted to know.

  ‘He’s a code,’ said the hooker.

  ‘Time on,’ said the referee.

  I turned to the ref to explain the problem – a bit of games-manship, and the ref knew it. Probably in his early fifties, the bloke was a wry character, with a cowlick falling on spectacles the size of Art Deco ashtrays. At first I tried the soft-shoe, told the ref that Lurch was new to the system. He needed briefing, I said.

  ‘Brainwashing more like it,’ said Cowlick. ‘Get on with it.’

  We had no option. The line-out was set. I filled my lungs and called ‘Titanic-26’ only for Lurch to swivel around and yell, ‘Does Schultz have a T?’

  The game was falling apart. Our code was compromised, our vision of finals melting in the rain. Lurch had a solution. ‘Just throw it to me and see if I can get it.’

  Like I say, rugby is a test of wills. In the end, we may have won that battle. That part I can’t recall. Though I do know that Mr Schultz kept a low profile for the campaign’s remainder.

  GSGE – rebus clues and the elusive definition

  Give me a dollar for every time I’ve heard the Scrambled Eggs Clue and I’d be living in the Bahamas. Seems that every mug’s idea of cryptic brilliance is GSGE. Answer: SCRAMBLED EGGS.

  If not that clue, then maybe HIJKLMNO, which equals WATER. Get it? H-to-O. And number three on the punter’s podium is NOEL, or more precisely: ABCDEFGHIJKMN–OPQRSTUVWXYZ.

  In recipe terms, such clues are called rebuses, where a word or phrase is depicted by an array of letters and symbols. Literally, rebus is Latin for ‘by things’; this draws on the notion of signs and alignments doing the customary job of words. Other books call them pictograms. Before I was a published puzzler I couldn’t resist loading my apprentice grids with rebuses, such as:

  MOMANON = man in the moon

  1D 2R 3A 4C 5U 6L 7A = Count Dracula

  PREIST = clerical error

  but but but but BUT = last but not least

  GAMES magazine, the puzzle-making bible during the 1980s, labelled these gimmicks Wacky Wordies. Part of the Playboy stable, the magazine began life in 1977. Crossword guru Will Shortz edited the title for a time, and the same mag nurtured many fine constructors including Mike Shenk, Henry Hook and Brendan Emmett Quigley. Avant-garde grids, space-age visuals: GAMES was my pornography, and just as awkward to buy. Distribution was patchy. Cover prices fluctuated. The magazine went from bimonthly to monthly to new owners to hiatus, but was always worth hunting down. Even today, my desk adjoins two milk crates full of back issues, and many of the ideas from GAMES seed the new crop of brainteasers we see across the Web and newsstands today. Picking through the pages I found these Wacky Wordies:

  r/e/a/d/i/n/g = reading between the lines

  GLIBNESS = mixed blessing

  JU144STICE = gross injustice

  O _ ER _ T _ O _ = painless operation

  Rebuses, you can see, lack a definition. The whole thing is wordplay. SKπY doesn’t talk about illusory rewards or distant dreams. Instead, it’s a cute way of denoting PIE IN THE SKY. Worse than that, to get pedantic for a minute, you’ll note that the same rebus ignores a homophone marker, obliging the solver to transfer PI into PIE. But that’s the roguish charm of the rebus, a devil-may-care attitude that dodges convention.

  Getting back to GSGE, I know that it’s the punter’s pet clue. First up, the joke is there to get. Anyone can see EGGS in the mixture, and the idea of scrambling (letters or eggs) occurs just as promptly. In chess terms, GSGE is a three-move checkmate memorised by amateurs with no deeper love of the game.

  It’s a bar trick. A gimmick. GSGE is something a drunk uncle scribbles on a coaster and asks the kiddies to solve at Christmas time. The fact that outsiders embrace it says more about their unfamiliarity with the cryptic rule book than anything else. As God is my witness I’d be prepared to give the dollar back if the same GSGE-lover was made aware of how cryptic clues require a balance of wordplay and definition, and thereby agree that HIJKLMNO is one element short, for all its cuteness.

  Agreed, then, that the rebus is a heretic recipe. And rare too. More than wacky, the formula divides the public as much as gangsta rap can split an audience. Some solvers despise the tack, while those in the GSGE camp, as well as some veterans, adore them. I’m split as well. If a rebus is original, and the answer makes me smile, then call me a fan. But if a setter has lifted the idea from mothballs, or the answer is a stretch – no thanks.

  Historically, the rebus has amused us for centuries. Antique puzzle books devoted whole pages to this picture play, where letters are gained or lost so rendering a final message. This style, with letters pinched or added, is more in the manipulation mode, but at that time the genre was dubbed a rebus and it still exerts a hieroglyphic cool.

  Let’s take a look at a few rebus samples. The first two stem from Guardian regular Paul, while the last two are mine:

  Husky GAG? (6)

  D-d-dog? (8)

  _ ettle t_ _ bi_ _ (5,3)

  estiMAte? (8,5)

  Paul is showing more mercy than your average rebus-monger, providing a definition in his two clues. The answer to the first is HOARSE, which means husky, and entails HORSE (or GG) around A: a visual interpretation of a container clue. Meanwhile his second clue implies CERBERUS, the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades.

  My own clues allude to a definition, going closer to the terse rebus tradition. The first answer is SHELL OUT, as the letters of SHELL have been dropped from settle the bill. And the last is EDUCATED GUESS, where estimate (GUESS) has its tertiary degree highlighted by capitals.

  Ready to make a stab at 3-Down, our lone rebus in the Master Puzzle? More or less, you say. Let’s have a look:

  M _ _ E (4,2,4)

  Wily, this one, mainly due to the lack of definition, or even the hint of one. More in the GSGE mould, the clue is all wordplay without any nod to meaning, though we do have some cross-letters for assistance.

  The answer’s last word obeys the pattern of L _ S _. Is it LAST, LOST, LESS? These last two, LOST and LESS, murmur the idea of missing letters, just as the rebus dashes imply. Something-something-LOST, or something-something-LESS? Even if undefined, we know the answer must be a familiar phrase, more or less.

  Bingo. The pictogram captures MORE minus OR, hence MORE OR LESS. Half of you will be booing, declaring the clue unfair, but rebuses shrug the customary niceties, and no Master Puzzle worth its name could omit this polarising recipe.

  More or less, this chapter’s done, though we can’t leave without the punch ________ to the ______-out story.

  TWO SHOCKS IN SHORTHAND – Pitman and the other man

  Doing a journalism degree, I thought it wise to attend a shorthand course during the summer. Given the choice of Pitman Script, the scrawl adopted by most stenographers, versus Pitman 2000, a dummy version for lazy reporters, I went with the latter. Most of my colleagues at the school opted for the tougher stream, being a little more committed to their careers. I should also add that 99 per cent of these same colleagues were female. I felt like a sultan in his harem.

  Over time I learnt how to doodle with guessable meaning and tap out forty words per minute on an asthmatic Underwood. When summe
r school shut, the girls and I swapped addresses, CAJUSTSE (just in case). A few months later, eager to host a picnic for my twenty-first birthday, I dug up the contacts and sent out invitations.

  With one catch. In a fatal bid to be clever, I put down all the details in shorthand, a rebus for the gang to unravel. Twenty young women, I thought: a perfect foil for the twenty young footballers also attending, plus the twenty bohemians from uni. The ideal party mix, except none of the girls showed up. Not one.

  Only later did the penny drop. I’d used the wrong shorthand. My Pitman 2000 squiggle for PICNIC resembled a sozzled worm to their eyes. Basically, I’d sent a love letter to twenty sweethearts in fluent Neptunian. Or, harking back to Mr Schultz, I’d hollered a line-out code to twenty gorgeous Lurches and consequently the ball was missed.

  But that’s not the only rebus shock during that period. While Lurch went on to make millions fixing people’s pipes, I then decided there was more profit in crossword-making, assuming the Herald would employ me. Sprucing up those early grids during 1982, my last year of college, I sent them to the paper in the cocky belief that they wouldn’t be able to resist.

  I was wrong. They resisted for a year at least, with the editor, Ron Nichols, and the vaunted LB both sending back reasons why my stuff fell short of the mark. A common beef was my rebus fixation. RUMEONGIN may well translate as LONG TIME BETWEEN DRINKS, wrote Ron, but can’t you find a better way to clue it?

  Maybe plumbing was a better option after all, or breaking codes for a spy office in Canberra. But slowly I weeded out the rebus plague and tested the mainstream recipes, only to draw more flak.

  Trim your fat. Quell the puns. Disguise your wordplay. Fairer definitions etc.

  Back to the drawing board. New grids, new clues, followed by more criticism. Naturally, LB’s counsel was easier to hear – the setter a demigod in my eyes – but who was this Ron geezer anyway? Did he make crosswords? We’d never met but that didn’t stop the man’s rebukes. After the third round of heat I decided to take positive action. The Herald building, by coincidence, was a block from campus, where my journalism course was winding up. One afternoon, after a tutorial, I skipped across to the Fairfax bunker on Broadway, in Ultimo, asking to see a man called Mr Nichols.

  ‘Is he expecting you?’ asked the woman at the counter.

  ‘No.’

  Given my lowly status, I wasn’t expecting him to even step out of the lift to talk to me. It was almost a rebus moment, seeing a familiar character in an unfamiliar setting, out of context, out of harmony with the norm. Certainly, my brain felt out of whack as a diminutive chap with a cowlick crossed the floor, his hand extended, the glint in his eye magnified by those ashtray glasses of his.

  ‘G’day, ref,’ I said instinctively.

  ‘Call me Ron,’ he said with a smirk. ‘Ron Nichols.’

  I tried to speak. My tongue was stone. I was b-o-u-n-d (spellbound).

  RECIPE PRECIS: REBUSES

  The layout says it all. The rebus clue is unique in its weirdness, an assembly of dashes or typefaces, perhaps a cluster of letters and numbers. With no definition, as a rule, the game is in your hands, as you try to find the word or phrase that lends meaning to the miscellany before you.

  SIX OF THE BEST FROM MY REBUS ARCHIVE

  SIX OF THE BEST FROM MY REBUS ARCHIVE

  wHaTEveR (2,3,4)

  PEEP (4,4,4)

  pASPalum (5,2,3,5)

  FI_TH WH_ _L (5,2,7)

  C O S M O S

  C O S M O S (8,9)

  A$$ ASS (1,4,3,3,5,3,4,6)

  SOLUTIONS: in any case, look both ways, snake in the grass, spare no expense, parallel universes, a fool and his money are soon parted.

  QUIZLING 28.1

  Can you intuit what familiar seven-word phrase is represented by the text symbol below?

  :-$

  QUIZLING 28.2

  What five Graham Greene novels have been roughly encoded below?

  SHUS (3,5,8)

  R (3,3,2,3,6)

  B

  ORE (8,4)

  TT (3,5,2,3,6)

  nuestro hombre (3,3,2,6)

  QUIZLING 28.3

  Look closely. That’s not an O in each cluster below, but a zero. With that in mind, can you reveal the river, the flavour, the country, the plant and two monsters on display?

  OE COR CAO PHOEO SAOCH MAROAN

  &Lits

  CHAPTER 29

  Central period in time-spread one spent!(7)

  Thankfully, after making me jump a few more hurdles, the Herald found a place for me, with just ten crosswords a year. I came to learn that Ron Nichols was a delightful man, while the rebus was a runt compared to the splendour of the &lit.

  Don’t be daunted by the strange label. You’ve already met the &lit category, back when we solved ETC, and you survived. In one regard, the &lit formula is the simplest on offer, due to the fusion of wordplay and definition into one unit. At least that’s my rough-and-ready explanation. Ximenes does a better job, as he’s the man who christened the genre in 1966.

  The term &lit is short for ‘This clue both indicates the letters or part of the required word … and can also be read, in toto, literally, as an indication of the meaning of the whole word, whether as a straight or a veiled definition.’

  To remind you, here’s that clue for ETC again: Partial set closer?! (3.).

  The clue can be read as a definition for ETC. Second to that, the same definition embodies the wordplay; all three words serve dual roles.

  But don’t go thinking &lits only use the hidden tactic. Till now every category we’ve tackled has adhered to its own formula. Containers have contained and homophones have sounded, every clue keeping to its separate box. From this moment, however, those boundaries will evaporate as we enter the realm of &lits and hybrids.

  Hybrids wait around the corner, the labradoodles of the cryptic pound, but let’s first grasp the versatility of the &lit. Depending on a setter’s approach, the &lit clue can play with puns or deletions, codes or even rebuses, whichever ploy that accomplishes the feat.

  Spoonerism is a category. Reversal is a category. Whereas &lit is an ideal, the pursuit of oneness. Almost every clue we’ve met has faithfully carried the two necessary burdens – definition and wordplay. Both are separate, despite meeting harmoniously at a clue’s midriff. The &lit clue takes intimacy to a new level, like the commingled souls of John Donne’s lovers, where the two partners merge into one organism, either lover fulfilling the role of the other. The border is lost.

  Here’s a glimpse of the anagram &lit – both these samples were made by US duo Henry Cox and Emily Rathvon:

  Is a bit less wobbly! = STABILISES

  Hunan caterer’s site, perhaps! = CHINESE

  RESTAURANT

  See how each signpost (wobbly and perhaps) unifies with the fodder to conspire as part of the definition? In the same vein, MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE could be defined by the wordplay Drifting item belongs at sea! Make those 16 letters ITEM-BELONGSATSEA at sea (or confused), and you’ll end up with the phrase the wordplay describes.

  Not to be outdone, charades can also become charade &lits, as with this gem deriving from The Times:

  Stop heading for takeaways! (4)

  One approach to cracking &lits is to treat each serving as an oblique definition. If you Stop heading for takeaways, what are you doing? If that doesn’t work, break the clue into pieces. When clocks or engines stop, they DIE. Heading for takeaway is a deft means of signalling the letter T, the head-letter of takeaway. Join these two pieces in charade style and you make DIET, or Stop heading for takeaways.

  Adhering to a strict &lit diet, these next two morsels are the container kind, again from The Times:

  Sweet best to keep cold! (4–3)

  Something carried about in box! (7)

  Your first answer is CHOC-ICE (C for Cold inside CHOICE, or best), while FREIGHT (RE in FIGHT) solves the second. Succinct and elegant, &lit clues are like hen’s teeth, as the ideal of
fusion is elusive. Speaking from experience, they usually entail some minor epiphany at the drawing board. You suddenly see how a word like THEOLOGY, say, contains EGO, which seems the answer’s counterforce. The leftover letters are THLOY, which gives rise to the anagram &lit:

  Ego hotly disputed by this study!

  That’s the epiphany, realising for the first time how the answer’s definition shares a compatibility with the wordplay. Priest-like, you marry two souls into one.

  No doubt, after meeting a few &lits, you’ve realised how the exclamation mark is a staple. This is despite the lament of F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, who warned all aspiring writers that ‘The exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.’ I can only imagine the great man was chiding novelists, since clue-writers have little choice but to tag &lits with the offending item. In Cryptopia, punctuation is etiquette. Though not quite a golden rule, the exclamation mark is certainly a dominant trait of the &lit formula.

  Not that every exclamation mark is automatically a sign that the &lit is in operation. Ximenes was once censured by a solver for stabbing his clues with far too many of the emphatic little critters. The solver, conceded Ximenes, had a point. The setter assessed his own work to see the plague of screamers (as printers dub exclamation marks) and consequently vowed, ‘Now I try to use much more restraint in this matter and to use them only when I am exclaiming, or for a technical purpose ….’

  Because that’s the gist. Occasionally a clue will shout by virtue of its message, with no &lit implicated. Here are two examples from my own bottom drawer:

  ‘Tax!’ yelled lunatic with triumph = EXALTEDLY

  Retro French artist almost curses! = EGAD [DEGAS

  minus S, reversed]

  Now and then the exclamation mark admits a clue’s own cheek, like Paul’s racy double meanings in the Guardian: