The Crossword Century

by Alan Connor

  There’s another instrument of torture in the word “crossword” itself: the cross, from which we get the sense of going side to side denoted by “across.” (Conversely, Old English speakers called a hill a “dúne” and used “of dúne” to refer to the direction you take when leaving the top of one; from this we got “down,” a word still used to describe hills and slopes in some parts of the United Kingdom.)

  Likewise analogous is “clue.” In the fourteenth century, a clue was a ball of thread. Those balls are useful for finding your way out of mazes both literal (kudos, Theseus) and metaphorical: The Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton bemoaned “loosing the clew which led us safely in,” leaving him “lost within this Labyrinth of lust.” Later, you didn’t need the maze as part of the metaphor, and might use the word in the context of detection: In Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Caroline Helstone announces that “I have a clue to the identity of one, at least, of the men who broke my frames.”

  Finally, a crypt can be an underground hiding place or a vault in a church—or, if you’re the subject of religious persecution, both simultaneously. Francis Bacon used “cryptic” as a noun to describe communication using secret methods; Agatha Christie used it as an adjective when the meaning of some words or behavior is not immediately apparent: a problem if you’re trying to solve a murder, but all part of the fun if the solving is of the puzzling kind.

  (Before the crossword, there was another “cross”-sounding puzzle, though this one took its name from the Greek —meaning “extreme.” Welcome to the crossword’s forefather, the baffling double acrostic . . .)

  RELATIVES WHO ARE REPEATEDLY GREAT?

  ANCESTORS

  The prehistory of wordplay

  The double acrostic was a wholly respectable way of whiling away an evening in Victorian England—so respectable, and so Victorian, that those who were addicted to the puzzles claimed that Queen Victoria herself both solved and constructed them.

  Here is one attributed to her majesty. It was supposedly a gift “for the royal children,” whose job as solvers was to give each clue an answer such that their first letters, read top to bottom, spelled out a place name, and the last letters, bottom to top, what that place was famous for:

  A city in Italy

  A river in Germany

  A town in the United States

  A town in North America

  A town in Holland

  The Turkish name of Constantinople

  A town in Bothnia

  A city in Greece

  A circle on the globe

  Got it yet?

  NapleS

  ElbE

  WashingtoN

  CincinnatI

  AmsterdaM

  StambouL

  TorneA

  LepantO

  EcliptiC

  So, the first letters give us NEWCASTLE—not the city in Oklahoma, or any of the Newcastles in Texas, Washington, and Wyoming, but the northern English city so famous for its COALMINES (to be found in the last letters) that the British expression “to carry coals to Newcastle” is shorthand for doing something unnecessary.

  The apparent imprimatur of the sovereign may have helped to popularize the double acrostic, but her influence was as nothing compared to that of the age of mechanical reproduction. In the mid-nineteenth century, the puzzles began to appear in The Illustrated London News, constructed by the clergyman and humorist Cuthbert Bede, author of The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green.

  His double acrostics became a national craze. Marion Spielmann’s 1895 history of Punch tells how Bede received letters about his puzzles from all over the world, “forwarded to him in packets by rail.” In America, the convoluted acrostic was more of a poet’s game, as seen in the intricate creations of Edgar Allan Poe, but the puzzle variant would have been familiar to one Arthur Wynne when, in New York in 1913, he found himself in need of a new kind of puzzle.

  The grip of the acrostic may be hard to credit today, when such wordplay appears seldom outside of the occasional British-style cryptic clue, but a story by Vladimir Nabokov hints at the revelatory power once possessed by this form of wordplay. In the final paragraph of 1951’s “The Vane Sisters,” the narrator unknowingly reveals that the two dead women of the title have been affecting his experiences, even leaving a message in acrostic form in his own writing. Nabokov wrote that this otherworldly device could “only be tried once in a thousand years of fiction,” but his choice of Sybil as the name for one of the Vanes makes a link that goes back to classical antiquity.

  The first acrostics to bear the name were the prophecies of the Erythraean Sibyl, a prophetess who wrote verses on leaves that could be rearranged such that the initial letters conveyed some important message. They were, however, sometimes a little obscure. Acrostics create readability obstacles sometimes: troubles in comprehensibility.

  The habit of leaving hidden messages in the first letters of verses can also be found in the Hebrew version of the Old Testament, Latin poems, and the runes of the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf.

  For none of these protopuzzlers was the acrostic merely a bit of fun. Leaving behind our everyday assumption that for any word or sentence there is a single, graspable sense involves accepting that there is an invisible sense—and before these were put there by other humans in the pursuit of entertainment, they were thought to be indicative of some more cosmic truths.

  Take the simplest form of mucking about with words: the anagram. In the ancient world, if one word could be jumbled to make another, it was thought, there had to be a reason. Such was the thinking of many ancient prophets, who, writes the anthropologist Marcel Danesi, “were essentially anagrammatists who interpreted this heavenly form of language.” If anagrams were a means of obtaining information sent by a higher power, then being good at solving them made you a soothsayer.

  If you could give the king a bunch of anagrams of the names of the members of his court, he might well think you’d found a way of revealing their innermost characters and intentions, and your prize for being good at jumbling letters would be gold.

  What we think of nowadays as a “clue” was likewise a more potent challenge. When The New York Times uses “Big piece of crust?” to elicit CONTINENT, the intention is to describe the answer while appearing to depict something completely different. The legendary Sphinx did much the same when it demanded of its Greek victims: “Which creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?”

  The answer is MAN, who starts life crawling and ends up with a cane. The jeopardy was greater when the Sphinx asked you a question: You’d be strangled if you got it wrong, rather than leaving some gaps at 13 across; even Oedipus, who got it right, received as part of his prize marriage to a woman who turned out to be his mother, so it was really a lose-lose proposition. But the sly humor is the same as that exhibited by today’s constructors.

  Those constructors need somewhere to put their clues, and for that, we need to look at the palindrome—the trick where a phrase reads the same backward as it does forward. Not easy to construct; so tricky, in fact, that it helped to be Lord of Evil Arts to manage it. Here’s a pair of Satan’s, cited by Étienne Tabourot in 1585:

  Signa, te Signa; temere me tangis et angis;

  Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor.

  This complaint is addressed to Saint Martin, who has ordered the devil to change into a donkey and carry him to Rome. It translates as “Cross, cross thyself; thou plaguest and vexest me without necessity; for, owing to my exertions, thou wilt soon reach Rome, the object of thy wishes.”

  Terrifying. However, when they’re not being hurled at you by the Prince of Darkness, multiword palindromes like the above can be giddyingly captivating.

  And that urge to travel simultaneously in two directions predates Saint Martin. The same ROMA . . . AMOR palindrome has its most beautiful phys
ical manifestation in Pompeii. There, those two words form part of a design that is the link between the palindrome and the crossword: the word square. Carved into the wall of the Domus Poppaeorum is:

  R

  O

  M

  A

  O

  L

  I

  M

  M

  I

  L

  O

  A

  M

  O

  R

  What does it mean? Nobody knows. Perhaps the “Milo” lines are a tribute to the sixth-century-BC athlete Milo of Croton, who could carry an adult ox on his shoulders. That’s a guess. Whatever the significance of each component, there’s no argument about the grace with which they fit together. Even more impressive is:

  S

  A

  T

  O

  R

  A

  R

  E

  P

  O

  T

  E

  N

  E

  T

  O

  P

  E

  R

  A

  R

  O

  T

  A

  S

  It’s a palindrome all right, and this time it has a plausible meaning—“the sower, Arepo, skillfully guides the wheels”—that lends itself better than Roma, Milo, etc., to interpretation, particularly if you allow yourself a bit of wiggle room. If Arepo is God and the wheels are metaphorical, too, the square would convey that the big guy upstairs has his eye on all of creation.

  There are a few problems with this. One is that the God interpretation is wholly metaphorical and so equally valid would be any paraphrase where Someone skillfully does Something to Something Else. The second problem is that the canny Roman who devised the square may have invented the letter string AREPO to make the whole thing work, a compromise familiar to many constructors.

  But to quibble is to miss the point. Like the anagram, the word square persisted as a source of fascination: If words could be made to fit together so well, the reason had to be a good one, and probably divine. Sure enough, if you stare at the Sator word square, truths reveal themselves: You can anagram the twenty-five letters into a plausible prayer, or find two instances of the first two words of the Lord’s prayer, PATER NOSTER, crossing on the N.

  And even if you don’t see divine intervention, you have to marvel at the symmetry. Or, perhaps, see whether you can construct one yourself.

  By the nineteenth and early twentieth century, various minds applied themselves to devising plausible squares of greater size. Word squares could be found in Victorian newspapers and magazines. Sometimes the letters were removed and readers provided with, effectively, a blank grid and clues for the words that ought to fill it. The word diamond was a popular variant, and it’s not hard to see the tiny evolutionary leap from that type of puzzle to the first crossword, Arthur Wynne’s “Word-Cross.”

  (Finding hidden messages, then, does not have to reveal the divine to be of value. Stripped of their metaphysics and rendered through Victorian mechanical reproduction, these devices still offer up that moment of revelation—but purely for fun. A little bit of magic, literally boxed up for daily consumption in the quotidian wrapping of newspaper. Though, of course, the secret messages are still there . . .)

  LITTLE SPANISH GIRL, OR BIG AMERICAN VOICE?

  NINA

  When crosswords contain more than just the answers to the clues

  In 1945 a daughter was born to the caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. She was named Nina. From that day, he concealed the letters of his daughter’s name somewhere in most of his drawings. The letters N, I, N, and A are wholly inessential to your enjoyment of any of his cartoons but lie there as a treat, woven into someone’s hair or the folds of his or her clothing, if you know what you’re looking for—much like Alfred Hitchcock’s cameos, which can be seen in almost all of his films.

  “Ninas” is a more charming term than “alfreds” and lives on as a way of describing hidden extra elements that can be discovered in completed crossword grids. Like their near namesakes, ninjas, ninas operate in the shadows. They’re not part of the solve, but they raise a smile on the faces of those who spot them. They can be found—if you know where to look—in British “concise” crosswords, which are a kind of pared-down cousin of the American style. Relying almost solely on straight definitions, they are nonetheless constructed by the same warped minds who come up with cryptic clues. It is easy to imagine that their creators might prefer to set themselves a more satisfying challenge than inauspiciously filling a thirteen-by-thirteen grid.

  Having a hidden structure is also a good way to get started, rather than sitting there pondering the infinite possibilities of a blank grid like Buridan’s ass in the fable, which finds itself stuck between two equally attractive piles of hay and, unable to rein in ambivalence and choose a favorite, dies of hunger.

  There are assuredly many constructors for whom the basic unit of crosswording is the clue and not the grid, and who relish each clue as it comes. For others, filling a grid may raise the unanswerable question of where to start. If you know that you’re going to try and construct a grid, though, whose perimeter reads TOBEORNOTTOBETHATISTHEQUESTION, well, you know what to do as you find yourself willingly thrown in at the deep end.

  That’s one reason for including a nina. Another is political. Take Hungary. Crosswords were banned there in 1925 when the Horthy government discovered that a monarchist constructor had hidden the message LONG LIVE OTTO in one of them. And when the final edition of the British tabloid News of the World was being prepared among the debris of the UK phone-hacking scandal, executive Rebekah Brooks may have had two senior colleagues comb the copy for messages from disgruntled staff, but they did not notice some seemingly pointed phrases in the clues within the quickie and the cryptic. Constructed, one suspects, less in sorrow than in anger, they included “woman stares wildly at calamity,” “catastrophe,” “stink,” and “criminal enterprise.”

  Other “personal” ninas are happier and subtler: birthday wishes to loved ones, which, ultimately, have only one intended reader but which are so unrelated to the mechanics of solving the puzzle that those for whom they are not meant would be churlish in the extreme to resent their presence—much better to join in and relish the fun.

  Among the most common ninas is a puzzle theme the constructor has decided not to announce—and you, the solver, only spot if you’re letting your brain wander around. In 2009 Brendan Emmett Quigley constructed a puzzle for The Guardian in which the answers included PIERCE (“break through”), LINCOLN (“city”), GRANT (“admit”), HOOVER (“clean”), and FORD (“go to other bank”). It is easy to miss connections like this—especially if your obsession is the speed of your solve—but once you do, your heart is lifted, and there are extra treats, like the unchecked letters in the central column spelling out the by-then-inaugurated OBAMA.

  Ninas work best when, like that example, they come in a place that feels right: in symmetrical form in the grid, as an acrostic in the clues, or—in a different context—in the same place in
every paragraph. They can be a treat that reveals itself at the end, or can provide help with the meat-and-potatoes of the puzzle. Spotting a nina midsolve, perhaps in an inattentive moment, can make the endgame a lot smoother as you may be able rapidly to fill in more squares, and hence gain more letter clues to the actual clue clues.

  Ninas are also a way for constructors to flex their muscles. Constructor Henry Hook showed his constructing chops at the age of fourteen. His grandmother gave him a puzzle that was part crossword, part jigsaw, created by Eugene T. Maleska, who went on to become the editor of the New York Times puzzle. Its endgame revealed a zigzagging nina reading, YOU HAVE JUST FINISHED THE WORLD’S MOST REMARKABLE CROSSWORD. Days after Hook received the gift, Maleska received a puzzle, written by Hook, with the nina WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOUR PUZZLE IS MORE REMARKABLE THAN MINE? Most ninas, it has to be said, are considerably less bombastic, but many serve a similar purpose: to prove one’s chops to one’s peers. They also convey an extra aspect of the personality of the more playful constructor, raising spirits and making a personal connection with the solver, the pair drawn inalienably together in fun.

  Such moments are all the more affecting when they take place in unlikely puzzles. The London Times has the most dependable of British crosswords: Constructors are anonymous to ensure a house style that does not allow for themes or even the inclusion of living persons with the exception of the reigning monarch. So when, in 1967, a teacher at Westcliff High School for Boys wrote to the paper to ask whether a relevant clue or answer might be included on the day of departure of Alfred Bately, the head of maths and an ardent Times solver, the answer was not unexpected. Written in a letter that seemed curt was the admonishment that “the crossword was certainly not the place for passing on personal messages!”