The Crossword Century

by Alan Connor

  That seemed to be the end of it until the last day of the same term. Hidden in that day’s apparently staid and anonymous puzzle were references including MATHEMATICS, GOOD-BYE MR. CHIPS, and even ALF, RED, BAT, and the cathedral city ELY. “It rapidly became clear to us,” a colleague recalled, smitten in admiration, “that the crossword editor was not as stony-hearted as his letter had led us to believe.”

  Just as touching is the story of Wing Commander Peter Flippant, who entered the 1999 Times Crossword Championship. Eliminated at the first round, he offered his help as a companion-in-arms with the practical arrangements, in his words, “moving chairs and tables around and shuffling pieces of paper.”

  A couple of months later, the Saturday Times puzzle contained, with zero fanfare, the following laudation in answers placed consecutively in the grid: SQUADRON LEADER, PETER, FLIPPANT, THANKS.

  The nina in its purest form, though, is probably the perimeter message of a puzzle by Monk for the Financial Times in 2007. It reads AGHBURZUMISHIKRIMPATUL, which is exactly the kind of gobbledygook that suggests that the solver has embarked on a wild-goose chase. AGHBURZUMISHIKRIMPATUL means nothing, even in a made-up language, surely?

  Not so. It means something in the made-up language Black Speech, invented by J. R. R. Tolkien for the inhabitants of Mordor. In fact, it is inscribed on the golden, inaccessible One Ring in the Lord of the Rings trilogy:

  Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,

  Ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

  And so our nina perimeter does mean something—“and in the darkness bind them”—monumentally irrelevant to the working of the puzzle as a crossword but a source of jaw-dropping joy and hats-off admiration to a tiny proportion of solvers. The nina, then, in a nutshell.

  (While constructors might make their invisible messages so arcane that they are only spotted by a few, the puzzle itself is a different matter. For a solver—especially the more dogged [or perhaps I should use the obsolete term “caninal”?]—the feeling that he or she should have been able to fill the grid is assuredly no mere bonus . . .)

  FAR FROM STORMY, UNLIKE A REDHEAD?

  FAIR

  Crossword constructors may play tricks but must also play fair

  From the 1850s onward, Lewis Carroll devised a stream of puzzles for magazines. While they were ostensibly constructed for children, their linguistic and mathematical demands were beyond the capabilities of many of his adult readers. Had the crossword been born a half century earlier, it’s no stretch to imagine Carroll as one of the greatest constructors in the game, probably appearing at the weekend with baroque themed challenges rather than in the weekday puzzles. His fictional characters show, to varying degrees, a keen grasp of what we would now call the constructor’s art.

  “Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.

  “I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”

  “Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”

  Crossword constructors disagree on many things: the best balance of high- and lower-brow material, which words are old chestnuts, and whether one another’s funny clues are, well, funny. But they all want to be seen to be fair.

  The alternative—to be thought of as unsporting, recondite, or contemptuous toward the solver—is tantamount to being no fun, after all. And since the point of word games is to have fun, the unfair constructor will find that his or her career is as poor and short as it is nasty and brutish.

  Editors of puzzle pages remind their charges of fairness when some constructor is trying to be too clever for the solver’s own good—or simply rewrite the clues accordingly. The first creator of puzzles to express this desideratum in the form of an actual injunction was a British headmaster, Prebendary A. F. Ritchie, who took his pseudonym from the first five letters of his name, and also from a mischievous Arabic demon, Afrit.

  Afrit’s Injunction is given in the introduction to his 1949 collection Armchair Crosswords. “We must expect the composer to play tricks,” insists Afrit, “but we shall insist that he play fair.” After this, in bold:

  You need not mean what you say, but you must say what you mean.

  No decent constructor wants any of the clues in a puzzle to remain unsolved, but if you, the solver, are well and truly stumped, Afrit’s Injunction means that, when you see the answer that defeated you, you should be able to look back at the clue and see that you could have solved it. Take this, from the London Times’s first constructor, Adrian Bell:

  Die of cold?

  Does Bell mean what he appears to be saying here? Of course not. A faithful paraphrase of the expression “die of cold” would be too mundane, not to mention morbid, for a diverting piece of entertainment. Once the solver has abandoned this image, considered other meanings of the word “die” and gone via “singular of dice” to the answer, ICECUBE, that is the moment of fun that is the point of the whole exercise.

  Not only is it a relief to shift your brain from something as wretched as hypothermia to something as refreshing as an ice cube, there is also respect for the constructor. He didn’t mean what he said, but he did say what he meant. All the information was there, presented in a form just misleading and unhelpful enough to be entertaining. Here’s another of Bell’s:

  Spoils of War

  Again, this clue does not mean what it says, and the answer is less dispiriting than looting in a combat zone: It’s MARS. As Afrit says, a cryptic clue “may attempt to mislead by employing a form of words which can be taken in more than one way, and it is your fault if you take it the wrong way.” Point taken.

  So, the Mad Hatter would, like his creator Lewis Carroll, make a fine creator of crosswords:

  “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

  Humpty Dumpty, on the other hand, would not:

  “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

  (And so for the constructor, the game can be fairly reinterpreted as: How much can I stretch language while still giving the solver a chance . . . ?)

  NOT IN KANSAS AT ALL, TOTO?

  WICKED

  Words that aren’t as helpful as they seem

  In most crosswords, you know to be on your guard when solving a clue with a question mark at the end. The words that precede that question mark often have a natural feel. And the more conversational, the more apparently friendly a clue is, the greater the chance that the constructor means something very far from what he or she appears to be saying.

  English is a language that abounds in ambiguity, and crosswording is a language that exploits this haziness. A few examples:

  Words that end with ER: When you see the word “number,” you naturally assume that it’s doing the same job it always does: depicting ONE, say, or TEN, or even, as part of some wordplay, PI. But in the clue “Number of people in the theater?,” you’re looking for someone who does the numbing: an ANESTHESIOLOGIST. Likewise, a letter can be a landlady, a tower a horse, a sewer a seamstress—and a flower is so often a river in crosswords that seasoned solvers get tripped up when the word is actually used to mean a piece of flora.

  Words that begin with DE: “Detailed,” you tend to assume, means comprehensive, meticulous, blow-by-blow. But “Detailed by the farmer’s wife?” equally fairly describes the THREEBLINDMICE. See also: “decrease” (iron), “delight” (extinguish), and “defile” (remove from the cabinet).

  Words that are pronounced differently to how they appear: Outside of crosswords, something “wicked” is amoral, heinous, or abominable. But “Supporter of wicked things?” is, you have to admit, an accurate description of a CANDLESTICK.
Try reading each of these aloud in your mind and see how they offer two options: “minute,” “pate,” “multiply,” “wound,” “drawer,” “refuse,” “sow,” “console.”

  Misleading names: When you see the word “Nancy,” your mind cycles through the options—from Sinatra to Pelosi, from Mitford to Drew. But “Nancy’s breakfast?” is a way of saying “what they call breakfast in the French city Nancy,” and so you might be expected to be thinking PETITDEJEUNER. Other words that may or may not be names—depending sometimes on the presence or otherwise of a capital—include “Job,” “Pole,” “Lent,” “Mass,” and of course “March,” “May,” and “August.”

  If you get tripped up by any of these, don’t get frustrated: Think of it as a kind of friendly pun-ishment.

  (And then there are those words that the seasoned solver comes to greet as longtime acquaintances . . .)

  UNFORGETTABLE ENCOUNTER?

  ALAMO

  Words found more often in crosswords than in real life

  Crossword English is a twisted version of the language. Do enough puzzles and you’ll soon become more familiar with the Italian river the PO and the Sumerian city-state UR than you would ever otherwise have been. In the trade, they’re called crosswordese.

  Such words occur more regularly in crosswords than they do in, say, conversation. Some are good at making up parts of other, longer expressions; others fit conveniently into a grid when you need, say, a four-letter word with a vowel at each end, like ASEA, made entirely of very common English-language letters.

  Most solvers develop a feel for such words, but web developer and data journalist Noah Veltman went one further and got some figures and lists. Through solving, he had become attached to words such as OLEO and OLIO and started to take an interest in their regular appearance. He took a database of the clues and answers in the New York Times crossword from 1996 to 2012 and compared the frequency with which words appear there with how often they crop up in the same period, but in another context: Google’s database of twenty million books.

  One word that doesn’t appear in any of those twenty million books is “crosswordiness,” Veltman’s splendid term to denote a word’s quality of appearing more often in a crossword than in real life—or, at least, one measure of real life.

  The constellations with names beginning URSA, the Texan mission the ALAMO, the name NOEL, the spirit ARIEL, the copy editor’s instruction STET, and the ardent desires known as YENS are among those words that score highest. All of them, when judiciously placed in a grid, increase the number of possible words for the entries that cross with them because of the presence of vowels and other oft-seen letters, or of those letters that, like Y, are often found at the end of a word. This also explains why, as crossword constructor, editor, and teacher Don Manley puts it in his Chambers Crossword Manual, you can “expect to find ELEMENT and EVEREST frequently, especially along the edge,” offering a bounty of those Es with which so many other words end.

  Part of the job of a crossword editor is to make sure that the “crosswordiest” words don’t become tiresome—and kudos to all the editors for this ongoing fight. But don’t be mistaken: Shunning cliché is not the same as making crossword language the same as our everyday lexicon. Manley continues by asking the solver to forgive the constructors their fillers.

  “Learn to regard them,” he advises, “as old friends.” Indeed, many solvers enjoy the discovery of new words through puzzles, and for any familiar entry there will always be a constructor with a fresh way of cluing it. Georges Perec, the French constructor and experimental author, describes well this ever-increasing pressure on the makers of crosswords. In his splendidly titled book Les Mots croisés, procédés de considérations de l’auteur sur l’art et la manière de croiser les mots, he insists that the greatest call on a constructor’s ingenuity is made by the shortest words, those “which hold the grid together.” In French, the old chestnuts include IO, ANA, ENEE, and UTE, all of which would be equally helpful for English-language constructors.

  “The constructor makes it a point of honor,” remarks Perec, “to find for each of these a clue that no-one has used before.”

  Here’s to that honor, and here are ten of the English language’s most crosswordy words, the unusually shaped faithful friends to constructors, and ones you meet sooner or later in Crosswordland.

  ALEE: The lee side of a vessel is the one that’s sheltered from the wind. ALEE can be an adverb meaning “away from the wind” or an order to put the helm toward the lee. It goes back at least as far as the fourteenth century and, as even the most casual fan of medieval alliterative debate poetry can tell you, is to be found in the anonymous poem “Mum and the Sothsegger.”

  ARGO: Reimmortalized in Jason and the Argonauts, famous for Ray Harryhausen’s ingenious stop-motion effects, these Greek heroes sailed on the ARGO in search of the Golden Fleece. The entry has also been clued as “Cornstarch brand” after the sauce thickener that may have cannily coined its name so as to appear near the top of alphabetical product lists, but the 2012 Oscars’ Best Picture provides a more contemporary alternative.

  ASEA: Hyphenated in the Oxford dictionary and defined as “On the sea, at sea; to the sea,” ASEA also lends itself to misleading definitions via the names of the various bodies of waters, such as in Eugene T. Maleska’s pert clue “In the Black?”

  EMU: Words that start and end with a vowel are always useful, and sometimes those vowels just have to be E and U. Alternatives do exist: EAU is used in English as a fancy way of saying “water,” and the European Monetary System once experimented with the ECU as a kind of single currency. But the plump, flightless Australasian bird is the go-to entry when you just have to end a three-letter word with a U. The less frequent appearance of the EMU in crosswords was mourned repeatedly by P. G. Wodehouse (see the chapter PLUM below).

  ERATO: The inspiration—if you happen to be an ancient Greek—for lyric love poetry, and far more beloved of crossword constructors than her sister Muses MELPOMENE, TERPSICHORE, or POLYHYMNIA. A favorite ruse of cryptic constructors is to make “muse” appear to be working as the verb meaning “to reflect or to gaze ponderously” when it should be read as a noun, thereby disguising the reference to this desirable five-letter string.

  IAMBI: In the Greek, whence it comes, a lampoon, because of the tradition in satirical verse of following a short beat with a long. “The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,” wrote Tennyson in the da-dum da-dum form known as iambic pentameter. “Iambus” is the singular term if you’re into analyzing the basic units of poetic rhythm, and two or more of these “feet” are IAMBI. Can also be clued rudely, as with Monk’s “Feet using which I can go either way?”

  PSST: If you count Y as a vowel in all but name, there are vanishingly few four-consonant words. CWMS, the plural of a Welsh valley, doesn’t really count since W is standing in as a vowel, as anyone who’s passed a sign reading SNWKER HALL in Cefn y Dyniewyd can testify. TBSP, TSPS, and other terms you might find in recipe books are, of course, available, but if you eschew abbreviations, you’re pretty much left with two interjections: BRRR and PSST.

  SMEE: The second-most crosswordy word in Noah Veltman’s analysis, SMEE has changed its role as an answer. Once teasingly depicted in a Punch cartoon in which one duck tells another that she is a SMEE, “only found in crosswords,” the avian type—which may also be a smew, a pochard, a wigeon, or a wagtail—has given way to the pirate who, we are told in Peter Pan, “stabbed without offense,” as in John Lampkin’s Los Angeles Times clue “Barrie baddie.”

  SOHO: Or, as it is often rendered, “SoHo,” for the Lower Manhattan neighborhood that’s SOuth of HOuston Street. Its equivalent in London, the boho Soho, is on a site once used for hunting, and named after an Anglo-Norman phrase hollered by huntsmen: “Soho!,” most likely an expression of purely exclamatory origin. SOHO can be also rendered with a hyphen, as in The Two Gentlemen o
f Verona (“Run, boy, run, run, and seek him out. / So-ho! so-ho!”) and all in capitals for those who work remotely in a “Small Office Home Office.”

  STYE: Edward Moor’s 1823 Suffolk Words and Phrases: or, An Attempt to Collect the Lingual Localisms of That County defines this word as “a troublesome little excrescence or pimple on the eye-lid” and prescribes the application of a gold ring; today, the preferred treatment is a warm compress and some painkillers.

  (The crossword is a kind of love letter to the English language. And as we shall see, the affection is mutual . . .)

  THE WRITER’S CRAFT?

  AUTHORSHIP

  Why English-language crosswords bear the names of their constructors

  Like many American inventions, the crossword became, in the twentieth century, a global phenomenon. Browse at newspaper kiosks and bookshops around the world, and you’ll see Greek, Persian, Japanese, and Tamil surrounding those familiar-looking grids. However, the crossword is not ubiquitous—some languages do not take kindly to being broken into pieces and plotted in interlocking squares.

  Where it does appear, the culture of crosswords adapts to its environment. Some differences are visual: In South American puzzles, the clues live in the grid, printed in tiny type with arrows indicating the direction of the answers; the squares of the smaller Japanese grids each take one syllable rather than one letter.

  More important—and something for its speakers to celebrate—is the greater scope afforded to constructors who work in English. English may be called a Germanic language, but it’s more like a mélange, salmagundi, or omnium-gatherum: For any English word with a German origin, there may well be a perfectly usable alternative brought to Britain by the Norman French or something with a Latin flavor.