The Crossword Century

by Alan Connor

  And so, as the Oxford Dictionaries website carefully words it, “it seems quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages.” There are many different ways of denoting the same objects and actions, but all are valid parts of the English lexicon. If you want to hint at some word or other, your options may well be multiple—even the definitions under that word in a dictionary will offer alternatives of varying degrees of delight. No wonder the English language is well suited to the crossword.

  When the crossword was on the rise, London Times editor George Geoffrey Dawson wondered if there were any better reason for the existence of words such as CADI, EFFENDI, MUEZZIN, and VIZIER than “to get crossword composers out of trouble.” It’s as if Dawson had tried to construct a puzzle himself, got frustrated when he found he’d constructed himself into a corner that needed a very un-English-looking word, and then realized that some exotic term imported from Turkey might just do the job.

  It’s certainly true that English has always been happy to absorb words from places with which Britain has traded or that have been part of its empire, thus further expanding the vocabulary available to the creators of word games.

  The existence of multiple words for any one given thing makes English not especially friendly toward nonnative speakers trying to learn the language, but on the upside, it’s perfect for games that involve words, terms, designations, expressions, and utterances.

  The obverse is also true: The existence of so many words with multiple meanings is a boon to constructors. Want to write a misleading clue where a perfectly ordinary word turns out to signify something quite unexpected? English is your language.

  All those choices mean that the crossword constructor is no mere paraphraser. Each time she chooses one interpretation of a word over another, or a circuitous route in preference to a direct one, she is expressing her personality. And so it is little surprise that solvers can have favorite constructors and develop over years of grid filling a sense that they know their favorites—that they understand how those challenging minds work. Can you say the same of the creators of other puzzles like word searches or sudokus?

  In non-English-language puzzles, named constructors are rare and the crossword sits on the puzzle page, impersonal and apparently aloof. They have their own pleasures—the cheery, inclusive way that È, É, and Ê are all rendered E in the French puzzle, for example—but the clueing cannot compete. And why put your name to a list of synonyms? English-language constructors, having all those extra words to play with, are, in contrast, regarded more like authors. And rightly so.

  (And so any puzzle, in whatever language, should be approached by the nonnative speaker with extreme caution. After all, it’s not like you can just translate a clue from one language to another. Can you . . . ?)

  TO RENDER LESS GREEK?

  TRANSLATION

  How on earth do you translate a crossword puzzle?

  You might wonder why anyone would ever translate a crossword clue, but some people have to. Take the scene in The West Wing where President Jed Bartlet calls out a clue to the First Lady: “It may be bitter (3).” He considers TEA, makes a wisecrack that WOMAN doesn’t fit, and his wife, Abbey, rebukes him: “END, you idiot, bitter END.”

  In the DVD’s French subtitles, this becomes “Peut être amer,” with a letter count of three. This is fine for THÉ, the French for tea, and FEMME still doesn’t fit, but the translator has Abbey offer RIRE as the correct answer. It’s a plausible answer—“rire amer” meaning “bitter laugh”—except that it’s too long. Faced with the challenge of finding two same-length words that might fit (or even making it a four-letter answer and having Jed say “THÉ is too short, but FEMME is too long”), the translation runs away and hides.

  The Swedish and Norwegian subtitles are even more cowardly, removing Abbey’s line altogether. It’s a shame, since the words are not random: The important ones are END (foreshadowing Abbey’s agonizing investigation for medical misconduct) and WOMAN (because Jed has been impatient with Abbey’s indecision over earrings). TEA is the least important word in the exchange and certainly isn’t the one to base the translation’s letter count on.

  And if that seems like an involved process for a throwaway gag at the top of an episode of a TV program, consider the challenge of translating something larger. What if the material in a fictional crossword was more important? What if wordplay was part of the original text?

  In Georges Perec’s French-language novel La Vie mode d’emploi, we find an unfinished puzzle in the room of one of the characters reproduced in the text. The rest of the book is riddled with cross-references, puns, and hidden expressions, so the task facing the translator is daunting: How do you re-create a collection of words, preserving not only their meaning but also the characteristics that allow them to intersect with one another in a grid? And since a seasoned solver might look at the grid and wonder which words might fit the empty spaces, should the gaps be taken into consideration, too?

  Happily, Perec was aware of this potential problem and furnished his German translator Eugen Helmlé with notes about the novel’s wordplay. In the case of the crossword, his instructions were that only ETONNEMENT and OIGNON mattered. And so, in David Bellos’s English translation, we see ASTONISHED and ONION among other unrelated words. Bellos told me that the inclusion of a potential TLON in his version of this fictional puzzle is a nod to the imaginary world in the title of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which seems a suitably perécienne flourish.

  He added a regret about his translation of the grid: The placement of ONION means that there’s an impossible entry ending with O in the English version of the grid. So if you have a copy of Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, you should pull out a pencil and add an extra black square to the grid, in this case in the space immediately following ONION.

  And if you’re an experimental novelist with, for whatever reason, a grudge against translators, you might consider creating a book featuring a puzzle in which the clues, the entries, and the way they intersect are vital to the plot. A translation of the grid would be likely to necessitate a different grid, and vice versa. As Bellos remarked, “It would be a paradoxical and fuse-blowing project.”

  (In the interests of sanity, then, let’s stick to our native tongue. Ah, but if only it were that simple. Are we talking about English as she was written in poetry and prose, where every word has a long and distinguished history, or as she is spoken, where new words appear as if from nowhere . . . ?)

  UNABLE TO USE JARGON?

  CANT

  The irresistible rise of slang

  Stanley Newman now holds a respectable role as Newsday’s puzzle editor, but in the 1980s, he was an enfant terrible of the crosswording world—or, as he terms it, one of the New Wave. He lay down his equivalent of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses in his Crossworder’s Own Newsletter, taking potshots at the then puzzle editor of The New York Times, Eugene T. Maleska, for running crosswords best suited to “the residents of a retirement home for university dons.”

  Newman believed that there was a younger audience for crosswords—one that was more comfortable with modern colloquialisms and pop culture than with arcane geographical and historical references.

  Maleska appeared unconcerned, referring to the New Wave as “the Newman ripple” and to Newman himself as “that pipsqueak.” But the New Wavers won the war: After Maleska’s death in 1993, the New York Times’s puzzle developed, under its new editor, Will Shortz, into a form not at all dissimilar to that envisaged by Newman and his votaries.

  It was the same in Britain. At Christmas 1966, The Guardian held a competition in which readers were invited to send in crosswords. The winner was David Moseley. He received six guineas and an invitation to submit more puzzles—which he now has been doing, as Gordius, for nearly half a century. However, amid the praise for his 1966 winning entry, there was a caveat from the pu
zzle editor John Perkin: “There are one or two things that I wouldn’t normally let through. ‘Booze’ is slang and you use it twice.”

  Nowadays, any crossword editor would still judge that any crossword with the same word twice is a less satisfying solve, but BOOZE would pass without comment. In the sixties, though, the crossword was younger and anxious to appear respectable. University slang such as DON was acceptable, but BOOZE? A little too rowdy.

  Happily, some words have almost disappeared from puzzles. Midwestern towns, population in three figures, the names of which their near neighbors would struggle to recall? Much less often spied in puzzles. And the little Latin words that completed arcane quotations and reassured newspaper readers that solving was not an activity to feel ashamed of? Almost entirely eradicated.

  Something had to take their place: something with unusual spellings and plenty of nice wee short words. That something was the irrepressibly fertile font of slang. So just as Arthur Wynne’s first crossword had “A river in Russia” to clue NEVA, so in 2008 did Brendan Emmett Quigley clue the same four letters with “‘— Get Enuf’ (3LW song),” exploiting the voguish penchant for misspelling among R&B songwriters.

  It happens, though, that slang is more likely to flourish in environments where speakers aren’t keen on outsiders being able to fully understand them. Teenagers resentful of their parents are one such group—and so are thieves, vagabonds, and users of narcotics, all of whose language makes the crossword a saltier place than it was in the days of Maleska and the young Gordius. After all, anyone who is trying to hide what he or she is really trying to say is engaged in the same activity as a devious crossword constructor.

  Take cocaine. Present-day solvers aren’t expected to be frequent users of addictive alkaloids, (notwithstanding the English humorist Stephen Fry’s former habit of taking the drug before tackling the hardest British crosswords). They would, though, do well to acquaint themselves with its nicknames: ICE, C, COKE, CANDY, READYWASH, CHARLIE, and BLOW, as listed in The Chambers Dictionary. And a constructor might induce you to take a hit of a heroin synonym such as HORSE, H, JUNK, SNOW, and SUGAR. And what can beat “drug” to indicate the most common vowel in English? You could almost suspect that ecstasy was given its shortest nickname by constructors bored of using “east” (E on a compass), “Spain” (E on the back of a car), and “base” (2.71828, or e in mathematical formulas).

  That isn’t to say that slang now habitually passes without notice. On January 7, 2012, The New York Times used the clue “Wack, as in hip hop” for ILLIN. Word soon reached the national press that a solver had complained that “wack” has a negative sense, and that ILLIN is its opposite. The tone of the coverage was generally derisive and seemed based on an assumption that the crossword was still a fusty corner of culture.

  How, pundits wondered, could those tweedy crossword-constructor types expect that experimenting with hip-hop terminology could result in anything other than embarrassment?

  Crosswords are slightly older (when the clue was published, ninety-eight years old) than B-boying (around forty years old), but there’s a good reason why puzzlers might take an active interest in hip-hop: Both activities promote flipping the meanings of words. Hence, in crosswords, clues such as “To show or not to show?,” which exploits two meanings of SCREEN, and “Chopstick?” for CLEAVE. In crosswords and in hip-hop, this ambiguity is quite deliberate (that’s “quite” as in “completely,” not as in “to a limited extent”).

  As Run-DMC helpfully pointed out in their track “Peter Piper,” the big bad wolf in your neighborhood, rather than being “bad” meaning “bad” might in fact be “bad” meaning “good.” See also WICKED, especially if it comes from a Bostonian—though F. Scott Fitzgerald did have a character use that word in a positive sense in 1920.

  And so it is with ILL. In 1979, the Sugarhill Gang used it in a negative sense, contrasting an urge to act civilized with the temptation to “act real ill.” But by 1986, when the Beastie Boys proclaimed themselves the “most illin-est” B-boys, that was a boast.

  So even if WACK flipped its meaning, too, the clue is sound either way. That is to say, it’s not bad. Before sanctioning a crossword editor for a lack of oversight, consider whether the clue really deserves a cool response. You might think better of it.

  (The cultural changes between NEVA’s being clued as a Russian river and with an allusion to “Neva Get Enuf” are echoed in a pleasing pair of anagrams. Back in the day, constructors noted with delight that PRESBYTERIAN was an apposite anagram of “best in prayers.” More recently, many have spotted that it’s just as pleasing a jumble of “Britney Spears.” Welcome to the modern world . . .)

  THE LATEST, FROM ALL CORNERS OF THE GLOBE?

  NEWS

  How the news can dribble into the puzzle

  Very often, the crossword becomes news. One morning at the Scott Lithgow shipyard in Scotland in 1981, two welders were tackling the Financial Times crossword while they waited for a welding rod to be repaired; a manager told them to put away the puzzle, and when they refused, both were suspended. Following a disciplinary hearing during which they apologized, one was further suspended and the other sacked, and their fellow shipbuilders went on strike in solidarity.

  This local incident was reported in the national press, and it wasn’t pegged as an industrial-relations report. The tone was one of incredulity. Welders tackling a cryptic crossword? And in the posh people’s Financial Times, at that? In the 1980s the perception of a class divide was still very strong: Quick crosswords in tabloids were for the workers; cryptics were for those who had had a classical education.

  And sometimes, the travel is in the other direction: from the news part of the newspaper into the puzzle. Happily, this is seldom. The puzzle provides a haven for anyone who has bought a newspaper and then realized that there is something unbearable about current affairs and a comfort of abstraction in the sturdy reliable grid.

  This is put most succinctly by Joan Didion in her study of bereavement, The Year of Magical Thinking, when she describes going straight from the front page of The New York Times to the puzzle page:

  ...a way of starting the day that had become during those months a pattern, the way I had come to read, or more to the point not to read, the paper.

  The flip side is that when the puzzle does reflect what’s going on among the other pages, the effect can be magical in a different sense. The greatest example is best told in reverse chronological order.

  January 2004, Butler University, Indiana: Mathematics professor Jerry Farrell takes part in an online interview. After discussing a puzzle he wrote in 1996, he shares with his interviewer a special “telekinesis puzzle” he has since constructed. The solver begins by tossing a coin. Heads or tails?

  November 6, 1996, a newspaper kiosk in New York City: The lead story in the newspaper is CLINTON ELECTED.

  November 5, 1996, the office of the New York Times puzzle editor: The phone rings. It is a crossword solver, angry that puzzle editor Will Shortz has been using the New York Times crossword to promote his personal political views. It rings again. Another solver is infuriated by Shortz’s presumption in predicting the outcome of the fifty-third presidential election. It is polling day and the votes have not yet all been cast, let alone counted. The phone continues to ring . . .

  Earlier that morning, in the home of a New York Times solver: Outside, people are heading to the polling stations to cast a vote for Bob Dole or Bill Clinton (or, indeed for Ross Perot or Ralph Nader). Inside, the solver looks at the day’s puzzle in The New York Times. She fills the third row from the top with the answer to 17 across’s “Forecast”—PROGNOSTICATION—and then the third row from the bottom with MISTERPRESIDENT, which directs her to the middle row. This row has two clues, both of them unusual:

  39A. Lead story in tomorrow’s newspaper (!), with 43A

  43A. See 39A

  Forty-three acros
s is clear from the crossing letters: ELECTED. The solver frowns. Tomorrow’s newspaper will of course lead on the victory of whoever is elected, but there’s no way that headline, with the name of the victor, can be an entry in today’s puzzle. Surely that’s not the PROGNOSTICATION?

  It is. The down clues that cross with 39 across spell it out: CAT (“Black Halloween animal”), LUI (“French 101 word”), IRA (“Provider of support, for short”), YARN (“Sewing shop purchase”), BITS (“Short writings”), BOAST (“Trumpet”), and NRA (“Much-debated political inits.”). The middle row reads: CLINTONELECTED. The solver picks up the telephone.

  Earlier that morning, in the home of another New York Times solver: Another solver frowns at the grid. “Lead story in tomorrow’s newspaper?” He fills in the squares of 39 across with help from the down clues: BAT (“Black Halloween animal”), OUI (“French 101 word”), BRA (“Provider of support, for short”), YARD (“Sewing shop purchase”), BIOS (“Short writings”), BLAST (“Trumpet”), and ERA (“Much-debated political inits.”). The middle row reads: BOBDOLEELECTED. The solver picks up the telephone.

  Earlier that year: The candidates in the forthcoming election are confirmed as Bob Dole and Bill Clinton (and Ross Perot and Ralph Nader). A math professor and occasional puzzle constructor named Jerry Farrell asks New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz if he remembers the puzzle that Farrell submitted to the paper in 1980. Shortz does.

  1980, the offices of Games magazine: Games editor Will Shortz receives a crossword puzzle that has been rejected by The New York Times. He thinks it is “pretty amazing” but can’t accept it as it is beyond the deadline for the November/December issue and the puzzle needs to be published before Election Day on November 4.