The Crossword Century

by Alan Connor

  Earlier that year, the office of the New York Times puzzle editor: New York Times puzzle editor Eugene T. Maleska receives a puzzle from math professor and occasional puzzle constructor Jerry Farrell in which the entries that intersect with 1 across are devised such that the first answer in the grid can equally validly take CARTER or REAGAN, clued as the winner of the forthcoming election. He rejects the puzzle, asking, “What if Anderson wins?” Maleska has been in the post for three years but already has a reputation for fastidiousness and fustiness. It is unclear whether his rejection is motivated by a conviction that independent candidate John B. Anderson might break the two-party stranglehold on American politics, by a sense of loyalty to another man who uses a middle initial, or by a sense that The New York Times is not in the business of provoking solvers and messing with political crystal balls . . . and never will be.

  So much for continuity. Here, in the same spirit, is Jerry Farrell’s telekinesis puzzle (answers in the Resources section at the end of the book):

  The solver begins by tossing a coin and writing HEAD or TAIL as 1 across in a four-by-three grid.

  Across

  Down

  1 Your coin shows a

  1 Half a laugh

  5 Wagner’s earth goddess

  2 Station terminus?

  6 Word with one or green

  3 Dec follower?

  4 Certain male

  Postscript: On July 9, 2003, a New York Times puzzle by Patrick Merrell had at 20 across TOURDEFRANCE and at 35 across “[Prediction] Lance Armstrong at the end of the 2003 20-Across”: Both FOURTIMECHAMP and FIVETIMECHAMP were valid entries, and the first letters of the first seven clues spelled out F-A-R-R-E-L-L, an appropriately arcane accolade.

  (The CLINTON/BOBDOLE puzzle is treasured by American solvers. Its equivalent in the UK is a puzzle that contains the clue “Poetical scene with surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating [3, 3, 8, 12].” If that means nothing to you, you are not alone. It is time to take a peek at the British cryptic and its celebration of sometimes baffling wordplay. Let’s start with an example of the British love of mucking about with language . . .)

  WHOSE HOBBY WAS NOT BIRD-WATCHING BUT WORD-BOTCHING?

  SPOONER

  The Brit who is treasured for the way he mangled language

  A child might look twice at the title of Shel Silverstein’s story Runny Babbit and ask, with some justification, what a “babbit” is. But by the subtitle, A Billy Sook, all is clear. Without much direction, the reader twigs that reading this silly book will involve switching the sounds at the beginnings of pairs of words.

  So it is in crosswords: Take Patrick Berry’s 2011 puzzle in which “handle with care” becomes CANDLEWITHHAIR and “letterbox” BETTERLOCKS. And in British crosswords, that delight in nonsense goes at least double.

  If the clues in a British crossword appear to be the kind of gobbledygook from which only a masochist could derive the slightest pleasure, it might help to bear in mind that Britain is a place that has made a heroic institution of an otherwise little-known cleric for a kind of speech impediment.

  That cleric was the Reverend William Archibald Spooner—indeed, Berry’s puzzle is a little fantasia in which we imagine Rev. Spooner as a new employee of the USPS—but he was not the first to mangle words in this distinctive manner.

  In his 1865 dictionary of slang, John Hotten writes about a “disagreeable nonsense” then in vogue among medical students at London University.

  The waggish undergraduate habit of referring to a mutton chop as a “chutton mop” and a pint of stout as a “stint of pout” was named “the Gower Street dialect” after the university’s location; before this, such mangled phrases were known as “marrowskies,” apparently after a violin-playing Polish count who was two and a half feet tall and amused upper-class women with the same kind of wordplay. However, in 1879, as soon as Dr. Spooner introduced a hymn as “Kinqering kongs their titles take,” his fate was sealed. His students began to refer to him as “the Spoo” and awaited his every gaffe with gusto.

  It was a long wait: In fact, Dr. Spooner did not perpetrate many eponymous isms. His biographers and students of language have been unable to verify “The Lord is a shoving leopard,” “Three cheers for the queer old dean,” or “The half-warmed fish in your hearts.” “You have hissed all my mystery lectures, tasted the whole worm, and must leave by the next town drain”? Far, far too good to be true. Even some of the slips of the tongue that are reliably reported have been tidied up for greater effect: His announcement that a bride and groom had been “loifully jawned in holy matrimony” became in legend the more powerful “jawfully loined.” The current edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations is happy only with the disappointing “weight of rages.” As the 1928 New York Times headline put it, SPOONERISMS WERE FAKED—OXFORD DEAN’S ALLEGED LINGUAL SLIPS INVENTED BY STUDENTS.

  So it’s tricky not to pity the Spoo. Already an awkward enough fellow that he absentmindedly poured claret onto a pile of spilled salt (that one does have a reliable witness), he was unable to deliver a lecture on Tacitus or William of Wykeham without feeling that the undergraduates were hoping he might twist a phrase or two to rude or amusing effect. The rambunctious Maurice Bowra recalled in his memoirs:

  Once after a bump-supper we serenaded him and stood outside his window calling for a speech. He put his head out and said, “You don’t want a speech. You only want me to say one of those things,” and immediately withdrew.

  In 1912 Spooner visited South Africa and wrote home to his wife: “The Johannesburg paper had an article on my visit to Johannesburg, but of course they thought me most famous for my Spoonerisms, so I was not greatly puffed up.”

  So why is it now the spoonerism rather than the gowerism or the marrowsky? One difference is that the medical students and the count were deliberately playing games with language, while Spooner’s isms were, in myth and in reality, accidental. Unintended slips of the tongue are funny in a different way, suggesting a cheering, if fanciful, way of looking at the man. If Dr. Spooner is not to be remembered for his scholarship or his guardianship of New College, then, rather than as an embarrassment, we should think of him as the embodiment of the unconscious bleeding out into the social—a subversive figure who reveals what can happen when language breaks down.

  It is not just the Brits who are taken with spoonerisms; a more intellectual approach is taken by the French with what they call the contrepet. The early French surrealists deliberately switched syllables in their prose to attack the idea that words and sentences have fixed meanings. Marcel Duchamp’s “Esquivons les ecchymoses des Esquimaux aux mots exquis” has a surface meaning of sorts (“Let’s dodge the bruising of Eskimos with exquisite words”), but its real intent is to force the reader to make fleeting connections that would otherwise seem irrational between Eskimos and language, language and the body, the body and Eskimos . . . and so on. Once you unshackle sounds from their apparent meaning, your mind is better able to question the so-called order of the world around you, which, in the experience of the surrealists, had just proved its own nonsensicality in four years of world war. Being French, they also found wordplay très amusant.

  The descendants of the surrealists, the experimental writers of Oulipo (the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature), were equally fond of the device. Luc Étienne’s book The Art of the Spoonerism, recalled that, during the Occupation, Parisians “took a special pleasure in seeing under Métropolitain in their sad underground stations the sacrilegious inscription ‘Pétain mollit trop’”—“Pétain is getting too soft.” For Étienne, this is as good an example as any of the subversive potential of the spoonerism: “a weapon of f
reedom.”

  The memoirs of Resistance secret agent Colonel Rémy take a similar joy in recalling how he arranged for the “prudish” BBC to broadcast French-language radio messages across the Channel, unaware that they contained scurrilous spoonerisms to cheer up the occupied, such as “Duce, tes gladiateurs circulent dans le sang!” The Beeb “would have shuddered at the mere thought of its airwaves being used to disseminate such imagery.” It’s safe to say that, in the 1940s, the BBC had never broadcast anything quite as rude. I would advise the sensitive francophone reader to skip to the next paragraph; for the rest of you, the phrase can be translated as “Mussolini, your gladiators are bloodstained,” but also despoonerized to “Duce, tes gladiateurs s’enculent dans le cirque” (“your gladiators fuck one another in the circus”), a salty allusion to the decadent days of Rome.

  In linguistics, too, the spoonerism is more than a passing slip of the tongue. Even though they’re emitted in error, reported spoonerisms share many characteristics; they even seem to have a structure. The affected words are always close together, and one of the affected syllables is the one that would be stressed in the correct version of the utterance. More often than not, the swap involves an adjective and a noun; more often than by chance, the spoonerized phrase consists of two real words, however nonsensical they are in context. And when the spoonerized words are not real words, they usually sound as if they could be.

  Crossword fans are used to the experience of being baffled by a clue but knowing some of the letters in an answer thanks to those that cross with it. If you think that the answer is a word you haven’t heard before, it’s a question of making up words in your head that fit. You concoct something plausibly pronounceable that sounds like other words—which seems to be the kind of thing that’s taking place at great speed in spoonerisms. A spoonerized phrase might lack literal meaning, but it’s never rhythmically clumsy: There’s poetry in the poppycock. You might find that you’ve said the phrase “a picky truzzle” but not “a wosscrurd”: Even your errors are made up of words that are real, or could be in your language.

  That’s why the best-loved spoonerisms are those that work just as well as the intended phrase, and why the spoonerism lives on in humor and in puzzles. The long-running British sketch show The Two Ronnies repeatedly exploited its scurrilous potential, producing lines such as “The rutting season for tea cozies” and “You’re much too titty to be a preacher,” just as Dr. Spooner’s students did two generations earlier.

  In the crossword century, constructors were not slow to pick up on the potential for puzzles in spoonerisms, and solvers are nowadays asked to come up with spoonerized phrases and reverse engineer the answer. One of the creators of the cryptic crossword, the poet and translator Edward Powys Mathers, gave a section in his 1934 collection The Torquemada Puzzle Book to challenges of the type: “When spoonerized, what aid to illumination suggests a slim sorceress?” (LIGHTSWITCH via “slight witch”).

  The puzzle magazine The Enigma used to run a form of puzzle that it called a spoonergram, where you replace the capitalized words in a piece of (slightly dodgy) verse with two phrases, one of which is a spoonerism of the other:

  (4 5; 4 5)

  His pretty love was young, petite.

  Her FIRST adorned by silken bow;

  They shared Sauternes, their joy complete;

  Their kisses had a LAST, you know.

  That’s TINYWAIST and WINYTASTE. Nowadays, a devoted solver of British cryptics expects to find about one spoonerism a week, tackling clues like:

  An insect to flit past, according to Spooner (9)

  Spooner’s “you’re such a gorgeous pipistrelle”—no charge? (4, 7)

  The answers are BUTTERFLY (via “flutter by,” by Don Manley) and FLATBATTERY (via “bat flattery,” by Paul). And the same kind of thing comes up in American puzzles: The New York Times has offered “Old comic actor’s Little Bighorn headline?,” “Controls a prison guard like a pop singer?,” and “Writer-turned-Utah carpenter?,” for BUSTERKEATON (“Custer beaten”), JAMESTAYLOR (“tames jailer”) and NORMANMAILER (“Mormon nailer”).

  Such American spoonerisms cannot be filed merely under oddities or gags: The spoonerism played an important part in the humans-versus-machines battle at the 1999 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. That year, spoonerisms such as “May I sew you to a sheet” (another one attributed to Dr. Spooner) were the reason that a nonhuman entrant, the computer program Proverb, slipped down the rankings—spoonerisms made a lot more sense to flesh-and-blood contestants, a difference we will return to later in the book.

  (So if the American puzzle may include the occasional spoonerism or cryptic definition, the British crossword is perhaps best understood as a form where that kind of wordplay takes place, unflagged, in every clue. Tempted? You are in good company . . .)

  WHO WROTE WORDS FOR SHARKS TO SING?

  SONDHEIM

  Stephen Sondheim, British crosswording ambassador

  During the writing of West Side Story in the midfifties, there was a predictable weekly drop in the productivity of lyricist Stephen Sondheim and composer Leonard Bernstein.

  Sondheim had a habit of picking up a copy of a British weekly magazine called The Listener every Thursday on his way to meet his colleague. He bought it for the crossword. “I got Leonard Bernstein hooked,” he remembered. “Thursday afternoons, no work got done on West Side Story. We were doing the puzzle.”

  The pair would also race each other to do anagrams—and the winner was always the lyricist, a man so enamored of wordplay that, one biographer claims, he submitted a crossword puzzle to The New York Times at the age of fourteen. Sadly for the crossover between musical theater and wordplay, the puzzle was unpublished and no copy is known to exist now.

  The injustice was rectified in 1968, when New York magazine published a series of cryptic puzzles constructed by Sondheim. He introduced the first with an essay provocatively titled “How to Do a Real Crossword Puzzle, Or What’s a Four-letter Word for ‘East Indian Betel Nut’ and Who Cares?”

  Sondheim makes the case that cryptic crosswords are more satisfying than those with a higher proportion of definitional clues, writing fondly of the cryptic’s demand that the solver follow the train of thought of a “devious mind,” invidiously compared to the encyclopedic memory demanded by regular puzzles. Sondheim grants that the conventions of the British puzzle take a little getting used to; all it takes, he reassures, “is inexhaustible patience.”

  And then there are his puzzles, modeled on those he and Bernstein had enjoyed so much in The Listener. These are as enjoyable examples as any of the eye-wateringly arcane “advanced cryptic.”

  Arcane? Advanced? Indeed. The Listener was a magazine founded by the BBC in 1929: No mere listings rag, it had the mission of providing easy access to highbrow, often modernist, ideas. Contributors were to include Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and an eighteen-year-old Philip Larkin.

  Its first puzzle appeared on April 2, 1930, offering as a prize “an invitation to visit the B.B.C. Studios on certain afternoons.” Only one correct solution was received, from a Mr. I. Cresswell of Colchester; some later puzzles would receive none. But it is much loved: The puzzle moved to the London Times when The Listener folded in 1991; six years later, when The Times wondered about devoting valuable space to a relatively niche feature, its future was discussed in Parliament and, happily, the strange crossword survives into the millennium.

  Not only is its language abstruse—solvers are recommended to have at hand a copy of the capacious Chambers Dictionary, which contains many words once used by some poet or other and since forgotten—but the solving of the clues is only the beginning. It is the only crossword that has required solvers to cut the completed grid into an origami wren, an advent calendar, or a snowflake—and those are just three examples from its Christmassy themes. Other themes are less physical but no less involving.

 
; “Be prepared,” warned Sondheim, “for odd shapes, sizes and problems.” And while his own Listener-style puzzles cannot be faulted on the grounds of wit, ingenuity, or addictiveness, they were a big ask.

  To introduce newcomers to the delights of the British cryptic with Listener-style puzzles is a little like persuading people to take a pleasurable healthy stroll on the weekends by dropping them blindfolded into the Borneo jungle equipped with a butter knife for hacking through the undergrowth. But you can’t blame Sondheim for trying.

  (If you remain tempted, the nuts and bolts of the more straightforward British cryptic follow. Soon, “Poetical scene with surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating [3, 3, 8, 12]” will yield its secret . . .)

  PASTIME THAT BRITS KEEP SECRET?

  CRYPTIC

  A rudimentary tool kit for solving British puzzles

  The relentlessly inventive constructor Brendan Emmett Quigley told The New York Times in 2013 of his predilection for cryptic crosswords. Not only do cryptics dominate his solving time, he said, they also have made his construction more playful:

  The cryptic bug has forced me to anagram words I would normally never have bothered to anagram, look for words contained in other words, even notice words running backward.

  There’s still another reason for trying out the strange British form. I maintain that cryptic crosswords are easier than their definitional cousins—and I maintain that in the face of goggle-eyed skepticism from those who have seen those odd phrases that don’t appear to have anything to do with what anyone might reasonably pencil into their grids.