The Crossword Century Read online

  The reason is this: A cryptic clue typically gives you two routes to the answer. Consider a noncryptic clue like “Disposition (6).” This could be answered by LAYOUT, or MAKEUP, or TEMPER, and there’s no way of knowing which the constructor has in mind until you get some letters from another clue—which will itself be subject to the same holdups.

  Now imagine that it’s a cryptic crossword and that same entry is clued with what is known as a double definition: a clue in two handy, interconnecting parts. Let’s say “Kind disposition (6),” from the constructor known as Rufus.

  There’s only one word that fits both halves of the clue once you think of “kind” not as in tenderhearted but as in “What kind of man is this?” and “disposition” straightforwardly, as in “an unfriendly disposition.”

  So you can write in NATURE without worrying about whether it fits with the other clues—although it would be a shame not to linger for a moment on the pleasing surface reading: the welcome sight of someone who is going to be nice to you. And this is pretty much as short as cryptic clues get: As you’ll see, longer ones start to tell miniature stories, or present you with endearingly daffy imagery.

  More importantly, you don’t have to worry as much about the grid: You have a sense when you’ve cracked each clue, without having to see whether the option you’ve chosen is going to mess up the interlocking entries. In a cryptic, each clue is a miniature puzzle in itself.

  This was the goal of those eccentrics who developed the cryptic form in the Britain of the 1930s. As we saw earlier, the posher British newspapers had waged a campaign against the crossword when it arrived from America; when they performed an about-face, they at least had the decency to come up with something a little different to print in their pages.

  Happily, they were able to call on the services of people like Edward Powys Mathers (1892–1939), a poet and translator who liked crosswords well enough but worried that they were too repetitive “to hold for long the attention of anyone concerned with and interested in words.” (He chose the name of the Spanish Grand Inquisitor Torquemada as his nom de guerre, and as we’ll see, most British constructors operate under mysterious pseudonyms.)

  Hence clues like the spoonerism, and indeed the double definition: There is a pleasure in seeing how two bits of language with apparently unconnected senses can each lead entirely fairly to the answer.

  If you can see how “Quits flat” works, you’ve got the hang of the double definition. Two more:

  Boat put in water (6)

  Very exciting, filthy habit (4-6)

  From the constructor known as Virgilius, the first is LAUNCH (a noun and then a verb); the second, by Paul, is NAILBITING (adjective, then noun).

  The next weapon in your tool kit is the cryptic definition. In a typical cryptic clue, you find a definition of the answer at the beginning or the end of the clue; here you get another one making up the rest, like in the double definitions above—but things are a little more playful. These are kindred spirits to the clues in American puzzles that end with a question mark and suggest something allusive is going on.

  So, in “Savagely competitive boxer getting to do more than bite his opponent? (3-3-3),” the first two words are the definition of DOGEATDOG and the rest is a more picturesque route to the same destination. The fact that you will inevitably read “boxer” as a sportsman rather than a canine and spend some time thinking about Evander Holyfield’s pinna in Mike Tyson’s buccal cavity is part of the fun.

  Here is another couple. If they don’t yield, having a look at the answer and working backward is just as good a way of grasping how it all works.

  Remember Pooh’s imaginary? (4,2,4)

  Unfathomable, not like A Midsummer Night’s Dream (10)

  So these are BEARINMIND, by Orlando, and BOTTOMLESS from the London Times, the constructors for which are anonymous.

  Most often, the definition part of the clue is coupled with something that asks you to move letters around to find the answer, often an anagram. In such clues, you are given—though it is not obvious which is which—a definition of the answer, an indication that you should be jumbling some letters, and precisely those letters that need jumbling.

  That indication could be anything that suggests change: movement, disorder, or even drunkenness. So in Notabilis’s clue “President’s unexpected vote loser (9),” “unexpected” tells you to scramble “vote loser” for President ROOSEVELT.

  More anagrams:

  Strange I should tan poorly (10)

  Demand to rewrite scenes in it (10)

  The first, by Puck, is an anagram (“poorly”) of “I should tan”: OUTLANDISH. The second, by Mudd, is an anagram (“to rewrite”) of “scenes in it”: INSISTENCE. Not too fiendish, are they?

  Even less Mephistophelian is the hidden answer. Here, again, there’s a definition at either the beginning or the end of the clue; the rest is made up of a string of words that contain the answer and a hint that this is what’s going on.

  The pleasure here is in noticing that the answer has been in front of you the whole time, hiding in plain sight. So in the London Times’s “Some forget to get here for gathering (3-8),” you’re being asked to take “some” of the letters of “forget to get here” for GETTOGETHER.

  What’s in Latin sign, if I can translate, is of no importance (13)

  As seen in jab, reach of pro miserably failing to meet expectations? (6,2,7)

  The first, by Brian Greer, is INSIGNIFICANT; the second is from the London Times: BREACHOFPROMISE.

  As the pioneering cryptic constructor Afrit wrote, the clue that hides the answer “may be flagrantly misleading, but the solver cannot complain, because there the solution is, staring him in the face.” Harsh, but fair.

  You’re ready now for the information that the hidden word might go backward, like in this clue from The Sunday Telegraph: “Cooking equipment taken back from heiress I tormented (10).” Same principle, but “taken back from” means we read some of the letters of “heiress I tormented” in reverse order for ROTISSERIE.

  I am not going to pretend every clue contains each of the letters of the answer. No, other times, you’re asked to come up with one word and then write that one backward: the reversal. Here you find a definition of the answer; as you must be expecting by now, a hint to another word; and an instruction to write that one backward to find the answer a second time.

  So it is in this clue, from a qualifying puzzle for the London Times’s crossword championship: “Grass one should put back, and maybe does (4).” Here, you use “Grass” to summon up the word REED and write it backward for the answer DEER, noticing in passing that “does” is one of those words whose relevant sense is not always immediately apparent.

  And again:

  A delay held back a sporting event (4)

  Advanced from the right with others (2,2)

  The first clue is Jed’s: You put back “a lag” for GALA. The second is from the London Times: “late,” spelled from right to left, gives you ET AL.

  Other times, these words you come up with are written in the normal direction, but there are more than one of them, in a kind of clue known by aficionados as a charade, after a tiresome parlor game that need not detain us.

  So when Quixote asks for “Student seen as ‘home bird’ (6),” he wants you to take a word for being “home” (in, as in “I stayed in all evening”) and combine it with a kind of “bird” (the tern) to make up a student: INTERN.

  A couple of other clues that are just one thing after another:

  Players below par no longer wanted (4-3)

  Carol thus delivered girls’ beach wear (10)

  The players on a stage plus something that’s a bit “off” give us CASTOFF in the first, from Orlando; the other, by Paul, asks you to combine SUNG and LASSES for SUNGLASSES. In a variant of this type of clue, you might be asked to put one of
the words inside the other—same principle.

  Right, two more devices and you should be ready to solve. Clues that use soundalikes give you a definition at one end or the other, plus a word or phrase and a suggestion that you conjure up another word or phrase that sounds the same. “Excited as Oscar’s announced (4),” from The Sunday Telegraph, for instance, asks you to think of a well-known playwright called Oscar and then write in the synonym for “excited” that sounds the same: WILD. The hint that there’s a homophone can be anything that involves speaking or hearing:

  Musical work that’s melodious to the ear (5)

  Mentioned pet getting soft drinks (5)

  So that’s SUITE (which Chifonie says sounds like “sweet”) and COKES (“coax,” according to The Sunday Times).

  Finally, a form of wordplay that, we will recall, goes back to ancient prophecies scribbled on leaves. Yes, it’s the acrostic, in which you take the initial letters of a run of words in the clue to match the definition. In Orlando’s “Black and white lamb starts to cry (4),” you need the “starts” of “Black and white lamb” for a synonym of “cry,” BAWL.

  Likewise:

  Does he lead prayer for openers? Is Mohammed a Muslim? (4)

  Natty, elegant and trim, primarily (4)

  The first is by Bunthorne and gives us IMAM; the second is by Viking and gives us NEAT.

  But where, the more diligent reader might be wondering, is the definition in the clue for NEAT? Once you remove the wordplay (“Natty, elegant and trim, primarily”), all you’re left with is a little number four in brackets. But at the same time, that wordplay is in itself a fair definition of NEAT. Very occasionally, the cryptic solver comes across an all-in-one clue like this. One that uses the “hidden answer” device, by Mudd, is “Some hitman in Japan? (5),” where you take “some” of “hitman in Japan” for NINJA.

  Our last examples, both anagrams:

  Royal at one time—aren’t I spoiled! (5,10)

  Punctuation mark perhaps too freely used (10)

  A pithy description from Paul of MARIEANTOINETTE and a mild admonition from Rufus about the misplaced APOSTROPHE.

  That’s it. You’re a solver. Go and buy a newspaper or spark up your web browser. Most of the clues in its puzzle should yield once you’ve set about them with the tools given above in some combination or other, twisted to produce surface readings in each clue that point you in the wrong direction. Your job is to enjoy—perhaps with a friend or relative—puzzling out what’s really being said. You now know everything the constructor does.

  And as for that “Poetical scene with surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating (3, 3, 8, 12)”—a little cultural knowledge is needed for this one. Lord Archer is a British politician accused by a newspaper of having had sex with a prostitute. He won substantial damages, but suspicions lingered, made worse by his party’s campaigning for Victorian-style family values. He and his wife live in a building called the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, which further upset his critics because it is the former home of Rupert Brooke, whose much-loved poem of the same name is a nostalgic, patriotic favorite. Just when Archer’s rise seemed unstoppable, he was found to have lied in court about the prostitution business, was banished from public life, and went home to lick his wounds.

  And so when the retired churchman John Graham, better known as the constructor Araucaria, wrote the clue “Poetical scene with surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating (3, 3, 8, 12)”—a lovely long anagram of THEOLDVICARAGEGRANTCHESTER—solvers found their pent-up indignation regarding Archer expressed with wit and economy in an ingenious and memorable eight-word rebuke.

  Such specific knowledge is rarely necessary to solve a British cryptic; still, since British cultural references may well be too much to take on in combination with a new kind of puzzle, American solvers are better advised to seek out the cryptics in The Wall Street Journal (on Saturdays), The New York Times (every few Sundays), and consistently in The Nation, which is even known to be bought reluctantly by conservative solvers who come for the puzzle and avert their eyes from the politics.

  (And if you haven’t scurried away in search of a cryptic—or if you’ve just returned from a successful solve—we move now from Across to Down. What happens to crossword puzzles when they are released into the world . . . ?)

  PART TWO

  * * *

  DOWN

  CHEATING—VOTING TWICE?

  DOUBLE-CROSSING

  What constitutes cheating in crosswords?

  In the Friends episode “The One with the Dirty Girl,” Rachel announces that she really wants to finish a crossword entirely by herself. But she is later heard suggesting to Chandler a trip to see a musical—specifically, and, more to the point, suspiciously, the 1996 Tony Award winner. She adds innocently that she is sure it must be good and casually asks if Chandler happens to know its name. (Spoiler alert: Rachel eventually completes the puzzle.)

  Was Rachel cheating? The only real answer: That is entirely a matter for her own judgment.

  There’s a sliding scale from sinlessness to sinfulness when it comes to filling a grid. The purest solve involves nothing more than the newspaper, a pen or pencil, and a solitary solver. It’s one-on-one combat, unarmed. No reference books, no phone-a-friend, and certainly no Internet. Anything that deviates in the merest morsel from this monastic model is, for some, cheating.

  Outside of competitive solving, which we will examine below, crosswords aren’t issued with terms of engagement. There’re no Marquess of Queensberry rules for wordplay. By definition, you can’t cheat when there are no rules, but most solvers have a sense—perhaps not articulated but running deep within them—of what is Acceptable and what is Unacceptable when they sit down and peer at 1 across.

  These boundaries of fair play vary, as do the settings in which solvers solve. Some approach puzzles in pairs, as is their right, and even if you’re going it alone, you may or may not choose to make judicious calls on those around you. Rachel initially plans to solve without that help but shifts the rules as the solve reveals itself to be more challenging.

  That kind of moral mission drift is familiar and can take place in the course of a single puzzle. If you were to respond to the very first clue you looked at by pulling Roget’s Thesaurus from the bookshelf, an onlooker would be entirely justified in asking what exactly was the point of the exercise and whether you had the slightest grasp of what the pleasure of the puzzle is supposed to be.

  When it comes to the endgame, by contrast, you might be looking at a grid with a dusting of unfilled squares and a couple of clues that stubbornly refuse to budge. Then it’s decision time. If you’ve set yourself, explicitly or otherwise, the challenge of completing the puzzle using your brain alone, then you must gather your strength and return to rereading every word of the clue, saying aloud the letters provided by the others to try and elicit a plausible answer, paying no heed the concerns of those around you, listening to your apparently deranged mumbling.

  But then again—again—nobody has imposed those boundaries on you, and you may prefer to use an external source to find some synonyms, finish the exercise, and get on with the rest of your life, or get off the bus before you miss your stop.

  The rules may change over a lifetime of solving, too. An experienced solver expects most of the action to take place in his or her head. For a beginner, it’s game on by any means necessary. Yes, the constructor is aiming to lose gracefully and intends you to decrypt every clue. But that doesn’t mean that the crossword should simply crumble before the novice. There has to be a degree of bloodshed.

  To tackle a crossword is to enjoy the experience of your brain pulling on many different areas simultaneously, working in a way that everyday life rarely calls for. It is also a matter of conventions: of coming to know those words that, as we saw earlier, appear more often in puzzles than in real life. Until recently, the best way for beginners to u
nderstand the clues that defeated them was to buy the following day’s edition of the paper and look at the answers; today, the paper’s website may offer a cheat button for individual clues or the whole solution on the day of publication.

  It may be educative, but the key thing is not to say, “Oh yes, it was WEBPAGES,” but instead to take the time to see how “Safari sights” cunningly put the name of the web browser at the beginning of the clue to disguise its capital S and to make a note to look out for that trick the next time you encounter it. This is not just about the moment of revelation: It is about the future of your solving soul. As each such device becomes clearer to you, your pleasure in future puzzles will multiply. If you remain baffled, most crosswords have dedicated blogs where other solvers parse each answer, so enlightenment is never that far away.

  Now, what if you have never heard of the word that you missed? Well, you look it up. But what if you haven’t admitted defeat, not quite yet? You have a guess, you feel confident it fits the clue and the crossing letters, but you have no way of knowing for sure—is it OK to consult a dictionary at this point?

  Once more, it depends who you ask.

  Some see the looking up of words as laudable and a sign that the solver is increasing his or her word power—and, after all, some newspapers give dictionaries as prizes for solving, and they can hardly expect solvers not to use them. Others regard a trip to the reference shelves as a sign of the coming apocalypse—and they took that view even when dictionaries were all made of paper and required a little donkeywork to obtain the answer.

  Nowadays, the nearest dictionary might be online or on a smartphone, in which case it may offer help of a kind way beyond the powers of a traditional reference work. With the bound, paper variety of dictionary, you need at least to be able to guess how a word begins in order to look it up and see if it’s right; a digital source that allows you to use wildcards lets you type in ?H?R?A?A? and confirms in seconds that you are a CHARLATAN.