‘Last week I got emphysema,’ said the schoolgirl, ‘followed by eczema and then psoriasis. After that, my teacher gave me antihistamines on top of hypodermics, which didn’t really help because a few minutes later I ended up with anaphylaxis. I swear—that was the toughest spelling bee ever.’
Gotcha. That’s the game jokes play, spinning a story to aim your focus one way, only for the punchline to subvert your perspective. Rather than ailing, the kid is spelling. Your relief prompts a laugh. In one phrase, reality flips, and your brain adjusts, plus or minus a smile.
That adjustment, that chuckle, is fundamental to this next chapter, where we gauge the effect humour has on our thinking, and how cryptic language can invert reality, and flip-flop outlooks with the best jokes in the playbook. The key to so many wisecracks, or cryptic clues, can be summarised by Mark Twain: ‘Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.’
Fresh links amuse the mind. Outsiders neglect that aspect when trying to grasp crosswords’ appeal. They assume the attraction is solely aha, and never haha. Yet both matter—both reward the solver with the endorphin-rich joy of discovery.
Similar to jokes, the best clues conjure a scene in the mind. Here’s a picture painted by Picaroon in The Guardian:
Fling with hunk is wild fantasy (7,8)
A solver may turn fifty shades of red, imagining rolling in the hay with their Fabio of choice, taking long walks on the beach. Yet this clue delivers a double happiness: the smile sparked by imagining this scene with the cognitive buzz of a breakthrough. Make flingwithhunkis go wild—as the wordplay is telling us—to spell WISHFUL THINKING, or fantasy.
PUNNET OF AMERICAN PUN-CLUES
The best US crosswords dabble in daffy definitions, where a word like NEIGH isn’t just an equine utterance, but a ‘Trigger warning?’ (according to ace setter, Patrick Berry). How many puns can you undo below? The letter count and initial/s below will help.
1. Fleet runner? (7–A)
2. Old timer? (9–H)
3. Housecoat? (5–P)
4. Academic hanger-on? (6–T)
5. Losing proposition? (4–D)
6. One getting hit on at a party? (6–P)
7. Turning point? (3-2,4–UBD)
8. Where leopards are spotted? (6–S)
9. Nice one! (3–U)
10. Series with many numbers? (4–G)
ANSWERS:
1. admiral, 2. hourglass, 3. paint, 4. tassel, 5. diet, 6. piñata, 7. use-by date, 8. safari, 9. une, 10. Glee
We’ll talk more about anagram recipes in the next section. For now this wild hunk is just a glimpse, to show how nimbly clues can jump from one train of thought to another, just as jokes can, warping the language’s intent. There’s one big difference, though: namely, jokes depend on a passive audience, while clues enlist your brain as accomplice.
To prove my point, let’s meet a professor of English. The gentleman enters a pet shop, carrying a caged parrot. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘but I need to return this bird as it uses improper language.’
The owner is surprised, since the parrot was in the shop for months and never once swore.
‘Oh that’s not it,’ said the professor. ‘Yesterday, the animal split an infinitive.’
Boom-tish—and you didn’t have to flex a muscle or fire a neuron. Or maybe your brain tried to second-guess the punchline, putting the cells to greater work. All the hints were there, like Chekhov’s pistol: why bother to specify the professor’s field of study if that detail didn’t pay off? Like anyone would, you probably assumed the parrot was a potty-mouth, the trope of countless jokes, and when that assumption collapses your surprise delivers the smile.
Psychologists call this incongruity, where an unseen outcome supplants the expected version. Whether the switch is passive (as in jokes) or active (as in Picaroon’s fling), the promise of amusement is in the contract. Because laughter matters. For each guffaw, each titter and snicker, the cortex is awash with electric waves that have long fascinated neuroscientists.
When we laugh, the brain connects across the hemispheres. Even the amygdala, the temporal nub governing emotion, is swept into the hilarity. That’s the peculiar bliss of laughter—the appeal of pealing if you like: as soon as we forfeit control, yielding to a mix of spasm and vocalisation, our brains sparkle from stem to stern.
Thanks to EEG recordings of a brain during laughter we know the anterior cingulate is prone to flare, that C-shaped network of neurons in the cortex’s understorey, just millimetres above the right eye. This brain segment relates to reward and impulse, where the listener—or solver—sees the light.
Dr Dean Shibata, a professor in neuroradiology at the University of Washington, labels this internal lobe the brain’s funny bone. When it ignites, the brain delights. When in stitches, the volunteers’ adrenaline also abates, as well as their cortisol and norepinephrine, the fight-or-flight cocktail. Finally, a wicked giggle boosts endorphins, the natural joy drug in our central nervous system. All this confirms the platitude that laughter is medicinal.
This is cheering news, until you learn we laugh a modest fifteen to seventeen times a day, less than once an hour, according to a 1999 study conducted by two Ontario academics, Rod Martin and Nicholas Kuiper. So why so seldom? Since when did life get so solemn? And it needn’t be the case, when you realise a cryptic clue can provoke more than a few grins. Going one better, a switcheroo clue can also reduce the animosity in your life. If you think I’m joking, read on.
Having words
He and I get into such rows! (8,5)
I love this clue, which hails from The Times, back in 2015. It makes me happy just to relive it—the deception so neat and solution so sweet that my brain smiles. Furthermore, it’s a rare formula: the clue marries wordplay and definition into one happy union, despite the rancorous story it tells.
But before we solve this deception, let’s explore a more surprising by-product of crossword solving, a dimension relating to rowing of the hostile kind, just as the clue suggests.
Harvard psychologist Christine Hooker supervised a study in 2010 to examine how couples resolve their differences. To qualify, couples needed to be in a relationship for longer than three months. Hooker then asked each person within the couple to keep an online journal over three weeks, recording any disagreements each participant had experienced with their partner.
This data was then measured against a lab test involving an fMRI reading and a string of photos. Each person in turn was shown pictures of their partner’s face expressing a range of emotions, from happy to angry to neutral. The fMRI scanner registered the mental response the observers attached to each image. Across the cohort, male and female, the people to exhibit better emotional control were those whose brains showed stronger activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex.
As mentioned, this chamber is deemed the prime adjuster of our social behaviour. The same precinct is also vital to puzzle-solving, separating good from bad, as well as the knack of decision-making. Speaking to The Telegraph, Hooker went on to add, ‘People who had a high lateral prefrontal cortex activity felt better [in the tests], and the people who had low activity continued to feel badly.’
WORDWIT
When I was young there were only 25 letters in the alphabet. Nobody knew why.
Never leave alphabet soup on the stove and then go out. It could spell disaster.
A teacher was telling her class about pronouns. She pointed to one boy, asking if he could give two examples. ‘Who, me?’
I stayed up all night, trying to work out where the sun went. And then it dawned on me.
Twelve vowels, 23 consonants, a comma and a full-stop appeared in court. They are due to be sentenced next week.
Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They drink. They leave.
People who can’t distinguish between etymology and entomology bug me in ways I cannot put into words.
Strange as it seems, partners who exercised their lateral prefrontal cortex more often had less capacity to harbour negative emotions. Such exercise included a regular dose of crossword-grappling, as Hooker’s research found, whether the puzzles were attempted solo or as a pair. Testing your brain with twisted words, the study suggested, can readily lessen the chance of barbed words cutting too deeply. If your frontal lobe is habitually busy, then it’s equally quick to process anger and disappointment, ensuring rows don’t overstay their welcome. A crossword a day, you could say, keeps the animosity at bay. Or, resorting to the bumper sticker version: WORDS IN A ROW FORGIVE WORDS IN A ROW.
Which leads us back to that Times clue, the kind a couple might solve together and in so doing keep their rows to a minimum:
He and I get into such rows! (8,5)
The soap-opera scene is set: he yells at her (or him), just as the writer (I) bellows back. But stop. Remember the parrot who didn’t swear and the schoolgirl who itched to spell ‘psoriasis’. Go below the clue’s surface and you’ll find the punchline awaits. Because if you think the topic is a tiff, you’ve slipped. That’s how the ‘joke’ is presenting, which should make you leery. Don’t fall for the clue’s misdirection—instead aim your focus another way, and soon the humour will dawn on you.
He is not a man, but He the noble gas that is Helium. And I is not the author, but Iodine, the stuff of antiseptics, possibly dabbed on psoriasis. As it happens, both pronouns are also chemical symbols, which align into atomic (not kitchen-sink) rows that comprise the PERIODIC TABLE. The gag, the laugh and the quarrel-easing pleasure is elementary.
Aaaah
Beyond a laugh, beyond a grudge repellent, a good puzzle also offers cranial pleasure for the solver, or a pair of solvers. Readers of Puzzled, one of my earlier books, may recall an email that served as proof of the erotic element to puzzling. The message came from someone known only as Alamala, who wrote to Radio National on hearing my broadcast about puzzle-making:
I am one of a couple of cruciverbalists—that’s couple, as in two people, who snuggle up together over cryptic crosswords. We’re evenly matched and complementary in that we have different areas of specialist interest. The satisfaction of this shared and cooperative intellectual activity brings us closer and excites our bodies via our minds. Usually we manage to finish at one go, but sometimes pen and puzzle are set aside for a more urgent activity …
The jury has spoken. Cranial pleasure can invite the carnal too, with crosswords ticking three boxes in one—the aha, the haha and the aaaah as well.
Exhibit B for such a claim is a query from a Herald reader called Alice Cairns: ‘I’m looking for a word which names the joy you feel when discovering that the answer you’ve managed to derive from the clue is in fact correct, albeit a word you’ve never heard of. Is there such a word?’ The obvious suspect is serendipity, the act of discovery via happy accident. But that wasn’t quite right.
I looked to German as a likely saviour, just as Sprachgefühl had furnished the language gap in the previous chapter. Salvation however came in the shape of phony German, more specifically a glossary compiled by English humorist Ben Schott by the name of Schottenfreude: German words for the human condition. This bogus A–Z includes such gems as Einsiedelei (the melancholy of cooking for one) and Ringrichterscham (embarrassment at being present when a couple argue). Between both terms lay Irrleuchtung: the surge of pleasure you experience as you solve a crossword clue. Was this the answer English lacked?
In the end I turned to social media, sharing Alice’s question to the Twittersphere, causing an avalanche of replies. It’s safe to say that every solver knows this unique brand of happiness, just as every solver has their own label for the sensation. Suggestions ranged from ‘logofelicity’ to ‘smilitude’. Others plumped for ‘crossguessing’ or ‘fulfillment’, or, the more ersatz German of Vermutenfreude (suspicion-joy). But the showstopper came from an ex-journo called Zena Yeoh Armstrong, her tweet ending all arguments: ‘The word you want is orguessm. I experience this feeling at least once every Friday.’
Eureka. The puzzle was solved. The brain could relax, or the body shake in laughter, as crosswords once more delivered their signature magic: aha, haha, aaaah.
