How to vex, rile, gall, or miff the solver
Here are some clues from the crossword in the National Enquirer . . .
“Five-headed cow born in Vermont”
“State with the most UFO babies”
“Aphrodisiac found in every kitchen cabinet”
“Where Franco’s brain is being kept alive”
—according, that is, to the sitcom Cheers. The answers are MAYBELLE, ARKANSAS, OREGANO, and FISHTANK—dubious to you perhaps, but perfectly sound in the opinion of dedicated solver Carla Tortelli.
Margaret Farrar, the mother of the modern crossword, recalled a letter she had received from an eight-year-old boy who saw that while WOODENLEG would fit the squares in a puzzle she had edited, the answer should be IVORYLEG—since the leg in question was Captain Ahab’s and he had read the book. “Perfectly true,” she reflected, “but I couldn’t help wondering, rather testily, what an eight-year-old was doing reading Moby-Dick.”
Since the creators of crosswords are in the business of testing solvers on what they do or do not know, it is quite understandable that some of those solvers relish the opportunity to tell the teacher that his or her facts are wrong. “Frogs hop, Sir,” one correspondent informed Will Shortz politely but firmly, “but toads do not. They waddle.”
Solvers are, of course, supposed to be frustrated, but only in certain ways. The best fictional depiction of the wrong way comes in the very first episode of The West Wing. Our introduction to White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry is an exasperated phone call he makes to the crossword editor of The New York Times about 17 across. “Khaddafi,” he insists, “is spelled with an H and two Ds, and isn’t a seven-letter word for anything.”
Leo claims to be just an everyday solver, but lets slip that he should know the correct spelling of the name of the Libyan leader because he has proposed a “preemptive Exocet missile attack against his air force.”
It’s a cracking subplot, but of course there is no “right” way of spelling—or rather transliterating—the name of the former Libyan leader whose name was made of a qaf, two dhals, a fa, and a yaa; more to the point, the clue would not have appeared in this way. Real-life New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz told me that while the spelling in clues follows New York Times house style—in this case “Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi”—the answer grids are different, where, he wrote in an e-mail:
... any legitimate spelling is fair game. So in a crossword clue, I would always use “Qaddafi.” In a grid, GADDAFI would be acceptable (although the clue would probably include the tag “var.” in fairness to solvers).
Puzzles also need to ensure they are not being too hard—or too easy—depending on which day of the week it is. Nothing too taxing on a Monday, please—we’re just getting going, and besides, there are beginners here. But don’t you dare patronize me on a Sunday, when I’ve put some time aside and expect a full workout. (In 1985, The Guardian received a letter from a solver unhappy at the “smart-arse, egg-head stunt” of printing themed puzzles on a weekday: “Number 17,164 introduces a Disney connection—on a Tuesday! Play the game, sir.”)
Gauging the difficulty of a puzzle is not as simple as it might appear—ponder for a while whether you can guess what proportion of the population has access to any given item from the sum of human knowledge, and you may find that you regard puzzle editors with an increased respect, or perhaps pity.
Even stickier is the question of what solvers will find acceptable when it comes to good taste.
When Denise Sutherland’s book Solving Cryptic Crosswords For Dummies was being prepared for the American market, the relatively innocuous clues “Five engaged in awkward caresses lead to rifts (9)” and “Jenny and I go, mischievously loving (8)” were changed to “Eve’s ugly scars cause rifts (9)” and “Appreciating Jenny, I go nuts (8).” (The answers in each case are CREVASSES and ENJOYING.)
The American puzzle, it seems, is not a place for too much raunch. Even the puzzle that is in its proper place has to tread carefully. Margaret Farrar told the sixteen-year-old would-be constructor Merl Reagle that “crosswords are entertainment,” advising him to avoid “things like death, disease, war and taxes—the subway solver gets enough of that in the rest of the paper.”
She might well have added to that list bodily functions. In 2006, The New York Times had a clue that read:
Scoundrel
Seven letters, and the answer is SCUMBAG. No problem. Except that it was a big problem, and there were complaints from members of the newspaper staff as well as from readers. It’s not a pleasant way to describe someone, but P. G. Wodehouse (of whom more below) had a character describe millionaires as “the scum of the earth” and he’s a respectable writer, so how was offense caused?
The issue was a different, more physical, sense of “scum,” and the original sense of “scumbag”: a condom. For that reason, The New York Times tends not to use the word: When Congressman Dan Burton said of Bill Clinton, “The guy’s a scumbag,” the paper reported the “use of a vulgarity for a condom to describe the President.” The style guide acknowledges that “taking a stand for civility in public discourse” is “sometimes at an acknowledged cost in the vividness of an article or two.”
There’s also a potential cost in representativeness, if the representative in question meant only that he considered the president a “base, despicable person” (as the Oxford dictionary gives the later sense) and not akin to a prophylactic.
To British solvers, this decorum is bewildering. Just as an apparently prim dowager or tweed-clad don might, in the UK, utter a profanity that would appall a stevedore, so can the apparently erudite British cryptic embrace almost all of language, including the scaggy, scuzzy, scummy bits. “Further issues might arise if this billet were not to be occupied” is a typically allusive description of a condom from the generally austere Daily Telegraph.
It gets worse. Merl Reagle, heeding Farrar’s advice, has spoken longingly of the words that good taste precludes. “URINE would bail me out of a corner a million times a year,” he lamented. “Same with ENEMA. ENEMA: talk about great letters.”
But in Britain? Oh yes. One of the most distinctive UK puzzles is in the magazine Private Eye, a mixture of investigations and satire. Its first crossword constructor was Tiresias, better known as the parliamentarian and security service asset Tom Driberg. The magazine’s official history describes his stint from 1969 until 1976 as “legendarily filthy.” Driberg had been receiving a retainer for providing parliamentary gossip; when this dried up because he was not in the Commons often enough to pick up much intelligence, he suggested that he instead set a prize crossword. His biographer Francis Wheen writes:
Perhaps his finest moment was Crossword 98, in 1972, which had such clues as “Seamen mop up anal infusions (6)” (ENEMAS) and “Sounds as if you must look behind for this personal lubricant (5)” (SEBUM).
Crossword 98 offered a prize of £2, which was claimed by a Mrs. Rosalind Runcie, whose husband was then bishop of St. Albans and went on to become the archbishop of Canterbury. Those clues, you might say, rather rub the solver’s face in the filth of the constructor; more frequently spotted is the clue that appears to be racy but of which the constructor can, with a straight face, insist perfect innocence. Here’s one from the London Times Crossword Championship:
In which three couples get together for sex (5)
Well, three couples equals three times two. That’s six, and the only context in which “six” is “sex” is the answer: LATIN. On other matters, both sides of the Atlantic are in general agreement.
In December 2012, if you asked any cryptic addict for the name of the best-loved constructor, the answer would almost certainly be Araucaria (see the chapter CRYPTIC above). In a 2008 interview, the retired churchman recalled the advice given to him some decades earlier by the puzzle editor of the Manchester and London Guardian.
“No diseases, no religion and no Bible” was the beginning, and the list ended, “No brand names and not too much by the way of politics.”
Many of these sensibilities have since gone by the wayside: HOOVER is as likely to appear as a brand name as it is a politician, but the steer on diseases, at least serious ones, is generally heeded. Which made it all the more shocking when Araucaria himself published a puzzle in 2013 with a preamble that began with the news that the constructor had “18 down of the 19.” Eighteen down was easy enough:
Sign of growth (6)
The solver, expecting nothing unusual, runs through the six-letter signs of the zodiac to find one that can also be indicated by “growth.” Not PISCES, TAURUS, or GEMINI . . . but CANCER fits. And then, before even writing in the answer, the penny drops and the stomach lurches, with no way back: Araucaria has CANCER. Postsolve, the puzzle’s preamble could be fully decoded as follows:
I have CANCER of the ESOPHAGUS; no CHEMOTHERAPY, just PALLIATIVE CARE; no NARCOTIC or STENT or MACMILLAN NURSE yet—plenty of MERRIMENT, though I wouldn’t have chosen the timing.
Nobody would chastise John Graham for defying the expectation that solving won’t make you feel queasy: Unusually for an Araucaria, the experience wasn’t in the least fun, though there was surely pleasure in marveling at the enormous chutzpah of responding to such a diagnosis with a themed puzzle. Araucaria died a month before the centenary of the crossword, and among the many obituaries and eulogies, none failed to mention with approval “18 down of the 19.” In crosswords, all rules are eventually broken, and broken well.
(And for a portrait in miniature of cruciverbal frustration, let’s look at one particular—very passionate and opinionated—solver . . .)