Crossword constructors may play tricks but must also play fair
From the 1850s onward, Lewis Carroll devised a stream of puzzles for magazines. While they were ostensibly constructed for children, their linguistic and mathematical demands were beyond the capabilities of many of his adult readers. Had the crossword been born a half century earlier, it’s no stretch to imagine Carroll as one of the greatest constructors in the game, probably appearing at the weekend with baroque themed challenges rather than in the weekday puzzles. His fictional characters show, to varying degrees, a keen grasp of what we would now call the constructor’s art.
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
Crossword constructors disagree on many things: the best balance of high- and lower-brow material, which words are old chestnuts, and whether one another’s funny clues are, well, funny. But they all want to be seen to be fair.
The alternative—to be thought of as unsporting, recondite, or contemptuous toward the solver—is tantamount to being no fun, after all. And since the point of word games is to have fun, the unfair constructor will find that his or her career is as poor and short as it is nasty and brutish.
Editors of puzzle pages remind their charges of fairness when some constructor is trying to be too clever for the solver’s own good—or simply rewrite the clues accordingly. The first creator of puzzles to express this desideratum in the form of an actual injunction was a British headmaster, Prebendary A. F. Ritchie, who took his pseudonym from the first five letters of his name, and also from a mischievous Arabic demon, Afrit.
Afrit’s Injunction is given in the introduction to his 1949 collection Armchair Crosswords. “We must expect the composer to play tricks,” insists Afrit, “but we shall insist that he play fair.” After this, in bold:
You need not mean what you say, but you must say what you mean.
No decent constructor wants any of the clues in a puzzle to remain unsolved, but if you, the solver, are well and truly stumped, Afrit’s Injunction means that, when you see the answer that defeated you, you should be able to look back at the clue and see that you could have solved it. Take this, from the London Times’s first constructor, Adrian Bell:
Die of cold?
Does Bell mean what he appears to be saying here? Of course not. A faithful paraphrase of the expression “die of cold” would be too mundane, not to mention morbid, for a diverting piece of entertainment. Once the solver has abandoned this image, considered other meanings of the word “die” and gone via “singular of dice” to the answer, ICECUBE, that is the moment of fun that is the point of the whole exercise.
Not only is it a relief to shift your brain from something as wretched as hypothermia to something as refreshing as an ice cube, there is also respect for the constructor. He didn’t mean what he said, but he did say what he meant. All the information was there, presented in a form just misleading and unhelpful enough to be entertaining. Here’s another of Bell’s:
Spoils of War
Again, this clue does not mean what it says, and the answer is less dispiriting than looting in a combat zone: It’s MARS. As Afrit says, a cryptic clue “may attempt to mislead by employing a form of words which can be taken in more than one way, and it is your fault if you take it the wrong way.” Point taken.
So, the Mad Hatter would, like his creator Lewis Carroll, make a fine creator of crosswords:
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
Humpty Dumpty, on the other hand, would not:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
(And so for the constructor, the game can be fairly reinterpreted as: How much can I stretch language while still giving the solver a chance . . . ?)