The irresistible rise of slang
Stanley Newman now holds a respectable role as Newsday’s puzzle editor, but in the 1980s, he was an enfant terrible of the crosswording world—or, as he terms it, one of the New Wave. He lay down his equivalent of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses in his Crossworder’s Own Newsletter, taking potshots at the then puzzle editor of The New York Times, Eugene T. Maleska, for running crosswords best suited to “the residents of a retirement home for university dons.”
Newman believed that there was a younger audience for crosswords—one that was more comfortable with modern colloquialisms and pop culture than with arcane geographical and historical references.
Maleska appeared unconcerned, referring to the New Wave as “the Newman ripple” and to Newman himself as “that pipsqueak.” But the New Wavers won the war: After Maleska’s death in 1993, the New York Times’s puzzle developed, under its new editor, Will Shortz, into a form not at all dissimilar to that envisaged by Newman and his votaries.
It was the same in Britain. At Christmas 1966, The Guardian held a competition in which readers were invited to send in crosswords. The winner was David Moseley. He received six guineas and an invitation to submit more puzzles—which he now has been doing, as Gordius, for nearly half a century. However, amid the praise for his 1966 winning entry, there was a caveat from the puzzle editor John Perkin: “There are one or two things that I wouldn’t normally let through. ‘Booze’ is slang and you use it twice.”
Nowadays, any crossword editor would still judge that any crossword with the same word twice is a less satisfying solve, but BOOZE would pass without comment. In the sixties, though, the crossword was younger and anxious to appear respectable. University slang such as DON was acceptable, but BOOZE? A little too rowdy.
Happily, some words have almost disappeared from puzzles. Midwestern towns, population in three figures, the names of which their near neighbors would struggle to recall? Much less often spied in puzzles. And the little Latin words that completed arcane quotations and reassured newspaper readers that solving was not an activity to feel ashamed of? Almost entirely eradicated.
Something had to take their place: something with unusual spellings and plenty of nice wee short words. That something was the irrepressibly fertile font of slang. So just as Arthur Wynne’s first crossword had “A river in Russia” to clue NEVA, so in 2008 did Brendan Emmett Quigley clue the same four letters with “‘— Get Enuf’ (3LW song),” exploiting the voguish penchant for misspelling among R&B songwriters.
It happens, though, that slang is more likely to flourish in environments where speakers aren’t keen on outsiders being able to fully understand them. Teenagers resentful of their parents are one such group—and so are thieves, vagabonds, and users of narcotics, all of whose language makes the crossword a saltier place than it was in the days of Maleska and the young Gordius. After all, anyone who is trying to hide what he or she is really trying to say is engaged in the same activity as a devious crossword constructor.
Take cocaine. Present-day solvers aren’t expected to be frequent users of addictive alkaloids, (notwithstanding the English humorist Stephen Fry’s former habit of taking the drug before tackling the hardest British crosswords). They would, though, do well to acquaint themselves with its nicknames: ICE, C, COKE, CANDY, READYWASH, CHARLIE, and BLOW, as listed in The Chambers Dictionary. And a constructor might induce you to take a hit of a heroin synonym such as HORSE, H, JUNK, SNOW, and SUGAR. And what can beat “drug” to indicate the most common vowel in English? You could almost suspect that ecstasy was given its shortest nickname by constructors bored of using “east” (E on a compass), “Spain” (E on the back of a car), and “base” (2.71828, or e in mathematical formulas).
That isn’t to say that slang now habitually passes without notice. On January 7, 2012, The New York Times used the clue “Wack, as in hip hop” for ILLIN. Word soon reached the national press that a solver had complained that “wack” has a negative sense, and that ILLIN is its opposite. The tone of the coverage was generally derisive and seemed based on an assumption that the crossword was still a fusty corner of culture.
How, pundits wondered, could those tweedy crossword-constructor types expect that experimenting with hip-hop terminology could result in anything other than embarrassment?
Crosswords are slightly older (when the clue was published, ninety-eight years old) than B-boying (around forty years old), but there’s a good reason why puzzlers might take an active interest in hip-hop: Both activities promote flipping the meanings of words. Hence, in crosswords, clues such as “To show or not to show?,” which exploits two meanings of SCREEN, and “Chopstick?” for CLEAVE. In crosswords and in hip-hop, this ambiguity is quite deliberate (that’s “quite” as in “completely,” not as in “to a limited extent”).
As Run-DMC helpfully pointed out in their track “Peter Piper,” the big bad wolf in your neighborhood, rather than being “bad” meaning “bad” might in fact be “bad” meaning “good.” See also WICKED, especially if it comes from a Bostonian—though F. Scott Fitzgerald did have a character use that word in a positive sense in 1920.
And so it is with ILL. In 1979, the Sugarhill Gang used it in a negative sense, contrasting an urge to act civilized with the temptation to “act real ill.” But by 1986, when the Beastie Boys proclaimed themselves the “most illin-est” B-boys, that was a boast.
So even if WACK flipped its meaning, too, the clue is sound either way. That is to say, it’s not bad. Before sanctioning a crossword editor for a lack of oversight, consider whether the clue really deserves a cool response. You might think better of it.
(The cultural changes between NEVA’s being clued as a Russian river and with an allusion to “Neva Get Enuf” are echoed in a pleasing pair of anagrams. Back in the day, constructors noted with delight that PRESBYTERIAN was an apposite anagram of “best in prayers.” More recently, many have spotted that it’s just as pleasing a jumble of “Britney Spears.” Welcome to the modern world . . .)