INSIDE BASEBALL’S LANGUAGE?

JARGON

The metaphors of the crossword puzzle

When the crossword first appeared, its mechanics were described in detail that is tediously verbose to today’s solver. Indeed, Arthur Wynne did not speak of “grids” or even “clues” (“Fill in the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions”) since the vocabulary of crosswording had yet to evolve.

Even “grid,” in the sense of the lines on maps and diagrams, did not appear until the First World War, which means that it was not really available as a way of describing the layout of the first puzzles. And it’s a grisly metaphor, too: The real-life gridiron was a lattice-shaped arrangement of metal bars useful for griddling food—or torturing people. But perhaps, if you’re stuck on a Sunday afternoon with an especially tricky southeastern corner of your grid unfilled, the metaphor is apt.

There’s another instrument of torture in the word “crossword” itself: the cross, from which we get the sense of going side to side denoted by “across.” (Conversely, Old English speakers called a hill a “dúne” and used “of dúne” to refer to the direction you take when leaving the top of one; from this we got “down,” a word still used to describe hills and slopes in some parts of the United Kingdom.)

Likewise analogous is “clue.” In the fourteenth century, a clue was a ball of thread. Those balls are useful for finding your way out of mazes both literal (kudos, Theseus) and metaphorical: The Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton bemoaned “loosing the clew which led us safely in,” leaving him “lost within this Labyrinth of lust.” Later, you didn’t need the maze as part of the metaphor, and might use the word in the context of detection: In Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Caroline Helstone announces that “I have a clue to the identity of one, at least, of the men who broke my frames.”

Finally, a crypt can be an underground hiding place or a vault in a church—or, if you’re the subject of religious persecution, both simultaneously. Francis Bacon used “cryptic” as a noun to describe communication using secret methods; Agatha Christie used it as an adjective when the meaning of some words or behavior is not immediately apparent: a problem if you’re trying to solve a murder, but all part of the fun if the solving is of the puzzling kind.

(Before the crossword, there was another “cross”-sounding puzzle, though this one took its name from the Greek —meaning “extreme.” Welcome to the crossword’s forefather, the baffling double acrostic . . .)