Word Salad

Fair and Square

Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto on March 28, 2012 - 2:09 AM ET

In Great Britain, cryptic crosswords appear daily in multiple newspapers, and the community of constructors and solvers is vastly larger than its US counterpart. One wonderful consequence of this state of affairs is a much wider range of voices among puzzle constructors than we have here in the United States. We’ll write more about British cryptics in a future post, but today, we’d like to say something about a debate that started there, and really never happened here in the United States.

The two sides in that debate differ about what makes for an acceptable cryptic clue. On one side, some constructors rely on wit and loose word associations to create entertaining puzzles, without worrying too much about rules and technicalities. In the United States, our predecessor Frank Lewis was the sole representative of this style. On the other side, some constructors call for “square dealing.” To paraphrase the founder of that school of thought, Ximenes (Derrick Macnutt), a cryptic clue should include three things: a definition, wordplay and nothing else. The wordplay, while deceitful, should work rigorously and offer a logical path to the answer.

In our tenure at The Nation, we have strayed from this basic principle just once. Here is a clue that we used in #3199:

Hinter Land: 3232

Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto on March 26, 2012 - 10:11 AM ET

A few helpful words for solvers of The Nation’s puzzle #3232. We will put hints for beginners further down, so that intermediate and advanced solvers can avoid looking at them.

Hints for everyone:

This puzzle contains possibly unfamiliar entries at 1A, 12A, 18A and 23A.

After Words: 3231

Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto on March 23, 2012 - 1:08 AM ET

In keeping with the theme of the issue, we packed as many mentions of “occupy” (as well as “occupation,” “occupancy” and so on) as we could into the clues. We thought this type of theme, in which the theme resides in the clues rather than the entries, was original to us—and in a sense it was, since we had never seen it before. But we’ve since learned that this is not uncommon in the vastly more varied world of British cryptics.

11A EDITORIALS Irrational idolatries—they are found near the front of this magazine (10)
3D NATIONWIDE Tear into wine ad throughout the magazine? (10)

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Crossword Puzzle Theme Park

Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto on March 21, 2012 - 2:27 AM ET

One of the longstanding traditions in cryptic crosswords, at least in the United States, has been the division between themed and “plain” puzzles. Typically, puzzles with a theme or gimmick are done with bar diagrams (the most familiar examples are those of Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, now found monthly as a Wall Street Journal Saturday puzzle. Conversely, puzzles with block (black-square) diagrams like ours are generally expected to be themeless.

We decided to see whether we could shake that up a bit.

In what was—depending on your perspective—either a savvy strategic move or a desperate bid for attention, we seeded our audition puzzle with four long fruit-related entries. That seemed like a promising and mostly unexplored avenue, so since then, we’ve been trying to stick to a rough schedule of giving every third puzzle a theme of some kind.

Hinter Land: 3231

Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto on March 19, 2012 - 12:44 AM ET

Note that this week’s puzzle is in keeping with the theme of the entire issue (“Occupy”). Here is our weekly batch of hints on the new puzzle.

For beginners:

Look for hidden words in 1A and 29A, and anagrams in 9A, 11A, 3D, and 13D. The part of speech in 13D may come as a surprise.

After Words: 3230

Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto on March 16, 2012 - 2:26 AM ET

We expected that ten movies by Hitchcock in a single diagram would be fairly unmissable, so the original version of the puzzle made no explicit mention of what was going on. Imagine our surprise when none of our test-solvers noticed the theme (this is the sort of thing that always seems more obvious to the constructor). So we decided to bring attention to it with the help of a reference in a clue, just to make sure solvers would not miss it. How to do it was not immediately obvious—mentioning Hitchcock explicitly, after all, would make the puzzle too easy. In the end, we settled on the reference in 7D, which mentioned movies without being overly specific.

7D OSCARS Piece of onyx marks awards given to some movies (though only one of the ten shown here) (6)

How did this play out for you? Too blatant? Too subtle? Just right? (Incidentally, Hitch’s Oscar-winning movie was Rebecca.)

On Dictionary Nature

Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto on March 14, 2012 - 2:11 AM ET

Every week, as we create the diagram, we need to decide what entries are acceptable.

Our main criterion is that we like our entries to have "dictionary nature." A word or phrase has dictionary nature if it appears in a dictionary, if it would appear in a theoretical, large-enough dictionary, or if it appears or would appear in a plausible list. The concept of "dictionary nature" is due to Xemu of the National Puzzlers' League (Guy Jacobson).

It is easy to check whether a word appears in a dictionary. The concept of dictionary nature is intended to serve as a guide in the case of words and phrases that do not. For example, a word may be assembled out of legitimate parts, and thus have a clear meaning even though it appears in no dictionary. For example, "underclued," which could be used to describe some unsolvable puzzles, appears in no dictionary, and yet has a perfectly clear meaning in context. That's not to suggest that we'd use it in a puzzle, but we certainly would not summarily rule it out. On the other hand, "underapple," say, would be out of the question, as we cannot imagine a dictionary large enough to have reason to contain it.

Hinter Land: 3230

Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto on March 12, 2012 - 12:00 AM ET

We are not the only ones to have written introductions to cryptic clues. (See last week’s Hinter Land.) Here are links to some other explanations of the basics:

• Our predecessor (Frank Lewis): http://www.thenation.com/crossword

• Wall Street Journal (by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon): http://s.wsj.net/blogs/html/wsjcrypticguide.pdf

After Words: 3229

Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto on March 9, 2012 - 3:27 AM ET

Last Monday we offered hints for Puzzle #3229, but no actual answers. Now that the solutions have appeared, we can comment on the technicalities and aesthetics of some clues, and explain how some clues work. We hope this will be of interest to the whole spectrum—beginning solvers and experts alike.

9A TEACART Milk producer adopts vehicle—it might roll by around 4:00 (3,4)

Defining TEACART without mentioning, well, tea or cart was a little tricky, like playing Taboo. We were proud of this one.

How the Cryptic Grid Got Its Squares

Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto on March 7, 2012 - 3:52 AM ET

One thing that solvers often wonder about on encountering cryptic crosswords is why the grid looks so different from the one in a regular crossword puzzle. Why this