Word Salad | The Nation

[First off, links to the current puzzle and solving guidelines.]

There’s an old joke among crossworders about the solver who meets a puzzle constructor for the first time and says, “I’ve always wondered how you go about creating a crossword. Which comes first, the grid or the clues?”

For ordinary crosswords, of the sort you find every day in the New York Times and other newspapers, this is an amusingly nonsensical question. Creating a grid in which every letter is checked (i.e., appears in two different words) is a task with enough constraints to keep a constructor on the alert. (For more on the different kinds of grids, see our blog posts on square patterns and diagram construction.) So all a constructor can really do is build a sound diagram, and then proceed to write clues for all the entries.

Cryptic crosswords, on the other hand—and especially those with checkerboard patterns like the ones in The Nation—offer the constructor enormous latitude in placing words. Except when building a puzzle around a theme of some kind, we find that there are almost always a wide assortment of entries available to us at any given juncture in the constructing process.

The result is that unlike the constructor in the joke, we don’t always start with a grid. Or rather, each puzzle begins with an intricate dance between grid-constructing and clues that have already been written. As we go about our daily lives, we remain on the lookout for the germs of good cryptic clues—long phrases that can be interpreted in two ways, funny homophones, interesting charades or anagrams and so on. We keep those on file—either in the form of a completed cryptic clue or just a general idea—and when the time comes to build a new crossword grid, we tend to use them as the structural beams, with shorter and more flexible entries connecting them as necessary. Because long entries are so much harder to write solid and entertaining clues for, it helps to seed a grid with entries that we know are amenable to it.

And yet one of the greatest spurs to creativity, in this or any other arena, is sheer necessity. Sometimes you just have to write a clue for whatever words the grid includes—and surprisingly often, that requirement yields happy results. For every entry that has appeared in one of our grids because it fit a clue we liked, there are probably two clues we’re proud of that came into being simply because the answer word had forced its way into a grid.

So which comes first? Just as with the chicken and the egg (or words and music in opera) the answer is the old one: Neither. And both.

Please share your thoughts below, where you can also post comments, questions, kudos, or complaints about last week’s puzzle or any previous puzzle.

[First off, links to the current puzzle and solving guidelines]

The other day, one of our regular solvers voiced an objection to this clue in last week’s puzzle:

    CHARITABLE  Generous one moving in two pieces of furniture (10)

Here, the wordplay points the solver to two pieces of furniture (CHAIR, TABLE), with I (“one”) changing position in it to yield the answer (“generous”). This clue struck our friend as unfair, because he felt that it came too close to violating the taboo on “indirect anagrams.”

Before considering this complaint, let’s take a minute to rehearse what constitutes a forbidden indirect anagram. By longstanding convention, a constructor who asks a solver to anagram a group of letters is expected to supply those letters (the so-called “anagram fodder”) explicitly in the clue itself.

What’s not acceptable is to give the solver a synonym of the anagram fodder, and expect him or her to first find the intended synonym, and then put its letters in the right order. That’s an indirect anagram, and it’s not hard to see why it places an undue burden on the solver. Most words can have a number of different synonyms, so it’s not always easy to know when you have the right one; to then be asked to rearrange the letters of a word that might not even be right is a step too far.

There’s no question that our clue for CHARITABLE has a bit of this problem to it. But we would argue that the distinction between indirect anagrams and legitimate clues is not entirely clear-cut. Rather, they lie at the two ends of a spectrum that contains a graded series of wordplay strategies—and our clue was an attempt to see whether we could nudge the line of acceptability a little further without sacrificing fairness.

What all the clues on this spectrum have in common is this: the solver is asked to (a) find a synonym for a word or phrase in the clue, and then (b) perform some kind of operation on it. What varies along the spectrum is how strictly determined the operation is.

So at one extreme are clues in which no operation is performed at all; the synonym is simply placed directly into the answer. Here’s a simple example from last week:

    CARNATION  Pink auto country (9)

There’s nothing for the solver to do here except find the appropriate synonyms for “auto” and “country” and glom them together. At the opposite end, the operation is anagramming, and there’s general agreement that that is too indeterminate a process to be fair.

But between these extremes, consider the range of things a solver might be asked to do to a synonym once it's found:
    1) reverse it
    2) say it out loud (i.e., find a homophone)
    3) remove the first or last letter
    4) remove the nth letter, where n is specified, or where the letter is specified some other way
    5) change a specified letter to another specified letter
    6) remove the first or last half, or some other specified fraction
    7) move a specified letter to a new and specified location
    8) move a letter from a specific location to a new and unspecified location, as in these clues
        (from Puzzles 3233 and 3236, respectively):
        PISCES  Postpone first bit of seasoning for fish (6)
        ABDOMEN  A black cat, perhaps, with head stuffed inside belly (7)
    9) move a specific letter to a new and unspecified location
  10) move an unspecified letter to a new and unspecified location
  11) change an unspecified letter to another unspecified letter

Now, note that although these processes shade into one another, they vary in their acceptability in a cryptic clue. 1, 2, 3, and 4 are uncontroversially OK. 5 is fine as long as it’s quite clear, while 6 tends to be more or less accepted depending on the length of the word. 8 is unorthodox, but we’ve done it without complaint, and 11 is undeniably too ambiguous to be fair. In between comes 9, which is the CHARITABLE clue—and it’s just a hair further along the spectrum than 8. Frankly, we don’t rule out some day using 10 if the letter shift is interesting, and if instead of a general anagram indicator the clue makes it clear that the change is minimal.

The point, as ever, is that a lot of what solvers come to see as fair or unfair in a cryptic puzzle is a matter of convention and expectation, and often those conventions can be unnecessarily narrow.

The bottom line is that we consider moving a single letter to get from CHAIR TABLE to CHARITABLE to be fun and interesting. Likewise SPICES to PISCES, with an interesting change in pronunciation, and BAD OMEN to ABDOMEN. All three would be boring as anagrams, but as letter shifts they’re quite entertaining—and isn’t that what this game is all about?

What’s your feeling about this clue, and others like it? Please share your thoughts below, where you can also post comments, questions, kudos or complaints about last week’s puzzle or any previous puzzle.

(First off, here are links to the current puzzle and solving guidelines.)

A few weeks ago, we wrote about the clear division in nearly all cryptic clues between the two essential components of a clue, the definition and the wordplay. Those are the elements that mutually prop one another up to lead to an unambiguous solution, and in most cases they are meant to be kept well apart.

But there are rare instances in which the definition and the wordplay get to mix it up a little. The classic case is the clue type known as an &lit. (the designation, which goes back to cryptic crosswords’ British roots, is short for “and literally so”). Here, the entire clue does double duty, serving as both the definition and the wordplay. These are the triple toe loops of the cryptic world: difficult to execute, flashy and impressive when done right. By convention, they’re generally flagged with a final exclamation point.

Here’s an example, from Puzzle #3232:

19 XERXES For example, masculine king from the East! (6)

(That, at least, is how the clue was supposed to read. Because of a communications mixup, it ran with “to” instead of “from”. Our apologies.)

The entire clue provides the wordplay (SEX plus REX reversed, or from the East) and at the same time it works as a definition for XERXES.

The workings of an &lit. clue are pretty straightforward, and there’s general agreement on the rules. In particular, clues that work fully with only one of the two parts—in which, say, the entire clue presents wordplay but the definition only accounts for part of the clue—are widely frowned upon. But a grayer area arises when a constructor allows a little leakage between the two parts. Here’s an example from last week’s puzzle:

1 HERACLES He clears stable? No and yes (8)

It’s impossible to break this clue into two discrete parts, yet it isn’t an &lit. either. Rather, it executes a sort of branching fork in the middle, so that “He clears stable? No” is the wordplay (an anagram of he clears) and “He clears stable? Yes” is the definition, a reference to Heracles’ labor in cleaning the Augean stable.

We would not have attempted such an unorthodox clue structure under just any circumstances. We did it here because “no and yes” seemed to justify that kind of switching mechanism, and because the clue presented the opportunity for a semi-inverted &lit. There may be other opportunities to write clues along these lines.

Then there’s the more casual breach, allowing small syntactic or semantic references to flow from one part of a clue to another. Here’s an example from Puzzle #3230:

17 NEON LIGHT Darkness engulfs Libya’s capital after many years—this could vanquish it? (4,5)

The definition (“this could vanquish it”) doesn’t stand on its own, because “it” refers back to the “Darkness” mentioned in the wordplay part of the clue. Purists are apt to reject such things; we don’t really mind them. To our way of thinking, a small leak here and there helps bind a clue together, and keeps a puzzle fresh and interesting.

If you have any thoughts on the issues raised here—or if you have comments, questions, kudos, or complaints about Puzzle #3237 or any previous puzzle—please post them in comments.

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(First off, links to the current puzzle and solving guidelines.)

In response to our post about themed cryptics, a British newspaper crossword editor who wishes to remain anonymous commented:

“In British cryptics, a barred grid indicates difficult vocabulary rather than a theme. The intention for most blocked grid puzzles is that you should be able to finish them without reference books, though you may have written in one or two answers that you would like to check afterwards. Most barred grid puzzles name a standard reference dictionary (always Chambers) and expect most solvers to use it. There are both themed blocked-grid puzzles and unthemed barred-grid ones. Themed block ones could be in any paper, but are most common in the Guardian, the Independent and the Financial Times—the Times and Telegraph, the other two in our weekday “big 5” have very few themed puzzles. Unthemed barred grid ones, all on Sundays, are Azed (Observer), Mephisto (Sunday Times) and Beelzebub (Independent on Sunday).

“In a country [the United States] where other blocked grid puzzles often have themes, it seems perfectly sensible to me to have themed blocked grid cryptics.”

And in fact, themed black-square cryptics have been a hit among our solvers. At least we think so, based on the reaction from both our friends and the strangers who have written to us. Let’s hope this catches on, and more themed black-square cryptics start appearing in other publications!

In another post, we mentioned our willingness to include uncommon words in our puzzles. This is a break with both US and British convention for black-square puzzles, but it is in line with our predecessor Frank Lewis, who had no objection to expanding his solvers’ vocabulary. See this 2008 homage to Frank by Peter Kramer, the author of Listening to Prozac, in his blog on the Psychology Today site.

As cryptic editors for The Enigma, we edited puzzles that are often considerably more challenging than anything else available in the United States. Part of that level of difficulty is achieved by borrowing a few ideas from our British counterparts, including the reliance on a standard dictionary, as mentioned above. In The Enigma, anything whatsoever that appears in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary is fair game. So it is legitimate not only to use obscure words as entries, but even obscure usages of words in clues. In our Nation puzzle, we do not go that far. If the entry is obscure, the clue will be straightforward. Here is an example from puzzle #3224:

Main objection raised is petty (3-3)

This was a down clue, so “raised” indicated a reversal. The answer was TIN-POT, as in “a tin-pot dictator”, which was not familiar to some solvers. Still, given T.N-P.T this was guessable, especially with the help of TOP NIT, two common words.

If the entry is common, we may reference an unfamiliar meaning of it, as in this double definition from the same puzzle:

Grasp and shoot (4)

The answer was TWIG. A twig is a shoot, and to twig means to comprehend, or grasp—a usage you may not have been familiar with. Again, with the W and the G checked, this seemed quite gettable to us.

Still, our use of less-known words is the exception, not the rule. We are assuming that, like Peter Kramer, you’re not averse to learning a new word or two when solving one of our puzzles. When you come across such a word, you can take a trip to the dictionary or the Internet to confirm your hunch. (We usually check two or three references before including an obscure word.) And you can tell your friends who don’t twig your enjoyment of cryptic crosswords that their objections are petty, and that this hobby of yours is educational: After all, the word you learn today may turn up in a puzzle tomorrow!