Word Salad | The Nation

Last week’s blog post cited the precept of Ximenes (the nom de guerre of the English constructor Derrick Macnutt) that a cryptic clue should consist of three things: (1) a definition, (2) wordplay and (3) nothing else. That’s an admirably crisp and straightforward guideline, expressed with wondrous wit; but in practice, the third part of the formula is hard to observe too faithfully—at least not without sacrificing more surface sense than we’d prefer.

So, like most American constructors, we use the Ximenean principle more as a guideline than as a commandment. It’s true that a clue that juxtaposes definition and wordplay without any intervening material has a certain elegance and purity to it—especially when the border between the two parts comes in the middle of a single phrase, as in this clue:

SPRAYER Mister Softee’s primary appeal (7)

Or, more fancifully, this one:

CURBSIDE “Where to Recycle a Dog”: a song not likely to hit the charts (8)

(All the clues quoted here come from past Nation puzzles.)

Far more often, though, it’s necessary to include some kind of connective tissue to make the parts of a clue work smoothly together. These fall into a few basic categories.

• Juxtaposition: The two parts of a clue can simply be joined by “and,” “or” or, less often, “with.” Some constructors go even further, using connectors like “by” or “alongside,” though we do not.

• Equivalence: Since the two parts of a cryptic clue both point to the same answer, it’s common for a clue to assert their equivalence with a connector like “is”, “can be” or perhaps “equals.”

• Process: Many clues are instructions that tell the solver how to arrive at a given solution, and here the constructor is on more delicate ground. Our philosophy is that the wordplay should lead to the definition, and never vice versa; so any connectors that imply directionality need to be pointing in the appropriate direction.

This arises most often with the connector “for,” in the sense of “to arrive at” or “to get.” Here are a few examples:

CIGAR Invest one grand in automobile for Havana, perhaps (5)

H G WELLS Mercury sources for writer (1,1,5)

NIECES Rewrite Scene I for younger relatives (6)

In each case, the solver is instructed to do the relevant operation (insertion, charade and anagram, respectively), to get the intended answer. “For” pointing in the other direction—i.e., [definition] for [wordplay]—would make no sense.

Today we wrote about clues that break into two disjoint parts (wordplay and definition). We’ll leave for a future post a discussion of clues where the two parts are coterminous (so-called &lit clues), as well as clues that have some leakage between the two parts.

Here are some constructors’ comments about The Nation’s Puzzle #3232.

1A BILLINGSGATE Abusive language in Montana scandal? (12)

Use of the -gate suffix for even the most inconsequential scandal is a blight on the general rhetorical landscape, but it can be a source of fun for wordplay aficionados. Many years ago we built a puzzle (not a crossword) around a list of various -gate words, including MITIGATE, INVESTIGATE and DIVAGATE, which involved a sexy soprano.

12A ELYSIAN When you speak, dropping a vowel sound is heavenly (7)

A not very common homophone of a not-very-common entry, but we like it.

13A IMPAIR Damage demonic appearance? (6)

Some solvers questioned this clue, saying that “demonic” would correspond to the adjective IMPISH, not the noun IMP. We would agree if this word stood alone, but we read the clue as a “whole thing” charade: “demonic appearance” defines the noun phrase IMP AIR. We put the question mark at the end in the hope it would mitigate this concern.

27A FAULTFINDERS Hypercritical types—seismologists, perhaps? (12)

You, dear reader, are not a seismologist, are you? If you are, please enumerate our faults in the comments!

3D INCOGNITO In part of machine, a bug: wheel is not readily identifiable (9)

A four-part charade. When using “wheel” for O, we are referring to the shape of the letter. Similarly, “horseshoe” would constitute legitimate wordplay for U.

5D GAS PEDAL “It makes the car go,” Unser said with difficulty (3,5)

Al Unser is the senior member of a race car dynasty. (Does he know his vehicle of choice is a palindrome?) This clue, once again, is a “whole thing” charade, and thus in our mind there is no problem with the order of its parts.

7D TRAIL MIX What slow cowboys do in early Westerns: snack (5,3)

The actor referenced in this clue was Tom Mix, star of nearly 350 oaters during the silent era.

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.

1A: You can probably guess the word’s ending.

18A and 1D: Each of these clues contains a word that is a verb in the surface reading, but a noun as the definition, or part of the definition.

26A: “Finally, Martha” and “above-average” each supply a single letter. “Washington” supplies two.

7D: This clue references a long-ago movie actor, but it should be solvable even if you haven’t heard of him.

Hints for beginners:

9A, 23A, 1D, 14D, and 24D are charades. 5D is also a charade, but it is clued as a whole phrase.

6A: What item is proverbially sharp?

25A: Think Roman numerals.

22D: “Exalting,” in a down clue, can indicate a reversal.

Need more hints? Just ask!

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.

Two of those are currently on view: #3230, which ran last week, was packed with ten titles of Alfred Hitchcock movies, and the current puzzle, #3231, is in keeping with the general theme of the issue, “Occupy.” Note that although most themes are designed to stay hidden until uncovered by the solving process, some (like “Occupy”) are overt.

To be sure, the range of theme types available in this format is more limited than in a full-blown thematic cryptic. In particular, the fact that our puzzle runs without special instructions precludes us from using the kind of gimmicks or trickery that are par for the course elsewhere: no unclued entries, no oddly shaped diagrams, no altered versions of clue answers entered into the grid. (The one exception so far was our puzzle based on Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.)

Still, there are a few good strategies for making a cryptic into more than just a collection of individual clues (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). Most of the puzzle themes we’ve used thus far fall into these general categories:

• Thematically linked main entries: These are similar to the themes found in American non-cryptic crosswords like the New York Times’s daily puzzle. Our examples include the Beatles-themed puzzle and one with long entries based on sections of the orchestra. And thematic entries need not be long: our “dimensions” puzzle had ten-letter thematic entries.

• Packing a set of entries (perhaps even a complete set) into the grid as clue answers: the Hitchcock puzzle is one example, and another was #3217 for the Books Issue, which included all the Nobel Prize–winning authors we could find whose names had a differently clueable meaning.

• A recurring motif in the clues: “Occupy” is an example. Another is puzzle #3201, which included the names of the twenty-two member countries of the Arab League. (The puzzle had been intended for a Nation special issue on the Arab Awakening, but accidentally appeared too soon.)

• A constraint in creating the grid: We haven’t used this in any of the puzzles published yet, but keep an eye out for one that’s in the pipeline.

One thing we’ve learned from experience in all of this is that themes need to be pointed out to solvers—even ones that seem dead obvious to us! So we always throw in a reference somewhere in at least one of the clues, because a theme that’s overlooked is a theme wasted.

Case in point: our first puzzle. In addition to putting the homage to our illustrious predecessor Frank Lewis at 1 Across, and including both our names in the clues, we also stocked the grid with several thematic entries—symmetrically placed, no less!—that alluded to the beginning of a new chapter in the Nation puzzle: THE NEXT GENERATION, CHANGE OF THE GUARD, END OF AN ERA, and NEW DEAL. No one noticed. We won’t make that mistake again.