Trying Again to the Start Crossword
Review: "The Crossword Century" by Alan Connor
"The Crossword Century: 100 Years of Witty Wordplay, Ingenious Puzzles, and Linguistic Mischief" by Alan Connor (Gotham/Gotham)
These words are written on a brilliant Saturday morning in the spring of 2014, a morn all the brighter considering I have just successfully completed a wickedly difficult crossword puzzle dreamed up past Evan Birnholz for the New York Times. Devotees of that paper's puzzles know well that each week's progression begins with the big, medium-hard Lord's day i, then an easy i on Monday, and thereafter marches inexorably to the Saturday toughie. Information technology'due south my favorite puzzle of the week, because it's almost always a challenge and a struggle and completing it without assist from Google is a notable if non heroic achievement.
I take been doing crossword puzzles and their next-of-kin, double crostics, for more six decades, and the pleasure they give me has yet to fade. I first each day with one and always look forward to Sunday, when I have not merely the Times puzzle but the absolutely terrific and witty one constructed each week by Merl Reagle for The Washington Post Magazine. I do not pretend to be an ace solver and would not dream of entering the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament held each twelvemonth in Connecticut, participation in which would exist for me abject humiliation. Simply I am enough of a starry-eyed fan that when, more than 50 years agone, I reported for work in the Sun Department of the New York Times, I was speechless in awe to find myself only a few desks away from Margaret Farrar, that newspaper's puzzle editor and, as Alan Connor puts information technology in this amusing and informative footling book, "the female parent of the modern crossword." Elsewhere he writes:
"In 1926 Margaret Petherbridge had taken the proper noun Farrar post-obit her marriage to John C. Farrar, founder of [the] publishing behemothic Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Equally Margaret Farrar, she tidied upwardly the messy conventions of crosswording: She may have become involved with puzzling past chance, but she thought deeply and effectively about what made ane crossword better than some other. . . . Margaret Farrar's parameters for an aesthetically pleasing grid are symmetry, a minimum alphabetic character-count of iii in answers, and 'all-over interlock' — in layman's speak, the grid does non have separate sections and the solver tin travel from any part of information technology to another."
She was an uncommonly nice person (she died in June 1984, aged 87) who told Reagle, when he was all of 16 years old, "that 'crosswords are entertainment,' advising him to avert 'things similar death, disease, state of war and taxes — the subway solver gets enough of that in the rest of the paper.' " True enough, but more and more improbable words have been creeping into puzzles as they, similar the residual of society, let information technology all hang out. Why, in the aforementioned puzzle by Evan Birnholz, the respond for "Controversial thing to play" turned out to be "race bill of fare" — hardly something one would take expected to notice in a newspaper puzzle only a few years ago. Crosswords seem to be cartoon "a younger audience . . . one that [is] more comfortable with modern colloquialisms and pop culture than with arcane geographical and historical references." Indeed, some of the all-time puzzle constructors today are astonishingly young — some are however in their teens! — and the content of their puzzles reflects their interests and experiences, as indeed one would expect it to.
Connor notes that Eugene T. Maleska, puzzle editor of the New York Times in the 1980s, had "a reputation for fastidiousness and fustiness," a reputation that was thoroughly deserved; one critic accused him of "running crosswords best suited to 'the residents of a retirement abode for university dons.' " I hope that this can never be said of my own taste in puzzles, but I practice confess to existence somewhat awestruck by the profusion of terms from hip-hop, of cast members of goggle box shows I accept never seen, of quotations from pop songs post-1975 and other adornments of the excellent world we now inhabit. Will Shortz, who took over the puzzle editorship at the Times 2 decades ago, has presided over much of this change, trying — so at least it seems from distant — to steer the crossword puzzle into an contradistinct world while nevertheless maintaining its traditional form. Shortz was the central figure in "Wordplay" (2006), the entertaining documentary picture show that fabricated him something of a star, albeit in a rather minuscule firmament.
The first crossword was published in the New York World in December 1913, designed by a journalist named Arthur Wynne; you wouldn't recognize information technology equally a crossword today, so much did Farrar alter and improve upon the rather bad-mannered original. The puzzles didn't really find a following until the new publishing firm of Simon & Schuster published the first puzzle book in 1924, inaugurating what "became the longest continuously published volume series." You can now find the successors to that volume in airports and train stations effectually the globe. But information technology was when newspapers overcame their hesitation near the puzzles and established them as regular features that they really took off. Indeed, Connor speculates that puzzles may be helping continue print newspapers afloat today, every bit readers flee to the Internet.
And so, too, exercise the puzzles. Inexplicably, Connor writes that "if the experience of habitation printing ever becomes less horrific than it is at present, [we] may exist printing off a daily puzzle rather than buying it from a kiosk." What kind of printer does this guy have? Every morning time during my annual three- or 4-month sojourn to Republic of peru, I print the puzzle — two or more on Sun! — on my trusty Canon, an experience approximately as "horrific" as watching the Peruvian dominicus set over the Pacific. Connor is correct, through, that "the challenge for crossword constructors and editors is to make wordplay piece of work in the devices that are replacing print." It is entirely possible that the puzzles my grandchildren endeavour to solve when they are bitten by the bug, as I hope they will be, volition look nothing like the ones I now work every day, but presumably the basic elements of wordplay and its challenges will remain.
Connor provides a quick tour d'horizon of puzzles as they accept been and are now, though obviously he is on shakier footing when trying to imagine what they will be similar in the future. He writes with tongue somewhat in cheek about "crossword English," which at times consists of words that appear "more ofttimes in a crossword than in real life." He lists "10 of the English language'southward most crosswordy words," to wit: Alee, ARGO, ASEA, EMU, ERATO, IAMBI, PSST, SMEE, SOHO and STYE. What faithful old friends they are, and the next time you utilize one of them in normal conversation, please practice let me know.
A couple of mild caveats about what is otherwise a good book. Connor is English, and the book has a decided British slant. This review has emphasized the American aspects of the puzzle, but Connor goes on at some length virtually the ambiguous puzzles so beloved of British solvers. He does acknowledge that "the clues in a British crossword [can] announced to be the kind of gobbledegook from which only a masochist could derive the slightest pleasure," but he insists that anyone can solve a British ambiguous puzzle if but she or he will only try. Believe me, I have tried, and I can't, and I won't try over again. Life is likewise short.
It is perhaps because he is British that he describes Merl Reagle as "one of the NYT's virtually playful and imaginative constructors." That was true some years ago, but if you want to practice i of his wonderful puzzles you'll have to buy the Sun Washington Post, every bit he now belongs hither, non in the Times. In fact, come to think of it, I'one thousand writing this on a Sabbatum, the Post pre-print has arrived, so I'll go wrestle with Reagle right now.
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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/review-the-crossword-century-by-alan-connor/2014/07/25/7886aebe-0b57-11e4-8c9a-923ecc0c7d23_story.html
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