Crossword Puzzles
If you don’t do crossword puzzles, you might be missing out on some fun word play or even some health benefits.
Today’s topic is crosswords. Perhaps you are one of the millions of addicts who snatch the crossword section of the newspaper before anyone else in the household can do so, or maybe you do your daily puzzle online or in a book. Good for you! If you don’t do crossword puzzles, you might be missing out on some fun word play or even some health benefits.
Origin of Crosswords
Here at Grammar Girl, we hope you won’t be cross with us. It seems we missed the centennial of the crossword puzzle’s invention. We’re celebrating this fun pastime about eighteen months too late. The first known published crossword appeared in a Sunday newspaper called the New York World on December 21, 1913． (1) Pop on over to the American Crossword Tournament website and see the actual puzzle itself. This first puzzle, created by a British journalist named Arthur Wynne, appears to be a lot easier than modern Sunday crosswords, but the clues do go up and down, as they do now. About ten years after Wynne’s first puzzle, crosswords became popular in Europe. And now you can find them everywhere, and in various languages. Just type “foreign language crossword puzzles” into Google, and you’ll get more than 800,000 hits.
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British and American Crossword Puzzles
This episode focuses on American crosswords, but we’ll mention British puzzles for just a minute. It seems that the British are known for very difficult cryptic puzzles, and a quick look at the Guardian’s cryptic crossword website proves it. It would be tough for most Americans to get the answers.
For example, Cryptic Crossword number 26,557 (2) contains the clue “Check others shower on time,” with the answer being “Restraint.” Hmmm. If you can explain how that clue leads to the word restraint, PLEASE leave a comment on the transcript of this podcast at QuickAndDirtyTips.com—we’re stumped. As one blogger put it, cryptic crosswords are “fiendish,” and he went on to explain, “Each cryptic clue must contain a ‘base clue’ (synonym for the answer) as well as some word play. This can include double definitions, anagrams, homonyms, charades, puns, amongst many others.” (3) By all means, if you’re a crossword fan, give cryptics a try!
American-style crosswords puzzles, on the other hand, are based more on information than on word play. (4) Maybe you try to complete the Sunday New York Times crossword. Each day the paper puts out a puzzle of a different level, starting with the easiest on Monday and ending with the hardest on Sunday.
To solve the Sunday puzzle, you need to have a lot of general knowledge, be good at figuring out puns, know some foreign words, and figure out some trick used in the puzzle. The Times puzzles are named, and each title gives a clue to the trick, which could be answers that go partially on one line and partially on the line above, or answers that have double letters. Puzzle writers have thought of many devious tricks to stump us. For instance, the May 3, 2015, puzzle is titled “Which Is Wish,” and certain answers substitute the “sh” sound for the “tch” sound. Two examples are “Last-dish-effort” instead of “Last-ditch-effort” and “Mush-to-my-surprise” instead of “Much-to-my-surprise.”
The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament
Casual puzzlers might spend many hours on one of these difficult puzzles, and many might give up. Serious puzzlers compete. Can you imagine doing an extremely difficult puzzle under time pressure, with the time limit being just twenty-five minutes? (5) Every year, a few hundred of the best crossword puzzle solvers in the country gather in Stamford, Connecticut, for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Solvers spend three days tackling eight original crosswords created especially for this event, run by New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz. (6) The grand prize is $5,000.
Benefits of Doing Crosswords
Not many of us can solve such puzzles in under half an hour, let alone an hour or two. Hats off to all the braniacs who compete. For those who are more casual about crosswords, we do them for fun or for the challenge. Sometimes solving a hard puzzle can boost our confidence, and we may even chuckle at a funny clue we’ve figured out. Many times we can learn new words. There’s even a blog by someone who discusses all the Times puzzles, and this blog features a Word of the Day, a mini vocabulary lesson prompted by an answer in that day’s puzzle. April 19th’s, for example, was tantara, which means the blare of a trumpet or horn (7).
Even if you think you don’t enjoy crossword puzzles, you might want to reconsider and try them again because doing puzzles might stave off Alzheimer’s disease. Last year, an Alzheimer’s Association press release quoted a researcher who said, “Our findings suggest that, for some individuals, engagement in cognitively stimulating activities, especially those involving games such as puzzles and cards, might be a useful approach for preserving brain structures and cognitive functions that are vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease.” (8) More recently, a Huffington Post article quoted another researcher: “Leisure activities such as crossword puzzles, card games, and reading provide an avenue to stimulate the mind, thus delaying the onset of dementia.” (9) Research is ongoing, but even though doing crossword puzzles isn’t a definitive cure for brain atrophy, we word nerds support cruciverbalists, individuals who solve or create crossword puzzles!
Catch you later! Time to do today’s crossword!
This podcast was written by Bonnie Mills author of The Curious Case of the Misplaced Modifier, who blogs at sentencesleuth.blogspot.com.
References
- American Crossword Puzzle Tournament website. www.crosswordtournament.com/more/wynne.html. (accessed April 29, 2015).
- The Guardian website. www.theguardian.com/crosswords/cryptic/26557. (accessed April 29, 2015).
- Denise. “America vs British crosswords.” Puzzling. https://alwayspuzzling.blogspot.com/2013/01/american-vs-british-crosswords.html. (accessed April 29, 2015).
- Romano, Marc. Crossworld: One Man’s Journey into America’s Crossword Obsession, New York: Broadway Books, 2005, p. 47.
- Romano, Marc. Crossworld: One Man’s Journey into America’s Crossword Obsession, New York: Broadway Books, 2005, p. 149.
- American Crossword Puzzle Tournament website. www.crosswordtournament.com/index.htm. (accessed April 29, 2015).
- Rex Parker Does the NY Times Crossword Puzzle blog. https://rexwordpuzzle.blogspot.com/2015/04/bit-of-exercise-in-britain-sun-4-19-15.html. (accessed April 30, 2015).
- “Potential Alzheimer’s disease risk factors and risk reduction strategies become clearer.” Alzheimer’s Association website. www.alz.org/aaic/releases_2014/mon-830am-potential-risk-factors.asp. (accessed April 30, 2015).
- Marley, M. “Do crossword puzzles really help prevent Alzheimer’s?” HuffingtonPost.com. www.huffingtonpost.com/marie-marley/do-crossword-puzzles-real_b_6741866.html. (accessed April 30, 2015).
Blank crossword puzzle grid image courtesy of Shutterstock.
About the Author
Bonnie Mills has been a copyeditor since 1996.
