Stuck in a Cheese Grater?

I love puzzles of all kinds, and am a crossword puzzle addict, er, I mean cruciverbalist – yeah, that’s the word. I solve them by the truckload and am irresistibly drawn when I espy a naked one or someone else solving one, and have often met interesting people that way, though I can’t claim I’ve met my best friend, the love of my life – one can have fantasies, can’t one? -- or had a career break by this form of contact.

I first started doing them in earnest when I would take my daughter to Hungarian school on Saturday mornings and would have over two hours at the library before I picked her up again. At first I did it desultorily and unsuccessfully, but on a trip to Halifax to audition for the Atlantic Symphony, my host’s roommate walked around the house with a copy of the New York Times, vowing that she would solve it before the week was out – did I know a seventeen letter word beginning with ow for when your elbow gets stuck in a cheese grater? Intrigued, I helped her out and found I could do it, and in the process I was initiated into the world of crossword puzzle words, actual words (unlike bogus words in a Scrabble dictionary that start with Q but are not followed by U) though not in common usage, like ort and erne and yegg, and began a lifelong relationship with Estes Kefauver.

So every Saturday for the next 20 years I did the weekend crosswords in the Toronto Star, and once I began to see certain patterns of language peculiar to them, I would complete two of them at a single sitting in under an hour. I never used dictionaries or other aids, but would occasionally ask my wife when I got stuck on a certain clue, and though she had no confidence in her own language skills, surprisingly often supplied a recalcitrant word, a movie title, disease, or colloquialism.

My halcyon days were when the local paper printed the New York Times Sunday puzzle (a week later, so what?), but eventually advertisements ate up its space. In case you don’t know, most large or sophisticated puzzles have themes, or quips from comedians’ one-liners, and part of the fun is cracking the code of the theme. Puns, palindromes, and conundrums are the mainstay of clever clues, and you should know that puns are followed by questions marks in the clues. For instance, from Jan 5/03, entitled Bonus Rounds, you have to add an “O” to a well-known phrase to come up with a new one: the clue “Dentist’s Jazz band?” produces “FineToothCombO,” and “I think, therefore I wrestle?” yields “CogitoErgoSumO.” Ha ha. One of my favourites is a St. Patrick’s Day special in which the centre black square is surrounded by four white ones, or rather green ones, as the colour green completes each of the solutions around it, forming a four-leafed clover. Particularly tricky are those that have more than one letter or even a full word in selected squares. However, what makes difficult crossword puzzles more challenging is usually not the solutions, but the clues, which get more abstruse and deliberately misleading the higher the degree of difficulty. The clue is always in the same tense or part of speech as the solution, but the part of speech itself is not easy to decipher. And it is true that, unlike many other types of word puzzles, you do have to have a fairly wide knowledge base that spans cultures, topics, and generations – if you don’t know who Yma Sumac and Mel Ott were, you’ll have a tough time beyond the moderate level.

Sure, puzzles and games are largely a source of amusement, but I believe all enduring games contain something valuable. Word puzzles and trivia games make your brain’s search engine skitter around your neural pathways like a frightened rodent, lighting up dusty corners, finding alternative routes unimagined by Mapquest, shrieking the wrong way down streets marked One Way, and creating new constellations. I’m told that it’s a prophylactic against Alzheimer’s, and thank God for that. For me, it performed an indispensable service when I was going through a major crisis that consumed my life: once I had said all my prayers, done all my work, and dumped my woes on my good friends, crossword puzzles kept my mind off fretting over sorrows which only time had the power to heal and change. Little could those little men and women fussing in solitude over the construction of these anagrammed squares have imagined.
In my pre-crepuscular years I have become one of those little men, creating puzzles, not professionally but as supplementary learning materials for various courses I teach. One of these is the Ruhi Institute, and the puzzles help the participants return again and again to the Scripture they are studying, expanding their vocabulary and even deepening their insight as they scour the passages again and again.

And I continue to meet interesting people on trains and in cafés who are poring over crosswords, erasing and scratching their heads, but I doubt that I will ever attend any conventions – I presume they exist – or travel thousands of miles to meet Will Shortz, the Grand Imperial Wizard of cruciverbalism. Yeah, that’s the word.