Types and Tactics

Which Crossword?

Now you will be wanting to try your hand at some real crosswords yourself. If you live in Great Britain, then the accolade is supposed to be the Times crossword. It’s certainly not the easiest. Some of the cognoscenti rate the Guardian crossword a little higher, I believe. In general, the higher the literacy of the readership, the more demanding the crossword is going to be. I don’t know anything of the Independent’s crossword, but I expect that will be a rather challenging one too.

If you live elsewhere, I’m afraid you will have to find out for yourself. I think that rule of thumb about the relationship between the readership and the difficulty is likely to apply pretty generally though.

You may prefer to cut your teeth on something a little less demanding. The ones I started with were those in the Daily Telegraph. I wouldn’t be seen dead reading the paper they come in, but they are well regarded as being ingenious and well set, but a little more approachable than the big boys. You don’t have to buy the paper to attempt them, though, because sets of them are published in paperback from time to time. Similarly you can buy volumes of Times and Guardian crosswords.

I chose to use examples from the Radio Times magazine, because that is ubiquitous (in Britain at least) and has a good but not fiendishly difficult crossword. It was also the one that I was doing when Daniel was trying to help. It does have the disadvantage that it is a weekly publication and that you will therefore have to wait several weeks to discover the true identity of that 17 down that you couldn’t get your brain around. Maybe collections of their crosswords are published - I don’t know.

It’s up to you where you start trying. It’s really a matter of what comes to hand, I suppose. I certainly wouldn’t start off by trying one of the more unusual varieties such as those without black squares or numbers or with exotic kinds of clues. Find a basic cryptic crossword in the normal format and give it a try.

Those Blank Squares...

So - you are sitting there with the blank squares and list of clues in front of you. What do you do next?

What I do, and I think most people do, is to read through the list of clues not particularly carefully at first, looking for something which jumps out at you. Some clues will be easier than others, either because they fit your own mindset and experience better or by design (as the setter wants you to gain a limited foothold to retain your interest) or simply by accident, because that is the nature of things.

Once you have one or two words in place - and you will be pretty certain that they are correct because of the multiple clues within a cryptic clue - then you will have some letters belonging to other words in place too. If, as often happens, I find, you are pretty certain, but not entirely certain, about one of these initial answers, you may choose to “write” it in place only mentally and then see if you can find further confirmation by solving one of the crossing words that will use one of the letters that would be supplied by the hypothetical word if it is correct. As the word in question may supply letters for more than one other word, you could have several clues to go at here, and it is quite likely that one or more of them will fall into place.

The first step in solving a new clue is to ignore as much of it as possible. You have to get your mind into a different groove from the one the compiler of the crossword is trying to force you into. Ignore the grammatical relationships of the words of the clue which come immediately to mind, and particularly ignore any capital letter or punctuation mark. You have to re-parse it not as a piece of natural language but as a crossword clue. Look for bits which could be definitions, either of the whole word or of bits of it, but don’t get too mesmerised by them: they might be right but they may be stinky herrings from the multitudinous seas incarnadined.

It’s easy to get a wrong idea fixed in your mind at this stage and waste an awful lot of time looking for the wrong kind of synonyms. I remember once, for example, spending a small eternity running through every blossom name in creation trying to solve a clue where I had “identified” the main definition as the word “flower”. I had, in fact, correctly identified the clue-word, but it was not a clue to a floral specimen; the solution to the clue in question was the name of a river. Get it? Something which “flows”! Boy, did I feel embarrassed when I solved it finally! At that point I had all the letters from the intersections in place and was reduced to the long, slow process of letter substitution to fill all the blanks. It was the last word unsolved in the entire crossword. The right answer was about the only letter combination possible according to the normal rules of English spelling. I had it right in front of me mentally, staring me in the face, and I was still trying to find the name of a damn plant! It still took me quite a while to break out of the mental squirrel cage I was in and finally see the alternative meaning of F L O W E R which the compiler had used... If you find yourself trapped in this kind of way, it is essential that you try re- and re-parsing the clue to find a different way of interpreting it. Your original interpretation may indeed be correct, but if the answer has not fallen into place moderately quickly, it is time to swallow your pride and look for alternatives.

Remember the hint I gave earlier about thickening the dividing lines in the blanks where you know a word division is to be found. Anything which breaks down that vast expanse of empty space is of help, and you will often find you can identify tentatively at least part of such a multiword answer. In can be of particular help in those answers which are phrases with several words in them. A three letter word within such a phrase, for example, will strongly suggest “the”, particularly if there is an even shorter word in front of it. Look at the following:

Even without a clue to go with it, you should be getting some fairly strong ideas. They may be wrong ones, of course, but they are worth a little examination. How many two letter words with an I at the start are there? IS, IT, IN - and because apostrophes are dropped we must consider I’M and I’D etc. The answer is going to be a common, set phrase, not any old word combination that can fill the blanks: “MUD IS BAD MESS” is simply not on the cards as a possible solution. Tentatively put a “the” in for the second three-letter group and we have either “something is the something” or “something in the something”. And if the clue contains the words “bloke” and a reference to the displaying of a naked posterior....

So thickening the dividing lines can be very profitable.

Speling is Immportent

Obviously crosswords are not very easy, if possible at all, for the dyslexic. A mis-spelled answer, even it is the “right” word, will set everything skew-whiff. You need to be fairly sure that your spellings are correct, and a dictionary can be of use for that. Personally I prefer to avoid the use of reference books in doing crosswords, but I will resort to a dictionary on occasions just to be sure that my spelling of the answer is correct. (Or of the word I think is the answer until I find that my spelling is wrong.)

More important than mere correctness, though, is an awareness of the possibilities of spelling. Only certain letter combinations are allowed in normal English words. Certain letter groups are more likely ways for a word to end than others are. If the last three letters of a word are “I something G”, it shouldn’t be too hard to suggest a highly probable identity for that something. Try this exercise: place the following letters in order of likelihood as being the last letter in an English word - Q I S U C.

You should have little trouble with the first three. As for the last two, I can’t think of any words at all ending in U off-hand, and I can think of something like FAQ as being just about possible as a crossword answer. (You do find acronyms and common abbreviations as answers, particularly in those corners of the grid the compiler is struggling to fill.)

But do remember that you are up against someone whose stock in trade is obscure words. The compiler will be aware of all those special “Scrabble” words that lurk within the pages of the larger dictionaries. In the real world, a Q will be inevitably followed by a U, but you can’t count on that kind of thing one hundred percent in the magical world of the compiler’s dictionary. (Which will probably contain “Qi”, for example...) And remember that, unlike the Scrabble player, he also has the possibility of using personal and geographical names. Once you bring Asian rivers or characters from Norse mythology into the picture, normal spelling rules can be of very little use indeed. (This is one of the reasons for my suggesting that you cut your teeth on something like the Radio Times crossword, which rarely uses such expedients.)

Parsing Clouds

Keep a careful look out for those sneaky words within a clue which suggest the presence of a spelling clue of some kind. If you see an “in”, for example, you should check for “hidden words”. (Flower in garment rents = TRENT) or for the kind of spelling clue which asks you to put one word inside another. (Wine loses height in animal companion for holder - POCKET = P-ET with (H)OCK inside it.) Which also reminds us to look for those conventional clues indicating single letters, “direction” for N,S,E or W etc.

Particularly keep a weather eye open for ways of indicating that an anagram is present: “alters”, “twists”, “changed”, “goes about” etc. These are many and varied, and the presence of such a word is not a cast iron guarantee that an anagram is present, because “misdirection” is the compiler’s second name. But look for them anyway, and you can often double check by counting letters in the word or words that they seem to be indicating as the source material. He has to play fair here, so the number of letters in the source group will correspond to the number of letters required for the answer. (Unless, of course, there is a an additional instruction demanding subtraction of a letter or letters from a group in order to produce the real source. “Pun hod loses a penny and turns to dog (5)” - you have to take the P out of PUN HOD before shuffling it for HOUND.)

In particular, you have to be very much on the guard against deliberate attempts by the compiler to distract you by using punctuation and similar devices. Here is a prime example:

Now, this came from the Radio times, where T.V. references are common and usually indicate a name of an actor or character or something similar. I fell for this example of distraction, and spent some time with references to do with the popular police television programme The Bill. Time wasted, as the answer is: BENGAL LIGHT, a kind of pyrotechnic device, I believe, which burns steadily and is used for signalling. “Makes” is the anagram indicator and the anagram is of THEBILLGANG. The italicised programme name was a complete distraction, and one that worked particular well in the context of a Radio Times crossword. It had me going for quite a while!

ENVOI

And that’s about it, really. As the work progresses, you will find more clues to the unsolved words appearing as the intersections provide letters for you. Obviously you must never rely one hundred percent on these helpful letters, as it is possible that one (or more) of the words producing them is in fact wrong. This shouldn’t be the case if you have completely solved the clue, but it is in the nature of things that sometimes you will have decided on answer without completely understanding the clue for it. Sometimes the compiler has been too devious for his own good - certainly for your own good - and although you feel pretty sure that the word you have written in must be the correct one, you’re not entirely certain how the clue for it works. It can be damned annoying. It will happen though, and it is probably best not to strain your brain too much trying to work it out, provided you are not relying on that answer to provide intersections. (Though sometimes those intersections can help confirm your tentative and partial solution later.) Of course, if it is a “prize” crossword, it may be that the compiler has used such a difficult clue to produce “the decider” - the answer that separates the men from the boys - in which case you are simply going to have to keep on chivvying away at that clue until you are absolutely sure you do have the right answer (if you intend to send it in, that is).

Enjoy yourselves. It’s a fascinating pastimes. Very useful for those occasions when you need to distract yourself for short periods. Some people like to do them before they fall to sleep - I’ve done that myself. That does incur the danger of dreaming about the clue to 12 across, and the weird results that may produce... I’ve seen crossword books with pencil attached in not a few toilets. (And one crossword was indeed published in tear-off toilet paper format as a novel Christmas present!)

If you know it is no use immersing yourself in a novel because you will soon be interrupted, or if you don’t want to tie your eyes fixedly to a book, such as when travelling, a good crossword is particularly useful. I do know of someone who likes to have one with him on a train, for example, so that he may inspect the passing scenery - and I don’t mean that outside the carriage! Someone doing a crossword has a perfect right to stare fixedly into space while his brain cells chew over 37 down - and if someone worth looking at happens to in the centre of his gaze at the time...

If my efforts in setting up this site have encouraged anyone to take up the hobby or allowed someone who has spent years being mystified by what on earth a “cryptic” clue means, then I will be more than satisfied. But it is no use your emailing me to seek help with that elusive 14 across - I’d probably be no better than you at it, and anyway, I want to do my own crossword, thanks!

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