I am a notoriously bad crossword puzzle enthusiast. Not bad in the late Michael Jackson's sense of "good", but bad in the sense of "really crappy"! Usually, I can whip through those "easy" crossword puzzle books I buy from time to time, giving me a false sense of expertise with this genre of diversion. But then I'll come across a Sunday New York Times puzzle and I'm instantly and hopelessly lost, desperately looking for at least ONE clue that I can solve on it. When I was much younger and actually followed prime time television, I could fill out much of the weekly TV-based crossword in TV Guide magazine. But nowadays, forget it!
But all is not lost; help is on the way. In the (incidentally free) Independent Florida Alligator is published the Los Angeles Times daily crossword puzzle. Which I guess is about halfway between the difficulty of the Sunday NY Times and the "easy" puzzles. Then I discovered that the weekday New York Times crossword puzzle, included in the (not free) Gainesville Sun is also much simpler than their Sunday monstrosity.
I am not one of those strange people who look up the answers to the clues that they can't figure out. If I can't solve 42-down, then I'll try to solve the horizontal clues that overlap it. And not completely finishing a puzzle is no big deal, either. I just enjoy the process of "backward thinking" that deriving a term from its oft cleverly constructed description entails. How about you?
I dig crosswords because I can just rip them out of the paper and carry them around with me, working on them during "down" moments when I am waiting in line or during a break in my routine.
When I was a kid, we used to have cruddy crossword puzzles to do at school or in those cheap children's magazines. By "cruddy", I mean crosswords that had squares that weren't covered by both vertical and horizontal words. In these inferior puzzles, one had to just "know" the answer with the minimal help of having only a few vertical/horizontal overlaps. Of course, mitigating against this glaring flaw was the tendency for the puzzles to be mind-bogglingly simple to solve!
My parents were both avid and expert crossword puzzle enthusiasts, having become so adept at the game that they ended up concentrating on the much more difficult "diagramless" puzzles. As a matter of fact it was while looking over their diagramless puzzles as a kid when I first realized that my parents were pretty damned smart!
Not that being a lousy crossword "puzzler" conversely means I'm stupid (or so I try to convince myself). For me, diagramless is "off the table" for now. Weekday newspaper puzzles rule!
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First, you're somewhat misled about the NY Times puzzles: the Sunday puzzle is not the hardest of the week; the Saturday puzzle is.
ReplyDeleteThe Times puzzles start dead-easy on Monday, and get progressively harder through the week, until, with the Saturday puzzle, one considers a single word answered to be something of a victory.
The Sunday puzzles are a mixed bag, usually about the difficulty of Thursday. What makes them distinctive is that they're on a larger grid and they (usually) have a theme. The theme sometimes adds to the difficulty, and sometimes makes the puzzle easier by giving you an extra clue for the themed words.
It's been years since I've bothered doing a Monday or Tuesday NYT puzzle — they're just too easy, and I can often finish one by just banging out answer after answer, with little thought. Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday are normal difficulty for me, and Friday and Saturday are often too hard to finish, but it's nice when I do.
I find it odd when people look up the answers. Where's the challenge there?
I don't do them on paper any more, though: I have a subscription to the electronic versions, and I download them — I actually have several years' worth of NYT puzzles (Wed thru Sun) on my laptop. I usually do them when I'm travelling, sitting in an airport or a plane.
One nice thing about the program is that you can do something you can't do with a paper puzzle: you can have the program tell you that you got a word wrong without having it tell you the correct answer. That's useful when you get stuck, and it turns out you're stuck because you have an answer wrong. I'll use that only when I know I can't get any farther where I am, and the alternative is to abandon the puzzle.
I do the diagramless ones on paper, though, because one has to. The program (AcrossLite) that they use for the e-puzzles can't deal with diagramless ones, except by exposing the grid to you. Since forming the grid is part of the challenge (and I find it an interesting logic task), once the grid is exposed the diagramless puzzles are usually too easy.
My favourites, though, are what we call "cryptic puzzles", which are, to the London Times readers, just regular puzzles. Those are the ones where each clue is in two parts, one of which clues the word or phrase directly, and the other gives an oblique clue. Like "Soldier insect is very large," might be a clue for "giant", where "very large" is the direct clue, and "soldier insect" clues the words "GI" and "ant".
The cryptic puzzles cross at (usually) every second letter, and the others are uncrossed. But regular, non-cryptic puzzles should never have uncrossed letters — every letter should be covered by both an across and a down clue. Failure there is a sign of a poor crossword writer.
Another sign of a weak crossword writer is the use of what I call "crossword-puzzle words" — words that every experienced cruciverbalist knows, and no one else does. "Chinese pagoda" = TAA. "Celebes ox" = ANOA. "Bacchanalian cry" = EVOE. And so on.
On the other hand, what would crossworders do without people like Arthur ASHE, Mel OTT, and ARA Parseghian?
Finally, the ability to do crossword puzzles is a specific skill that one develops with practice. Intelligence certainly helps, but isn't sufficient, and lack of practice will kill one, regardless of how smart one is.
And it's nearly impossible to do a crossword in another language, even if you're fluent. They require an amount of sideways thinking and cultural knowledge that you don't realize until you really think about it.
My high school trivia bowl team used to do crossword puzzles at practices, and it got me hooked. Here's a tip on the daily NYT puzzles -- Monday is the easiest, and it progresses up to Saturday as the hardest. Sunday is challenging because it's bigger, so there's more clues available to not know, but Saturday's supposed to be a tougher puzzle overall.
ReplyDeleteH-m-m...that probably explains why yesterday's NY Times puzzle is harder than Tuesday's. Good to know, keeps me from suspecting that I'm "losing it".
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