Romano - Crossworld: one mans journey into Americas crossword obsession

Contents

To Alan D. Williams,
in very fond memory of
a punster, a polymath,
and, best of all, a gentleman

A Note on Crosswords

This is a book about my yearlong journey into the world of competitive crossword solvingalthough saying that is a little like saying Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is a song about a girl or The Scream is a painting of a guy standing on a bridge. The real topic of any book about crosswords is all the information in the world; more to the point, it's about the type of person who has enough of that information at his (or her, of course) disposal to walk into a tournament and know with a degree of confidence that he (or she, on occasion) will be able to accurately finish in a few minutes a puzzle it would take most ordinary civilians several hours or more to complete. Crossworld is also, for the record, rare among books about crosswords in that it doesn't actually contain one.

Specifically, Crossworld's subject is the American-style crossword as exemplified by the New York Times puzzle, whose defining characteristics are a symmetrical grid, a ban on the use of words fewer than three letters long, the absolute avoidance of stand-alone letters, a proportion of white squares to black that never falls below 70 percent, and the injunction that a clue and its answer must be substitutable for each other if used in a sentence. The use of rebuses (symbols that stand in for a word or phrase), multiple letters within the same square, and numerals (Arabic or Roman) have all, over the last two decades, become increasingly popular and acceptable elements within American puzzles.

Like all specialized fields in the realm of human endeavor, over the years crosswords have engendered a specific vocabulary that constructors and editors use to describe the technical aspects of what they do; the average solver can live a perfectly normal life without needing to know these terms, but in a book about crosswords they will inevitably make frequent appearances, so it would be best to explain what they are at the outset. (Should you forget what they are, no worrythey are explained again in the text.)

A crossword puzzle is made up of three parts: the grid, the fill, and the cluing. The grid is the arrangement of black-and-white squares you see when you open up your newspaper and turn to the puzzle page; the fill is the set of correct answers that, when you're done, will populate the puzzle; the cluing is the list of prompts and hints, numbered sequentially across and down, that when interpreted correctly will yield the fill. The only other term you'll need to know is keyingthe placement of letters so that they form a word, phrase, or abbreviation. A stand-alone letter would be completely unkeyed; a letter in a corner, where it becomes part of the 1-Across and 1-Down word, would be double-keyed. In crosswords, a word is defined as any single answer across or down; quite commonly, a word in the puzzle sense is in fact made up of several real words.

Not all people like solving crossword puzzles, and not many of those who do spend a whole lot of time talking about them, so there won't be many occasions, unless one day you attend the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (held annually every spring in Stamford, Connecticut), when you'll be called upon to know the activity's specialized vocabulary.

But this knowledge still could be useful to you. Imagine you're at a cocktail party and fall into conversation with a knot of particularly wonky guests who are talking about that day's New York Times puzzle. Even if you don't know anything about that puzzle except the name of its constructor (a piece of information made available by only a small number of crossword venues, including the Times), you can pretend that you do by saying something like: Ah, yeselegant grid, fresh and creative fill, great cluing. Classic Cathy Millhauser. The mavens might think you're a puzzle expert and, with luck, start talking about another and more congenial subject. Congenial to you, that is.

Chapter 1

I am hopelessly addicted to the New York Times crossword puzzle.

Like many addicts, it's taken me time to admit I have a problem. The hints I was heading for trouble came, at first, only occasionally. The moments of panic when I realized that for whatever reason I might not be able to get my fix on a given day. The toll on relationships. The strained friendships. The lost hours I could have used to do something much more productive.

It gets worse, too. The high no longer lasts as long as it once did; what initially could occupy me for a whole afternoon now takes me twenty minutes or less to get through. I have become increasingly alarmed that the supply of the thing I need is limited. The Times publishes only one puzzle per day, and when that's done I find myself rooting about for substitutesthe Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer, and New York Sun puzzles, to name just a fewthat are somehow less satisfying. Sure, there are a couple of thousand puzzles in the Times's electronic archive. But a puzzle you've already done being something of a dead letter, falling back to that recourse is something like accepting an herbal cigarette when you're a smoker plumb out of Camels. There is no substitute for the genuine article, and a sort of panic sets in once it's no longer available. To badly paraphrase the British novelist C. S. Forester, it is prospect and not possession that affords the greatest pleasure, and the delicious agony of the twenty-four hours between completing one puzzle and starting another makes up the circadian rhythm by which my life has been regulated for nigh on two decades now.

If you've ever been to or listened in on a meeting of any of the twelve-step groupsAlcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymousyou may have noticed the pattern that emerges from the narratives of the people who get up to publicly confess their addictions. These men and women all seem to be describing, in their own ways, how they were caught blindside by their particular object of desire. At an AA meeting, it may be the woman whose parents owned a tavern; all those surreptitious sips of liquids from colorful bottles as a little girl transmuted, for her, into a spiral of inebriation and promiscuity that ended only six months before in this very room. At an NA meeting, it may be the regional salesman whose toots of cocaine on the road, originally just to help clear his head, paved the way for divorce, petty theft, and finally grand larceny and imprisonment.

What these stories say, in essence, is that all addicts go through a lapsarian event of some sort or another, which may be why so many twelve-step meetings take place in churches: It's comforting to explain one's own fall from grace in an environment where the fact of being out of grace is dwelt upon so constantly. Addicts seem to fetishize the fact of their own fall, even though the process of falling is, in the end, rather the same whether you happen to be the reformed floozy, the now reemployed and sober salesman, or Adam and Eve. Only the substance changes: alcohol, cocaine, knowledge of good and evil. Or crosswords.