While recuperating from a trifecta of ailments, I became hooked on crossword puzzles. I even bought one of those Dell collections to pass the time on planes. I do the Times crossword every day of the week, and I do the in-flight magazine crossword, and the Sacramento Bee’s. I’ve even tried to puzzle out a People crossword recently in a doctor’s waiting room. And I would have completed it, too, had I recognized the names of any of the glossy young celebrities it celebrated.
Work enough puzzles, and after a while you get tired of and even a little affronted by the easy ones: The Times’ Monday puzzle, say; or Tuesday’s sometimes; or the ones they print with the funnies. And you weary of the three-or-four-letter inevitables that appear in every puzzle: Ava, Eva, Uma, Zsa (as in "half a Hungarian actress), gem, Iran, Abel, ass, zoo, anti, ante, ‘ette, 'esse, Isis, asp, sue, baa, Ovid, moo, Ito, halo, ode, rah, Eli, Eros, sot, Mao, urn, ole, Los, tsar, “et tu”, Las, ewe, din, riot, send. And then there are the acronyms and abbreviations: RFD, QED, ACLU, RCA, RDA, OSHA, AOL, IOU, NBA, ETA, BPOE, SST, USSR; and sta., Inc., Ltd., Ste., and so on.
I used to breathe a contemptuous sigh whenever I encountered them. But when I opened that Dell book, I found the first forty or so puzzles beneath my admittedly shaky, autodidact level of erudition. After working backward and thereby completing the more difficult puzzles first, I got to a point where I figured I might as well throw the uncompleted book away.
But then it occurred to me that I could ignore the clues to the easy ones and use the blank diagrams to make up puzzles of my own. These being diagrams for easy puzzles, few had room for anything more than maybe a couple of six- or seven-letter entries. And I found that after years of playing “Hangman” with my children and weeks of working crossword puzzles with myself I could make up my own puzzles in about ten minutes.
But then it occurred to me that I could ignore the clues to the easy ones and use the blank diagrams to make up puzzles of my own. These being diagrams for easy puzzles, few had room for anything more than maybe a couple of six- or seven-letter entries. And I found that after years of playing “Hangman” with my children and weeks of working crossword puzzles with myself I could make up my own puzzles in about ten minutes.
The only drawback was that I could not accomplish this without resorting to at least half a dozen of the inevitables I had scorned, for it turns out that the inevitables are unavoidable. Try as I might to replace them with Hindu divinities or Japanese royalty, I always found that short of employing expletives, the only way I could make my way out of the corner I’d painted myself into was to summon up one of these time-worn standby’s.
My only recourse was to obscure their clues, which I now realize is the puzzler's lifeline. “Actress Gardner,” for instance, or even “Sinatra’s heartbreaker” wouldn’t do for Ava any longer; it had to become something like “Movies’ Lavinia’s first name;” or “Jazz vocalist Lemert;” or even “porn society acronym.” “Egyptian god” Isis I broke up into “Oh, she __ __ she?” Eros became “backward pain.” I disdained “Female sheep” or “lamb’s ma” for ewe (or for that matter “Miss Gardner” for Ava, or “Adam’s squeeze” or "garden lady" for Eve) and came up with “palindromic female.”
These may be random and overreaching acts of defiance against the severe finitude of three- and four-letter English. Nevertheless, I think my children are going to appreciate the clever way I've handled them, for I am bequeathing all of my completed puzzles to them as a fond remembrance of their father. I just hope they don’t end up fighting over them.
