I’ve only been at the NYT crossword for a couple of months. I’ve never solved one without googling something. I know nothing about sports or geography which is a major handicap right there. But my rule is to do it as much as I possibly can on my own, then when I Google I actually try to learn something rather than just get a one word answer. It’s amazing how often I fail to guess things that I do know about. There was one I didn’t get about a Buddhist concept and I’m literally a Buddhist, and I’m still not even sure what the phrase was referring to.
You may be mourning the monoculture, but I prefer the clever wordplay and themes today’s puzzles provide over those heartless machine clues.
Today one clue made my day. GAMES magazine published puzzles that were used in this year’s American Crossword Puzzle tournament. The title of the puzzle is “Words to the Wise.” It didn’t take long to determine the puzzle’s theme, that the letter y would be appended to the end of a phrase to make it something totally different.
The clue: Chatty doll with an authoritarian streak?
Answer: Stern Talking To+y
Heh. I did a NYT Sunday puzzle the other day that I thought was pretty clever in its gimmick. The title was “When in Rome,” and my first thought was that it might have some punny turn on “Appian Way,” “Trevi Fountain,” “Colosseum,” and other Roman landmarks.
Nope. It was Roman numerals in answers. So “Stubble” was “V OCLOCK SHADOW,” and “Salad bar option” was “M ISLAND DRESSING.” There were others, of course, and once I figured out that Roman numerals were the key, the puzzle all fell into place.
Some of you might like the Cox and Rathvon puzzles. There’s always some twist or theme, like the answers have to be changed in some way, like an anagram, before being entered in the grid. There was one puzzle with 12 across answers that had no clues, and could only be solved by getting the down answers. I eventually figured out that the unclued answers were PARTRIDGE, DOVE, HEN, BIRD, RING, etc. It was a December puzzle, of course.
Wait, is this different from the cryptics they’ve been doing for decades (and decades)? I’d lost track of them, but what great puzzles they made (or make).
I didn’t become an NYT crossword addict until last year. (Maybe you’ve seen me in some of the comments).
No, but their puzzles always had some theme or tweak to them. I remember one where each clue had an extra letter, which had to be removed for the clue to make sense. (Which was not always obvious in cryptic clues.). And the extra letters would spell out a quote and the person who said it. Things like that.
I went to a showing of The Last of Sheila at a revival theater in Boston and overheard someone saying it was the movie he watch while constructing a puzzle. I don’t know if he was a pro or just did it for fun, bit I should have struck up a conversation and asked his name.
Cox & Rathvon are retired now, but there’s a website where you can find their old cryptics.
This is how old I am. I sold an article to Will Shortz for GAMES before he took over the Times spot.
Ooh, what issue? I have a whole bunch of Games magazines from the 80s and I wonder if it’s in one of them.
November 1982. “Brother, Can You Spare a Puzzle?” about a Depression-era national puzzle contest that involved solving 90 rebuses over 15 weeks to win $100,000. More than two million people sent in all 90 answers along with 45 wrappers from Old Gold cigarettes to the tobacco company. They made out like the bandits they were.
It was my first piece for a national magazine and an extra ego boost when Shortz told me he had always wanted to write an article about the contest.
Looking back, I am utterly stumped how I could possibly have done the newspaper research to write it without access to newspaper databases.
The monoculture was dead as soon as Col. Klink started wearing one in Hogan’s Heroes.
Very cool.
It’s on the Internet Archive!
Very cool indeed. We were GAMES subscribers in that era, I have no doubt I read it.
“Old Gold fell to the back of the cigarette pack…”
Clever double entendre, that.
Same!
As for the topic of the thread, I’ve sometimes wondered if the “death of the monoculture” is at all related to the debate over the study of great literature or music.
What I mean is, there’s been increasing debate over the fact that the “classics,” the works of art that everyone cultured is expected to know in the West, is overwhelmingly white-, male-, and Eurocentric, and whether that’s an injustice to equally great works outside of that. Maybe “monoculture” is only possible by doing something like that, concentrating on a limited subset of The Canon and simply shunting the rest into the darkness. Or maybe not.
But I find the point interesting, as well as the question of whether pop culture is any better, given the “cultural dominance” of the US in particular.
I’m up to 1990. Pretty soon I’ll start encountering puzzles I’ve done before. Not sure of I’ll keep going at that point.
As far as I know, they started the trend of the clues in acrostic puzzles being related to the theme, in a tricky way. Current acrostics in the Times still do this. I used to do lots of books of Thomas Middleton acrostics. A few were cryptics.
Does anyone know a good source of American cryptics? British ones I have. There was a spate of them, but they vanished. I asked old Doper twickster, who was an editor for puzzle magazines, if they failed because most people couldn’t get anywhere, and she confirmed it. If you are interested in doable British cryptics, I found the first Chambers book of puzzles very reasonable, with few local references. Chambers is the standard dictionary for British cryptics. The big Daily Telegraph books are my second favorites.
I did a book of Margaret Farrar puzzles. They were incredibly difficult since they were full of obscure islands and Polynesian gods. My mother-in-law did them with a crossword puzzle dictionary nearby, and I understand because no one could remember all that junk they used to complete grids.
The New Yorker publishes five crosswords on line a week, with the hardest being Monday and the easiest Friday. You need a very different knowledge set than for the Times. An awful lot of modern musicians and artists who I have to look up. I at most look up one or two words for Saturday Times puzzles, but my knowledge base is right at the Times sweet spot.
Piffle. 50 years ago when I lived in Champaign, IL I got the Sunday Times at a supermarket a block from my house. A few years after that when I moved to Louisiana I had a mail subscription. I don’t think they had remote publishing plants back then, but they weren’t hard to get.
I don’t find the NYT Sunday puzzle particularly difficult, just long. It’s usually the Saturday puzzle that gives me the most grief. The Thursday, if there’s a gimmick to it, can take awhile. The Friday can sometimes just be too obscure.
I’m not sure monoculture has been a thing for at least the last sixty years. I would guess crosswords have become easier, but do not know if this is due to my skill, knowing a few popular clues, or having more in common with creators. I’m sure fewer people do crosswords, if it is true fewer even read at all for entertainment.
I try to complete the Sunday NYT puzzles in under thirty minutes. Occasionally it takes me an hour, one puzzle I recently finished but still do not get the complex theme allowing you to guess an additional four letter word at the centre even after seeing the answer. Recently I did one in eighteen minutes, which had the clever theme of five long anagrams placed side by side - my kind of thing.
I just get the Sunday NYT, so do not know how it changes throughout the week.