That “Good Taste” requirement includes some funny things. I’ve noticed in my usual crossword (Newsday crossword, edited by Stanley Newman) that the word “NUDE” is always clued as “Stocking shade” or “Art museum sculpture,” and never as "without clothing.
I wonder how the NY Times editor feels about having to dumb down the Sunday puzzles? I haven’t gotten any smarter but I am able to finish puzzles whose predecessors ten years ago had me stumped.
My understanding is that Will both edits for correctness and also edits for clue difficulty - in order to make the clues fit the day of the week he’s running the puzzle. I’d guess the editor of a puzzle book with multiple authors might edit clues so the difficulty builds - or do constructors target the clues to a certain level? Even for one author collections, does an editor decide a clue doesn’t quite fit, even if it is correct?
Is there a sense of the level of difficulty of normal cryptic clues? If you are defining a container, you can put the word in a clue, or put a clue to the container in the clue, which is harder.
I don’t think it’s dumbing down, but rather a different philosophy. The older puzzles had more simple definitions of hard words, the newer ones are more playful. The difference between Games style puzzles and the Times puzzles was very obvious when Maleska (or Will Weng) was editing the Times, and Will Shortz was editing Games. Try some of the really old Times collections - the experience of solving is very different. I’ve always liked the new style, myself. Maybe it takes me less time to solve the Sunday puzzle, but it’s a lot more fun.
One thing I don’t like - I wish Cox and Rathvon would stop writing acrostic clues that match the theme of the reading. One of the best things about acrostics is figuring out what the reading is about - that’s gone now, pretty much.
Are you sure you haven’t gotten any smarter? If you’ve been doing them for ten years, you almost have to have improved at least a little.
If anything I’ve gotten dumber. What also bugs me is the use of brand names in the NY Times puzzle. I thought that was taboo (not the board game brand or the cologne brand) in real good puzzles.
Well, actually, no, I served as a proofreader for UC Press, and I very well know the differences. I was just wondering if, when I finally grow up, I want to edit crosswords or classified ads. It’s still a toss up.
Actually, guizot, Reality Chuck is wrong – puzzle editors tend to be a whole lot more proactive than he seems to think – a lot of my job was writing clues. As I mentioned above, people who can write good diagrams cannot, with a couple of exceptions, write good clues.
Part of this is – to respond to Voyager’s question – is to make sure that a series of puzzles do build in terms of difficulty. No, the constructors don’t generally even know where in a book a puzzle might fall; most of that work is done by the editor. (Nine times out of ten, I didn’t even bother to look at the constructor’s clues, other than, sometimes, his or her clues for the theme entries to see if something fun was going on there. Usually there wasn’t.)
And gigi – I don’t think you should discount the idea that you’re getting better at puzzles (if not necessarily smarter. I keed! I keed!). It is the case that you will learn the “vocabulary” of cluing, and get more tuned into a particular editor’s style, the more you puzzles edited by that person you do.
Well, twickster, you’re surely tipping the scales! I usually can solve Mon. through Wed. Thursday it’s a maybe.
Now I know who’s responsible that every Friday evening I get off the train in a bad mood. It’s…
YOU!!!
Shame!! Forget about the EPEE. Noboby has an “EPEE” today. Erase it from your editor’s mind. If you get a puzzle with “EPEE,” ban that person. Don’t accept his/her puzzle. “EPEE” no longer exists, I tell you.
Not I – I have left the biz.
And when I was in the biz, I was doing magazines, not newspapers.
And when I was doing magazines, one of the “crap-removing” tasks I was doing was removing crosswordese. “Epee” I might have left – but “etui” and “anoa” usually came out.