I came across this outstanding example doing the crossword in the free commuter rag while waiting for my train home last night:
14 Down: Pertaining to America (8)
By the time I got to it I had AM—C-N
Any other examples?
Moved MPSIMS --> the Game Room
twicks, who’s written thousands and thousands of crossword clues and never scraped the bottom of that particular barrel
I dimly remember an old “National Lampoon,” probably from the 70’s, that had a crossword puzzle called “The Nose On Your Face.”
The answer to every clue was the clue, verbatim.
PS I never realized what a funny word “cunctator” was until just now.
twickster, do you write puzzles for any newspaper syndicate, or do you do them for yourself?
One from the other day: “Federal Bureau of Investigation, abbrev.”
Two women who are beloved by crossword makers are “Actress Thurman” and “Actress Hagen”. (Uma and Uta, both of whom show up constantly.)
I don’t do crosswords, but wouldn’t a better clue for “Uma” be something like “Poison Ivy”
The puzzle constructors create the word grids first, and in a tight spot a letter configuration like “Uma” might help them to do so…they then write the clues, and how obvious or obscure they make them plays a big part in determining the puzzle’s difficulty.
You’re right that “Poison Ivy” works - but it’s much less obvious for the average non-enthusiast solver than “Actress Thurman” - whether it’s “better” depends on the target audience, and how difficult they want/need the puzzle to be.
There ARE certain clues that show up all the time… like “Mine entrance” (adit) and if you memorize them, you are going to make your life easier.
One thing that kills me is the hebrew months and letters of the alphabet. I have tried memorizing them but for some reason they just don’t stick.
What kind of crosswords are you folks doing? NY Times, for example don’t tend to give out clues like the ones I’m seeing.
Except when they say “alphabet run” and if you have one letter in the string, you just fill in the rest. I also hate roman numeral math. Leave me alone! DCI x XXIV
oleo, lol.
great one!
I have a NYC Times Sunday Omnibus, and one of the favorites has been “They play at Shea”
I highly recommend the documentary “Wordplay” for all crossword puzzle nerds out there…
Twistable cookie
Toiletries case
Soothing plant
Large stewpot
Like a moray
UN workers organization
Fencing sword
Erstwhile Heathrow landing
Clues with “Livy’s (blank)”
Clues pointing to alphabet strings, like “D-H Bridge”
Joe
Here are three I got in one puzzle, in an actual adult newspaper. I remember them exactly because I ranted about it on FB.
“All’s well that ___ well”
“to be or ___ to be”
“___ and yang”
I especially liked this clue “+” for the answer “plus”.
Note that this is a sampling of the horrible clues, the puzzle was filled with them. This puzzle was so bad I gave up on it in disgust.
In this thread about lazy crossword clues, I made the following post:
Joe
The ones that annoy me are the converse - where the clue is too broad to even offer a chance of finding the answer. E.g:
Type of fish (5)
Author (6)
European Capital (6)
Yes, if I already have half the letters I can fill in the rest but I have to start somewhere. If you can’t, in theory, get the right answer from the clue alone then what’s the point?
All of the clues for any crossword in People magazine.
Two more common ones for getting in the vowels:
Jacob’s brother. (Esau)
Fencing sword. (Epee)
There was one the other day that said “One of the Mario Brothers”.
Well, “Mario” would be TOO obvious, which only leaves one other one. :smack:
The Times sometimes used to use “crossword puzzle words,” but they mostly dropped that after Will Shortz became puzzle editor. (Or if they were included, they had unusual clues.) This greatly improved things, as far as I was concerned. Before that I would sometimes have “knots” where I didn’t know either crossing word. Now most clues are “gettable” without knowledge of words used only in crossword puzzles.