A crosswording miscellany – Arthur O'Dwyer – Stuff mostly about C++
A crosswording miscellany
I just finished reading Natan Last’s 2025 book Across the Universe: The Past, Present,<br>and Future of the Crossword Puzzle. It was… fatiguing. Now, I myself am a “discursive”<br>writer, so I’m throwing stones from a glass house here; but it seemed to me that Last’s<br>every paragraph consisted of three or four anecdotes halfway told, capped off with some<br>nonsensical simile. Open the book at random to page 31:
On December 11, 2022, Eric [Albert] suffered a hemorrhagic stroke of his cerebellum.<br>He’s lucky to be alive: around 50 percent of patients die in a month, half of those within<br>the first two days. When we first spoke in April 2023, I immediately asked if his language<br>had been affected, then regretted it. But he was fine, he said. The neurologists don’t know<br>why the stroke happened, or how he recovered his cognition so quickly. He says he repeated the<br>French he was learning to himself in the ICU. I imagined him, was almost ashamed to imagine him,<br>saying ciré ciré ciré, épée épée épée — as if the accent marks were stray neurons in need of repair<br>— or an item from James Joyce’s _Finnegans Wake I’d just seen in Word Ways because it’s the<br>only “word” with five or more Q’s: Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq! In Joyce’s Wake, it’s<br>preceded by the line: “He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak.” I remembered analyses of<br>Broca’s aphasia I’d read studying neuroscience in college […]
Page 163:
In P.G. Wodehouse’s 1957 novel, Something Fishy (called The Butler Did It in<br>its American release), Lord Uffenham, every bit an imperious sneeze as his name suggests,<br>barks at his wittier niece, Jane: “[…] Run and ask Keggs what the dickens ‘Adventurer<br>goes in for outrageous road-speed’ is supposed to signify. Tell him it’s urgent. And I want<br>some more coffee… Yer can’t drink too much coffee. It bucks you up. It stimulates the<br>mental processes.” The answer — DESPERADO, an “outrageous” anagram of ROAD SPEED and synonym<br>of “adventurer” — is supplied by the august valet Augustus Keggs. Then Uffenham proceeds to<br>a second stinker: “Desperado, eh? Capital. Now, go and ask him what the devil ‘So the subordinate<br>professional on trial gets wages in advance not without demur’ means.” For the intellectual or<br>the upper-crust peer, the crossword and coffee must be consumed; who labors for it is immaterial.<br>Eliot’s brooder Prufrock “measured out [his] life in coffee spoons,” Margaret Farrar called<br>the Times Saturday crossword a “two cups of coffee puzzle,” Lord Uffenham has his niece<br>make the coffee and his butler solve the puzzle.
The butler did it; but who is there to<br>say, besides Jane, that Uffenham didn’t solve it himself? One imagines Keggs following<br>Uffenham on a summery lawn the color of turtle shells, moving the lord’s croquet balls,<br>muttering “Very good shot, sir” as he does._ […]
Does one, though? Anyway, if you are excited by the mere idea of 300 pages of this sort of thing —<br>accent marks as damaged neurons, lawns the color of not just one turtle shell (i.e. a mottled<br>brown) but several, the names of Simon & Schuster inflated into “fat illegible balloons pricked<br>into oblivion by a skyscraper’s spire” (page 50), a missed encounter between Vladimir Nabokov<br>and his future wife Véra described as “a word golf of only one, as if embalming a simpler past”<br>(page 169), etc., then you’re in for a treat. I myself alternately slogged and skimmed.<br>Many of the book’s chapters were first published individually in magazines, which explains<br>how the same anecdotes keep recurring.<br>“Three-letter word for a female swan” appears on page 54 and again on page 222.<br>There are two capsule biographies of Elizabeth Gorski and at least three of Arthur Wynne.
Last’s shotgun approach does give starting points for some interesting web sleuthing.<br>For example, he reprints a butterfly-shaped Russian-language crossword drawn by Nabokov on 1926-07-06.<br>The image he uses just comes from Wikipedia,<br>which got it from a tweet; but Nabokov’s tiny handwriting is solvably transcribed<br>in Письма к Вере<br>(“Letters to Véra,” 2014).<br>(Thanks to Russian StackExchange for that link!) The solution to Nabokov’s butterfly<br>crossword is (spoiler) here.
Last mentions that Georges Perec,<br>of La Disparition lipogram fame, also wrote crosswords (in French).<br>See one of Perec’s, and solution, at<br>Derek Harrison’s blog.<br>Perec’s crosswords seem to be collected in two books:<br>Les mots croisés (1979; ISBN 2863740032) and<br>Les mots croisés II (1986; ISBN 2867440661).
This reminds me that Stephen Sondheim, of Broadway fame, not only wrote cryptic<br>crosswords for New York magazine in 1968–1969 but is thereby credited with<br>introducing the cryptic to American audiences. His fantastic series of cryptics<br>is not hard to find online, e.g. here<br>and here and<br>even on nymag.com (1,<br>2,<br>3).<br>My favorite is 1968-04-29’s “One Shy.”
Fun fact: Sondheim apparently inspired the “Andrew Wyke” character in Sleuth.<br>(Run, don’t...