Australian Crosswords

Some of you may know from various interviews I’ve done that I was introduced to cryptic crosswords by my English teacher when I was 15. He used the Guardian that was published every Sunday in NSW to teach us the ins and outs of cryptic crosswords. In fact, we would spend all week solving it and do a report at the end of the week summarising what we’d learnt. He had a huge impact on my life. As no-one in our family did cryptics I doubt I would have ever taken up solving. I look back at that time in the late 1970s, when there were only books to aid solvers, as a wondrous time. I had no preconceptions, no idea of what was normal, permitted, hard, easy, clever, sloppy or wrong – I just had a puzzle to solve and a language of sorts to learn along the way. I was 15 years old and I knew this puzzle was meant for people with wider word knowledge than me, so I expected to struggle, but as the clues were well-written with generally clear wordplays, I knew I would recognise the answer when I saw it.  Solving was fun – much more fun than in this current era – as there was no choice but to chip away at the puzzle the entire week – not an arduous task because rewards eventually came with satisfaction. I can remember thumbing though an old 1962 “Book of Words”, page by page, trying to match the letter pattern I needed in the hope of finding an answer. I didn’t mind this and for all I knew it was normal. Some of the best answers came from nutting out the wordplay without actually  knowing the answer word. What joy when the worked-out answer is found in the dictionary with the stated definition in the clue!
I think the joy I experienced back then will never be repeated by me or anyone else as blogs, anagram searches and word pattern matches give a clue a short life, and our instant world encourages us to finish and move on. Maybe there are some out there who intentionally prevent the digital age from intruding on their solving pleasure and those, perhaps, who resolve anagrams with pencil and paper.
Tell me your stories.

It’s amazing out of the thousands of possible words that can fit into a grid, how often words could end up being related in some way. It’s not uncommon to have two words that are synonymous or a few words that have a medical bent etc. Of course, it’s up to the setter what words are chosen, but still, being able to create a mini-theme without really trying must be statistically difficult but it often doesn’t seem that way. It also happens sometimes that words are included that seem harmless in isolation, but when combined with others in the grid, it may appear that the setter is making some kind of statement. In a recent Australian Financial Review crossword for Christmas, I finished the grid (complete with a colourful Christmas tree inset), filled in the words and wrote the clues. In some regards doing this is routine for me, or I may be working on a number of puzzles at once, and I can forget about context. Such was the case here. I exported the finished grid, and while eying it over, I noticed I had included a five-letter religion right in the middle of the crossword at the heart of the Christmas tree. It’s just a puzzle and including that religion doesn’t mean anything, but its positioning might make people think otherwise. I quickly rearranged a few words, clued them and sent it off. No need to cause an issue if it can be avoided.

I was alerted by the rec.puzzles.crosswords newsgroup to an editing mistake in a recent Times crossword, and thought I’d talk about it briefly as I think it highlights a couple of interesting things. Here’s the faulty clue: Disturbance in field scattered old fragments in two minutes (8,5)*. The mistake is that “scattered” should be “scattering”, possibly not a problem if it was an anagram indicator, but as “scattering” was actually part of the anagram fodder, the change made the clue incorrect from a wordplay perspective.
I’ve always believed the UK Times puzzles were test-solved, and if they are, then it’s clear that the editing process happens after the test-solving, as there’s no way such an error would get through. If there’s no test-solving, then maybe there should be, and if there is then maybe it should happen after the editor has done an initial rounds of changes, which leads me to the second point: the editor obviously doesn’t “cold-solve” the submitted crosswords, that is, solve them as if they were an actual solver – it’s more likely that they go through it with the answers at hand, which is a dangerous practice. Cold-solving takes more time but will force the editor to understand the workings of clues which will help them better realise the impact of making editorial changes. (BTW, the UK puzzles I’ve written have included explanations at the request of the editor – do they look at them, or only look at them when they are stumped?) Lastly, it’s clear the editor doesn’t feed back the changes to the original setter, if it had happened in this case the setter would have realised the editor’s mistake. I know from my dealings with editors they reserve the power to make changes without consultation or approval – which is their right – but a courtesy email listing changes would have been beneficial in this case.
So how did the mistake happen? It’s not a simple case of an “improvement” gone wrong, although the editor no doubt believed that’s what they were doing. There’s been an increased use over the years of descriptive language in clues that isn’t common in everyday speech. “AA boxes B” becomes “ABA” and “ABC changes in DD” becomes “DBACD” etc. No-one I know describes or defines things this way and I believe it only works if the same sort of language continues throughout the whole clue. “ABA” (definition) = “AA boxes B” (wordplay) just doesn’t work for me. However, many setters use this style of clue and that’s what’s happening in the faulty clue: “fragments” is used as an anagram indicator and should act on “scattering” (plus “o” for “old”), however, the editor missed “fragments” and saw “scattering” as the anagram indicator and decided to improve it by changing its form to “scattered”.
It’s rare that a puzzle like the Times contains such a mistake as it uses the best setters and the best people in the puzzle production process, but this mistake perhaps highlights a deficiency in the process that could possibly be eliminated with a tweak or two.

[*Disturbance in field scattered old fragments in two minutes (8,5) should be Disturbance in field scattering old fragments in two minutes (8,5) – MAGNETIC STORM = anagram of SCATTERING + O(ld) inside MM]