Australian Crosswords

A regular poster around these parts is Arthur Maynard, a cryptic crossword junkie who spends a lot of time trying to pass on his cryptic knowledge to others. He mentioned a short time ago about his attempt to solve a Guardian cryptic by Crucible that contained a theme that wasn’t stated, and lots of slang English terms he didn’t know. It’s a dilemma for solvers in Australia, both novices and experienced ones, as there aren’t many appropriate crosswords that celebrate Australian culture and words and have a style that provides the foundation needed to tackle the celebrated more difficult crosswords. When solvers want to look beyond the locally-produced product, what choices are there? It’s not surprising that UK newspapers carry UK-centric crosswords – that’s their traditional market and there’s no need for them to try and engage the whole world. There are, of course, pockets of UK-born solvers scattered around the world who can access crosswords online and are mostly familiar with the culture and language, but very few newspapers actively seek solvers outside their local sphere. Foreign-based solvers, as such, are forced to adapt to them, rather than the other way round. One newspaper that does make an effort is the Financial Times (FT) which is described on Wikipedia as “an English-language international daily newspaper”. I wrote cryptics for the FT for a couple of years after a friend suggested that it was a potential outlet for me since they discouraged the parochial nature that dominates most of the crosswords in the UK. As it turned out, he was right, and I basically produced Stickler Weekly-style cryptics keeping the Australian references to a minimum.
The FT cryptic has two other things going for it: all the crosswords are available free online (for the time being at least) and there are many different setters, providing a great deal of variety. After you’ve finished the Stickler Weekly this week, gives some a go.

We talked recently about indirect references and the need for them to be obvious to allow solvers a reasonable chance of working out the association BEFORE finding the solution. I mentioned a couple of different types of indirect references, but I left one out as I believe it simply shouldn’t be used even though it turns up in published crosswords every now and then. This one I call “guilt by association”, where a word is expanded, or a synonym is used, to define a word that is used in a completely different way to the original word. Here is an example: “Go first” = LEAD = PB (chemical symbol for lead). Here is another: (a little less removed this time, but the same concept) “Cop” = COPPER = CU (chemical symbol of copper). “Cop” could just as easily be “policeman”, but either way I’m not a fan – just too much to do for the solver. Imagine the overhead of having to translate and map out potentially every word of a clue in this way? These kinds of devices are simply setters showing off, giving the average solver little chance of using wordplay to reach the answer.