Australian Crosswords

A while back I received an email from an old Stickler fan lamenting the loss of decent cryptics from the papers and complaining about the inevitable move away from the printed medium. He said he would love to do The Stickler Weekly but wasn’t tech-savvy and had no desire to become so. He suggested a service where I would print a month’s worth of puzzles at a time and send them to him. He was happy to pay for the expense of doing this and indicated that other people might be interested in doing the same thing. I suspect that there are people out there in the same boat, however, with no way to reach solvers except through the internet, it seems I’m caught in a Catch-22 situation.
I assume if you have friends who prefer doing The Stickler Weekly on paper then you are downloading the PDF and printing it off for them, so my current solver base probably isn’t a good source for partakers of a print-and-send service.
I’d gladly do something in this area if enough people were interested but how to reach them? Any suggestions? Any comments?

When describing straight and cryptic crosswords to new solvers, I point out that a well-written cryptic crossword is a straight crossword plus wordplay, that is, if you scrub the wordplay from each cryptic clue, you should end up with a bunch of definitions, which is effectively a straight crossword. This only works if a setter provides accurate definitions, ones that can stand on their own two feet and match exactly with the answers. For me, a correct definition in a clue is paramount, and the least that a solver should expect. A setter may include deception in the wordplay, or deception in how the wordplay joins the definition, but in all cases a solver must have the assurance that their answer at least matches what they believe to be the definition. It’s for this reason I’m not a fan of an example of the answer being used as a definition, for example, CAT defining PET or HUMBUG defining SWEET. The other way round is fine, of course, but as there are so many things that CAT could be (besides a PET) and those things to some extent are arbitary, it doesn’t properly do its job as a definition.
The English language is full of wrinkles and society likes to ignore history and iron them out wherever it can. One such area is gender, where there are specific words representing the female and male forms. I don’t see anything wrong with killing two birds with one word-based stone, and using a female form, for example, to tell the reader or listener an occupation and sex at the same time. These words aren’t always appropriate but still have a place in language and are dotted throughout our modern-day references. If one of these is a solution to a cryptic clue, say, for ACTRESS, then what could be a valid definition? Lady thespian? YES. She works on stage? YES. Thespian? YES. Stage perfomer? YES. One on stage? YES. No problems here. Now if the answer is ACTOR, which is a gender-neutral term, which clues still apply? IMO, only those definitions that are themselves gender-neutral are valid. The others are incorrect as they make the solver look for a gender-specific term or a particular person – there’s not proper equality here. I’ve seen some setters (both male and female) make this mistake with their definitions, possibly to champion their own sex, but it’s not helpful for the solver – it’s purely a misguided indulgence of the setter.

We all have, both solvers and setters, little annoying problems with devices used in most crosswords. That is, there are things that make us cringe every time we see them, but we tend to accept them anyway. For solvers it might be the use of terms like “revhead” = R or “backdoor” = R or anagram indicators that don’t do their jobs. For setters it might be the overuse of crosswordese or the addition of extra words in clues that play no role. A recent topic on The Crossword Centre’s forum was entitled “More Pet Peeves”, and a couple of people contributed particular things in cryptics they didn’t like. There wasn’t a big response, but a couple of things came out of the topic for me. Firstly, one pet peeve was the use of the term “essence” to mean the centre part of. I don’t think I’ve ever used it simply because I couldn’t justify its use based on the dictionary definition. This is despite its general acceptance in crossword circles by solvers and setters. It was good to see that this crosswordese has its detractors. Secondly there were two quite separate responses which I think says something about how setters can approach the use of a possible questionable device. Alberich (Neil Shepherd), who brought up “essentially” in the first place, refuses to use it because he doesn’t think it does the job even though he could. Andy Stewart sort of feels the same but uses it because “it is in such common use”. Interestingly he compliments Alberich on his restraint since every device excluded reduces the toolset of a setter, making their job harder. I also admire setters who actually think about the true validity of the devices they employ as such setters are all-inclusive, remembering that not all solvers are veterans and new solvers must be able solve without too much inside knowledge.