Ximenes On The Art Of The Crossword
What does the setter do with words which do not conveniently allow any of the treatments described in the last chapter? In the old days he often used to fall back on a mere definition. That won’t do for us. Our principle is that every clue must have some entertainment value, and this can very rarely be achieved unless a clue has two parts. So we must improvise. Sometimes it may be a long time before a good idea arrives, but it is always possible that an inspiration may produce a really good clue. In this chapter my aim is to give some examples of devices which, though they are not used as often as those classified in the last chapter, may from time to time be useful. I shall finish these off with some wild extravagances, the sort to amuse if they don’t appear too often.
1. Heads and Tails.
This is not an uncommon device, and there are traces of its use in the previous chapter; but I think it is used rarely enough for this to be the best place for it. It is the type which indicates the required word or some part of it by alluding to a word which must lose its first ar last letter, thus: “Wail — South African beheaded not long ago” — ULULATE (Z-ulu, late). “Hard workers have a limit: one exam unfinished” — TERMITES (term, i, tes-t). A certain caution is needed here, lest this type should get out of hand and become questionably fair. Some composers, as I mentioned above, allow heads and tails to consist of more than one letter, sometimes even of half the letters of a word. I question the soundness of this, though, as I said, I would make an exception in favour of a hyphened word. If, say, two letters are referred to, I think this should be made clear, by writing “heads” or in some such way. A further point is that while head and tail may be applied to either across or down words, and so may some other similar indications such as beginning and end, top and bottom are only appropriate to down words. This, I think, is only logical.
Here is a straightforward example for you to solve.
(1) “Besetting sin cut short, doing household chore [10]”.
2. Peculiarities of speech.
These include local accents, lisping, stuttering and even the effects of the common cold. Take first the cockney. DIME is not a very promising word: it has only one meaning, though one can perhaps use a reference to a dime novel, the American equivalent of the penny dreadful or — more probably nowadays — shilling shocker, But what about “Arry’s pronunciation of dame”? That may lead to “The figure of a shocker — ’Arry says there’s nothing like ’er in South Pacific.” That song “There is nothing like a dame” is a bit out of date now, but everyone knew it at the time when this clue appeared, and probably many remember it still. Then the Welshman’s habit of softening B into P may serve its turn, so that for PLIGHTER we may offer “The Welsh beggar has taken the pledge.” You may notice that this word would provide light in per; but that doesn’t, to me at least, suggest much of interest. Or we may turn to the north for TARTUFFE: the north country pronunciation of tough suggests “I’m a hypocrite to denigrate a Liverpool rocker? Sounds like it.” Notice that the hint of a pun, “sounds like it”, is essential for accuracy. Again, the dropping of the G in the ending -ing may be useful. Try for yourself:
(2) “Goin’ for a ride, in short, in minimum attire [6]”, bearing in mind that ‘i’ is short for in. Local or poetical you say ? Not necessarily: the dictionary doesn’t attribute it to any special usage.
Lisping is the sort of device that mustn’t be overdone and may be too obvious, but we’ll have one example: “A chap like Macbeth’s quite rethponthible” — THANE. Stuttering can be, perhaps, a little more entertaining, if, again, it isn’t overdone: “I was thought magical, but I’m fer-futile’ —- VERVAIN (a magical plant).
Finally, with a cold one tends to make Ms into Bs and Ns into Ds: hence (for you to solve):
(3) “Effect of cold on one undressed? One who’s overdressed [4]”.
3. Words treated as parts of other words.
This method can often be applied to words unhelpful in themselves, but it needs care: it can easily become much too difficult, and it is probably best to restrict it to cases where the longer word is a reasonably familiar one, thus: “After an outing, terrier wants a drink [5]”.
Don’t forget that “wants” can mean “lacks” as well as “desires”; so you should look for a word, probably a past participle of a verb, meaning “after an outing”, and for a kind of terrier from which the letters spelling a drink have been removed: AIRED (Aired-ale). Again, a rather more difficult one this time: “A lifter causes swearing (four letters first) [5]”. The solver has to understand the parenthesis to be conditional, i.e. to mean “if four letters are put in front of it”; tricky, perhaps, but just fair, I think. Don’t try naughty four-letter words: these don’t occur in crosswords. Try to think of a lifting device, which, with four extra letters in front of it, suggests swearing or an oath. The answer is DAVIT (affi-davit). Here is an easy one for you to try.
(4) “Trade without an effort feeds many mouths [5]”.
4. Initial or final letters.
When the setter is in real desperation with a dull or intractable word, he may try a clue which indicates its letters as the initial or final letters of other words. Unless rarely, and reasonably skilfully, used, this method is apt to be transparently obvious, and I hardly ever admit it to a puzzle. I used it once for ESME, a name which can very easily be indicated — by a ‘hidden” clue, but I had done that before, and I wanted something new. So I tried “Name of the last of the Legends Barham wrote.” I doubt if many solvers were green enough to turn to their Ingoldsby, but I like, wickedly, to think that a few did. The device is less obvious if it is only used for part of the required. word, as in the following.
(5) “Mocking bird with tips of tail blue or grey [8]”.
5. Foreign Languages.
A word whose letters are unsympathetic to the setter as long as he thinks in English may, perhaps, be more helpful in some other language. But he has no right to assume that his solvers are linguists, even if he is one himself, and he had better restrict himself to very elementary references, of this kind. Mine are usually to French, the only modern language of which I have any knowledge; they are necessarily elementary and carefully checked with a dictionary — I know my limitations.
This is the sort of thing: “English writer, but understood by all Frenchmen” — MAIS. The best that can be said for it is that it has a little more point than the almost inevitable “Mother is … or “A reverse for Thailand”. A slightly more venturesome sally is the following: “Very critical — would be bolder about Vichy? [10]”. Various signs here should point the way: “would be… about” suggests that the inclusion in the required word of the letters of a word satisfying “Vichy?” would produce “bolder”.
Then note the question mark: that probably means that Vichy is an example of a generic word — water — eau, as it’s French.
These considerations may lead to MORDACIOUS (mor-e au- dacious).
Here is an easier one for you to try.
(6) “What’s French? That’s French: it’s all French [10]”.
The knowledge of French required is most elementary.
6. Literary references, etc.
I have already expressed my dislike of purely quotational clues; but I have no such dislike of making part of a clue have a literary connexion or, on a lower plane, a connexion with some familiar phrase. Even if this proves to be elusive to a solver, he has the other part of the clue to fall back on. In the first example quoted, the solver has two indications as well as the quotational one: “Poet whose ‘sculptor is paid’ in advance [5]. The quotation, though in the Oxford Book of English Verse, is not a chestnut, and there is no reason why you should know it; but you don’t need to. PRIOR means “in advance” and is also the name of a poet; so that must be right. The quotation (which I used because it fitted so neatly with “in advance”) comes from Matthew Prior’s “For My Own Monument”.
The next example is a biblical reference, familiar to everyone, once they see the point — which is somewhat disguised. “Procedures followed by Romans [4]” — ACTS: no need to explain that one. Again, a disguised reference to a common mild expletive; “Fed up about being at home, like my aunt? [7]”. “At home” is usually “in”; answer: SAINTED (sa-in-ted, and ‘My sainted aunt!”).
Finally I offer you a reference to a poem familiar to very many people.
(7) “They make tongues wag: you can believe what one of them tells you more than twice [7]”.
7. Outsides.
This is an unusual device, which can take several forms. I quote two, which I have used in order to deal with intractable words. “Cavalrymen disheartened in Normandy [4]”.
This is a converse of a “hidden” clue. All you have to do is to discard the heart of cavalrymen — and notice that it must be an exact heart, leaving an equal number of letters at each end — and you get CAEN. You have only to spot the idea to get the answer, but it is an unusual idea and may cause trouble for a little while.
A simple anagram would have been possible, but I couldn’t make one interesting.
The second example uses this idea in a different way: “Put me in the bloomin’ ward — you’ll see what I am [4]”. I could do nothing with GAWK, with the simple meaning of a clumsy, awkward person, till I saw it as part of “blooming awkward”!
8. Various.
Finally we come to unclassified extravagances. These may hit the setter, if he is lucky, when he has been staring for some time at a word which suggests nothing of one of the more usual kinds. For instance, BLAST is a pretty dull word, until one notices B last: that suggested to me “Withering effect, invariably found in rhubarb”, an unusual form of charade, but at least a fair one.
Sometimes one may reasonably allude to an imaginary word that might exist, thus: “A great big swimmer, like a barrel? [5]”.
Note the question mark. In this case it suggests that the last three words are questionable, because there is no such adjective as TUNNY, derived from tun; but there might be. This clue would be definitely unfair without the question mark.
One may occasionally ask the solver to make a logical deduction in a slightly unusual way: “One who will be (Part II) married? [5]”. This might suggest that the person concerned is (Part I) unmarried but likely to be married later; and so he is, if he is a PARTI. But he needn’t ever get married; hence the question mark.
Normally the artistic setter likes his clues to make misleading sense. Occasionally a good idea may strike him, which simply refuses to submit to such “sensification”: then he may, just for once, have recourse to a puzzling sort of nonsense. I had deliberately put AUTOMOBILE into a diagram, intending, as one who has suffered occasionally (being unmechanical) from motor-mowers, to have fun with the pun on “ought to mow” followed by “bile”. After more than half an hour trying to make sense of this, I relapsed instead into this nonsense, which, I was later told, proved not unamusing when the penny dropped: ‘Mowers which are this sound of more than half: if not, the rest follows’. In other words, mowers which are automobile ought to mow (sound of six letters — more than half); if not, bile follows. Here is a simple one of the same kind for you to try.
(8) “When the clouds inside outside, inside it! [6]”.
Usually these improvised clues arise, as I have said, from the setter’s difficulties: they may also be used because he wants to avoid using for a very common word a method that has been used all too often before. Take the familiar VETO, which has appeared so often with an anagram of vote or in “hidden” form.
Wanting a change, I tried a rather unusual use of a split blank for the word required, thus: “Lea— — act? On the contrary!” (lea-ve-to act).
My next quoted clue I include with very strong reservations, because I regard its method as clumsy and definitely to be avoided, unless there is some strong compensating merit. Others, I think, use it much more readily than I do. This is the imperfect anagram, an anagram in which some letter or letters must be added or subtracted. The essence of an anagram is, I think, its completeness. This usage spoils it. However, here goes: “Clumsy tailors are, almost, of their work [9]”. The answer is SARTORIAL: “almost”’ indicates that the final E of “are” must be disregarded.
I’m not proud of it, but I passed it because I couldn’t resist the appropriateness of working tailors into an anagram.
I will finish with two extreme outrages of mine, and then add two much less extreme ones for you to toy with. Faced with the dull word ERRATA (err at a? — rat in era? — neither was promising), I thought of the idea of indicating misprints by including some in my clue. A literal is another name for a misprint, so “literals listed in books” is a reasonable definition. I therefore dared to print “Liberals lifted, in boots — there are three there!”’ At least I offered an exclamation mark to indicate the outrage, and no one protested. Secondly, when unable to think of anything very bright for DIAGONAL, I said to myself, “Why not refer in the clue to one of the long diagonals of this diagram? Does either of them lend itself?”? One of them read AOMGCROELIOS. At least this ended with two words, one of them reversed: Roe and soil.
A.O. and M.G.C. both happen to be military abbreviations. So again I was rash and offered “e.g. here: Army Order, Machine Gun Corps, imaginary defendant, rising ground! [8]”. (Richard Roe and John Doe are familiar to lawyers, at least.) At first it might seem that this clue could only be used when the rest of the puzzle had been solved; but this is not really so. A solver might think of the idea that “here” meant “in this diagram’; “eg suggests that there are more than one; and a few letters towards DIAGONAL, combined with these ideas, might make the penny drop. Anyway, here, too, there were no protests! But let me emphasize that I only do this sort of thing very occasionally.
Now here are your two, neither of them anything like as weird as the last two.
(9) “Last appearance of Garbo G.? Wrong surname [8]”.
(10) “Likely to produce a deep dent in a luggage-carrier [6]”.
Before giving the answers to the improvised clues I have offered to you to solve, I will refer, for the sake of completeness, to a further device that I use occasionally, namely the coupling of two clues, with dots at the end of one and the beginning of the next. I don’t care to use it unless there is really a strong point of connexion. I deprecate the use of it, which one sometimes meets, simply for its own sake. When there is real point, its use may give pleasure to the solver by its variation from normal types. The rarity of my use of it makes it difficult to find an example which doesn’t involve at least one “dictionary” word; but this will show what I mean:
“Engineer breaks into quarters — ones for women [6] …” followed by “… Hooked one of those and tucked in [6]’. The answers are HAREMS (hams, R.E.) and HAMATE (ham, ate) — you may not know this word, which means hooked. The point lies in the two references to “ham”, and in the misleading reference of “those” in the second clue to “quarters”, not to “women”, which is unexpected but possible, and therefore legitimate. But such opportunities arise rarely, and the temptation to drag in these couplings pointlessly should, I think, be resisted.
Answers to clues unsolved in the text above: