Off grid
It is an old saw in the newspaper business that you can get anything wrong – the name of the prime minister (easily mistaken when they change every month), the score in the cup final, the winner of the 4.10 at Haydock – and almost no one will bat an eyelid. But make a cock-up in the crossword puzzle and you will be dealing with complaints for weeks. Crossword lovers are obsessive and their squeals of displeasure if you put in the wrong answer for seven across will be anything but cryptic.
The usual mental image of a crossword devotee, aka cruciverbalist, is of a balding former accountant, almost invariably male. Colin Dexter, creator of Morse, was a crossword enthusiast and named his eponymous detective after a fellow competitive solver, Lloyds Bank chairman Sir Jeremy Morse. But the male domination is deceptive: women are reckoned to be in the majority when it comes to getting a daily crossword fix. It is in setting and competitive solving that men dominate. Women treat crosswords as brain-expanding fun. Men see them as a way of life.
The erroneous but pervasive balding-accountant view of crosswords, especially cryptic ones, may explain the excitement among cruciverbalists at a recent tweet by Canadian singer-songwriter Carly Rae Jepsen. “Once upon a time I was the answer in the New York Times crossword puzzle,” she enthused. “A true career highlight. My father and I thought I had peaked.” She appended her own puzzle to the tweet, plugging her latest album to her 9.3 million Twitter followers. Clever marketing but also a useful corrective to the view that crosswords are the exclusive province of elderly, desiccated chaps who went to Oxbridge.
Though crosswords can trace their roots back to the middle of the 19th century, they really took off a century ago with a “word-cross” puzzle set by English-born journalist Arthur Wynne in the Christmas 1913 issue of New York World, where he was editor of the “Fun” supplement. Word-crosses morphed into crosswords and within a few years every newspaper in the US had one, with the exception of the New York Times, which in 1924 described them as the “utterly futile finding of words, the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex”. Five years later, it boldly declared: “The cross-word puzzle, it seems, has gone the way of all fads.” In 1942, it finally recognised its error and introduced one, at the prompting of Margaret Farrar, the person who did most to popularise crosswords. She reckoned they would help take Americans’ minds off the war, and the New York Times crossword, which she edited for almost 30 years, became America’s foremost puzzle. Some fad!
The recent death of another crossword-loving Margaret – Margaret Irvine, who set crosswords for the Guardian as Nutmeg – produced tributes which underlined that women setters are just as capable as men of seeing crosswords as both an art form and a way of life. A way of death, too: the great Guardian setter John Graham, universally known by his nom de plume Araucaria, announced in a series of clues in one of his puzzles that he had terminal cancer. A courageous act as well as one of artistic affirmation. Crosswords, for all their rules and conventions, know no bounds.
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