I have always like words. In fact, I generally find it difficult to express myself without them.
I was not an early convert to crosswords. I tried them when I was younger, and I either found them to be simple, stupid, or impossible. My mother was good at crosswords (and Scrabble), and her mother did all the Sunday crosswords in ink and was absolute death in Scrabble.
But when I got in my late 30s, I started to do the daily crosswords – starting with the easy Monday ones, working through the harder – and often weird – midweek ones, and onto the hard Friday ones.
Along the way, I learned a few things:
- There are a class of words – that I just learned are called “repeaters” – that show up all the time, because they are very convenient for those who create crosswords (known as “constructors”). They are not common words, but once you learn them, puzzles get much easier:
- Ale
- Oleo – margarine was originally known as “oleo-margarine’”.
- Epee – a small dueling sword
- Oreo – Nabisco’s gift to the world
- Etui – a small ornamental case for needles or cosmetics.
- An abbreviation in the clue means the answer is also an abbreviation.
- A question mark in the question means there is wordplay at work.
- “ending” and “start” mean you should a fragment. For example, “East ending” is probably “ern”.
- Being a constructor takes skill, and different constructors have different skill levels. This probably should have been obvious to me at the start, but it wasn’t. There are some people that just aren’t very good at putting puzzles together.
- The construction of the grid and the creation of clues (“clueing”) are two distinct acts, and they both require aptitude. Poor clueing can make a puzzle much more annoying. The NY Times crossword is notorious for having clues that you would automatically know if you lived in NY – which makes it good for people who do live there – but makes it really annoying for the rest of us.
- If you work put a puzzle aside and come back to it the next day you will find a lot of obvious answers.
Once you learn these things, crosswords get much easier.
And I found Merl Reagle, who not only was very skilled at construction and clueing, but had a weird sense of humor and great themes. And wonderful puns. And… his Sunday puzzles were challenging but possible; when you finish one of his, you feel like you’ve really accomplished something.
So, my mother and I would email back and forth about the most recent Sunday puzzle. Did we like it, what did we think of the theme, and how far had we gotten. My mother would do as much as she could, and then hit the crossword dictionaries (and the internet) so she could finish it, while I wanted to solve it by myself, and was fine leaving it unfinished.
As my mother’s health deteriorated, she lost the ability to live on her own and eventually spend most of her time in bed, but she still did crosswords and we still discussed them. After she died, I continued to do the Sunday Reagle puzzle, and thought about her when I came across a puzzle that she would have really liked.
And so, I was especially sad to read a notice in that paper today, which said,
Puzzle section changes:
Crossword puzzle constructor Merl Reagle died Saturday in Tampa, Florida. The Times will carry the Sunday L.A. Times crossword instead.
So, what do you think ?