Puzzling
By Alice Lowe
I was hooked on the Spelling Bee and other weekly word games in the New York Times Magazine long before I had a smart phone. When I went high-tech, my first app was the Times’ games page, where I adopted Wordle from the beginning, then Connections and Strands. I do all four faithfully every morning, before my coffee and peanut butter toast, before my stretches and walk. None of the online word games, however, has replaced crossword puzzles in my affections. My sublime pleasure comes from doing the Times daily crossword—preferably the Thursday through Saturday puzzles—on paper, in ink, while watching a baseball game on TV (ideally the New York Yankees), in the early evening, with a chilled glass of rosé.
A few years ago, I made a rushed trip to the emergency room and was hospitalized overnight. Unprepared for the idle hours between tests, I had my husband bring my phone and Kindle. Neither had internet connectivity, but at least I could contact friends and access the e-books I’d acquired for just such crises. Amid the non-stop noise and frequent interruptions, I couldn’t focus on reading and didn’t want to watch TV. I knew a crossword puzzle would distract and calm me, so I asked a nurse if she could find one in a newspaper or magazine. She turned up a half-hour later—“Ta da!”—waving a photocopied sheet, proud of her success. It was super easy; the Times Monday puzzle would be challenging in comparison. But I thanked her profusely, worked it in a couple of minutes, then went back to my brooding. After I got home I bought a book of difficult crossword puzzles and put it in an emergency bag in case of a repeat occurrence.
Wordplay of all kinds goes back to the earliest days of recorded history, but the first crossword puzzle, called Word-Cross, was published in 1913 by the New York World. The New York Herald started running puzzles in 1924, and by 1925 it was estimated that more than ten million people in the U.S. were doing daily puzzles. The crossword craze of the ’20s and ‘30s was described by skeptics and antagonists as an epidemic, a virulent plague, a national menace, a waste of brainpower. The New York Times resisted the trend, dismissing it as mob mentality, perhaps beneath them, until after Pearl Harbor, when they recognized people’s need for a distracting pastime. No doubt readership and circulation figures played into the decision to get on board.
It didn’t escape notice that the crossword frenzy coincided with first-wave feminism. The 19th Amendment had passed in 1920, giving women the vote. Crossword solvers, the majority of them women, along with suffragists and Jazz Age flappers became linked as “flouters of Victorian gender conventions,” according to Anna Shechtman in The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle. Women were accused of abdicating their household and maternal duties for puzzling, which led to increased divorces. Songs written at the time attest to the disruption: “Cross-Word Puzzle Blues,” “Cross-words (Between Sweetie and Me),” “Crossword Mama, You Puzzle Me.”
Crossword puzzles were in women’s domain throughout their early decades. Shechtman reveals women’s prominence in both solving and creating puzzles, which included winning the first two crossword contests, in 1924 and 1925, and constructing the first puzzle published under a byline. Women were hired as the first puzzle editors at both the Herald and the Times, their jobs to establish guidelines, select and edit puzzles for publication.
The craze never ended. What was once called an epidemic became endemic, and crossword puzzles continue to rise in popularity. They’ve made appearances in episodes of The Simpsons and Sex and the City. Isolation during COVID-19 spurred many new puzzlers, and now I hear that Gen Z-ers have taken to them. I’m one of the many who do them every day, for entertainment and education, for mental health and wellbeing, for mindfulness and mindlessness. I delight in the wordplay and logic, puns and double entendres, pop culture and history, obscurities and ephemera. I’m good with clues involving baseball, food, literature, and the ‘60s. I do okay with mythology, movies, and music, but TV and hip-hop trip me up. I love drawing on my store of trivia and adding to it, obscure four-letter words clinking around in my brain like nickels and dimes in a piggybank. How else would I know the Russian mountain range, the 13th-century poet, the first name of early 20th-century British singer/actor Novello. I rarely look words up, but when I do I consider it learning, not cheating. Last week I discovered that Anheuser-Busch has a low-end beer called Natty Ice—that’s bound to come in useful one day.
The health benefits of working crossword puzzles have been much-discussed in recent years, perhaps a result of aging Baby Boomers’ quest for the panacea that will halt the brain’s decline and slow aging. Findings are mixed and inconclusive. On the plus side, doing moderately difficult crossword puzzles may stimulate new brain connections. A study found that people with mild memory problems who did crosswords showed greater improvement in cognition than those who played web-based cognitive games. On the other hand, some say that doing crossword puzzles improves only your skill at doing crossword puzzles, that learning a new language or musical instrument is a better way to enhance brain power. In Thinking Inside the Box, Adrienne Raphel summarizes the various findings by saying that crosswords are either the brain’s secret weapon or a gigantic waste of time. Yet even if puzzles don’t prevent dementia, I’m convinced they produce positive effects—mental sharpening, stress reduction, distraction from cares and woes.
Bletchley Park, about 50 miles outside of London, was the top-secret home of World War II code breakers, the place where Alan Turing and his team cracked the German Enigma Code. In addition to enlisting mathematicians and communication specialists, the British Intelligence Service sought to recruit new people by placing a difficult crossword puzzle in the Daily Telegraph on January 13, 1942. They invited anyone who could solve it in under twelve minutes to respond, and those who did were brought in and given a second puzzle. In the based-on-true-events movie Imitation Game, Joan Clarke was the only woman in that group and the first of only two contenders to complete the in-person puzzle in the allotted time. The less romantic version is that Clarke was a mathematical whiz recruited by her academic supervisor at Cambridge, but either way she became a key member of the team.
When I let my imagination loose, my fantasies alternate between being a spy in counterespionage and a code breaker at Bletchley Park. Both cryptanalysts behind the scenes and agents in the field were instrumental in wartime. Both served in secrecy; both were skilled at solving problems. The link to crossword puzzles made me a perfect fit.
One afternoon a week I work at a used bookstore in my neighborhood, entering books acquired through trades and donations into the database. A few months ago, Bletchley Park Brainteasers crossed my desk. On the cover in red letters: “the World War II codebreakers who beat the enigma machine—and more than 100 puzzles and riddles that inspired them.” A perk of the job, this one never made it into the system. It reproduces the renowned January 1942 challenge puzzle, known as the world’s most famous crossword. I knew I couldn’t complete it in twelve minutes, but I was humbled when I couldn’t solve it all. I worked out a handful of cues on my first attempt and a few more in subsequent tries before admitting defeat, a dismal achievement and a negation of visions of myself as a cunning agent, decrypting secret messages.
I consider myself above average in crossword competence. The stumbling block I faced with the British puzzle is one I share with most Americans, the puzzle design itself. The Brits don’t consider what we do to be real or proper crossword puzzles. Theirs are what we call “cryptic” puzzles, described by a Guardian writer as “the kind that separates true cruciverbalists from mere dabblers.” They use intricate wordplay, puns, anagrams, and obtuse definitions, often in combination, making each clue a puzzle that must be unraveled. I surrender after a couple of sessions with a cryptic puzzle but can’t resist trying again and again, hoping for a breakthrough, like cracking a secret code. Most Americans avoid them, like Adrienne Raphel, who admits, “I admire cryptic crosswords from afar, like bonsai.”
I’m in awe of those who master the complexities of crossword construction. I’ve tried making puzzles but haven’t advanced beyond small grids with short words and rudimentary, not very clever clues. Anna Shechtman started writing puzzles at 14, had one accepted by the New York Times at 19. A few years later, after having two puzzles published by the Times, she was hired as an interim assistant to Will Shortz, the puzzle editor. She questioned his motives and her qualifications, believed she was hired because she was a woman in a field dominated by men. The decline of women puzzle constructors from a majority to fewer than 20% by 2013 has been attributed by some to the expansion of digitally assisted crossword-making and the preponderance of males in technology-related fields. Shechtman asserts that it’s the culture, not the technology.
She continues to create crossword puzzles for the Times and the New Yorker, her aim to make them more gender and race inclusive and to explore the political evolution of language. Inclusivity was also the goal of my friend Sarah, a self-proclaimed “democruciverablist,” whose goal in making puzzles for a community publication was “to amplify the work of women of color and queer folks in particular.” Crossword puzzles are a colonized space, she believes, in which white men are overrepresented as constructors, discounting people who don’t see their knowledge reflected in the content of grids or clue lists.
Most constructors now use puzzle-making software. I was skeptical at first, thought it was a copout or a case of machines and technology co-opting people. Anna Shechtman and Adrienne Raphel convinced me that constructing a good crossword is still a creative challenge. The software fills in the grid from extensive word lists, but constructors develop the design, determine the theme and key words, and write the all-important clues. While I accept all this to be true, I’m not interested in trying it. Solving crosswords is enough.
Crossword contests began in the 1920s, but the be-all of competitions is the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, started by Will Shortz in 1978. How could expert puzzlers resist pitting themselves against each other? Competition is built into our way of life. Not just sports, but eating and cooking, singing and dancing, knowledge (College Bowl and spelling bees), even dating. And games of all kinds.
Sarah went to New York in 2013 to take part in the ACPT. She didn’t expect to take home any prizes; she went for the experience and to breathe the same air as Will Shortz. She described the difficulty of the seven puzzles as equivalent to the Times Thursday puzzles—challenging but not too mind-bending. Both speed and accuracy were judged, so after completing the final puzzle with 19 minutes to spare, she waved her hand “like I needed a cab to the hospital.” She reported proudly that Will Shortz himself came over to pick up her puzzle and offered his congratulations. Sarah finished the competition 263rd in a field of 572, a more than respectable performance. In her early 30s, she felt she’d held her own as a newbie and one of the younger participants. When I asked her whether it was fun or grueling, she said, “I had fun, and it was humbling.”
I was impressed with Sarah’s spirit and envious of her experience, and she was game to try it again. We made a tentative plan to go together in the next couple of years, but life intervened, as it often does. It’s one of those might-have-beens that I like to imagine. I wouldn’t embarrass myself in a competition—I could cruise through a bunch of Thursday-like puzzles, unless I froze in the stressful environment, forgot the answers to common clues like the “Thin Man” dog or the aunt’s name in “Oklahoma.” I’m not a speed solver. I sprint through the online word games every morning, try to complete Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, and Strands before 6:00 a.m. to start up my brain. But crossword puzzles are for mulling over and savoring.
We hear about crossword puzzles in terms of their benefits to the brain, as therapy, as a time killers, distraction, escape, tests of proficiency. But what about the sheer enjoyment and satisfaction, with no ulterior motive, no higher purpose. For some that might come from baking pies, building things in the workshop, solving mathematical equations. For me it’s doing the Times daily crossword—preferably the Thursday through Saturday puzzles— on paper, in ink, while watching a baseball game on TV (ideally the New York Yankees), in the early evening, with a chilled glass of a four-letter-word for the pink-hued fruit of the vine.
Alice Lowe writes about life, literature, food and family in San Diego, CA. Recent work has been published in Bluebird Word, Burningword, New World Writing, Skipjack Review, Sport Literate, Bridge VIII, and Bookends Review. She’s been cited twice in Best American Essays. Read and reach her at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.