This whole post on crossword puzzles starts with a stinking dream (and here you get a little raw experience of the "hurry up and get it down" manner in which I jot down dreams when I wake up and realize I want to remember them ... and see my post on "Inception" to see my theory I call "dreamthink"):
daytime party at house of somebody I know, sitting at a side table talking on the stairway (very maze type of house, not mansion, but has multiple level splits, I think the table at which I am sitting is in a little hallway at the landing-between-floors level but of stairs only the length of a suburban split-level house, rustic English pub style, rough off-white semi-stucco on top of harder more rocklike wall board with dark wood trim), talking to somebody else I know, but can't remember whom (but not the owner of the house, whom I also can't remember - I think there was no in-dream specification at any level, so probably a conglomeration of a number of people), going to get something from a small little fridge that is disguised as a small set of drawers set into a wall, but go long way round, closeby group of women on marble stairs, toward somebody else I'm supposed to be meeting, somebody's friend in the "you should meet my friend [female name]" sort of way, then total shift [but somehow same dream] to in a canal that is in a city like Venice canals but much more modern NYC looking, at a T intersection, things are kind of swirling, female friend who is blonde, but can't place who, is in a car with other people as I talk to her, but I am not in the car, just somehow alongside it (but don't know what I am in that is floating or not etc), at first car is closed-top with door window open and sinking with water rushing in, so car is going down but nobody inside is panicked, then the car is open topped and staying afloat although some water has come in. The blonde friend says to me, "remind me again why you like crosswords so much."
(and there you have it folks: I have no idea whether androids dream of electric sheep, but I do know that I dream some weird shit ...
... and speaking of androids and electric sheep: Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Jared Leto, Robin Wright, Edward James Almos ... Blade Runner 2049 looks awesome if for nothing else than just the cast, but Scott made a classic the first time, so I don't see why he shouldn't the second time [and, yes, I know that I also make some random jumping around connections]).
On Crosswords:
What I said in reply in that dream (or would have said, had I not woken up from the dream just then), why I like crossword puzzles, is the basis for this post: I like doing crossword puzzles because the clues, especially as they get trickier, remind you that language is ambiguous even on the completely literal level, without even getting to wordplays ... and then you get into word plays, and the ambiguity is simply downright fun. The trivia is fun for people who know it, and sometimes the content can be neat allusions for the central theme, but that's not what's at the heart that defines crosswords, which is the cluing.
One of the things I have always thought is that possibly one of the best things I can do for kids' minds (which are by far not the only or most important part of them to care about and interact with, but they are still important) is to get them interested in crossword puzzles. For one, it gets a person used to dealing with the ambiguity (more detail below), but it also teaches one attention to detail: a clue in which plural form is only one letter more than singular form may yield an answer in which there is a much greater difference between singular and plural, and so it is harder to guess, especially if you have not paid attention to whether or not the clue was singular or plural, or whether the "s" could be a plural form of a noun or a present singular form of a verb (see more below); and if there is an abbreviation used in the clue, the answer is an abbreviation form (so you have to watch for that ... attention to detail).
Basic Ambiguity:
A very basic example is that "bare" as an adjective might have "naked" or "exposed" (as an adjective), but "bare" as a verb might have "uncover" (vs "uncovered" for the adjective). Some of those are relatively simple: either the case of the same exact form being used for adjective and past passive verb are the same for the answer as they are for the clue, but others are not so simple: in an ironic bare as an adjective might have "absolute as the answer, because the idiom "bare minimum" is synonymous with the idiom "absolute minimum" (although, this would be a later-in-the-weak cluing and answer ... see somewhere below where I briefly describe the progression of difficulty level thing). "Bare" as an adjective is also used in the idiom "the bare facts" (I even double checked this with a google search ... it's common usage is so recognizable that some good ole American money grubbing fucktard asshole named his "gentlman's club" as "Bare Facts"), so the answer could be "simple" or "basic," which is not what we think of when we start from a "dictionary definition" way of thinking about "bare." This is because, in crossword puzzles, there needs to be only one instance in which they are legitimately interchangeable in some actual speech act that is relatively commonly recognizable, such as an idiom ("bare facts" and "basic facts" or "simple fact"). The answer doesn't have to be some "core" part of the definition that is common to all. Quite often the answer comes from an adapted idiomatic usage.
In a sense, these types of answers are analogous to the factual trivia answers in that, just as you have to know a lot of trivia to get the trivia answers, the more familiar you are with various idioms, the better you're able to get the answers that involve ambiguity (one of Tolkien's side projects was to go around the rural shires of England collecting all the myriad idioms known only to people in a certain region so that these small but rich gems of language are not lost forever; you can read about it in Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way, which also has a chapter on crosswords, apparently the crosswords in England are insanely hard). And it teaches you to be looking for those ambiguities (as well as the imaginative leaps required for the wordplays I talk about next).
In this (and this is the really important thing), they reflect how language occurs in real life. We don't walk around with dictionaries in our back pockets, let alone all stuffed into our tiny little brains (and in my experience, the people who harp on the most about dictionary definitions as a "point" know very little about dictionaries and real definitions). We walk around with a head full of contextual usages, always on the fly working out the one that best matches the context of the language we are hearing used by the person with whom we are conversing (which is sometimes the author of a book we are reading etc.).
Word Plays:
Then sometimes you have straight-up word plays or puns, which are usually clued with a question mark and quite often very fun. For instance, "updated art?" could be "are." An excellent purely pun-based example was related to me by the carpenter for whom I worked for a year in the Bronx one day when I was doing the NYT crossword in the car on the way home; it was also kind of a "connecting moment" too (for a guy who did biblical studies like me and a carpenter from the Bronx who seemed to feel rather frustrated at times and had a lot of trouble with religion but was trying to do a good job and be fair to people etc) because he told me that doing puzzles with his grandmother as a kid was a good memory because he was the one who was sort of unique as her friend as she got older and more removed: the clue was something like "donate to a psychic," with the answer being "fund a mentalist," but since there are no spaces in answers, it is also recognizable as the religious zealot who often has a very stripped down version of the tenets of the religion (which are often then skewed by being blown up beyond their natural proportion so as to fill the spaces left by stripping out other, often more key, elements, and are usually then developed into concretely erroneously defined things) ... the "fundamentalist" (oftentimes, theme answers that are puns will be making a common, although usually unrelated, thing, such as one creative puzzle in which the answer to "what singer Courtney smokes" was "Clove Cigarettes," not meaning that Courtney love is known to smoke cloves (which would be a trivia answer rather than a wordplay answer), but that the answer is really C. [Courtney] Love Cigarettes, but clove cigarettes are also a real thing ... probably a better example of how the "is also a real thing" can be unrelated to the clued "answer" as part of the fun was another from that same puzzle: the clue was "what comedian Chris smokes" and the answer was "Crockpot," C.[hris] Rock Pot, for smoking, and "crockpot" as the commonly recognizable thing in which you cook and then keep pork or stew simmering ... this is part of the fun of crosswords: once you get a theme answer or two, you see the particular pun or wordplay logic or trick on which they will all be based and you are able to guess the others more easily and needing fewer letters in place)
You can also have slangs, such as "eat up" as the answer for the clue "readily accept," and the trick is knowing such slangs and then using letters picked up from the crosses to begin to see whether one of the technical usages might work or rather a slang usage. Again, like the similarity between literal idioms and trivia, the richer and broader your knowledge of such slang, the better you do.
Multiple contexts:
And then you have other types in which the issue does not begin with ambiguity in grammar or idiomatic usage or slang but they are still not wordplay (pun etc) because the words used are literal in their context; it's just that you don't know what the context is because their are multiple possibles. So, in last Friday's NYT puzzle, 1-down was "bank deposit." The natural first context that at least anybody in America starts with is an institution that handles money. However, the answer could be something like "silt," if the context is a river or stream bank (although, yes, I am aware that silt is usually what is dropped onto the bottom of the waterway and that usually material is taken away from from the bank, meaning erosion, rather than deposited there, which is why I said "something like," but I think it is sometimes what is deposited in some parts of waterway banks during flood conditions, sometimes coming from the silt on the middle bottom, but often gouged out of other parts of the waterway bank ... but in Cleveland, where I lived for a year, an accurate answer for "bank deposit" in this sense might be "bio-hazardous waste"). In fact, it was "plasma" because the context is a blood bank.
Rebus Puzzles:
One of the most difficult but most satisfying puzzles is the rebus, in which certain tiles contain more than one letter and the significance of the letters together is above and beyond their function in the words they are in, at least in one direction. These are the trickiest to get because, even when you have absolutely nailed the, say, nine-letter full answer that fits the seven-letter grid answer, you have to figure out in which square they have condensed what three letters, which complicates getting the answers for the cross, because they use the same rebus multi-letter condensing. For instance, one of my favorites ever (particularly because I got it on my own with no help; although I am fully aware that that places it on the "simple" or "easy" end of the spectrurm") played on "bb" as the simple double consonant and the infinitive "to be," with the central instance clue being "that is the question" and the answer being "bbornotbb" ("to be or not to be"... not only the content gets harder as the week progresses also the difficulty of clues, so a Monday version of the clue would be "that is the question" but a Thurs, Fri, or Sat version would be simply "the question"), and one of the crosses that intersected the rebus was "bag-end dweller" with the answer being "Hobbit" but with five letters instead of six because the two "b"s were in a single square. Another example was a puzzle themed on water that had the rebus of "hoo" (H2O) being all in one squares in the theme answers.
The Main Point of this Rambling Post:
In all of this, the point of crosswords, especially in getting the young interested in them, is to have fun, natural enjoyment while learning a very important thing: language is ambiguous. Some would argue, and I would agree, that the world would be a much better place if divorce lawyers were out of work; but I think the case is the opposite with contract lawyers ... and I don't think they ever will be out of work (unfortunately, the divorce lawyers probably won't ever be out of work either). We need contract lawyers because language is ambiguous and it's difficult and technical work to get it to the level of perspicuity that is best in a legal contract so that nobody is getting screwed over (I used to play in a band in the Pittsburgh area, and we swapped shows a couple times and had the same producer for independent recording etc as the band Rusted Root, and when they signed to a national label, I remember hearing that they had an 11th hour read-over of the contract with a contract lawyer who found a bunch of different ways in fiddly language that the contract was set to screw them over on royalties etc). Why I say I hope they are never out of work (the contract lawyers, not the divorce lawyers) is that it is this same ambiguity that makes word plays, which I think flow out the thing that is at the center of literary art, possible. I think that if you take away the ambiguity, you're left with a world bereft of interesting meaning (and I do mean bereft with a sense of "destitute") and left with nothing but scientific fact.
Epilogue
So, that was my main point, but I just have to add, as an epilogue, the most clever thing I ever saw in a crossword (by the way, I am nothing special as a solver and probably actually way down the list; I just enjoy it a lot and can see some of the elements that make it an important study in language). I say "thing" because there is a question, at least as far as I can tell, as to whether the theme was actually word-based. I don't think it was, and so I think it would be technically out of bounds for crosswords, at least as far as the central theme content, but my main reaction when I saw the answer in the following day's NYTimes, after I thought "nuts, why didn't I get that so I can think about how smart I am?" and then "hey, wait, that's not really word play as such, that is visual, so I can't be blamed for not getting it, right?" was a chuckling "but I still wish I had gotten it because ... that's pretty stinkin' clever."So, I think this one crosses the line out of fair crosswords because its actual content leaves the realm of language. There are plenty of puzzles in which constructors have managed to work visual allusions using the placement of black squares and places where locations in the grid play a role (like one Sunday puzzle had a stoplight theme, and so the theme answers had a thing where one cross was made of two separate words/answers because broken in the middle because their "light" was "red" because the cross went all the way through as an entire phrase answer because it's "light" was "green" ... really clever and really stretched one as far as being able to crisscross [I would not have gotten it without them having actually used colored dots in the 4 squares of each intersection, two red and two green, whereas Rex Parker, king of the crossworld, something like 40th in the world in solving, got it in a version that did not have the colors or any extra dots at all ... always interesting commentary on his daily blog of solving and commenting on the NYT daily puzzle - easily googled, highly recommended), but whenever it is a matter of actual answers, it always, by definition involves words, even if it relies on some more visual element too, for example: the theme is "black hole" and theme answers follow the pattern of the main theme answer, in which the answer is "black" ending in a black square that represents a hole, so "black hole," then "sink" ending in a black square is "sinkhole", and "watering" ending in a black square would be "watering hole" (maybe with the clue "local tavern"), and "hidey"-balck square would be "hidey hole" (maybe clued "secret lair"), and so on ... the point being that it is still word-based because it relies on the system of the black square filling in for the word "hole.".
But this one that I am saying was probably over the line but still too stinking clever not to really admire was entirely visual aside from the basic clue, which was simply "dairy aisle purchase." The answer was actually two answers together, so the clue for the first one was "with [the other numbered across answer), a dairy aisle purchase" and the clue for the second one is a "see the first one [Across # whatever]). The two answers were each six tiles, and the first was directly on top of the second, making a rectangle that is six tiles long and 2 tiles wide ... and each tile has the letter "O" in it ... so ... it looked like looking down on a carton of eggs from the top ... completely visual, no word content at all (or so I argue), and so, out of bounds for crosswords (or so I also argue) ... but amazingly clever in and of itself; I chuckled a good long while when I saw the answer (I was sitting on the BX 9 riding from the terminus at Broadway and 262nd in the Riverdale section of the Bronx back over to home in the Fordham area of the BX after teaching at Mt Saint Vincent's, seeing the answer while doing the next day's puzzle ... I would say that people around me on the bus probably were thinking "crazy-ass cracker" at me chuckling to myself that long, but in truth nobody probably noticed and kept listening to their iPhone, to quote one of the greatest NYC musicians ever, Paul Simon: "my life so common it disappears").
(Subsidiary theme answers were things like the clue "what 53 and 63 across come in" having the answer "carton" and several of the same clue "a way to prepare 53 and 63 across" having the answers "scrambled," "sunnysideup," and "overeasy," and as you start to see the possibilities of those answers from crosses that you get from trivia and other stuff, you start to see that they could be those things with a common theme of "eggs" and so you realizes that 53 and 63 across together must be a synonym for chicken eggs, and if you're really imaginative and clever, you realize that it's not a matter of synonyms because it's not a matter of words; it's a purely visual matter ... but an incredibly ingenious one; I'm in no way being sarcastic when I say that I wish I could be that clever.)
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