Archive for 03/31/2010

Fighting The Liar

03/31/2010 crossword puzzles, grammar

Following on from the last post.

In 642 ACE a a border dispute/land-grab was fought out between two Anglo-Saxon leaders – Penda and Oswald. Warfare in the year 642 was conducted quite differently using a vastly different technology to the devastating computer games played by recent school-leavers of today who have had the great (or ill-) fortune to have been recruited by some military force. Big knives and axes were pretty-much the cutting-edge  of military weaponry (cutting-edge –geddit !). Oswald is supposed to have been hacked into many bits ‘n’ pieces on this field of endeavour. So I’m guessing that the end result hasn’t changed much, just the method of it’s delivery.

One of the many bits of Oswald hacked off is supposed to have been carried off by an eagle into a nearby tree. His arm – but the news media of then was as unreliable as of now.

Since then the site of this battle has been known as ‘Oswald’s Tree’ or Oswstrey

Skipping forward a millenium or so we remember this place of bloody dismemberment for locals

– Andy Lloyd (the Captain of the English Cricket team)

– the only survivor of (or injured participant in) the successful MI5 assassination of Diana Spencer Trevor Rees-Jones,

– a thinker/writer on matters religious – Thomas Bray and the poet Wilfred Owen

but most of all (for today’s purpose) WILLIAM ARCHIBALD SPOONER (he went to school there).

"it is now kisstomary to cuss the bride"

from National Portrait Gallery, London

Spooner was employed to further the arcane interests of the Church Of England, a cleric, but mostly lectured at New College, Oxford. But I’m pretty sure there’s not many people who remember his vivid and inspiring lectures on Aristotelian Ethics. Described as “an albino, small, with a pink face, poor eyesight, and a head too large for his body” almost a stereotype of a competent but dull lecturer. Nope, most people remember this person for his malformed morphemes. OK ‘morphemes’ are the smallest unit of semantics, an individual unit of meaning. Think of the suffix  “-able” or prefix “-un”, now think of any verb (remember them ? – they’re ‘doing’ words) hell ! — lets just go with “do”. So to try and describe an action that is considered impossible we might combine these 3 and apply the word un-do-able – simple innit ?

Spooner is supposed to have regularly got this wrong, we can’t possibly know what was going through his head (who can know what a person is actually thinking ?) but we do have some record of what came out of his mouth. Whatever he was thinking he’d do some internal mixing and matching with the morphemes before they got from the tip of his tongue to the ear of the listener.

We now call this mis-application a “Spoonerism”. I did a bit of a read on the internet to try and cite a few of Spooner’s originals but guess what ? There are very few to be had, and I have great reservation about their reliability ( rely-ability). But even if he never said them himself it’s probably instructive to provide at least a few examples. Interviewed in 1930 (when he was quite old admittedly) he said “Kinkering Congs Their Titles Take” when waffling on about succession and Conquering Kings but the unreliable examples include …

“The Lord is a shoving leopard” – the Lord is a loving shepherd

“You have hissed all my mystery lectures, and were caught fighting a liar in the quad” – he was giving a student his marching orders for cutting all his history lectures and starting a fire

Anyway, you should have the drift. Again these could just have been made up by his students to take the piss out of a dull lecturer and the ‘Conquering Kings’ reference was from a ‘Funny Words’ web-site. He was supposed to have been a bit odd in other mannerisms, reportedly,  so the language thing is likely to be true, but we are talking about the late 1800’s (he is said to have spilt some salt over a hostess’s tablecloth and attempted to clean it up by pouring claret over it, or another, was in the pulpit for an hour delivering a sermon for an hour on St Paul but in that sermon never mentioned this Christian saint a single time but repeatedly referenced Aristotle, over and over he mis-quoted Aristotle, climbed down and went to his seat, immediately rose again and re-climbed the pulpit and said “Did I say Aristotle ? – I meant St Paul”

He was born in 1844 and died August 1930, try and find his biography in The Oxford Dictionary Of National Biography he was an Oxford Don after all.

But I digress, when you see any reference to ‘Spooner’ or ‘Spoonerism’ in a cryptic crossword you will have to bear this in mind, it may be asking you to re-read the clue incorrectly (??) um, it’s asking you to unravel the clue to get the actual clue (??). The clue has been deliberately malformed to further muddy the waters. Try this…

Spooners Light Wine Divides Lanes (5, 4)

Before you start racking your brain for types of alcoholic fermented grape pressings (wine obviously has 4 letters) that have 5 letters in it’s name and then spending time ‘dividing’ (or  re-arranging the letters of) to come up with an answer that makes some sense out of the clue. You’ve been told that there’s a spoonerism involved and two seem to spring out, “Livides Danes” (livid Danes ?) doesn’t make any sense but ‘Wight Line’ suggests White Line and Eureka ! a white line does indeed divide many a traffic lane and, best of all, it fits. Often you have to take a gamble and just enter into the grid something that fits and come back to it later if it becomes less likely to be correct (which is why we use pencils when we are learning this skill) but if you can complete the puzzle and every other clue is correct then this answer is most likely correct as well.Besides, who looks up the answers in the paper published the next day anyway ?

You can now get off the bus or train  and deposit the finished newspaper in the nearest appropriate receptacle. I’m guessing that the crossword page is the last page you turn to, it would be just dumb to buy a paper just for the puzzles wouldn’t it ? Always read the news, it’s important to know what’s going on in the world that’s wider than your own, limited, experience.

I’m hoping that this will help in solving those enigmatic beauties – Cryptic Crossword Puzzles – inspire you even (hence the headline)

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A Rose By Any Other Name

03/28/2010 Uncategorized

Titles for books and essays are important in my view, they set the tone and are an indication of content – unlike headlines which are meant to grab your attention and draw the reader into the article.

I was going to use “How Do You Get To Carnegie Hall ?” as the headline for today. It’s an old saw and you know the answer is going to be “practice, practice, practice’.

Since I was asked recently how to do something, something I have dabbled in for a while. I have formed the notion that it is within my nature to try and make some contribution to the total sum of the body of knowledge possessed by humanity and also contribute in some way to epistemology. Even someone as decrepit, broken, scorned and reviled as I may have something worthwhile to say from time to time

So today I’m going to provide what I hope to be my guide on how to make the first attempts at cracking the cryptography used in setting a crossword puzzle. Not the ‘easy’ or ‘quick’ versions but the convoluted coded versions. I find the straight crossword puzzles a bit tedious, they are often ambiguous and are merely grids where the person solving is directed to find the appropriate synonym that satisfies the clue – fairly boring

So let’s embark on examining the ‘rules’ for solving cryptic crossword puzzles.

Firstly the rules aren’t as hard and fast as some might suggest but can fall within a few general categories. I’m pretty sure that the person creating the puzzle doesn’t want something that no-one can ever solve, what would be the point of that ? You might get a gig for a week, but I’m pretty sure that if you wrote a daily crossword that was unsolvable you’d be looking for something else to do. Even though you may have just established a reputation of being the person that writes the ‘unsolvable crossword’ and you’ll get a bunch of freaks trying to eventually get it finished, if it’s never completed all you will have done is created a neat grid with accompanying gibberish and that’s just a pile of crap.

I’m not going to have room today for a complete guide, it’ll take a few more that a thousand words to complete this task, and besides the battery on this laptop will only last as long as it will take to post this instalment anyway.

The first step is to read the clue, have a look at the number bracketed at the end, now you know that you’re looking for a word of (x) letters. So far so good (you could probably look at the actual crossword itself). The clue preceding this number will tell you two things, what you are looking for and how you might go about finding it. If we can successfully separate out these two elements we’re well on the way to being rid of this clue (and getting the first answer is always the hardest,  a journey of a thousand miles etc etc etc) I should probably start providing examples at this juncture, but intend to leave that for the second installment.

There are a few ways the person setting the clue will point you to the solution. It can be a simple anagram, it can be a string of letters contained within the clue, it can be phonetics. You will have to read the clue a few times to decide which of the rules apply to it, but there are a few common triggers. And it’s rather up to the skill of the compiler how well or ill concealed the triggers are.

If you read a clue that has ‘within’,  ‘inside’, ‘in’, ‘you will find’, ‘buried’ or something in this vein you might try looking at all the letters in the clue to try and find the word you are seeking embedded in that string.

If  that doesn’t work, does the clue contain ‘heard’, ‘sounds’, ‘you will hear’ ? now you may have to read the clue differently, the word you seek could be found by simply reading the clue to yourself and listening carefully. Don’t read it out aloud to yourself on the bus or train people will (rightly) think you a nutjob.

If there’s no joy thus far, have a look to see if you have been, for example, invited to perhaps join two 4 letter words and re-arrange their order to make a single eight letter word. Indicators like ‘make’, ‘rearrange’, ‘change’, ‘alter’ or ‘edit’ should tip you off.

Also look out for switches that invite you to look at something ‘backwards’ or ‘in reverse’

Then for an added bonus there are some clues that you just have to pick up from doing a lot of crosswords on a lot of train trips (I’m going for a million public transport miles). These mongrel hints inside the clues aren’t generally used in puzzles from the US (but may). If you see ‘queen’, ‘sovereign’ or a ‘monarch’ you’re going to get an ER (for Elizabeth Regina – the Queen of England and their current monarch) in there somewhere, if there’s some mention of someone who is a writer there’s likely to be an ED (for editor), Shakespeare is always the bard and the bard is always Shakespeare and it’s a bloody compiler who starts getting you to try and recall all the characters of every Shakespearean drama and everything they have ever said – but they do ! This type of clues is confounding and quite often I have found myself trying to kick my own arse when I’ve seen the solution, because it was so frickin’ obvious (but not at the time I was doing the puzzle – obviously, kicking my own arse for no reason is a fairly recent personal phenomenon).

So the first and hardest step is to keep reading the question and work out what the word you are looking for might be then have a crack at applying the rules to see if the remaining words in the clue might have applied to satisfy the question being asked of you by the compiler

OK KO ?

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