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 ?