The Crossword Century

by Alan Connor

  But are you? Your sense of what is and is not fair is a declaration of self: of how you prefer to reach goals and what you like to do with your own mind. As the former New York Times puzzle editor Will Weng used to say: It’s your puzzle. Solve it any way you want.

  Some take that advice quite literally. In Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Swimming-Pool Library, the narrator William Beckwith tries to finish a puzzle begun by an elderly aristocrat, but isn’t sure that some of the words in the grid are correct. “Oh, I don’t do the clues,” chuckles Lord Nantwich, explaining that he plays a kind of solitaire in which he has to fill the grid with interlocking words that are not the answers.

  “Often, I’m afraid,” he explains, “you get buggered in the last corner.” Indeed. But William and the baron enjoy themselves inventing such words as CO-ZIP (to fasten your pants with someone else’s help)—and who is to deny them that? At least they’re fictional. Nobody would do such a thing in real life. Would they?

  One real-life crossword fanatic was the stalwart English actor John Gielgud. He wrote to the London Times’s crossword editor in 1993 to say that his puzzle addiction began in 1944, inspired by an electrician at the Haymarket Theatre: “I have found the crossword a sovereign therapy during endless hours of waiting while filming and doing television.”

  His approach to filling the grid, however, was not always sovereign. Fellow actor David Dodimead once noticed that Gielgud was “skipping through the clues, neatly filling them in at an amazing pace.”

  Was there nothing the great man couldn’t do? Dodimead scanned Gielgud’s grid and found his eye drawn to one entry in particular. “Excuse me, John,” he asked, “what are DIDDYBUMS?”

  “No idea,” replied Gielgud. “But it does fit awfully well.”

  (The idea that you are only cheating yourself is wedded to the notion that crossword puzzles must be good for you. If they give you pleasure, then they surely are good for you, but sometimes the claims are greater—that crosswords will prolong the life of your brain. Really . . . ?)

  CRAZY TO BE SEEN IN GEORGIA, TWICE?

  GAGA

  Do crosswords stave off dementia?

  If you want to lend a character in a film or TV program an intelligent air, give him or her a crossword. The puzzle serves as shorthand for a vague cluster of cleverness indicators, such as impressive powers of recall, sizable vocabulary, and perhaps speedy lateral thinking.

  One link between crosswords and the brain that everyone seems certain about is that they yield greater dividends the older you get: A puzzle a day keeps dementia at bay. Well, that’s not quite “certain,” I think to myself as I wander over to the corner of an Oxford pub toward the waiting psychologist investigating the link between crosswords and mental acuity, but certainly many people know an elderly relative who does a puzzle every morning and still has all his or her faculties.

  Sitting by the restrooms, I strap on a pair of noise-reduction headphones and begin the psychological test.

  Kathryn Friedlander and her colleague Philip Fine are interested in solvers’ cognitive skills and motivational drivers. She has joined a weekly get-together for constructors, solvers, and crossword bloggers that takes place around the UK every Saturday. It started when the constructor John Henderson (Enigmatist, who has been constructing for The Guardian since he was fifteen years old) noticed that whenever he solved in a pub, others were looking over his shoulder, and decided against a festering annoyance and in favor of actively inviting others to join him.

  This week, those others include Kathryn, who wants to be around crossworders so that she can gather some data. She has devised a series of exercises for three groups: solvers, expert solvers, and noncrossworders. I am invited to count the number of vowels in various words, then fill in the blanks in some others. I suspect that the first task is designed to hobble me in the second by planting in my head various unhelpful linguistic shapes and sounds. The research is ongoing, but I learn something about myself, and not something flattering: While I appreciate that the point of the exercise is academic enrichment, I find that I urgently want to get a decent “score.”

  Afterward, we chat about Kathryn’s curiosity regarding whether very able solvers have higher “fluid intelligence”—the capacity to approach new problems with a fresh mind and apply the appropriate analysis. The tasks have been designed to give her a sense of what’s happening in the brain when it is led to a misleading place, then recovers its bearings and enjoys what the crossword world calls the “penny-drop” moment of clarity. For me, at least, I tell her, there’s an addictive quality to the experience of letting go of the apparent meaning of a clue and seeing the message hidden in code that leads to the real interpretation.

  We discuss a paper with the title “Eye-Witnesses Should Not Do Cryptic Crosswords Prior to Identity Parades” from the journal Perception, which concludes that solving a cryptic has a detrimental effect on subsequent face recognition, and that the same does not go for quick crosswords, reading, or sudoku. It’s a convincing piece of research that presents its results cleanly and without undue speculation as to the reasons behind them. I ask Kathryn whether she has come across any similarly decent investigations into whether crosswords are good for older people’s minds. There’s not much in the papers, in the sense of peer-reviewed journals, but there’s plenty in the other sort of papers: tips such as 10 WAYS TO DECREASE ALZHEIMER’S RISK: FLEX THAT BRAINPOWER—DO CROSSWORD PUZZLES, or PUZZLES AND EXERCISE HELP BEAT DEMENTIA SYMPTOMS, SAY EXPERTS.

  Ah, those much-vaunted “experts.” It’s from the newspapers that people I know—relatives and coworkers—have got the idea that crosswords are a prophylactic against Alzheimer’s. Newspapers are of course also the place where crosswords are most readily available, so the association is presumably good for circulation. In the twenty-first century, similar pieces began to appear about the benefits of the fourth estate’s newer geegaw, the sudoku.

  There are more such articles every couple of months, and if the combined reports are to be believed, here’s the truth about crosswords: Solving is a handy way of hanging on to your faculties, but this comes at a cost. And the price is paid by your waistline. In 2009 there was a flurry of stories warning that solving puzzles makes you fat, citing research by Dr. Kathleen Martin Ginis of Ontario into whether exercising willpower in one activity leaves less resolve when you approach others.

  Since solving is often a seated pastime, it’s not difficult to visualize a connection between crosswords and gastric girth—and the same goes for the idea that crosswords are a kind of brain-saving mental workout. You can see vividly how both claims might be true. Alternatively, they might both be false. Or they might be neither, in the sense that nobody has actually tested either.

  In the case of the crossword obesity epidemic, it’s the last of those options. Ginis’s research didn’t include any sudokus or crosswords. “Someone told me that the story had been in the UK press,” she told the BBC. “I was quite excited. I googled it, I saw it, and I just cringed. I felt sick.”

  Probe too deeply into the evidence for stories that use words like “neurobics” and “brainercise,” and you’ll find yourself similarly baffled and confounded. Here’s the clearest statement I’ve seen about the facts of the matter. It’s from a 1999 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology called “Predictors of Crossword Puzzle Proficiency and Moderators of Age-Cognition Relations,” and it is, to say the least, deflating: “The results provide no evidence to suggest that amount of crossword puzzle experience reduces age-related decreases in fluid cognition or enhances age-related increases in crystallized cognition.” In other words, solve if you like, but don’t think it will stop you going gaga.

  Kathryn’s experience is similar. Crosswords may or may not have these beneficial effects but the evidence isn’t there to tell us much. Besides, she adds, what aspects of which kind of crossword are we talking about?

 
Some elements of solving—synonyms, say, antonyms, and abbreviations—are correlated with regular solving, but may also improve with age, whether you solve or not. Others—preserving ambiguities, switching from the big picture to the details—decline. Doing crosswords makes you better at doing crosswords, but that’s not such an exciting discovery. A proper examination of popular computer games with names like Professor Okinaga’s Cerebral Zumba revealed that users are no better at memory, concentration, planning, or problem solving than nonusers; what these programs do is make you good at the next volume you buy of Professor Okinaga’s Cerebral Zumba, and there’s no reason to believe that the same is not the case with crosswords.

  And what of the real-world anecdotal examples: the avidly solving relatives who have retained their marbles? Can we say with any certainty whether the solving is the cause of the retention of marbles, or the retention of marbles the cause of the solving, or whether both share an earlier cause? Crucially, I’d like to know more about whether this relative solves alone or with a friend or relative.

  Kathryn is more open to the idea that cosolving might have benefits for the elderly, and she is not alone in her interest in the social angle. I’d recommend crosswords over sudokus as a morning activity in the Rusty Cogs Retirement Home on the basis that you’re less likely to call out an interesting sudoku column for everyone to enjoy or to find yourself inspired to relate an anecdote on the basis of an especially amusing 7 in that day’s grid. Whatever puzzle you choose, a daily challenge that offers temporary goals and some pleasure is not a bad thing; as a cheap way of dealing with mental-health problems in an aging population, however, it may not be enough.

  The image of crosswords as intrinsic Alzheimer’s bashers seems unlikely to go away anytime soon. For one thing, there’s the legacy of the notion that you have to be particularly intelligent to solve a crossword.

  For another, the association has a distinct appeal for constructors and solvers, both of whom are often asked to explain why on earth they channel their time and energy into puzzles. “Still, it staves off dementia, I suppose” lets them off the hook. But the implicit charge—that crosswords are a waste of time—should not need to be countered. There’s no real comfort in seeing the newspapers that decried the arrival of the crossword in the 1920s and proscribed their use on grim utilitarian grounds now prescribing their use on a similarly dispiriting cost-benefit basis.

  And so I leave Kathryn to her research and look back across the pub to the gathered solvers, all of whom are there because it’s a congenial way to spend an afternoon and an opportunity to have a stiff word or two with the constructors of some recent troublesome clues. That’s an end in itself. If you want to do a puzzle, you don’t need a doctor’s note.

  (So if the puzzle appears to be taking longer than usual, you don’t need to fear for your mental capacity. Besides, what are you doing timing your solve, anyway . . . ?)

  BREAK THIS WITH SOME EGGS?

  FAST

  The urge to time your solve

  Got up

  Had shave

  Did Times crossword

  Had another shave

  —ROGER MCGOUGH

  The wonderful 2006 documentary about crosswords, Wordplay, shows us two very different worlds. There are the famous solvers—Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart, Mike Mussina—and those who are not so renowned outside crosswording circles. Or you might think of the same two groups as the casual puzzle fans, who grab a crossword when they can, and the devotees, who see each puzzle as training for the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, in which they will race other super-solvers at the Marriott hotel in Stamford, Connecticut, each year.

  I see them differently. I see the happy solvers and the damned.

  Clinton, Stewart, Mussina, and the others smile as they describe their relationships with the grid—in these moments, it is a movie about pleasure. In invidious contrast are the faces of the time-obsessed entrants, in particular that of the astonishingly gifted Al Sanders.

  The movie follows Sanders and other contestants as they prepare for and then attend the twenty-eighth tournament. The viewer might well wish that he or she were there, too. It’s a weekend away from everything except puzzles: collegiate, mutually supportive, occasionally silly, and always proud. Yes, it’s an alluring world—except for the actual business of the timed tournament puzzles.

  Al Sanders makes it to the final. He looks every inch the winner. And, in fact, he finishes first—but after he announces “done,” he notices that he has omitted to fill in two squares. The shots of the moment of realization—Sanders hurling his noise-reduction headphones to the floor, then gasping, red-faced and bent double—are heartrending. But they are also evidence of the inevitable result of timing crosswords.

  You see the same thing in a book by solver Marc Romano called Crossworld: One Man’s Journey into America’s Crossword Obsession. Romano enters the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, and his is a tale of anxiety, apprehension, and anguish that ends with the competition wreaking psychological and physical havoc as he collapses at home, a broken man.

  It’s the same at the British equivalent, the Times Crossword Championship. There, the winner is the same man every year, a finance director called Mark Goodliffe. His solving is enjoyable from afar—losing some valuable seconds considering whether RAISINY is a word before returning to his relentless decryption of cryptics. More enjoyable, though, is the annual response from perennial runner-up Peter Brooksbank.

  Goodliffe skipped the 2007 final because his wife had given birth two days before. Brooksbank quipped: “If he could be persuaded to have another one, that would be useful.” A later wheeze, to create a distraction: “You could slip a mobile phone into his pocket and get someone to phone it.” In 2010 he was terser: “I’m going to have to kill him.”

  These are gags, but ones delivered through gritted teeth. They are also a warning not to get involved. Usain Bolt might be able to run the 100 meters in 9.58 seconds, but that doesn’t mean there’s no point in the rest of us ever exercising. Indeed, since the constructor of a puzzle has slaved so long over its intricacies, it seems disrespectful to plow away, giving only the minimum possible attention to each clue. Sometimes, though, the temptation is there.

  For one thing, if a solve is going fast, you feel smart. At this moment, it might be worth recalling the thoughts of the humorist Stephen Fry, often described as “a man with a brain the size of Kent.” (Kent is a county of approximately 923,000 acres.) “I don’t know many people who can do the Times crossword more quickly than me,” Fry notes in his first autobiography. “There again I do know dozens and dozens of people vastly more intelligent than me for whom the simplest cryptic clue is a mystery—and one they are not in the least interested in penetrating.”

  So, horses for courses. But another temptation comes from the little clocks that accompany many newspapers’ puzzles in their online versions. Some are even set to time your solve by default, making speed seem an intrinsic part of the process. Again, though, there is something to bear in mind.

  These digital versions of the puzzles typically provide leaderboards that purport to show which solvers have been especially speedy tackling each puzzle. The problem, though, is that the times at the top tend to be implausibly low. Not even implausible on the level of an Al Sanders or a Mark Goodliffe—these are times so low you wonder whether the solver has had time to read the clues. And, of course, they have not. These are people, you suspect, who, for reasons best known to themselves, have completed the puzzle in advance—perhaps on paper, or using another login—and then simply typed the answers in order to appear to be cruciverbally superhuman. And since their times are quite literally measures of nothing, what does yours mean in relation to them?

  I concede, though, that the temptation is sometimes irresistible. Indeed, even the sight of the near-broken Sanders was no deterrent, and since the release of Wordplay, the
American Crossword Puzzle Tournament has seen such an increase in attendance that it has moved to a larger Marriott, near Brooklyn Bridge.

  If you must concentrate on speed, then, here are some tips.

  Train yourself in a kind of automatic writing so that you can use those scribbling seconds to start reading the next clue.

  Reshape your Es. In his book, Marc Romano reveals that Will Shortz advised him that modifying his handwriting has saved him “time both in solving and in life.” Restructure your script around fast strokes of the pencil.

  Have someone tell you a joke before you start solving. Neuroscientist Mark Beeman found that college students performed better at word-association puzzles if they had been shown a video of stand-up comedy beforehand than if they had watched something boring or scary.

  Use a pencil and an eraser. Times Championship winner Peter Biddlecombe adds: “If you think that a letter is unclear, be prepared to rub it out and write it again.” No pen.

  Start in the bottom right-hand corner. Some champions swear by this technique, on the basis that the constructor may have written those clues last, in a more tired frame of mind.

  Try to get the beginnings, not the ends, of words—beginnings have more variation and yield their secrets faster.

  Check. As Will Shortz said in his welcome to the twenty-eighth American Crossword Puzzle Tournament: “If either you leave a letter out or you make a mistake, that will cost you 195 points. The champions generally spend a little extra time after they finish a puzzle, looking it over, making sure that every square is filled and that nothing silly has been put in a square.” And if you are merely timing yourself for fun, you haven’t finished at all if there’s a single misplaced letter. Your time is, sadly, infinity. Check again.

  But be aware that you are making sacrifices. Not least among them is the potential crosswords offer to have the opposite effect to that of a stopwatch—to make you less aware of time. The moments you spend in a puzzle have the potential to shut out the outside world for a blessedly silent period. After a more leisurely solve, you return refreshed from a happier place where, unlike the rest of life, the day is not carved up into fifteen-minute segments, each of which must be accounted for. The other, realer problems in your life are easier to solve.