The US “crossword of record” is marking its 75th birthday with some very welcome stunt setting
It’s time again to take a look at crosswording in the US. The grandmother of US puzzling is the New York Times, to whom we can wish what it might clue as “Party line?”: a HAPPY BIRTHDAY, since the paper has been offering puzzles for three-quarters of the crossword century.
It was a slow start because of some initial reluctance. Just as this country’s Times campaigned against the prospect of the crossword, invented in the US in 1913, crossing the Atlantic ...
The nation still stands before the blast and no man can say it will stand erect again.
Scarcely recovered from the form of temporary madness that made so many people pay enormous prices for mah jong sets, about the same persons now are committing the same sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex ... They get nothing out of it except a primitive sort of mental exercise, and success or failure in any given attempt is equally irrelevant to mental development.
We ought to proceed with the puzzle, especially in view of the fact that it is possible that there will now be bleak blackout hours – or if not that, then certainly a need for relaxation of some kind or other ...
We ought not to try to do anything essentially different from what is now being done – except to do it better.
That is what makes them bright and pungent. To cut down what is already succinct is to impair the general quality of the work.
The great majority of puzzle solvers want a large, challenging, rather hard puzzle, with terse dictionary definitions plus occasional literary, historical and news references. Such a puzzle gives an hour or two of real satisfaction to everyone who tries it.
... it was simultaneously an exercise in boundless, abstract creativity (a food snowman?) and rigid boundaries (we need exactly two 13-letter and two 10-letter foods that are also parts of the body!). It’s a discipline that requires multiple parts of the mind: half Jackson Pollock, half Alan Turing.
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