Tag Archives: allies

Crossword Charities Have No Chill (and That’s Awesome)

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Words are awesome. We use words to express ourselves, to paint pictures for each other, to explain the world and our viewpoints in vivid, meticulous detail. There is a heart-stirring magic in the poetry and art of words.

But words can also obscure, conceal, and mislead. Words can be bent, they can weasel into unlikely positions, they can camouflage and doublespeak ideas as something else. There is a sinister potential in how words can deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate. (That’s one for the diehard X-Files fans in the readership.)

This is not news to puzzle solvers. Crossword cluing is often about playfully duping the reader, using puns, alternate pronunciations, and clever phrasing to challenge the solver.

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Picture courtesy of ThinkingCloset.com

But there is a certain charm and elegance to speaking directly, to bluntly sharing who you are and what you are about. No room for misinterpretation or misunderstanding. Only truth and honesty, explicitly stated.

And that’s why I appreciate how crossword charity endeavors have been dropping all pretense and simply stating what they’re about.

Like These Puzzles Fund Abortion. They don’t call it reproductive rights or protection for women. They say what they’re doing with no ambiguity. These Puzzles Fund Abortion.

That’s awesome.

And I recently saw another crossword charity project with a similarly unflinching level of honesty and forthrightness that I’d like to highlight today.

A Trans Person Made Your Puzzle.

A collection of 10 puzzles created by trans constructors, A Trans Person Made Your Puzzle celebrates the trans community and their contributions to puzzles and society alike.

Donate $10 or more to an American trans charity (like G.L.I.T.S., Rainbow Railroad, or The Trevor Project) and you’ll receive your puzzle packet.

You can click here for more information, and I sincerely hope you do. It’s an incredibly worthwhile cause.

Puzzle Activism, like our trans friends and fellow puzzlers, is here to stay.

Happy puzzling, everyone!

Crossword History: Dawe and D-Day

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[Image courtesy of Wikipedia.]

June 6, 1944 is a date that will continue to resonate for decades to come, and perhaps centuries. On that day, D-Day, the largest amphibious military attack in history was launched as the Allied forces landed at Normandy. This was one of the major offensives that helped bring about the end of World War II.

But a few days before that, a curious confluence of events brought crosswords to the attention to British agents, namely those of MI5.

Yes, tomorrow, June 2, 1944, marks the anniversary of the day a physics teacher and crossword constructor named Leonard Dawe was questioned by authorities after several words coinciding with D-Day invasion plans appeared in London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper.

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More specifically, the words Omaha (codename for one of Normandy’s beaches), Utah (another Normandy beach codename), Overlord (the name for the plan to land at Normandy on June 6th), mulberry (nickname for a portable harbor built for D-Day), and Neptune (name for the naval portion of the invasion) all appeared in Daily Telegraph crosswords during the month preceding the D-Day landing.

So, the authorities had to investigate the highly improbable, yet still possible, scenario that Dawe was purposely trying to inform the enemy of Allied plans, and scooped up the constructor to investigate.

In the end, no definitive link could be found, and consensus is that Dawe either overheard these words (possibly mentioned by the loose lips of soldiers stationed nearby) and slipped them into his grids unwittingly, or this is simply an incredible coincidence.

Some crossword fans suspect that there’s more to the story, though.

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According to The Guardian newspaper:

During the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of D-day, one of Dawe’s former pupils approached the Telegraph and insisted that as a lad, he had overheard US and Canadian soldiers discussing the plans, picked up on the codewords, and suggested them to his headmaster as possible entries.

This has been dismissed by most historians as an attempt to rewrite or embellish an already baffling story.

Nonetheless, it’s possible that, somewhere, some document connecting Mr. Dawes and the codewords is waiting to be discovered.

Until then, it simply remains a curious moment in crossword history.

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