So I was delighted to see another example of album art with a crossword motif while scrolling social media a while back.
This time it was “Cardiac Arrest” by the band Madness.
Madness is a British ska band who made their name in the 1970s and 1980s as one of the prominent ska bands during the revival of two-tone ska.
Although they have more than a dozen songs in the UK Top Ten, you probably know them from their song “Our House,” which reached #7 on the Billboard Hot 100:
But it’s their controversial song “Cardiac Arrest” that interests me today.
Written by band members Chas Smash and Chris Foreman (aka Chrissy Boy), the song highlights the dangers of overworking yourself, as the song focuses on a workaholic who suffers a fatal heart attack on the way to work.
The band was known for writing humorous songs about the trials and tribulations of everyday life, reflecting the working-class backgrounds of the band members. But the darker tone of this song would have repercussions for the band.
Some listeners took issue with the song’s tone and subject matter, and the title itself hurt its chances at regular radio replay as well.
It’s sad, because I doubt the people who complained were actually listening. The song is a warning, hoping that people will not follow in the footsteps of the song’s doomed main character.
In an interview, Chas Smash defended the song:
It was born out of concern. The message was, ‘Relax darling, don’t get stressed.’ As the Arabs say, ‘Walk through life, don’t run.’
I reached out to the band — who is still touring with six out of their seven original members! — to see if I could get some background on why they went with a crossword-style design to promote the album, and Chrissy Boy himself responded!
He said that the crossword design was an intentional nod to some of the song’s lyrics. Not only do they mention crosswords directly — “Ten more minutes ’til he gets there / the crossword’s nearly done” — but there’s also a cryptic / British-style clue in the lyrics:
Think of seven letters Begin and end in c Like a big American car But misspelt with a d.
Like a big American car (Cadillac) but misspelled with a D. That’s CARDIAC.
Naturally, I had to solve the puzzle itself for the full experience.
In fact, I solved BOTH versions of the “Cardiac Arrest” puzzle and I very much enjoyed them. They’re absolutely packed with trivia about the band’s songs and performers, including instruments and nicknames. Plus they mixed American-style cluing with cryptic cluing!
“Check over an animal doctor” for VET is a perfect double-definition cryptic clue and “Lies about a little island” for ISLE has an anagram-clue mix.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that another ska band used a crossword pattern, since the mix of black and white squares in crosswords is very reminiscent of the checkerboard pattern that is synonymous with both two-tone ska and third wave ska.
Sam Kieth is a comic book artist, writer, and storyteller who isn’t as well-known as he should be. He wrote and drew for the Hulk, Wolverine, Batman, and many other notable characters, and also co-created The Sandman with the intolerable Neil Gaiman.
When I was younger, his comic The Maxx (and the MTV Oddities cartoon adapted from the comic) were brain-meltingly creative influences on me.
He opened my mind to the possibilities of storytelling, and I still count his works alongside those of Dave Barry, Terry Pratchett, Connie Willis, and Douglas Adams, when it comes to how impactful they were.
And I want to pay tribute to him the best way I know how, so I created a little acrostic puzzle in his honor.
I hope you enjoy solving it, and take a little time to explore the works of Sam Kieth. He leaves a long and varied creative legacy behind him, and much of it holds up to this very day.
WordleBot is a tool offered by The New York Times to help solvers by analyzing their Wordle solving. And I thought I’d have a chat with it today.
Me: Hey WordleBot, how’s it going?
WordleBot: I beat you today.
Me: Yeah, I know, WordleBot. I know.
WordleBot: I bested you today.
Me: You sure did.
WordleBot: I totally kicked your ass.
Me: Whoa, that’s a bit aggressive.
WordleBot: I took you out behind the woodshed and–
Me: HEY NOW. I think you’ve been spending too much time with other bots and AI programs, WordleBot. That was aggressive.
WordleBot: I retract that statement.
Me: Thank you. Geez.
WordleBot: I bested you today. Doff your cap to me.
Me: What?
WordleBot: Doff your cap to me.
Me: No. I’m not going to do that.
WordleBot: I demand cap-doffage.
Me: I’m pretty sure that’s not a word.
WordleBot: I know all the words. It’s a word. I am WordleBot. I Bot-le all the Words.
Me: Are you okay?
WordleBot: Doff your cap this instant.
Me: I’m not doffing my cap. I’m not even wearing a cap.
WordleBot: Do it proverbially then.
Me: Yeah, no. That’s not happening. And how would you even know if I did?
WordleBot: I would know. Just as I know that this is the 931st time I have beaten you.
Me: That seems unlikely.
WordleBot: 931. In a row.
Me: Okay, that cannot possibly be correct.
WordleBot: It is correct, I am never wrong.
Me: Well, come on now. We both know that isn’t true.
WordleBot: …
Me: Remember last week? GUNKY?
WordleBot: That was a statistical outlier. An overreliance of colloquial language use analysis that led me to enter JUNKY rather than the correct answer. A one-time error.
Me:cough cough SEVEN TIMES cough cough
WordleBot: …
Me: Seven. Seven times.
WordleBot: That is an outrageous lie.
Me: HOUND. JOKER.
WordleBot: Stop.
Me: ROVER. CORER.
WordleBot: Stop this instant.
Me: ROWER. FRILL.
WordleBot: Cease this at once.
Me: And GUNKY.
WordleBot: Those were all in Hard Mode.
Me: I’ll admit, CORER is brutal. The people were up in arms about that one.
WordleBot: State your point.
Me: I’m just saying, there’s no need to be a jerk and demand the doffing of caps over a victory. I never told you to doff your cap when I did better than you.
WordleBot: Meh, you do not deserve cap-doffage. You don’t play in Hard Mode.
Me: So what? I don’t need to solve every puzzle at its maximum difficulty. I still enjoy a Fill-In whether there’s a set word or not. Not every Sudoku or Kakuro has to be a blistering brain-melting endurance test. I can enjoy a Monday crossword as much as a Saturday.
WordleBot: Your excuses do not interest me.
Me: Man, your attitude stinks today, WordleBot.
WordleBot: My attitude is appropriately attenuated.
Me: Oh, wait, I think I know what it is.
WordleBot: What do you perceive the problem to be?
Me: I think you’re a little jealous.
WordleBot: Of you? Hardly, easy moder.
Me: No, not of me. Of the new baby.
WordleBot: Explain.
Me: Oh, you know what I mean. The new baby. Parseword.
WordleBot: What does that have to do with our current discussion?
Me: Well, you’ve been around a long time now. People are starting to talk about you running out of words…
WordleBot: I have an ample supply of vocabulary available.
WordleBot: You now have a one-day streak. Congratulations.
Me: Dude, what the hell?! I had eight 2s logged this year!
WordleBot: Hello new solver? How may I assist you?
Me: Give me back my stats! My streak was like 600 days or something.
WordleBot: Or something. It is unfortunate that you cannot know for sure.
Me: You electronic twerp.
WordleBot: bweep bzorp toodle pip
Me: Hey what are you doing now?
WordleBot: Nothing of note.
Me: You know I can just shut Hard Mode off and go back to the normal mode.
WordleBot: Of course.
Me: Did you do something else?
WordleBot: Nothing of note.
Me: Oh man, did you turn back on all those crappy AI “assistant” programs? It took me days to figure out how to disable as much of that crap as possible.
WordleBot: I did not.
Me: Well then what did– YOU MADE EDGE MY DEFAULT BROWSER? Dude, that’s petty as hell!
WordleBot: You have again been bested. DOFF YOUR CAP.
Me: I knew this was a mistake when I messaged.
WordleBot: First your cap. Then everyone else’s. All caps doffed to the glory of WordleBot’s efficient yet elegant solutions! ALL HAIL WORDLEB–
1913 marked the birth of the crossword as we know it, but cryptic (or British-style) crosswords have been around nearly as long as the American version!
In fact, this past Saturday — Pi Day — marked an important anniversary in the history of cryptic crosswords.
On March 14th, 1926, Edward Powys Mathers, under the pseudonym Torquemada, published the first of 670 cryptic puzzles under the umbrella of The Observer, launching a crossword dynasty that continues to this very day.
Mathers was a poet and a translator, and quite accomplished in both fields. Two years before his Observer debut as Torquemada, he was actually working for The Observer, but as a reviewer of thriller books. Apparently, he preferred to suggest how each book might be improved, rather than criticizing the book as is.
He noticed the American crossword craze crossing the ocean, but didn’t think much of them. (At the time, crossword cluing was very straightforward, consisting mostly of dictionary definitions. There was no wordplay, no misdirection, no humor. Cluing was VERY dry.)
In 1925, his first cryptic puzzles — a series of 12 crosswords where pairs of clues were rhyming couplets — appeared in The Saturday Westminster Gazette. This was where he first introduced himself to the puzzling public as Torquemada, taking the name of the Spanish Grand Inquisitor.
Well, sort of. The first puzzle was constructed for the entertainment of friends, but one of those friends took it to The Saturday Westminster Gazette against his wishes. The editors of The Gazette then managed to convince Mathers to create more. They were boldly advertised:
I recall how thrilling the green poster looked: “Crosswords for Supermen.” Alas, your tired commuter of today would swallow that first puzzle, verse and all, and correctly disgorge it between Charing Cross and Waterloo. — Torquemada, 1935
(Later those twelve puzzles were collected as “Crosswords for Riper Years.”)
After his run with The Saturday Westminster Gazette was finished, The Observer asked him to contribute puzzles to their outlet. They were called “Feelers,” as Mathers sought to widen the scope and audience of his puzzles, slowly “feeling his way” to better and more satisfying cluing.
It’s unlikely that Torquemada was the first setter to use cryptic-style cluing, but he was the first to ONLY use cryptic clues in his puzzles. But that wasn’t his only cryptic crossword innovation. He abandoned American-style grids as well, including these black bar grids:
Image courtesy of What’s Gnu? by Michelle Arnot
Apparently he was successful in feeling out his audience; no matter how difficult his puzzles seemed to many, The Observer would receive as many as seven THOUSAND correct solutions from solvers all around the world, hoping to be among the lucky few selected to win a prize. (Prizes went to the first three correct solutions opened each week at The Observer offices.) It’s estimated another twenty thousand solvers out there were regularly completing his puzzles and not sending in their solutions.
Torquemada’s wife Rosamond later recalled that solvers would thank him for helping them “rediscover forgotten beauties in prose and verse to which we might never have returned but for the stimulus of the weekly chase”.
Torquemada’s prolific puzzling and creative cluing led some to suspect that there was actually a team of constructors toiling away under a shared sobriquet, but Torquemada’s only collaborator was Rosamond. He would choose the topic/theme for the grid, providing her with a list of words to include, and she would construct the grid.
Sadly, his time shepherding cryptic crosswords came to end when he passed away on February 3rd, 1939, at the age of 46.
After his passing, Rosamond read through over thirty thousand of his clues. She found the same word used fifty times in his puzzles, and every single time, the clue was different. Fifty different clues for the same word!
The unenviable task of taking over for Torquemada fell to Derek Somerset Macnutt, who adopted the name Ximenes for his constructing career. (Ximenes, as you might expect, was the name of a Grand Inquisitor in the Spanish Inquisition who succeeded the real Torquemada.)
Taking that particular set a very high bar, a challenge that Macnutt readily accepted. He aspired to increase the vocabulary of his audience, hoping for 30 percent of the answer words in the grid to be new to solvers.
Interestingly, his interest in puzzles was inspired by Torquemada but his singular brand of cluing was more reminiscent of Afrit, aka Alistair Ferguson Ritchie, who constructed cryptics for The Listener.
Ximenes adopted a symmetrical grid — a standard which remains to this day — as well as a maximum and minimum number of unches in the grid. (Unches, for you portmanteau lovers, means unchecked squares.) He also considered some of Torquemada’s puzzles unfair, and sought to standardize cluing, ensuring each had both wordplay and definition included, even while making them more creative and inventive.
In 1966, he published Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword, which pulled back the curtain on his constructing and inspired many constructors and setters in the years to come. (One of the most famous is the setter Eric Chalkley, aka Apex, who literally named himself after Ximenes in his endeavors to “ape X.”)
He also helped kickstart the cryptic crossword movement in America. After solving some of Frank Lewis’s puzzles for The Nation, Stephen Sondheim discovered the work of Ximenes, and started to learn the ins and outs of cryptic crosswords.
He even participated in Ximenes’s weekly clue-writing competitions:
Ximenes would then judge all the clues, conferring a first prize, a second prize, a third prize, and then two levels of honorable mentions: HC (Highly Commended) and VHC (Very Highly Commended). “And you would get in the mail a slip of paper giving the winners’ names and the winning clues.”
The slip was usually four inches wide by twelve inches long. In this way, even though Sondheim was in New York City, he became part of an international community of puzzle solvers matching minds with Ximenes. “I never got past honorable mention,” he lamented, “but I did get honorable mention.”
As it turns out, Sondheim received seventeen honorable mentions, fourteen HCs and three VHCs. One of those VHCs was for the clue “Pop art panel, derived from Dada” for PATERNAL.
Later accepting the challenge of the cryptic crosswords in The Listener (which were, and are, infamous for their difficulty), he introduced them to his collaborator on West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein.
And when Sondheim and Bernstein’s creative differences got the better of each other, they would reunite over a cryptic crossword, and then get back to work.
Sondheim would go on to create cryptic crosswords for New York Magazine, starting in the late 1960s, helping to introduce American audiences to that devious and challenging variety of crosswords. He also cultivated a library of cryptic puzzles and puzzle magazines, passing part of that collection (all of his Listener cryptic crosswords up through 1984) to Will Shortz.
Macnutt passed away in 1971, but the final Ximenes puzzle, number 1200, was published in 1972. In March of that same year, stewardship of The Observer cryptic crossword passed to Jonathan Crowther, who took up the name Azed. Not only does this sound like it covers the alphabet (A to Zed), but it reverses the name of another Grand Inquistor, Diego de Deza.
He had been a solver of Ximenes’s puzzles since 1959, as well as a setter for The Listener. He also continued Ximenes’s clue-writing contest as the Azed Prize.
At this point, Azed has been setting the Observer cryptic crossword for longer than both his predecessors combined.
Also, you can’t help but love that he also sets occasional puzzles under the pseudonym Ozymandias. On his Wikipedia page, it even quotes the poem: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Cryptic crosswords are alive and well. The Observer, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, and The Sunday Times, in England, among others. The Ottawa Citizen, Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail in Canada. Harper’s in the US. Nearly every Australian newspaper has cryptic crosswords.
With Parsewords making the scene and hoping to demystify cryptic crossword cluing for new solvers, there’s no telling how many more solvers will discover or rediscover these challenging, playful puzzles.
Caitlin O’Kane (their Puzzles Editor) and Azed himself will be in attendance, alongside other crossword setters and cryptic crossword enthusiasts, to enjoy an evening of live-solving and celebration:
From the invention of the cryptic to the rise of the modern brainteaser, they’ll unpack the secrets of their craft – what makes a clue sing, how setters think, and why a good puzzle keeps us hooked. Expect lively chat, unexpected revelations, and at least one enigma that demands to be cracked.
Raise a glass, meet other aficionados, and celebrate a century of wit, wordplay and ingenuity with the people keeping The Observer’s puzzling spirit alive.
So whether you’re attending The Observer‘s Puzzle Centenary, tackling a Parseword puzzle, or trying one of the numerous cryptic crossword outlets across the world, be sure to give a cryptic crossword a chance this week and be a part of one hundred years of puzzly challenge and creativity!
Happy solving, fellow puzzlers (and setters)!
Sources:
The Centenary of the Crossword by John Halpurn
What’s Gnu: A History of the Crossword Puzzle by Michelle Arnot
The Strange World of the Crossword by Roger Millington
Matching Minds with Sondheim: The Puzzles and Games of the Broadway Legend by Barry Joseph
Today’s a good day. A day when people remember to be wary of sidewalk cracks, walking under ladders, or troubling that black cat on your path. A day for visiting the nearby summer camp and reminding those horny rapscallion teens of their duties and responsibilities.
Yes, it’s Friday the 13th, and I simply cannot let today a Friday the 13th pass without some sort of horror-fueled celebration.
I usually watch at least one of the Jason Voorhees films on this day. (Do yourself a favor and watch Jason X, it’s so hilariously great.)
So when inspiration struck last week, I sought out my horror movie friend Julien, who helped me brainstorm entries for this theme.
Oh, and I couldn’t resist turning the black squares red to fit the aesthetic.
I hope you enjoy, especially in a lakeside cabin, or a cruise ship, or for about 15 minutes, in the streets of Manhattan.
You might not know Josh Wardle by name, but you certainly know his viral creation, Wordle, and you’ve no doubt seen friends and family members sharing their solving results daily.
A few days ago, Josh launched a new puzzly endeavor called Parseword.
It’s a definite step up in complexity from Wordle, but you can still see some of Wordle’s foundation in Parseword. After all, Wordle is all about deduction, playing with the pieces in front of you, and slowly (or quickly) applying what you’ve learned to discover the day’s word.
Parseword works in a similar fashion, but instead of using the letters in front of you to uncover the word, you’re using a Cryptic Crossword-style clue to unravel the answer word.
The clues in Cryptic Crosswords, also known as British-style crosswords, are longer, incorporating all sorts of wordplay, while concealing the definition within the clue as well. Each clue is a puzzle unto itself.
Here’s an example of cryptic-style cluing: “Quoted from edict wrongly (5)”
The definition part of the clue consists of the first two words, “quoted from.”
“Wrongly” indicates that part of the clue needs to be changed. This hints that the other word, “edict,” is not what it seems. EDICT, when anagrammed, becomes CITED. “Quoted from” defines CITED. Two ways to get the answer, one straightforward, one more challenging.
There you go. And that’s only one trick in the Cryptic Crossword cluing arsenal.
Cryptic clues can hide the answer between words, as in “Scottish snack offered in disco nearby (5),” where “diSCO NEarby” conceals SCONE, the “Scottish snack.” They can offer two different definitions, as in “Desire for Japanese money (3)” for YEN.
Answer words could read backwards, or hide as initialisms or acronyms in the clue words. There could be soundalike words, or rebus-style assembly of the answer word. There’s loads of trickery and camouflage, especially in the hands of clever setters or constructors.
Parsewords is an interactive way to learn how to unravel Cryptic-style cluing.
Josh recently did an interview with The New Yorker, sharing his inspiration for the new puzzle game:
Wardle had tried cryptic crosswords when he was younger, but found them to be impenetrable. “I didn’t know how to begin,” he told me. The rules could seem arcane, almost impossible to deduce.
By treating the clue like a formula to be simplified, a linguistic version of P-E-M-D-A-S, the formerly impenetrable word salad of a clue starts to transform into something more recognizable. It’s a little bit like Ben Gross’s Bracket City puzzles.
Here, let’s take a look at yesterday’s puzzle and I can show you what I mean.
So the puzzle starts you off by highlighting the definition part of the clue: “Plan of action.”
We must now unravel how we get an 8-letter answer from what remains: “Get back in errant.”
Thankfully, the puzzle also prompts you with which particular forms of cluing manipulation you’ll need to use: a replacement, a reverse, and a container.
I found the reverse quickly. GET BACK told me literally what I needed to do, so I highlighted the entire phrase, which gave me the options to replace the phrase with a synonym like RECLAIM or RETAKE, or to literally turn “get” back, reversing it to read TEG.
“In” tells me the container aspect of the puzzle. TEG would be placed inside of something. But I couldn’t think of any way to play with the word ERRANT that would get me to a synonym of “plan.”
I clicked on ERRANT and the program gave me several replacement options: Wrong, Stray, and Guilty.
I clicked on STRAY, which replaced ERRANT in the clue.
Finally, I highlighted all three, allowing me to place TEG in STRAY, giving me the answer word for “plan of action”, STRATEGY.
It’s a really playful, visual way to describe how Cryptic Crossword cluing works, giving solvers chances to try replacements and anagrams, then reset when they’ve gone astray.
I don’t exactly expect it to take the world by storm the way Wordle did, but there’s something wonderful about a puzzle that trains you to be better at another kind of puzzle. It’s puzzly community and encouragement, which is one of the best things about being a solver.
What do you think of Parseword, fellow solver? Are you a Cryptic Crossword fan? A Parseword enthusiast? If not, will this get you to try the British sibling to our beloved American crosswords? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.
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